Month: April 2007

What Really Matters

by digby

MSNBC guest Karen Hanratty “Republican Strategist” on Gore:

There was a blind quote in one of the papers, actually Carville, James Carville said if he loses 15 pounds we’ll know he’s running, and I thought, it’s going to take a lot more than that! (Gales of laughter on the panel.)

Presidents who win are usually very athletic. Bush runs like a seven minute mile! And Clinton liked hamburgers but he worked out.

Those are the little things that actually matter.

There you have it.

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Thank God [But See Update]

by tristero

Fortunately, saner heads than those at the top of the Bush administration have ordered a halt to the walling-in of a Sunni ghetto in Baghdad. We can only hope that that puts an end to it. Truly one of the most hare-brained and dangerous blunders I know of during the Bush/Iraq war.

While many of the commenters to my previous posts got it, a disconcerting number truly didn’t see the danger, which, I must say, is patently obvious if you place yourself in a Sunni’s shoes for a minute or two.

I think what we’re talking about here is a classic example of framing. Had the reports from Baghdad used the word “ghetto” – which, by the way, doesn’t necessarily imply a poor ethnic population – the problems would have been apparent to everyone. But instead, the neighborhood was described as an “enclave” and comparisons to Belfast were invoked.

Folks, paranoid rule number one for living in a fascist state: Never accept Their frames. Always make your own.

[UPDATE: Apparently, even in the face of mass protests, it is unclear whether Bush will continue to wall-in Sunnis in their ghetto. Incredible.]

Up To His Eyeballs

by digby

McClatchy:

After thousands of pages of documents and hours of testimony from Justice Department officials, it remains unknown who in the Bush administration conceived the plan to fire eight U.S. attorneys and why.

Gonzales’ testimony Thursday left senators convinced he wasn’t behind the plan or its execution and in fact knew far less than a department head should have about the details. Former and current members of Gonzales’ staff who’ve been interviewed by congressional investigators also have said their roles were limited or nonexistent.

Absent another explanation, the signs point to the White House and, at least in some degree, to the president’s political adviser, Karl Rove.

David Iglesias, the former New Mexico U.S. attorney and one of the eight fired last year, said investigating the White House’s role is the logical next step – one that would follow existing clues about Rove’s involvement.

“If I were Congress, I would say, `If the attorney general doesn’t have answers, then who would?’ There’s enough evidence to indicate that Karl Rove was involved up to his eyeballs.”

Iglesias said another clue that the White House may have been the driving force is the relative lack of Justice Department documentation for the firings in the 6,000 pages of documents turned over to Congress.

“If you want to justify getting rid of someone, you should have at least some paper trail,” Iglesias said. “There’s been a remarkable absence of that. I’m wondering if the paper trail is at the White House.”

Even if Gonzales decides to step down – he says he won’t despite widespread Republican disappointment with his performance – Democrats say they’ll continue their probe into whether politics inappropriately influenced the firings.

“The arrow points more and more to the White House,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. “The one thing I can assure you of: This is not over, far from it.”

If anyone wants to look at Rove’s involvement from another angle, there’s this one from Rick Hasen of the Election Law blog (who found the unethical “Publius” writings by ex DOJ staffer, FEC commissioner and GOP operative Hans von Spakovsky.)

This one is news to me. Via this story at the Brad Blog, it turns out that fired U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas Bud Cummins has alleged in this LA Times article and this article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that his firing may have had to do with an investigation of Missouri governor Matt Blunt and the law firm of Lathrop and Gage. The Dispatch: “Cummins” investigation had focused on Missouri’s openly political system of fee offices that dispense drivers licenses and license plates. The governor awards the contracts, which often go to political allies under a long-standing patronage system. Blunt had come under fire because his administration had privatized some state branches that dispensed the licenses and had allowed Lathrop & Gage to set up a behind-the-scenes system of private management firms that run dozens of offices.
On Oct. 4, Cummins announced that the investigation had concluded and that no charges were filed against anyone.” Cummins in the Los Angeles Times: “In an interview Thursday, Cummins expressed disgust that the Bush administration may have fired him and the others for political reasons. ‘You have to firewall politics out of the Department of Justice. Because once it gets in, people question every decision you make. Now I keep asking myself: ‘What about the Blunt deal?'”” The Brad Blog notes that a partner at the Lathrop and Gage firm is Thor Hearne, who headed American Center for Voting Rights (an organization that has mysteriously disappeared), which has been the main NGO pushing the argument that voter fraud was rampant was deserved investigation and new election administration rules, such as voter id laws.

