Month: June 2008

End Of The Quarter

by digby

We are coming to the end of the fund raising quarter and it’s important for these congressional candidates we all support to be able to tell the press they have raised enough money to make a good run to the fall. If you have some extra change from your rebate check or any other spare change, you might want to put it toward your favorite candidate or a little bit across the board to all of our Blue America field.

I’m going to be sending money today to Darcy Burner. I support her because she is an extremely smart, truly progressive politician who will be a leader for our side in the congress. She’s already done great work in this campaign. As Steve Clemons wrote about her:

One of the best pieces of policy work out there that I have seen done thus far was Darcy Burner’s “A Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq…”
This “Responsible Plan” is a big deal. Read it — I think that this is perhaps a more important fundamental playbook for thinking through an Iraq withdrawal than what we are getting from either of the two (well, barely two) Democratic presidential candidates.

Ifthis is any guide as to where the Democratic establishment is going then we need as many people in congress like Darcy as we can get.

But as much as I like her I also want to support her because of the first class ass she is running against. Here’s his ad from 2006:

It’s fine to run on experience. It’s not fine to portray your opponent as being a blithering bimbo in an advertisment.

Matt Stoller wrote:

Darcy Burner is a Harvard educated former Microsoft group program manager who oversaw a staff of about 40 people with a budget of $17 million, and this year, she authored a Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq. She is brilliant, accomplished, and a hell of a candidate, but Reichert in 2006 successfully portrayed her as a dumb ditzy blond who would do whatever Democrats told her, in contrast to the wise older experienced man. A few days ago, Reichert joked about Hillary Clinton dying in a plane crash, a joke he’s been telling since last February. He used a grossly sexist and nasty campaign in 2006 to keep his seat in Congress and vote against women’s rights. And just watch him interrupt Darcy Burner during a debate, in order to argue in favor of denying birth control to women.

Needless to say, there are many positive reasons to support Burner and many substantive reasons to get that reactionary jerk Reichert out of congress. But I’ve reached the limits of my tolerance for this sexist crap in politics and I want to see it stopped.

Women don’t run for office as often as men largely because they know they are going to face not only the usual horror show of diminished private life, constantly dialing for dollars, having their words and deeds twisted by their opponents and facing a stupid and juvenile press corps. But they have this whole other layer of bullshit and anyone would have to ask herself if it’s worth it.

I admire people like Darcy and all the other women who put themselves out there to do this thing and face sexist, privileged creeps like Dave Reichert. I couldn’t do it. But I can stand up for them and try to help make this kind of campaigning go the way of the minstrel show. Enough.

You can donate to all the Blue America candidates here.

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It’s Not Her Place

by digby

Uh oh. Melinda Henneberger takes note of an important Village social leader making a major faux pas:

For years, Catholics have been arguing about who is and is not supposed to receive Communion. Until now, these were family fights, always over abortion, and nearly always involving elected officials. After pro-choice presidential candidate John Kerry received the Eucharist at my parish in 2004, for instance, the priest was so excited, he announced the big news at a subsequent Mass, and got a standing ovation. (I know, right? Oy.) While at the other end of the spectrum, some cowboy in vestments recently refused to serve the conservative pro-life jurist Doug Kmiec, for the supposed sin of having smiled at Barack Obama. (OK, he endorsed him, in Slate.)

But then non-Catholic Sally Quinn took Communion at Tim Russert’s funeral—and blogged about the body and blood in the Washington Post-Newsweek religion site “On Faith.”

Last Wednesday at Tim’s funeral mass at [Holy]Trinity Church in Georgetown (Jack Kennedy’s church), communion was offered. I had only taken communion once in my life, at an evangelical church. It was soon after I had started “On Faith” and I wanted to see what it was like. Oddly I had a slightly nauseated sensation after I took it, knowing that in some way it represented the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Last Wednesday I was determined to take it for Tim, transubstantiation notwithstanding. I’m so glad I did. It made me feel closer to him. And it was worth it just to imagine how he would have loved it. After I began “On Faith,” Tim started calling me “Sister Sal” instead of “Miss Sal.”

This reads a little too much like a restaurant review for my comfort; Christ Almighty: Tangy Yet Nauseating? And good as he was, we don’t really take Communion to feel closer to Tim Russert.

