Chasing Spamalot

"THIS DEFINITELY WARRANTS LOOKING INTO."

Dr. Danielle Allen's investigation into e-propaganda, in a profile Saturday by the WaPo:

"What I've come to realize is, the labor of generating an e-mail smear is divided and distributed amongst parties whose identities are secret even to each other," she says. A first group of people published articles that created the basis for the attack. A second group recirculated the claims from those articles without ever having been asked to do so. "No one coordinates the roles," Allen said. Instead the participants swim toward their goal like a school of fish -- moving on their own, but also in unison.

Obama's campaign, for better or worse, is writing the manual on combating this new asymmetrical guerrilla warfare. Obama has not shied away from the rumors -- he mentions them frequently. "Before I begin," he told a pro-Israel group this month, "I want to say that I know some provocative e-mails have been circulating throughout Jewish communities across the country. . . . They're filled with tall tales and dire warnings about a certain candidate for president. And all I want to say is -- let me know if you see this guy named Barack Obama, because he sounds pretty frightening."

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

We are the microgeneration

A new government report to be released Monday mirrors a Conservative Party policy announced six months ago advocating "a decentralised energy revolution," according to The Independent of London.

The government-backed report, to be published tomorrow, says that, with changed policies, the number of British homes producing their own clean energy could multiply to one million – about one in every three – within 12 years.

These would produce enough power to replace five large nuclear power stations, tellingly at about the same time as the first of the much-touted new generation of reactors is likely to come on stream.

[. . .]

The 130-page report . . . has been produced by a consultancy, Element Energy, after a wide-ranging survey of public attitudes on installing household renewable energy systems. It has been financed, and steered by, 14 official and other bodies including DBERR, the official Energy Savings Trust, five regional development agencies, British Gas, the Micropower Council and the Ashden Trust.

After some hemming and hawing over energy policy in Britain, including entertaining building more nuclear stations and reducing support for microgeneration that leaves Britain well behind the rest of Europe, the report may offer a change of direction:

The report offers a very different future, as do the Tories, who see microgeneration as central to their philosophy of redirecting power to individuals. David Cameron sees "decentralised energy" as "a key part of our political vision, energy for the post-bureaucratic age". He believes microgeneration could make Britain, and individual communities, "self-sufficient in energy".

Post-bureaucratic? Decentralized? Self-sufficient? What kind of conservatives are they growing over there? Real conservatives know that the only way to cheaper gas and more freedom is drilling, drilling and more drilling. Clearly, British conservatives are a looney bunch of DFHs. Call Bill O'Reilly to have them arrested.

When was the last time you heard "lily-livered"?

Sir Simon Jenkins, writing for the Sunday Times of London, declares al Qaeda beneath the dignity of James Bond:

Oh do pay attention, 007, this enemy simply isn’t worthy of you.

Jenkins traces our need for a great enemy and laments that al Qaeda simply doesn't measure up to Cold War-inspired villains of the Bond books.

But the histrionics of the neocons, Bush and Blair has been a boon to this ragtag troop, Jenkins says, inflating al Qaeda "into a body of fiendish efficiency and global strength. Its cells had to be everywhere, its influence titanic, its fanaticism superhuman." They all but painted bin Laden with a mechanical hand and a white cat.

The West has not curbed Al-Qaeda.

The movement has been honoured by Blair, the neocons and the military industrial complex as the global antithesis to the once-vaunted new world order. Never can so wretched an outfit have been awarded so vast a dignity.

Al-Qaeda is thus an Orwellian classic, a necessary enemy. As portrayed by Philip Bobbitt in his new book, Terror and Consent, it is the ultimate Smersh, terrorist without aim or purpose, secretive, fanatical and blessed with an awesome arsenal on the brink of going chemical, biological and nuclear. Its alleged goal is to create mayhem as a prelude to some notional world theocracy.

Now if the loutish Yanks at Halliburton would just deliver that new Mach 2 jetpack, Bond could kick some Islamofascist butt . . . after a few, quick hands of Baccarat.

