Month: March 2008

Too Big To Fail

by dday

So the Treasury Secretary called for a “sweeping overhaul” of financial rules, and the cheerleaders on the business channels are predictably calling this some kind of radical change, whereas Paul Krugman rightly explains this as rearranging deck chairs.

Anyone who has worked in a large organization — or, for that matter, reads the comic strip “Dilbert” — is familiar with the “org chart” strategy. To hide their lack of any actual ideas about what to do, managers sometimes make a big show of rearranging the boxes and lines that say who reports to whom.

You now understand the principle behind the Bush administration’s new proposal for financial reform, which will be formally announced today: it’s all about creating the appearance of responding to the current crisis, without actually doing anything substantive.

I think what we’ve seen is the belief in deregulation of financial markets and massive corporate consolidation in general working in tandem. This created huge financial institutions of the likes of Bear Stearns, which then became too big to allow to fail no matter how speculative they became. And so they could engage in whatever risky operations they wished, full with the knowledge that they would never experience a full washout of their assets. The result is a safety net for massive corporations only at the expense of the social safety net for individuals.

Without a vote of the Congress or a public debate, the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve have made government the guarantor of the shadow banking system – the unregulated, unhinged hedge funds and investment houses whose compulsive excesses now threaten the global economy. They say necessity is the mother of invention, but we seen only a part of the new machine, not surprisingly, the part that buttresses Wall Street. They have scrambled to put this together in an emergency, behind closed doors, without a hint of the necessary regulatory changes that must rationally accompany such guarantees. That is what the fight in the coming months will surely be about […] The shadow banking system now must be brought out of the shadows. After all we are constantly told that finance serves the economy, and the market system is the best means to solve our social goals. It feels very uncomfortable when our servant’s servant becomes our master’s master as Wall Street has been permitted to become in America in recent years by contribution- hungry elected officials.

Barack Obama explicitly connected the current crisis to the bipartisan practice of deregulation. This is part of a culture of laissez-faire economics that has shifted risk to individuals and removed risk from corporations, and Obama’s speech talked about the need to radically change that midset with actual regulation instead of putting new names on the same old ineffective regulatory agencies. Corporations for too long have, as Bob Borosage said, been given “the freedom to gamble with other peoples’ money … protected by lavish campaign contributions and powerful lobbies.”

One thing we all know is that John “Let’s Schedule A Meeting Sometime” McCain would offer the same Hoover-like do-nothing approach. But it’s striking how many connections there are between McCain allies and surrogates and every aspect of the financial crisis. After all, some top campaign advisors of his lobbied for the shady lender Ameriquest, one of his top surrogates Carly Fiorina is a welfare queen whose company paid off her mortgage between 1999 and 2003, the most recent RNC chair is saying that his non-plan to deal with the mortgage crisis is incomplete, and his top economic advisor is perhaps most responsible for the crisis itself:

The general co-chairman of John McCain’s presidential campaign, former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), led the charge in 1999 to repeal a Depression-era banking regulation law that Democrat Barack Obama claimed on Thursday contributed significantly to today’s economic turmoil.

“A regulatory structure set up for banks in the 1930s needed to change because the nature of business had changed,” the Illinois senator running for president said in a New York economic speech. “But by the time [it] was repealed in 1999, the $300 million lobbying effort that drove deregulation was more about facilitating mergers than creating an efficient regulatory framework.”

Gramm’s role in the swift and dramatic recent restructuring of the nation’s investment houses and practices didn’t stop there.

A year after the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealed the old regulations, Swiss Bank UBS gobbled up brokerage house Paine Weber. Two years later, Gramm settled in as a vice chairman of UBS’s new investment banking arm.
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Later, he became a major player in its government affairs operation. According to federal lobbying disclosure records, Gramm lobbied Congress, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department about banking and mortgage issues in 2005 and 2006.

During those years, the mortgage industry pressed Congress to roll back strong state rules that sought to stem the rise of predatory tactics used by lenders and brokers to place homeowners in high-cost mortgages.

For his work, Gramm and two other lobbyists collected $750,000 in fees from UBS’s American subsidiary. In the past year, UBS has written down more than $18 billion in exposure to subprime loans and other risky securities and is considering cutting as many as 8,000 jobs.

The regulation referred to here is the Glass-Steagall Act, and after its demise investment banks grew larger and larger, essentially becoming invulnerable. It’s so clear that lack of regulation gave the investment banks a license to steal, and that Phil Gramm and his puppet Presidential candidate, who doesn’t know or care about the economy, want the theft to continue.

UPDATE: See also emptywheel deconstructing the Treasury Department’s fallacious rhetoric.