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The American Center for Voting Rights was a front group set up by the Republicans for the express purpose of testifying before congress about voter fraud. (I’m not kidding.) It’s web site has disappeared because it is no longer in service. But do yourself a favor and check out old Thor. Brad Friedman did a thorough job of documenting the atrocities some time back. When the Cummins thing was revealed last week he wrote:

I can’t underscore enough Hearne’s highly placed position as a White House operative, as the man behind the GOP’s entire, systematic, and well-financed “voter fraud” scheme/initiative (which has played directly into several of the other firings), his longtime efforts on behalf of and under the direct employ of MO Gov. Matt Blunt (son of the powerful GOP minority House Whip Roy Blunt), his position as a top attorney in the Republican National Lawyers Association (singled out by Rove during an April 2006 speech to that group of Republican election attorneys), and of course, as the national general counsel for Bush/Cheney ’04 Inc.

That’s right. Thor Hearne, the man who ran a GOP voter fraud front group was Bush’s national campaign lawyer in 2004.

Fired Up Missouri pulls all the pieces together here.

As I’ve said before, the entire vast right wing conspiracy can fit into a large hot tub. (I apologize for the unfortunate visual.)

Update: BTW, just last week a federal judge found that there was no evidence of voter fraud in Missouri either. Here’s what the Secretary of state had to say:

Yesterday in a statement, Carnahan said the ruling “concluded that my office not only complied with federal law but also went beyond its requirements through our many efforts to assist the county clerks and election boards with their responsibilities. The ruling also confirmed that there is no evidence of voter fraud in Missouri.

“This is the culmination of 18 months of an unnecessary, unwise and costly lawsuit by the Department of Justice,” Carnahan added…

waddaya know?

Update II: Raw Story reports that Alaska got one of those fabulous “interum prosecutors” too:

In an interview with the paper, Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski admits that the Bush Administration “blindsinded” her with Cohen’s interim appointment, when her own picks, selected in consultation with fellow Republican Sen. Stevens, were rejected with no explanation after “a heck of a long time.”

“So it gets to the point where you’re thinking, ‘Wait a minute, this has been a heck of a long time. What is happening?’ And so the response to my inquiry is, ‘We still haven’t, there’s some issues,’ and ultimately what we got back was, ‘The picks were not acceptable by the White House,’ and yet no explanation as to why they’re not acceptable,'” Murkowski told the paper, adding that she first learned of Cohen’s appointment from a media report while the Senate was in recess last summer. “You just think, ‘It can’t be, wait.’ There was no consulting, no process, no nothing. That’s where I was certainly caught blindsided.”
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DC Confidential

by digby

Hey everyone, remember this?

HOWIE KURTZ: Well, just when it appeared that the Clinton story might finally be dying down after the former president’s unprecedented appearance on the cover of “Time” and “Newsweek”, a new pardon controversy erupted. This one courtesy of “The National Enquirer”… getting the scoop just weeks after rocking the establishment press by breaking the story of what it called Jesse Jackson’s love child.

