Delicious Bass

A Year Later

2011-07-24T22:01:00.002-05:00

We have a President in the White House, who, like the editorial writers and Sunday morning talk show hosts, refuses to call the GOP out for what it is, a batshit insane caucus of religious fanatics, economic fantasists, and shills for an elite that they can't even begin to understand. Krugman, who's Nobel prize in economics for some reason disqualifies him from intelligent discourse in modern American political discussion, cites Elizabeth Drew and says quite simply, that the man has lost the thread:

Even more alarming, however, is her window on what the White House is thinking:

It all goes back to the “shellacking” Obama took in the 2010 elections. The President’s political advisers studied the numbers and concluded that the voters wanted the government to spend less. This was an arguable interpretation. Nevertheless, the political advisers believed that elections are decided by middle-of-the-road independent voters, and this group became the target for determining the policies of the next two years.OK, I’ve never won a tough election. But neither has Obama! The 2008 race was looking close until Sarah Palin and Lehman came along. And as far as I can tell, this assessment both of what 2010 was about and what matters for 2012 is just ludicrous.

As I recall, two things happened last year: voters were angry about the weak economy, and older voters believed that Obama was going to take away their Medicare and send them to the death panels. And so the way to win those voters back is to cut Medicare and weaken the economy?

A further point: even if Obama really does cut spending, will anyone notice? Even people who are supposedly well informed believe that there was a vast expansion of government under Obama, when in fact there wasn’t. So we’re supposed to believe that independent voters will actually be able to cut through the fog — the deliberate fog of Fox, the he-said-she-said of most other media organizations — and give him credit for spending cuts? Remember, whatever he does Republicans will claim that the government is getting bigger — and news organization will report only that “Democrats say” that this isn’t true.

What a disaster.

The real tragedy in all of this is not laughing Boehner, et all, out of the room. There is no crisis, of course, only a manufactured one that allows the poseurs on the Right to position themselves for their cynical political motives. All the while, the safety net is torn, and Obama misses the opportunity to call them out for what they are. They should almost be commended for their shamelessness, and Obama will and rightly should pay the price for giving them the air they need to survive.

That is all

2010-07-01T07:13:00.002-05:00

Howard Beale is Looking Sane...

2010-04-23T08:28:00.003-05:00

In all honesty, the rodeo clown is slipping into another dimension. Won't be long now....

War Without End

2010-04-15T09:32:00.004-05:00

Jesus. Bring these poor kids home. What in the world are we hoping to accomplish?

Many of the soldiers are in the remote valleys of eastern Afghanistan, forested slivers where outsiders—even those from elsewhere in Afghanistan—have never been welcome and the government's writ never really existed.

"If you don't understand the dynamics, you have no chance of getting it right," Gen. McChrystal said.......

The valley never became one of those places in Afghanistan where the coalition could measure progress in schools and clinics and irrigation projects built. Whatever they built, the Taliban destroyed. There is no local Afghan government here to work with.

"Everybody hates them in the valley," Haji Nizamuddin, a tribal elder in Korengal, said of the Americans. U.S. forces "shoot at people, they raid our houses and kill our women and children." Mr. Nizamuddin stressed that he wasn't pro-Taliban. He, like many people in the valley, simply wanted to be left alone, he said.

Serious Matters

2010-04-14T19:58:00.001-05:00

It's hard to believe that these people are serious, but I can assure you, they are.

Obama is the loyal son of a left-wing anthropologist mother who sought to expiate her white guilt by going to bed with Muslim Third World men. He is a Third World anthropologist studying us, learning our culture and our customs the better to neutralize what he considers to be a malignant American influence in world affairs.

C'mon.

The lies of the Right

2010-04-12T11:32:00.002-05:00

Crooks and Liars has a good rundown of the lies that surround the GOP's attacks on lower and middle class Americans, in the form of a number of clearly misleading and wholly inaccurate talking points. First among these is the widely held belief of Glen Beck and Newt Gingrich fans that 40-50% of all Americans 'pay no taxes'. Read the C&L post, as well as this one, which runs down the top ten lies that the right uses. It is the type of crap that the Teabaggers spew constantly, and it has absolutely no basis in fact.

Heed the Apostate

2010-04-08T08:19:00.002-05:00

When you are really looking for the most scathing indictment of a particular religion, such as modern american Republicanism, it's always best to seek the opinion of the apostate, the lapsed believers who feel most ashamed of their formerly held beliefs. David Brock at MediaMatters, the recent comments by David Frum, etc.

and, Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs, of course. Formerly one of the most fervent supporters of Bush, Cheney, and the criminality of their administration, he now sees the GOP for what it is and has been for years: a party that is "proudly ignorant", trafficking in lies, distortions and fear, devoid of ideas but laden with hate. He quotes approvingly from an article that appeared in The Atlantic:

Senior editor for The Atlantic Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it all in a nice neat package: Proud Of Being Ignorant.

A lot of you have e-mailed me to note that Virginia governor Bob McDonnell has decided to honor those who fought to preserve, and extend, white supremacy. I don’t really have much to say. The GOP is, effectively, the party of willfully unlettered Utopians. It is the party of choice for those who believe global warming is a hoax, that humans roamed the earth with dinosaurs, and that homosexuals should work harder at not being gay.

That the party of unadulterated quackery also believes that Birth Of A Nation is more true to the Civil War than Battle Cry Of Freedom, is to be expected. Ignorance does not respect boundaries. It is, at times, qualified and those who know more, often struggle to say more. But people who believe that the Census is actually a covert attempt to put Americans in concentration camps, are also likely to believe that slavery was incidental to the Civil War.

This is who they are—the proud and ignorant. If you believe that if we still had segregation we wouldn’t “have had all these problems,” this is the movement for you. If you believe that your president is a Muslim sleeper agent, this is the movement for you. If you honor a flag raised explicitly to destroy this country then this is the movement for you. If you flirt with secession, even now, then this movement is for you. If you are a “Real American” with no demonstrable interest in “Real America” then, by God, this movement of alchemists and creationists, of anti-science and hair tonic, is for you.

Well said. The GOP is the party of creationists and climate change deniers; nearly every major GOP politician is anti-science, because they know they won’t get any votes if they don’t toe the right wing line. And increasingly, the barely suppressed racism inherent in this atavistic world view is bubbling to the surface, as we see today in Virginia.

Obama isn't perfect, in many ways he has failed those who most fervently supported him, who saw in him a truly transformative liberal cipher. On the other hand, the loyal opposition at this point is a calumny.

Coolest video you've seen in a while.....

2010-03-10T12:41:00.001-05:00

Cold Here....

2010-02-01T12:56:00.001-05:00

Won't see another one....

2009-12-23T15:54:00.002-05:00

The Future of the GOP

2009-12-15T16:18:00.002-05:00

I had always wondered how someone as clearly insane as Jim Bunning could be returned to the Senate time and again. His grasp of the issues is non-existent, and along with Inhofe, is arguably the most unhinged member of either house.

Well, here's your answer...behold, his constituents. Tea Partiers to the core.

Little bit o' Kate....

2009-12-15T12:35:00.001-05:00

The Case for Sarah Palin

2009-11-23T14:13:00.001-05:00

A few thoughts on the USPST

2009-11-20T08:34:00.006-05:00

A few quick items on the revision of the breast cancer screening guidelines issued this week....

Obama had nothing to do with it. The USPST is a non-partisan panel made up of primary care physicians. Their recommendations come from work that they've been compiling over a two year period. In fact, the administration explicitly disagreed with their findings.

This has nothing to do with the healthcare reform bill. In a quick visit to wingnuttia on my AM dial, it's pretty clear that Rush, et al are working feverishly to instruct their listeners that this is the first salvo from the death panels and that Obama's true nature as a socialist or something has been exposed.

The findings are based upon science. Basically, the panel recommends that women make their own decisions when it comes to this important issue. It also simply states that statistically the amount of prevention may not be meaningful. That is not to say that women's lives have not been saved by early detection or that it is not a good idea to have a mamo at the age of 40. Rather, women should continue to have mamos at whatever age they would like, knowing full well that if they decide that it may not be necessary, the science says that they are not being irresponsible.

Insurance companies are not in any way bound by this decision. Further, with the American Cancer Society, several high profile cancer hospitals, and the administration in vocal opposition, it would be hard to imagine that insurance companies will change their existing coverages. Further still, in a world with a competitive healthcare system, as envisioned by the Reid legislation, insurers would be incented to provide the most attractive options in this regard, wouldn't they?

My gut tells me that part of the reaction comes from the fact that over the past 8 years, we have been led by an administration that has cynically and amazingly ignored and distorted scientific fact. We endured a President who denied that global warming exists. We witnessed a VP candidate who is convinced that Jesus rode on a dinosaur, and we saw a Senate Majority Leader diagnose a woman in a vegetative state over the TV. It is a long way out of the hole that we've been dug into.

Lastly, do a reverse Glen Beck on the issue and look at it from the conspiratorial point of view. If the dusky hewed Kenyan socialist was intent on stripping us of our healthcare options, could he have picked a worse time to announce this? Wouldn't it have made more sense to change the coverage options after the bill was passed?

There was a time.....

2009-11-19T15:17:00.001-05:00

RuffTuffCreamPuffs

2009-11-17T16:49:00.002-05:00

The incoherence of the Right appears pretty consistently these days, but maybe no more starkly than in the pants pissing that is going on concerning the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The immediate and reflexive response to the Administration's decision to try KSM in our legal system proves conclusively that not only do these small minded bigots have no sense of historical perspective or understanding of our system of government, but their blinding hatred of Obama overtakes any semblance of consistency in their arguments. As Glenn Greenwald points out

the Right's reaction to yesterday's announcement -- we're too afraid to allow trials and due process in our country -- is the textbook definition of "surrendering to terrorists." It's the same fear they've been spewing for years. As always, the Right's tough-guy leaders wallow in a combination of pitiful fear and cynical manipulation of the fear of their followers. Indeed, it's hard to find any group of people on the globe who exude this sort of weakness and fear more than the American Right.

People in capitals all over the world have hosted trials of high-level terrorist suspects using their normal justice system. They didn't allow fear to drive them to build island-prisons or create special commissions to depart from their rules of justice. Spain held an open trial in Madrid for the individuals accused of that country's 2004 train bombings. The British put those accused of perpetrating the London subway bombings on trial right in their normal courthouse in London. Indonesia gave public trials using standard court procedures to the individuals who bombed a nightclub in Bali. India used a Mumbai courtroom to try the sole surviving terrorist who participated in the 2008 massacre of hundreds of residents. In Argentina, the Israelis captured Adolf Eichmann, one of the most notorious Nazi war criminals, and brought him to Jerusalem to stand trial for his crimes.

It's only America's Right that is too scared of the Terrorists -- or which exploits the fears of their followers -- to insist that no regular trials can be held and that "the safety and security of the American people" mean that we cannot even have them in our country to give them trials. As usual, it's the weakest and most frightened among us who rely on the most flamboyant, theatrical displays of "strength" and "courage" to hide what they really are. Then again, this is the same political movement whose "leaders" -- people like John Cornyn and Pat Roberts -- cowardly insisted that we must ignore the Constitution in order to stay alive: the exact antithesis of the core value on which the nation was founded. Given that, it's hardly surprising that they exude a level of fear of Terrorists that is unmatched virtually anywhere in the world. It is, however, noteworthy that the position they advocate -- it's too scary to have normal trials in our country of Terrorists -- is as pure a surrender to the Terrorists as it gets.

