Primary Calculus

One of those now-infamous Superdelegates emailed the other day asking for thoughts on who to vote for at the DNC convention, and received something much like this:

The outcome of this election will come down to turnout. The large primary turnout so far is no no indicator of success. The question for us is who is the most likely Democrat to win against John McCain? As much as we wish it were different, a candidate’s qualifications do us no good if they are not able to win.

Regardless of the Democrats’ candidate, John McCain is a negative for GOP turnout. The GOP’s base may not come out to vote for McCain, but they will come out in force to vote against Hillary Clinton. A Clinton nomination is a gift to a discouraged Republican base. It in no small measure erases McCain’s negatives and gives the GOP a fighting chance against us, as early polls show. It’s less clear that Clinton’s appeal to women voters is strong enough to pull GOP women to vote for her in numbers large enough to offset that.

The word from the streets suggests that the GOP base will not come out in the same numbers to vote against Barack Obama, an African-American Democrat, and in fact may simply stay home. Disaffected Republicans may even cross over to vote for him, fewer for Clinton.

Two days in a row this week, Sen. McCain tried to call down more exuberant members of his party for written and verbal attacks on Sen. Barack Obama. The hard Right will declare open season on Clinton if she's nominated. That's a given. But worse for both McCain and the GOP, these not-so-rogue elements spoon fed on Limbaugh, Drudge, Savage, Beck, Coulter, etc. will publicly expose the unflattering underbelly of the GOP in a way McCain and party leaders will be unable to contain or disguise. Whatever McCain may say, faced with the Democrats' first African-American presidential candidate, creatures of the GOP's own making will unwittingly aid Democrats and alienate droves of minority voters this year and for years to come.

On the Democratic side a critical question is, what will conservative Democrats do? If Hillary Clinton is the nominee, most will vote for her. But this may not offset the increased GOP performance generated by a Clinton nomination. A few Reagan Democrats may cross over to vote for McCain, but they will not stay home in a Clinton-McCain match-up.

If Barack Obama is the Democrats’ nominee, some conservative Democrats will vote for John McCain, as they would in a Clinton-McCain race. But since many registered Democrats in WNC tend to vote Republican in federal elections anyway, is not a net negative for Democratic performance.

Also heard on the streets, rather than vote for an African-American for president or for McCain, some Reagan Democrats will simply stay home, lowering Democratic performance.

The variables in this election season calculation will give fits to Las Vegas odds makers -- too many to manage. In the end, however, the Democrat/Republican performance ratio will favor an Obama candidacy, as early polls on a McCain match-up already show. In an election year in which voters are inclined to “turn the page,” Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton isn't a winning formula for Democratic success here or nationwide.

Then there is the "wow" factor an Obama candidacy has already generated. As the Democratic Party experiences a slow changing of the guard, engaging new, young voters generated by Obama’s candidacy is an opportunity for party building Democrats cannot afford to miss. We have a party to build and they want to help build it. Let’s welcome them by nominating a leader from a new generation.

Next man makes a move, the country gets it!

The new, improved GOP -- less reality-based than ever! Glenn Greenwald dissects the "Hollywood liberal" haters' new Hollywood-based Internet ad promoting the Protect America Act. All that's missing is Kiefer Sutherland:

Impressively, the ad dramatically packs every component of GOP politics into one minute: There are dark, primitively omnipotent Arab Terrorists lurking darkly and menacingly, planning to slaughter you and your whole entire family right now. You have only a few seconds to live, literally or metaphorically. The clock on your life is counting down right now. You are in severe danger.

We want more unchecked government power. You better give it to us, or else the Terrorists will kill you all. Give up more power to us, do what we say, and you can lay your head down on your pillow at night without a care in the world, knowing that we love you and are keeping you Safe and Protected -- Keeping America Protected -- like a baby snugly embraced in the womb. You want that, don't you? We want to give it to you. The House Democrats want you dead.

Come to think of it, alluding to Mel Brooks is too flattering. They've become more like campy, lipstick-smeared Tallulah Bankhead, the crazed religious fanatic out to "cleanse" others' sins and herself of self-loathing for her incestuous impulses.

Die! Die! My Darlings!

Come on Wall Street, don't be slow . . .

Why man, this is loans a-go-go!
There's plenty good money to be made
Enticing home buyers with adjustable rates...

Froma Harrop reminds us we've seen heard this song before (Originally Published on Thursday February 14, 2008):

Schemes We Have Seen

During the push to privatize Social Security, the idea's foes were accused of not trusting the American people to manage their own money. The naysayers prevailed, and aren't we glad.

How interesting that the buildup to the mortgage meltdown employed many of the same sales tactics as the Social Security privatization scheme. Resentment, fear, flattery and hype — plus scant details on fees and other costs — all went into the pitch.

When a former Fed official called for rules to tame the subprime mortgage business, the peddlers howled. This was an attack on low-income people, particularly those of color, they said. Without lax lending practices, fewer minorities would have enjoyed the blessings of homeownership.

(Worth reading in full, if the link lasts.)

So, hello subprime paradise.

Bye, bye, Miss American Pie.

Sunday Sermon

“The New Narcissism,” Peter Marin’s October 1975 opus in Harpers described the banality of the trendy human potential movement therapies on the rise in America in the 70s.

. . . I listen for two hours in a graduate seminar to two women therapists explaining to me how we are all entirely responsible for our destinies, and how the Jews must have wanted to be burned by the Germans, and that those who starve in the Sahel must want it to happen, and when I ask them whether there is anything we owe to others, say, to a child starving in the desert, one of them snaps at me angrily: "What can I do if a child is determined to starve?"

That, precisely, is what I am talking about here: the growing solipsism and desperation of a beleaguered class, the world view emerging among us centered solely on the self and with individual survival as its sole good. It is a world view present not only in everything we say and do, but as an ambience, a feeling in the air, a general cast of perception and attitude: a retreat from the worlds of morality and history, an unembarrassed denial of human reciprocity and community.

I re-read much of Marin’s 1975 piece after remembering how much the conservative obsession with personal responsibility mirrors the narcissism of the human potential and New Age movements.

“For if we are each totally responsible for our fate,” Marin wrote, “then all the others in the world are responsible for their fate, and, if that is so, why should we worry about them?” Writing about what is generally considered a liberal worldview, Marin observed:

That is what makes our new therapies so distressing. They provide their adherents with a way to avoid the demands of the world, to smother the tug of conscience. They allow them to remain who and what they are, to accept the structured world as it is-but with a new sense of justice and justification, with the assurance that it all accords with cosmic law. We are in our proper place; the others are in theirs; we may indeed bemoan their fate or even, if we are so moved, do something to change it, but in essence it has nothing to do with us.

It's the same disdain for the fate of others perceived as not as "responsible" as ourselves that is reflected in much of what I hear from conservative colleagues. It's dog whistle politics, code-speak for saying these Irresponsibles have made choices that place them outside the velvet ropes of middle-class convention, including - and rarely mentioned aloud - poor choice of parents, national origin, religion and skin color.

Bill McKibben’s “The Christian Paradox” in the August 2005 Harpers explored the political right’s amalgam of movement- and Christian-conservatism, noting the same self-referential, “I’m all right, Jack” morality:

. . . the softfocus consumer gospel of the suburban megachurches is a perfect match for emergent conservative economic notions about personal responsibility instead of collective action. Privatize Social Security? Keep health care for people who can afford it? File those under "God helps those who help themselves."

Popular megachurches preach a reassuring prosperity gospel which tells well-heeled believers that their good fortunes are a sign of God’s favor. Others’ misfortune is their own fault – the result of bad choices for which they alone must bear the weight of personal responsibility. How else will they ever learn and grow up to live lives of personal responsibility in 7500 well-earned, God-blessed square-feet on the seventh tee? Like moi?

McKibben observed,

How nice it would be if Jesus had declared that our income was ours to keep, instead of insisting that we had to share. How satisfying it would be if we were supposed to hate our enemies. Religious conservatives will always have a comparatively easy sell.

[. . .]