This is a woman who writes a blog in the Washington Post on the subject of religion. You would think she’d know that communion is a fairly serious matter. But then, “Sister Sal” isn’t a serious person. She’s a Village socialite and trend follower. Right now, Catholicism is all the rage what with Monsignor Tim’s untimely death and all. It’s the hip clique of the moment and Quinn just wants to be a part of it.

Unfortunately for Quinn, that clique is a bit prickly about it’s rituals:

Not surprisingly, Quinn inflamed conservative Catholics. William Donohue’s Catholic League responded with the usual outrage: “Just reading what Sally Quinn said is enough to give any Christian, especially Catholics, more than a ‘slightly nauseating sensation.’ In her privileged world, life is all about experiences and feelings. … Moreover, Quinn’s statement not only reeks of narcissism, it shows a profound disrespect for Catholics and the beliefs they hold dear.”

Well, yes, but she’s also brought progressive and conservative Catholics together for a minute; as a left-leaning Catholic writer I know said in an e-mail this morning, “For the first time ever, I may agree with Bill Donohue!”

Oh my goodness. When normal people agree with Bill Donohue, you know that something has gone horribly wrong. Sadly, for the allegedly deeply religious Quinn, she didn’t stop with her column. Evidently she really is so uninformed about religion that she defended herself by saying that Jesus wouldn’t agree with their rules and restrictions. Oh lordy:

Alas, when the New Republic reached Quinn for comment, she made things worse for herself by asking What Would Jesus Do, lecturing that real Christians wouldn’t turn anyone away and confusing her situation with that of Catholic pro-choice politicians. “Sally Quinn’s comments on her decision to take communion was one of those moments that makes professionals on the religion beat cringe,” said David Gibson, a longtime religion journalist and former member of the board of the Religion Newswriters Association, the organization for those covering religion in the secular media. “Her explanation displayed such ignorance of the most fundamental tenets of a major faith as well as the basic proprieties of how journalists—and other guests—should conduct themselves at the services of a faith not their own.”

Quinn’s never been much of a journalist, religious or otherwise. She’s a trendy and a gossip, always at the forefront of whatever is the Village’s prevailing social obsession of the moment. When loose, liberal morals were in, she was loose — had an open affair with her married boss. When hypocritical conservative morals were in she was hypocritically conservative, looking down her nose at others’ foibles. (Oh wait … that’s always in.) After 9/11, she turned herself into an “expert” on surviving a terrorist attack. She went around the DC area giving lectures on what people needed to do to keep themselves safe. When being an evangelical became all the rage in the capitol, she was there writing columns about Jesus in the Washington Post.

She never knows what she’s talking about so there’s nothing new about this. But it’s interesting nonetheless because it illustrates that the Village is under some stress. Perhaps it’s a generational changing of the guard or just simple confusion and nervousness around the idea of a different BMOC and attendant kewl kidz. But the unfortunate truth is that if Sally Quinn is replaced by the likes of her critic here, Melinda Henneberger, don’t expect anything substantial to change. The new crowd is the same as the old crowd.

Still,you can’t help but enjoy seeing Quinn hoist by her own petard on this. She’s forever lecturing others about proper behavior and showing respect. And here she treats taking communion like it’s a night out with Paris and Benji at Crown guzzling Missionary Downfalls. People who take their worship seriously don’t care for that. She went to their church and trashed the place. And it’s not her place.

H/T to GL

The Dumbest People Alive

by dday

The right’s latest hissy fit is truly a stunner. I don’t know how they found out about the Addington-Yoo hearing on torture, because it certainly didn’t make the news, but somehow this exchange bubbled up to them:

ADDINGTON: As I indicated to the Chairman at the beginning of this thing, I’m not in a position to talk about particular techniques, whether they are or aren’t used or could or couldn’t be used, or their legal status. And the reasons I give for that, I think if you look at page 9, the President’s speech of September 6, 2006, explains why he doesn’t talk about particular techniques…

DELAHUNT: Oh I can understand why [the President] doesn’t talk about it.

ADDINGTON: Because you kind of communicate with al Qaeda. If you do — I can’t talk to you, al Qaeda may watch C-SPAN.

DELAHUNT: Right. Well, I’m sure they are watching, and I’m glad they finally have a chance to see you, Mr. Addington.

ADDINGTON: Yeah, I’m sure you’re pleased.

This joke about Addington’s famous secrecy is now being held up by the arbiters of discourse on the right, the scared little piddlies, as some example of William Delahunt “inciting Al Qaeda to violence,” if you can believe it.

