Month: September 2008

The Next Hissy

by dday

So here’s what the traditional media is going to be talking about for the next day. Be prepared for it. It’s too stupid for them to ignore.

Today at an event in Virginia, Barack Obama mocked the McCain-Palin ticket’s notion that they will change Washington. He didn’t refer specifically to Gov. Palin, he didn’t refer to the line she used in her convention speech about hockey moms and pit bulls. He simply used a common idiom.

“That’s not change,” Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., said of what Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is offering. “You know, you can put lipstick on a pig,” Obama said, “but it’s still a pig.”

The McCain campaign is going to try to frame this as a sexist remark.

Jake Tapper decided to make the connection for everyone, no doubt prodded by the McCain spin machine. He specifically connected the “lipstick on a pig” remark to Palin, despite it being an expression. Later in the same riff, Obama says that “You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called ‘change,’ but it’s still gonna stink after eight years.” Is that anti-marine life?

Ben Smith picked up on this too, claiming that “The crowd apparently took the “lipstick” line as a reference to Palin,” because I’m sure he asked them all. The crowd certainly wasn’t cheering simply because it was an accurate line, that McCain and Palin are a couple of liars, and that’s a common phrase used to show someone trying to put a veneer over their true beliefs. Marc Ambinder has pushed back a bit on this, asking incredulously, “Suddenly, common analogies are sexist?” He also found instances of Obama using the phrase in other contexts. And there’s also this:

McCain criticized Democratic contenders for offering what he called costly universal health-care proposals that require too much government regulation. While he said he had not studied Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s plan, he said it was “eerily reminiscent” of the failed plan she offered as first lady in the 1990s.

“I think they put some lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig,” he said of her proposal.

Not to mention the fact that McCain has made notoriously sexist remarks in the past.

But the die is cast. If you don’t think this will go large, please note that the Malkinites have already started in.

There’s no doubt that this is going to turn into some giant controversy, despite it being COMPLETELY MANUFACTURED. Believe me, if there was a sexist remark made by Obama or one of his surrogates, I’d be the first person to jump on it. We have to protect women running for public office from being put on an unlevel playing field, and I’m very disappointed that far too many liberals seem to not understand this.

But this is ridiculous. And the newfound Republican guardians of feminism, the ones who spent the spring selling Hillary nutcrackers and Citizens United Not Timid T-shirts, are somewhat less than credible.

The McCain campaign has no honor and no shame, and they will try to ram this down everyone’s throat. The goal here ought to be letting the traditional media know, from a grassroots level, that they ought to give this exactly the attention it deserves, which is none. But, this is a tailor-made manufactured story for the daytime talking heads to cackle over.

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Biden Asks A Damn Good Question

by tristero

CNN:

“I hear all this talk about how the Republicans are going to work in dealing with parents who have both the joy…and the difficulty of raising a child who has a developmental disability, who were born with a birth defect,” he said. “Well, guess what folks? If you care about it, why don’t you support stem cell research?”

It would be nice to think this is a prelude to the Dems taking on the Republican War on Science, but my guess is that while global warming may come up, evolution never will be.

h/t, Atrios.

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Cracking The Whip(ped cream)

by digby

Wow. Reid goes super tough on Holy Joe:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has decided that Sen. Joe Lieberman (ID-Conn.) — one of Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) top supporters — can no longer attend Democrats’ weekly caucus lunches or the biweekly chairmen’s lunches used to formulate policy, senior Democratic aides said Tuesday.

The decision comes in the wake of Lieberman’s attacks on Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) at the GOP convention last week, and essentially formalizes a deal Reid and Lieberman had cut earlier this year under which Lieberman would not attend meetings that included discussions of sensitive campaign or political issues.

Lieberman for weeks has voluntarily forgone the weekly caucus lunches and weekly policy lunches on Thursdays.

Oh snap! He’s been formally told not to attend Democratic meetings where campaign strategy is being formulated against the man Lieberman just enthusiastically endorsed at the Republican convention. He must be devastated.

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Atrios’ Best Deep Thought

by digby

Keep this in mind because it’s absolutely true:

At this point even Republicans all know it’s full of shit, but they don’t care. It pisses off liberals! And that’s really all they care about.

Apply this to any issue that seems to drive us nuts, from choosing Palin to “drill, baby,drill.”

It’s how they motivate their asshole base.

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Why The Media Game Is Rigged

by dday

We’re finally getting around in the larger blogosphere to something I was flogging a few weeks ago – how the media is failing to apply the same standard to John McCain that they did to Al Gore in 2000.

It’s completely clear that the McCain campaign is outright lying about Sarah Palin’s opposition to the bridge to nowhere. It’s almost comical how many news stories have debunked it (here’s a pretty thorough list). And the Obama campaign is not being passive about it, either. Not in any way.

