Except For Scooter
by digby
The Bush administration is trying to roll back a Supreme Court decision by pushing legislation that would require prison time for nearly all criminals.
[…]Republicans are seizing the administration’s crackdown, packaged in legislation to combat violent crime, as a campaign issue for 2008.
No shame, no conscience.
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Saturday Night At The Movies
SIFF-ting Through Celluloid-Part 2
By Dennis Hartley
The 2007 Seattle International Film Festival is in full swing, so I am continuing my series sharing some of this year’s highlights with you.
This week, we’ll take a look at the new rock doc “Kurt Cobain: About a Son”, directed by AJ Schnack (whose previous work includes “Gigantic (A Tale of Two Johns)
It’s nearly impossible to be a pop culture aficionado living here in Seattle and not be reminded of Cobain’s profound impact on the music world. Every April, around the anniversary of his death, wreaths of flowers and hand taped notes begin to appear on a lone bench in a tiny public park sandwiched between the lakefront mansions I pass on my way to work every morning. Inevitably, I will see small groups of young people with multi-colored hair and torn jeans, making their pilgrimage and holding vigil around this makeshift shrine, located a block or two from the home where he took his own life.
Needless to say, this has certainly been a highly anticipated film here in the Emerald City (ironically, it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last fall; I was surprised that the director, who attended the Seattle screening, wasn’t called to task for this slight by one of the numerous flannel-wearing diehards in the audience).
“About a Son” is a reflective and uniquely impressionistic portrait of Cobain’s short life. There are none of the usual talking head interviews or performance clips here; in fact there is nary a photo image of Cobain or Nirvana displayed until a good hour into the documentary. Nonetheless, Schnack is holding an ace; he was given access to a series of surprisingly frank and intimate audio interviews that Cobain recorded at his Seattle home circa 1992-1993. He marries up Cobain’s childhood and teenage recollections with beautifully shot footage of his hometown of Aberdeen and its Washington logging country environs. As Cobain’s self-narrated life story moves to Olympia, then inevitably to Seattle, Schnack’s POV travelogue follows right along. The combination of Cobain’s narrative voice with the visuals has an eerie effect; you begin to feel that you are inside Cobain’s temporal memories-kicking aimlessly around the depressing cultural vacuum of a blue collar logging town, walking the halls of his high school, sleeping under a railroad bridge, sitting on a mattress on a crash pad floor and practicing guitar for hours on end.
The film is almost an antithesis to Nick Broomfield’s notorious and comparatively sensationalistic documentary “Kurt and Courtney”. Whereas Broomfield set out with a backhoe to dig up as much dirt as quickly as possible in attempting to uncover Cobain’s story, Schnack opts for a more carefully controlled excavation, gently brushing the dirt aside in order to expose the real artifact. And again, in spite of the relative dearth of actual visual images of its subject, “About a Son” succeeds in giving us a thoroughly intimate portrait of the artist. I also should give a nod to the fantastic soundtrack (although Nirvana themselves are conspicuously MIA). The film opens wide in August.
Feelin’ Grungy: Gus van Sant’s Last Days
Punky Rootsters: End of the Century – The Story of the Ramones
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Nachos and Everything
by digby
Check out this strip by August Pollack on the FOX debate. Hey, if the Democratic presidential candidates won’t kiss up to the fascistic right wing propaganda arm of the Republican party, how can they possibly kiss up to the terrori… oh wait.
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They’re Different From Us
by digby
I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying this conservative crack-up. The Saturday money show on FOX, a show that’s so revolting that I usually have to have my brain bleached after I watch it, was vastly entertaining this morning as the big money boys squared off against an anti-immigrant crusader for a group that calls itself Mothers Against Illegal Aliens. (They kind of missed the point on the acronym, but judging from their president, they aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed.)
Anyway, we had this woman, Michelle something, spitting nails about “real Americans” while the craven greedheads sounded like they were going to start singing hymns in Spanish and reciting the “I have a dream speech.”
Here’s a little taste of Michelle:
“I can’t stop laughing at all of you guys. You guys are all racist against the American people… This is about me, the legal citizens of the America, all speaking out that this country is for us.”
Here’s a revealing exchange:
Pat Dorsey of morningstar.com: Every single individual who is in this country illegally would have come in legally had we given them the opportunity.
Michelle: We do, we have a legal system…
PD: The HB1’s are snapped up in a morning.
Michelle: You said the Hispanic or Latino population is this explosion of financial growth in America. But it’s wrong to think that one nation should take over 30-60% of the population of America when our country is based on immigrants from all over the world.
Somebody in the backround: yeah… as long as they’re white.
But my favorite is this:
Question: Do you think this is as important as fighting terrorism?
Michelle: We’ve got to get away from the “terrorism” the president’s trying to scare us with. There will always be crime. We’re always going to have people trying to kill us. The reality is that our perimeter has never been secured after 9/11… Our country’s perimeter is not secure.
Mexicans are a bigger danger to America than the terrorists.(But I like the use of democratic talking points against bush. Yea!)