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And Again, The Winner Is Iran

by tristero

Juan Cole analyzes the latest cease-fire in the multi-front Iraqi civil war:

The entire episode underlines how powerful Iran has become in Iraq. The Iranian government had called on Saturday for the fighting to stop. And by Sunday evening it had negotiated at least a similar call from Sadr (whether the fighting actually stops remains to be seen and depends on local commanders and on whether al-Maliki meets Sadr’s conditions).

Cole also notes in his headline that Bush has been reduced to sheer irrelevancy: al-Sadr and Iran clearly are in control of the situation.

Think about that. Four thousand plus American lives have been sacrificed, countless Iraqis have also died, at a financial cost in the multiple trillions and the upshot is not democracy but the spread of radical Shiite islamism. There aren’t words in the English language ominous enough to describe how profound a catastrophe this is.

Note to United States: Bush/Iraq is why you should never, ever, elect a president with a C+ average.

Note to United States II: Bush/Iraq is also why you should never, ever elect a president who has “senior moments” and scrambles the differences between Shiite and Sunni.

Fun

by digby

Saturday Night At The Movies

Divine Trash, Hidden Jewels, Part 6: Short Attention Span Theater

by Dennis Hartley

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.
-Jean Luc Goddard

A mixed-up mix
Mix up your journey to the next journey
Mixers rock
-DJ Takefumi, from the film Funky Forest: The First Contact

So, do you think you’ve seen it all? I would venture to say that you haven’t- until you’ve sat through a screening of Funky Forest: The First Contact, originally released in 2005 as Naisu no mori in Japan but now available for the first time on Region 1 DVD.

The film is a collaborative effort by three Japanese directors, most notably Katsuhito Ishii (The Taste of Tea). Ishii, along with Hajime Ishimine and Shunichiro Miki, has concocted a heady “mixed-up-mix”, indeed. There is really no logical way to describe this blend of dancing, slapstick, surrealism, sci-fi, animation, absurdist humor, and experimental filmmaking, married to a hip soundtrack of jazz, dub and house music without sounding like I’m high (perhaps I already sound that way in a lot of my posts-n’est-ce pas?), but I will do my best. There is no real central “story” in the traditional sense; the film is more or less an anthology of several dozen vignettes, featuring recurring characters a la late night TV sketch comedy. Some of these disparate stories and characters do eventually intersect (although usually in a somewhat oblique fashion). The film is a throwback in some ways to “channel surfing” anthology films from the 1970s like The Groove Tube, Tunnel Vision and The Kentucky Fried Movie; although it is important to note that the referential comic sensibilities are very Japanese. If a Western replica of this project were produced, it would require collaboration between Jim Jarmusch, Terry Gilliam and David Cronenberg (and a script from Charlie Kaufman).

Although there are ostensibly no “stars” of the film, there are quite a few memorable vignettes featuring three oddball siblings, introduced as “The Unpopular With Women Brothers”. The barbed yet affectionate bickering between the hopelessly geeky Katsuichi, the tone-deaf, guitar strumming Masuru (aka “Guitar Brother”) and the pre-pubescent Masao, as they struggle with dissecting the mystery of how to get “chicks” to dig them is reminiscent of the dynamic between the uncle and the two brothers in Napoleon Dynamite and often quite funny. It is never explained why the obese, Snickers-addicted Masao happens to be a Caucasian; but then, the whole concept wouldn’t be so absurdly funny, would it? The scenes centering around the relationship between Notti and Takefumi, a platonic couple, probably come closest to displaying any kind of conventional narrative structure (well, at least up to the point where they start telling each other about their dreams). Then there are the 1001 Tales of the Arabian Nights-influenced trio of giggly “Babbling Hot Springs Vixens”, who tell each other tall stories in three segments entitled “Alien Piko Rico”, “The Big Ginko Tree” and my personal favorite, “Buck Naked and the Panda”. I could tell you more (I haven’t even scratched the surface on the really bizarre stuff) but I’ll let you discover all that on your own-if you dare.

You will need to clear some time-Funky Forest runs 2½ hours long, in all its challengingly non-linear glory. So is it worth your time? Well, it probably depends on your answer to this age-old question: Does a movie necessarily have to be “about” something to be enjoyable? At one point in the film, Takefumi goes into a soliloquy:

The turntable is the cosmos
A universe in each album
A journey, an adventure
A journey, a true adventure
Journey, adventure
Journey
Needles rock. Needles rock.
Music mixer and the mix

There is also another significant clue on the film’s intermission card, which reads: “End of Side A”. I think that this may be the key to unlocking the “meaning” of this film, which is, there is no meaning; perhaps life, like the structure of the movie, is best represented by a series of random needle drops, no? It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey (OK, now I’m stoned.) With an underlying spirit of winking goofiness running all throughout this unconventional weirdness, perhaps the filmmakers are just paraphrasing something that Mork from Ork once said about always retaining “a bit of mondo bozo”. God knows, it’s helped me get through 52 years on this silly planet.

