ROTFLMAO
by tristero
Who says the right is humorless?
The number of prominent Democrats urging pre-emptive action against North Korea’s ICBM grows as Walter Mondale chimes in. These are the Democrats who can win elections because they are serious.
Courtesy Daou Report.
It’s The Abuse Of Power, Stupid.
by tristero
As expected, the Bush administration tried to shoot the messenger. The purest expression of the administration’s position comes from Terri Wagner, a regular New York Times reader from Elberta, Alabama* who writes:
Your decision to print this article is disturbing to me. Timing is the issue with me.
We have troops in the field fighting every day. We have just recently seen the brutality of the enemy.
The time to consider which programs are successful or not is after the troops come home, which in this case means a free Afghanistan and Iraq.
Please consider the timing of your articles in matters of national security when troops are still on the ground. [Emphasis in original.]
As long as troops are abroad, Bush should not be criticized. Ever. And you wonder why Bush has said troops will be in Iraq during the rest of his term in office.
No one’s criticizing the effort to track terrorist finances, duh.** The real issue is simple:
The Times (and others) would never have decided to break the story were it not the fact that the Bush administration is once again abusing its power and refusing to recognize any rules or limits on that power.
*Of course, Terri’s a regular reader of the Times, even if she lives in Elberta, Alabama which is, I admit, pretty far from New York City. How else could she have learned about the article? She may even have a subscription. You’re not suggesting her letter was part of an organized rightwing campaign against the Times, are you? Honestly, the cynicism of some people.
** From the first time I heard the term a few days after 9/11, I’ve repeatedly said (and of course, this is far from an original thought) the US should infiltrate and thoroughly corrupt the hawwalas, making them unreliable. That, of course, is rather difficult to do when you don’t have more than five fluent Arabic speakers tops working in the FBI (which is true, by the way, at least until very recently). Far easier – and far less effective, if your real goal is to catch terrorists and not hoover up as much info as you possibly can – is to once again operate with no serious oversight and troll through ” ‘at least tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of searches’ of people and institutions suspected of having ties to terrorists.”
The Times Book Review Index
by tristero
[NOTE: Please see update at end of post.]
For several years now, when Saturday rolls around and we receive the New York Times Book Review in our paper, I have been in the habit of totting up the number of left-leaning and right-leaning books on the hardcover non-fiction besteller list. It’s probably a worthless exercise, so far I haven’t perceived a trend I can correlate to anything, except maybe to election cycles where more rightwing books make the list. But I thought it might amuse you as well so here is this week’s tally based on the online bestseller list which seems one week ahead, strangely enough, of the printed one (dated July 2 instead of July 25). In any event, I only look at the official (to be printed) list of top 15.
Now caveat lector, boys and girls. Of course, to anyone with even a smattering of statistics, the whole enterprise is a hopelessly crude metric (and of absolutely nothing to boot). At the very least, the index should also weight length of time on the list and relative placement, if not also take into account actual sales. As for determination of political leanings, sometimes they are open to serious question as they are this week with all three “left” bestsellers (and perhaps two of the authors on the “right” might object to my forcing them to share the red bed, ideologically speaking of course, with Coulter). You wanna make a better NYT Bestseller Index, be my guest.
Anyway…
It’s a tie this week, 3 to 3.
Left:
Cooper: DISPATCHES FROM THE EDGE
Friedman: THE WORLD IS FLAT
Levitt/Dubner: FREAKONOMICS
Right:
Russert: WISDOM OF OUR FATHERS
Coulter: GODLESS
Stossel : MYTHS, LIES, AND DOWNRIGHT STUPIDITY
[UPDATE: Some folks in comments have objected that at best the so-called “left” books are centrist or centrist-right. DukeJ astutely observes: “[A]re we so conditioned that we see centrists or even ‘objective’ journalists as representing the left?”
Good point. He’s exactly right. If the index has any utility at all, it is as a stark demonstration of precisely how constipated our public discourse on politics has become. With this in mind, perhaps it is worthwhile (but only a little) to track the index as the election season progresses.]