Jenkins concludes,

What I cannot do is join the pessimists in claiming that western civilisation is so enfeebled by immorality, as the Bishop of Rochester implied last week, as to be structurally vulnerable to bomb explosions, devoid as they are of any political programme or local support. Because a terrorist claims to attack western culture does not make the claim plausible. Conrad’s terrorist was equally grandiloquent in his demented ambition. This is childish fear-mongering.

I have more faith in western democracy than the lily-livered neocons. I believe in the robustness of its institutions, its traditions and its liberal outlook. They beat the real threat of communist totalitarianism. Nothing on the present horizon is remotely comparable to that. I rather agree with the St Petersburg comrades. That some people need the emotional prop of a Great Satan does not make Satan any more real.

Lily-livered, yet. All things old are new again.

Chairman Mao, Inc. is watching you

File it under "free markets and free people go hand in hand."

Naomi Klein writes, in her current Rolling Stone piece that China's new surveillance infrastructure, Golden Shield, is almost ready to protect China's "market Stalinism."

This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country's notorious system of online controls known as the "Great Firewall." Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder's personal data. This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces.

Golden Shield (which Klein dubs Police State 2.0) must be inducing surveillance envy among higher-ups in the Bush administration, both for its domestic spying and profit potential. Former Bush CIA chief, George Tenet, is already on the board of Connecticut-based L-1 Identity Solutions, the biometrics firm vying for the contract to supply China with the technology for Police State 2.0. Supplying police-state technology to China is probably illegal under U.S. law, Klein notes, and has been since shortly after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.

U.S. business consultant, Stephen Herrington, a former military-intelligence lieutenant colonel, tells Klein that what he's seeing in China scares the hell out of him.

"I can guarantee you that there are people in the Bush administration who are studying the use of surveillance technologies being developed here and have at least skeletal plans to implement them at home," he says. "We can already see it in New York with CCTV cameras. Once you have the cameras in place, you have the infrastructure for a powerful tracking system. I'm worried about what this will mean if the U.S. government goes totalitarian and starts employing these technologies more than they are already. I'm worried about the threat this poses to American democracy."

Herrington pauses. "George W. Bush," he adds, "would do what they are doing here in a heartbeat if he could."

If he hasn't already. "Ready for export to a neighborhood near you," Klein quips.

What’s more ironic is how this new Homeland Security industry isn’t some poster child for free-market capitalist innovation, but constitutes another kind of arms industry. Companies like L-1 Identity Solutions developed their technology using taxpayer dollars. Their principle clients are government agencies funded with taxpayer dollars. And their efforts at getting around export restrictions so they can sell these new "arms" to a lucrative Chinese market are defended by a growing Homeland Security industry lobby funded, again, with taxpayer dollars.

Klein observes,

The global homeland-security business is now worth an estimated $200 billion — more than Hollywood and the music industry combined. Any sector of that size inevitably takes on its own momentum. New markets must be found — which, in the Big Brother business, means an endless procession of new enemies and new emergencies: crime, immigration, terrorism.

Homeland Security player General Electric controls major media in this country and Cisco Systems, a supplier of security hardware to China, is a sponsor of television's 24. For both, fear is their business. Maintaining it makes business sense.

In a sidebar, Klein considers what China's security apparatus means for us.

"... they're becoming more like us and we're becoming more like them. I think this urge to know as much as possible about what people are saying and writing and doing, this is something the police around the world share. They generally want as much information about people as possible. The way I put it in the piece is that there seems to be this global middle ground emerging, not to say that we are like China now, but you do have a glimpse of catching the future and of course it's the future that we've imagined many, many times in every Hollywood movie."

Smile.

When Bush pardons himself

The Bush administration did not have an exit strategy for Iraq, but you can bet they have one for themselves. With the nation distracted by the election, few are discussing what steps Bush might take before leaving the White House for avoiding the Big House. Or what secret, pre-planning is likely going on as we speak to address that.

We all expect a flurry of preemptive presidential pardons for Bush’s pals before he leaves office. But unless there is a Republican following him in the White House, who pardons Bush?
“He couldn’t pardon himself,” my wife said yesterday.

