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.