Are these people 6 years old? What is the expected conversation in the caves of Tora Bora:

AL QAEDA #1: My friend, come quickly, check out C-SPAN!

AL QAEDA #2: The cable is working again?

AQ #1: Yes, Waziristan Time Warner came out this morning. Look, it’s Addington!

AQ #2: Cheney’s Cheney?

AQ #1: Yes, finally we know what he looks and sounds like! We must begin plans for the attack now. Death to America!

AQ #2: Wait… let’s exercise caution. We haven’t been egged on by a Democratic Senator yet.

(voice of Delahunt offscreen: “I’m sure they are watching, and I’m glad they finally have a chance to see you, Mr. Addington.”)

AQ #1: Congressman Delahunt gave the signal!

AQ #2: Release the sleeper cell! Insh’allah!

What pathetic, pathetic people. It’d be nice if they focused on the part where John Yoo wouldn’t admit that a President was not allowed to order a prisoner buried alive. But I guess I’m asking too much. Feigned outrage is more their specialty.

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Don’t Speak The Obvious

by digby

It is a matter of conventional wisdom that liberals need to be better at “marketing” their ideas. Liberals respond by saying our ideas are complicated and meaningful so we are at a disadvantage in terms of sloganeering and elevator pitching. We can’t come up with the pithy one liners and bumper stickers like they do because we are much more serious than they are.

And yet, there was one liberal slogan in the past 20 years that was completely to the point, short, pithy and spot on — and it was vilified by nearly everyone across the political spectrum as being just too over the top. (As if “you’ll take my smoking gun when you pry it from my cold dead fingers” is a mild little jingle.)”Serious” people could never say such a thing.

As I’ve written before, that slogan was the antiwar chant, “no blood for oil.” It was true and yet it was considered “all wrong.” It’s a testament to the conservative rhetorical dominance of our culture that it was relegated to the fringe.

Here’s Bill Moyers, from tonight’s Journal:

It Was Oil, All Along

By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn’t a war about oil. That’s cynical and simplistic, they said. It’s about terror and al Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire, and ashes. And now the bottom line turns out to be….the bottom line. It is about oil.

Alan Greenspan said so last fall. The former chairman of the Federal Reserve, safely out of office, confessed in his memoir,“…Everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” He elaborated in an interview with the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward,
“If Saddam Hussein had been head of Iraq and there was no oil under those sands, our response to him would not have been as strong as it was in the first gulf war.”

Remember, also, that soon after the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, told the press that war was our only strategic choice. “…We had virtually no economic options with Iraq,” he explained, “because the country floats on a sea of
oil.”

Shades of Daniel Plainview, the monstrous petroleum tycoon in the movie There Will Be Blood. Half-mad, he exclaims, “There’s a whole ocean of oil under our feet!” then adds, “No one can get at it except for me!”

No wonder American troops only guarded the Ministries of Oil and the Interior in Baghdad, even as looters pillaged museums of their priceless antiquities. They were making sure no one could get at the oil except… guess who?…

Here’s a recent headline in The New York Times: “Deals with Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back.” Read on: “Four western companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power.”There you have it. After a long exile, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP are back in Iraq. And on the wings of no-bid contracts – that’s right, sweetheart deals like those given Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater. The kind of deals you get only if you have friends in high places. And these war profiteers have friends in very high
places.

Let’s go back a few years to the 1990’s, when private citizen Dick Cheney was running Halliburton, the big energy supplier. That’s when he told the oil industry that, “By 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.”

Fast forward to Cheney’s first heady days in the White House. The oil industry and other energy conglomerates have been headed backdoor keys to the White House, and their CEO’s and lobbyists were trooping in and out for meetings with their old opal, now Vice President Cheney. The meetings are secret, conducted under tight security, but as we reported five years ago, among the documents that turned up from some of those meetings were maps of oil fields in Iraq – and a list of companies who wanted access to them. The conservative group Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club filed suit to try to find out who attended the meetings and what was discussed, but the White House fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep the press and public from learning the whole truth.

Think about it. These secret meetings took place six months before 9/11, two years before Bush and Cheney invaded Iraq. We still don’t know what they were about. What we know is that this is the oil industry that’s enjoying swollen profits these days. It would be laughable if it weren’t so painful to remember that their erstwhile cheerleader for invading Iraq – the press mogul Rupert Murdoch – once said that a successful war there would bring us $20 a barrel of oil. The last time we looked, it was more than $140 a barrel. Where are you, Rupert, when the facts need checking and the predictions are revisited?