“We’re talking about George W. Bush,” I replied. Who would have foreseen a president voiding habeas corpus, authorizing torture or any of his other offenses?

Sure, there would be a firestorm of criticism, but if it is between public opinion or George doing time, has he ever cared what we think? They have already granted themselves retroactive immunity for past war crimes in the Military Commissions Act.

With our president’s history, it would not surprise me for Bush to pardon himself. Barring impeachment, the constitution does not forbid it. At worst, Bush might worry that someone will challenge it before the Supreme Court -- the Roberts Supreme Court.

Empathy 101

Barack Obama won North Carolina by 14 points on Tuesday, but not here in the NC-11. Hillary Clinton won in this conservative district by 16 points, except in Buncombe County. Liberal activists in Buncombe will be grinding their teeth over that for weeks.

Last week, Jeff Greenfield had a piece in Slate that feeds into what I've been thinking about regarding activists and the "elitist" label that gets attached by conservative elitists to liberal ones. Greenfield quotes George Orwell from 1937 on the failure of socialism to take root in England. Orwell brands socialism's supporters as its worst promoters, commonly bearing "the worst stigmata of sniffish middle-class superiority."

Greenfield paraphrases:

Real working-class folks, he says, might be drawn toward a socialist future centered around family life, the pub, football, and local politics. But those who speak in its name, he says, have a snobbish condescension toward such quotidian pleasures—even condemning coffee and tea. "Reformers" urged the poor to eat healthier food—less sugar, more brown bread. And their audience balked. "Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like organs and wholemeal bread, or [raw carrots]?" Orwell asks. "Yes it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would rather starve than live on brown bread and more carrots … a millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits. An unemployed man doesn't."

The amusing thing about insistent activists everywhere is how smart they think they are about their pet issues, and how dense they are about people -- voters they are asking for the privilege to represent.

With this week's results in NC-11, I'm bound to hear local activists dismissing more conservative Democrats as ignorant or uneducated, the kind of people who still believe Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. The question they should ask themselves is, Why do they trust George Bush rather than you?

Because elections aren't about issues. They're not about programs and policies. Essentially, they are about identity and trust. Greenfield explains:

The perennial struggle of Democratic contenders to appeal to ordinary Americans seems very much of a piece with Orwell's sharp descriptions. Election after election, Democrats argue that once Joe and Jane Sixpack fully grasp the wisdom of the latest six-point college-loan program, or of an 800-page health-care scheme, they will come to wave the Democratic banner. And, sometimes, these voters do just that—provided that the candidate in question has demonstrated a sense that he or she is not treating them as the subject of an anthropological study. Bill Clinton had a full steamer trunk of domestic programs; he also was a product of Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale Law School. But his 18 years in the vineyards of Arkansas politics gave him the tools to compete for support on a more visceral level. Then there were Clinton's obvious tastes for earthly pleasures—from Big Macs to more intimate diversions—which made it very hard to label him as an aloof elitist.

It's their own wonkishness that separates the activists from average voters. Voters want first to vote for somebody who they can trust, for somebody who thinks like they do. This is Empathy 101.

Or as I wrote a couple of weeks ago,

. . . with more and more Americans feeling as if they are treading water amidst a flotsam of bills, soccer practice, commuting and longer work hours, throwing them a candidate survey or a stack of position papers isn't helping. They need a lifeline. Like it or not, many voters just want some way to participate that doesn't require that they master the arcana of the legislative process. That's what they have representatives for. They just want some shorthand way of choosing candidates who will legislate in their best interests. A party they can trust. A party who thinks like they do.

Brings tears to my eyes

First from Alex Knapp:

Both Matthew Yglesias and John Cole agree that the Obama/Clinton proposal to tax the “windfall profits” of the oil companies is a bad idea, and you’ll get no argument from me. However, one thing that I did notice when I was doing a little google-fu on the issue is that there appears to be approximately 20 to 50 billion dollars spent by the federal government per year on direct subsidies (as opposed to tax breaks) given to the oil industry each year.

[. . .]