Tired Of Jimmy Swaggert Tears
by digby
Here’s another reason for Democrats to stop running scared and start running on privacy:
Latest Gallup Poll:
“The public is divided … on whether the federal government should be involved in promoting moral values, with 48% saying it should and 48% saying it should not. In 1996, Americans took a very different view on this matter, with 60% saying the government should be involved and 38% saying it should not… That change appears to be a fairly recent phenomenon.” From 1993 until recently, majorities of at least 10 percentage points chose “Government should promote traditional values” over “should not favor any values.”
People are getting sick of these phony busybodies blathering on about moral values when everybody knows they are anything but moral. There’s always been a strain of moral sanctimony in America. And there’s always been an equally strong strain that wants to shove a grapefruit in their faces. It looks like we might be coming back into balance.
(Speaking of which, is everyone excited about this week’s Deadwood? I know I am…)
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More Of The Same
by digby
I initially had some second thoughts about this post from yesterday. I thought perhaps I was being to harsh in criticizing the Democrats for their response to this Republican trash talk on the war. But I posted it anyway because I honestly believed that they were in danger of screwing this up at a time when there is no reason for it and I feel almost apoplectic at the prospect.
I’m not the only one. From Josh Marshall:
Consider this post an open letter to Senate Democrats.
You’re really doing a poor job in the public debate over Iraq.
Luckily, unlike what’s imagined by the imbeciles who write The Note and others in Washington, reality is not simply a DC media and politics confection. The Dems can muff this several times before coming back and getting it right. And they’d still be more or less fine. Because the Iraq War is still really unpopular. And the great majority of the country has lost faith in President Bush’s conduct of the war.
But that’s still no excuse for handling this so poorly.
The Democrats have to be much more aggressive. But ‘more aggressive’ doesn’t mean a quicker withdrawal. It means making your point forcefully, on your own terms, repeatedly.
But they’re not doing that.
What I see is Republicans on TV repeating their ‘cut and run’ charges. And to the extent I see Democrats, it’s Democrats denying the charge. No, we’re not for cutting and running.
The president wants to stay in Iraq for at least three more years. It’s not that he won’t set a date to withdraw. He doesn’t even have a plan that gets to the point where the US could end the occupation. In practice he wants to stay in Iraq forever. What Repubicans are voting for is More of the Same, More of the Same failed policy.
The war is unpopular. It’s a quagmire. Yet, they change nothing. The only proposal they can come up with is to grant amnesty to the insurgents in the hopes they will be so grateful they will just give up. That’s it. This war just grinds on, nothing improves, they make no progress.
And they refuse to change course because the president sees everything in terms of losing face and covering ass. From what we’ve been reading this week, it’s his prime motivation for everything. He believes that if he loses face, the country loses face — l’etat c’est moi.
In the face of that, it doesn’t matter whther or not the Democrats all agree to the last comma on a plan for withdrawal. What matters, as Marshall says, is that we are against the status quo:
The thing is that the status quo is morally indefensible because it just means continue to burn through men and money for a failed policy because President Bush isn’t capable of admitting his policies have failed.
He’s like an owner of a business that’s slowly going under. He doesn’t know how to save the situation. So he won’t get more money or resources to fix the business. That’s throwing good money after bad. And he won’t just liquidate and save what he can, because then he’d have to come to grips with the fact that he’s failed. So his policy is denial and slow failure. Here of course the analogy to President Bush is rather precise since he only has to hold out until 2009 when he can give the problem to someone else, just as he did in his past life with other businesses he drove into the ground.
But for the country that’s not acceptable. We don’t have a policy except for slow burn and denial. And the president’s ego isn’t enough to ask men and women to die for. We need an actual plan. And the president doesn’t have one.
Democrats need to hammer this point again and again and not get tripped up in the president’s bully-boy rhetoric. The president has no plan. He wants to stay in Iraq forever. He says for at least three more years. All the Republicans agree they want more of the same.