Meanwhile, in the real world, you have a predictable effect (which those big money boyz know perfectly well):
As a Cuban who fled Fidel Castro’s communist rule for a new life in the U.S., Julio Izquierdo would seem a natural Republican voter — a sure bet to adopt the same political lineage that has long guided most of his countrymen who resettled in South Florida.
But moments after taking his oath this week to become a U.S. citizen and registering to vote, the grocery store employee said he felt no such allegiances.
“I don’t know whether Bush is a Democrat or a Republican, but whatever he is, I’m voting the other way,” Izquierdo, 20, said Thursday as he waited for a taxi after a mass naturalization ceremony at the Miami Beach Convention Center.
Izquierdo said he did not like President Bush’s handling of the Iraq war and was miffed at politicians, most of them Republican, who seem to dislike immigrants.
That sentiment, expressed by several of the 6,000 new citizens who took their oaths Thursday in group ceremonies that take place regularly in immigrant-heavy cities nationwide, underscored the troubled environment facing the GOP in the buildup to next year’s presidential election.
Surveys show that among Latino voters — a bloc Bush had hoped to woo into the Republican camp — negative views about the party are growing amid a bitter debate over immigration policy.
Republicans in Congress have led the fight against a controversial Senate bill that would provide a pathway for millions of illegal immigrants to eventually become citizens. All but one of the GOP’s leading White House hopefuls oppose the measure.
Many Latino leaders, including Republicans, have said the tone of some critics in attacking the bill has been culturally insensitive. They say that has alienated some Latinos from the GOP.
One of the big problems for Republicans in this is that their lizard brain base thinks that the Latino population is even more stupid than they are, and that’s a very big mistake. Politics are mother’s milk in Latin culture — they pay attention. And they certainly hear it when you have people like Michele there expressing contempt for them and complaining that they are “taking over the country.”
This is the person Michelle and Tom Tancredo is handing over to the Democrats:
Priscilla Girasol, 36, a mother from Brazil who lives in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., said she liked Bush because of his Christian faith and the compassion he expressed for the immigrant experience. But she said she could not forget the words of one GOP presidential candidate, Rep. Tom Tancredo of Colorado.
Tancredo, a vocal critic of illegal immigration, late last year called Miami a “Third World country.”
“It’s a shame,” Girasol said. “I’m sure in his life somebody from another country did something for him.”
Priscilla Girasol isn’t a fool and knows very well what Tom Tancredo and the Mothers Against Illegal Immigration are all about, and it has far less to do with anything “illegal” than it has to do with worrying about their “way of life” supposedly being compromised by all these furriners, no matter how much they protest otherwise. All the gains that Bush made over the years to securing the Latino population with appeals to traditional values are being wiped out by the racist id of the Republican base.
But what did he expect? That they would sit still for his “compassionate” outreach to a bunch of brown people just because the corporations want cheap labor? Of course not. Live by racism, die by racism. But they had no choice, really. Karl Rove knows that without being able to carry at least a large minority of Latino votes, they cannot cobble together a majority. As Florida goes … well, let’s just say they have a problem. George Bush is not desperately pushing this bill just because of big agriculture or the restaurant lobby. He’s pushing it on behalf of all big business — his real base — because if the neanderthals in the GOP base are successful at seriously alienating the Latino vote, the ship is going down.
(Of course, if the neanderthals in the base don’t vote, or find themsleves a Perot figure, they have an even bigger problem. Gosh, hate mongering gets complicated after a while, doesn’t it?)
Trent Lott said yesterday, “talk radio is running America.” Well, it may not be running America, but it is competing with the big money boyz to run the Republican party and having some success. The big money boyz are coming to regret the monster they created:
The undoing of the immigration bill in the Senate this week had many players, but none more effective than angry voters like Monique Thibodeaux, who joined a nationwide campaign to derail it.
Mrs. Thibodeaux, an office manager at a towing company here in suburban Detroit, became politically active as she never had before. Guided by conservative Internet organizations, she made calls and sent e-mail messages to senators across the country and pushed her friends to do the same.
“These people came in the wrong way, so they don’t belong here, period,” Mrs. Thibodeaux, a Republican, said of some 12 million illegal immigrants who would have been granted a path to citizenship under the Senate bill.
“In my heart I knew it was wrong for our country,” she said of the measure.
Supporters of the legislation defended it as an imperfect but pragmatic solution to the difficult problem of illegal immigration. Public opinion polls, including a New York Times/CBS News Poll conducted last month, showed broad support among Americans for the bill’s major provisions.
But the legislation sparked a furious rebellion among many Republican and even some Democratic voters, who were linked by the Internet and encouraged by radio talk show hosts. Their outrage and activism surged to full force after Senator Jon Kyl, the Arizona Republican who was an author of the bill, suggested early this week that support for the measure seemed to be growing. The assault on lawmakers in Washington was relentless. In a crucial vote Thursday night, the bill’s supporters, including President Bush, fell short by 15 votes. While there is a possibility the legislation could be revived later this year, there was a glow of victory among opponents on Friday.
“Technologically enhanced grass-roots activism is what turned this around, people empowered by the Internet and talk radio,” said Colin A. Hanna, president of Let Freedom Ring, a conservative group.
Mr. Hanna suggested the passion and commitment were on the side of the opponents.