WTF?: Paprika, The Falls (1980), Bliss (1985), What the Bleep Do We Know!? Sans Soleil , Waking Life, Schizopolis , Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, Beat the Deva, Eraserhead, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, The Ninth Configuration, 8 1/2, Forbidden Zone, Love and Anger, Dancer in the Dark , Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, The Short Films of David Lynch, The Brothers Quay Collection, El Topo, Arizona Dream, The Ruling Class, Greaser’s Palace, Head, The Acid House, The Bed Sitting Room, The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie, Naked Lunch , Delicatessen, Being John Malkovich, UHF, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

And one more thing…

I’m sad to note the passing of actor Richard Widmark, he of the patented “stare”- who died at the age of 93 earlier this week. He appeared in over 70 films from 1947 to 1991. Widmark specialized in tough guy roles; he certainly played his share of killers, cops, rugged cowboys, and steely-eyed military men.

Few actors have ever made a screen debut as audacious or memorable as Widmark’s psychopathic killer, Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death. One particular scene, wherein Udo shoves an elderly crippled woman down a flight of stairs, was shocking enough for 1947, but I’m sure audiences never expected Widmark’s character to then laugh manically at the sight of his hapless victim as she tumbled ass over wheelchair to her grisly demise.

Nearly all the films noir that Widmark starred in early in his career are now considered genre classics; in particular I would recommend Night and the City (1950) and Pickup on South Street (1953), which have both been given the deluxe DVD treatment (including luminous transfers) by Criterion. Another recommendation from this period would be No Way Out (1950), a hybrid noir/social issue drama with Widmark and co-star Sidney Poitier both in top form.

Widmark teamed up again with Poitier in 1965, giving a great performance as the captain of a naval destroyer in one of my favorite nuclear paranoia thrillers, The Bedford Incident (1965). A few other mid-career highlights include one of the seminal “cop on the edge” dramas, Madigan (1968) and the epic Cinerama spectacle, How the West Was Won (which will be airing on Turner Classic Movies April 3; check your local listings!)

Widmark’s career came full circle in 1984, when director Taylor Hackford cast him in Against All Odds , which was a loose remake of the 1947 film noir Out of the Past.

Definitely one of the last of a certain breed of Hollywood icons.

-D.H.

There’s Something About JJ

by digby

I wrote about this before, but I think it’s worth reiterating. The “special relationship” between John McCain and the press is particularly dangerous in one respect: he is not held accountable for his words on the stump, (while Democrats’ are used against them as if they’d carved them in stone from Mt Rushmore) and he’s not held liable for his gross and obvious panders and policy shifts. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a politician have this kind of industrial strength teflon before.

Dave Neiwert addressed this the other night over on FDL:

A lot of wags have been chortling about “the McCain Moment,” myself included, because it encapsulates so neatly much of what’s wrong with John McCain. But not everything. We also need to deal with the McCain Of The Moment. The guy who said one thing six months ago and says nearly its opposite now. Who knows what he’ll say in another six months? As disturbing as his obvious mental lapses might be, McCain’s bizarre policy flip-flops make Daffy Duck look positively stolid in comparison, especially because they have come in many cases in which he has made himself a national reputation. Things like torture and campaign finance ethics. And this is especially the case with immigration. The co-author of the Kennedy-McCain Immigration Act — which, comparatively speaking, took a moderate approach to immigration reform — McCain is now saying that he wouldn’t even vote for it today, let alone co-author it.

I think we all remember a fellow who was relentlessly called a “flip-flopper” for much less egregious and far more ancient policy shifts than that. Indeed, one of the truisms about presidential politics until now has been that Senators, particularly those with long legislative records, could not be elected because of votes they’ve taken in the past which were done for horse trading or positioning or some other reflection of sausage making that isn’t easily explained. (You see it in the current Democratic race.)

