Month: July 2008

The Maliki Primary

by dday

This is pretty enormous news:

In an interview with Der Spiegel released on Saturday, Maliki said he wanted U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible.

“U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes” […]

Asked if he supported Obama’s ideas more than those of John McCain, Republican presidential hopeful, Maliki said he did not want to recommend who people should vote for.

“Whoever is thinking about the shorter term is closer to reality. Artificially extending the stay of U.S. troops would cause problems.” […]

“The Americans have found it difficult to agree on a concrete timetable for the exit because it seems like an admission of defeat to them. But it isn’t,” Maliki told Der Spiegel.

There’s just no way to spin this. Regardless of Maliki’s motives, this is a total rejection of the McCain conservative position on Iraq. They never wanted to “win,” they wanted to stay. And they are being told they have to leave.

UPDATE: FYI, Dr. Susan Rice of the Obama campaign responds:

“Senator Obama welcomes Prime Minister Maliki’s support for a 16 month timeline for the redeployment of U.S combat brigades. This presents an important opportunity to transition to Iraqi responsibility, while restoring our military and increasing our commitment to finish the fight in Afghanistan.”

The question is what “finish the fight” really means – who are we fighting, and what is the end-state?

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CPAC And Spurs

by digby

I can’t wrap my mind around the fact that the right wingers decided to hold a confab here in Austin at the same time as Netroots Nation.

They claim to be “confronting” us “head-on.” Except we didn’t know it existed.

The right is really off its game these days. I’m afraid it’s going to take a Democratic administration to revive their spirits.

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How The Media Learned To Bend Over Backwards

by dday

OK, so welcome to the main exhibit hall, where we just had a debate between Markos and Harold Ford. (who defended the Congressional vote on FISA by basically saying that the Constitution doesn’t poll very well. I’ll elaborate later.)

Right now I’m in the front row of Digby’s panel on the media, with Rick Perlstein, Paul Krugman, and Atrios. Not a bad group.

Digby dedicated this panel to Molly Ivins, who called for “sustained outrage” on the part of the citizenry against the instruments of power, admonishing the media for its too-cozy respect for authority. Now we’re on to Rick Perlstein, who is giving a little history lesson on how the media went awry. Back in the early 1960s, footage of civil rights marchers having hoses turned on them galvanized public opinion against repression and bigotry. But in 1968, when the Chicago police beat up antiwar protesters half to death, the public opinion was the opposite, “Right on for the cops,” etc. There was a popular bumper sticker in the country at the time, reading “I Support Mayor Daley and His Police.” The press, who considered themselves guardians of the public interest, started to consider whether or not they were prejudiced, elitist, not rooted in the heartland of America, biased toward young people and minorities. And it basically all went to shit from there.

This is going to be good. I’ll update…

…Now we’re on to the media’s liberal guilt, and Spiro Agnew’s series of speeches (written by William Safire) on the “nattering nabobs of negativism” and how the media is trying to tell ordinary Americans what to think. We’re 40 years on and these pundits still are haunted by this. Old narratives die hard.

Paul Krugman is up. He says he was never told to stop writing what he was writing in the run-up to war through much of the Bush years, but he was told that he was making management nervous. In 2005, he was indirectly told to lay up a bit, and that “the election solved some things.” He said that a lot of these failures of the media aren’t exactly political. They go beyond politics. “It is better to be conventionally wrong than unconventionally right.” The example is how nobody who was actually right about the war is allowed to comment about it, but that’s also true with the housing bubble, etc. “There’s something wrong with you if you actually figure this out too early.” There’s a narrow range of being counter-intuitive. It’s acceptable, for example, to say “Bush is actually better on the environment than you think.”

…OK, I’m going to lose laptop juice here, but feel free to gab about the media and I’ll be back around later to wrap up.

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Send Karl Rove To Jail

by dday

I’m watching the premiere of Meet The Bloggers, a brand-new Web-only issues and answers chat show, at the main hall at Netroots Nation. Marcy Wheeler, Baratunde from Jack and Jill Politics and Liliana from Alternet are discussing the case of Karl Rove blowing off the House Judiciary Committee and politicizing the Justice Department. I saw Don Siegelman today, and we all know this story, but to hear Gov. Siegelman say it himself is absolutely stunning. As he said, “If this can happen to me, someone with power and authority, this can happen to you and your family.” This is about perverting the system of justice and restoring fundamental rights and the rule of law.