Taking seriously the actual message of Jesus . . . should serve at least to moderate the greed and violence that mark this culture. It's hard to imagine a con much more audacious than making Christ the front man for a program of tax cuts for the rich or war in Iraq. If some modest part of the 85 percent of us who are Christians woke up to that fact, then the world might change.

[. . .]

Since the days of Constantine, emperors and rich men have sought to co-opt the teachings of Jesus. As in so many areas of our increasingly market-tested lives, the coopters – the TV men, the politicians, the Christian "interest groups" – have found a way to make each of us complicit in that travesty, too. They have invited us to subvert the church of Jesus even as we celebrate it. With their help we have made golden calves of ourselves – become a nation of terrified, self-obsessed idols. It works, and it may well keep working for a long time to come. When Americans hunger for selfless love and are fed only love of self, they will remain hungry, and too often hungry people just come back for more of the same.

The left/right parallels are striking enough that McKibben accuses neither left nor right, but the culture at large,

These similarities make it difficult (although not impossible) for the televangelists to posit themselves as embattled figures in a "culture war"- they offer too uncanny a reflection of the dominant culture, a culture of unrelenting self-obsession.

And yet, that culture may be beginning to change as American wake up from the shell shock of the last eight years. It is the belated observation of the punditocracy that in this election year voters are hungry for authenticity again, for an America that is once more about something greater than ourselves.

Voters have had their fill of the slash-and-burn, divide-and-conquer, zero-sum politics of the last dozen years. They've seen their home values plummet and their purchasing power shrink along with America's middle class. Weary of being told whom to vote against, they desire something to vote for. Something better than business as usual.

“There’s no ‘business class’ in law enforcement." - ACLU

Au contraire.

First, there was Pinkerton. Now there's InfraGard!

[h/t A-TONE MUSIC]

"Living is easy with eyes closed...."

Received another of those right-wing pass-it-on emails today. It doesn't matter what the subject of these electronic tracts is. The object is to sow unreasoning fear, prejudice and distrust.

And what a patriotic thing ethnic hatred is when shared among friends. Just the way Tom Paine or Samuel Adams would have if they had had computers, the Internet and little knack for critical thinking.

A friend wrote to ask what I thought about these things, saying:

It makes me crazy.

During this election season, hatred and bigotry rise up from the mouths of people I have known and I am just shocked.

I guess I am just that naive to think that times have changed and that it shouldn't matter whether you are a man or woman or person of color when it comes to choosing a president to lead the nation.

It just makes me sad.

Indeed. The fact that this particular, unoriginal screed was attributed to some retired general who hadn't written it should surprise no one. As the Chicago Reader noted, the truth doesn't matter in Nixonland:

Nixonland, which will be published by Simon & Schuster, takes its title from a coinage of former presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, who once described “Nixonland” as a place with “no standard of truth but convenience, and no standard of morality except sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call.”

In Nixonland, presidential candidates of the Republican party that insists that the world irrevocably changed on 9/11 are falling over themselves to reinvent 1980s Reaganomics.

In Nixonland, Republicans who impeached a Democratic president accused of perjury allow a Republican president to decide for himself which laws he'll obey.

In Nixonland, two successive Bush Attorneys General refuse to answer whether waterboarding is a crime -- the same practice we prosecuted as a war crime when perpetrated by the Japanese in WWII. Say no, and the Republican A.G.s become international laughing stocks. Say yes, and they'll be asked why they haven't pursued Americans who have practiced it lately, and their own bosses who authorized it.

Comedian Lewis Black has observed:

... there has to come a point, where Democrats and Republicans, where we see a piece of footage and we just agree on what the fuck reality is. And the fact is you cannot shoot video of a Land Rover running over a cat and then say... the cat was trying to kill itself.

Unless you're a movement conservative ... and the truth is inconvenient.

This is what Barry Goldwater's party has become. Blogger and Goldwater expert Rick Perlstein writes about Allen Raymond's How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative. Raymond did jail time for jamming Democratic party and union firefighters' phones for the RNC -- arguably, under instructions from the White House -- in New Hampshire on election day, 2002:

"The mouth-breathers who decide GOP primaries might allow people who steal their money and send their children to impossible wars to get away with anything, but they'll cut no such slack for baby-killers," Raymond writes.

[snip]

If that's the contempt he harbors for RNC members—the party elite—you can imagine how he talks about "the Jesus-loves-guns crowd" with their "pro-life, snake-handling babble" and "religious doggerel." In one memorable phrase, he regrets he did it all just "so some platitude-spewing hack could be elected Grand Cyclops"—thus, from the inside, weighing in on the debate over whether today's conservative movement is racist or not: "Grand Cyclops" is the title for the leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

He's rather thrilled to be able to demonstrate just how authoritarian-minded these "knuckle-draggers" are, picking up his cell phone from the Republican convention, telling [a friend on the other end] to watch his TV set, then barking "U-S-A! U-S-A!" while pumping his fist in the air.

Soon the whole section has picked up the chant: "That shit's fucking scary, man!" his friend says. Responds Raymond: "What else do you want them to say?"

I'm reading the Raymond book now. It's reminiscent of Jack Abramoff colleague, Michael Scanlon's appreciation of the usefulness of getting unwitting "religious whackos" to do their dirty work. Perlstein writes:

... Raymond is quite explicit that "both sides do it" is a myth: " When it came to playing in the gutter, we were the professionals—the Dems weren't even junior varsity."

Raymond himself writes:

In GOP circles in 2002 it seemed preposterous that anything you did to win an election could be considered a crime. For ten years I'd been making phone calls with the intent to manipulate voters; hell, I'd been handsomely rewarded for it. In my business, communication devices were all lethal weapons—and every fight was dirty.... Even the guys who didn't expose undercover CIA operatives, proposition congressional pages, and send other people's children off to die in an impossible war wouldn't rat on the ones who did.... I was truly beginning to understand how few metaphysical limitations a person is up against once he decides that the truth is what he makes it. From then on, two plus two would equal whatever sum I found most useful."

The party that routinely accuses its Democratic rivals of advocating moral relativism has become, not just comfortable with, but skilled at situational ethics.

"Attempting to gill net bad guys"

Congressional Quarterly's Jeff Stein dissects the problem with FISA, and points to a New Yorker audio with The Looming Tower's Lawrence Wright, explaining how he himself fell under surveillance without a warrant, despite assurances to the contrary.

Electronic surveillance (and overdependence on it) is a kind of armchair way of gathering intelligence, and no substitute for "good human intelligence work out there — where the bad guys are."

CQ observes:

It’s just not true, no matter how many times administration officials say it, that critical operations to find the kidnappers of American soldiers in Iraq and an al Qaeda cell in Germany were held up by FISA regulations. McConnell himself said he was mistaken.

[. . .]

As former counterterror agent Michael Tanji put it on Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog: “It’s bad enough that the Director of National Intelligence is trotting out a bogus threat so the government can snoop on all Internet traffic. What’s worse is that this kind of mass surveillance is a pretty lame way to catch the honest-to-God bad guys.”

Tanji added, “The fact that we are essentially attempting to gill-net bad guys is a fairly strong indicator that the intelligence community has yet to come up with an effective strategy against information-age threats.”

Worth reading in full.

[h/t A-Tone Music]

FBI denies file exposing nuclear secrets theft

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article3216737.ece

[h/t Crooks and Liars]

The Bourne Spike

Every morning this week I've checked Google News for American coverage of former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds' bombshell in the London Sunday Times last week: For sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets.

Nada. Zip. Bupkis.

Edmonds violated a State Secrets gag order to name "names" by posting uncaptioned photos of those she knows are involved. Pentagon and State Department officials selling nuclear information through Turkey to the AQ Khan network and from there to the black market (shades of Iran-Contra). Including this:

Following 9/11, a number of the foreign operatives were taken in for questioning by the FBI on suspicion that they knew about or somehow aided the attacks.

Edmonds said the State Department official once again proved useful. “A primary target [of an FBI investigation] would call the official and point to names on the list and say, ‘We need to get them out of the US because we can’t afford for them to spill the beans’,” she said. “The official said that he would ‘take care of it’.”

The four suspects on the list were released from interrogation and extradited.