St. McCain is different. When he makes a policy shift or takes a U-Turn in his rhetoric, or misrepresents his own record, it’s excused by his fanboys in the media as something he “had to do.” Here’s Nick Kristoff on the subject:

… his pride in “straight talk” may arise partly because he is an execrable actor. When he does try double-talk, he looks so guilty and uncomfortable that he convinces nobody. It’s also striking that Barack Obama is leading a Democratic field in which he has been the candidate who is least-scripted and most willing to annoy primary voters, whether in speaking about Reagan’s impact on history or on the suffering of Palestinians. All of this is puzzlingly mature on the part of the electorate. A common complaint about President Bush is that he walls himself off from alternative points of view, but the American public has the same management flaw: it normally fires politicians who tell them bad news. It is true that Mr. McCain sometimes weaves and bobs. With the arrival of the primaries, he has moved to the right on social issues and pretended to be more conservative than he is. On Wednesday, for example, he retreated on his brave stand on torture by voting against a bill that would block the C.I.A. from using physical force in interrogations. His most famous pander came in 2000, when, after earlier denouncing the Confederate flag as a “symbol of racism,” he embraced it as “a symbol of heritage.” To his credit, Mr. McCain later acknowledged, “I feared that if I answered honestly I could not win the South Carolina primary, so I chose to compromise my principles.” In short, Mr. McCain truly has principles that he bends or breaks out of desperation and with distaste. That’s preferable to politicians who are congenital invertebrates.

That sentiment is quite common among the punditocrisy and the media fanboys. They have talked themselves into believing that McCain’s flip-flops and panders are actually a sign of his integrity and strength because he does them so blatantly. Now that’s teflon.

The main thing at play here is a pernicious, primal narrative that’s been out there for decades in which liberals are tarred as being sissies who can’t stand up for the country. Therefore, when they “flipflop” they do it out of weakness of will and unformed identity. They are always trying to “find themselves.” Conservatives have no such issues. They are always on the side of God, Mother, Country (and Wall Street) and don’t care who knows it. Unlike those nancy boys on the left, they aren’t small, flaccid and flip-flopping — they are large, hard and straight-up. That’s the long standing (ahem) narrative of liberal and conservative politics in the modern era and McCain is the perfect hero of the tale.

This is where all that bonhomie on the old Straight Talk Express really pays off. He can literally say anything and the press will excuse it because they think he’s their cynical, postmodern pal — a Rorschach test for their own beliefs. When he gets “angry” at lobbyists or rightwing ministers he’s telling the truth. When he cozies up to lobbyists and seeks the endorsement of rightwing ministers, it’s because he *has* to, (and he really, really hates doing it.) John McCain’s heart, you see, is always in the right place, and oddly enough, everyone believes it’s in the same place as is their own.

I can’t conceive of a greater advantage for a politician. He’s almost a magical figure. He’s an editorial from The Advocate, from just last week:

McCain’s opposition to the Federal Marriage Amendment is emblematic of his tempestuous relationship with the religious right. After the bruising 2000 Republican presidential primary in South Carolina, McCain labeled the Revs. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson “agents of intolerance” and “corrupting influences on religion and politics.” Sure, McCain spoke at Falwell’s Liberty University in 2006, but he didn’t pander. At the end of the day, McCain loathes the religious right, and the feeling is mutual. A notoriously stubborn man, he will probably not feel the need to appease the anti-gay wing of his party, especially considering how outspoken its members have been in their denunciation of him. Evangelical leader James Dobson has already said he will not support McCain.

His allegedly stubborn belief in gay rights, you’ll notice, is assumed. Sure, he went down to Liberty University and kissed Jerry Falwell’s ring. But that wasn’t a pander. And all the other anti-gay legislation he’s supported he just did because he *had to.* He won’t feel the need to appease the right wing of his party by throwing gays to the wolves. He said he’d take money from the Log Cabin Republicans and everything!

This is a serious danger for the Democrats. Everyone thinks this guy is secretly on their side. Jonathan Chait, one of the original McCain fanboys, wrote this recently:

Determining how McCain would act as president has thus become a highly sophisticated exercise in figuring out whom he’s misleading and why. Nearly everyone can find something to like in McCain. Liberals can admire his progressive instincts and hope that he is dishonestly pandering to the right in order to get through the primary. Conservatives can believe he will follow whatever course his conservative advisers set out for him and will feel bound by whatever promises he has made to them…

The amazing thing about McCain is that his reputation for principled consistency has remained completely intact. It is his strongest cudgel against opponents. Wall Street Journal editorial page columnist Kimberley Strassel recently gushed that McCain is “no flip-flopper.” “Like or dislike Mr. McCain’s views,” she added, “Americans know what they are.” Then, in the very next paragraph, she wrote that McCain will now be “as pure as the New Hampshire snow on the two core issues of taxes and judges” and that “[t]he key difference between Mr. McCain in 2000 and 2008 is that he…appears intent on making amends” to conservatives.It is a truly impressive skill McCain has–the ability to adopt new beliefs and convince his new allies that his conversion is genuine (or, at least, irreversible) while simultaneously strengthening their belief in the immutability of his principles.