“The opposition to the amnesty plan is so much more intense than the intensity of the supporters,” said Mr. Hanna, speaking of the bill’s provisions to grant legal status to qualifying illegal immigrants, which the authors of the legislation insisted was not amnesty.
There is another group who feel pretty intensely about this too, although they may not be calling their senators. Here they are:
For Mrs. Thibodeaux and others on her side, the immigration debate was a battle for the soul of the nation because it seemed to divert taxpayer-financed resources to cater to foreigners who had not come to this country by legal means.
“This hit home with me because I knew it was taking away from our people,” said Mrs. Thibodeaux, 50, who works at Ruehle’s Auto Transport. “What happened to taking care of our own people first?”
[…]
When asked about Mr. Bush’s support for the bill, Mr. Murphy, a longtime Republican, had to pause to temper his words.
“I was stunned, really,” he said. Mr. Bush “has always been a person who stood for some basic human values, and now he’s going to give away the country?”
[…]
Here in Michigan, speaking at her neatly maintained home under hickory trees in Washington, a town north of Detroit that has been battered by auto company layoffs, Mrs. Thibodeaux said the immigration bill worried her like no other political issue. She believed it would reward undeserving immigrants who do not speak English and would soon become a burden on public services that Americans need in a time of economic uncertainty.
“A lot of our American people in Detroit are hurting,” Mrs. Thibodeaux said, noting that she has often done volunteer work in poor neighborhoods here. “It’s just not right.”
Her strong feelings about the immigration issue came gradually, she said. A nephew who works as a house painter had trouble finding high-paying work because of competition from illegal immigrants. Some Mexican teenagers hassled her on the street, seeming to mock her because she walks with a cane. She spotted immigrants shopping with food stamps at the grocery store.
Mrs. Thibodeaux said she favored orderly legal immigration, but did not think illegal immigrants should benefit from American generosity.
“I have a very hard time with illegal,” she said. She proposes that all illegal immigrants be given a 90-day period to leave voluntarily. After that, immigration agents, local police and the National Guard, if necessary, should be mobilized to deport them, she said.
While Mrs Thibodeaux has a point about house painting being the type of work that’s often done by immigrants, illegal or otherwise, these days, she doesn’t say a word about the people who hire them. And she clearly believes she was mocked by illegal teen-agers and that the people she saw using food stamps must be illegal, too, although she gives no reasonable basis other than race to back that up. So, bringing in the national guard to comb through the cities looking for anyone who looks like those people and presumably demanding they provide proof of their citizenship seems like a reasonable thing to her.
Here’s one example of how that might work:
THERE ARE THOSE who argue that police should cooperate more aggressively with immigration officials, that cops should be the front line in spotting people here illegally and expediting their removal from this country. To those advocates, we commend the case of Pedro Guzman, a 29-year-old developmentally disabled man born in Los Angeles and deported by mistake last month.
Arrested for trespassing at an airplane junkyard, Guzman was questioned while in the custody of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and, perhaps because of his disability, mistaken for an illegal immigrant. He was turned over to immigration authorities, who deported him to Tijuana. He then promptly disappeared. Despite their frantic attempts to find him, Guzman’s family has not heard from him since May 11. What that means is that Guzman’s trespass has earned him a sentence of banishment and disappearance, a fate common in third-rate dictatorships but abhorred in civilized nations. And the federal government’s response has been to evade responsibility and to refuse the family’s pleas for help.
“ICE only processes persons for removal when all available credible evidence suggests the person is an alien,” read a statement. “That process was followed here and ICE has no reason to believe that it improperly removed Pedro Guzman.” An agency spokeswoman declined to comment further because the lawsuit was pending.
Guzman called the home of his half-brother Juan Carlos Chabes in Lancaster on May 11, Michael Guzman said. He spoke briefly with Chabes’ wife, telling her that he had been deported but that he didn’t know where he was.
He asked a passer-by where he was, and Chabes’ wife heard a man respond, “Tijuana,” Michael Guzman said.
The phone cut off, and the family hasn’t heard from him since, Guzman said. The family has put up fliers and visited police stations, jails, hospitals and morgues in Tijuana.
Federal agencies have denied the family help in finding him, said Catherine Lhamon of the ACLU of Southern California.
Pedro Guzman had previously done jail time for drug possession, so he had a record that could have been cross-checked before a deportation decision was made, Lhamon said.
Michael Guzman said that his brother was in special education classes before he dropped out of school, that he can’t read or write, and that he has trouble processing information.
Michael Guzman said his parents were from Mexico, but seven children, including Pedro, were born in California. Pedro speaks both English and Spanish, he said.
The Latino community knows all about this, of course.
I don’t mean to be too hard on Mrs Thibodeaux. I believe she really doesn’t like Mexicans, but I also think if it weren’t for talk radio she wouldn’t be all worked up about it either. However, as many of us watching the political debate unfold for years already know, the talk radio right is capable of affecting the debate in this country far beyond its actual representation. They are loud, obnoxious and driven by hate, whether it’s hatred of the Clintons or hatred of Latinos.