Not only would that generate more revenue than the “windfall tax” (estimated to be $15 billion), but it would do so without getting the federal government into the problematic business of deciding how profitable companies are allowed to be.

Kevin Drum puts icing on the cake:

Anyway, this really ought to be the liberal rallying cry: forget a windfall profits tax, let's work first on getting rid of the massive corporate welfare infrastructure we've constructed for an industry that really, really doesn't need it. Not as sexy as a gas tax holiday, maybe, but it makes a helluva lot more sense.

"Somebody who thinks like me"

If Democrats want a stronger hand in guiding America's future, they need to strengthen their brand identity among busy and beleaguered American voters.

For decades, too much emphasis has been placed promoting programs and policies -- or attractive personalities -- over deeper brand identification. There are a lot of folk myths about the 1950s, and maybe this is one of them, but I think I remember a time when brand loyalty made for Democrats' success. A time when, if someone mentioned a candidate's name, the first question someone might ask was, "Is he a Democrat?"

"Yes."

"That’s all I need to know." And that meant another vote for the Democrat.

Democrat meant, he thinks like me. He believes what I do. He’s on my side. You didn’t need to know his or her position on snail darters or NAFTA or gay rights. Or even his name. Democrat meant something.

But how many events have you been to where someone starts talking about what Democrats stand for? And they unroll a laundry list of programs and policies anywhere from forty to seventy years-old. It’s like a K-tel commercial for Democrats’ Greatest Hits. “Can anyone forget the rocking, G.I. Bill?” Proud accomplishments, okay? But they don’t say anything about the beliefs behind those programs, nothing about our passions or ideals, about who we are.

Coke, the Chicago Cubs, Nike, the Marines. Images, feelings and associations are more important in brand loyalty than particular features, and Democrats have neglected brand-building for too long. Behind the argument echoed in Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? -- that many working class voters vote Republican against their own economic interests -- is the assumption that economic interest is (or should be) the basis for casting a ballot and for party identification.

One of the disconnects in American politics between Democratic activists and typical voters arises from activists' focus on the wonky details of programs and policies that busy non-wonks haven't the time to master, even if they have the interest.

Early primary voting is underway here in NC, and yesterday my wife went out to vote with a group of friends. They turned to her to tell them who they should vote for on the down-ticket races. To some degree, they just wanted to vote for Clinton or Obama and the other races were afterthoughts. They wanted, at minimum, to do their civic duty, but were too busy be more informed. For that, they trusted her to advise them.

Why? Because they respect her, trust her judgment, believe she's like them and on their side. They identify with her. As a party, Democrats have to rebuild voters' confidence that that is just as true of the party as a whole.

Democracy isn't supposed to be easy, but with more and more Americans feeling as if they are treading water amidst a flotsam of bills, soccer practice, commuting and longer work hours, throwing them a candidate survey or a stack of position papers isn't helping. They need a lifeline. Like it or not, many voters just want some way to participate that doesn't require that they master the arcana of the legislative process. That's what they have representatives for. They just want some shorthand way of choosing candidates who will legislate in their best interests. A party they can trust. A party who thinks like they do.

That’s all they want to know.

A stark choice

A friend in the clergy just forwarded a noxious e-mail along with comments expressing his frustration and anger. The e-mail labeled that went out to NewsMax readers was labeled Christian Response (to Barack Obama). It was anything but (and not worth dignifying with a link). But then, what would you expect from the fine people who brought you the famous Willy Horton ad?

Future GOP leaders may see this year's attack ads as their "Civil Rights Act" moment, when they lost every minority voter in America for a generation.

Tactics like this one and the one mentioned above could easily backfire. The Roves and the Attwaters of the GOP have been feeding their attack dogs under the table for decades. But as these ads show, they won't be able to control them in 2008 if Obama is the Democratic candidate. Attacking a minority presidential candidate without alienating every minority group in our increasingly multiethnic country requires a scalpel. These guys carry bludgeons. They don't have much finesse.

Do we?

