Month: January 2006

Filibuster!

by digby

John Kerry is calling for a filibuster of Alito. Flood your Senators’ offices with phone calls now.

Here are the phone numbers.

Might I make a special appeal for Califronia voters to make a forceful appeal to our Senator Dianne Feinstein. She is supposed to be a voice for women in the Senate and right now she is a voice for lukewarm water. Let her know that her constituents demand that she represent the people of California’s support for a women’s right to choose and a judiciary of fairminded jurists, not Federalist Society fascists.

(202) 224-3841—Washington
(415) 393-0707—San Francisco
(310) 914-7300—L.A.
(619) 231-9712—San Diego
(559) 485-7430—Fresno

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Men Of Principle

by digby

The Editors deconstruct the Deborah Howell story as only they can. An excerpt, regarding those who bemoan the new leftist barbarity:

When one is an Elder Statesman of the American media, and when one can’t be bothered to look into the particular details of some issue, it is never a bad idea to fall back on Ecclesiastes, and remind the readers – in a tone as wise and weary as you can muster – that the seasons change and the winds blow now this way, now that, turn turn turn, but there is nothing new under the Sun. As there was a time of saying Clinton was a coke-dealing Commie and a serial rapist, now comes the time of saying that George W. Bush shouldn’t run secret torture prisons. Men of Principle lament both of these equally, for they are just two sides of the same lamentable coin. Vanity of vanity, all of it. Can’t we just play nice?

Amen.

Political Fandango

by digby

I know that Atrios and others have already discussed this, but it’s such an obvious example of Tweety bullshit that I have to pile on.

Matthews yesterday claimed that an ad about GOP corruption implied incorrectly that DeLay was charged with bribery:

MATTHEWS: Dana, you’ve got to love it. This is America in action. Have you noticed in the Democrat ad, though, they do a close-up on Tom DeLay and they said “bribery”? Well, that’s not a charge against Tom DeLay. His charge is this thing about hard money, soft money. It’s a political little bit of a fandango. But nobody’s accused him yet of bribery. But that ad sure does.

The problem is that it clearly doesn’t. The ad shows a picture of DeLay when they say “money laundering” and a picture of Abramoff when they say “bribery.”

This is the kind of stuff Matthews does all the time. Just recently he had really bizarre hissy fit about Alito:

MATTHEWS: Well, I don’t know, I mean the Democrats, I’ve got a, I’m sitting here holding in my hands a pretty disgusting document. This is a, uh, put out for not for attribution, but it comes from the Democrats. They’re circulating it, I can say that. And in their complaint sheet against Judge Alito’s nomination, the first thing they nail about this Italian-American is he failed to win a mob conviction in a trial 20 years ago or — way back in ’88. In other words, they nail him on not putting, putting some mobst — Italian mobsters in jail, the Lucchese family. Why would they bring up this ethnically charged issue as the first item they raise against Judge Alito? This is either a bad, a very bad coincidence, or very bad politics. And either way, it’s going to hurt them. This document — not abortion rights, not civil rights, the fact he failed to nail some mobsters back in 1988. And this is at the top of their list of what they got against this guy. Amazingly bad politics.

He was so way out there on that one, that it didn’t even get traction among the Republicans. The document was about Alito being a lousy lawyer, which was clear when you read it —- unless you are Chris Matthews, of course, whose world is filled with people who love Bush for his sunny nobility and lying Democrats who slime fine public servants like the “moderate living” Tom Delay for crimes they didn’t commit. He is living in Bush’s bubble.

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Gentleman’s Agreement

by digby

Maureen Dowd is the Queen Bee of the Kewl Kidz. And she is one of those most responsible for the media’s current narrative of American Politics: Republicans are jocks, Democrats are nerds.

Here’s Dowd’s nasty and dangerous little sideswipe today:

“As the White House drives its truckload of lies around the country, it becomes ever clearer that Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Al Gore are just not the right people to respond to the administration’s national security scare-a-thon.”