And here is rightwing nutbag and coward John Shadegg (R, AZ)

The various ridiculous arguments against a trial by jury for KSM in New York are as disingenuous as they are puerile. They treat these terrorists like they have Super Powers worthy of a Marvel Comic, for chrissakes. As Greenwald says, it is a combination of pitiful fear and cynical manipulation, and it runs through their worldview. Whether it is Beck tearfully wailing that Obama and his dusky hewed African minions are Nazis, or whether it is Lou Dobbs wailing about the brown hordes spilling over the borders, these faux tough guys appeal to their pathetic follower's fears of losing control of their white, male ascendancy. Like the Irish Question, time and generational change will roll over them like a tide rising slowly, but before this country becomes a place where a culturally diverse majority is abundantly clear, their death cries will be increasingly shrill and violent.

Joining the xenophobes and Beck's legions, of course, are the bloodthirsty ghouls of the last administration, who have a separate fear...that their misdeeds and illegal goings-on will be exposed in a court of law. As Digby says:

But the possibility is what's got the rufftuffcreampuffs on the right quaking in their booties, that American law will actually shine a light on the murderous, torturing, incompetent, insanely frightened, paranoid, corrupt, and completely out of control Bush/Cheney regime.

It is going to be quite an ugly fight, once these trials start.

Dead...

2009-11-17T16:45:00.001-05:00

Behold the Teabaggers

2009-09-15T11:28:00.004-05:00

As John Stewart said a while back about the teabaggers, they seem to be confusing tyranny with losing. From Crooks and Liars, a quick ten point reminder for the confused opposition:

President Obama Cut Your Taxes
The Stimulus is Working
First Ronald Reagan Tripled the National Debt...
...Then George W. Bush Doubled It Again
Republican States Have the Worst Health Care
Medicare is a Government Program
Barack Obama is Not a Muslim
Barack Obama was Born in the United States
70,000 Does Not Equal 2,000,000
The Economy Almost Always Does Better Under Democrats

Post 9/11

2009-09-14T16:20:00.002-05:00

With no offense to anyone, this really sums up my thoughts on the eighth anniversary.

Shortly after (or maybe during) that day, our president at the time, a little fuckhead no one liked, handed over the reins to the most psychotic elements of his administration. In the vast national wave of jingoism, paranoia, dread, and fear that followed, he and his friends led us into an unrelated war they'd been planning beforehand, allowed the CIA to wiretap and torture anyone they liked (and encouraged the CIA to wiretap and torture even more than they were comfortable with!), and regularly insisted that our memory of that day should not be sullied with critical thinking or expressions of anything other than still-palpable fear.

and, this:

On 9/12, people in New York (and DC) did not feel as "great" as Glenn Beck. They just felt like shit. They felt scared and confused and depressed. Many of them were drunk. And only an idiot or an actual terrorist would want to always feel like it was 9/12/01. And eight years later, normal people, with brains and souls, have decided that some emotional distance from that disaster is healthier and wiser than trying to recapture the dread.

So thank fucking christ that the Commander in Chief is no longer subjecting the nation to death porn.

No, this year it's limited to a nutty little cult leader on basic cable who is encouraging his radicalized band of fanatical followers to invade the cities where the tragedy actually happened in order to shock the populace back into fear.

Glenn Beck is an actual terrorist, and the people attending his rally in DC tomorrow are al-Qaeda in America.

Glenzilla, Digby on Torture

2009-08-25T19:36:00.004-05:00

Glenzilla takes apart Peter King, but more broadly, indicts the Right for assuming that their beliefs even have a passing familiarity with those of the founding fathers.

Money:

Few things are more repellent than watching the contemporary Right in America invoke the principles of the Founders -- in general -- to justify their warped and lawless authoritarianism. But nothing is more repulsive than watching them pretend that Thomas Paine -- of all people -- has anything to do with them (Glenn Beck actually wrote his most recent book based on the explicit pretense that he is the modern day Paine). Any casual reading of Paine makes clear that, today, he would be so far on what is deemed the "left" side of the spectrum that you'd be unable to find him. Paine is nothing but what Joe Klein refers to as a "crazy civil liberties absolutist" and what Rush Limbaugh similarly calls "far, fringe, lunatic kooks, far left radical lunatic fringe."
The Right today argues that condemning torture is wrong because the people who were tortured were just Terrorists -- barely human -- and they deserve no defense, not even the force of law. Thomas Paine argued as a first principle that those devoted to liberty "must guard even his enemy from oppression." Could the contrast be any more stark?

Maybe even more importantly, Digby points out that the constant "restarts" on the torture revelations are dilatory and hurtful to the ultimate goal. All of this has been revealed over and over again. Not only did we torture, we tortured innocents, we murdered and disappeared captives held without trial, and it was all approved from the highest levels. The notion that there is anything more or new to reveal is simply wrong. The Holder investigation is good news, but it is long overdue and needs to now move forward unimpeded.

The Loyal Opposition

2009-08-20T13:00:00.000-05:00

We probably shouldn't be surprised....

2009-08-20T11:14:00.002-05:00

As Atrios says, it won't get as much attention as Michelle Obama's shorts, or the latest insane ramblings of Sarah Palin, but it should be mentioned that the use of the threat of terror in order to affect politics or elections is, um, what terrorists do.

Good God. Can we Revisit that Secession Issue?

2009-07-31T11:37:00.001-05:00

It beggars the mind....

Where we find ourselves...

2009-07-01T11:24:00.003-05:00

This is where we are with regard to the wingnut right in America. Glen Beck and his guest, Michael Scheuer are openly rooting for an attack on America, to save us from ourselves and our Islamonegrophied President, who is totally into socialism and is plotting to take away all of our guns and ammo. Don't bother to try and stomach the entire clip, it's mainly two chimps throwing poo around their cage. Skip to the six minute mark for the denouement..

Keep in mind that 2.5 million people get their news from this guy.

Quit your bellyaching....

2009-06-23T08:40:00.001-05:00

Digby shows us the true Republican approach to healthcare reform in the US.

The GOP concern trolls...

2009-06-16T10:41:00.004-05:00

Bret Stephens has an entirely predictable opinion piece in the WSJ today, in which he voices the concern and newfound support for the Iranian populace, who have taken to the streets in an historic and inspiring fashion in order to protest the incumbent regime's handling of the recent presidential election. Leaving aside the obvious ironies of the Katherine Harris/Norm Coleman type, the concern trolls unleashed at the Journal are a bit hard to swallow, as they are the same group that until recently was insisting that it would be a swell idea to bomb the shit out of these same people. As Greenwald points out, at about the same time that Batshit Crazy John McCain was singing "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran", the Journal was running an editorial from Norman Podhoretz, the bloodthirsty ghoul who breathed life into the neocon movement, explaining that he "hopes and prays" that we bomb Iran.

The other toadies of the neocon movement, including Bill Kristol, Dick Cheney, John Bolton, and Joe Lieberman fell quickly into line, supporting pre-emptive strikes against the 70 million or so souls who live in Persia. Their recent conversion to Iranophiles may be somewhat cynically viewed by the protesters in the streets of Tehran, I'd guess.

Look, I don't know whether the election there was fairly counted or not. It seems plausible that the will of the Iranian people may well have been to return Ahmadinejad, certainly some of the polling supports that conclusion. My guess is that Stephen's bold assertion that the "election was so transparently rigged that the only serious question is whether the regime even bothered to stuff the ballot boxes", is probably a rash assertion based upon his hopes and not any familiarity with the facts on the ground or the true wishes of the Persian people. The elections in Iran probably had much more to do with the day to day lives of the citizens there than they did with what Bret Stephens, John McCain, and George Will hoped to happen there.

More to the point is the sad irony that we continue to take seriously the opinions of the Kristol's and Podhoretz' of the neocon right, who have been so transparently wrong on every question on which they have opined, and now cry crocodile tears for a people who up to a few months ago they lusted to destroy.

UPDATE: Leave it to TBogg to play the Pam Geller card. Read the whole post, it's priceless.

All I do is keep the beat....

2009-05-29T09:42:00.001-05:00

happy friday.

Long Weekend

2009-05-22T09:00:00.003-05:00

Here's yer music:

Jay Farrar and the boys. I actually caught a few minutes of Jeff Tweedy and Wilco at Jazzfest, walking out after a full day of New Orleans sun. James Taylor and Erykah Badu were playing at the same time. Erykah has no competition for best 'fro in the business.

Funny Stuff.

2009-05-12T09:45:00.003-05:00

Let's just get this straight. Wanda Sykes silly joke about Rush Limbaugh, the gasbag that routinely calls our President Osama, who spits bile and racist lies on a daily basis to 20 million mouth breathing subhumans, and who when challenged on his hateful discourse hides behind the excuse that he is "just an entertainer", was not not particularly funny. The feigned outrage of hypocritical torture supporters and fear mongering embittered old men like William Bennett are truly pathetic. But tasteless? Over the line? Outrageously insensitive and truly offensive. You want offensive humor at the White House Correspondents Dinner? That I've got:

Give me a break.

Best thing you'll see today

2009-05-04T08:24:00.000-05:00

Impromptu jam session by a couple at the Mayo Clinic..

Here's what we got....

2009-04-22T10:49:00.002-05:00

And just so we're clear on exactly what we were able to "get" for all of our torture porn, the Senate Armed Services Committee report issued yesterday makes it pretty clear. Jane Hamsher spells it out:

Serial sadists Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, the psychologists who were the first to rationalize and implement torture, were not members of the CIA and are not covered under Obama's immunity blanket. They violated their ethics as health professionals, and should lose their licenses and face criminal prosecution.

• Jessen and Mitchell modeled their torture program on methods used by the North Koreans to extract false confessions.

• Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney "demanded that intelligence agencies and interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration," despite the fact that the CIA told them repeatedly that no such collaboration existed. So, extracting false confessions was the goal.

• The Bybee Memo justified the use of waterboarding on enemy combatants because it had been deemed safe for use by US military in a program (SERE) to train soldiers at high risk of capture about what they might expect to encounter. It's sort of like saying it's okay to throw someone out of a plane because you pushed them off the porch and they were fine.

• The doctor whose memo Yoo/Bybee relied upon for assurances that waterboarding was safe, Dr. Jerald Ogrisseg, said that "he was surprised when he found out later that Lt Col Baumgartner had forwarded his memo to the General Counsel’s office." Dr. Ogrisseg testified that when Lt Col Baungartner asked about waterboarding in the real world, he told him that "aside from being illegal, it was a completely different arena that we in the Survival School didn’t know anything about." (h/t Valtin)

• So, Yoo/Bybee based their legal justification for waterboarding on assurances of safety they got from a memo that was talking about something else entirely, and which the author of the memo had expressly said did not apply in the situation.

Rumsfeld and Cheney worked backwards from a survival guide that the army used to prepare their men for torture techniques used by the Chinese and North Koreans. That torture was specifically designed to elicit false testimony. Either the two of them were psychopaths or morons, and probably a health dose of both. Bybee and Yoo gave them all of the legal cover that they requested and required to proceed. The ultimate goal was certainly to force the confession of a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam.

Cheney continues to belch bile....

2009-04-21T14:52:00.004-05:00

Couple of things about Cheney's whine this weekend concerning the release of the torture memos, in which he said:

"I haven't talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country," Cheney said. "I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was."

First, at this point, Dick Cheney has no more authority to ask the CIA to do anything than I do. It's getting a bit embarrassing, actually. He's probably ordering his neighbors around, and screaming at his secret service agent to bring him some fresh pudding.

Secondly, my guess is that if we had to waterboard Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in one month, the information we got from him wasn't so super at all. I'd admit to being Ethel Merman after the first dunk, and by number 183, I can't imagine what I'd cop to.

Happy Teabagging Day!

2009-04-14T13:58:00.002-05:00

Tomorrow is the big day for the rightwingers, the spontaneous and entirely grass roots "teabagging" movement will take to the streets. Enjoy!