The Jan. 6 Sunday Times story has popped up in Turkey, Italy, Iran, India, Pakistan, Germany, Australia, Azerbaijan, and even Somalia. But of the mere 30+ Google News hits, just one blogger commentary in the Baltimore Chronicle (which ties it to the BCCI scandal). What little else there is in the U.S. comes from "free press" type papers and blogs. The NYTs, the WaPos, LATs and the Gannetts are MIA. Even McClatchy?

Does somebody have photos of somebody with farm animals? Okay, but the whole US press corps? And 535 members of Congress?

Is it me, or does that strike you as just a little creepy? Like something out of a Bourne film?

How is that possible?

Freeze Dried and Sanctified

Another faith-based fiasco from the world-changers at BushCo.

Writing for Salon, Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett analyze the Benazir Bhutto assassination and the same Bush faith-based foreign policy that led to Iraq and a Hamas victory in territories.

One of President Bush's more appalling flights of fancy in the foreign policy arena is his belief that democratically elected governments will somehow be more inclined than incumbent authoritarians to support U.S. policy objectives that are wildly unpopular with their own electorates. The logical absurdity of this proposition should be readily apparent, but, nevertheless, the Bush administration has proceeded blithely to test it in the real world: In January 2006, the White House and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice insisted, over the objections of Palestinian and Israeli leaders, on holding elections in occupied Palestinian territories -- purportedly to elect a Palestinian government that would have the legitimacy to crack down on ongoing anti-Israeli violence. The result of this experiment, of course, was the victory of Hamas, long designated by the United States as a terrorist organization.

The prescriptions of Democratic presidential candidates fare little better, in their view.

Oh, for a nostalgic dose of realpolitik:

Sound policy toward Pakistan must start with a sober understanding of reality. That reality was described with admirable succinctness in 2004 by the 9/11 Commission, writing in its final report: "Musharraf's government represents the best hope for stability in Pakistan and Afghanistan." But insisting that Musharraf -- or any potential successor from the senior ranks of the Pakistani army -- break ranks with his military power base and the only institution that can limit the spread of militant violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan is only going to undermine the prospects for such stability.

Getting Pakistan "right" will require that we, first of all, get Afghanistan"right," and that we embed both of these troubled states in a broader regional strategy that includes the development of regional security institutions. Russia and China are already moving in this direction with their cultivation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, encompassing the former Soviet states of Central Asia -- which have largely abandoned their post-9/11 security ties to the United States -- and including Pakistan, India and Iran as observers. If the United States wants to preserve a serious leadership role in the region, or simply protect its critical security interests where Central and South Asia come together, it will need to abandon comforting illusions about "democratization" and begin working seriously to persuade Pakistan and other regional states that they can serve their interests best by working with us.

So sensible. So unfashionable.

Magical Thinking

“You simply can’t run an economy as complicated as ours on ideology alone.” -- Jared Bernstein, senior economist, Economic Policy Institute

Yes, you can. Just badly.

Peter Goodman, in this morning's New York Times, asks whether belief in the "unfailingly" wise unfettered free market is, in fact, a false idol.

. . . the invisible hand is being asked to account for what it has wrought. In this country, many economic complaints — from the widening gap between rich and poor to the expense of higher education — are being dusted for its fingerprints.

Some "fervent proponents of unfettered market forces have lately come to embrace regulation," Goodman observes.

Free market fundamentalists have for years approached the market with something resembling the unquestioning ardor of their religious fellow travelers.

Religious fundamentalists (especially, charismatics) sometimes display magical thinking when applying their theology. The Bible is perfect and inerrant, so their reasoning goes. Thus, verses containing "God's promises" are vows which God must, by his ever-truthful nature, keep. Recite the incantation with the appropriate reverence, goes the syllogism, and mere humans can make the creator of the universe jump on command. Crank in Bible verse, out pops God like Jack from his box.

If the magic fails, the fault lies not in God or in the Bible, but in oneself.

"Did you plead the blood, brother?" I heard a believer ask of a friend who complained a prayer had gone unanswered. "You've got to plead the blood."

If the magic doesn't work, you didn't do the spell right. The true believer never questions his theology. It, too, is perfection.

So it is with free-market fundamentalists from Milton Friedman's Chicago school of economics, Naomi Klein observes in "The Shock Doctrine." Market forces act like unchanging forces of nature:

In the truly free market imagined in Chicago classes and texts, these forces exited existed in perfect equilibrium, supply communicating with demand the way the moon pulls the tides. If economies suffered from high inflation, it was, according to Friedman's strict theory of monatarism, invariably because misguided policy makers had allowed too much money to enter the system, rather than letting the market find its balance.

[. . .]

According to the Harvard sociologist, Daniel Bell, this love of an idealized system is the defining quality of radical free-market economics. Capitalism is envisaged as "a jeweled set of movements" or a "celestial clockwork . . ."

As true to life as the Ptolemaic and Copernican models of the universe, but with more profit potential.

Klein continues:

Like all fundamentalist faiths, Chicago School, economics is, for its true believers, a closed loop. The starting premise is that the free market is a perfect scientific system, one in which individuals, acting on their own self-interested desires, create the maximum benefits for all. It follows ineluctably that if something is wrong within the free-market economy -- high inflation or soaring unemployment -- it has to be because the market is not truly free.

Faith and pseudoscience: both unfalsifiable. Like tax cuts, as Slate's William Saletan observed in 2004 (emphasis mine):

In 1999, George W. Bush said we needed to cut taxes because the economy was doing so well that the U.S. Treasury was taking in too much money, and we could afford to give some back to the people who earned it. In 2001, Bush said we needed the same tax cuts because the economy was doing poorly, and we had to return the money so that people would spend and invest it.

Bush's arguments made the wisdom of cutting taxes unfalsifiable. In good times, tax cuts were affordable. In bad times, they were necessary. Whatever happened proved that tax cuts were good policy. When Congress approved the tax cuts, Bush said they would revive the economy. You'd know that the tax cuts had worked, because more people would be working. Three years later, more people aren't working. But in Bush's view, that, too, proves he was right. If more people aren't working, we just need more tax cuts.

Keep flying, Yossarian:

Let me see if I've got this straight: in order to be grounded, I've got to be crazy and I must be crazy to keep flying. But if I ask to be grounded, that means I'm not crazy any more and I have to keep flying.

Exactly.

Arguing for Edwards

A neighbor pointed out that Edwards is the only Democratic candidate with the will and experience to take on big corporate money. It's what he's done for a living.

Lambert makes the same case while addressing Obama's weaknesses. A must-read.

The creature we've created in the form of the public corporation has to be brought back under the control of its creators.

Technology -- whether political, scientific or legal -- may be used for good or for evil. There are enough cautionary tales set in the public consciousness about all three to give us pause: Terminator, Resident Evil, Aliens.

The age-old question is who is to be slave and who the master? Is government by the people or by the corporation in our future? Corporate interests are designed to serve their own interests, not ours. While extolling the benefits of globalization, unfettered markets and the global consumer paradise that awaits, in the end, are they really that likely To Serve Man?

Edwards seems to be the only one of the current Democratic crop likely to reprise Teddy Roosevelt and bring our creations to heel again.

Not available in stores

On Christmas Eve, two stories on NPR's Morning Edition celebrated the embrace of American consumer Christmas traditions in Turkey (99% Muslim) and India (80% Hindu). Red Santa hats, Christmas trees, and English-speaking, Jingle Bells-singing Chinese Santa dolls are appearing in Istanbul shopping malls and New Dehli street-vendor stalls.

Together, the stories conjured images of the Tyrell Corporation's Los Angeles, with its Latino/Asian/Anglo cultural blend and brightly lit blimps displaying Japanese advertising.

A happy Blade Runner Christmas to all, and to all renegade replicants, Good Night.

(Not available in stores . . . yet.)

The Bottom Line and the Flatline

Thank goodness we don't have "socialized" medicine.

