by digby
I am attempting to post this by e-mail, which has not worked for me the past few days, but who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky tonight. (Not quite the same as some of my fellow bloggers “getting lucky” tonight in Las Vegas, but at this point it would actually be a bigger thrill to be able to post…)
Blogger’s latest excuse is this:
Down for Maintenance
We are migrating databases to make Blogger stronger and better.
Hahahahahaha…
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Polipapparazzi
by digby
This is fun. Politics TV is filming bloggers at the convention. Check it out over the course of the convention this week-end.
The Theme
by digby
I cannot say that I’m entirely surprised by the Busby results in CA-50 on Tuesday. The minute I heard her gaffe, I knew it would become an iconic symbol of the Republican’s meme for this mid-term — Democrats are stealing elections by having illegal aliens vote. They can piggyback on the Democratic drumbeat of the last few years about stolen elections and rile up their racist base all at the same time. It’s tailor made for them.
The Republicans have figured out something that the Democrats refuse to understand. All political messages can be useful, no matter which side has created it. You use them all situationally. The Republicans have been adopting our slogans and memes for years. They get that the way people hear this stuff often is not in a particularly partisan sense. They just hear it, in a sort of disembodied way. Over time thye become comfortable with it and it can be exploited for all sorts of different reasons.
In this instance, there has been a steady underground rumbling about stolen elections since 2000. Now we know that it’s the Republicans who have been doing the stealing —- and the complaining has been coming from our side. But all most people hear is “stolen election” and they are just as likely to paste that charge onto us as they are onto them. It’s like an ear worm. You don’t know the song its from, necessarily, but you can’t get it out of your head.
We have created an ear worm that the Republicans are going to appropriate — and they will use it much more aggressively and effectively than our side did. They are already gearing up for it. As I mentioned a month or so ago, Karl Rove was at the Republican Lawyers Association talking about how the Democrats are stealing elections. I can’t find an exact transcript of his talk, but it exists on C-SPAN for 30 bucks if anyone wants to watch it. Raw Story caught a few excerpts although not the ones I recall about about the dirty elections in the “state of Washington and around the country.”
I want to thank you for your work on clean elections,” Rove said. “I know a lot of you spent time in the 2004 election, the 2002, election, the 2000 election in your communities or in strange counties in Florida, helping make it certain that we had the fair and legitimate outcome of the election.”
Rove then suggested that some elections in America were similiar to third world dictatorships.
“We have, as you know, an enormous and growing problem with elections in certain parts of America today,” Rove said. “We are, in some parts of the country, I’m afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where they guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored sunglasses. I mean, it’s a real problem, and I appreciate that all that you’re doing in those hot spots around the country to ensure that the ballot — the integrity of the ballot is protected, because it’s important to our democracy.”
Nobody can ever accuse these Republicans of not having balls. It’s really breathtaking sometimes. This is not an isolated remark. Here’s an excerpt from yesterday’s Chris Matthews show:
MATTHEWS: … What did you make—we just showed the tape, David Shuster just showed that tape of a woman candidate in the United States openly advising people in this country illegally to vote illegally.
MEHLMAN: It sounds like she may have been an adviser to that Washington state candidate for governor or some other places around the country where this has happened in other cases with Democrats.
But the fact is, one thing we know, the American people believe that legal voters should vote and they believe that their right to vote ought to be protected from people that don‘t have the right to vote.
That is almost verbatim what Rove said at that lawyers conference. He also singled out one very special “voting rights” Republican lawyer named Thor Hearne, about whom Brad Friedman did a great deal of investigation last year. (Links here.):
Karl Rove spoke to Republican lawyers this weekend (carried on C-SPAN) and thanked them for their work ensuring “clean elections” in 2000 and 2004.
He singled out Mark F. “Thor” Hearne by name. Hearne was the National General Counsel for Bush/Cheney ’04 Inc. who, along with RNC Communications Director Jim Dyke, created the so-called non-partisan “American Center for Voting Rights” (ACVR) just three days before being called to testify before Rep. Bob Ney’s (R-OH) U.S. House Administrative Committee hearing in March of 2005 on the Ohio Election. The front group, which declared tax-exempt 501(c)3 status, has still failed, to our knowledge, to disclose any information of it’s funders or proof of their 501(c)3 non-profit, non-partisan status. They operate out of a PO Box in Houston, TX, though neither of their founders live in Texas.