The trick for Democrats may be to not overreact. This is a change election and these tactics are anything but. It will take great confidence to stare down such opponents without becoming like them -- confidence the White House of Bush clearly hasn't shown in dealing with suspected terrorists. Democrats have to show integrity and strength in responding firmly, but also strength of character in not responding in kind. We may have to hold fire until our opponents begin to collapse under withering public outcry and plummeting poll numbers. With the GOP flogging the GWOT for all they're worth, it may look a bit "Gandhi" to frustrated activists itching for a fight, and to nervous pols anxious about looking tough for November.

But standing in the middle of the ring and drawing more blood than our opponents doesn't win elections. Winning over the crowd does. Americans are sick of the "fear and smear" politics of the last decade. If they are seeking a better alternative -- if enough are, that's the catch -- we have to show them we are it. Accentuate our positives, illuminate (but not flog) their negatives, and let the stark contrast speak for itself.

Let's hope it doesn't get much more stark than this.

“Psyops on steroids” - Col. Ken Allard

Awhile back I posted a letter at Salon about an article I'd received from David Horowitz's FrontPageMagazine. In June 2005, a week after Sen. Dick Durbin made a well-publicized criticism of conditions of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu (Ret.) was flown to Cuba on Vice President Cheney's plane with other retired military officers as part of a "Department of Defense trip." Upon returning, he wrote "What I Saw at Gitmo" -- consisting largely of what he'd been told at Gitmo.

The New York Times has a lengthy, front page piece this morning that mentions that flight in the summer of 2005:

Some of these analysts were on the mission to Cuba on June 24, 2005 — the first of six such Guantánamo trips — which was designed to mobilize analysts against the growing perception of Guantánamo as an international symbol of inhumane treatment. On the flight to Cuba, for much of the day at Guantánamo and on the flight home that night, Pentagon officials briefed the 10 or so analysts on their key messages — how much had been spent improving the facility, the abuse endured by guards, the extensive rights afforded detainees.

These ' “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” ' in Pentagoneze were part of an "information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance," the Times finds.

... members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.

As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.

“Night and day,” Mr. Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.”

You can find photos of Lt. Col. Cucullu being hosed here.

Bill Kristol's gift for spiritual discernment

In his NYT editorial, Kristol dissects Obama's "guns or religion" gaff. Quoting Marx and explaining how Obama's "mask slipped," Kristol peels away the layers of exoskeleton for us - a la Independence Day - to uncover the "real" Obama.

Andrew Sullivan punches back,

"Kristol is deliberately distorting to paint Obama as a cynical manipulator of religious faith for political ends, rather than as a genuine Christian. He's calling him a lying, Godless communist.

[. . .]

A non-Christian manipulator of Christianity is calling a Christian a liar about his own faith. That's where they've gone to already. And it's only the middle of April. What are they so scared of?"

Perhaps with "manipulator," Sullivan is lumping Kristol in with the likes of Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff-associate, Michael Scanlon, who reduced the GOP's attitude towards conservative Christians in America to this little nugget:

"The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees," Scanlon wrote in the memo, which was read into the public record at a hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. "Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them." The brilliance of this strategy was twofold: Not only would most voters not know about an initiative to protect Coushatta gambling revenues, but religious "wackos" could be tricked into supporting gambling at the Coushatta casino even as they thought they were opposing it.

Please, Bill. The mask is off, all right. And it's yours. Allen Raymond, one of your own, put it better than I could (after getting out of jail):

"When it came to playing in the gutter, we were the professionals—the Dems weren't even junior varsity."

What did you expect?

From corporate-bred politicians who view governing through a corporate lens?

WASHINGTON - Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality, The Associated Press has learned. (Emphasis mine.)

And the president approved, telling ABC's Martha Raddatz on Friday,

"Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people." Bush told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. "And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."

As first reported by ABC News Wednesday, the most senior Bush administration officials repeatedly discussed and approved specific details of exactly how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the CIA.

The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

Glenn Greenwald cautions against placing too much emphasis on John Yoo's as the author of the just-released "torture memo" referenced at the top of the post. Yoo was doing what he was asked, to deliver a legal justification for illegal acts.