On the same day that dozens of news organizations have exposed Governor Palin’s phony Bridge to Nowhere claim as a ‘naked lie,’ she and John McCain continue to repeat the claim in their stump speeches. Maybe tomorrow she’ll tell us she sold it on eBay,” said Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor.

And this is only one of a host of lies that McCain and Palin have uttered on the stump and in interviews. McCain, who has abandoned virtually every “maverick” instinct he’s ever had, just yesterday blasted Obama for wanting to cancel a weapons system that he himself opposed just a few years ago. This has happened multiple times and it’s not going to stop. In fact, Palin is STILL saying that she opposed the bridge to nowhere on the campaign trail. She’s lied about it at least 23 times.

It’s not going to stop because the media has not exacted a price for all the lying. They haven’t built a “serial liar” narrative around John McCain the way they did around Al Gore, despite there being far more cause for one in this case. This is what Matt Yglesias was getting at yesterday with Marc Ambinder’s blithely ignorant post wondering why the electorate doesn’t penalize campaigns for lying. Yglesias correctly stated that the media doesn’t penalize the campaigns, so why should the electorate, who’s getting their cues from that same media? One-off stories debunking the lies are nice, but an overall narrative – which does exist – is the only thing that would do the trick in this case. In response, Ambinder said this:

…it must somehow be the press’s fault that John McCain is enjoying a post-convention something-or-other because Americans don’t realize that he’s a lying liar, or whatever, […] To move to a Greenwaldian debate about the duties, obligations and frustrations of the press — well — read elsewhere if you want to play that game. I’ll abstain.

Ambinder is playing the conventional journalist’s game of failing to recognize that the media is part of the story of campaigns. It’s inescapable that they are the filter through which candidates must get out their message. And the hands-off approach they take, their unwillingness to referee on the side of the truth, hurts America.

If everyone got a newspaper once a day, and there were eight political stories, and all of them were different each day, and one of them had pointed out that Palin actually did support the Bridge to Nowhere, then the press would indeed have done its job. The job was to report the story, and they reported it.

But cable news and blogs and radio sort of changed all that and now there’s too much information, and so consumers largely rely on the press to arrange that information into some sort of coherent story that will allow them to understand the election. And the press assumed that role — they didn’t create some new institution, or demand that the cable channels be credentialed differently and understood as “political entertainment.”

They fill this new role through the methods storytellers have always used to tell stories: the repetition of certain key themes and characters, which creates continuity between one day’s events and the next and helps the audience understand which parts to pay attention to […] This requires deciding what matters. And on this, people have different opinions. Take the Bridge to Nowhere, which Ambinder mentions in his post. I think it’s important that one of the central arguments the McCain campaign is making for Palin is a lie. I think that should be reported a lot, at least as often as the McCain campaign repeats it, and then if the McCain campaign doesn’t stop repeating it, their lying should be emphasized a lot, because that’s also important. On the level of first order principles, I know the press agrees with me, because they did this with John Kerry. The crucial problem in this discussion comes here: The press isn’t allow to admit that they construct these narratives at all, and so can’t transparently justify why they choose to use one and not another. Which creates mistrust and anger.

In a similar way, the press can’t report that their corporate overseers play a significant role in shaping the news that we see. If you don’t believe that, look at the MSNBC situation from yesterday. It’s a cable network with a corporate parent that has found a niche generating cable news with a nominally liberal perspective, but it conflicts with the perceived rights and repsonsibilities of the corporate parent, so they must act against their financial interest and squash the nominal liberal perspective.

So they tie their own hands about a fundamental part of the campaign, something that really shapes public opinion on a variety of subjects. It really comes down to whether or not the grand poohbahs of the chattering class like the candidate. Glenn Greenwald weighs in on this.

It isn’t particularly surprising that journalists view debates over their “duties and obligations” as sanctimonious, worthless, boring irritants — a frivolous little “game” that is the last thing they’re going to indulge. After all, they have campaign planes to catch, Steve Schmidt gossip to be dished along, petty scoops to uncover, and the daily drama of the election to be dissected. They’re not going to be sidetracked from those fun and exciting pursuits by haughty objections from interlopers about the destructive role they’re playing in our elections, or by ponderous debates from non-members about their so-called “obligations” to scrutinize candidates’ claims and expose the falsehoods of political leaders. Please.

I do think that Democratic operatives embedded in the media, what few there are, have started to catch on to this, and maybe a constant haranguing can bring us to some kind of reckoning. Paul Begala does a good job here.