It isn’t a skill, it’s a gift, bestowed upon McCain by a press corps which can’t ever seem to do its job properly. Because of his POW history and his savvy manipulation of their hero worship, they have imputed the character of the young man of integrity who stood steadfastly by his fellow prisoners forty years ago to the older sleazy, self-serving, intellectually lazy politician he became.

He’s the perfect man for the Republicans right now, a party which has devalued its brand in the service of neocon crazies and corrupt incompetents. He’s one of them to the core, but because of his stirring life story, the media present him as sui generis, a different kind ‘o Republican, their kind ‘o Republican, a man who shares everyone’s principles, even when they are diametrically opposed.

We’d better hope he dodders around so much that people think he’s sick or something because that is a formidable advantage for any candidate. It means there’s nothing he can say or do that disqualifies him on the merits.

Even on Iraq, you say? Well get this, from Chait again, in the same article from which I quoted above:

Even the ideological tendency McCain is most strongly identified with–neoconservative foreign policy–is, as John B. Judis explained in The New Republic, a relatively recent development: McCain originally opposed intervention in Bosnia and worried about a bloody ground campaign before the first Gulf war (see “Neo-McCain,” October 16, 2006). McCain’s advisers include not only neoconservatives but also the likes of Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft. It would hardly be unimaginable for McCain to revert to his old realism, especially if Iraq continues to fail at political reconciliation. He could easily be the president who ends the war.

See, he’s just saying we might have to stay in Iraq for a thousand years because he *has* to. He factually finds the idea quite distasteful (just like me!) and because he’s a stubborn man of principle he will end the war much sooner than anyone else.

Don’t underestimate him. I know true blue liberals who really like this guy. Why wouldn’t they? They read the liberal media.

Update: Classic Somerby

Does the press corps fawn to McCain? It’s a very important question. But if you watched this seven-minute segment, you saw very little real discussion of that critical question. The scribes’ minds wandered all about, as is the rule when such questions are asked. Until the very end of the segment, when Matthews explained the whole syndrome:

MATTHEWS: Let me explain why a lot of guys like McCain. He served his country in ways that none us cannot imagine serving this country. I think that gives him a moral edge over a lot of us and we show it. Anyway, Jennifer Donahue, thank you very much for being on. Ryan Lizza, as always.

It’s all about Nam, Matthews said. McCain served there, and we multimillionaires didn’t. “That gives him a moral edge over of us,” Matthews said. And then, the key part of his statement: That gives him a moral edge—and we show it. Shorter Matthews: We refused to serve during Vietnam. And because we feel so guilty about it, we refuse to serve today too.

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Weird, As In Pravda Weird

by tristero

Am I the only one who finds this news article about al-Sadr’s call to Arabs to support his cause profoundly weird?

Anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has called on Arab leaders meeting in Syria to voice their support for Iraq’s “resistance” to what he calls foreign occupation.

Al-Jazeera television has shown a brief clip of an interview with the Mahdi Army militia leader. It says the full interview will be shown later Saturday.

The broadcast is the first word from the reclusive cleric since the Iraqi government launched a crackdown against militia violence in the southern oil port of Basra earlier this week.

Al-Sadr is believed to be in Iran, but Al-Jazeera doesn’t say where or when the interview took place. The portly al-Sadr, who is in his mid-30s, appears to have lost a great deal of weight in the clip.

From word one, “Anti-American,” the article is designed to create an irrational animosity against al-Sadr.He could just as accurately, and with less volatility, be described as “Shiite cleric,” “Radical Shiite cleric,” “The popular radical Shiite cleric Muktada al-Sadr” but no. The only salient feauture, as far as AP is concerned is his anti-Americanism. Then we get scare quotes around “resistance” and a careful hedge “from what he calls foreign occupation,” as if that is somehow an inaccurate description of the American – I’m so sorry, I meant coalition – troops stationed in Iraq behind heavily protected walls.

Then we learn that al-Sadr is “reclusive.” Oh, really? For all I know he really may be another Unabomber, choosing to live alone in some shack out in the desert, but somehow I suspect he doesn’t go for a nice stroll in public because he’s shy but because the United States military once had a contract out on his life (and probably still does). I may be a nervous Nellie but I, too, would probably become pretty reclusive if I knew the most powerful military organization on earth was trying to kill me. But “reclusive” really does imply someone mysterious, vaguely malign, and maladjusted. In short, an evil “anti-American.”

Next we are told what al-Sadr’s resistance to the occupation really should be called – “militia violence.” In this context, “militia” implies illegitimate paramilitary organizations, quite a contrast to describing the beyond-any-law mercenary killers of Blackwater as “contractors.” Yet there is a bit of truth to AP’s description. This is no longer about “insurgents” – shadowy guerrilas and the like. The civil war in Iraq goes far, far beyond IED’s and surreptitious assaults. Heckuva job, General Petraeus!