Glen Beck, Historian

2009-04-14T12:47:00.002-05:00

It's funny, I remember clearly learning the difference between fascism and communism, within the broad definition of totalitarianism in eighth grade in Mrs. Griffith's history class. We studied the continuum of political beliefs and systems (oligarchy, aristocracy, monarchy, democracy, etc) and discussed how no pure system would really work, including a pure democracy, which would dissolve into mob rule or anarchy.

And when Jonah Goldberg published "Liberal Fascism" last year, it was easy to shrug it off as the meanderings of a third rate conservative slob, because any sentient eighth grader would immediately recognize that liberalism and fascism were and are in diametric opposition.

Interesting to note, then, that one of the highest rated cable news shows, Glen Beck's, continues to promote the notion that the Obama administration is somehow leading us down the road to fascism, and that the policies that we are pursuing to pull ourselves out of the mire that eight years of the Bush administration left us in are somehow akin to those of the Nazi party in Germany. Of course, when I was in Mrs. Griffith's history class, we'd also have recognized Beck as nothing more than a madman screaming at people on the street corner, so perhaps this is all part of a general rise in the stupidity level of Americans.

Anyway, Beck's particular thesis, if it can be dignified with that term, is shredded to pieces by Orcinus, here.

It makes for great reading.

Kudlowmania!

2009-03-25T09:12:00.004-05:00

Larry Kudlow denies his interest in Chris Dodd's Senate seat, in a way that makes it clear that all he wants if for a few more people to ask him to run and he'll do it.

Yes, Larry, please run. You are clearly what the GOP needs right now, another thinly closeted, thrice married, apostate recovering alcoholic and cocaine addict.

Yikes, a plan....

2009-03-23T13:20:00.002-05:00

Unfortunately for all of us, Krugman is probably right.

The common element to the Paulson and Geithner plans is the insistence that the bad assets on banks’ books are really worth much, much more than anyone is currently willing to pay for them. In fact, their true value is so high that if they were properly priced, banks wouldn’t be in trouble.

And so the plan is to use taxpayer funds to drive the prices of bad assets up to “fair” levels. Mr. Paulson proposed having the government buy the assets directly. Mr. Geithner instead proposes a complicated scheme in which the government lends money to private investors, who then use the money to buy the stuff. The idea, says Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser, is to use “the expertise of the market” to set the value of toxic assets.

But the Geithner scheme would offer a one-way bet: if asset values go up, the investors profit, but if they go down, the investors can walk away from their debt. So this isn’t really about letting markets work. It’s just an indirect, disguised way to subsidize purchases of bad assets.

The banks would be crazy to begin to sell their troubled portfolios of assets while Geithner continues to promise them that at some point somebody will overpay for them. First it was 'the market', then it was 'the hedge funds' and now it is a combination of private capital with an explicit guarantee from you and I.

As Krugman points out, this is looking weirder by the day:

The likely cost to taxpayers aside, there’s something strange going on here. By my count, this is the third time Obama administration officials have floated a scheme that is essentially a rehash of the Paulson plan, each time adding a new set of bells and whistles and claiming that they’re doing something completely different. This is starting to look obsessive.

There are any number of other plans out there that do not rest upon the idea that these assets need to be purchased in such a way that the banks are saved. Temporary nationalization is just one. Why this administration remains fixated on the Goldman Sachs Recovery Plan is now looking very odd.

Round em up..

2009-03-06T08:46:00.003-05:00

When I started this blog 360 posts ago, I began with a comment about Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo, basically noting that at the core of the Bush Administration's dark heart there were lawyers that were willing to justify imperious and illegal activities in order to support the franchise and curry favor with the fearmongers and "Mayberry Machiavellis" in the White House.

Brad Delong brings us up to speed on how the tide is turning against the actions of Yoo and the Office of Legal Council (OLC). The legal fraternity is slowly warming up to the idea that was clear to so many all along, that Yoo's work was an aggressive and conscious attempt to undermine our Constitution and he, Gonzales and men like David Addington were quite willing to shred 300 years of precedent to further their hateful agenda.

He quotes Brian Tamanaha, who belatedly arrives at this conclusion:

But the recent release by the OLC of several of the relevant memos removes any doubt: these memos were elaborate exercises in manipulative legal argument.... OLC lawyers were faced with a big hurdle: the applicable law was directly contrary to what the Administration wanted to do. (That’s the thing about law—it can get in the way.) Rather than concede that the actions were illegal and could not be done, however, the lawyers constructed a covering legal analysis which arrived at the desired ends. The soundness of their legal argument did not matter. What mattered was that OLC has the power to issue legal opinions that are authoritative for immediate purposes (within the executive branch) and the mere issuance of the opinion supplied the first part of the “good faith” excuse described above (providing a defense to those who directly engaged in the illegal conduct).

Tamanaha highlights on representative conclusion of an OLC memo penned by Yoo:

The courts have observed that even the use of deadly force is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment if used in self-defense or to protect others. Here, for Fourth Amendment purposes, the right to self-defense is not that of an individual, but that of the nation and of its citizens. If the government’s heightened interest in self defense justifies the use of deadly force, then it would certainly also justify warrantless searches.

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, quoth Barry Goldwater.

I guess you had to be something other than a lawyer to see that the intent was pure evil all along.

Posted without much comment

2009-02-20T15:24:00.001-05:00

Apparently, the GOP doesn't think that Obama's first month in office has been a smashing success.

if only he'd been a bit more bipartisan, I guess.

Obama in a nutshell...

2009-02-13T09:37:00.002-05:00

Here are the last eight minutes of so of Obama's speech on Lincoln yesterday, delivered in Springfield, IL. (The first part of the speech is also available at YouTube). If you want to get a sense of the governing philosophy of this administration, and understand the stark differences between Obama's belief in the role of government and that of the GOP, this is a tremendous illustration. Aside from the stunning oratory and the succinct and well designed historical context, this speech brings into high relief the differences between the Luddites who have placed themselves into opposition to the President and this administration, which is founded upon the fundamental belief that the government has a vital and irreplaceable role to play in making this country work for all of its citizens, particularly in troubled times such as today.

This speech highlights the difference between those who would spend a trillion dollars on a pointless and unnecessary war and then advocate broad-based tax cuts in order to starve the government of any ability to act when the inevitable bills came due, and a party who believes that our government has a vital role in providing services and infrastructure for its citizens so that as a polity we are a better thing. It is the same argument that surrounded the fundamental optimism and pessimism of Locke and Hobbes, and if we haven't been living in the ultimate manifestation of a Hobbesian nightmare for the past eight years, I'm not sure what we would call it.

Make Them Stop

2009-02-05T11:03:00.004-05:00

Watching functional morons like Mitch McConnell rail against the stimulus plan as pork laden tax and spend liberal policies, rather than just about the only thing we can do to stave off a complete economic collapse, begs the obvious question as to why we would listen to the the very individuals who are responsible for this mess. Krugman points out that the approaches to the current crisis really reflect the fundamental world views of the parties, rather than some sort of true economic debate.

You see, this isn’t a brainstorming session — it’s a collision of fundamentally incompatible world views. If one thing is clear from the stimulus debate, it’s that the two parties have utterly different economic doctrines. Democrats believe in something more or less like standard textbook macroeconomics; Republicans believe in a doctrine under which tax cuts are the universal elixir, and government spending is almost always bad.

Listening to McConnell, Shelby and the like try to wrap their parochial world view around the crisis at hand is more than maddening, it can only be compared to listening to Cheney and Bush criticizing the new administration for not continuing the absurd policy of poking the hornet's nest that they relentlessly bashed for the past eight years. At what point will the American people stop listening to the folks who are directly responsible for our current mess? More importantly, can the Obama administration call these jokers out for the charlatans and blockheads that they are?

Digby calls out the Dems for their approach. She's right.

Your Republican Party....

2009-02-03T10:53:00.002-05:00

When they aren't blaming our current economic woes on immigrants and scolding Obama for being a tax and spend liberal (stimulus? bailout? what-evah), the loyal opposition is getting down to serious business:

When GOP congressional aides gather Tuesday morning for a meeting of the Conservative Working Group, Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher – more commonly known as Joe the Plumber — will be their featured guest. This group is an organization of conservative Capitol Hill staffers who meet regularly to chart GOP strategy for the week.

Wurzelbacher, who became a household name during the presidential election, will be focusing his talk on the proposed stimulus package. He's apparently not a fan of the economic rescue package, according to members of the group.

If nothing else, GOP aides are using the appearance to get staffers to attend the 9 a.m meeting.

“In case you weren’t planning to attend CWG tomorrow morning, you might want to reconsider because Joe the Plumber will be joining us!” Kimberly Wallner, an aide to South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, wrote in a message to her e-mail list this afternoon.

Yesterday

2009-01-21T15:54:00.002-05:00

Where many saw yesterday as a wonderful affirmation of the audacity of hope and reveled in the soaring rhetoric and the grandeur of our functioning republic, I had a hard time getting by the day as the most powerful condemnation of the colossal failure of the Idiot Prince, a resounding repudiation of the epic disaster that he represents. Obama's words, his powerful renouncement of torture, fearmongering, unilateralism, xenophobia, unbridled executive power, obstinance and boastfulness and his embrace of the democratic and constitutional ideals that have been fouled by the outgoing administration was as brazen and shocking a takedown of a sitting historical figure as you may ever see. It was all well deserved, and not a word of it was exaggerated, but I found it startling none the less.

Meanwhile, as Bush slunk off to his faux ranch in his faux home state of Texas, the former Andover and Yale cheerleader surrounded himself with an ever smaller and ever more pathetic circle of sycophants who whine that if only we had his moral compass, we'd see the triumph of the Bush legacy.

A hearty fuck you, W.

The Mighty WSJ

2009-01-16T15:45:00.002-05:00

Wall Street Journal Editorial, Jan 16, 2009:

By his own standard, Mr. Bush achieved the one big thing he and all Americans demanded of his Administration. Not a single man, woman or child has been killed by terrorists on U.S. soil since the morning of September 11. Al Qaeda was flushed from safe havens in Afghanistan, then Iraq, and its terrorist network put under siege around the world. All subsequent terror attacks hit soft targets and used primitive means. No one seriously predicted such an outcome at the time.

Pesky reality:

The 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States, also known as Amerithrax from its Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) case name, occurred over the course of several weeks beginning on September 18, 2001. Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to several news media offices and two Democratic U.S. Senators, killing five people and infecting 17 others.

Of course, that's leaving aside the fact that the Bush administration is responsible for allowing the most devastating terrorist attacks on our shores in our history and the greatest failure do defend these shores since the War of Canadian Aggression in 1812. I suppose what his supporters want credit for is that we didn't suffer a second cataclysmic attack after 2001. Somewhere along the line, the original goals of capturing OBL or isolating Islamic fundamentalism fell by the wayside and the triumphant success became the avoidance of a second 9/11.

Getting Everything Wrong

2009-01-08T20:27:00.003-05:00

To follow right up on my last post, Juan Cole has a stunning and succinct takedown of Perle, Feist, Kristol and the rest of the neocon movement in Salon. I don't know that I've read a better summation of the criminal wrongheadedness that brought us to this point. Maybe most alarming is that the current situation in Gaza is an afterthought to the end of the tragic Bush era, mainly due to the fact that our own economy dominates our thoughts and headlines.

Cole's conclusion:

The neoconservatives had prided themselves on their macho swagger, their rejection of namby-pamby Clintonian multilateralism, and on their bold vision for reshaping the Middle East so that the Israeli and American right would not have to deal with existing reality. In the cold light of day, they look merely petulant and arrogant. The ancient Greek poet Bion said that boys cast stones at frogs in sport, but the frogs die in earnest. The neoconservatives were the boys, and the people of Iraq, Israel, Palestine and Lebanon have been their frogs. The biggest danger facing the United States is that there will be no true "Clean Break" -- that the neoconservatives will somehow find a way to survive the Bush administration, and continue to influence American foreign policy.