Yoo wasn't opining in a vacuum. He knew that these techniques were already being used and that the highest level of our Government wanted him to create legal protections for what had happened and to enable more of what they wanted to do. He bears substantial culpability, but certainly not exclusive or even principal culpability. (Emphasis mine.)

There is a pattern here.

Greenwald points to Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin's observation that the 2006 Military Commissions Act "effectively insulated government officials from liability for many of the violations of the War Crimes Act they might have committed during the period prior to 2006."

There is a pattern here.

It is the triumph of corporate thinking applied to governing. The corporation exists -- as a style of organizing a business -- to shield its principals from personal responsibility for actions they take on its behalf. Why wouldn't our CEO president and his board members take the same approach to their roles in the executive branch?

Spam, spam, spam, spam . . .

Friends at the Asheville Citizen-Times get lots of spam:

Now, people can believe what they want to believe; got no problem with that. The problem I do have is that the wild claims in chain e-mails keep popping up in letters to the editor or in calls to the newsroom carping, “Why aren’t you printing this?’’

Short answer: ’cause it isn’t true. Tracking down rumors about whether Barack Obama is Muslim or Target is unpatriotic is a public service, I suppose, but it eats up a lot of hours in the day during the political season, especially for letters editor Dave Russell.

I couldn't resist responding:

The saddest thing about what I call "right-wing spam" is that people who forward the e-mails don't care that they're lies. They have no skeptical "Sixth Sense" and don't want one. They only see what they want to see.

The irony is that in less time than it takes to attach that buddy list to the forward, you can debunk the majority of these things ... if the truth still mattered. Sadly, truth has become a casualty. Facts have such a way of messing up good propaganda.

I've seen a couple versions of Obama-the-Muslim-sleeper-agent. I expect any day now to get Obama's-Christian-church-hates-America -- forwarded without a hint of cognitive dissonance by the very same people who forwarded Obama-the-Muslim-sleeper-agent.

Outside the Bill Clinton event last week, two women in line told my wife that if Obama won the nomination, they would vote for McCain. See, they didn't like Obama's church because the choir wears African garb. His church isn't American enough.

[My wife] asked if they'd voted for Kennedy. They had. She didn't point out that, like him, I grew up in a church where the services were in a dead language and the clergy wore sacramental gear dating back to thirteenth-century Italy. They only see what they want to see.

[. . .]

One more thing. Have the people who forward these things never heard of a blind copy? Some of the mails I receive have as many as 75 addresses attached in the multiple forwards. And they wonder why they receive so much spam.

Limbaugh fans join Earth First and the Merry Pranksters

(I wonder who brought the drugs?)

A radio campaign by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce last year called voting "as sacred as the Constitution." Now Rush Limbaugh is using the public airwaves to urge listeners to join "Operation Chaos" and corrupt Democratic primaries. 4,000 Americans dead in Iraq to "plant democracy" in the heart of the Middle East. Limbaugh and his listeners honor that sacrifice by demonstrating to the world how sacred they think democracy is.

Thanks for something

Gordon over at Scrutiny Hooligans has a post up that lists the earmarks Congressman Heath Shuler has brought to NC-11. The first item grabbed my attention. So this, cross-posted at Scrutiny Hooligans:

$282,000 AdvantageWest (Henderson/Buncombe)

I thank the congressman for funneling some money to our local development agency. But I’ve had my eye on AdvantageWest for years. In my estimation, they have consistently underperformed in achieving their stated goals.

Chartered by the North Carolina General Assembly in 1994, AdvantageWest is a non-profit public-private partnership whose primary focus is marketing the North Carolina mountains to corporations seeking to relocate or open a new facility, expand an existing business within our region, and those who might otherwise improve the quality of life for citizens within our region through activities such as filmmaking, entrepreneurship and tourism.

Or maybe, they’ve simply underperformed in achieving attracting good-paying manufacturing jobs to this area (to replace the thousands we’ve lost).

I was [an observer] at AdvantageWest in 2004 when the governor parachuted in to take some of the credit for Jacob Holm locating a nonwovens plant on Sandhill Rd. 70 jobs - sweet. And since then?