And whoever does end up speaking for the Democrats will also fall short. In Maureen’s world, a Democrat is an object of derision, always. She may put down the Republicans, but she always reinforces the accepted narrative: Republican strong/Democrat weak. She has reduced the whole world into her stifled little junior high dating drama, and her influence is immense. She represents one of the most serious problems Democrats have.

Reed Hundt takes Maureen on today in a scathing post over at TPM. But here’s the nut:

In its way, this sorry tale resembles that of many other erstwhile liberals in the mainstream media who, when invited to the never-ending Washington cocktail party, have chosen to smile obligingly at the contemptible remarks made about progressives rather than to express repugnance for the viciousness. Ms Dowd is famously shy in person, they say, but in writing she’s laughing it up at the bar with the rest of the crowd. The original movie version was Gentlemen’s Agreement, starring Gregory Peck.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with that movie, here’s the pertinent passage from the NY Times review:

This film stars Gregory Peck as recently widowed journalist Phil Green. With a growing son (Dean Stockwell) to support, Green is receptive to the invitation of magazine publisher John Minify (Albert Dekker) to write a series of hard-hitting articles on the scourge of anti-Semitism. In order to glean his information first hand, Green decides to pose as a Jew. As the weeks go by, Green experiences all manner of prejudice, the most insidious being the subtle, “gentleman’s agreement” form of bigotry wherein anti-Jewish sentiments are merely taken for granted. Green’s pose takes a toll on his budding romance with Minify’s niece Kathy (Dorothy McGuire), who comes to realize by her own example that even those who insist that they harbor no anti-Semitic feelings are also capable of prejudic

This is why we out in the hinterland are alarmed by people like Deborah Howell and Chris Matthews. These are people who are not open partisans. Yet by “gentlemean’s agreement” they take for granted certain negative assumptions about Democrats and pump them out into the body politic. It has been so internalized that they seem to not even know they are doing it. In a world where toxic liberal-eliminationist rhetoric is openly celebrated as “mainstream” and where liberals are commonly derided as cowardly and denounced as treasonous, this is very disturbing indeed.

I’m sure that most of Washington laughed uproariously when Grover Norquist made this crude characterization of Democrats as animals last January:

Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they’ve been fixed, then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful. They don’t go around peeing on the furniture and such.

And I’m sure that the same people whose sides were splitting over that hilarious bon mot were nodding their heads in agreement when Lindsay Graham admonished the Democrats to behave with decorum toward Samuel Alito and then fell over with the vapors when readers of the Washington Post rebelled against an ombudsman who refused to acknowledge a biased assumption. Not only are we democrats cowardly and tresonaous, we have no sense of humor, either. That’s the curency of the nation’s capital.

Many of us out here in the country are seeing a capital that operates in dozens of ways on a Gentleman’s Agreement that Democrats are bad. Our values are wrong, our leaders are dishonest, our philosophy is weak, our policies are ridiculous and our beliefs are immoral. The conventional wisdom is crystalizing into prejudice.

Here’s Howard Kurtz talking about Rush Limbaugh (via the Daily Howler):

KURTZ: Has Tom Daschle lost a couple of screws?

Did the normally mild-mannered senator accuse Rush Limbaugh of inciting violence?

He came pretty darn close. There were cameras there. You can watch the replay.

We can understand that Daschle is down, just having lost his majority leader’s job and absorbed plenty of blame for this month’s Democratic debacle.

What we can’t understand is how the South Dakotan can suggest that a mainstream conservative with a huge radio following is somehow whipping up wackos to threaten Daschle and his family.

Has the senator listened to Rush lately? Sure, he aggressively pokes fun at Democrats and lionizes Republicans, but mainly about policy. He’s so mainstream that those right-wingers Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert had him on their Election Night coverage.