Frogs die in earnest. Indeed.

Read the whole thing, it's illuminating.

Of course, the brutal war in Gaza had become convenient fodder for the Hannity/Beck/NRO wing of Muslim haters, which should not come as a surprise. Lost amidst their bloodthirst is the simple truth that war is all hell, and that the tragedy of Gaza will not be transformed by the wonton loss of Palestinian life.

These guys gotta get their story straight

2009-01-08T15:01:00.003-05:00

An integral piece of the Bush Legacy Project is the hard work of polishing the turd that W made in Iraq, and Rove, Bush and Cheney have been been blathering on in one after another "exit interviews" with the absurd notion that the Iraq War is justified/going well/successful. Case in point is of course the shoe-thrower, who Bush famously used as an example of the burgeoning democracy that is breaking out all over Mesopotamia. Aside from the fact that the guy was tortured and jailed without a trial, I suppose he has a point.

But Richard Perle and the neo-cons are reading from a different script, in which he belches:

I am described as an “architect,” and often as “the architect,” of the Iraq War. I certainly supported and argued publicly for the decision to remove Saddam, as I do in what follows. But had I been the architect of that war, our policy would have been very different. […]

But about the many mistakes made in Iraq, one thing is certain: they had nothing to do with ideology. They did not draw inspiration from or reflect neoconservative ideas and they were not the product of philosophical or ideological influences outside the government.

ThinkProgress does a great job of pointing out the absurdity of Perle's brazen lie, but the more troubling thing is the inconsistency that the formerly buttoned down Bush foreign policy team displays as they race for the exits from the drunken bash they've thrown themselves. Either the mess-o-potamia was and is a ringing success (Bush/Rove/Cheney) or it wasn't (Perle/Kristol/Feith), but it can't be both.

Lazy Blogging

2009-01-06T16:26:00.001-05:00

Frank Rich with a great paragraph on the tragic Bush legacy

The last NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on Bush’s presidency found that 79 percent of Americans will not miss him after he leaves the White House. He is being forgotten already, even if he’s not yet gone. You start to pity him until you remember how vast the wreckage is. It stretches from the Middle East to Wall Street to Main Street and even into the heavens, which have been a safe haven for toxins under his passive stewardship. The discrepancy between the grandeur of the failure and the stature of the man is a puzzlement. We are still trying to compute it.

Merry Merry

2008-12-22T13:11:00.001-05:00

The Way it Is

2008-12-18T13:48:00.002-05:00

Memorable quotes from the first week of the great Bush/Cheney rewrite:

"While there's room for an honest and healthy debate about the decisions I made — and there's plenty of debate — there can be no debate about the results in keeping America safe," Bush said.

"I was aware of the programme, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency, in effect, came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do," he [Cheney] said.

"And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it."

Look, whether it is over the decision to go to war on what turned out to be a bevy of lies, the decision to inflame the hatred of a billion Muslims and turn the entire international community against us, or the explicit approval of the use of illegal and immoral torture against captured prisoners, it is important that you realize that Bush and Cheney simply do not give a shit what you think. Just get over it.

Just go.

2008-12-16T16:28:00.004-05:00

Two short clips from the first few exit interviews with Bush perfectly illustrate just how amazingly unreflective and obtuse he is in the face of the destruction he has brought to this country, our reputation, the economy, and the lives of millions of Americans and Iraqis.

First, he comes to the conclusion that he has "abandoned free market principles in order to save the free market"

Unlike Alan Greenspan, who finally came to the conclusion that his Randian belief in a self regulating free market was an absurd and childish notion, Bush simply does not understand that his free market fundamentalism hasn't been abandoned, it has failed.

Next, he farts out his true thoughts on the disaster in Iraq. In the face of all of the information that has come forward over time, the misguided decisions made that dragged us to the place we find ourselves today, the flawed intelligence, the outright lies and the human tragedy that he has unleashed, his response is a chilling, "so what?"

Socrates said that the unreflective life was not worth living. Apparently that message didn't resonate with the cheer leading squad at Yale.

and another thing....

2008-12-15T10:26:00.002-05:00

...that I learned from Joe Scarborough this morning:

It is very suspicious that the sitting Democratic State Senator in Illinois would support the election campaign of the Democratic candidate for Governor in 2002.

Truisms

2008-12-12T15:50:00.002-05:00

Some things I learned from watching CNBC today

1. The auto industry is in trouble and the bailout failed because the auto workers get paid too much and wouldn't budge on negotiations regarding future wage concessions.Their problems have nothing to do with the fact that GM sells less cars than Honda but has 10x more dealerships. Furthermore, the fact that the Republicans in the Senate think it's a good idea to forcibly legislate the wages of working Americans is in tune with their belief in a free market economy.

2. The SEC failed miserably in the last decade not because they have been starved as an organization by successive Republican administrations, but because they've lacked a strong leader.

3. Nancy Pelosi is really to blame for the fact that the Treasury has poured a trillion dollars into banks, insurance companies and brokerage firms. She said that the Democratic Congress would be more frugal than the Republican one.

4. Larry Kudlow thinks that Mitt Romney should be the car czar because his father ran AMC, and he used to live in Detroit.

5. Nobody in Detroit has even lost their job, like on Wall Street. It's been like a big party out there.

6. Sen's Corker, Shelby and McConnell did a great job because they were tasked with brokering a settlement. The fact that they failed at this should not in any way get in the way of Corker being named by MNBC as a new "star". Their failure also has nothing to do with the fact that they each represent states with large non-union plants for Toyota, Mercedes, Nissan and BMW.

Meanwhile, read Joseph Stiglitz' article in Vanity Fair if you'd really like to understand how we reached this point. I'll be wrestling my neighbor for a dead squirrel in the street.

Universal Health Care, Round II

2008-12-03T10:28:00.002-05:00

Thomas Frank lets the cat out of the bag in today's WSJ...

He points out that the GOPs visceral reaction to any proposed plan to provide universal health care is based upon two bedrock beliefs, one of which they have proven to be quite willing to cave on, namely big government spending. Conventional wisdom tells us that the GOP opposes universal health care because they can't stomach the idea of big government programs and favor the magic of the free market. This is a bit tough to swallow considering the debacle we are wading through at the moment.

The other, more critical opposition comes from a much deeper place, however. As Frank points out

Still, conservatives have always dreaded the day that Democrats discover (or rediscover) that there is a happy political synergy between delivering liberal economic reforms and building the liberal movement. The classic statement of this fear is a famous memo that Bill Kristol wrote in 1993, when he had just started out as a political strategist and the Clinton administration was preparing to propose some version of national health care.

"The plan should not be amended; it should be erased," Mr. Kristol advised the GOP. And not merely because Mr. Clinton's scheme was (in Mr. Kristol's view) bad policy, but because "it will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests."

Historian Rick Perlstein suggests that this memo is "the skeleton key to understanding modern American politics" because it opens up a fundamental conservative anxiety: "If the Democrats succeed in redistributing economic power, we're screwed."

Frank's piece places this thought in the context of the Clinton administration's failure to realize that embracing a "liberal" approach to the issue would not only be popularly accepted, but could become a game changer for the Democratic party, but perhaps that was another time and place. At this point, it is irrefutable that the country resoundingly supports a comprehensive universal health care plan, and that the GOP understands the existential threat that such a plan may represent.

Deep thought of the day

2008-12-03T10:27:00.003-05:00

Am I the only one that thinks it odd that Goldman and Morgan Stanley are issuing government-backed debt?

Whoa.

2008-11-25T11:51:00.000-05:00

This, by the way, is not a parody.

ziggy

2008-11-18T22:19:00.002-05:00

Don't forget that at one time, David Bowie ruled the pop music world like few others ever have.

Michael Lewis on the end of Wall Street

2008-11-18T14:42:00.001-05:00

Great read.

Blowback on the Treasury..

2008-11-17T16:47:00.003-05:00

We are really in uncharted waters in terms of reacting to the conflagration that is running through our economy and the markets, and the great fear is that opinions will swing wildly one way or t'other. Digby, who's writing I enjoy, has been at the far end of the reaction to the bailout efforts of the Treasury, basically getting the pitchforks out and lighting the torches.

I think at this point, stripping Henry Paulson of his authority to spend more cash, with Ben Bernanke thrown in for good measure, isn't an option but a duty. And Chuck Grassley's call for the newly minted oversight board to investigate conflicts of interest among all the Goldman Sachs execs serving as the ladlers of corporate cash during the bailout is absolutely warranted. However, this oversight is coming at the END of the process, not the beginning. With four trillion already passed out, it's not like putting the brakes on the giveaways is going to make much of a difference today. This is not to say we shouldn't be investigating and scrutinizing what amounts to theft, as well as building a new regulatory structure for the future (yes, listen to Eliot Spitzer on this one - setting aside his personal life he's probably the most knowledgeable person in America about what needs to be done).

I don't share the abject fear of the Goldman-led cabal that is wildly flailing about, throwing our money at the problem in any and every way that they can come up with. But I do understand the suspicion, the cynicism, and the outrage that Digby shows. In my estimation, the systemic problem facing us, the painful de-leveraging of the economy itself, is truly unprecedented, and like the 1930s requires creative and disruptive ideas and approaches. Those are by nature unsettling and scary.

What I do fault Paulson and the Treasury on is their incredible tin ear as it pertains to the process. His immediate response, in which he said: "give me the 700 billion and don't ask any questions" was an obvious non-starter in a politicized environment. His refusal to move quickly away from the flawed idea of repurchasing troubled assets from the banks rather than investing directly into the institutions themselves looked bad as well. But the appointment of Neil Kashkari really sealed his doom, I think. He could have picked from any number of smart and competent candidates to head up the TARP program, and in fact, Kashkari may be the smartest and most competent candidate. But he is 35 and he's from Goldman, and that wasn't going to play in DC.

Paulson lame ducked himself, and the fallout is ugly. He gave his opponents all the ammunition that they needed to paint him as a Wall Street guy taking care of his Wall Street buddies. He's exiting, stage left, but can't do it soon enough.

Tom Friedman Recants

2008-11-13T16:31:00.003-05:00

Wow. The confessionals keep rolling in. Here's the column that we all wish that Tom Friedman would actually write. It's fun to imagine, though:

But to have been so completely and fundamentally wrong about so huge a disaster as what we have done to Iraq — and ourselves — is outrageous enough to prove that people like me have no business posing as wise men, and, more importantly, that The New York Times has no business continuing to provide me with a national platform.

In any case, I have made a decision: as of today, I will no longer write in this or any other newspaper. I will immediately desist from writing any more books about how it’s time for everyone to climb on board the globalization high-speed monorail to the future. I will keep my opinions to myself.

The importance of Sarah P

2008-11-13T10:54:00.002-05:00

Andrew Sullivan, former editor in chief of the New Republic, who literally destroyed his reputation as he went into the tank for Bush and the rush to war in Iraq in 2003, has seen the scales fall from his eyes over the past five years and admirably called out the McCain campaign for the travesty that it was. He reaches his boiling point in this post where he explains why the nomination of Sarah Palin continues to be a shocking and important thing.

The impulsive, unvetted selection of a total unknown, with no knowledge of or interest in the wider world, as a replacement president remains one of the most disturbing events in modern American history. That the press felt required to maintain a facade of normalcy for two months - and not to declare the whole thing a farce from start to finish - is a sign of their total loss of nerve. That the Palin absurdity should follow the two-term presidency of another individual utterly out of his depth in national government is particularly troubling. 46 percent of Americans voted for the possibility of this blank slate as president because she somehow echoed their own sense of religious or cultural "identity". Until we figure out how this happened, we will not be able to prevent it from happening again. And we have to find a way to prevent this from recurring.