Finally, AP pulls out all the stops to portray al-Sadr in the most unpleasant light to a famously obese America. “The portly al-Sadr” – I honestly can’t believe I read that – lost a “great deal of weight”! That evil, anti-American, militia-wielding bastard! How did he do it? I guess we’ll have to tune in to our local al-Jazeera broadcast later today to get his diet tips.

All joking aside, this kind of blatantly propagandistic reporting (how, by the way, do we know he may be in Iran?) serves no useful purpose whatsoever. It merely makes it more difficult to understand what is going on and provides nothing of importance about what is clearly a very ominous move on al Sadr’s part – an overt appeal to make the Bush/Iraq war a regional conflict. But to write an article about that requires research and interviews and a lot of icky work with translators – it’s too much to ask that American reporters speak Arabic. It’s far easier to notice that al-Sadr has slimmed down and “report” that.

Squids and Romans

by digby

I am on the road today travelling to Philly PA to pay homage to the great Atrios and cheese steaks, not necessrily in that order. I am blessedly away from all gasbags and feeling the better for it.

to keep you all entertained, I have flagged two articles that should give you something to laugh, cry, or maybe get angry about (as if we need that…)

The first is “Generation Squeeb” by Matt Taibbi, who shows us once again, in his inimitable way, that we Americans are all a bunch of suckers:

Now, no one is suggesting that there shouldn’t be some reaction to genuinely toxic ideas, or that all criticism of racist or unpatriotic comments is unfounded. But what we’re getting with all of these scandals isn’t a sober exchange of ideas but more of an ongoing attempt to instill in the public a sort of permanent fear of uncomfortable ideas, and to reduce public discourse to a kind of primitive biological mechanism, like the nervous system of a squid or a shellfish, one that recoils reflexively from any stimuli. And the campaign is where you really see this process at work full-time. It’s something I noticed while spending so much of the last year (and, before, so much of the years 2003 and 2004) on the campaign trail talking to prospective voters, listening to their complaints and their fears and their (often fleeting) enthusiasms. During this time, I started to notice a pattern, comprised of several elements.

The first is a truly remarkable tendency of seemingly intelligent people to work themselves into genuine outrage over information they didn’t even know about twenty minutes ago, until they heard it on television, or coming out of the mouths of a candidate.

(Or a blogger, perhaps?)

Along the same lines, but much less fancifully written is this from Walter Shapiro in today’s Salon called “Rum, Romanism and James Carville”

If Carville, McPeak and Fischer did not exist this week, some cable-news producer would have to invent them. Fischer, for instance, is portrayed as a close advisor to Obama, even though the Iowa Democrat admitted in an interview Wednesday that he has had only three short telephone conversations with his favored candidate (including a call on his birthday) since the Jan. 3 caucuses. “I’m going to exempt myself, since I wrote something stupid,” Fischer said. “But we’ve had two full news cycles parsing what Carville said as if it were written by Abraham Lincoln or recorded in the Bible.”

Of course, it does not take a video camera or a gossip-monger with a BlackBerry to turn the incendiary comments of a campaign surrogate into a voting issue. In the waning days of the 1884 campaign, Republican nominee James Blaine listened without objection as a New York City minister at a GOP rally denounced the Democrats as the party of “rum, Romanism and rebellion.” All it took were some handbills and newspaper stories to inform Irish Catholic voters about Blaine’s silence in the face of the slur — and Democrat Grover Cleveland carried New York state (and with it the Electoral College) by a scant 1,149 votes.

It would be nice to believe that the American electorate has grown more sophisticated in the past 124 years. But you certainly cannot prove it by the latest twists in the Democratic race. The way the news coverage is going, pretty soon we will be arguing over the cosmic meaning of some comments by an alternate delegate from Idaho immortalized on a Facebook page. And by the time we get to the potentially rambunctious Denver convention, the final week in March may be remembered as the good old days of substantive political debate on the issues.

God help us.

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How About 30 Days? Best 3 Out Of 5?

by dday

Before I go I just have to post about the situation in Iraq, which would be funny if it didn’t involve mass death. First the Prime Minister went down to Basra to personally direct the fighting like a miniature Commander Codpiece, and he defiantly gave the ultimatum that all Mahdi Army officers must disarm within three days. After the Mahdi Army replied by, well, kicking the Iraqi Scurity Forces in the teeth, the deadline is now ten days.

Iraq’s government has extended by 10 days a deadline for Shia militiamen fighting troops in the southern city of Basra to hand over their weapons.

