Month: October 2008

Stop The Presses. Drudge Is A Hack.

by digby

I think it’s just terrific that the media are finally seeing that Drudge is a hack, but Jesus H. Christ — he had to start screaming that Obama was a socialist before they saw it?

For Halperin to describe Drudge as “semi-defanged” and to rib his “fifth-to-last refuge” is a seminal moment of sorts. Recall that Halperin is the person who originally coined the “Drudge rules our world” phrase.
That’s not all. The Financial Times recently weighed in with a piece called “Shock: Drudge loses his grip on US media!” Traffic? HuffPo vaulted ahead of Drudge in September, as did Politico. While those outlets’ staffs are obviously far larger than Drudge’s, this still represents a blow to the former ruler of the Internets. It’s worth noting that the view that Drudge’s fearsome influence is a shadow of its former self was a pretty controversial view even during this cycle, the exclusive province of whacked out liberal bloggers. Eric Boehlert sounded the siren about Drudge’s tumble from the throne (as we did), and Hillary-spokesperson-turned-blogger Phil Singer has been flogging this argument, too. The simple truth is that whatever dominance Drudge had over the cable networks just doesn’t mean what it once did.

Like I said, I’m glad he has lost his “credibility.” But somebody needs to do some soul searching about why such a blatant, over-the-top right wing whore had such a hold on the Village in the first place and everybody acted like it was perfectly normal. It’s 2008 fergawdsake and Drudge has been peddling wingnut oppo non-stop for over a decade. How he came to “rule their world” and how they came to openly admit such a bizarre outrageous thing should be the subject for an emergency blogger ethics panel. Stat.

How High Can It Go?

by tristero

By all knowledgeable accounts, the latest McCain smear target, Rashid Khalidi, is a very distinguished scholar with, agree or disagree, a very important perspective on the Israel/Palestine situation. That’s why I’ve just ordered Khalidi’s book. Perhaps more of us should.

h/t Ezra via Crooked Timber

Years In The Making: The Ground Game Revs Up

by dday

Chris Bowers says that Obama has already won the election. Thanks for depressing turnout, Chris Bowers! But looking at his methodology, he may well be right.

However, I know that the Obama campaign is not going to bask in the glory and all head off for spa treatments this weekend. They’re going to work their tails off right through till the last polls close on the West Coast on Tuesday.

To close the deal, Obama and his campaign must, in some ways, work opposite of one another.

The campaign’s ground forces, the likes of which this country has never seen, must make sure that the millions they helped register actually get to the polls. They have to continue knocking on doors to ensure that complacency doesn’t set in. Obama’s workers, paid and voluntary, have not traveled all this way to come up short.

As for Obama himself, he must maintain his steady, cool demeanor, which, ironically, was once viewed as a political liability. But now it has come to symbolize the candidate’s sure hand in the middle of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

“It’s extraordinary,” said Dee Dee Myers, a former Clinton White House press secretary and now a political analyst for CBS. “If you look back, there have been so few incidents where he’s been drawn off message, or resorts to getting involved with the attack of the day. He responds — but he does so in a rational, not emotional, way.

Obama will not get in the way of his campaign in these final days. There will be tens of millions of phone calls, millions of houses canvassed, millions of rides to the polls, seeking to extract every last voter and get them to their polling place. And it’s going to happen in every state in America. The ground game, which has long been Obama’s big bet, is bolstered by a strong union presence, which will do their own work to reach their membership. There are new media initiatives on Facebook and Twitter. But this starts and ends with the Obama campaign recruiting over a million volunteers for these last four days. As opposed to blowing your cash on attack ads and not bothering to expand turnout.

Sen. John McCain and the Republican National Committee will unleash a barrage of spending on television advertising that will allow him to keep pace with Sen. Barack Obama’s ad blitz during the campaign’s final days, but the expenditures will impact McCain’s get-out-the-vote efforts, according to Republican strategists.

McCain has faced a severe spending imbalance during most of the fall, but the Republican nominee squirreled away enough funds to pay for a raft of television ads in critical battleground states over the next four days, said Evan Tracey, a political analyst who monitors television spending.

The decision to finance a final advertising push is forcing McCain to curtail spending on Election Day ground forces to help usher his supporters to the polls, according to Republican consultants familiar with McCain’s strategy.

Wow, is that stupid. Especially in a year where turnout will mean everything. We don’t live in a culture where the electorate collectively watches TV and experiences the campaign in a one-way manner anymore.