There is a bit more piling on that follows, but the post is worth a read. I truly never thought that we as a nation could be more insulted by a candidate than we were by W, but I'll admit that Caribou Barbie took it to a new level. And Sullivan makes a good point, in that we need to understand why this could happen and in particular why a near majority of our electorate would support such a potential President. It is disturbing indeed.

Fast Forward..

2008-11-11T16:38:00.004-05:00

Man, I know that we just finished a grueling death march, but with the prohibitive favorites for the Republican nomination lining up, I almost want to fast forward to 2011, when the recession will presumably be over and the race for the White House will resume.

I mean, c'mon, really?

Holy Joe

2008-11-06T20:25:00.003-05:00

Here's as far as I would reach across the aisle if I were President Elect Obama....

Chuck Hagel for SecState, bitches...

by the way, as soon as the Senate races are settled, Holy Joe should be stripped of his committee chair and relegated to the back benches of the Senate. They won't forbid him from caucusing, but they darn well should.

John McCain Will Win

2008-11-04T15:33:00.007-05:00

Alabama.

Worst campaign ever.

A generation of voters will never consider the Republican Party because these idiots listened to Karl Rove and Bill Kristol and stirred up this ridiculous culture war. They fell back on their old canards because they couldn't find anything better or more relevant to talk about. They will be rightly drubbed, and the collateral damage will be great.

Good riddance to the lot of them.

UPDATE: An enlightened commenter at Townhall.com gives his opinion on unfounded reports of a Republican election official being removed from a polling station in Philadelphia:

Bring it on
Start the rioting. I know my neighbors and we are ready for battle. We have seen this before. Every time blacks don't get their way, they riot, killing innocent people and burning down businesses. It's never that I lost this time, and I will try even harder next time to succeed. It's the evil white man. The bright side is they always burn down their own neighborhoods, knowing full well that a 12-gage is waiting for them elsewhere.

What it's all about.

2008-10-29T14:26:00.001-05:00

Daughter of slave votes for Obama
109-year-old Bastrop woman casts her vote by mail.

By Joshunda Sanders
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, October 27, 2008

Amanda Jones, 109, the daughter of a man born into slavery, has lived a life long enough to touch three centuries. And after voting consistently as a Democrat for 70 years, she has voted early for the country's first black presidential nominee.

The middle child of 13, Jones, who is African American, is part of a family that has lived in Republican-leaning Bastrop County for five generations. The family has remained a fixture in Cedar Creek and other parts of the county, even when its members had to eat at segregated barbecue dives and walk through the back door while white customers walked through the front, said Amanda Jones' 68-year-old daughter, Joyce Jones.

It's Friday.

2008-10-24T13:50:00.001-05:00

Deep Thoughts on the Economy

2008-10-23T10:14:00.003-05:00

You knew this was coming, that it wouldn't be long before the right pointed out that the broad destruction of wealth caused by the global economic meltdown happened at a very interesting moment...

Why the crescendo of economic collapse right before the election? Why didn't the media and congress act just as concerned some time ago or wait until sometime after the election to go into crisis mode? The timing of the current financial crisis seems too planned and calculating to be just a coincidence. Polls show that people's number one concern right now is the economy and that for the most part, voters believe Democrats are somewhat more likely to help with the economy. Could it be that the liberal media and those in Congress, knowing that, is blaring the bad economic news from the rooftops in order to manipulate voters into voting for a Democrat? If so, it won't be the first time.

AHA! It's a conspiracy of the lefties.

And we'll know the real story just as soon as the election is over and B Hussein Obama is safely ensconced on Pennsylvania avenue, I suppose?

My guess is that if Obama gets elected, the true facts of the economy will come out. Suddenly, our economic outlook will look much brighter after November 5th. In the coming months and years after the election, we will be told how Obama has managed this crisis and overcome it

Indeed.

On another note, a proposal that I helped Bill Hambrecht put together was highlighted at Joe Nocera's blog yesterday. We've actually put together four white papers on the recent financial meltdown, they can be accessed here.

Seeing through the now

2008-10-17T09:40:00.003-05:00

One thing that worries me a bit about the inevitable rout of McCain and the ascendancy of an Obama administration (aside from the enormous task that faces that administration) is the propensity of our press and pundits to quickly spin the "meaning" of the election and explain the results in real time. This focus on interpreting the results of great public exercise of an election tends to run to the near term and skews towards the ahistoric.

On November 5th, when we wake up after having elected this nations first black President in a landslide, the recriminations will run deep and the punditocracy will look for the usual suspects. My hunch is that the deepening and rolling economic crisis will be indicated as a key reason why the McCain candidacy failed, and in some ways it is one. Further, the absurdity of McCain, his inept and lurching strategy, his muddled and plainly contradictory messages and his bizarre and frankly irresponsible choice of Caribou Barbie as his running mate will also be cited.

But those are all derivative. What cannot be ignored and cannot be forgotten is that the election of Obama and the rejection of McCain is part of a larger statement made by the Republic. It is a repudiation of the failures of George Bush, a complete rejection of the man, his character, his words, his actions and his smug entitled philosophy of governance. If the economic troubles that the Second Bush Recession are the near term causes of our discontent, let us not forget that these troubles are his failure. The "MBA President" proved to be as incompetent and unsympathetic as Richard Fuld at Lehman, or Kenny Lay at Enron. When he speaks of the crisis he is unconvincing and seems blissfully unaware of the nuances, inevitably glossing over the differences between liquidity and insolvency, proving over and over again that he has not matured from his days as the failed CEO of Harken Energy. The aggressive effort to leave the credit default markets as unregulated and opaque as possible, led by Phil Gramm has much to do with where we find ourselves today, and it is an attitude towards regulation that springs directly from this President's head. The disdain for institutional oversight and the petulant disgust for our system of checks and balances pervades Bush's worldview, is something so grand even exists.

His foreign policy has been flatly rejected by all but a desperate few dead-enders, who lust for Arab blood and flatly consider "the other" a threat to our white, heterosexual, male-dominated protestant culture. The blatant fear-mongering and manipulation that this administration has wielded like a club on the American public has left the majority of the country weary, and as the slow moving disasters in Mesopotamia and Afghanistan grind on, the scales have fallen from the all but the most paranoid and angry jingoists.

For Bush's approach to government is in no way "conservative" and certainly not laissez faire. Thousands of signing statements directly undermining signed legislation is hardly "hands off", rather, it points to an aggrandized and obnoxious belief that the unitary executive should be unfettered, that the will of the people, expressed through our elected legislature is to be ignored, and that the wishes of a small group of privileged insiders should be paramount. This, and a cynical and opportunistic appeal to the inherent fear, racism and homophobia of a portion of our electorate has corroded and destroyed the Republican Party in America, and the inevitable result is McCain, an almost comical candidate that carries their standard today.

The complete failure of the Bush presidency cannot be forgotten, and cannot be ignored. There were too many people who were derided as unpatriotic and whose reputations were besmirched by this band of fools for stating the obvious, that this man is more than an incompetent buffoon, but rather a plague upon our country, a dangerously incurious vessel that happily acceded to the nefarious advice of a group of cynical, disdainful and ultimately wrongheaded advisors who brought shame and tragedy upon our heads.

This is why we have McCain and Palin, cartoon characters both. Don't let us forget that their failure is Bush's failure.

Posted without comment

2008-10-16T09:32:00.000-05:00

Hugo!

2008-10-16T09:03:00.001-05:00

Hard to argue his point, actually.

"Bush is to the left of me now," Mr Chavez told an audience of international intellectuals debating the benefits of socialism. "

Comrade Bush announced he will buy shares in private banks."

Mr Chavez, who has insulted Bush in the past as a drunkard or the devil, called him clueless.

He accused him of simply parroting the words of his aides without understanding the new policies that rely on heavy state intervention.

"I am convinced he has got no idea what's going on," said Mr Chavez, who has nationalised swaths of the OPEC nation's economy in recent years and is in negotiations to take over a Spanish bank in Venezuela.

The GOP falls all over itself....

2008-10-14T08:44:00.003-05:00

Digby points out that the conservatives who are suddenly having second thoughts on the question of whether or not Sarah Palin is a blithering idiot aren't really being that consistent.

I actually feel sorry for McCain on this one. He had every reason to believe that the conservative intelligentsia would support putting a functional incompetent on the ticket. After all, people like David Frum wrote glowing books called The Right Man about the current functional incompetent in the White House. How was McCain to know that these rats would scurry over the side squealing about "competence" and "intelligence" all of a sudden?

David Frum had the audacity to point out that Sarah Palin isn't quite up to the task of stringing three coherent sentences together, and apparently the knuckle-draggers at the National Review aren't too happy with him stepping out of line. Digby points out that

Frum is getting slammed by his own side for being an inconvenient truth-teller about Palin's incoherence. How could they?

I suspect it may because Frum was positively giddy about the man who said this:

"Because the—all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There's a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those—changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be—or closer delivered to what has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It's kind of muddled. Look, there's a series of things that cause the—like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate—the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those—if that growth is affected, it will help on the red."—Explaining his plan to save Social Security, Tampa, Fla., Feb. 4, 2005

Billy Kristol is a Comedian

2008-10-13T12:11:00.004-05:00

It's hard to read Bill Kristol and not burst into uncontrollable laughter these days, but sometimes he outdoes himself. The basic premise behind today's column is that McCain needs to take a complete mulligan on his entire campaign efforts to date, and get back to some state of grace in which the American people can get to know the real McCain/Palin ticket as a couple of Happy Warriors who is amenable to bipartisan rule and willing to govern reasonably and competently from the center.

William the Bloody:

And let McCain go back to what he’s been good at in the past — running as a cheerful, open and accessible candidate. Palin should follow suit. The two of them are attractive and competent politicians. They’re happy warriors and good campaigners. Set them free.

Provide total media accessibility on their campaign planes and buses. Kick most of the aides off and send them out to swing states to work for the state coordinators on getting voters to the polls. Keep just a minimal staff to help organize the press conferences McCain and Palin should have at every stop and the TV interviews they should do at every location. Do town halls, do the Sunday TV shows, do talk radio — and invite Obama and Biden to join them in some of these venues, on the ground that more joint appearances might restore civility and substance to the contest.

It's a lovely idea, but ignores the reality that this campaign will end up exactly where we knew it would all along. The campaign is McCain, it is unfocused, erratic, angry, incoherent and nasty, even a bit addle-brained. At the time McCain was ensured the Republican nomination, I predicted that he would "bring on the nasty", and I've not been disappointed. Pundits like Kristol have in their mind a version of McCain that not only doesn't exist, but has been proven to be demonstrably wrong time and again. From his well documented temper to his long history of erratic swings, both in policy and in approach, McCain is less a maverick and more of an angry old coot. The American people have come to realize that the more that they know of McCain, the more they dislike him.

UPDATE: Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly piles on Kristol a bit more:

This is, of course, the same Bill Kristol who devoted his column just seven days ago to urging McCain to do the opposite, attacking Obama with guilt-by-association smears. Kristol said he was looking forward to McCain taking off the "gloves."

McCain's strategy coincided nicely with Kristol's previous advice, and most evidence suggests the tactics failed. So, Kristol is now arguing that McCain should disregard all that advice from last week, and take his new suggestions to heart.

And if you want to get right down to it, Kristol was banging the table for Palin for veep months before anyone had even begun to experience her profound absurdity.

all the kids are doing it...

2008-10-10T14:01:00.000-05:00

Hehhhh?

2008-10-06T08:33:00.001-05:00

2008 Tom Waits Stuff

2008-10-01T19:26:00.001-05:00

Great version of Tom Traubert's Blues....

Feel the Meme.....