More than 130 people have been killed and 350 injured since a clampdown on militias began in Basra on Tuesday.

US-led forces joined the battle for the first time overnight, bombing Shia positions, the UK military said.

I’m guessing that US-led forces joined the battle because the Iraqi forces were failing miserably, as we’ve seen about 25 other times in this misbegotten war. And this doesn’t just include air cover, which we’ve been giving all along, but armor forces. And we’re in the lead.

Four U.S. Stryker armored vehicles were seen in Sadr City by a Washington Post correspondent, one of them engaging Mahdi Army militiamen with heavy fire. The din of American weapons, along with the Mahdi Army’s AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, was heard through much of the day. U.S. helicopters and drones buzzed overhead.

The clashes suggested that American forces were being drawn more deeply into a broad offensive that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, launched in the southern city of Basra on Tuesday, saying death squads, criminal gangs and rogue militias were the targets. The Mahdi Army of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a Shiite rival of Maliki, appeared to have taken the brunt of the attacks; fighting spread to many southern cities and parts of Baghdad.

As President Bush told an Ohio audience that Iraq was returning to “normalcy,” administration officials in Washington held meetings to assess what appeared to be a rapidly deteriorating security situation in many parts of the country.

“Drawn in” like one is drawn into quicksand. Or perhaps a quagmire.

Baghdad Bush can go on all he wants, but I hope something else doesn’t get lost. For two years, these Iraqi security forces, the ones who consistently get routed on the battlefield and defect to the other side and generally provide a pretext for our troops having to continue to return to battle, were organized by DAVID PETRAEUS, who now walks with angels, I’m told. We shouldn’t forget this.

According to the WaPo we didn’t even know in advance that this offensive would be launched, and considering that we had to end up doing the fighting that seems odd. It’s obvious that this is a political fight disguised as a military operation, with Maliki’s Iran-backed militia attacking Sadr’s not-so-Iranian-backed militia in order to gain an edge heading into provincial elections in the Shiite south in the fall. That’s all this is about, and our troops are now paying the price.

It’s really enough to make you sick. The New York Times has some additional coverage. And don’t miss Josh Marshall’s take.

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Bush’s Goons, Jenna’s Barhopping, and Breathtaking Lawlessness

by dday

I’ll be heading out to San Jose tomorrow for the California Democratic Party Convention, the largest gathering of uncommitted superdelegates outside the US Capitol. Bill Clinton will be there on Sunday and we’ll have a lot of coverage at Calitics. So I won’t be posting around these parts much, unless you like hearing about legislative districts in the Palm Springs region.

But before embarking on that journey, I wanted to highlight this incredible excerpt from Eric Lichtblau’s upcoming book Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice. Lichtblau and his partner James Risen won a Pulitzer for breaking the illegal warrantless wiretapping story in late 2005. But they had the story over a year earlier, and were rebuffed from going to print due to the Administration’s intimidation of New York Times editors. In this excerpt Lichtblau recounts the story when Bush sends in the big guns to try and kill the story once and for all. You really sense how they work as a kind of loanshark operation rather than an executive branch:

For 13 long months, we’d held off on publicizing one of the Bush administration’s biggest secrets. Finally, one afternoon in December 2005, as my editors and I waited anxiously in an elegantly appointed sitting room at the White House, we were again about to let President Bush’s top aides plead their case: why our newspaper shouldn’t let the public know that the president had authorized the National Security Agency, in apparent contravention of federal wiretapping law, to eavesdrop on Americans without court warrants. As New York Times Editor Bill Keller, Washington Bureau Chief Phil Taubman, and I awaited our meeting, we still weren’t sure who would make the pitch for the president. Dick Cheney had thought about coming to the meeting but figured his own tense relations with the newspaper might actually hinder the White House’s efforts to stop publication. (He was probably right.) As the door to the conference room opened, however, a slew of other White House VIPs strolled out to greet us, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice near the head of the receiving line and White House Counsel Harriet Miers at the back.

For more than an hour, we told Bush’s aides what we knew about the wiretapping program, and they in turn told us why it would do grave harm to national security to let anyone else in on the secret. Consider the financial damage to the phone carriers that took part in the program, one official implored. If the terrorists knew about the wiretapping program, it would be rendered useless and would have to be shut down immediately, another official urged: “It’s all the marbles.” The risk to national security was incalculable, the White House VIPs said, their voices stern, their faces drawn. “The enemy,” one official warned, “is inside the gates.” The clichés did their work; the message was unmistakable: If the New York Times went ahead and published this story, we would share the blame for the next terrorist attack.