There’s a lot of activity around this today. Gov. Siegelman put up a site called ContemptForRove.com, to send a petition to legislators to not let up on their emasculation by this Administration.

Recently, the House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Karl Rove, demanding his testimony about his own role in the politicization of the Department of Justice and politically motivated prosecutions of Democratic leaders, including me.

Karl Rove refused to even show up for the hearing, claiming that Congress has no power to compel senior White House officials from testifying. That’s outrageous. Yet again, Karl Rove has showed his callous disregard for the law and for Congress’ constitutional role as a co-equal branch of government.

It’s time for Congress to act: Forward an email to your Member of Congress below, urging him or her to support a contempt resolution against Karl Rove. If Karl Rove won’t respond to a legitimate Congressional subpoena, it’s time to turn up the heat.

And Brave New Films has come out with SendKarlRoveToJail.com.

To paraphrase Baratunde Thurston, there are 2.3 million people in prison in this country, but Karl Rove can blow off Congress and have relative impunity. If anyone deserves jail, it’s him. If we give up and say that Congress won’t do a thing, then in a way we’re complicit in this ourselves. Keep up the pressure.

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Greetings From The Fuck Panel

by dday

Hey, so hello from Netroots Nation in Austin. I’m sitting in Digby’s panel on language and rudeness and horrible vituperativeness on the Internets. So I’ll try and liveblog it a little bit for you, just to bring it to the comfort of your living room or office.

…The idea of the panel is about the role of language inside the blogosphere. Digby just mentioned about how blogging is taken a bit more seriously than it was in earlier days when it was an extended conversation. And so the language is a bit more professionalized. However, as we all know, she doesn’t hold back.

…Atrios just brought up the ultimate bit of rudeness in the last decade… Tom Friedman’s “Suck. On. This.” quote. “If Tom Friedman can say suck on this to Charlie Rose, I can say fuck every now and again.” If the ideas and policies we’ve been subjected to over the last several years are truly offensive and repulsive, then why exactly should the words be so horrifying?

More in a minute…

…also on the panel are Jesse and Amanda from Pandagon, the Rude Pundit, and Kevin Drum, so a mix across the “fuck” spectrum. Jesse just mentioned how people mistake profanity for anger, but sometimes it’s standing in for bemusement. When you see something so offensive, you can use it as a shorthand.

…Atrios said that when people on the right or in the traditional media throw a hissy fit about language, it’s really about removing authority and critiquing on the margins instead of addressing the substance of the arguments. That’s not to say that they are right, and we ought to censor ourselves (there are other means of marginalization). But it’s well-known that there’s an element that talks about bloggers by saying “they say nasty things on the Internets” to avoid the real issue.

…Here’s a pretty good point to throw out there by Digby. Somehow bad language has been associated with the left. Never mind that John McCain has been quoted in public making some, shall we say, untoward comments. But it doesn’t get reported, by and large. But the left ends up tarred with the brush of vulgarity. As she says, “I think the response to that is to own it and say it even more.” Kevin Drum says it about a public/private argument, that when you swear in private it’s somehow OK, but in public it’s deeply horrifying. Think of the Jesse Jackson weeklong brouhaha. They actually got an extension in the news cycle because they found another word to hype. A word.

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Bored Independents

by digby

The good news is that Obama’s fund raising and enthusiasm advantage remain formidable. We’re going to win. Unfortunately, the hunt for the elusive Independent vote doesn’t seem to be going very well for either candidate:

Independents, whom both McCain and Obama are avidly pursuing, remain underwhelmed. Only 21 percent find the election interesting — down from 31 percent in November — and just 7 percent say it’s exciting. Substantial numbers say they feel frustrated, helpless and even bored.

Independents are about evenly divided between the two candidates, with about a quarter behind each. Four in 10 remain undecided, and half say they could still change their minds.

I don’t know what these people need to make an election interesting. If the huge crowds, new faces, songs, debates galore and huge issues don’t do it, I’m not sure what these people want. On the other hand, if it’s stale story lines and narratives that are getting them down, then you can’t really blame them. Listening to gasbags drone on about soccer Moms and security Dads again would put even the most interested observer into a coma.