2008-09-29T09:35:00.003-05:00

It is bubbling up underneath the bailout analysis and discussion, and it will rear its ugly head in all of the dank corners of the rightwing blogosphere. The meme is that the credit crunch, the collapse of the ridiculously levered banks on Wall Street, and the severe decline in the value of your home is not due to rapacious bankers, lenders and brokers, but because of.....blacks!

The general thought process is that because Clinton (of course) and the Democrats insisted that home ownership should be available to those who had been traditionally left outside of the lending process, and often explicitly discriminated against, the banks were forced to begin reckless lending to lower income and lower credit borrowers, in particular, minorities and, gasp, blacks.

Here's a taste of the meme:

Clinton saw homeownership as a way to open the door for blacks and other minorities to enter the middle class.
Though well-intended, the problem was that Congress was about to change hands, from the Democrats to the Republicans. Rather than submit legislation that the GOP-led Congress was almost sure to reject, Clinton ordered Robert Rubin's Treasury Department to rewrite the rules in 1995.
The rewrite, as City Journal noted back in 2000, "made getting a satisfactory CRA rating harder." Banks were given strict new numerical quotas and measures for the level of "diversity" in their loan portfolios. Getting a good CRA rating was key for a bank that wanted to expand or merge with another.
Loans started being made on the basis of race, and often little else.

We can argue all that we want about the chicken and egg here, but the chicken and egg are the boom in securitization that Wall Street led and the artificially low interest rates that Chairman Greenspan left in place after 9/11, not the absurdly racist notion that black and minority home ownership are to blame. Keep an eye on this, it will enter the conversation over and over again, until it meanders towards conventional wisdom on the right.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin gives it a little twist, and blames it on the other dark skinned culprits....

It’s no coincidence that most of the areas hardest hit by the foreclosure wave - Loudoun County, Va., California’s Inland Empire, Stockton and San Joaquin Valley, and Las Vegas and Phoenix, for starters - also happen to be some of the nation’s largest illegal-alien sanctuaries. Half of the mortgages to Hispanics are subprime (the accursed species of loan to borrowers with the shadiest credit histories). A quarter of all those subprime loans are in default and foreclosure.

Snark.

2008-09-25T14:09:00.001-05:00

Finally, a coherent analysis of the bailout:

The Bailout Plan...

2008-09-21T19:42:00.005-05:00

I'll give you two posts that point out the inanity of the bailout scheme that Hank Paulson, Helicopter Ben, and the Bush Administration have proposed. The first, from Glenzilla, analyzes the bailout from the higher level, noting that it is the most naked example of Republican hypocrisy that we'll see in our lifetimes, perhaps.

Second, whatever else is true, the events of the last week are the most momentous events of the Bush era in terms of defining what kind of country we are and how we function -- and before this week, the last eight years have been quite momentous, so that is saying a lot. Again, regardless of whether this nationalization/bailout scheme is "necessary" or makes utilitarian sense, it is a crime of the highest order -- not a "crime" in the legal sense but in a more meaningful sense.
What is more intrinsically corrupt than allowing people to engage in high-reward/no-risk capitalism -- where they reap tens of millions of dollars and more every year while their reckless gambles are paying off only to then have the Government shift their losses to the citizenry at large once their schemes collapse? We've retroactively created a win-only system where the wealthiest corporations and their shareholders are free to gamble for as long as they win and then force others who have no upside to pay for their losses. Watching Wall St. erupt with an orgy of celebration on Friday after it became clear the Government (i.e., you) would pay for their disaster was literally nauseating, as the very people who wreaked this havoc are now being rewarded.

The second is from Krugman, in this blogpost here, who points out, quite succinctly, why this thing just won't work.

Here’s the thing: historically, financial system rescues have involved seizing the troubled institutions and guaranteeing their debts; only after that did the government try to repackage and sell their assets. The feds took over S&Ls first, protecting their depositors, then transferred their bad assets to the RTC. The Swedes took over troubled banks, again protecting their depositors, before transferring their assets to their equivalent institutions.

The Treasury plan, by contrast, looks like an attempt to restore confidence in the financial system — that is, convince creditors of troubled institutions that everything’s OK — simply by buying assets off these institutions. This will only work if the prices Treasury pays are much higher than current market prices; that, in turn, can only be true either if this is mainly a liquidity problem — which seems doubtful — or if Treasury is going to be paying a huge premium, in effect throwing taxpayers’ money at the financial world.

And there’s no quid pro quo here — nothing that gives taxpayers a stake in the upside, nothing that ensures that the money is used to stabilize the system rather than reward the undeserving.

I hope I’m wrong about this. But let me say it again: Treasury needs to explain why this is supposed to work — not try to panic Congress into giving it a blank check. Otherwise, no deal.

What Krugman is correctly noting is that we are at cross purposes here. It is in the interests of the taxpayers to pay the least amount possible for the shitty loans on the books of the banks (broadly defined). If we overpay, we receive no potential upside and simply own a trillion dollars of garbage. It is in the interests of the banks (and the bailout, by the way) for the taxpayers to grossly overpay for those loans. If the government (ie, us) doesn't overpay for the loans, the bailout itself does no good.

And thirdly, a question that cuts to the heart of the flailing about that has defined the past two weeks...namely, what do we do if the bailout doesn't work? Again, what is plan B here? I hate to draw specious parallels to our misadventures along the Tigris and the Euphrates, but didn't we all agree that we needed to do a bit of "postwar planning" next time?

Jackson

2008-09-18T08:44:00.001-05:00

Goin down to the Tower to see JB tonight. Betcha he doesn't look like this anymore...

The Challenge Ahead

2008-09-18T08:30:00.002-05:00

Russ Feingold nails it right on the head in his special comment for Constitution Day. You can read the entire statement here.

The money graph is here:

Our next president will face a difficult challenge. He must repair the wreckage the current administration has left, which means renouncing some of the powers the current President tried to amass as he turned a blind eye to the rule of law and separation of powers. No president will want to limit his own power. But if we are to be the nation our founders envisioned when they gathered in Philadelphia more than two centuries ago, we must work together — across party lines and at all levels of government — to protect and defend our Constitution and restore the rule of law.

The assault on the Constitution by Cheney, Addington and Bush (through his general disinterest and disdain for the concept of government itself) is perhaps the most corrosive legacy of this failed administration. (That said, the havoc we see in the financial world is not far behind, as it represents the logical conclusion of the Bush Presidency's incompetent fiscal policy).

Another one that doesn't do nuance....

2008-09-16T15:45:00.003-05:00

As Wall Street lurches through the painful de-leveraging that is necessary to deflate the bubble that has provided 60% of the revenue and 40% of the pre-tax profit for investment banks over the past five years, the big question is exactly how the GOP will spin this, particularly the mouth breathing right. It seems a meme has emerged, namely, that this is all Congresses fault. I'm not quite sure how this squares with the reality of the last eight years of disdain for any sort of government regulation or oversight, but clearly a theme is emerging that someone, perhaps Chris Dodd, should be arrested.

John McCain added this to the conversation:

"We're going to need a '9/11 Commission' to find out what happened and what needs to be fixed," he said. "I warned two years ago that this situation was deteriorating and unacceptable. And the old-boy network and the corruption in Washington is directly involved, and one of the causes of this financial crisis that we're in today. And I know how to fix it, and I know how to get things done."

McCain has made no secret of the fact that he doesn't understand the economy, doesn't particularly care about it, and doesn't have the predilection to spend the time to look into it, as it is complicated business. As Digby notes, this is the man that intends to solve the centuries old conflicts in Western Asia this way:

“One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit,’” said Mr. McCain.

So, we probably shouldn't expect too much from Grampy McCranky when it comes to an enlightened or nuanced examination of the current tectonic shift in business models that is occurring on the Street. In my own personal opinion, we are reaping the result of eight years of unfettered capitalism, which grew out of the utter disdain that the right has for the notion of government itself. Movement conservatives hold as religion the thought that any regulation, any bureaucracy, any oversight, or any safety net that government would put in the way of the free hand of the markets is anathema, and that any discussion of the appropriate role of our government in checking the excesses of our systems is tantamount to treason.

And where have we ended up? The litany of Bush failures are underpinned by this broken calculation. Katrina, Freddie and Fannie, the subprime debacle, AIG, Lehman and Bear, the misery of the bankruptcy bill, all of these are part and parcel of the anti-government bent that drives their worldview. Along the way, they've been forced to bail out the very markets they swear by, ironically. So you and I will take on the mortgage responsibilities of Freddie and Frannie, we'll lend $50b to AIG, and we'll backstop Bear's losses on behalf of JP Morgan. If GM comes hat in hand to the Fed next week, how can we say no?

Thank goodness he's got Palin on his ticket to work through the complexities.

Ahh, whatever....Ronnie Drew Passed in August...

2008-09-15T21:04:00.002-05:00

Passed without comment....

2008-09-10T11:00:00.001-05:00

McCain criticized Democratic contenders for offering what he called costly universal health care proposals that require too much government regulation. While he said he had not studied Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton's health-care plan, he said it was "eerily reminiscent" of the failed plan she offered as first lady in the early 1990s.

"I think they put some lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig," he said of her proposal.

link

WSJ on Palin's lies...

2008-09-09T08:54:00.003-05:00

What's with these two radical liberals who've invaded the hallowed spaces of the WSJ?

Despite significant evidence to the contrary, the McCain campaign continues to assert that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told the federal government "thanks but no thanks" to the now-famous bridge to an island in her home state.....

But Gov. Palin's claim comes with a serious caveat. She endorsed the multimillion dollar project during her gubernatorial race in 2006. And while she did take part in stopping the project after it became a national scandal, she did not return the federal money. She just allocated it elsewhere....

Why is this one issue such a big deal? Sen. McCain's anti-earmarks stance has been paramount to his campaign. The Arizona senator has blamed everything from the Minneapolis bridge collapse to Hurricane Katrina on Congress's willingness to stuff bills full of pork barrel spending.

As such, Gov. Palin's image as a "reformer" is part of the storyline the McCain campaign needs to complement the top of its ticket. Her quip about passing on the bridge and "building it ourselves" has been a staple of her stump...

At a rally today, Sen. McCain again asserted that Sen. Obama has requested nearly a billion in earmarks. In fact, the Illinois senator requested $311 million last year, according to the Associated Press, and none this year. In comparison, Gov. Palin has requested $750 million in her two years as governor -- which the AP says is the largest per-capita request in the nation.

Another word for what Gov. Palin is doing is, of course, lying.

Once again, her comical performance isn't the issue; of course she's a travesty as a national candidate, and the next six weeks will be filled with one gaffe after another, at least as far as the GOP allows her to speak openly. The issue, as it has always been, is McCain's decision to include her on the ticket. He vowed that the person he ultimately chose as his running mate would be the person best able to fulfill his responsibilities should something happen to him. He had months and months to find that person, and when the time came, he picked Palin. This is about judgment. This is about temperament, and this is about erratic behavior on the part of the man the GOP has chosen as their standard bearer.

UPDATE: Careful, some on the right are already wishing and hoping that the 72 year old four time cancer survivor doesn't even make it that long..

Hockey Guy, You're Famous!

2008-09-05T12:31:00.005-05:00

Apparently, Grampy McSame is a big fan of reality television. I suppose he has his pudding on a TV table watching the latest version of Biggest Loser or Wife Swap. Appropriately, he's now got a supporting role in the latest hit, Baby Daddy, in which a 17 year old boy from Alaska is whisked off to the Twin Cities to meet the man who in six weeks could be the President of the United States! And what great feat did he pull off to win this great honor? He knocked up his high school girlfriend...