At a congressional hearing this week, James Hansen, the NASA climate scientist who exactly twenty years ago alerted Congress and the world to the dangers of global warming, compared the chief executives of Big Oil to the tobacco moguls who denied that nicotine is addictive or that there’s a link between smoking and cancer. Hansen,
who the administration has tried again and again to silence, said these barons of black gold should be tried for committing crimes against humanity and nature in opposing efforts to deal with global warming.

Perhaps those sweetheart deals in Iraq should be added to his proposed indictments. They have been purchased at a very high price. Four thousand American soldiers dead, tens of thousands permanently wounded for life, hundreds of thousands of dead and crippled Iraqis plus five million displaced, and a cost that will mount into trillions of dollars. The political analyst Kevin Phillips says America has become little more than an “energy protection force,”doing anything to gain access to expensive fuel without regard to the lives of others or the earth itself. One thinks again of Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood. His lust for oil came at the price of his son and his soul.

Throwdown

by digby

Glenn Greenwald and Keith Olbermann have gotten into a dustup over the FISA legislation in which John Dean seems to be the arbiter. (Isn’t the blogosphere grand?)

Anyway, everyone can have their own opinion about the merits, and whether or not Keith or Glenn are taking the right tack in terms of Obama’s agreement to support the compromise. Unsurprisingly, I favor Greenwald’s argument on this. I just don’t think it’s really necessary to support this compromise in order to win this election and I think that at the very least we should have these programs examined by a new Justice department before anybody makes any more laws on the subject. It’s entirely possible that an Obama administration will simply reinstate them — the willingness to support this compromise suggests that it will. And I wouldn’t support that under any circumstances. But the idea that it has to be done in order to win the election I think is wrong. You can appeal to swing voters in some other way than trashing the constitution. (Here’s a novel idea. How about making a better argument?)

Having said that, Obama is the Democratic nominee and he’s a far more liberal, modern, open minded leader than John McCain could ever dream of being. Indeed, he is in every respect a fine candidate who I am proud to support, despite his campaign’s decision to use some moldy old tropes to offset some of the public’s mistrust of a young, liberalish, African American nominee. It’s going to take years of hard work on the part of progressives everywhere to make that something that politicians no longer believe is necessary or desirable.

Obama has opened up some avenues for his supporters to talk directly to him. From Jane Hamsher:

It’s also interesting to note that the tools created to help organize Obama supporters against his opponents are now being used to organize themselves to communicate with him. There’s a new group on “MyBarackObama.com” called “Senator Obama — Please Vote Against FISA.” Stop by and tell the Senator that you’ll be voting for him in November and hoping that in the meantime, he does the right thing.

It’s unlikely to make a difference in this vote, of course, but it’s necessary to go on the record and keep talking about these things if you want them to change. If we can change the political zeitgeist, someday conservatives will be the ones having to risk offending their base for a change.

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Acid Flashbacks

by digby

Somerby has been doing an incredible retrospective on the Russert years at NBC this week. If you want to really dig into an interesting examination of why our media is so incredibly destructive, take a few minutes and read it all.

Here’s a little excerpt from one exchange he discusses from back in 1999, featuring two of our most important gasbags in 2008:

The Clintons had recently purchased their home in Chappaqua, but they hadn’t moved into it yet. After an inane discussion about Hillary Clinton’s choice in home decor and lack of a New York driver’s license, Matthews began to offer his thoughts about a statement she had made concerning New York City homelessness policy. A taped statement by Clinton began his next segment. Mitchell snarked along with her host after that:

CLINTON (videotape): No violent or dangerous person should be on our streets threatening themselves or our community. But we don’t help matters by throwing them out of shelters onto the street or putting them into a revolving door jail time where they go in and out and are on the streets again. The goal should be treating such people and, where necessary, putting them into situations where they can be treated effectively.

MATTHEWS: Boy, you’ve got a tough job being an objective reporter in a race like this. I don’t even have to try. Here’s a woman complaining about homelessness and how they’re being treated when she hasn’t even checked into her shelter yet!

MITCHELL: She’s a—

MATTHEWS: This woman doesn’t even have a home in New York!

MITCHELL: She empathized; she’s a homeless person.

MATTHEWS: Right!