The silent majority, however, thinks quite differently about this, which is what’s so frustrating to the Republicans who are saddled with this beast of their making:
A strong majority of Americans — including nearly two-thirds of Republicans — favor allowing illegal immigrants to become citizens if they pay fines, learn English and meet other requirements, a new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found.
That is a striking show of support for a primary element of an immigration overhaul bill that has stalled in the Senate amid conservative opposition.
Only 23% of adults surveyed opposed allowing undocumented immigrants to gain legal status. That finding bolsters the view, shared by President Bush, that the bill’s opponents represent a vocal minority whereas most people are more welcoming toward illegal immigrants.
“They are willing to take jobs that our people aren’t interested in, and I think this helps the economy,” Joseph Simpkins, a retired dry cleaner in New Jersey who participated in the survey, said in a follow-up interview. “As long as they pay taxes, I see nothing wrong with having them become citizens.”
This is essentially a made up crisis by people like Lou Dobbs and talk radio show gasbags to exploit the insecurities of certain Americans by creating the illusion that the fact they are losing ground economically is caused as much by illegal immigrants doing day labor as the total abandonment of the manufacturing base by big business. This is the tried and true formula for right wing populism which for some reason always seems to result in a lot of trouble for the people with brown skins, and not so much for the CEOs, who continue to get rich. Go figure.
I know there are significant issues in the border states that need to be dealt with, and I’m sure it’s unsettling that some communities are having to deal with a group of immigrants they never had to before. But the “cultural effect” is not a crisis and most of the nation knows that. Whatever real challenges there are can be rather easily dealt with through practical immigration reform.
Whether that actually happens or this becomes an ongoing roiling issue for a while, the ramifications for the Republican party are immediate and huge. Considering the population levels of Hispanic Americans, who rightly understand quite well that this rhetoric has little to do with “illegals” and everything to do with “immigrants,” if the Republicans remain captive of the racist base they inherited and then cultivated, they are going to be in deep caca.
If they are even losing the Cubans then they are in major trouble:
Naturalization ceremonies are nonpartisan. But for a moment Thursday, the Miami Beach event seemed like a GOP rally, with symbols reminiscent of the 2004 outreach effort.
There was Bush, in a videotaped message, extolling immigrants’ values of “hard work, entrepreneurship, love of family and love of country.” Then huge video screens showed patriotic images and pictures of national landmarks, and the audience stood, little American flags in hand, as immigration officials played a recording of that mainstay at GOP rallies, Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.”
But outside, as the new citizens departed, dozens of canvassers from the local Democratic Party and left-leaning activist groups swarmed the sidewalks, clipboards in hand, offering help in filling out voter registration forms.
The local party chairman, Joe Garcia, sweat soaking through his blue guayabera shirt, walked up and down the sidewalk, exhorting the new citizens to register to vote.
Garcia, former director of a prominent Cuban American exile group, did not make a partisan pitch, but many in line recognized him from his frequent appearances on local Spanish-language television.
“Democrat! Democrat!” said one man, holding high the thumbs-up sign.
No wonder Bush is sweating bullets. Aside from the small matter of turning the country into a rogue super power, his lasting political legacy may be overseeing his party’s decline to a minority faction of racists and malcontents because they foolishly empowered a bunch of shrieking wingnut gasbags to speak for them in the national media — and now they can’t control them. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.
Update: But never let the facts staring you in the face change an establishment narrative:
Hannity: I think the Democrats have gone further left than anybody would have anticipated. I think these bloggers have really gotten to them. I think they’re really positioning themselves that they’re gonna have a very difficult time moving center. Do you see that?”
Russert: Absolutely…
Meanwhile, Trent Lott is railing at the out of control rightwing talk radio hosts and Timmeh himself said this on Tucker yesterday:
RUSSERT: Traditionally, Hispanic voters in the 50s and 60s, smaller number obviously, were Republican. Strong family values. Now it`s trending more and more Democratic. The new registrants are overwhelmingly Democratic. And what the political advisers of the president are saying, we cannot afford to have another block like African-Americans, and Hispanic Americans. If we have Hispanics and blacks voting ten to one Democratic, we are in trouble.
whatever
And what in the hell is Tim Russert doing kissing Sean Hannity’s ass? Jesus, these people are almost criminally incestuous.
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A Litmus Test For The Honest Conservative
by tristero
Digby points to Rick Perlstein’s mordant post about the “honest conservative” and I thought I’d chime in.
I hesitate to admit this, but I harbor a strong hope that, all the evidence to the contrary, there really is a prehistoric creature lurking in the mysterious deeps of Loch Ness (although I suspect that a diet of deep-fried Mars Bars has seriously affected its health).
But to believe in the existence of an honest conservative?
Let’s examine paragraph 3 of Mansfield’s essay:
In other circumstances I could see myself defending the rule of law. Americans are fortunate to have a Constitution that accommodates different circumstances. Its flexibility keeps it in its original form and spirit a “living constitution,” ready for change, and open to new necessities and opportunities. The “living constitution” conceived by the Progressives actually makes it a prisoner of ongoing events and perceived trends. To explain the constitutional debate between the strong executive and the rule of law I will concentrate on its sources in political philosophy and, for greater clarity, ignore the constitutional law emerging from it.