The cameras were rolling, the world was watching. Fox News complains non-stop about the MSM's shameless attacks on the Palin family, the gross invasion of privacy that has taken place because the liberal media has pried into the sanctity of this family matter. In other words, keep the family out of it, and never mind the fact that we leaked the story and have shamelessly used the family as props all week. Oh, and who's turn is it to hold the little special kid?

Ten days ago, he was a high school dropout, drinking beer and smoking weed in Alaska, and today, he's being lauded by the fundamentalist right wing as a symbol of strong "culture of life" family values.

What a strange world.

This....

2008-09-05T08:40:00.001-05:00

Beyond the Palin

2008-09-02T13:39:00.004-05:00

The Palin nomination is a complete fiasco, of course. McCain's judgment has proven once again to be shaky and erratic, and it will take months to figure out just who called the shots on this one. Bill Kristol has been banging the table for Palin for months on Fox News, so this hardly came out of the blue. James Dobson and the religious fundamentalists clearly vetted the choice (just as McCain's lawyers seemed not to have). If Rove and the fundies sank Lieberman as possibility, which is being reported, what exactly does that say about Maverick McCain? So many unanswered questions.

Barring the possibility that she will be dropped from the ticket quickly, a possibility that I find highly likely at this point, it will be interesting to see how our opinion of Sarah Palin changes between now and November. The reaction that I got from various conversations over the weekend was that the choice was puzzling, desperate, insulting and a bit creepy. All of the information that has emerged in the past two days has done nothing but reinforce the idea that this is perhaps the greatest gaffe that a Presidential candidate has ever committed. We've learned that her bold declaration of opposing the 'bridge to nowhere' is complete bunk, we've learned that she's lawyered up for her own "troopergate" scandal which calls into question abuse of executive power, and we've learned that she has links to a bizarre secessionist movement in Alaskan politics. The timing of the revelation of Bristol Palin's pregnancy will trickle out over the next few days, and my guess is that it will lead to many more questions than answers about who knew what and when.

Whether or not the mainstream press, the spinmeisters and the talking heads on Fox, MSNBC and CNN will be able to transform that impression will be fascinating to watch.

Can they convince us that this is a wise choice?

Joe Lieberman and John McCain

2008-08-27T14:29:00.002-05:00

Glen Greenwald points out that the foreign policy advisers closest to John McCain are of the most rabid strain of bloodthirsty neoconservative ilk. In an editorial in the WSJ, Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham talk tough on Russia's recent border skirmish with Georgia.

The idea that we are going to somehow assert ourselves militarily against Russia, while at the same time fighting two wars and after having made ourselves an international pariah would be laughable if it weren't so utterly scary. Lieberman, in particular, who yearns dearly for war in Iran and Syria, represents the most extreme vision of neoconservatism, a view shared by a rogue's gallery of discredited fools, such as Bill Kristol, John Bolton, and Paul Wolfowitz.

The foreign policy team exerting chief influence over John McCain is truly more extremist -- in a purer and more deranged form -- than the foreign policy team of the Bush administration. They're not only the most extremist faction in American political life, but also the most delusional. These aren't just the people who led the U.S. to war in Iraq -- though they are that -- but they're also the ones who actually believe that the Bush administration has been far too meek in its assertion of U.S. military force and too passive in its interference in the affairs of other countries. They want to accelerate -- massively intensify -- virtually every one of the polices that has brought the U.S. to such disgrace and near ruination over the past eight years.

This is McCain's worldview as well. It is jingoistic and dangerous and tinged with unreality, even a bit of madness. This is what the election is about, for me. An Obama presidency is going to be a difficult one, as the damage that has been done to this country is substantial. A huge amount of any political capital that Obama will bring to the White House will be spent trying to reestablish ourselves as an honest broker and true beacon of democracy. The international audience that he will face will be a tough one, and the enmity will be real and intense.

The fact that McCain chooses to be associated with the Lieberman/Graham camp (and actually to be a proud member of that camp) is more damning than anything else about that man.

man o' the people...

2008-08-22T13:17:00.002-05:00

It's officially stupid season. The next two months are going to be painful. Just keep two things in mind: Obama is a muslim, and McCain was a POW.

TBogg has a great rundown of the wingnut's response to the McCain house kerfluffle here. My personal favorite is this one...

My third reaction was, hey, how many houses do I own? The answer, it turns out, is pretty complicated, what with property held in trust for my benefit and controlling interests in investments and such. It is either two -- the house in Princeton that we live in and the house we are trying to sell -- or some larger number up to six, including three houses in the Adirondacks held in a trust among all the descendants of my grandparents and a dual residential/commercial property that we rent.

So, if you put that question to me and I were unprepared for it, I'd probably have to get back to you too. And if I really did not want to be wrong and had a staff with an official position, I would refer you to it. Neither diminishes one iota my love of eating at Applebee's, the joy I feel walking a boardwalk "down the shore," or my identification, such as it is, with the average Joe.

HEH: A reader emails, "I just want to know if Obama has 'experimented' with more illegal substances than McCain owns houses... Then we'll decide."

Careful....getting into dangerous territory when we start making innuendos about illicit drug use....

The Real McCain

2008-08-18T15:21:00.004-05:00

Kevin Drum is absolutely correct that the idea that the American public will sour on John McCain because he is rich and white and a belligerent warmonger is fantasy. America has shown time and again that they are just fine with rich white playboy warmongers.

The far more powerful approach is to focus on McCain's demonstrable flaws, which he lists thusly:

McCain is old and gets confused occasionally.

McCain is running an ugly, smear-based campaign.

McCain has a legendarily short fuse.

McCain is annoyingly self-righteous.

McCain's straight talk has evaporated in the face of his need to win evangelical votes.

McCain, who says that he is hesitant to speak about his time in the Hanoi Hilton, or his war service in general, demonstrated this sanctimonious streak last week:

On Thursday, Walter Isaacson was the latest pundit to publicly call out the Mama Mia-loving presumptive Republican presidential nominee during an interview at the Aspen Institute in Colorado.

"If there is anything I am lacking in, I've got to tell you, it is taste in music and art and other great things in life," McCain said in his own defense. "I've got to say that a lot of my taste in music stopped about the time I impacted a surface-to-air missile with my own airplane and never caught up again."

and it bleeds over to his staff, who drop the POW card any time McCain is questioned, for anything:

Interviewed Sunday on CNN, Mr. Warren seemed surprised to learn that Mr. McCain was not in the building during the Obama interview. A spokeswoman for Mr. McCain said he was en route to the church.

Nicolle Wallace, a spokeswoman for Mr. McCain, said on Sunday night that Mr. McCain had not heard the broadcast of the event while in his motorcade and heard none of the questions. “The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous,” Ms. Wallace said.

Aside from that, he has confused Sunni with Shia, imagined the existence of Czechoslovakia, and relentlessly confused the geography of Western Asia, imagining a border between Pakistan and Iraq.

As dozens of articles have pointed out, McCain has flipped on just about all of his "maverick" positions in the past four years, including the use of torture, the Bush tax cuts, immigration reform, timetables for withdraw, wiretapping and FISA,gay marriage, affirmative action, ANWR, and so many more, that the mere notion of describing him as anything other than a Bush clone is absurd.

In many ways, he represents the worst of the last three Republican Presidents, he's as old and confused as Reagan, as dim and unimpressive as Bush I, and a vindictive and short tempered bully like W. This is where Obama should hit McCain, by calling him out on his "maverick" bologna, his age and mental acuity, and his general temperament.

UPDATE: As dday points out, another manifestation of the McCain character is a wee bit of a problem with telling the truth:

So Many Half-Truths, So Little Time

by dday

Just because I want to keep track of this stuff, here are some more stories providing strong evidence of John McCain's growing problem with telling the truth. Both relate to Saturday's Saddleback Forum but are also anecdotes and excerpts he habitually brings up on the trail.

In the first question of the forum, he was asked to name three people he would "rely heavily on" for advice and counsel. One of the three he named was the great civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis (D-GA). McCain has no relationship with Lewis despite serving in Washington with him for 22 years.

Later, McCain told the story he often tells on the campaign trail, a little joke about how the federal government spent $3 million dollars to study the DNA of bears in Montana. At the time, he never sought to remove the earmark appropriating money for the bear project, despite seeking to reduce funding for other projects in the same bill; and he voted for the final bill.

And, he claimed that he would never have nominated Justices Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer, though he voted to confirm all three of them.

Quote of the Day....

2008-08-14T12:04:00.001-05:00

One of the Russian commanders, Gen. Vyacheslav Nikolayevich of the Pskov Airborne Division, said Russian soldiers would remain on the outskirts of Gori but not enter the city. “People can get back to their lives,” he said.

Asked whether Mr. Bush’s relief mission made him nervous, he scoffed. “What can the Americans do to us?” he said. “A big country like Russia doesn’t fear America.”

Sad state of affairs

2008-08-13T10:44:00.004-05:00

My guess is that the Russo-Georgian conflict is a situation fraught with intrigue that involves the highest level of the Bush administration, which is completely understandable. At this point, the key question seems to be around just how strongly we encouraged Georgia to push for the recovery of their breakaway republics. Clearly, we were playing a dangerous game, and it looks like we may have mishandled the situation badly.

The real issue, though, is the upshot of it all. Once again, we've been exposed as a toothless enforcer, threatening all sorts of actions that the Russians and the rest of the world know that we can't back up. McCain's highly inflammatory statement that "we are all Georgians now", is truly irresponsible, as Matt Yglesias points out, and President Saakashvili called him out on it:

“Yesterday, I heard Sen. McCain say, ‘We are all Georgians now,’” Saakashvili said on CNN’s American Morning. “Well, very nice, you know, very cheering for us to hear that, but OK, it’s time to pass from this. From words to deeds.”

There is no denying the fact that we have lost a great deal of leverage on the international stage. Leave aside the fact that we can no longer hold ourselves out as a beacon of morality, as the stain of Abu Ghraib hangs heavy on our mantle, the larger result of the eight years of the Bush fiasco is that we've been exposed as "all hat and no cattle", as they say in Crawford. Fredrick Kagan, Bill Kristol and Dick Cheney can rant and rave about Russia all they want, the world now knows that our words are hollow slogans, and that there is little that we can do to change events on our own. There was always wisdom in the notion that collective action is imperative in international affairs, and it will take an Obama administration to return this country to that sort of sanity.

Doug Feith Just Won't Go Away

2008-08-07T19:27:00.003-05:00

The utterly loathsome Doug Feith, famously referred to as "the stupidest fucking guy on the face of the planet" by Tommy Franks, may have been Dick Cheney's go-to guy when he came up with the brilliant idea of forging a letter linking Saddam to 9/11:

The American Conservative’s Philip Giraldi argues today that “an extremely reliable and well placed source in the intelligence community” told him Suskind’s overall claim “is correct,” but that it was Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans — not the CIA — that forged the letter:

feith.jpgMy source also notes that Dick Cheney, who was behind the forgery, hated and mistrusted the Agency and would not have used it for such a sensitive assignment. Instead, he went to Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans and asked them to do the job. … It was Feith’s office that produced the letter and then surfaced it to the media in Iraq.

If five thousand kids weren't dead, and hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, this administration's shenanigans would almost be laughable. Unfortunately, the damage that these people visited on our country will never be a joke.

Joe Lieberman Makes My Head Hurt

2008-07-31T15:52:00.002-05:00

Joe Lieberman, today:

LIEBERMAN: That’s why Senator Graham and I are introducing a resolution recognizing the strategic success that the surge has achieved in a central front — the central front of the war on terror against the enemies who attacked America on 9/11/01, and expressing our thanks to our troops who’ve made that success possible.

This is McCain's "go to guy" on Iraq. God help us.

WTF?