ACVR was the only “Voting Rights” group called by Ney to testify at the hearings, and identified himself only as a “longtime advocate of voter rights” in his testimony. He failed to mention his connections to Bush/Cheney ’04 Inc.
Hearne and ACVR have done little more since they opened shop beyond creating propaganda reports to suggest that their is an epidemic of Democratic voter fraud in the country to encourage state legislatures around the country to implement Democratic voter disenfranchising “Photo ID requirements” at the polls. Their charges of a voter fraud epidemic has been roundly disproven in various court cases around the country. (Though it does appear that at least one voter, Ann Coulter, seems to have engaged in voter fraud lately.)
They have been gearing up for this for some time. However, Rove had wanted to use this against African Americans, not Hispanics. He knows that alienating the Latino vote is the kiss of death for the party long term. But it’s out of his hands now. Immigration has a life of its own and I suspect it will be quite easy to adjust the plan and the machinery to try to 1) get out the base, 2) suppress the Latino vote which is now heavily leaning democratic and 3) serve as a rallying cry and cause when they lose seats and possibly their majority. This will be immediately played for 08 with a whole bunch of “voter integrity” legislation. They will be screaming to high heaven. Lou Dobbs will have his aneurysm removed on live television.
The Democrats could have innoculated against this when the Republicans stole the 2000 election, but they didn’t. Had they been screaming bloody murder for six solid years about Republican vote fraud, it would be much more difficult for the GOP to suddenly glom onto this issue. Instead, it was a mere underground drumbeat that was heard, but only in the vaguest way. Now the CW about stolen elections is going to be turned on us — and we will be on the defensive fighting both the charge of electoral fraud and being soft on criminal Mexicans because we need illegal aliens to stuff the ballot boxes for us.
Francine Busby couldn’t have done anything more helpful to the Republicans than saying what she said. (I know she was misquoted and taken out of context. That means nothing when dealing with the RWNM.) She gave them a test run on their November plan and it worked out perfectly. Here’s Robert Parry on how this works:
At dinner a few weeks ago, a well-placed Republican political operative was oozing confidence about GOP prospects in the November elections, not because the voters were enamored of George W. Bush but because the Democrats and liberals had done so little to improve their ability to reach the public with their message.
By contrast, he described to me a highly sophisticated Republican system for pouncing on Democratic “bad votes” and verbal gaffes and distributing the information instantaneously to a network of pro-Republican media outlets that now operates down to the state, district and local levels.
This huge conservative media advantage has now contributed to dooming Democratic hopes for snaring the vulnerable suburban San Diego seat of imprisoned Republican congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham.
In the June 6 special election, Republicans reported a last-minute surge of support after conservative media outlets trumpeted a verbal blunder by Democrat Francine Busby, propelling Republican lobbyist Brian Bilbray to victory by about four percentage points.
If we allow the Republicans to define this next election as they usually do, it will be about immigration and voter fraud. If I were in Vegas I’d be placing a bet on it. And it won’t take a gaffe like Busby’s. They will attempt to create a national story, which will be exploited in the last days of the campaign in various individual ways through their media infrastructure. If they lose it will be blamed on dishonest vote stealing Democrats and illegal aliens. If they win it will be be because they fought back against the dishonest vote stealing Democrats and illegal aliens. Unless the Democratic party wakes up and figures out a way to both define the election to our advantage and counter this move, it’s going to be much harder to dislodge those GOP incumbents than we think.
I think this election is going to be all about turn-out and Democrats are stupidly resting on their laurels on that count. More on that in the next post. (If I can access Blogger…)
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Blogging from Hell
by digby
No, I’m not in Las Vegas. I was actually hoping to be the official “not at Yearly Kos” liberal blogger. (Think of me as that one member of the cabinet who doesn’t attend the State of The Union in case somebody bombs the Capitol.) I figured there needed to be at least one of us out here who is not hungover, busy being feted by the Democratic party poohbahs or making time with some previously unknown blog-hottie and so would have the time to do serious blogging about serious things while everyone else was having too much fun to document the ongoing atrocities. Alas, I began to suspect last night that all the coolest bloggers in the world gathered in Vegas and conspired with BlogSpot to make me entirely irrelevant.
Unless, of course, I have managed to finally foil their dastardly plan and can blog throughout the week-end from my undisclosed location. I promise to give it my all, Blogger willing.
So, what’s been happening? Anything?