None of this concerns me all that much because I still think this election will depend on Democratic turnout. High party ID, great ground organization and lots of enthusiasm is key and that seems to be in the bag. And the independents may get excited as the big set pieces of the campaign, like this overseas trip and the convention, get a lot of media attention. These are the dog days. And even if they don’t it’s hard to see how they vote for Mr Excitement. Unless they find crotchety men screaming at the kids to get off their lawns to be interesting, it’s unlikely they’ll suddenly decide that he’s their guy.

On the other hand, if they don’t want to take any chances, Obama and McCain could partner each other on Dancing With the Stars. That might raise the excitement level.

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So literal, dude

by digby

from Instaputz:

Stewart: Do you feel sad, because you wrote the book, Threatening Storm: The Case to Invade? Do you feel like you wish you’d written it, But I’m Just Kidding. I’m Theorizing? Do you feel like you would take it back?

Pollack: I wish people had actually read the book instead of just the subtitle. The book talked about all the things we needed to do to get it right, none of which we did.

Well, yeah, and except for all the stuff inside the book about Saddam having WMD and preparing to use them so we had to invade the country to pre-empt him before he killed us all in our beds, he was pretty much on the money. Why does everybody always obsess over the details he got wrong instead of what he got right? So unfair.

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Deep Thought™

by digby

Travelling by airplane in the US is nothing more than mass training of Americans to the requirements of the coming police state. The whole point is to make you learn to acquiesce without question, en masse, to completely absurd directives by dull functionaries wearing uniforms.

™Atrios

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Boo Hoo Hoo

by digby

Apparently it’s perfectly fine to spend your money to deny people equal rights, but if others decide to withhold their money in protest of your actions, they are big old bullies:

A hotel owner’s $125,000 donation to support a ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage in the state has become a flashpoint, with opponents calling for a boycott of two of his hotels and supporters highlighting the donation in a fund-raising letter.

The hotelier, Doug Manchester, donated the money to support the collection of signatures to qualify the initiative, which would amend the state’s Constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage, for the November ballot.

[…]

Mr. Manchester said Wednesday: “This really is a free-speech, First Amendment issue. While I respect everyone’s choice of partner, my Catholic faith and longtime affiliation with the Catholic Church leads me to believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman.”

The hotel boycott has been framed by supporters of the ballot initiative as intimidation of those who express their political views.

On Tuesday, Brian S. Brown, executive director of the National Organization for Marriage California, a group supporting Proposition 8, sent out an e-mail message warning of the boycott, calling it a “bullying” tactic.

Can you be any more obtuse that this?

Let’s hope the Obama youth juggernaut will defeat this heinous thing at the ballot box once and for all this fall. It’s time for California to live up to its reputation — and do the right thing.

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Good News?

by digby

This is a double edged sword. It’s good to get major coverage, but it depends on what kind of coverage it is. We have no way of knowing how this will be reported:

Senator John McCain’s trip to Iraq last March was a low-key affair: With a small retinue of reporters chasing him abroad, the NBC News anchor Brian Williams reported on Mr. McCain’s visit there from New York, including it in the “in other political news” portion of his newscast.

But when Senator Barack Obama heads for Iraq and other places overseas this summer, Mr. Williams is planning to catch up with him in person, as are the other two network evening news anchors, Charles Gibson of ABC and Katie Couric of CBS, who, like Mr. Williams, are far along in discussions to interview Mr. Obama on successive nights.

And while the anchors are jockeying for interviews with Mr. Obama at stops along his route, the regulars on the Obama campaign plane will have new seatmates: star political reporters from the major newspapers and magazines who are flocking to catch Mr. Obama’s first overseas trip since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee. A “Meet the Press” interview is also being planned.

The extraordinary coverage planned for Mr. Obama’s trip, though in part solicited by aides, reflects how the candidate remains an object of fascination in the news media, a built-in feature of being the first black presidential nominee for a major political party and a relative newcomer to the national stage.

I would expect the coverage of this trip to be positive, barring some sort of mistake. Clearly all the celebrity journos want to make themselves part of the story and bask in Obama’s glow. But they are likely to overdue it and turn it into a sideshow, which may or may not end up being good for Obama in the long run. The downside of them overdoing the fawning is that the right will swing into high gear working the refs and will demand retribution. The boyz and gurlz will feel just terrible about being so unfair.

It would almost always be better to have a serious, professional press corps on trips like this instead of a bunch of preening TV stars. But since we don’t have such a thing at least they seem to be using their shallow narcissism to promote the good guys as well as themselves for once. It’s the best you can do.

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