Here is the commentary Daschle was referring to:

Limbaugh: You seek political advantage with the nation at war. There is no greater testament to the depths to which the Democratic Party and liberalism have fallen. You now position yourself, Senator Daschle, to exploit future terrorist attacks for political gain. You are worse, sir, than the ambulance-chasing tort lawyers that make up your chief contributors. You, sir, are a disgrace. You are a disgrace to patriotism, you are a disgrace to this country, you are a disgrace to the Senate, and you ought to be a disgrace to the Democratic Party but sadly you’re probably a hero among some of them today…

Way to demoralize the troops, Senator! What more do you want to do to destroy this country than what you’ve already tried? [pounding table] It is unconscionable what this man has done! This stuff gets broadcast around the world, Senator. What do you want your nickname to be? Hanoi Tom? Tokyo Tom? You name it, you can have it apparently. You sit there and pontificate on the fact that we’re not winning the war on terrorism when you and your party have done nothing but try to sabotage it, which you are continuing to do. This little speech of yours yesterday, and this appearance of yours on television last night, let’s call it what it is. It’s nothing more than an attempt to sabotage the war on terrorism for your own personal and your party’s political gain. This is cheap. And it’s beneath even you. And that’s pretty low.

In case anyone failed to notice, Daschle lost his next election. And nobody connected the dots, least of all Howard Kurtz or Maureen Dowd, who bask in the glow of establishment approbation for mainstreaming the idea that Democrats are crazy, ineffectual and treasonous.

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The Humor Of The Humorless

by tristero

Recently, comedian Joel Stein in the LA Times called anti-Bush/Iraq war troop-supporters wusses and openly admitted,“I don’t support the troops.” The right has pilloried the schnook. And they are trying to turn Stein into the latest deadly serious cause celebre now that Belafonte’s had his Two Minute Hate. But I think the right’s gonna have problems with Stein.

Y’see, when you boil it down, Stein’s saying that if you support the troops, then you’re not supporting the troops; however, if you don’t support the troops then you are, in fact supporting the troops. So Stein does, in fact, support the troops. Except he doesn’t. I’se like, Wha?

So…if you make the rightwing’s mistake of taking Stein’s writing as worthy of serious notice, then you are compelled to conclude he’s even dumber than John Ashcroft. And that immediately creates a serious existential problem, because no one can be dumber than Ashcroft and breathe without medical assistance. And that, Stein is doing, or so I’m led to believe. Therefore, anyone who knows how to read English should find it patently obvious that to argue with Stein’s “ideas” is to tilt at a very stoned windmill. They’re a joke.* And jokes are what comedians do, duh. And jokes are often offensive, duh.

Now, I don’t happen to think his column was very funny. But I DO find it gut-busting hilarious that the right would be so STOOPID as to interpret his remarks as a serious starting point for an earnest discussion. What next, are they gonna seriously complain that SpongeBob’s gay?

Ooops…

*That Joel Stein the citizen might actually believe what Joel Stein the comedian says is not relevant. It was Stein the comedian who was clearly the “I” in the op-ed.

Google v. Bush: Not After Personal Records?

by tristero

In comments to an earlier post, Seth wrote that he’s read the documents in the Google versus Bush dispute and that they are not after personal records in this case. As it happens the Times makes the same point today. The article, states, “The government apparently wants to show that real-world searches will pull up offensive materials that filters will not catch” and goes on to say that “Google’s main argument was that its ‘highly proprietary’ trade secrets could be jeopardized.”

I’d like to make the point that I respect this conclusion. I haven’t read the subpoena but I trust their reporting. Both Seth and the Times (I know the reporter) have examined the documents, reported what they found, and stated their conclusion without spin or hyperbole (the Times article has several qualifications but clearly the impression left is that there are no serious privacy issues at stake).

Where we disagree is not on the legal issues in play, but on the potential for abuse of the data by an administration which has demonstrated time and again its obsession with character assasination as well as its desire to amass huge amounts of information while insisting that it operate at an unprecedented level of unaccountable secrecy. Despite assurances that searches cannot ever be linked to individuals, some of us who remember John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness program, which advocated mining of vast amounts of seemingly random information, can’t help but worry that a week’s worth of Google searches in the hands of the Bush administration is an invitation for heretofore unknown forms of blackmail and abuse of anti-Bush critics.