I heard that Zarqawi is dead. Again. Awesome. I’m hoping they lay out his corpse like they did Uday and Qusay because that goes over so well in Muslim culture. They love it when the infidel messes around with dead bodies and displays them publicly.
I shed no tears for the bastard, of course. But he’s just a convenient symbol the Bush administration glommed onto to “Al Qaeda-ize” Iraq. In fact, they had ample opportunities to take him out before the war started, but they declined for political reasons. (I wouldn’t even be surprised if there were actual deals made — these guys are nothing if not savvy marketers.)
And heck, if it weren’t for the fact that the war is actually a homegrown insurgency and civil war, taking out a satellite al Qaeda cell leader might make a difference. Unfortunately, the war the Bush likes to think he’s fighting and the one those poor schmucks over there actually are fighting are very different things. You don’t have to be a military expert to know that even if Zarqawi were the mastermind the administration portrayed him as, the war is a lot more complicated than the cheap Chuck Norris movie the Bushies have tried to market to the masses. (Think “Syriana.”)
So, the beat goes on. Bush is still incredibly unpopular, especially about the war. Which is a really good reason for Democrats to steer clear of criticizing him for it. It simply wouldn’t be sporting of them to take political advantage of the fact that Bush and his Republican lackeys in congress insisted that we invade a country for no good reason. The Marquess of Queensbury would give them all a damned good thrashing for even thinking such a thing.
More on that in the next post.
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Aieeee!
by digby
Jesus H Christ on a muffin top — Blogger has been down all fucking day again.
Your regular programming will return in a moment.
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Job Description
by digby
Oh for Christ’s sake. Via Americablog I see the WaPo published this ridiculous nonsense from George Will:
By 1987, when President Ronald Reagan gave his first speech on the subject, 20,798 Americans had died, and his speech, not surprisingly, did not mention any connection to the gay community. No president considers it part of his job description to tell the country that the human rectum, with its delicate and absorptive lining, makes anal-receptive sexual intercourse dangerous when HIV is prevalent.
I don’t know why. The whole country discussed the president’s own personal rectum for weeks, in great detail, two years before. People couldn’t stop talking about it. I don’t know why he needed to be so polite about it when it came to AIDS.
In July 1985, Reagan underwent surgery to remove a suspicious polyp from his colon. Two feet of the intestine was removed, and tests days later revealed that the growth was cancerous but had not spread far. Doctors were confident that they had removed all the disease, and tests during the rest of Reagan’s presidency showed no sign of cancer.
Doctors quoted Reagan as saying after the surgery, “Well, I’m glad that that’s all out.”
This picture shows Reagan showing the whole country how the procedure was done:
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Kennedy And Manjoo
by tristero
Kennedy responds, as he had to, and Manjoo responds to Kennedy.
The least compelling arguments:
Kennedy pulls a bait and switch close to the beginning on the 3 percent/2 percent who were “disenfranchised by the long lines in Ohio”:
Manjoo seizes on one line in the 204-page report and then attempts to play a clumsy game of gotcha. But if he had read more carefully he would have understood that the 129,543 votes he refers to were only a subset of those disenfranchised by the long lines. Had Manjoo read a mere paragraph further in the report, he would have seen that it identifies a second group, comprising roughly 48,000 citizens, or 0.83 percent of Ohio’s electorate, whose votes were also suppressed because of the lines and other factors [Emphasis added.].
I haven’t worked through the details of Kennedy’s argument to gauge the extent to which the “other factors” affect his point about the size of the group of voters disenfranchised by the long lines. At the least, it’s a bit – not a lot, but a bit – sloppy on Kennedy’s part.
Manjoo, however, seems on very shaky ground in his attempt to salvage his rebuttal of the “Connally Anomaly.” He found one ignoramus who didn’t know how “liberal” Connally was. No doubt he can find a second (that Ignoramus 1 has a rep as an Ohio voting expert would seem to say more about his qualifications than anything else; he’s certainly a rotten witness for Manjoo’s point in this context). Barring confounding factors (eg, party affiliation wasn’t printed on the voting ballots), it seems highly unlikely, however, that ignorance played a large role in the discrepancy between Connally’s tallies and Kerry’s, although like any other halfway reasonable factor, it had some.*
And Kennedy’s rebuttal of the Black and Resnick results from 2000 seem very plausible. Yes, Kucinich was wrong, twice before, down-ticket candidates outperformed presidential candidates. The relevant number is how often does that occur? Neither Kennedy nor Manjoo say here (nor do I recall their saying so in the original article). I suspect, however, it is quite rare. Otherwise, Manjoo would have cited more examples than just these two.