[…]

KURTZ: Well, joining us now from Florida is Steve Coz, Editor- in-Chief of “The National Enquirer”. And here in Washington, Michael Isikoff, investigative reporter for “Newsweek” magazine and author of “Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter’s Story”. Steve Coz, first the Jesse Jackson scoop. Now the Hugh Rodham story. Is the “Enquirer” becoming, forgive me, a more serious newspaper? Or has the establishment press gotten a bit slow? STEVE COZ, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, THE NATIONAL ENQUIRER: I think it’s a combination of both. We’ve obviously changed our focus a bit. We are heading more into politics. At the same time, when we were chasing down the pardon story that we ran, we didn’t come across any other news organization out there beating the same trail. We were surprised.[…]
BERNARD KALB, CO-HOST: Mike, investigative journalism of this sort is your field. Now, this is one that somehow got past you. MICHAEL ISIKOFF, INVESTIGATIVE CORRESPONDENT, NEWSWEEK: Well, we try to catch as many as we can, but we miss quite a few. Look, it was a slam-dunk story. They had the wire transfer. If Steve says he got it without paying money for it, you know, my hat off to him. My hat off to him anyway, because the story held up and it’s solid and it’s something that, you know, any mainstream news organization, from “The New York Times” to “The Washington Post” to “Newsweek” to CNN, would have gone with in a minute once they had the facts.[…]

KALB: What was appealing, just follow-up, what was appealing? The potential for a journalistic scandal or, as you suggested before, there’s a kind of convergence? You’re walking in the direction of mainstream journalism now.COZ: Yeah, we’re walking in the direction of mainstream journalism in that mainstream journalism spends a lot of time and energy covering Washington. And between that and Bill Clinton, Washington politicians are now celebrities. Bill Clinton is heads- and-shoulders, you know, the largest celebrity in Washington, despite being the ex-president. He’s achieved a Hollywood status, as have other politicians in Washington. They’ve become familiar to the population. They want to know about them and it sells “Enquirers”.

Yes, once upon a time, not all that long ago, the Enquirer was being applauded by all the insiders for its investigative journalism even establishment “media critics.” But times seemed to have have changed since those halcyon days. For some reason, nobody’s following the ongoing tabloid saga of George and Laura, which has been glaring at everybody in the nation’s grocery store lines for months. I wonder why not? Are they suddenly not credible anymore? Even as the story is breaking into the more establishment entertainment sites?

Inquiring minds want to know.

*Needless to say, I am not seriously endorsing the Enquirer tabloid style. I merely point this out to remind everyone of the reprehensible performance of the media during the Clinton years and recommend that you fasten your seatbelts — the Modo column this week-end shows which way the wind is blowing.

The good news is that while the public does seem to enjoy this crap, they don’t take it very seriously — at least if Clinton’s poll ratings were any guide. So, this may just be the price the Democrats have to pay for the privilege of cleaning up after the GOP time and time again.

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Teflon Pete

by digby

Representative Pete Sessions was very adamant about passing the bankruptcy reform bill and he told everyone in the house the reasons why:

Mr. Speaker, I am pleased today that this House will have the opportunity to once again during the 108th Congress consider and send to the Senate much-needed bankruptcy reform legislation under this fair rule. I am proud of the tireless efforts on behalf of many Members and their staffs, who have put in countless hours towards the passage of this legislation over the last four Congresses.

Their efforts allow us today to again urge Senate action to ensure that our Nation’s bankruptcy laws operate fairly, efficiently, and free of abuse. Congress has the opportunity to once again end, once and for all, the loophole to debtors who are able to repay some portion of their debts to game the system and increase the cost of credit, goods and services for other law-abiding citizens. Between 2002 and 2003, the Federal court system reported that there was a 9.6 percent increase in bankruptcy filings to over 1.650 million filings, and these filings have a real cost not only to every consumer but also to simple, everyday Americans.

In 1998, debtors who filed for bankruptcy relief discharged more than $44 billion of debt. When amortizing on a daily basis, this amounts to a loss of at least $110 million every day; or put more simply, bankruptcies cost each American family that pays their bills on time $450 a year in the form of higher costs for credit, goods and services. As the other body continues to stall on this legislation to protect the system from further abuse, these numbers and totals only continue to mount.