RN's Statement on Death of Nataline Sarkisyan: 'CIGNA Should Have Listened to Her Doctors And Approved the Transplant a Week Ago'

On Dec. 11, four leading physicians, including the surgical director of the Pediatric Liver Transplant Program at UCLA, wrote to CIGNA urging the company to reverse its denial. The physicians said that Nataline “currently meets criteria to be listed as Status 1A” for a transplant. They also challenged CIGNA’s denial which the company said occurred because their benefit plan “does not cover experimental, investigational and unproven services,” to which the doctors replied, “Nataline’s case is in fact none of the above.”

[. . .]

CNA/NNOC Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro called the final outcome "a horrific tragedy that demonstrates what is so fundamentally wrong with our health care system today. Insurance companies have a stranglehold on our health. Their first priority is to make profits for their shareholders – and the way they do that is by denying care."

"It is simply not possible to organize major protests every time a multi-billion corporation like CIGNA denies care that has been recommended by a physician," DeMoro said. “Having insurance is not the same as receiving needed care. We need a fundamental change in our healthcare system that takes control away from the insurance giants and places it where it belongs – in the hands of the medical professionals, the patients, and their families."

Follow the link to Crook's and Liars' ABC video clip. (Quicktime format)

[h/t Crooks and Liars]

Taking the fight to al Qaeda - NOT!

Saudis biggest group of al Qaeda Iraq fighters: study

The researchers at West Point's Combating Terrorism Center found that 41 percent of the fighters were Saudi nationals.

Libyan nationals accounted for the second largest group entering Iraq in that time period with about 19 percent of the total, followed by Syrians and Yemenis each at 8 percent, Algerians with 7 percent and Moroccans at 6 percent.

[. . .]

"The United States should not confuse gains against al-Qa'ida's Iraqi franchises as fundamental blows against the organization outside of Iraq. So long as al-Qa'ida is able to attract hundreds of young men to join its ranks, it will remain a serious threat to global security."

Not even honest criminals

"After 10 full years inside the GOP, 90 days among honest criminals wasn't really any great ordeal." - former GOP political operative, former penitentiary resident, Allen Raymond, author of "How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative"

Safer in the shallow end

Eric Boehlert on the shallowness of the coverage of the presidential race: It's never the media's fault.

ABC's The Note took Bill Clinton to task for complaining about the media's substance-free coverage of the presidential race. Boehlert observes:

As for Clinton's actual point about campaign coverage being void of substance, The Note never bothered to refute the charge. How could it? The day Clinton made his observation, ABCNews.com itself pretty much proved his point when, in a round-up of the day's key Clinton-related news stories, it highlighted one of its own dispatches about how the Clinton campaign had dropped a Celine Dion song as its campaign theme. It presented that breaking news nugget as further proof that it was "another rough stretch for Camp Clinton." No joke. Also, that same day, the artwork for The Note featured a photoshopped image of Clinton dressed up as a man and a photoshopped image of Obama dressed up as a woman. Again, no joke.

Boehlert quotes a survey by Harvard's Center for Public Leadership National Leadership Index:

[T]he press receives the lowest ratings of all. This is troubling, because democracies rely on a vibrant, probing, and trusted press. This year, we dig more deeply into the public's views on news media election coverage. The key finding: Americans' lack of confidence in the press stems from deep unease about bias and editorial content.

According to the survey:

88 percent agree that the news media focuses too much on trivial rather than important issues.

Surely not.



Glenn Greenwald observes today how non-establishment candidates are handled by the establishment-leaning media:

Such outsider candidates begin as the nerdy losers to be held up by our campaign journalists for adolescent, giggly mockery. If their campaigns prosper, they become the target of outright hostility (see, e.g., the media's role in the destruction of Howard Dean's candidacy in 2003). In different ways, that has been the arc of media treatment accorded to Paul, Huckabee and Edwards, all of whose candidacies -- for better or worse -- represent something significant in our political culture, represent direct challenges to prevailing conventional pieties and dominant power centers, and yet (or, rather, therefore) are treated as silly jokes when they are discussed at all.

And the FCC want's McMedia to be able to get bigger and us even dumber:

WASHINGTON - The Federal Communications Commission approved rules yesterday that allow publishers to own both newspapers and broadcast stations in the biggest US cities and that limit growth for cable companies.

Chairman Kevin Martin and the other two Republicans on the five-member panel backed the loosened rules for newspaper owners, which modify a ban adopted in 1975. Martin joined the agency's two Democrats in approving the cable limit.

Publishers Tribune Co. and News Corp. had said the ownership proposal didn't go far enough, while consumer groups said it threatened diversity in local media. The FCC disregarded 25 US senators who vowed in a letter released Monday to block the decision. They said more time is needed to review a policy that has "a substantial impact on the American people."

[h/t Glenn Greenwald]

Atrios the Wise

After quoting Greenwald on Chris Dodd's success, Atrios puts the naysayers in their places:

One of my pet peeves has long been a certain strain of defeatism. Understandably we all feel defeated at times, but there's a certain kind of defeatist out there on the internets, people who spend most of their time chastising others for thinking it's possible to have any influence and attacking the "stupidity" of those who even bother to try. Maybe those people are right. Maybe there never is anything to be done. But if that's the case, get a new goddamn hobby. It's rather odd to spend all your time following political news and blogs if the only reason to do it is to provide justification for your view that All Is Lost. Just go out and have some fun instead.

Like he said.

Always with the negative waves, Moriarty.

Dodd rocks their world

People power forces Harry Reid to put FISA on the back burner until next year:

All throughout the day, Judiciary Democrats such as Dodd, Edward Kennedy, and Russ Feingold took aim at the bill, even as Reid professed his hope that the Senate would pass the FISA bill today, in advance of its holiday adjournment. Dodd, a margin-of-error presidential candidate, vowed to filibuster the FISA bill on the floor if it granted large telecom companies such as Verizon and AT&T immunity from civil lawsuits for allegedly cooperating with the government. The Intel Committee bill did just that.

But early this evening, Reid surrendered, saying the FISA legislation would be taken up again in January, after the recess.

Watch Dodd's video thanking 500,000 of us for pressuring Harry Reid into pulling the FISA bill from the floor until next year:



Glenn Greenwald:

The most important value of victories of this sort is that they ought to serve as a potent tonic against defeatism, regardless of the ultimate outcome. And successes like this can and should provide a template for how to continue to strengthen these efforts. Yesterday's victory, temporary as it is, shouldn't be over-stated, but it also shouldn't be minimized. All of it stemmed from the spontaneous passion and anger of hundreds of thousands of individuals demanding that telecoms be subject to the rule of law like everyone else. And this effort could have been -- and, with this additional time, still can be -- much bigger and stronger still.

[h/t Glenn Greenwald]

Kennedy got pissed

in the Senate today. And not on alcohol. About FISA. (emphasis mine)

Let’s not forget why we are even talking about this issue. At some point in 2001, the Bush Administration began a massive program of warrantless spying. New reports suggest that the Administration began its warrantless spying even before 9/11. The Administration never told Congress what it was doing. In clear violation of the FISA law and in complete disdain for the 4th Amendment, it also never told the FISA court what it was doing.

[. . .]

There is still a great deal we don’t know about this secret spying, but what we do know is alarming. Numerous reports indicate that it covered not only international communications, but also Americans’ purely local calls with their friends, neighbors, and loved ones. A lawsuit in California has produced evidence that at the government’s request, AT&T installed a supercomputer in a San Francisco facility that copied every communication by its customers, and turned them over to the National Security Agency.

Think about that. The National Security Agency of the Bush Administration may have been intercepting the phone calls and e-mails of millions of ordinary Americans for years.

The surveillance was so flagrantly illegal that even lawyers in the Administration tried to fight it. Nearly 30 Justice Department employees threatened to resign over it. The head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, testified that it was “the biggest legal mess I had ever encountered.”

Mr. Goldsmith himself acknowledged that “top officials in the administration dealt with FISA the way they dealt with other laws they didn’t like: they blew through them in secret based on flimsy legal opinions that they guarded closely so no one could question the legal basis of the operations.”

Think about that as well. The President’s own head of the Office of Legal Counsel states that the Administration’s policy has been to “blow through” laws it doesn’t like, in secret, so that its actions cannot be challenged. The Bush White House has repeatedly failed to understand that our government is a government of laws, and not of men.

[. . .]