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Clinton was talking about the homeless—and she didn’t even have a home yet! And then, things went from bad to worse. Jack Welch’s favorite fruitcake decided to say a few weird things about his own interactions with the homeless:

MATTHEWS: Let’s talk about the homeless, because the homeless—most of us men, maybe more than women, because guys reach into their pockets for change—women have to go in their pocketbook. I really think it’s easier for a male to give a half a buck or a quarter to somebody on the way by because of guilt or—

MITCHELL: We still manage to give.

MATTHEWS: I know, but you could stop—and also guys, I don’t know what it—

MITCHELL: And we’re guiltier than you guys are.

MATTHEWS: I don’t think that’s true. I’m—I always feel like saying I give—in San Francisco, it’s a big problem there; you give a guy a half dollar or whatever you have available or a quarter or a dollar even sometimes, if they really look in trouble, and then you feel like the next guy you get to, he doesn’t have a—you had—like you had—you put a, you need to put a badge on, “I just gave at the last corner here.” HA! But you get hit with the same kind of ferocity, the same kind of—sometimes pathetic, sometimes intimidating manner. And I think people who pay taxes and, and give to church or synagogue or something, say, “Wait a minute, I do a decent job here,” and if a person comes up with a particular case, I’m gonna be open to him. But if they’re just here to intimidate me—you know, that’s what it’s about.

MITCHELL: Well, that—that’s exactly why Rudy Giuliani has sort of the right tempo of New Yorkers. He really gets that.

I think it’s hard to wrap your mind around just how corrupt, trivial and downright stupid these people are when you’re in the middle of a big story, particularly one in which you have a personal emotional stake. But this is typical of the way they portray our politics and it’s almost always in service of some braindead rightwing worldview. In this case, you had Chris Matthews and Andrea Mitchell pretty much endorsing Rudy Giuliani for the US Senate based on some complete bullshit fantasy in Chris Matthews’ twisted mind. It’s amazing that these people are still on the air.

MSNBC is supposedly “our” network. But sometimes you have to ask if friends like this are what we really need. With the exception of a few independent intelligent voices on the network, this is pretty much representative of the level of discourse they provide. On the whole, it still serves conservatives, not us.

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Wrong About Everything

by dday

Boy, the wingnuts really don’t know what to do about this North Korea situation. It’s really a foreign concept based on “diplomacy” and “incentives for compliance” and other fantasyland hippie stuff they must have come up with on the pot-smokers lawn in the Haight-Ashbury. Real men know that such multilateralism is excessively dangerous and will cause all of us to be blown to bits.

HEWITT: By the way, I — I’m still trying to find two tickets to the Ohio State-USC game. And none of the USC people will give up their tickets to me. I’d pay fair price. They — they know Ohio State’s gonna slaughter the Trojans. They know that they’re gonna slaughter the Trojans, and therefore they do not want me there at the bloodbath, since it’s probably the last football game we’ll ever get to see before the United States gets blown up by the Islamists under Obama.

But this foreign policy decision was made by the Dear Leader himself – W., with a big assist from envoy Christopher Hill – and they just don’t know what to make of that. Leading to the most amusing 30 seconds of Sean Hannity’s career.

HANNITY: North Korea has finally handed over a long awaited accounting of its nuclear program to Chinese officials, fulfilling a key step in the denuclearization process. Although North Korea’s declaration is six months later than their deadline, the news today brings a clear foreign policy victory for the Bush administration. But will the press report it that way? Joining us now for analysis, former ambassador to the U.N. and a Fox News contributor, John Bolton. What do you think this means?

BOLTON: I think it’s actually a clear victory for North Korea. They gain enormous political legitimacy….In return, we get precious little. I think this is North Korea demonstrating again that they can out-negotiate the U.S. without raising a sweat.

HANNITY: Boy I tell you they’ve done it time and time again, and I’m sorta perplexed, Mr. Ambassador, to understand why we keep going back to the well knowing that they haven’t kept the agreements in the past. Whatever happened to Reagan’s “trust but verify”?

That’s fair and balanced all from the same guy.

Not even Fourthbranch, the Barnacle himself, could outmaneuver the State Department on this one, and he’s not happy:

WASHINGTON — Two days ago, during an off-the-record session with a group of foreign policy experts, Vice President Dick Cheney got a question he did not want to answer. “Mr. Vice President,” asked one of them, “I understand that on Wednesday or Thursday, we are going to de-list North Korea from the terrorism blacklist. Could you please set the context for this decision?”