ROBERTS: That would appear, Paul, to end any argument over whether or not she supported the bridge initially. But why can’t Barack Obama make that point stick?

PAUL BEGALA, CNN POLITICAL CONTRIBUTOR: Because the press won’t do its job, John. I criticized Barack Obama when he hasn’t been tough enough. Barack’s job is to run against John McCain, right. Don’t shoot the monkey when you can shoot for the organ grinder. His job is not to focus on number two but number one. But it is the media’s job when a politician flat out lies like she’s doing on this bridge to nowhere so call her on it. Or this matter of earmarks where she’s attacking Barack Obama for having earmarks, when she was the mayor of little Wasilla, Alaska, 6,000 people, she hired a lobbyist who was connected to Jack Abramoff, who is a criminal and they brought home $27 million in earmarks. She carried so much pork home she got trichinosis. But we in the media are letting her tell lies about her record.

ROBERTS: Hey, OK. We got to let Alex respond to that. Flat out lies, Alex?

ALEX CASTELLANOS, CNN POLITICAL CONTRIBUTOR: Let’s be a little gentle. Look, every elected official in this country works under the system we have, which is you try to get a little bit of your tax money back. You just don’t want to leave it all in Washington. The amazing thing about Sarah Palin is when she became governor she actually stood up and said no. And she made it –

BEGALA: That’s not true.

CASTELLANOS: She took a strong stand. That is rare and that never happened.

ROBERTS: All right.

BEGALA: That’s just not true. You know, John, the facts matter. There’s lots of things that are debatable who is more qualified or less experienced or more this or more passionate, whatever. It is a fact that she campaigned and supported that bridge to nowhere. It is a fact that she hired lobbyists to get earmarks. It is a fact that as governor she lobbies for earmarks. Her state is essentially a welfare state taking money from the federal government.

ROBERTS: We still have 56 days to talk about this back and forth.

BEGALA: This is the problem. We have this false debate when we ought to have at least agreed upon facts.

There is going to be a lot of resistance to this. The Village establishment couldn’t dare see themselves as biased arbiters and swayers of public opinion. They’re just going to have to be called out. Repeatedly.

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Back To Back Bloviation

by digby

I missed Obama on O’Reilly and Olbermann last night, but it sounds pretty wild:

Give Money. Give It Now. Give It Responsibly.

by tristero

The Obama campaign needs money, lots of it, right now. So please give.

If you want to try to increase liberal/progressive leverage over the Democratic party, I would strongly suggest that you funnel your donation through something like this.

But the important thing is to donate. Now.

New Clear Terrorism

by tristero

If Jeffrey Goldberg was right, but he isn’t, that the chance of a radical Islamist nuke detonating in a major American city in the next 10 years is between 10% and 50%, then:

The only acceptable platforms for either party to run on are proposals to mass convert the United States to Taliban-style Islam and swear loyalty to Osama bin Laden.

That’s because even a 10% chance of a nuclear attack in the next ten years is unacceptably, frighteningly, paralyzingly high and the only effective way to stave off such an attack would be to capitulate completely and bet that radical Christianist terrorists will take far longer to develop nukes to threaten the Islamist States of America.*

I carefully looked into this issue a while ago – after all, as a New Yorker and a parent, I have a vested interest in the subject. I concluded, for a variety of reasons, that the actual likelihood of an attack was probably far lower, but definitely not zero.** Of course, since risk equals probability times consequences, the risk is so exceedingly high, even if the probability is very low, that nuclear terrrorism should be a legitimate worry near the front of everyone’s mind, particularly whomever leads the country.

But Goldberg’s analysis is simplistic. A truly effective response to nuclear terrorism would include not only effective intelligence and pre-emption.*** It would also include a sane foreign policy including a thorough re-evaluation, and major re-adjustment, of the US policies towards corrupt, oppressive Arabic regimes like Saudi Arabia.

Only one candidate has the intelligence, expertise, attitude, and strength of character to attempt fundamental and sensible change in American foreign policy, and therefore, lower the chances for a terrorist nuclear attack. That candidate is, of course, Barack Obama.

The McCain/Bush ticket has demonstrated that they are unfit for command, having given the US and the world 8 unbearably dangerous year when international and US security has alarmingly deteriorated. Bottom line: To vote for McCain/Bush is to vote actually to raise the prospect of nuclear terrorism to 10% or much higher.

At which time, we better start breaking out the burqas because nothing McCain/Bush is capable of doing will prevent or pre-empt a nuclear holocaust on American soil.