It’s impossible to overstate how much of a lie this is. “Terrorists” who didn’t know they were being surveilled before December 2005 were indeed very stupid and out-of-work terrorists. The program that would have to be shut down immediately is illegal; but spying on terrorists who threaten the country is still, in fact, both legal and operative, under FISA. And the chief Administration concerns are on full display here: how would the phone companies get out of their lawsuits, and who would get blamed for their own fuck-ups. Corporate crime and passing the buck; that’s the Bush way.

And later we learn that the White House is so concerned about keeping every American safe in their beds that they have agencies like the Secret Service only tackle the most important assignments.

As federal officials scrambled to avert the much-feared “second wave” of attacks, reporters likewise scrambled to follow any hint of the next possible attack and to put it on the front page—from scuba divers off the coast of Southern California to hazmat trucks in the Midwest and tourist helicopters in New York City. One example of the shift: On Sept. 12, 2001, another major newspaper was set to run a story on the extraordinary diplomatic maneuverings the U.S. Secret Service had arranged with their Mexican counterparts to allow Jenna Bush, then 19, to make a barhopping trip south of the border. (She had just been charged with underage drinking in Texas.) A few days earlier, a scoop about a presidential daughter’s barhopping trip getting special dispensation from the Secret Service and a foreign government might have gotten heavy treatment. But the story never ran, and the Secret Service’s maneuverings remained a secret until now. In the weeks and months after 9/11, there was no longer an appetite for such stories.

Then Lichtblau explains to us the Administration’s contempt for the press:

By 2004, I had gained a reputation, deservedly or not, as one of the administration’s toughest critics in the Justice Department press corps; the department even confiscated my press pass briefly after I wrote an unpopular story about the FBI’s interest in collecting intelligence on anti-Iraq war demonstrations in the United States. To John Ashcroft and his aides, my coverage reflected a bias. To me, it reflected a healthy, essential skepticism—the kind that was missing from much of the media’s early reporting after 9/11, both at home in the administration’s war on terror and abroad in the run-up to the war in Iraq.

And what’s so typical of this crowd, guys like Cheney who really think they are the smartest guys in the room, is that they can out and out lie to reporters and the American public even when they must KNOW that the recipients of their lies know the truth. That’s a rare gift.

On that December afternoon in the White House, the gathered officials attacked on several fronts. There was never any serious legal debate within the administration about the legality of the program, Bush’s advisers insisted. The Justice Department had always signed off on its legality, as required by the president. The few lawmakers who were briefed on the program never voiced any concerns. From the beginning, there were tight controls in place to guard against abuse. The program would be rendered so ineffective if disclosed that it would have to be shut down immediately.

All these assertions, as my partner Jim Risen and I would learn in our reporting, turned out to be largely untrue. Jim and I had already learned about much of the internal angst within the administration over the legality of the NSA program at the outset of our reporting, more than a year earlier in the fall of 2004.

It wasn’t until Risen basically told the paper that he would put the wiretapping story in his book State of War that the Times got serious about publishing it. And even after their reporting uncovered all the ins and outs of the story – and how the debate reached the highest levels – the Bushies were about to go so far as blocking publication through a “Pentagon Papers-type injunction.” (This led the Times to publishing the story online the night before they put it in the paper.)

There’s only one reason for this: because the Administration knew what they were doing was flagrantly illegal, and at the time thought they wouldn’t be able to wiggle their way out of it. The extraordinary lengths to which they wanted to go to spike the story speaks only to the enormity of the crime. We still don’t know the extent of it, but Lichtblau and Risen gave us a road map to follow, and Mark Klein and the EFF and the ACLU are continuing down that path today. For now, the Congress hasn’t put up a roadblock. But add this excerpt, and Lichtblau’s forthcoming book, to the pile of cautionary tales which should give any Blue Dog or Jello Jay pause before they eviscerate the rule of law.

That issue looks to be in a stalemate for now. What is far more revealing in this story is how utterly shameless this crew, which should have a restraining order barring them from coming within 100 yards of Washington, has always been. A responsible media would be churning out story after story about the breathtaking state of lawlessness inside the White House, viewing it in historical context and talking about the pall they’ve cast over our nation. As it is, everybody wants to forget it. But that would be a crucial mistake. There should be no binding up of wounds and moving on for the sake of the nation. In fact, for the sake of the nation we must do just the opposite: have a full recounting of the facts and a full prison cell for everyone who participated in this wreck.

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Who’s On First

by digby

In case you missed it, K-Drum has put together a very helpful cheat sheet for trying to sort out all the players in the new Shia intramural explosion in southern Iraq. Very helpful. I was beginning to feel like John McCain, not knowing which extremist/jihadist/terrorist/militia was up.

I’ll sure be glad when St John gets all the players in a room and gets them to “stop the bullshit” won’t you?

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