That kind of worry, of course, is a matter of opinion, it’s an assertion of intent which depends upon the weighing of relevant facts, not upon reporting a set of facts and performing a more straightforward analysis. And honest people can disagree about how much weight should be applied where, and even whether certain facts, such as prior performance, are relevant.

In this case, I’ll gladly, and carefully, read the subpoena if someone will link to it, but I don’t think my concerns about it will abate. Technical details might help convince me that there could never be a problem here – I do know a smattering of statistics and I’m pretty stubborn when it comes to understanding technical issues – but I also know that even an expert’s knowledge might not encompass all scenarios, including very simple ones that are inadvertently overlooked. A few years ago, a record company went to a lot of trouble and expense to copy protect their cd’s against copying them in a computer. I’m sure the documentation that the copy protection was robust was quite convincing. And no one imagined that, soon after the system’s debut in the real world, someone would be able to subvert it using nothing more than a black magic marker. So I’ll keep an open mind about this, which means in this case a highly skeptical one, but not entirely dismissive.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a subpoena for searches will not have anything to do with trolling for dirt on individuals. But sometimes a cigar is more than a cigar. Given Bush’s history, I think that clearly this is one of those cases. I hope Seth is right, however, and I hope I”m overreaching. I’m pretty sure I’m not and only time will tell.

[Update: Seth has kindly provided some links. Some court documents and an analysis can be found here. More analysis here. Seth discusses the subpoenas. While he criticizes what the government is up to, he strongly believes that the blogosphere has entirely mischaracterized these searches as privacy issues when they are not. He speculates that Google may be angling to improve its image and be perceived as a Defender of Freedom.

I’ve read his criticisms and skimmed the court documents, reading carefully the parts having to do with the requests made and their purpose. Nothing causes me to change my opinion that this is unnecessary and potentially ominous. Yes, even to individuals. That other engines may have complied doesn’t mean they were right to, or that Google should. I see no reason why the US government, and especially the Bush administration, should have this information. At the very least, it would set dangerous precedents which all of us know all too well the Bush administration will perceive as a boot in the door to ask for much more. At worst, Google’s trade secrets will be compromised, the Bush administration will have URLs and search queries which could, in some ways, come in handy down the road for nefarious purposes, and personal information will be included as it was when the Bush government requested passenger lists.

Finally, apparently it won’t it serve much of a useful purpose in addressing the stated objectives of the government to defend the COPA law as constitutional.]

{Update: Another interesting link about the legal precedents courtesy Seth.}

Smoke Signals

by digby

I missed this yesterday and it’s fascinating. Via Think Progress, here’s Michael Isikoff yesterday:

ISIKOFF: As a general rule, if you’re the president … you don’t like pictures out there of you with convicted felons. It sounds like … there’s at least one picture of him with at least one convicted felon and another indicted, so it’s probably not a picture the White House is eager to have out there. The other interesting aspect of this is, while the White House hasn’t put these out, Jack Abramoff has clearly shown them to people. I don’t know anything about Time sources, but I do know that he showed them to Washingtonian magazine, which suggests he may be playing a little bit of a game here. He has, of course, pled guilty already to the Justice Department. But it does raise a question in my mind at least as to whether Abramoff is maybe sort of sending some sort of signal out here: “Hey, I’ve got this stuff.” Maybe he wants something from somebody at the White House, or he wants someone at the White House not to do something, and just sort of subtly playing with people here.

It seems to me that might qualify as obstruction of justice. But what do I know? My recent exposure to that crime was when Clinton allegedly betrayed the republic by wearing a certain tie to signal Monica Lewinsky to … well, we were never sure just what he was signalling her, now that I think about it.

Felon Jack Abramoff sending signals to the White House that he has embarrassing photos certainly doesn’t rise to that level. That must be why this time we aren’t seeing the heads of every graduate of the Barbizon School of Blond Former Prosecutors spin around on their shoulders while they spew green bile and speak in Aramaic on all the cable news shows. It just isn’t as important, I understand that.