Coats North America (Cherokee County): -98 jobs, 2008
Stanley Furniture (Graham County): -450 jobs, 2007
Western Forge (Cherokee County): -170 jobs, 2006

1,400 jobs were lost in 13 days in Haywood, Buncombe, McDowell and Mitchell back in 2004.

Recently, a friend who wants to start up a small CNC machine shop asked the Asheville Chamber of Commerce what help they could offer him. They offered him the door. Manufacturing, it seems, is too blue collar, and not the kind of “new economy” business they want within the city limits.

AdvantageWest, the Asheville Chamber and local leaders need to get a clue: thousands of laid-off factory workers won’t likely land filmmaking jobs, or “new economy” jobs writing software in trendy Biltmore Ave. storefronts. Our local economy is slowly being hollowed out to where only those who don’t need work (or bring theirs with them) can afford to live here.

Worst of all, that may not change until local moguls awaken to find a shocking shortage of waiters and housekeeping staff.

The guy can give a stump speech.

Former president Bill Clinton spoke in Asheville last night, promoting Hillary Clinton's bid for the White House. Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans:

Pres. Clinton was convincing, and sold Sen. Clinton well. Good speech and good points. Most telling was when Clinton asked for a show of hands: “Raise your hand if you know somebody without health insurance at all.” Somewhere from 40-50% of the crowd raised their hands.

Clinton surveyed the crowd and said, “This is the only country in the world where you could get that answer - the only rich country. This is the only country in the world where anybody could ask the question at election time.”

Mrs. Blue and I went without in 2003 and 2004 after I got laid off and COBRA ran out. He got me where I live.

I visited the new Obama HQ earlier in the day and was frank about going to hear Bill to fish for volunteers for the fall campaigns. 2500 potential volunteers in one place was an opportunity not to be missed. I’ll be at the Obama event at the Orange Peel on April 17 too, for the same reason.

Hillary Clinton supporters we met last night who said they would vote for McCain before they’d vote for Obama might want to think that through some. That goes equally for the Obama supporters who say the same. You want to shoot yourselves in the foot? I’ll loan you the gun.

Both our remaining candidates and their supporters owe this country better. We owe the world better. Republicans win when Democrats who don’t get their way take their balls and go home. Bill Bennett probably has probably placed bets on that happening - with good odds.

For all of the wonky policy talk to make any difference, we first have to win. We have to pull together when this nomination is resolved. And we have to work together to get out our vote.

Ideals are nice, but to both Obama and Clinton supporters I’m frustratingly practical. I don’t care that Obama has the chance to be the first Africa-American president. I don’t care that Clinton has the chance to be the first woman president. I don’t care which candidate claims the most experience, or who gives the best speech or whose husband does. They’re nice perks. But I want the candidate who has the most potential for energizing volunteers, for attracting new and crossover voters. I want the candidate who has the most potential for coattails, for helping new Democrats win office on the local, state and national levels. I want the Democrat who is going to make turning out our vote this fall the easiest. I want the candidate who is going to make the GOP’s job the hardest.

Elections are a numbers game. Bottom line: 50% + 1 wins. If on November 5th, there is a Republican president-elect, none of the trash talk about which Democrat is better or more qualified ain’t worth squat.

One step forward, two steps back

Study: N.C. family needs $42,841 a year

The average family of four in North Carolina requires $42,841 per year to provide for basic needs, according to a report from the N.C. Budget & Tax Center.

And it's even worse west of Statesville.

Although per capita income for the Asheville MSA for 2006 was approximately $30,789, the last time I looked it up, the breakdown showed that figure significantly inflated by rental, retirement and investment income. People earning wages earned proportionately less.

My guess is, that hasn't changed.

False Witness

As campaign season ramps up, we'll be seeing more and more political spam in our in-boxes. If my in-box is any indicator, 98% will be distortions and lies. What's increasingly disturbing about this information superhighway trash is what its proliferation says about our relationship with reality itself. Truth, it seems, is now an endangered species.