Here’s another fact that no one should lose sight of. From the very beginning, telecommunications companies have always had immunity under FISA when they comply with lawful surveillance requests. In fact, the Senate Judiciary Committee worked closely with AT&T, and the company played a major role in drafting FISA’s immunity provisions in the 1970s.

To be completely protected from any liability whatever, all a company needs under FISA is a court order or an appropriate certification from the Attorney General. That’s it. Just get one of those two documents, and you’re off the hook.

So in this debate, let’s be clear that we’re not talking about protecting companies that complied with lawful surveillance requests. We’re talking about protecting companies that complied with surveillance requests that they knew were illegal.

[. . .]

Some of the telecoms might have been doing what they thought was good for the country. Some of them might simply have been doing what they thought would preserve their lucrative government contracts. We simply don’t know. But either way, it is not the role of telecommunications companies to decide which laws to follow and which to ignore. FISA is a law that was carefully developed over many years to give the Executive Branch the flexibility it needs, while protecting the rights of Americans. It is the companies’ legal duty—and their patriotic duty—to follow that law.

Nothing could be more dangerous for Americans’ privacy and liberty than to weaken that law, which is precisely what retroactive immunity is meant to do. Yesterday’s newspaper disclosed that in December of 2000, the National Security Agency sent the Bush Administration a report asserting that the Agency must become a “powerful, permanent presence” on America’s communications network. A “powerful, permanent presence” on America’s communications network. Under this Administration, that is exactly what the NSA has become. If the phone companies simply do the NSA’s bidding in violation of the law, they create a world in which Americans can never feel confident that their e-mails and phone calls aren’t being tapped by the government.

[. . .]

The President has said that American lives will be sacrificed if Congress does not change FISA. But he has also said that he will veto any FISA bill that does not grant retro-active immunity. No immunity, no FISA bill. So if we take the President at his word, he's willing to let Americans die to protect the phone companies.

So the telecoms were entrapped by the government into breaking the law, huh?

And they knew it was against the law? (Quest Qwest did too. Except it's legal team said no, get a court order first.)

And now the telecoms should be immune from prosecution because the government instigated it?

Every John, pimp and drug dealer caught in a sting will be demanding that deal.

A Most Persuasive Case

from Prof. Amy Chua in today's Washington Post, The Right Road to America?.

Chua examines both sides of the immigration debate and argues for both tolerance and toughness. Read the whole thing, including her prescriptions.

The United States is in no danger of imminent disintegration. But this is because it has been so successful, at least since the Civil War, in forging a national identity strong enough to hold together its widely divergent communities. We should not take this unifying identity for granted.

If there is any value to identity politics, Chua's analysis suggests (indirectly), it lies in America's historic success in "forging an ethnically and religiously neutral national identity" as a means to national cohesion amidst ethnic and religious diversity instead of a " 'white, Christian' identity and what Huntington calls its Anglo-Saxon, Protestant 'core values' ."

Yet, she suggests,

America's glue can be subverted by too much tolerance. Immigration advocates are too often guilty of an uncritical political correctness that avoids hard questions about national identity and imposes no obligations on immigrants. For these well-meaning idealists, there is no such thing as too much diversity.

The right thing for the United States to do -- and the best way to keep Americans in favor of immigration -- is to take national identity seriously while maintaining our heritage as a land of opportunity. U.S. immigration policy should be tolerant but also tough.

Like all Americans, immigrants have a responsibility to contribute to the social fabric. It's up to each immigrant community to fight off an enclave mentality and give back to their new country. It's not healthy for Chinese to hire only Chinese, or Koreans only Koreans. By contrast, the free health clinic set up by Muslim Americans in Los Angeles -- serving the entire poor community -- is a model to emulate. Immigrants are integrated at the moment when they realize that their success is inextricably intertwined with everyone else's. (emphasis mine)

And that's true for each of us.

Just last night we were discussing the merits of mandatory national service for keeping the country out of wars of choice instigated by national leaders without buy-in by the citizenry. Chua's observations suggest its value as "cultural and political glue" as well.

Digby and others wonder why -- given the Bush administration's track record -- there's no introspection among the GOP's leaders about the future of their party. Instead:

They want a living incarnation of the party (Jesus, maybe, if he hated racial minorities and liked torture and tax cuts.)

The problem is that it's not easy to find a walking incarnation of a party based entirely on a dissonant image of narrow regional folkways and aristocratic privilege. Now that the Bush political franchise has been permanently tarnished, you can't just pull one off the shelf.

For a double dose of Digby, there's this:

Here's a little story from a book called "The Genius of the Jewish Joke" by Arthur Asa Berger:

Three Jews were going to be executed. They were lined up in front of a firing squad and the sergeant in charge asked each one whether he wanted a blindfold or not.

"Do you want a blindfold?" he asked the first. "Yes," he said, in a resigned tone.

"Do you want a blindfold?" he asked the second. "Ok," said the second.

"Do you want a blindfold?" he asked the third. "No," said the third.

At this point the second leaned over to the third one and said "Take a blindfold. Don't make trouble."

That's the Democratic electoral strategy in a nutshell.

Who will rid us of these ineffectual pols?

The Empire Strikes Out

Jurors Deadlock in 6 of 7 Defendants


Thursday December 13, 2007 8:46 PM

By CURT ANDERSON

MIAMI (AP) - One of seven Miami men accused of plotting to join forces with al-Qaida to blow up Chicago's Sears Tower was acquitted Thursday, and a mistrial was declared for the six others after the federal jury deadlocked.

The mistrial means prosecutors will have to decide whether to retry the six men.

Too busy chasing vote fraud.

But they're hell at propaganda.

[h/t Brad Blog]

Civics 101

Watched the president spin the NIE Iran report this week, trying to hype a threat he's known for months the NIE wouldn't confirm.

I was struck by how this administration is a civics lesson in why the Founders gave the power to declare war to the Congress and not to one man. Congress needs to remind them (Bush & Cheney) of that fact before they preempt again.

Sex on the City

The name nails it, her, him . . . whatever.

Voter fraud snipe hunt

"Everytime someone says, 'Show me the fraud,' there isn't any," said Coleman.

Get mad. Again.

Heard this morning on Air America:

Brad on the Stephanie Miller Show This Morning, Discussing the Sibel Edmonds Case... - 11/23/07

More background:

What The Heck is the Sibel Edmonds Case Anyway? And Why Should You Care About It? - 11/20/07

EXCLUSIVE: Daniel Ellsberg Says Sibel Edmonds Case 'Far More Explosive Than Pentagon Papers' - 11/19/07

EXCLUSIVE: FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds Will Now Tell All - and Face Charges if Necessary - to Any Major Television Network That Will Let Her - 10/29/07

EXCLUSIVE: FBI WHISTLEBLOWER SIBEL EDMONDS IS READY TO TALK! - 3/3/06

Vanity Fair, An Inconvenient Patriot - 8/15/05

Polterzeitgeist

This piece first appeared in the Asheville Citizen-Times on November 11, 2007.

Flipping through channels last week, I caught the tail end of the 1982 movie, “Poltergeist.” It’s still unnerving decades later. Childhood terrors come to life: monsters in the closet, outside the window, under the bed. In one scene, JoBeth Williams runs to her screaming children, but in helpless slow motion as their bedroom door recedes impossibly before her.

Watching the rerun of the Bush administration’s war-starting strategy — this time featuring Iran — feels like those slow-motion nightmares.

We charge Iran with interfering in Iraq. They’ve supported fellow Shiites there since the days when the United States supplied Saddam Hussein with chemicals, but no matter.

We charge Iran with smuggling weapons across their border with Iraq. The U.S. smuggled Stinger missiles to mujahideen halfway around the world in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, but no matter.

Determined hawks

One influential hawk among many, National Review’s Michael Ledeen, insists a state of war with Iran has existed since 1979. Ledeen helped the Reagan administration transfer weapons to the Iran he repeatedly claims we were at war with, but no matter.

In “The Secret History of the Impending War with Iran That the White House Doesn’t Want You to Know” in the recent Esquire, two former Bush State Department Middle East policy experts outline their post-Sept. 11, 2001, discussions with Iranian diplomats. “Iran was ready to cooperate unconditionally,” Esquire reports. The Bush administration was not — is not — interested in diplomacy, but no matter.