2008-07-28T12:26:00.002-05:00

Ben Stein, former Nixon speech writer, and all around putz, vomits this out on the Glen Beck horror show:

What is the matter with these people? Because Obama has energized the electorate (as well as enthusiastic Europeans) he is a Nazi? A Mussolini or a Hitler? Is he trying to be funny? Honestly, I'm at a loss to explain exactly what his point may be.

Splints Win! Splints Win!

2008-07-28T11:07:00.004-05:00

Defying the very laws of nature, the Splendid Splinters, the world's most self destructive beer league softball team, won their eighth Villanova Summer Softball league championship last weekend, braving 100 degree temperatures and oceans of Budweiser and undercooked bratwurst on their way to the trophy. Improbable is the best way to describe the triumph of this motley group of now middle aged clowns.

Little Tuesday Snark.....

2008-07-15T13:01:00.005-05:00

I was listening to Rush (I know) on that way back to the office this afternoon and the dittoheads are having a heck of a time getting their heads around the controversial New Yorker cover that is the talk of the town today.

The callers, one after another, kept insisting that the cover was the MSM's warning to Obama that if he continues to move towards the center, they will use all of their liberal superpowers to destroy his campaign with inflammatory attacks like the one shown here. Rush, in vain, attempted to explain that the cover was meant as satire, and that in fact the target of the satire was the right wing itself, and even the callers themselves. This notion, not surprisingly, was met with mouth-breathing and confusion from the adoring callers.

The dittoheads like their messages a little more straightforward, it seems. This billboard in Florida succinctly captures the worldview the way they like it....black and white, if you will:

Now that's some straight talk, my friends. The group that paid for this billboard also has a Youtube hit single, you'll be happy to know, and I'm happy to highlight this little ditty here:

Not exactly Masters of War, I understand....

Flippity.....

2008-07-09T09:11:00.001-05:00

John McCain, yesterday:

ABC News’s Bret Hovell reports: Sen. John McCain responded late Tuesday to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s call for a drawdown in foreign troops from Iraq as a prerequisite for a security agreement with the United States.

McCain said he was not concerned about the call for a "timetable" for withdrawal, a concept McCain has consistently criticized.

"I know for a fact that [troop pullout] will be dictated by the situation on the ground, as it always has been," McCain said Tuesday evening at a stop for dinner in Pittsburgh, Pa.

"Since we are succeeding, then I am convinced, as I have said before, we can withdraw and withdraw with honor, not according to a set timetable," he said. "And I’m confident that is what Prime Minister Maliki is talking about, since he has told me that for many meetings we’ve had."

John McCain, 2004:

"Well, if that scenario evolves than I think it's obvious that we would have to leave because -- if it was an elected government of Iraq, and we've been asked to leave other places in the world. If it were an extremist government then I think we would have other challenges, but I don't see how we could stay when our whole emphasis and policy has been based on turning the Iraqi government over to the Iraqi people."

Lies and the lying liars....

2008-07-07T20:17:00.005-05:00

This post by Glen Greenwald really illustrates the very best of the blogosphere and neatly shows the revolution in news coverage that the rise of bloggers has wrought. The chronology is really telling. Mara Liason goes on Fox News Sunday and makes several statements about Obama's plan to leave Iraq, and emphatically juxtaposes the Obama position with what the "American People" feel about leaving Iraq.

HUME: But is [Obama] on the verge of changing on his long-stated promise that says, "The mission is to get out and I'll have them all out, all the forces out, in 16 months?"
LIASSON: I think the 16 months -- he is trying to get himself out of that box. Look, Samantha Power got in a lot of trouble . . . where she said, "Well, of course he's not going to just stick to some campaign promise of 16 months. He's going to look at the facts on the ground."
Well, that's what the American people want a commander in chief to do. That might not be what his left-wing base does. The question for Obama now is what kind of Iraq does he want to leave behind.

In the old days of a few years ago, that's where punditocracy ended. Mara Liasson is an expert, well informed, and her statement would have stood as fact. Brit Hume, frow burrowed, would nod approvingly at this wisdom, comfortable in the fact that the radical left-wing base of the Democratic Party was being counterbalanced by the power of the national media.

Except that it is all bullshit.

As Greenwald points out, in near real time, Obama's position clearly reflects the desires of the majority of the American people, and Liasson's assertion is pure, unadulterated crap.

How much clearer could that be? The truth is exactly the opposite of what Liasson said. Americans want to withdraw from Iraq in accordance with Obama's timetable (if not faster) regardless of circumstances "on the ground" -- not conditioned on those circumstances. But because that's not the view Liasson and her establishment colleagues embrace, they just lie and claim that the majority view is the one held only by the "left-wing" fringe, while their own actually fringe view is the one embraced by "the American people" and thus defines the "Center."

As Greenwald concludes:

The fact that Mara Liasson feels perfectly comfortable going on television and baldly uttering a clear-cut falsehood -- that only "the left-wing base" favors unconditional withdrawal while "the American people" only want to leave Iraq when "facts on the ground" allow it -- demonstrates how pervasive this deceit is. She likely isn't even aware that what she's saying is false. The establishment class is so self-absorbed, so inculcated with faith in their own wisdom, that they automatically think that whatever they and their comrades believe is, by definition, what "the American people" believe, even when all empirical data proves that the opposite is true.

And therein lies the sea change. Print media dies each and every day. Even bold commentators who speak truth to power like McClatchy struggle in this digital age. The mainstream network press will follow right behind. Information and analysis is ubiquitous and immediate. Leave aside the ridiculous profile of Rush Limbaugh that appeared in the Sunday Times Magazine this weekend, as he is as much "mainstream media" as Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather. Lord knows, reading between the lines of that article, he sat up nights crying himself senseless because Brokaw and Rather considered him a low class drug addled fatty, and wouldn't let him cocktail with them at the Waldorf. The truth and the future lies with the bloggers, like Greenwald, who in a few short keystrokes dispel the myths and outright lies of the lazy mainstream press.

Things will never be the same.

media matters for america...

2008-07-04T16:18:00.002-05:00

Everything that you need to know about the Wes Clark brou ha ha is right here.

It is an absolutely shameful performance by the DC "villagers", and one that has already entered the discourse in this country. If you take five minutes to read Jamison Foser's recap of this, you'll understand what is wrong with our media today. I suppose the good news is that more and more people will get their news and analysis from people like Foser than people like Andrea Mitchell, but in the meantime, we're stuck with the Village Idiots. Foser concludes:

Let's pause for a moment to review. According to the news media, if you call John McCain a "hero," but say that heroism doesn't qualify him to be president, you have dishonorably attacked his military service. (Feel free, however, to say the same thing about John Kerry.) And if you criticize McCain's Iraq policies, you are participating in "an organized campaign against John McCain's military service."

But wait! There's more!

The media's knee-jerk defense of McCain doesn't stop at their use of his military service to rule criticism of his Iraq policies out of bounds. It extends to (things having nothing to do with) his age, too. See, if you criticize John McCain for ignoring his own pledge to avoid negative campaigning, the media will quickly announce that you're really attacking his age. That was ridiculous, of course, but McCain aide Mark Salter told them to say it, so they did.

You get the picture: the media is on the verge of declaring any criticism of John McCain off-limits -- even when it isn't really criticism. Even when you call him a "hero," but not quite enthusiastically enough.

One of the hallmarks of the Karl Rove era of GOP politics is that the Republicans aren't particularly subtle about their tactics. They tend to clearly telegraph what they intend to do, though often with the slight wrinkle of accusing the opposition of doing what they plan to do themselves.

That is certainly true of the McCain campaign. In the very memo in which Salter convinced the media to pretend that Obama's criticism of McCain's negative campaigning was an attack on the Arizona senator's age, Salter wrote: "Senator Obama is hopeful that the media will continue to form a protective barrier around him, declaring serious limits to the questions, discussion and debate in this race."

Yes, that's John McCain's senior adviser complaining that the media has formed a "protective barrier" around Barack Obama.

Let McCain be McCain?

2008-06-30T08:30:00.005-05:00

Peggy Noonan, who has been certifiably senile for years now, attempts to capture the lighthearted wit of John McCain in her bizarre commentary this weekend in the WSJ. Her column, entitled "Let McCain Be McCain ", is ostensibly organized around the idea that certain forces in the McCain campaign are keeping him too reigned in, holding him back, and in doing so, hurting McCain's chances because the real John doesn't come out. Peggy wants us to understand that McCain's real personality is funny, mischievous, witty and lovable. As an example of the real McCain, she tells us

The most interesting thing about Mr. McCain has always been the delight he takes in a certain unblinkered candor. There is also the antic part of his nature, his natural wit, his tropism toward comedy. All this was captured wonderfully by Mark Leibovich last February in the New York Times. Mr. McCain had taken the lead in the primaries and had gone from being "one of the most disruptive forces in his party" to someone playing it safe. In an airplane interview he said things like, "There is a process in place that will formalize the methodology." Then he couldn't help it, he became McCain:

"[He] volunteered that Brooke Buchanan, his spokeswoman who was seated nearby and rolling her eyes, 'has a lot of her money hidden in the Cayman Islands' and that she earned it by 'dealing drugs.' Previously, Mr. McCain had identified Ms. Buchanan as 'Pat Buchanan's illegitimate daughter,' 'bipolar,' 'a drunk,' 'someone with a lot of boyfriends,' and 'just out of Betty Ford.'"

Wow. I may be a bit old fashioned, but lovable and witty don't seem to describe that little bit of charm. That seems to veer a bit towards the insanely nasty, disjointed and vicious ramblings of an addled old man. Sounds like old Johnny may be a bit off his meds, actually. McCain's reputation as a cranky and hot tempered senior citizen has been well documented, and I'm sure that the McCain campaign knows a bit better than Peggy why they need to keep gramps under wraps.

An angry Rove....

2008-06-24T15:53:00.003-05:00

One of the things that really appeals to me about Obama and to a lot of people, I'd guess, is his quiet confidence in the face of the Republican smear machine. Unlike Kerry, who's brow would wrinkle up, and who seemed almost apologetic in the face of the attacks, Obama seems supremely confident in his ability to deflect the mud that is and will continue to be inevitably slung his way. Obama's clear and concise support of the Boumediene vs. Bush decision was based upon his background as a constitutional lawyer and it clearly showed that he will not be swayed by the fearmongers on the right who equate anything short of outright torture of brown skinned foreigners with complete capitulation to the terra-rists. He simply pointed out that the decision is well reasoned and backed by precedent, and never shied from calling out the current administration's excesses in the face of the "Scariest Threat Evah". Kerry, who correctly noted that the logical and most effective response to the threat of Islamic extremism domestically was to beef up our law enforcement capabilities, backpedaled furiously when Rove and the right wing accused him of being a French speaking windsurfing traitor.

You can tell that Obama's confidence really irks Karl Rove, and has taken him way off his game and way off his message. Yesterday, he let this one slip:

"Even if you never met him, you know this guy," Rove said... "He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."

That's real seething hatred, and it shows that Rove is off his game. The problem with it is that Rove and the GOP have been working tirelessly to paint Obama as an oriental, an outsider, an exotic, and of course, a Muslim. They want their base, and whatever portion of the center that may still be listening to them to fear his "otherness", which of course is dog whistle for their thinly veiled racism. Subtle it aint. But the Rovester is off the reservation on this comment, he's lost the script, because as Greg Sargent points out, that description only fits one man:

It should also be noted, of course, that Rove took a man who actually is a country club denizen who makes "snide comments" about others -- that would be George W. Bush -- and turned him into a regular Joe. Meanwhile, the guy who would struggle for admittance to some of these exclusive enclaves -- Obama -- is now "the guy at the country club." Rovian up-is-downism at its finest.

These guys are so turned around right now that they can't even follow their own playbook. Maybe the GOP will get it together before November, and it will be an ugly summer if they do, but for now, if the Rover is that far out of synch with his own GPS, things and looking good for Old John.