Mansfield is being highly disingenuous and evasive here. Take sentence 1: “In other circumstances I could see myself defending the rule of law.” Folks, I don’t think it’s any stretch at all to conclude from the way this is presented that this sentence is nothing more or less than a rightwingers idea of a funny haha joke. You don’t have to ask, “Well, exactly what are those circumstances, Harvey?” Anyone with half a brain can infer that Mansfield, with a certainly approahching 1, can only mean, “If Hillary Clinton was president. I could see myself defending the rule of law over a strong executive.”
…
Can a conservative be, in any real sense, “intellectually honest” or a clear thinker? Let me put this way. If Mansfield is a conservative, if Morecraft is, if Klinghoffer, Robertson, and Cheney are conservatives, then the answer is, “No, never.”
Here’s a very simple litmus test. If any conservative is prepared not only to acknowledge that Brady Kiesling was right but actually to hire him, I am prepared to call said conservative “honest.”
Otherwise, they can all just take a jump in the Loch.
A Word To The Wise
by digby
Perlstein and Delong are both discussing the rare phenomenon of the “honest conservative” (if such a thing exists) and prominently feature this insightful comment from John Emerson, (whom I assume to be our friend from Seeing The Forest.)
Check it out:
I think that when the “honest conservatives” reject Bush they’re just setting up their assault on the Democratic president they expect to see elected next year. Their way of digging themselves out from under the Bush disaster (and obscuring their own massive role in that disaster) will be to swear that “Never again can an American President be allowed that kind of free hand!” This will justify their fighting the new Democratic President tooth and nail for every inch of ground.
For example, Bush’s politicization of the career staff in Justice and elsewhere was a very bad thing, no? And certainly this kind of thing has to stop, no? So we will forbid the new Democratic President to interfere with career personnel, with the result that all of the political hacks Bush put in civil service positions will be untouchable. (When that happens, can we expect the media to understand what’s going on? No, of course not….)
Now that they’ve stolen the horse, they’re going to lock the barn door. It’s just like January 2001: once Bush was inaugurated, the media and the Republicans decided that sabotage by impeachment and Gingrichian nastiness are really very bad things after all.
This is exactly right. You can see the contours already as you observe the unbelievable sight of the House Republicans taking to the floor to assail the Dems for earmarks. Really. They are. They have no shame and no conscience and they can switch gears and turn on the phony sanctimony without even a sheepish grin to show they know they are full of shit. For them this is combat by any means necessary and they simply don’t care if someone says they are hypocrites.
This also plays into one of my long running themes here on the blog, which is the very smart value they place on repetitive rhetoric. And it’s not just their own, they use the Democrats’ rhetoric as well:
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 they become comfortable with it and it can be exploited for all sorts of different reasons.
When I wrote that a year ago, I was speaking about the likelihood that they would use our drumbeat of “stolen elections” against us the next time they came up short. But they do it all the time in other ways as well. When you criticize Condoleeza Rice, Ann Coulter immediately attacks you for being a misogynist racist, even though she is herself a shrieking misogynist racist. Just the other day, I was accused of being a homophobe because I said Chris Matthews had a mancrush on Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani by someone who has made their reputation being hostile to gays. Questioning a Supreme Court nominee’s stand on abortion is Catholic bashing — even if the questioner is Catholic himself. Or as Greenwald pointed out today, Democrats are apparently not allowed to criticize generals — even though Republicans do it frequently. And on an on.
We know this is a political tactic and yet we lose the argument the minute we start sputtering an explanation as to why-what-we-said-isn’t-what-they-are-saying-it-was because blah, blah, blah. (I do it myself, far too often.)
One way to deal with this infuriating, sophomoric (yet highly effective) political style is to simply ignore them, as we do trolls, who operate on the same principle. Instead of David Obey coming to the floor of the Senate with steam coming out of his ears, explaining that the Democrats are trying to clean up the carnage left behind by 12 years of Republican rule while John Boehner smugly buffs his fingernails and chants “earmarks, earmarks, earmarks” Obey should just refuse to acknowledge Boehner’s ridiculous accusations and move forward with his own argument.
It’s very unsatisfying, because you want more than anything to scream in frustration that these hypocritical asses have the unmitigated gall to accuse the Dems of exactly what they’ve been doing for 12 years! But it’s what they want and the Dems shouldn’t give it to them.
But that won’t solve the larger problem, which really hurts us in the larger political dialog. As Emerson says in his piece above, all the things the left has been saying since 1992 will be used against us if we become the governing majority in 2008 — even though the effects will be to further empower the right and hamstring the left. It’s ingenious. We’d better start thinking about how to deal with their antics now. They are very good at this “I know you are but what am I” stuff — in fact, it’s what they do best.
Any ideas?
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The Humanity!
by digby
“Talk radio is running America. We have to deal with that problem.” — Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS), who supports comprehensive immigration reform, explaining why right-wing conservatives were able to torpedo the legislation last week.
Excuse me. Give me a minute…. sorry … ohjesus, I can’t….
hahahahahahahahahahah!
Springtime For Kafka
by digby
I wonder if other people are like me and wake up some days wondering how in the world the United States is going to be able deal with the moral and ethical failure of these last few years.