The Republicans are like mortally wounded dogs who are barely standing but who bare their teeth and growl dangerously when you get too close. When that happens, if you are a responsible person, you don’t get afraid and run away. You get some help and you put the dog down.
They can hammer us with “cut ‘n run” all they want, but they can’t “cut n’ run” from the fact that they are telling the American people there is no end in sight and there is nothing they can do about it. That’s the reason why Dems must step up now and aggressively pound this message home that the president has no plan. In order to win, the people must believe that by electing Democrats they are taking action to change the status quo. Democrats need to hammer the fact that for all the president’s bluster — he’s paralyzed by his inability to admit that he’s made a mistake.
Democrats may not have all the answers. The administration has got us in a hell of a mess and it’s not easy to get us out of it. But the Republicans have made it quite clear that their intention is to keep doing exactly what they are doing until somebody stops them. Democrats need to stop them — and they need the American people to understand that they are the only ones who can stop them. The Republicans can’t stop themselves.
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Privacy For The Common Good
by digby
Kos wrote an interesting post yesterday that deserves some further discussion. He offered his thoughts on Hillary Clinton (which were right on the money in my opinion) and in the midst of it mentions something that Hillary did last week that has not gotten nearly enough attention. (I would suggest that it would have gotten a lot of blogospheric attention if she wanted to use this medium to promote her ideas. This speaks to us directly.)
Last week Hillary introduced what I think should be a primary plank of the the Democratic Party:A Privacy Bill Of Rights. Indeed, I think this is the most fertile territory out there to gain some disaffected Republican voters and put some of the mountain west in our electoral quiver. It’s smart politics.
I happen to be a believer in the Democratic strategy that includes pulling on the civil libertarian threads in our coalition to weave a bigger tent. I’m personally horrified by the excesses of this administration and terribly worried that the huge bureaucratic domestic surveillance apparatus they are building is going to be impossible to control. I hear tales from all over the country of wads of DHS pork going to local and state police departments to use to spy on their own citizens and we know that at the national level they’ve pretty much discarded the fourth amendment and have enabled both the foreign and military spy agencies to work within our borders. There’s a lot of money and power involved, it’s secret and it’s fundamentally anti-democratic. We are building a police state and I firmly believe that, politics aside, if you build it they will use it.
That all this has been done by the alleged libertarian small government Republicans is no surprise to me. They have always been about big bucks and authoritarianism over all else. But it seems to me that it may come as a surprise to people with a certain “don’t tread on me” kind of ethos, particularly in the west which has a long tradition of such sentiment. If these tribal divides about which I often write exist, then there is a big one here. And if politics need to play to the gut as much as the head and the heart, this issue is powerful. Democrats have an opportunity to craft a real message of American independence if they choose to take it — and it might just be the way to beat back the fear factor a little bit, which I think people are getting tired of.
But there is another aspect of this which is important, as well. Clinton’s privacy Bill of Rights includes a lot of consumer protections, which is something that I think is a truly sellable, populist idea. The intrusion into our private lives by government is a threat to our individual liberty. The intrusion (and collusion) by its ally, corporate America, is truly a threat to the fundamental definition of what it means to be an American. The ability to amass all this data and create profiles of us and put us into categories and label us as being one thing or another according to complex formulas, means that the great innovation of America — the ability to reinvent ourselves and take risks — will no longer be optional. The great nation of immigrants and hucksters and innovators will become a stratified society based on criteria that has nothing to do with our potential and everything to do with our past.
Hillary said in her speech the other day: “privacy is synonymous with liberty.” This is correct. We give it up far too thoughtlessly in our culture and its going to come back to bite us if we don’t wake to the fact that big powerful forces are poking into our lives in unprecedented ways and will use the information they get to force us into little boxes they design.
Democrats need to make some new arguments. They need to talk in terms that are relevant to today’s world. Progressives are about progress; we cannot only be concerned about maintaining what we’ve got. We must forge on. If we believe in the common good, which I do, it must be tempered with a healthy respect for individual privacy. Without that we will not have the freedom or the ability to come together to create a better world. We’ll all be too busy furtively looking over our shoulders to pay attention to the road ahead.