Mr. Cheney froze, according to four participants at the Old Executive Office Building meeting. For more than 30 minutes he had been taking and answering questions, without missing a beat. But now, for several long seconds, he stared, unsmilingly, at his questioner, Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation, a public policy institution. Finally, he spoke:

“I’m not going to be the one to announce this decision,” the other participants recalled Mr. Cheney saying, pointing at himself. “You need to address your interest in this to the State Department.” He then declared that he was done taking questions, and left the room.

The Barnacle froze because it’s one of the few things that could be considered a foreign policy triumph in the history of the Bush Administration, and it happened because mindless warhawks like him were finally sidelined. Bush’s North Korea policy began with a series of mishaps and belligerence, just as the neocons wished, and it led to Kim Jong-Il getting the bomb. Precisely when the State Department started guiding the policy and Christopher Hill was given leeway to negotiate in the six-party talks, the situation changes, leading to today’s destruction of their nuclear facility at Yongbon. The world is still a more dangerous place because of all of the delays, and the DPRK still has about a dozen poorly-designed nuclear weapons as a result.

But the facts are that as soon as the neocon “my way or the highway” approach was abandoned, progress was made. And that’s because the neocons have been wrong about every single foreign policy decision for well over 50 years, and their attitude with respect to North Korea made no dent in that unbroken record. I don’t have to tell you the position John McCain has held on this issue since 1999, do I?

McCain repeated this trope throughout the speech, drawing on his personal history and adopting the rhetoric of moral seriousness about the consequences of committing American forces. But awareness of the consequences was, for McCain, no reason to avoid starting a war […] In his view, efforts at conflict prevention are fundamentally misguided. He told the Kansas State audience that notwithstanding the Clinton administration’s efforts, Korea’s leaders “remain quite capable of launching in their country’s death throes one final, glorious war. But now, they are much, much better armed.” In short — war is inevitable, so better to get it over with as soon as possible.

I hope I’m not surprising anyone by saying that on foreign policy, John McCain is basically to the right of George W. Bush.

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Standards

by digby

This piece of tabloid trivia from a supposedly responsible news person isn’t really worth commenting on except to say that we should probably expect to get more of these little tid bits. It’s the kind of kewl kid gossip they furiously blackberry to each other all day long.

But I have to say that the Washington Post blog comment sections are revolting. And that’s pretty surprising considering how they went completely around the bend when liberals dared to criticize … the paper itself. Apparently, it’s just fine to make stomach churning racist comments on their site, but call a reporter on the carpet and it’s time to shut them down. It’s an unusual standard. I would suggest an emergency blogger ethics panel immediately.

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A Piece Of Ordnance In Every Pot

by dday

We in the blogosphere have been so worked up about the FISA bill that we virtually ignored the fact that the Senate confirmed what the House began, passing an enormous spending bill to fund the occupation of Iraq and the war in Afghanistan well into the next Administration. There are also provisions for a new GI Bill, unemployment benefit extension for an additional 13 weeks, and a number of domestic spending initiatives (including midwest flooding relief).

Considering that the 110th Congress was elected with a mandate to end the war, it’s a little surprising that practically nobody raised their voice in so much as anger to this continued funding. It could be learned helplessness, a resigned view that Congress wasn’t going to use their procedural abilities to make any effort to stop the occupation of Iraq. Or it could be that the nation has been bullied into believing that “we’re winning” and “the surge is working” while the media has simultaneously taken the details about Iraq off the TV screens and front pages, which makes it that much easier for the bullies.

It’s not like people aren’t still dying – they are, including 13 Americans this week and scores of Iraqis, at least 70 just yesterday. They’re dying at a somewhat reduced rate, but political progress is not existent and the core factors causing the violence remain unchanged. Ethnic cleansing and paying off enemies to create heavily armed militias are the main contributing factors, and those aren’t recipes for stability. Yet this is considered to be success. But let me give you an example of what that success looks like, what our tax dollars have bought, and keep in mind the Heller v. DC ruling when you read about it:

Meanwhile, Iraqi officials said a U.S. airstrike killed four members of a family north of Baghdad early Wednesday. Iraqi and U.S. officials provided conflicting accounts of the incident.