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Unitary Criminal

by digby

For those of a certain age, Bush’s contention that he has the constitutional right to ignore the law sounds strangely familiar. That’s because you have heard it somewhere before — and when you heard it you were appalled but not surprised, considering the source.

Take a trip down Memory lane over at Crooks and Liars:

When The President Does It Means It’s Not Illegal

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Resurrection

by digby

Responding to all the Claud Rainsing on the right yesterday about manipulation of Amazon reviews I wrote a post about their own long standing manipulation of Amazon reviews.

How serendipitous, then, that one of the most notorious of Amazon manipulators in history should show up on the pages of the NY Times today. John Lott was long ago discredited as a social scientist. Indeed, economists at the University of Chicago use his work to illustrate shoddy scholorship. But naturally, even though he is held in almost universal opprobrium by every expert in his field, because he is a right wing academic he was granted a cushy sinecure at AEI and a lucrative speaking schedule. That he has now landed on the most valuable journalistic real estate on the planet, however, is nothing short of shocking.

But as I mentioned, Lott is even more interesting than just being a lousy (dishonest) scientist. In one of the blogosphere’s earliest triumphs, Lott was exposed as being slightly nuts:

Mary Rosh thinks the world of John R. Lott Jr., the controversial American Enterprise Institute scholar whose book “More Guns, Less Crime” caused such a stir a few years ago.

In postings on Web sites in this country and abroad, Rosh has tirelessly defended Lott against his harshest critics. He is a meticulous researcher, she’s repeatedly told those who say otherwise. He’s not driven by the ideology of the left or the right. Rosh has even summoned memories of the classes she took from Lott a decade ago to illustrate Lott’s probity and academic gifts.

“I have to say that he was the best professor I ever had,” Rosh gushed in one Internet posting.

Indeed, Mary Rosh and John Lott agree about nearly everything.

Well they should, because Mary Rosh is John Lott — or at least that’s the pseudonym he’s used for three years to defend himself against his critics in online debates, Lott acknowledged this week.

“I probably shouldn’t have done it — I know I shouldn’t have done it — but it’s hard to think of any big advantage I got except to be able to comment fictitiously,” said Lott, an economist who has held senior research positions at the University of Chicago and Yale.

[…]

Julian Sanchez, a Cato Institute staffer, is the cybersleuth who tracked Mary Rosh back to John Lott.

Sanchez is a blogger — someone who maintains a Web site where they report and comment on the news — who had been tracking the debate between Lott and critics of his gun research. He became suspicious about Rosh after he noticed that several of Rosh’s online defenses of Lott seemed to track closely with arguments the scholar himself had made in private e-mails to Sanchez and other bloggers. He tracked Mary Rosh’s IP address (the computer code translation of the standard e-mail address) to Pennsylvania.

“I compared that IP with the header of an email Dr. Lott had sent me from his home address. And by yet another astonishing coincidence, it had originated at the very same IP address. Now, what are the odds of that?” he wrote in a posting on his Web site. “Sarcasm aside, we’re a little old to be playing dress up, aren’t we Dr. Lott?”

I hear that South Korean stem cell researcher is out of work. Maybe The Times can get him to come on board as their science editor. Credibility is certainly not a requirement.

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Uh Oh

by digby

Tweety’s got a problem. A big problem.

Those of us on the left of center aren’t going to sit back and take it anymore. I’m sorry if that’s hurt people’s feelings but they’ve left us no choice. We are half of this country and yet our views are consistently marginalized, often by fake Democrats like Chris Matthews. Samela, a regular reader of mine heard Matthews speak sometime back and he was quite upfront about his agenda. He said “they like it when I beat up on the liberals.” He is the definition of a media whore. He whores for ratings and he whores for access.

Update: I always find it interesting when Chris Matthews and Rush Limbaugh use the same talking points, don’t you? How do you suppose that happens?

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