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x-posted for Jane on FDL
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Hoovering, In More Ways Than One.
by tristero
When I first saw the headline in the Times, “Bank Data Sifted in Secret by U.S. to Block Terror” I naturally assumed that Bush was sniffing through my bank account. After all, he’s listening to my phone calls. Why should my finances be any different? But then I read the article:
The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records from the nerve center of the global banking industry, a Belgian cooperative that routes about $6 trillion daily between banks, brokerages, stock exchanges and other institutions. The records mostly involve wire transfers and other methods of moving money overseas and into and out of the United States. Most routine financial transactions confined to this country are not in the database…
The program is grounded in part on the president’s emergency economic powers, [Treasury Undersecretary] Levey said, and multiple safeguards have been imposed to protect against any unwarranted searches of Americans’ records.
Whew. Well, that’s reassuring. There’s really no potential for abuse. None. Just read the article.
I’m sure they have to obtain the proper warrants. And the outside firm that verifies there really is a good reason to examine the data has zero ties to the Republican party.
Look, it’s not as if there’s a systematic attempt on the part of the Bush administration to break down longstanding legal or institutional barriers to the government’s access to private information about Americans and others inside the United States. It’s only a temporary thing anyway, a response to a national emergency.
They’re not just turning on a vacuum cleaner and sucking in all the information that they can.
“Personal Psychodrama Seems To be Involved”
by digby
Gene Lyons has a great column up this week about Murtha and Karl Rove. You’ll enjoy it. I particularly liked this line:
Murtha didn’t say so, but there’s no chance of an Iraqi democracy friendly to the U. S. That’s a delusion. Bush’s photo-op visit merely underscored the point. Three years after “Mission accomplished,” and the mighty conqueror flies into the fortified “Green Zone” unannounced and can’t trust Iraq’s prime minister enough to give him, oh, an hour’s notice ? That’s not how Alexander the Great did it.
No it’s not. One of the most infuriating things about the triumphal coverage of the Baghdad trip is the fact that the media didn’t seem to think it was noteworthy that after all this time the president (or anybody else) still can’t make a planned visit because he can’t trust anyone and the situation on the ground is so dangerous. Why that’s considered “good news” for him is anyone’s guess. Rational people are right to conclude that there has pretty much been no progress since Bush dropped in exactly the same way for that stupid Turkey stunt. By this time we should have been able to have a state visit and a parade.
Gene brings up something else that I’ve been meaning to write about and keep forgetting:
For the record, Rove’s military experience, like Vice President Dick Cheney’s and that of virtually all the neo-conservative architects of this ill-conceived utopian fantasy, is absolutely zero.
Rove has an interesting story to go along with this, which I’ve not heard discussed and which I’m sure a lot of patriotic Republicans would be interested in rationalizing for us:
While Rove was in high school in Utah, a future president Bill Clinton, was finishing Georgetown University and then moving to England to attend Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He escaped the draft and, in the famous ROTC letter, outlines his reservations: “The draft system itself is illegitimate. No government really rooted in limited, parliamentary democracy should have the power to make its citizens fight and kill and die in a war they may oppose, a war which even possible may be wrong, a war which in any case does not involve immediately the peace and fredom of the nation.”
Curiously, Rove’s view at the time was not so different, according to classmates. Rove had doubts about the war — which after all was being prosecuted by a Democrat, Lyndon Johnson. In any case he felt government had no right to require citizens to serve in the military.
He and classmate Mark Gustavson sat by the huge windows in the cafeteria discussing the issue. “He was opposed to compulsory service. He felt we don’t need the damn government telling us what to do. We can do it on our own.”
According to Gustavson, Rove had reached his conclusion not from the left, but the right — as an expression of libertarianism. Supporting the war was equivalent to supporting big government and the intrusion of big government, especially the bloated, post-New Deal government of LBJ and Hubert Humphrey and the rest of the liberal washington establishmnent. Whether guided more by the apprehension of being drafter or a commitment to individual liberty, Karl Rove was no fan of the war, or at least the draft.