The executive branch players reprise roles they made famous, pre-Iraq. President Bush warns of “nuclear holocaust.” Vice President Cheney threatens Iran with “serious consequences.” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accuses Iran of “lying” to inspectors about its nuclear programs.

It doesn’t take a quarterback to see that the administration is running the same play again. Against Iran and against us.

Trumping up a case

They’ve been wrong about everything from weapons of mass destruction to Iraqi “dead-enders” to de-Baathification, Hurricane Katrina and Harriet Miers, but no matter. Regimes must be changed. Wars must be started. Reasons will be found.

In February, a story in London’s Telegraph newspaper reported that more than 100 .50-caliber Steyr-Mannlicher sniper rifles had been captured during American raids in Iraq. The weapons shipped to Iran in 2005 were now in use against U.S. troops, claimed the Telegraph’s anonymous source.

These formidable-looking Austrian weapons can take off a man’s head at a mile. Austrian native Arnold Schwarzenegger might wield one in the movies. What a jim-dandy backdrop for a press conference 100 would make, a picture worth a thousand words.

But no photos of the captured weapons appeared in any newspapers — only shots from Steyr’s online catalog. Skeptics asked if the serial numbers matched the weapons shipped to Iran, and the tale of the unseen rifles died overnight.

“Explosively formed penetrators” (EFPs) star in this year’s sequel too. Military briefers told reporters that the armor-piercing roadside bombs require machining too sophisticated for Iraqis. They had been manufactured in Iran.

“We have no evidence that this has ever been done in Iraq,” a senior U.S. military official told the New York Times in February.

Days later, a Los Angeles Times op-ed article cited a November 2006 raid on a Baghdad machine shop producing EFP components. Earlier reports of Iraqi EFP factories surfaced, and more questions. Military spokesmen backed away from earlier claims, prompting suggestions that the allegations against Iran had been manufactured. Bush called those suggestions “preposterous.”

Congress can stop this

These anecdotes don’t disprove Iranian weapons are reaching Iraq. Some indeed may. But these examples cast a cloud over tales — especially regarding Iranian nuclear programs — used to justify a disastrous new “preemptive” war by the same people who produced the last one.

Congress has the power to stop it. But despite receiving the voters’ mandate last November — to exercise its duty to flex its own constitutional war and oversight powers — Congress shies like an abused child who fears slaps and name-calling for doing so.

Hoping to wait out a reckless and power-hungry White House until November 2008 is itself reckless, as it is unconscionable.

Presidential spokesmen and candidates warn that a nuclear-armed Iran will destabilize the region. But that mission is already accomplished. Another American pre-emptive war will destabilize it further, and quicker.

Like a slow-motion nightmare, we watch it unfolding just as it did in 2002 and 2003. We scream warnings, but our leaders do not hear us.

Water Woes

Uptown Ruler takes note of the Southeast's water woes, highlighted in Orme, TN. (Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

The Associated Press reports “As twilight falls over this Tennessee town, Mayor Tony Reames drives up a dusty dirt road to the community’s towering water tank and begins his nightly ritual in front of a rusty metal valve.

With a twist of the wrist, he releases the tank’s meager water supply, and suddenly this sleepy town is alive with activity. Washing machines whir, kitchen sinks fill and showers run.

About three hours later, Reames will return and reverse the process, cutting off water to the town’s 145 residents.

The severe drought tightening like a vise across the Southeast has threatened the water supply of cities large and small, sending politicians scrambling for solutions. But Orme, about 40 miles west of Chattanooga and 150 miles northwest of Atlanta, is a town where the worst-case scenario has already come to pass: The water has run out.

The mayor wonders what the 4.5 million people in Atlanta will do. I had my own perspective on the problem:

As Dreyfuss once said, “Well, this is not a boat accident! And it wasn’t any propeller; and it wasn’t any coral reef; and it wasn’t Jack the Ripper!” But for Atlanta, anyway, it wasn’t a shark or the drought either. It was overdevelopment.

The drought just precipitated the crisis that’s been a long time coming. Atlanta’s been sucking hard on the Flint River Aquifer for years without regard to what sprawl was doing to the water supply.

“Heavens, we can’t tell developers no. That would interfere with their personal freedom and right to put their land to its ‘highest and best use’.”

In 1998, I put in a wastewater neutralization system for a lens coating operation in an office park in Alfalfa-retta, north of Atlanta. I asked what the small out-building was at the edge of the parking lot. The Culligan rep told me it was a well house (in an upscale office park!).

He knew clients (including hospitals) drilling wells all over Atlanta because the Metropolitan Sewer District wouldn’t let people use all the water they wanted (both because of the MSD infrastructure capacity and water source limits, I think). So they were drilling their own wells to get unmetered water.

I was on the edge of another client’s lawsuit in Duluth Buford, GA, in 1999 when the county Fulton reneged on its water contract to supply the water needed for a new, water-heavy manufacturing operation we helped design.

The drought is just the straw that’s broken the camel’s back. The Flint River Aquifer has been under strain for a decade as Atlanta keeps growing, the developers keep developing, and the water supply keeps shrinking.

It was only a matter of time before the taps started running dry. Nobody listens. Nobody cares. Anyone who raises the alarm is an anti-business kook.

For years, I’ve wondered when we’d start seeing bumper stickers that said, “Suppose they gave a subdivision and nobody came?”

Maybe soon, now.

Then from today's LA Times:

But experts say the Southeast’s struggles over water resources are far from over.

“What was not on the table, and what has got to be on the table, is Atlanta’s unrestricted growth and cavalier attitude to water use,” said Sally Bethea, executive director of Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, a watchdog group.

[. . .]

“Atlanta is a greedy, poorly designed behemoth of a city incapable of hearing the word ‘no’ and dealing with it,” said a recent editorial in the Valdosta (Ga.) Daily Times.

The editorial said Atlanta’s “politicians can’t bring themselves to tell their greedy constituents complaining about the low flows in their toilets this week that perhaps if they didn’t have six bathrooms, it might ease the situation a bit.”

There is sowing, and then there is reaping.

Sandbox Rules

Dave Neiwert of Orcinus began a series this week, "The Politics of the Personal," over at Campaign for America's Future. Part 1 describes his journey from growing up in Idaho in a Republican working class family, to rejecting that ideology. But there's enough caution to go around for all:

A basic realization took shape, perhaps typical of the age, but it has persisted: even though I had always believed (and still do to some extent) upper-class and urban liberals are prone to indulging a paper-thin compassion that more resembles a parlor game rationalized with a tortuous intellectualism, it was also clear that conservatives, conversely, were fond of wrapping themselves in my old-fashioned, working-class values (along with the American flag, of course) even as they systematically undermined the ability of ordinary, working-class people to make a decent living and obtain equal opportunity.

[. . .]

I simultaneously came to almost instinctively mistrust ideologues of all stripes because it seems that to them, ideas are more important than people. This observation arose first out of personal experience, since ideologues are often likely to reject friendships with those who don't think like them or fit their ideologies. I might be able to maintain a relationship with an ideologue (right or left) for awhile, but inevitably, they would reject me because I didn't fit the pure mold they had in mind. People who disagree with them or challenge them assault their egos and are placed out of their personal realms. This dynamic – valuing ideas above people -- played out on the larger stage as well; indeed, it’s virtually a guarantee that when ideologues act out their ideologies, in both national politics and everyday interpersonal dealings, ordinary people in real life are harmed.

You see it at both ends of the ideological spectrum, as I've written myself after encountering liberal activists who wouldn't give pro-life Democrats the time of day:

It has been obvious to me for some time that the further right and the further left one goes in the political spectrum, the more alike conservatives and liberals become. They don't think the same things, but they begin thinking the same way: rigid, dogmatic and intolerant. They just don't see themselves that way: "You must mean those people."