New York Times Magazine weighed in on Sunday, March 16. Internet rumors such as Obama-is-a-Muslim die hard:

The Obama-is-a-Muslim rumor does not seem to have hurt the candidate’s fortunes, at least not yet. But the myth’s persistence illustrates a growing cultural vulnerability to rumor. Journalists typically presume that facts matter: show the public what is true, and they will make decisions correctly. Psychologists who study how we separate truth from fiction, however, have demonstrated that the process is not so simple.

Psychologist Ian Skurnik studied the phenomenon at the University of Michigan, using health claims, finding . . .

. . . it helps to know how our brains suss out truth from fiction. To determine the veracity of a given statement, we often look to society’s collective assessment of it. But it is difficult to measure social consensus very precisely, and our brains rely, instead, upon a sensation of familiarity with an idea. You use a rule of thumb: if something seems familiar, you must have heard it before, and if you’ve heard it before, it must be true.

The rule obviously invites many opportunities for error. The seniors in Skurnik’s study couldn’t remember the context in which they had heard the health claims (research shows that we are quick to forget “negation tags,” like whether something is said to be false or a lie), so they relied, instead, on a vague sense of familiarity, which steered them astray. Repetition, psychologists have shown, easily tricks us. Kimberlee Weaver of Virginia Tech recently found that if one person tells you that something is true many times, you are likely to conclude that the opinion is widely held, even if no one else said a thing about it.

Some say, FoxNews?

But it's the enthusiastic distribution of scurrilous Internet rumors I find disturbing. Among the right wing, electronic poison pen letters go around like wildfire. Some I receive have had as many as seventy-five e-mail addresses attached. (Have none of you people ever heard of a blind copy? Your e-mail addresses are being compromised. Got it?)

After years of lies and propaganda from the highest levels, the ability to distinguish truth from fiction has itself been compromised. Point out that they're being used as propagandists by propagandists, and friends and relatives still persist in spreading lies. Either because they can no longer distinguish them from the truth, or because the lies are more fun, or because they just don't care what the truth is if it conflicts with what they'd rather believe.

As Rick Perlstein observes in his new book, we have arrived 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.”

The greater irony is how many of our friends among the religious Right gleefully play along. You know, the people convinced that liberals are to blame for the decline of values in this country. The ones who quote Matthew and caution that we "become what we behold." The people obsessed with putting displays of the Ten Commandments in courthouses. Including the Commandment about not bearing false witness.

Until recently, what I receive came from the Right. But even that may be changing. This weekend a friend reported receiving one of the poisoned-Barak letters. Only not from a right-winger, from a relative.

After my friend pointed out that the entire thing was bogus, his relative replied, "I know, but I'm a Hillary supporter, so I forwarded it anyway."

Great.

The Man Between War and Peace

Thomas P.M. Barnett profiles head of U. S. Central Command, Admiral William "Fox" Fallon, in this month's Esquire.

With a cooler head than the administration's war cheerleaders, Fallon has earned the ire of the Bush administration for opposing Bush's Iraq "surge" and for not joining in on the saber rattling over Iran. (Emphasis mine.)

As with Pakistan, Fallon keeps his powder dry when he deals with Iran. He doesn't react like Pavlov's dog to inflammatory rhetoric from inflammatory little men.

Goodness, to whom could Barnett be referring?

Described by Secretary of Defense Gates as "one of the best strategic thinkers in uniform today," Fallon is too busy trying to find answers to problems than to demagogue them.

On this trip, he's been shepherding a new bridge that links isolated Tajikistan with Afghanistan. The potential here is huge: Tajikistan is 95 percent mountainous and extremely food dependent. Its main asset is its untapped hydroelectric capacity. Afghanistan presents just the opposite picture--food to export but most of the country lacks an effective electric grid.

So what should America be pushing first in both states? Free-and-clear elections for massively impoverished populations, or whatever it takes to get Tajikistan's resource with Afghanistan's resource? Which path, do you think, would scare the Taliban and Al Qaeda more? To Fallon, there isn't even a question to answer.

No wonder neocons don't like him.

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.