Capt. Ahmed al-Azwawi, a police official in Samra, a village about seven miles south of Tikrit, said U.S. troops were conducting an operation in the area when a man fired shots in the air with an AK-47.

Azwawi said the man, who sold propane gas for a living, was afraid thieves were in the vicinity.

U.S. soldiers then retreated and called in an airstrike, Azwawi said, killing the man, his wife, and two of their children.

The kids were 6 and 8, and a separate report claims that two other kids were killed.

There’s no secret, other than in the US media, that American forces are trying to secure Iraq through massive airstrikes, many of which result in trigger-happy responses anytime anyone fires a gun (and practically every adult male in Iraq owns an AK-47). The murdered families have relatives, and every incident like this engenders anger and distrust. The status of forces agreement sought by Bush calls explicitly for continued air superiority for the US military.

As usual, when America sees a war slipping away, they bomb the fuck out of the ground. And the bipartisan coalition of the United States government enthusiastically endorses and funds the slaughter. Let’s be very clear – your representatives bought another year’s worth of stories like the one above, with no gain in national security, a stretching of the US military to the very breaking point should anything else crop up, and no effort to manage or deal with the underlying root causes in the country we unnecessarily invaded.

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Britneyizing Logan

by digby

Here we go again with another respected journalist being targeted for daring not to abide by the established village mores. As I noted earlier today, Lara Logan appeared on Jon Stewart and made some pretty harsh assessments of the news media’s commitment to serious war coverage. From Will Bunch:

A number of bloggers picked up Logan’s comments on “The Daily Show” and to the Times, and the video was a huge hit on the Internet. She was on with Stewart last week and was featured in the Times article on Monday. Later this week, a story appeared about Logan — not exactly your normal A-list celebrity — in the pages of the National Enquirer, which of couse had nothing to do with Logan’s actual news coverage of Iraq or her pointed criticism of the U.S. media. The story was strictly about allegations involving Logan’s personal life. It was quickly picked up by some other outlets, some surprising, like the Huffington Post, and some not surprising at all. In fact, the story was splashed across the front page of this morning’s New York Post, the tabloid that is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who is also owner of (among many things) the Fox News Channel, the leading producer of braindead pro-war journalism that is the exact opposite of Logan’s groundbreaking work. You’d also be shocked, I’m sure, to learn that the Post article is linked on the highly popular, conservative leaning Drudge Report. I’m not going to link to the articles — use “the Google” if you must — but to give you a flavor of this important news story, the Post cover shows a smiling Logan over the large headline, “Sexty Minutes.” If you do read the stories, you’d be hard-pressed to see why these allegations are suddenly rushing out now. One traces back to a court matter filed back in January. The second part of the article is old news, too — dating back at least to last year. As the Post notes in the one part of the article that I will mention, it’s a saga that “first broke on the freerepublic.com in December.” The freerepublic.com? As in, the ultraconservative Web site where reporters and photojournalists who report truthfully from Iraq are frequently attacked or smeared. Indeed, it seems that attacks on Logan in the right-wing blogopshere are nothing new — last year, conservative Michelle Malkin falsely charged that “Haifa Street” story contained footage provided by al-Qaeda. But this is different — the smearing of Lara Logan is bleeding into the mainstream, more widely read media, and it’s getting personal. And of course it’s easy to play devil’s advocate, because gossip about certain types of TV personalties — certainly the local news anchors in a market like mine, Philadelphia — is standard newspaper fare, especially when the personalities are good-looking, as Logan surely is. But she’s not an anchorwoman, just a network war correspondent whose not even based around here, and even if these stories about her personal foibles are true, and who knows about that, it’s simply not Page 1 news. But the timing here really stinks. Is this just another low-grade tabloid scandal — or a message to journalists who dare to criticize big corporate media’s growing blackout on news from Iraq?

Well there is a precedent for sidelining anyone who dares criticize the media’s war coverage, isn’t there? And in this case, the journalist is highly respected with an impeccable record as a war correspondent.

After being forced to watch that unctuous, phony grief fest a week ago for a fellow everyone extolled as the ultimate newsman because he asked asked some silly questions on Sunday mornings, that someone might be trying to shut this real reporter up for speaking the truth is truly beyond the pale. They will do anything to maintain control of the narrative.

I hope this is coincidence. And, frankly, the smear is fairly innocuous celebrity gossip. But at the very least, it trivializes her, which begins to devalue her as a journalist. I guess they need to bring her down to their shallow level.

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