It has been estimated that if current practices continue, one out of every seven households will have filed for bankruptcy by the end of this decade, with many of these losses as a result of the misuse of the law by irresponsible, high-income filers. The Credit Union National Association, known as CUNA, reported last year that credit unions have lost nearly $3 billion from bankruptcies since Congress began considering bankruptcy reform legislation in 1998.

This bill is crafted to ensure the debtor’s right to a fresh start while protecting the system from flagrant abusers by those who can, should, and, we believe, will be paying their own bills. Bankruptcy should not be a convenience or just another financial planning tool, and this legislation will ensure that it will remain a safety net for those who genuinely need it while trying to prevent bad actors from imposing their costs on everyone else.

Stirring words, I’m sure you’ll agree. But apparently these calls to protect business from fraud are meant for losers and Democrats, not good Republican friends of Pete’s:

In the first day of September last year, Congressman Pete Sessions was in a place no congressman would want to be: sitting in a conference room with a pack of divorce lawyers, describing how a longtime friend and campaign contributor shuffled assets while trying to avoid a $1.4 million judgment in a stock fraud case.

The Dallas Republican’s friend and donor—69-year-old Ahron Katz—had begun transferring assets to his wife Lucia shortly after the judgment. The transfers were done, Sessions knew, with the understanding that when the legal storm blew over, she would give them back. When the fraud case was settled 10 months later, Lucia Katz thanked her husband for his generous gifts of real estate, cash, and securities, and decided it would be bad manners to return them.

When the marriage ended up in a Collin County divorce court, the congressman found himself in the odd position of providing testimony about his knowledge of the transferred assets. First, in a sworn affidavit, Sessions recounted a telephone conversation in which the Katzes described their scheme to him: “The intent expressed to me was that both understood that it was clearly never intended by Ahron to gift this property to Lucia and Lucia clearly understood this.”

Later, in the September deposition, Sessions reiterated that the whole arrangement had been a ploy to fend off the creditors: “I think they were trying to find a way to hide and move those assets,” the congressman said under oath.

Read more at the link about the ethically challenged Sessions and then come back and tell me again how I’m being shrill and hyperbolic when I make the generalization that Republican politicians are crooks. They break laws and do unethical things even when it doesn’t benefit them directly — just because that’s the way their system works.

They simply don’t believe that the rules apply to rich and powerful people. Read his words once more about that bankruptcy legislation which it more difficult for families without health insurance to recover from massive, obscene medical bills when they had a health crisis. Then look again at the sanctimonious gasbag complaining about business being defrauded, which apparently is only a problem if it isn’t one of his rich friends doing it, since he admits under oath that this contributor and his wife were hiding their assets from creditors.

This is just one guy. But those who fail to rein them in, who refuse to distance themselves from this — particularly the so-called religious right, who also worship big bucks — are aiding and abetting. The fact is that there are so damned many of the that I don’t know why we should avoid making the sweeping generalization that the GOP is basically a racket. It makes sense when you think about it: their swaggering rhetoric that says you’re a dupe if you pay taxes and calls government the enemy would naturally draw the kind of political leader who literally believes that the rules don’t apply to him.

H/T to BB
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Saturday Night At The Movies

The Tutors

By Dennis Hartley

I don’t need to tell you that the news from academia this week has been bleak. As we grapple with the incident at Virginia Tech and debate the coulda-shoulda-wouldas, the one glimmer of light in the story emanates from the English professor who reached out to the troubled young man (although, tragically, we now know that he needed much more than individual tutoring.)

Teachers are traditionally (and thanklessly) thrust into multiple roles by default. Depending on the situation at hand, they take on the responsibilities of social workers, surrogate parents and life counselors, and are perennially undercompensated for doing so.

There are a plethora of movies that have dealt with the dynamic of teachers and students, particularly the “troubled youth” genre that proliferated from seminal films like “The Blackboard Jungle” and “To Sir, With Love”. Of course, the definition of “trouble in the classroom” has become a bit more complex. “The Blackboard Jungle” was considered quite “shocking” in its depiction of leather-jacketed delinquents pulling switchblades on teachers, but when compared to the Columbine-inspired “Elephant”, with its scenes of trench coat wearing 16-year olds leisurely strolling down the hall, blowing away teachers and students with automatic weapons, the former film feels like “the good old days”.