Dave, who has followed the "eliminationist" trend in America for some time, also wanders, as I have, into exploring the mindset(s) behind the American Right. Dave, Digby and others have been puzzling over the coverage of Hillary Clinton's appearance at Wellesley -- for playing the "gender card" -- by the boys' club that unashamedly gushes over their favorite candidates' manliness. As Digby puts it:

Indeed, the entire Republican campaign strategy can be said to be one big gender card --- the only people they believe matter in this country are delicate, insecure creatures who are so sensitive that they have to be pampered and pandered to like a bunch of overfed princes who like to play cowboy and don't want to share their favorite binky.

Even more fascinating is Orcinus' Sara Robinson's take on fundamentalist/Right Wing Authoritarian ideology that traps people "somewhere around the age of five or six":

They also have to give up on adult-level emotional functioning (which, as I mentioned, may be welcomed as something of a relief after adult life has blown up under you a few times). Authoritarian followers crave someone who will keep things ordered and safe, someone who will provide and protect and set firm rules and boundaries; someone all-powerful and all-knowing who can teach you right from wrong and keep the harsh parts of the world at bay. Someone, in short, who looks like Daddy looked when you were about five years old.

RWAs would far rather curl up in Daddy's lap -- even if it means abandoning reason and taking the occasional spanking -- than try to deal with the world by themselves, on adult terms. This is also why RWA family and community relationships (as Lakoff has explained) are necessarily hierarchical. These people still need parents around, because they don't feel emotionally safe without the presence of a strong authority figure. Egalitarian relationships terrify them, because there's nobody in charge to make the rules and set the boundaries that keep people from hurting each other. And that's damned scary, because (as masters of projection) they're quite sure that everybody else in the whole world is also still five years old and playing by sandbox rules. Without a playground supervisor in charge, they know for sure that somebody will get hurt.

It takes us full-circle to the Bush joke that went around the Net awhile back. As Digby put it:

Avedon Carol snares a great quote that finally cleared something up for me: why does Bush always sound like he's talking to five year olds?

"He speaks to the audience as if they're idiots. I think the reason he does that is because that's the way these issues were explained to him." - Graydon Carter

All well and good. Now, what do we do with this information that will help us set this country right again? How do we elect leaders who will lift us out of the sandbox in Iraq and the political sandbox Washington has become?

Why are we not surprised?

From this morning's WaPo:

In a series of internal musings and memos to his staff, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld argued that Muslims avoid "physical labor" and wrote of the need to "keep elevating the threat," "link Iraq to Iran" and develop "bumper sticker statements" to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war.

Regarding the president's nominee for AG, Mr. Mukasey, today's NYT editorial weighs in:

Mr. Gonzales resigned after his extraordinary incompetence became too much for even loyal Republicans. Now Mr. Bush wants the Senate to confirm Michael Mukasey, a well-respected trial judge in New York who has stunned us during the confirmation process by saying he believes the president has the power to negate laws and by not committing himself to enforcing Congressional subpoenas. He also has suggested that he will not uphold standards of decency during wartime recognized by the civilized world for generations.

After a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in which Mr. Mukasey refused to detail his views on torture, he submitted written answers to senators’ questions that were worse than his testimony. They suggest that he, like Mr. Gonzales, would enable Mr. Bush’s lawless behavior and his imperial attitude toward Congress and the courts.

Just another day at the Ministry of Truth.

Blogging still slow

My other political project continues to consume much time.

Op-ed: Coming soon in the funny papers.

The Propagandists Next Door

The right-wing Pass-It-On e-mails that come to me (via friends and relatives who know I collect it) was were a source of amusement for years. But what with the machinations of this administration and its lackeys - and a pending attack on Iran - I've come to see them in a darker light.

Folks, you're not just forwarding e-mail from friends. You're being used as propagandists by propagandandists.

An old one from 2002 came around again last week, already debunked by Snopes.com. Among the lies it traffics in are:

Oliver North warned an unfriendly Senate inquisitor about Osama bin Laden during the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings. "Quotes" are included.

North's inquisitor was Al Gore.

9/11 mastermind, Mohammad Atta, in prison in Israel for a bus bombing conviction, was released from prison in 1993 at the behest of the Clinton administration. This "fact" was reported in the U.S. press immediately after 9/11, but subsequently censored.

Oceana has always been at war with Eastasia.

Okay, that last bit wasn't really in there. But as is customary, the spam urges readers to pass it on (to everyone in your e-mail list).

All lies, of course. It was Abu Nidal, not Osama bin Laden. Gore wasn't on that panel. It wasn't that Mohammed Atta - different guy, same name. Ollie North even disclaimed the e-mail on his own site. Newspapers did report the Atta story after 9/11, but stopped after the Boston Globe discovered the error.

The disquieting thing is, these things continue to crop up - along with new ones - and fan out like a chain reaction. And they fly comfortably below the radar, day after day, passed from e-mail list to e-mail list. The mail I got had 75 e-mail addresses on it.

What makes Pass-It-On mail such an efficient conduit for spreading propaganda is that it arrives from a friend, colleague or relative - sources less impeachable, and much less likely to be challenged than the Mainstream Media. A 30-sec Google search would reveal the mail to be false, less time than it takes to attach dozens of your friends' addresses to the forward. Yet few bother. It reinforces existing prejudices. It came from a friend. Why inquire further?

What especially strikes me about this one is, it's not just one falsehood that slipped through the cracks, but many. The newspapers got the Atta story wrong. Okay. But Oliver North (Iran-Contra transcripts are readily available)? Al Gore?

As with other mailings in my collection, somebody went to a lot of trouble to assemble and distribute these lies with World Trade Center graphics and extra-large, extra-bold red, white and blue formatting - not uncommon for Pass-It-Ons. Given what we've seen from the administration and its supporters, it's not a stretch to assume that the authors already knew these things were lies ... and didn't care so long as they furthered the cause and poisoned the well of public discourse.

Such tactics filter from the top down. We shouldn't be surprised.

With evidence that the recent right-wing blogger smear campaign against twelve year-old SCHIP recipient, Graeme Frost, was orchestrated out of Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's office, one wonders if the persistent Pass-It-On spam has similar parentage, though perhaps not regularly originating in the Senate.

These things do their jobs discretely, quietly poisoning minds, breeding mistrust of the unpatriotic Others, laying a foundation of support - almost subliminal - for secret prisons, military tribunals, indefinite detention, kidnapping, torture of prisoners, and the next preemptive war.

As a child reared during the Cold War, I was cautioned what would happen to freedom-loving "trouble-makers" if the Communists ever took over: surveillance, imprisonment, show trials, friends and relatives informing on each other, secrecy and ubiquitous propaganda.

They just never anticipated talk radio and the Internet.

The Greatest Hits Party

At recent and not-so-recent Democrat events I've attended, invariably someone gets up to remind us what Democrats are all about. To cheers and applause they reel off a list of 40-to-70-year-old programs and policies of which Democrats are justly proud. Only it begins to have the air of a late-night K-tel commercial: Democrats' Greatest Hits - All your favorites from the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s.

Makes me want to put on some plaid golf pants, a white patent-leather belt, and dance the Shag with Mrs. Blue.

Folks, you'd better get off your widening rear ends and create some new hits if you want to remain relevant in the 21st century. This democracy may not survive your biding your time until the end of Bush's term.

Here are a few off-the-cuff suggestions:

Restore habeas corpus.

Insist the Executive branch obey the law or impeach the blackguards.

Cut off the Boy King's war-waging allowance -- give him a G.I. Joe and send him to his room.

Demand an Attorney General who's not another presidential toady.

Need more ideas? You know where to find me.

Eliminationists United

This is a few days old, but worth reading in full.

Ezra Klein renders a diagnosis of the latest Malkin/wingnut crusade -- against 12-year-old Graeme Frost -- into plain English:

This is the politics of hate. Screaming, sobbing, inchoate, hate. It would never, not in a million years, occur to me to drive to the home of a Republican small business owner to see if he “really” needed that tax cut. It would never, not in a million years, occur to me to call his family and demand their personal information. It would never occur to me to interrogate his neighbors. It would never occur to me to his smear his children.

The shrieking, atavistic ritual of personal destruction the right roars into every few weeks is something different than politics. It is beyond politics. It was done to Scott Beauchamp, a soldier serving in Iraq. It was done to college students from the University of California, at Santa Cruz. Currently, it is being done to a child and his family. And think of those targets: College students, soldiers, children. It can be done to absolutely anyone.