**Among those reasons, and there were others, was the sheer complexity of the task of designing, acquiring materials, building, storing, transporting, and actually detonating a nuclear bomb which was, back in 2003 when I looked into it, far beyond the capabilities of al Qaeda (although the desire was there to do so). Now, after Bush/McCain has guaranteed that nearly every Muslim in the world hates our guts, and they’ve radicalized countless Iraqis by killing their friends and relatives, the probability of nuclear terrorist attack is higher, but still doesn’t reach the mindboggling likelihood of 10%. Of course, if McCain/Bush extends the madness of the past eight years, all bets are off.

*Cue some reactionary illiterate suffering from severe cognitive distortions not unlike a permanent salvia trip to argue that I’m saying it’s a good idea for the country to convert rather than fight. I’ll say it real slow: What I’m saying, using common figurative linguistic devices well known to most English speakers who aren’t ideologically deranged, is that the likelihood of a nuclear terrorist threat is probably quite overstated. But keep reading: I also state that the risk is extremely high even if the probability is very low.

**As Goldberg well knows, no one in their right mind would argue against the pre-emption of an imminent nuclear attack. This is one of many distracting strawmen Goldberg erects to pretend that Obama/Biden and McCain/Bush have equivalent strengths and weaknesses. He drags in Bush/Iraq, a conflict which he supported, and which throws his posture of objectivity between Obama and Bush/McCain into serious jeopardy. (An objective examination of the facts makes it quite clear, of course, that a McCain/Bush presidency would catastrophically extend the disasters of the Bush/McCain presidency. (Cue the conservativs amongst us to snort that I don’t perceive the irony in this. Well, guess what? I don’t. I am being objective))

How To Lose, Lesson XXXIX

by dday

Can everybody in the Democratic leadership in the Congress be required to take a political science class?

Congressional Democrats have scrapped plans for another vote on expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, thus sparing Republicans from a politically difficult vote just weeks before elections this fall.

Before the summer recess, Democrats had vowed repeatedly to force another vote on the popular program. But Democrats say they have shifted course, after concluding that President Bush would not sign their legislation and that they could not override his likely veto.

Mr. Bush vetoed two earlier versions of the legislation, which he denounced as a dangerous step toward “government-run health care for every American,” and the House sustained those vetoes […]

Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said: “We are not going to change any votes on the children’s health insurance bill. We still don’t have enough to override a veto. Those who opposed this bill can face the voters and explain why they believe 10 million kids should not get health coverage.”

Yeah, no kidding, Rahm, and it’ll be easier for Democratic challengers to draw this contrast if YOU PUT THE BILL UP FOR A VOTE AGAIN and showed yet again the callousness of the Republican caucus.

There were 2 SCHIP votes over a year ago. In news cycle time that might as well have been during the Eisenhower Administration. Everyone knows that SCHIP wouldn’t pass – the point is to make the Republicans vote on it. It’s part of the perks of being in the majority, forcing the opposition to make inconvenient votes in an election year. You might want to look up the vote for military force in Iraq (2002), the Homeland Security bill (2002), the Military Commissions Act (2006), and on and on…

Because there’s no way the bill would pass, it’s a free vote. You could tie the revenues to removing tax breaks for the oil companies and make the vote a two-fer. “Congressman X would rather give oil executives a new yacht than help sick children!” But alas, the leadership sees no reason why that would be a useful vote.

Thanks for making life harder for the dozens of challengers trying to unseat the bozos on the other side. Really nice work. Be sure to pass an offshore drilling bill while you’re at it, because we should definitely play on Republican turf with our votes in an election year when we hold the majority. Great strategery.

UPDATE: There’s a counter-claim to my view, in the comments and elsewhere, that the Democrats canceled the vote because it would just give an opportunity for some threatened Republicans to vote for SCHIP.

That would be compelling if many of those vulnerable Republicans that they’re talking about didn’t already vote for SCHIP in 2007. They got to 265-270 votes in the House before, after all.

Don Young – already voted for it. Chris Shays – already voted for it. Jon Porter – already voted for it. Dave Reichert – already voted for it.

What you want to do is draw out the hardcore wingnuts who could then be hammered over their vote. There are quite a lot of them, many in competitive races, and to them, voting against SCHIP is a matter of principle – they think it’ll give illegal immigrants health care or something. There aren’t enough slots for all of them to escape because then they’d get to the 289 votes needed for a veto override. This is particularly true because many of the retiring GOP Congressmen, lots of them moderates – Gilchrest, Wilson, Ramstad, etc., etc. – voted for the bill last time around and have no reason not to do so again.

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Holy Donahue!

by tristero

Rachel Maddow was terrific last night in the debut of her new show. Watch it, tivo it, enjoy it. I never thought I’d see it again: A real, genuine, left of center liberal actually has a tv show on a network (albeit far from a major one). It was a great pleasure to watch and I look forward to much more.