Take this story from the Washington Post this morning:
Abdul Ra’ouf Omar Mohammed Abu al-Qassim has been held at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for more than five years, and he longs to leave it. But the one place the U.S. government is willing to send the “enemy combatant” — his native Libya is the country Qassim fears most.
Having exhausted all possible legal remedies in U.S. courts — including a petition to the Supreme Court in April — Qassim is facing possibly imminent transfer to Libya, a country that the State Department deems a regular abuser and torturer of its captives. Qassim, accused by U.S. officials of being part of a terrorist group that aims to overthrow Libya’s leader, expects that returning there means torture and perhaps death.
Qassim is one of the first detainees deemed an “alien enemy combatant” who is publicly fighting his departure from Guantanamo. His attorneys and at least one member of Congress have pleaded with U.S. officials to spare him from transfer to a country known for its human rights transgressions.
Qassim is among about 80 detainees at Guantanamo who have been cleared for release or transfer, and he represents a problem that could recur many times as the United States tries to clear out the facility: sending the men into the custody of nations known to employ torture.
Human rights groups estimate that there are more than a dozen men at Guantanamo slated to go to countries with spotty rights records. Absent court intervention, the men have no choice but to go where the United States sends them.
“It’s a huge problem,” said Shayana Kadidal, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights who represents Qassim. “It’s the number one crisis we’re dealing with. A large number of people who are cleared for release are cleared to go to countries where they likely will be tortured. They will be suspect just for the fact that the U.S. has detained them for such a long period of time.”
I honestly don’t know what the solution is. The US government kept a man locked up in Guantanamo for five years with no due process and has now determined that he can be set free with no apologies, no explanation, no hearings, no public findings, no lessons learned. And now nobody in the world will take this man because he is still designated an enemy combatant. His home country Libya, which considers him a dangerous radical for completely unrelated reasons that are antithetical to US interests, will take him and will probably torture him some more. The man claims he has never been anything of the sort but it’s impossible for anyone to judge that fully because the US government refuses to release any information about him.
This is repeating itself many times over as the military sobers up and realizes that they can’t keep these people imprisoned forever and now must grapple with the fact that they have created a bunch of global outcasts, who, largely due to our actions, will be subject to torture in their own countries. And nobody else will have them because they fear our treatment of them may have caused them to become the radicals and potential terrorists they never were before. Jesus.
I don’t know the answer to this one. The Bush administration gleefully “took the gloves off” and started behaving like marauding conquerers (mostly for cheap PR purposes, by the way, which makes it even more reprehensible) and now this country is faced with a horrible moral dilemma and a practical Catch 22. These people may not have been terrorists before, but our harsh and irrational treatment means there’s an excellent chance we’ve made terrorists of them now. (Call it the “Count of Monte Cristo” effect.)
9/11 caused this extremely powerful nation to profoundly lose its moorings and it exposed a side of ourselves that we need to look at very carefully and thoroughly over the next few years. Guantanamo may be the lasting symbol of that fevered time. It will be closed, it has to be. But I would hope that it is kept open as a museum to remind Americans of what can happen when they allow simpleminded cheerleaders and greedy war porn distributors to sweep them up in irrational, martial excitement and act out of sheer (racist) revenge. It was a mistake of epic proportions that may end up rivaling the invasion of Iraq as to which Bushian atrocity caused the most international hatred and mistrust for the United States.
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Intelligent Design Creationism
by tristero
Barbara Forrest, whose testimony was crucial in the Kitzmiller case, and whose Creationism’s Trojan Horse is the go-to book about the “Intelligent Design” creationism movement, has written a new position paper for the Center of Inquiry called Understanding The Intelligent Design Creationist Movement. It is well worth reading. It summarizes the numerous legal and scientific problems with ID creationism and also discusses how it’s being funded, by huge donations from wealthy backers associated with some of the most extreme organizations on the religious Right. Here is her conclusion:
As this paper demonstrates, the ID movement is nothing more than barely camouflaged creationism. Seeking to convince the public that ID is something different, ID proponents avoid open debate on the least defensible elements of earlier creationism such as the young age of the earth and “flood geology” based on the biblical story of Noah’s flood. Their attempt to manufacture a “scientific” controversy and their sanitizing of ID terminology reflect their effort to tailor their strategy to the current legal landscape and to the current attitudes of the American public. Hoping to appeal to Americans’ instinctive notions of fairness, which would allow “both sides” to be heard, ID creationists have tried to exploit this alleged scientific controversy by pushing public schools to “teach the controversy” or “teach the full range of scientific views.” However, the only real controversy is the one that the ID creationists have fabricated for the precise purpose of advancing their agenda. There is no legitimate scientific debate between ID and evolution, and there is no controversy within the scientific community concerning the status of evolutionary theory. Accordingly, we recommend that educators, local and state boards of education, and all responsible government officials at every level reject any attempt to insert ID into the classroom, whether by expressly teaching ID or by more subtle means, such as “disclaimers” read in biology classes, stickers placed in biology textbooks, or euphemistic proposals to teach the “strengths and weaknesses of evolution,” etc. Because ID is a religious belief, allowing it to be inserted into the public school science classroom violates the constitutionally protected separation of church and state. Just as significantly, introducing ID into the classroom is detrimental to the teaching of real science. The methodology of modern science has consistently produced notable scientific achievements for more than three centuries. To ensure that American scientific progress continues—especially if American students are to contribute to it as scientists—we must ensure that our children have a proper understanding of science.