Bottom line: I’ll anger a lot of you, but based on the information in Kennedy’s first article, Manjoo’s response and this new article, I believe it is a seriously open question as to what actually happened in Ohio in 2004. Without further, extensive investigation honest people will disagree on whether it was stolen or whether Bush would have won anyway. If the latter, it seems it would have been a squeaker.
What is beyond dispute either by Kennedy or Manjoo are two points. First, what happened in Ohio (if not elsewhere) stinks to high heaven. Agreed. Second, if America is still a democracy, then election form is what the president of the United States should be using his bully pulpit to advocate, not ways to use the Constitution to empower gay bashing. Agreed.
*Dan Tokaji, the voting expert who didn’t know the politics of Connally, says, “So inferring election fraud in 12 counties based on Connally’s vote total is, in my view, quite a stretch.” Correct me if I”m wrong here, but the discrepancy between Connally’s and Kerry’s vote totals was one of several factors that led Kennedy to infer voting fraud in 12 counties. The convergence of highly smelly data, all trending clearly in one direction, is what leads to the inference, not one single piece of trash.
Introduction To Malmedy
by tristero
Here are some links to get you started with understanding exactly what Bill O’Reilly is playing around with.
A History of the Malmedy Massacre. You’ll get details on the SS slaughter of surrendered American troops. Further investigations confirmed this account. As an aside, note the fate of the last Nazi participant in the massacre:
In December of 1956, the last prisoner, Peiper, was released from Landsberg. He eventually settled in eastern France. On July 14, 1976, Bastille Day in France, Peiper was killed when a fire of mysterious origin destroyed his home. Firefighters responding to the blaze found their water hoses had been cut.
Another source fills in some details about this death:
On December 22, 1956, SS Sturmbannführer Peiper was released. He settled in the small village of Traves in northern France in 1972 and four years later, on the eve of Bastille Day, he was murdered and his house burned down by a French communist group.
Communists. Interesting.
So is this, from a negative Wall Street Journal review of Ann Coulter’s “Treason”:
Ms. Coulter’s work includes an admiring if brief biography of McCarthy’s political career. One that for some reason excludes the senator’s remarkable efforts on behalf of the members of the SS battle group who executed 86 American POWs in the Ardennes campaign in December 1944; otherwise known as the Malmedy Massacre. In his impassioned efforts on behalf of the accused–one never to be repeated in his investigative career–the senator charged that the U.S. Army had cruelly mistreated the former SS men.
And here, from a site called “Original Dissent,” which bills itself as “Traditional, American Conservatism for and from the Common Man” and to which I will not link, are the racist lies about Malmedy. It is impossible to unpack the full extent of overlapping lies, distortions, etc without going into detailed investigations that the charges simply don’t deserve, but which they received due to the relentless pressure from the lunatic American right including McCarthy:
After the war, Germans who had taken part in the fighting at Malmedy were turned over to U.S. Army Colonel A.H. Rosenfeld and his Jewish underlings for “interrogation.” The prisoners were arbitrarily reduced to civilian status so that they would not be protected by the Geneva Convention, and brutal torture was used to extract confessions. When 18-year-old prisoner Arvid Freimuth hanged himself after repeated beatings rather than sign a “confession,” the prosecutors were permitted to use as “evidence” the unsigned statement which they themselves had contrived.
McCarthy dared to speak against this officially sanctioned lynching, when almost no one else had the courage to do so. By fearlessly championing the underdogs, the defeated and vilified Germans, and speaking out against the actual atrocities committed by self-righteous aliens in American uniform, the Senator demonstrated the rare moral courage that later propelled him into the forefront of the struggle against Communism.
The Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Senator Raymond Baldwin, Republican of Connecticut, was assigned to investigate the charges of torture, but whitewashed them instead. On July 26, 1949, Senator McCarthy withdrew in disgust from the hearings and announced in a speech on the Senate floor that two members of the Committee, Senator Baldwin and Senator Estes Kefauver, Democrat of Tennessee, had law partners among the Army interrogators they were supposedly investigating. This was in several ways a preview of things to come.