He brought this passion to the topic of compulsory military service, winning debate after debate in classrooms of receptive draft-age young high school students. He used what he called the “mom, apple pie and flag,” defense meaning the position of the true American patriot. It was a fine piece of rhetorical jujiotsu, friends remembered, which allowed Rove to reconcile opposition to the draft with conservative principle. (Bush’s Brain p. 124)
Jujiotsu indeed. If my draft age brother had tried that argument on my Dad, he would have found himself face down in the dirt. Conservatives of that day didn’t buy it one bit. My father hated Frank Sinatra his whole life because he didn’t go overseas during the war and all the girls were drooling over him back home. (He wasn’t too thrilled with Reagan either, although he voted for them.) This was a big thing to the WWII generation wingnuts who were in charge of Rove’s GOP at the time. No excuses.
I think it’s just awfully interesting that he and Bill Clinton had he same rationale for being against the draft, don’t you? Yet I’ve never hear Karl speak out defending old Bill on this. And when the swiftboat liars were making John Kerry out to be an opportunistic coward in Vietnam, we now know that phony chickenhawk #2982 was a guy who contructed elaborate libertarian arguments to justify being against the draft and that same war. Oh my, he’s always been a slick one.
Lyons writes:
As history, this cut-and-run business is nonsense. It wasn’t Democrats who made peace in Korea. It was President Dwight Eisenhower. Democrats didn’t dispatch Henry Kissinger to whisper to China in 1972 that the U. S. could live with a communist Vietnam. President Richard Nixon did. He began the long, bloody retreat that ended with the North Vietnamese taking Saigon under President Gerald Ford.
Maybe the oddest thing about the legacy of Vietnam is that the worst thing that could happen, from a rightwing perspective, did happen. The U. S. lost the war. Communists conquered much of Southeast Asia. And the effect on national security ? Well, we got lots of good Vietnamese restaurants out of it. Otherwise, none.
The communists soon fell to fighting among themselves, with Vietnam invading Cambodia, China attacking Vietnam, and the Chinese and Soviet Russians entangled in a blood feud. Next, Russia invaded Afghanistan. Domestic fallout from that bloody fiasco helped cause the collapse of the U. S. S. R. and the demise of communism almost everywhere—also because nobody but a few crackpot professors in the West believed in it anymore.
Exactly why so many like Rove, Bush and Cheney, who avoided Vietnam, subsequently metamorphosed into countryclub Napoleons is mysterious. Personal psychodrama appears to be involved.
I don’t think there’s any doubt.
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More Brokeback Kossack
by digby
Until reminded by a Dave Weigel just now, I’d forgotten that the gay Kos bashing thing was actually used in a campaign mailer earlier this year down south. It’s actually quite hilarious.
Here’s a nice way to deal with it. Send a couple of bucks to Brad Miller, the jackass’s opponent. Let’s put our outrage and revulsion to work in a positive way shall we? Be sure to tell him Kos sent you…
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Downsizing The Punditocrisy
by digby
I’m much too disgusted to write about this stuff in any depth right now, but luckily Peter Daou has done it for me. He comments on the latest scribblings by Dame David Broder (thanks CP) and reminds us of a comment from a rightwing blogger acquaintance of his:
I got a call from a conservative blogger with whom I’m appearing at a blog workshop. He’d just read the Cohen piece and much as he said he enjoyed watching liberal bloggers get criticized, he articulated a response to Cohen that was far less polite (and shorter) than the one I intended to post: “Tough sh*t! So after thirty years of writing this stuff in a bubble, you’re finally getting feedback from people who are pissed off. Deal with it.”
Yes indeed. Change is painful. You can either fight it or you can find a way to adjust. But it’s happening. I’m sorry these people are upset about all the “vituperation.” But what the hell did they expect? They’ve been lounging around the beltway court of Versailles eating tarte tatin out of Grover Norquists’ chubby little hands for years now while the country is going to hell. And now the services of the punditocrisy are no longer necessary.
You’ve been outsourced fellas.
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