This is not politics. This is, in symbolism and emotion, a violent group ritual. It is savages tearing at the body of a captured enemy. It is the group reminding itself that the Other is always disingenuous, always evil, always lying, always pitiful and pathetic and grotesque.

To punctuate the point, Klein cites a recent account by Jim Henley of road rage, threats and a near assault provoked by simply ... well, let him explain it:

I yell back when he stops for air, “What is your FUCKING problem? What did I do to you?”

He leans out to point at my car bumper. Which is entirely unadorned except for a Kerry-Edwards sticker from 2004.

“YOU FAGGOT YOU VOTED FOR THAT WAR CRIMINAL. I’M GOING TO BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF YOU.” Guy is turning a shade of purple. I don’t think he’s just putting on a show. He actually sped up, nearly rammed with his car at high speed and is now seriously contemplating attacking me over a bumper sticker.

Liberal protesters may camp out in front of Nancy Pelosi's house, but that's about it. Malkin's mob falls into this disturbing brand of conservatism, the kind of insecure, easily threatened people who beat up guys with long hair in the 60s before wearing theirs long in the 70s.

There are plenty of sane people on the right, to be sure -- some of my relatives among them -- but for too many twisted individuals conservatism isn't a political philosophy, it's a personality disorder.

Dave Neiwert has the last say:

It's important to make an issue of eliminationist talk precisely because it is so poisonous to the national discourse. For starters, its innate divisiveness belies its practitioners' demands for "national unity." Moreover, its targets are in a lose-lose position: if they attempt to continue to practice the old-fashioned politics of traditional civility out of principle, they are doomed to be bulldozered; but if they stand up and fight back, they're accused of being uncivil. (It's funny how bullies act all wounded and picked on when somebody punches back.)

This is easily the ugliest facet of a conservative movement that doesn't have many attractive ones to begin with, and the more the general public sees it in all its mouth-foaming glory, the less they want anything to do with them. With polls a month ago showing something like 86 percent support for SCHIP, nasty attacks on 12-year-olds seem unlikely to change the public's mind. (A more recent Rasmussen poll showed 57 percent disapproved of President Bush's veto of the SCHIP bill.) More important, there's a growing consensus that, like the centrists at Poliblogger, we are "sick to death of these people and their views of both politics and public discourse."

Yet at the same time, eliminationist rhetoric creates a vicious upward spiral that inevitably expresses itself in violence: When its practitioners face the inevitable retaliation, their response always is to ratchet it up another notch, until the back-and-forth gets so ugly that hardly anyone can tell who is worse. This is not discourse; it's a recipe for the destruction of our democratic institutions.

[h/t Dave Neiwert/TomPaine.com]

A little history lesson

from "Last of the Mohicans," on cable tonight:

I believe if they set aside their law as and when they wish, their law no longer has rightful authority over us. All they have over us is tyranny, then. -- Jack, a militiaman

Wake up on the wrong side of the bed?

Every day for the last several decades?

Rick Perlstein (citing James Fallows)observes that Al Gore isn't the first Nobel winner to give conservatives a hissy fit.

For conservatives, everything is political war. Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize, reflecting the entire world's consensus that man-made climate change is a crisis? For conservatives, that means: time to discredit the Nobel Peace Prize itself as a pathetic racket—or, as National Review's Steven F. Hayward puts it, "a once-prestigious award," now suffering its "final debasement."

It raises an interesting question. When did conservatives first begin questioning the prestige of the Nobel Peace Prize? Steve Benen and James Fallows point out that would be 1964, when the Prize was won by Dr. Martin Luther King.

[. . .]

As I wrote in an essay last January (subscription only; email me at rperlstein@ourfuture.org and I'll email you a copy), conservatives "hated King's doctrines. Hating them was one of the litmus tests of conservatism." Prominent conservatives even went so far as to blame him for his own death—for didn't the doctrine of "civil disobedience" mean you got to choose the laws you followed? Strom Thurmond: "[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." Ronald Reagan: this 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." Civil rights? That was just a front. A have here in front of me a slim 1965 pamphlet c0-authored by Lee Edwards, a present-day fellow at the Heritage Foundation, entitled Behind the Civil Rights Mask, whose cover features King's face as a mask, hiding their true goal: "revolution."

And they go after children the same way.

Separate and unequal

Glenn Greenwald opines today on the naked corruption on display in the Telecom Immunity law winding through Congress with bipartisan support. It's designed to exempt telecoms from lawsuits spawned by violations of communications laws, committed at the behest of the NSA for the White House's domestic surveillance program.

. . . these corporations are using their vast resources to give money to key lawmakers and pay huge lobbying fees to politically
well-connected former government officials to pressure the Congress to write a new law that has no purpose other than to declare that they are immune from accountability for their lawbreaking. They're conniving, literally, to be specially exempted from the rule of law.

[. . .]

By definition, our Beltway establishment does not believe in the rule of law -- at least not for them. They are creating a completely segregated, two-track system where high Beltway officials and their corporate enablers arrogate unto themselves the power to decide when they can break the law. They are thus literally exempt from our laws, even our criminal laws, while increasingly harsh, merciless, and inflexible punishments are doled out for the poorest and least connected criminals -- who receive no consideration of any kind, let alone presidential commutations or special laws written for them by Congress retroactively rendering legal their patently criminal behavior.

The Telecom Immunity law that Congress seems well on its way to enacting is one of the most conclusive pieces of evidence yet not only that our Royal Beltway Court is corrupt and decayed at its core. It also proves that they no longer care who knows it.

This weekend, the WaPo reported allegations by former Qwest Communications CEO, Joseph P. Nacchio, that "the government withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest refused to participate in an unidentified National Security Agency program that the company thought might be illegal."

Per Nacchio's lawyer:

"Mr. Nacchio made inquiry as to whether a warrant or other legal process had been secured in support of that request," Stern said. "When he learned that no such authority had been granted and that there was a disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process, including the Special Court which had been established to handle such matters, Mr. Nacchio concluded that these requests violated the privacy requirements of the Telecommunications Act."

Granted, Nacchio is appealing convictions for insider trading, and the substance of his allegations could be suspect, but company records of the alleged Feb. 27, 2001 meeting with the NSA could easily confirm whether the NSA was working on a domestic surveillance program six months before September 11, 2001.

What will Fox News say?

Gore Wins Nobel Peace Prize

First Jimmy Carter, now Al Gore. Clearly, the Nobel committee is weak on defense and hates America. They don't even have a Nobel Belligerence Prize do they?

Those socialists are as crazy as Gore is.

More from the Times

Today's editorial:

Is this the country whose president declared, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” and then managed the collapse of Communism with minimum bloodshed and maximum dignity in the twilight of the 20th century? Or is this a nation that tortures human beings and then concocts legal sophistries to confuse the world and avoid accountability before American voters?

Uh, "B"?

And worse. These "leaders" are giving license for their followers to behave likewise.

“Surprise, surprise, surprise."

"That ain’t my finger, neither.”

From this morning's New York Times:

Tens of thousands of Medicare recipients have been victims of deceptive sales tactics and had claims improperly denied by private insurers that run the system’s huge new drug benefit program and offer other private insurance options encouraged by the Bush administration, a review of scores of federal audits has found.

The Road to Damascus

experience -- circa 1st century A.D. -- is what America needs: scales falling from eyes. Courtesy of Glenn Greenwald, evidence that that's happening from John Cole at Balloon Juice:

Seriously- what does the current Republican party stand for? Permanent war, fear, the nanny state, big spending, torture, execution on demand, complete paranoia regarding the media, control over your body, denial of evolution and outright rejection of science, AND ZOMG THEY ARE GONNA MAKE US WEAR BURKHAS, all the while demanding that in order to be a good American I have to spend most of every damned day condemning half my fellow Americans as terrorist appeasers.

And that isn’t even getting into the COMPLETE and TOTAL corruption of our political processes at every level.

Follow the link above and this one. I was only vaguely aware of the Siegelman case in Alabama. The article in Time should change that for a lot of people.