The Jews showed instant hostility toward anyone who interfered with their campaign of vengeance against the conquered Germans, and so they began turning their big guns in the media against McCarthy: a December 1949 poll of news correspondents covering the United States Senate already had reporters branding McCarthy “the worst Senator” — a high honor indeed.
[UPDATE: Incredibly, according to this synopsis of a book on Malmedy, the man who pushed for the vindication of the Nazis was an anti-semite who, as a Southerner, identified with and felt sympathy for the humiliation the defeated Nazis suffered.
Communists murdered the last Nazi implicated in the massacre. The “plight” of the Nazis, so similar to the “plight” of the white South in 1865. O’Reilly knew exactly what he was tapping into. Boy, did he ever.]
Memo To Bill O’Reilly: The Nazis Were The Bad Guys.
by tristero
Bill O’Reilly’s outrageous attempt to paint the Nazis as victims of an American atrocity at Malmedy when in fact Nazis slaughtered American troops should have led to his immediate firing and ostracism from American airwaves. What did Fox do? They tried to scrub the transcript, but were caught and restored it.
But that’s not all. Watch and marvel at the sordid history of rightwing denial of the Malmedy atrocity, complete with genuinely ugly eruptions of American homegrown anti-semitism. And don’t miss a cameo appearance by Joe McCarthy, which should thoroughly discredit anyone malicious enough to try to whitewash that scoundrel’s reputation.
And you know what’s the worst part of this? No one really cares that much, no one that matters. “Oh, that’s just Fox News, that’s just O’Reilly, whaddya expect?” The level of bullshit, ignorance, bigotry, and malicious stupidity is so high we don’t even notice it anymore. Worse, the stench is so bad and is so far over our heads already, we don’t even notice when it’s reached a new height.
But we’re not done yet. If O’Reilly can keep his job – and he can and will – after smearing American WW II soldiers (as well as sending covert signals of support to all the David Irvings in America), then he will feel compelled to top that. Anyone care to predict the next O’Reilly outrage?
I don’t. If you had told me that Bill O’Reilly could get away with rewriting Malmedy, I would have said you were mad. But what we do know is that the goal posts have moved and rightwing extremism is just a little less extreme than it was.
Let’s call it the Neiwert Effect, in honor of the expert in how extreme rightwing memes get mainstreamed. Last week’s racist anti-immigrant remarks seem downright moderate compared to re-casting Nazis as innocents when they were cold-blooded murderers. And since there were no consequences for him doing so, O’Reilly now has permission to be as publicly bigoted against Mexicans and Hispanics as Stephen Douglas was against African Americans.
Hey, it’s just his opinion!
The Vessel Intuition
by digby
Taking a trip through neglected posts from last week when my blog imploded, I find (via Yglesias) that the Wall Street Journal has finally reviewed Ramesh Ponnuru’s pathetic flop “The Party Of Death” and surprisingly wrote this:
“It doesn’t matter to Mr. Ponnuru that this argument flies in the face of a complex intuition that seems to underlie the American ambivalence: Invisible to the naked eye, lacking body or brain, feeling neither pleasure nor pain, radically dependent for life support, the early embryo, though surely part of the human family, is distant and different enough from a flesh-and-blood newborn that when the early embryo’s life comes into conflict with other precious human goods or claims, the embryo’s life may need to give way.”
Whoa. That, like, makes sense and everything. Yglesias adds:
Ponnuru responds with what amounts to an effort at burden shifting, pointing out that this kind of vague appeal to intuition isn’t an argument per se. This is a point I’m sympathetic to as a general matter. But to the best of my knowledge, though abortion rules have varied widely no society has actually considered the deliberate destruction of an early-stage embryo as on a par with deliberate murder of a human being, nor the accidental death of such an embryo (which is very common) as on a par with the accidental death of a human being. Thus, it seems reasonable to me to say that the burden here lies with Ponnuru, and that Berkowitz is merely observing that Ponnuru’s argument seemed unpersuasive in light of its wildly counterintuitive consequences.
No kidding. Call me crazy, but it seems to me that one of the main reasons humans have this complex intuition about the beginning of life is because this “life” happens to exist INSIDE THE BODY OF A FULLY FORMED HUMAN BEING!!! It would seem fairly obvious to me this unique circumstance in human experience requires a little more sophisticated thinking than just “ugh life, good.” But that does necessitate that one admits that the fully formed “vessel” that houses that life has more rights than a blastocyst. That seems to be the real sticking point for some people.
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