We should not exaggerate the threat posed by the ID creationist movement. As the Kitzmiller case and ID’s defeats in Kansas and Ohio have demonstrated, concerned scientists and laypersons—with the law and good science on their side—can protect both the Constitution and science education (Forrest and Gross, 2007a, 318-21). But we certainly must not discount this threat. Given the strong anti-Enlightenment sentiments of ID proponents and their alliances with other groups, some of which are extremist, ID poses a danger to constitutional government and, by extension, to a free, open society. ID proponents and their Religious Right allies promote a distorted understanding of secularism, presenting it as synonymous with atheism and antireligious animosity. However, contrary to this misconception, “secular,” properly understood, merely means “not religious” rather than “anti-religious.” In the same vein, criticism of ID as a religious belief rather than a scientific theory is not criticism of religion per se. To reject secularism as the Religious Right does, based on their distortion of its meaning, is to reject one of the First Amendment’s most important protections: the right to live and work without being constrained by religious doctrines not of one’s choosing; and to worship, or not worship, as suits one’s conscience. This right implies the attendant obligation to refrain from requiring that others be constrained by one’s personal religious preferences (Forrest, 2004). Yet ID creationists, as well as the Religious Right generally, seek to convert their personal religious commitments into public policy. In their minds, merely refraining from including creationism and other examples of their favored views in public school classrooms constitutes active discrimination against religious people. This position is not only illogical, but it is not shared by the vast majority of Americans, who understand that the strongest protection for people of faith lies precisely in maintaining government neutrality with respect to matters of religion. Only when the government refuses to promote or endorse religious beliefs (or antireligious beliefs) can we achieve the freedom necessary for both religion and civic friendship to flourish and for rational inquiry to guide the development of public policy. Yet this is precisely what ID proponents are unwilling to countenance. While they benefit from living in a secular democracy, they would use its gifts of free expression and personal freedom to force American culture, science, and education backward into a pre-modern era.
Civic friendship means, at the very least, being reasonable enough and respectful enough of one’s fellow citizens to trust that they can be good people—good neighbors—without adopting one’s own religious views, or perhaps without any religious views at all. The hope of civic friendship is among the central legacies of the Enlightenment, along with tolerance of religious diversity and the confidence that embracing modern science and rational inquiry does not destroy, but rather strengthens, the moral bearings of one’s fellow citizens. In “Public Reason and Democracy: The Place of Science in Maintaining Civic Friendship,” political scientist Steven M. DeLue expresses this hope beautifully (DeLue, 2005, 26, 38-39):
The . . . Enlightenment embodied the hope of establishing governments that freed people from superstition and tradition, so that people could use reason and science to generate knowledge useful in improving society. . . . . . . [S]ince the Enlightenment, our modern world has been characterized by a public culture, which holds as primary beliefs the . . . views that rational intelligence must be used both to make it possible for science to produce knowledge and to ensure that this knowledge serves only humane purposes. Moreover, it is understood that society can achieve these goals, and attain the flourishing that results, only when it allows intellectual autonomy to manifest itself fully across the social and the public realms. Thus, attaining the degree of civic friendship needed to maintain the stability of a liberal democracy . . . depends on the extent to which science is understood as necessary for progress in all dimensions of life. When this understanding is strong, then there would be an overwhelming respect for the public culture of civic friendship that sustains autonomy and its associated virtues—freedom, critical thinking, intellectual pluralism, and the civic virtue of toleration.
To give some indication of the cartoonish nature of ID creationist discourse – notwithstanding the fact that they are dead serious – by all means go on over to PZ Myers place and take a gander at what Michael Egnor, a neurosurgeon has to say about the mind and the brain. I must confess that after reading what he wrote, I wouldn’t permit him to prescribe a band-aid for me, let alone operate on my brain.
Bitches Brew
by digby
As regular readers know, I’ve written many a blog post about the last 30 years of male panic in this country. Indeed, the irrational fear of hippies on the Democratic side and the “feminization” of Democratic candidates on the Republican side has been the sub-text of our politics ever since the 72 campaign. I wrote a piece a while back about this called Tarzan, Cheetah and Jane:
For forty years the Republicans have been winning elections by calling liberals “faggots” (and “dykes”) in one way or another. It’s what they do. To look too closely at what she said is to allow light on their very successful reliance on gender stereotypes to get elected.
Rick Perlstein recently noted that Saint Ronnie went for it early on:
…he got the tribal stuff right, the us-versus-them stuff–as when he confronted young people harassing him with make love, not war signs. He said it looked like they were incapable of doing either.
Reagan also used to say the hippies “look like Tarzan, walk like Jane and smell like Cheetah.” That’s not so different than Coulter saying, “my pretty-girl allies stick out like a sore thumb amongst the corn-fed, no make-up, natural fiber, no-bra needing, sandal-wearing, hirsute, somewhat fragrant hippie chick pie wagons they call ‘women’ at the Democratic National Convention.”