There is light at the end of the tunnel, however, as long as there are dedicated educators in our midst. I think we need to be inspired again. That’s why this week I’m taking another look at one of 2005’s finest documentaries, “The Boys of Baraka”, which the Ironweed Film Club recently released on DVD (Number 12 in the club’s series).

Co-directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady have fashioned a fresh and rousing take on a well-worn cause celebre: the sad, shameful state of America’s inner-city school system. Eschewing the usual hand-wringing about the under funded, over-crowded, glorified daycare centers that many of these institutions have become for poor, disenfranchised urban youth, the filmmakers chose to showcase one program that strove to make a difference.

The story follows a group of 12-year-old boys from Baltimore who attend a boarding school in Kenya, staffed by American teachers and social workers. In addition to more personalized tutoring, there is an emphasis on conflict resolution through communication, tempered by a “tough love” approach. The events that unfold from this bold social experiment (filmed over a three year period) are alternately inspiring and heartbreaking.

Many of these African American youth seem to have sprung straight from Central Casting for HBO’s “The Wire”; they are the corner boys, the habitual troublemakers “acting out” in the cacophonous homerooms, the kids with junkie mothers who only get to see their fathers during visiting hours at the jail. In other words, most seem destined to lead the kinds of lives that only serve to fuel the stereotype of the inner-city poor.

Something amazing happens, however, when these “at risk” kids find themselves in a completely new environment-a place of light, space and none of the distractions of urban living. As cliché as this sounds, they begin to find themselves, and it is a wondrous transformation to observe. By the time they embark on a day hike to Mount Kenya to celebrate their one-year anniversary at the school, and you realize that they have at that point literally and figuratively “been to the mountain” and gazed over the limitless landscape of their potential, I guarantee you’ll have a lump in your throat.

Of course, all good things must come to an end; the boys return to Baltimore for their summer vacation, which becomes a permanent break when Kenya’s political climate turns too volatile to facilitate continuation of the project. There is no pat, sugar-coated denouement (that’s life) but one is still left with a sense of hope as some of the boys are inspired to push forward and build on their newfound momentum. Recommended.

Teach your children well: Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939), Blackboard Jungle, To Sir, With Love, Up the Down Staircase, The First Year, Stand and Deliver, Lean on Me, Freedom Writers, Mr. Holland’s Opus, Dangerous Minds, Dead Poets Society , The History Boys, Wonder Boys, Pay It Forward, The Principal, Finding Forrester, Good Will Hunting, Mona Lisa Smile, The Emperor’s Club, Renaissance Man, October Sky, Little Man Tate, Akeelah and the Bee .

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Really?

by digby

I guess we’re going to have to start collecting all the ridiculous wingnut Virginia Tech theories in order to fully understand the absurd “common sense” arguments that are going to come our way. (You’ll notice that nobody on the right advances the one truly common sense argument: crazy people shouldn’t be allowed to pack heat. But that would be infringing on their freedom of religion, so don’t go there.)

Hilzoy made the unfortunate decision to visit Rush Limbaugh’s web site and lo and behold we have yet another example of the right’s amazing ability to blame Cho on some facet of their long standing liberal shibboleths, regardless of how utterly stupid it is. Yep: it’s liberal academia that drove him to it:

I saw this headline: “Can Any Good Come from V Tech Horror?” followed by this blurb: “Maybe, just maybe, we’ll face the hatred for American traditions and capitalism infesting our campuses.” No, I thought. No, no, no. So I clicked the link. The transcript I found quoted at length from an article called “Was Cho Taught To Hate”, by one James Lewis, published in the American Thinker (sic):

“Still, I wonder — was Cho taught to hate? Whatever he learned in his classes — did it enable him to rage at his host country, to hate the students he envied so murderously? Was he subtly encouraged to aggrandize himself by destroying others? Was his pathology enabled by the PC university? Or to ask the question differently — was Cho ever taught to respect others, to admire the good things about his host country, and to discipline himself to build a positive life?

And that answer is readily available on the websites of Cho’s English Department at Virginia Tech. This is a wonder world of PC weirdness. English studies at VT are a post-modern Disney World in which nihilism, moral and sexual boundary breaking, and fantasies of Marxist revolutionary violence are celebrated. They show up in a lot of faculty writing. Not by all the faculty, but probably by more than half.

Hilzoy dispatches those lies — and they are lies. Of course. But honestly, it’s cognitively dissonant these days to hear these wingnuts lecture anyone about values such as respecting others, admiring the good things about this country, and discipline. Are we supposed to believe that Limbaugh is respectful, disciplined and admiring of the good things about this country — like the constitution, for instance? Please.

Read her whole post to see just how far these people will go to blame liberals for the fact that a severely mentally ill person blithely walked into a store, bought a couple of guns and blew away 31 people. (I’m pretty sure it was that class on Truman Copote that did it — or maybe that horrible bleeding heart liberal Baraka movie .)

*Oh, and let’s not forget how the liberal elites have turned all those college boys who failed to throw themselves into a hail of bullets (as all the manly men at National Review would have done, by God!) into a bunch of pansified wimmin! I think most of them were engineering students, but I heard that a few of them were studying French. I rest my case.

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Man Up

by digby

I see that there is a little argument going on in the comments of this post over at Election Central as to whether John Edwards was asking for the Republicans and the Queenbee to go after him when he spent $400 on a haircut. Some people believe that he is a hypocrite because his campaign is based on the “two Americas” theme and his spending so much money makes him look bad.

I don’t know if that’s the case, but I do know that’s not what the Republicans and the Queen Bee are getting at. It’s not about how much the haircut cost — it’s about the fact that he gets his hair cut by a fancy “hairdresser” instead of a butch barber like a real man would. They are basically calling him a “faggot” just like Coulter just as Coulter did.

They are feminizing him, the same way they feminized Gore with his earth tones and Kerry with his “flip-flopping” you-know-what.They tried to do it with Clinton but couldn’t really get at him very well because he was a womanizer — so they said his wife was a dyke instead.

The Republicans start these memes and pass them around to their little insider pals because they know it amuses the sophomoric punditocrisy during homeroom. But it is also a way for them to get the media to subtly identify with the manly virtues they covet or admire, thus furthering the GOP goal of alienating the legions of insecure white males (and the women who love them) in this country from the Democratic party. They’ve been doing it for years, ever since the 60’s when Ronnie was talking about how you couldn’t tell the girls from the boys anymore.

Don’t confuse this with money. These people are all millionaires. This is about social hierarchy and high school archetypes being used to sell Republicans — and the dupes or agents in the press who help them. If they haven’t signed on to GOP politics directly, the Queen and all her followers in the media at least signed on to the idea that if they treat the Dems like a bunch of feminized losers, tripping them in the halls, knocking over their lunch trays and putting “kick me” signs on their backs, the awesome BMOC’s will finally invite them to the party. Why do you think they kissed that macho jerk Don Imus’s butt all those years?

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Who’s Responsible for Virginia Tech?

by tristero

Why, Dr. Spock, of course.

(Oh, someone’s gonna have a blast doing a mash-up of this one!)

Common Sense

by digby

La Noonan:

The most common-sensical thing I heard said came Thursday morning, in a hospital interview with a student who’d been shot and was recovering. Garrett Evans said of the man who’d shot him, “An evil spirit was going through that boy, I could feel it.” It was one of the few things I heard the past few days that sounded completely true. Whatever else Cho was, he was also a walking infestation of evil. Too bad nobody stopped him. Too bad nobody moved.

I’ll tell you one thing, if I saw somebody who was infested with evil, I’d exterminate him. With prejudice. It’s common sense.

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