A lot of the shrieking aversion to the dirty hippie came from all that “feminine” hair on men’s heads and “masculine” hair on women’s bodies, if you’ll recall. My brother was constantly harrassed about “looking like a girl” in 1966 Mississippi for having hair below his collar. In those days, hair was a political statement and even though forty years have passed and most of those people can only dream about all that hair they no longer have, the right successfully parlayed that gender role anxiety into a political narrative that continues to powerfully effect politics today.
Lately we’ve seen this effect in the embarrassing fawning of the pundits over the various manly stereotypes they attribute to the Republican presidential candidates and the blatant male panic they show at the idea of a female president.
Here’s Chris Matthews yesterday, imagining a female conspiracy to vote for Hillary Clinton and keep it secret from their men:
HARRIS: The whole premise behind this survey I think is actually very bad news for Hillary Clinton because if her entire victory margin is predicated on this notion that she is going to sweep the female vote, like she‘s doing currently, I think once women go through and examine all of these candidates, you know, I think that that actually presents a fairly large problem for her. This early in the cycle…MATTHEWS: Yes. HARRIS: … voters—voters tend to look for commonalities. Is the candidate Republican, Democrat, white, black? Very superficial indicators…MATTHEWS: Yes. HARRIS: … and superficial levers—levels. (CROSSTALK) HARRIS: So, it is not surprising to me that she is doing well…MATTHEWS: OK. HARRIS: … among women.MATTHEWS: Well… HARRIS: But as the campaign develops, that could really change.MATTHEWS: Todd, you won‘t know. You will never know, Todd, because women don‘t have to tell us who they are going to vote for. It‘s a secret ballot.
This isn’t the first time he’s remarked that he thinks women are going to lie to the pollsters and then stab men everywhere in the back and secretly vote for Hillary. Of course, he says the same thing about men, except that they are going to tell the pollsters that they support Hillary but once they get in that voting booth they will never be able to pull the lever for that castrating bitch. (Ok he didn’t actually say castrating bitch.)
Anyway, you’ve heard this all before from me. But I have treat for you, if you haven’t read them already. Both Gene Lyons and Glenn Greenwald, two of the very best, have written sizzling pieces on the subject this week that are not to be missed:
Here’s a little bit of Lyons:
That’s how it goes on “Hardball” night after night. Mention a prominent Republican and the courtier-pundits swoon like 12-year-old girls at a boy band show. Matthews goes into virtual meltdown over former Sen. Fred Thompson, another “daddy” figure. Frequent guest Mark Halperin, Time’s version of Fineman, praises his “magnetism.” On TV, he wrote, Thompson plays “a straight-talking, tough-minded, wise Southerner—basically a version of what his supporters say is his true political self.” Now here’s a guy who’s been a Washington lobbyist and Hollywood actor most of his adult life; campaigned across Tennessee in what turned out to be a rented red pickup driven by an aide; and sports a very un-first ladylike trophy wife younger than his kids. (There’s a funny picture on-line of neo-con guru Paul Wolfowitz peering at lovely Jeri’s low-cut cocktail dress. ) So what’s Thompson to the “Hardball” gang ? Fineman: “A tough guy” with “a strong record on cultural issues as a cultural conservative from the South.”
Heh. And here’s a touch of Greenwald:
During the last week, when I was traveling, I spent substantial time driving in a rental car, and thus had the opportunity to listen for large chunks of time to The Rush Limbaugh Show, which I hadn’t actually heard in several years. Virtually the entire show is now devoted to an overt celebration of masculinity — by Rush Limbaugh — and to claims that Democrats and liberals lack masculinity. As but one example, Rush claimed that the New York Times buried the story of the JFK terrorist plot on page C30, immediately prior to the Sports Section, because nobody would see it there, because the “wimps and sissies who read the New York Times don’t read the Sports section, because it’s too macho for them.” And just as Glenn Reynolds has done, Rush has developed a virtual obsession with the book The Dangerous Book for Boys, geared towards teaching “boys how to be boys.” Rush spent the week hailing it as the antidote to what he calls the “Emasculation of America.” Identically, Reynolds on his blog has promoted the book a disturbing 17 times in the last six weeks alone. When doing so, he routinely proclaims things such as “maybe there’s hope,” and — most revealingly — has fretted: “Are we turning into a nation of wimps?” It is the identity of the “we” in that sentence where all the meaning lies. Perhaps if “we” torture enough bound and gagged prisoners and bomb enough countries, “we” can rid ourselves of that worry. Republicans have long tried to exploit masculinity images and depict Democrats and liberals as effeminate and therefore weak. That is not new. But what is new is how explicit and upfront and unabashed this all is now. And what is most striking about it is that — literally in almost every case — the most vocal crusaders for Hard-Core Traditional Masculinity, the Virtues of Machismo, are the ones who so plainly lack those qualities on every level.
This is one of the oddest political phenomena out there and this election cycle does seem to be producing a comic overreaction even by their normally neurotic standards. The only thing that makes any real sense is that they have screwed the pooch so badly on the war that they are humiliated — and the Democrats may just bring in someone who doesn’t even have a penis to fix it. Oh the humanity.
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