This whole thing, the Democratic resurgence, the Obama campaign, is the realization of something started about five years ago in Burlington, Vermont, of all places, and continued in Washington after the Kerry loss, at a low point for Democrats.

His hypothesis was simple: To be a national political party, you have to compete everywhere. It was called the “50 state strategy,” and it was unveiled in 2005.

Remember 2005?

That’s when Karl Rove was building a permanent Republican majority, and when President George W. Bush was going to save Social Security by privatizing it.

In 2005, Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, campaigned among grass-roots activists to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Campaigned to be head of the DNC? That’s an establishment job, hand-picked.

Howard Dean? What a loser.

But politics is all about a little prescience and a little luck. Dean had both. He had the wisdom to know Democrats could win in a lot of places if they bothered to show up and make an argument. The lucky part: The public has turned on the Republican Party.

It’s a simple formula, but this article doesn’t fully capture what Dean did. He put paid staffers into those 50 states so he could capitalize on any opportunity. He revitalized moribund state parties and created the neighbor-to-neighbor tool that can make Democrats a presence in people’s lives all year round, not just before Election Day. He helped build a voter file that now rivals Republicans’ vaunted data bank. He laid all the groundwork for Obama to build on and surpass.

In many ways, Tuesday could be Howard Dean’s victory as well.

…Sean Quinn at 538 has more on the McCain campaign’s ground game FAIL. They aren’t funding it because they don’t have anything to fund.

[ Find Your Polling Place | Voting Info For Your State | Know Your Voting Rights | Report Voting Problems ]

.

Got Hypocrisy?

by digby

I often say that Republicans have retired the concept of hypocrisy and people titter politely, but I suspect they think it’s a sort of glib slogan and not a serious observation. But I mean it literally.

Recently Michelle Malkin went ballistic over Joe the plumber’s privacy being invaded. And many people pointed out that she was hardly the best messenger for such a complaint considering her own notorious history of stalking low income families to prove they weren’t actually in need of government subsidized health care when they had the nerve to speak out politically.

One would have thought that would be enough for her to slither off in an embarrassed funk and let someone else carry the hypocritical wingnut banner personal privacy, but it apparently spurred her on to write a big op-ed in the mainstream media instead.

[W]hen freelance members of the Obama Goon Squad take it upon themselves to do opposition research on The One’s citizen critics and rummage through government databases, where are all the privocrats? And how safe will your state tax and IRS records be if Dear Leader is elected? Welcome to Obama’s America.

Now, as it happens, I think that public employees searching through Joe the plumber’s governmental records is absolutely wrong and that people should lose their jobs if they did it. It creeped me out too. And I thought the press treatment was overkill as well — right up until the moment that Joe started grandstanding for the cameras, got an agent and started talking to people about a recording contract.

But, again, Malkin is hardly the right person to complain considering the absolutely horrific invasion of privacy she perpetrated against the Frost family. It’s mind-boggling that, of all people in the right wing blogosphere, she has appointed herself to be the one to lead this story. The sheer brass of it, the unreflective audacity, is simply breathtaking.

This is why I say that they have retired the concept of hypocrisy. It goes far beyond double standards or duplicity or bad faith. There’s an aggression to it, a boldness, that dares people to bring up the bald and obvious fact that the person making the charge is herself a far worse perpetrator of the thing she is decrying. There’s an intellectual violence in it.

In a world in which the conservatives weren’t such post modern shape shifters, we could come to a consensus on certain issues in this country — like privacy, for instance. We could agree that it’s wrong for government employees to use private information for partisan purposes — or for the media, including bloggers, to stalk and publish private information of anyone who dares speak out for a political cause. But we don’t live in a world like that.

We live in a world where the right wing ruthlessly and without mercy degrades and attacks by any means necessary what they perceive as the enemy, and then uses the great principles of democracy and fair play when the same is done to them. They leave the rest of us standing on the sidelines looking like fools for ever caring about anything but winning.

it’s not that I believe liberals are purely good and decent. We have many, many faults and are almost preternaturally talented at seizing defeat from the jaws of victory before we even get finished celebrating. But failing to truly grok just how pernicious this right wing rejection of hypocrisy really is and how much power it gives them is a foolish mistake.

I think we’re about to get schooled. Again. The torture loving right is dusting off its completely hypocritical “government is full of jack-booted thugs” playbook — and it’s going to drive us all completely crazy.

.

Iraq

by tristero

Another fake success story debunked::

Two years ago, President Bush hailed Najim al Jabouri as a symbol of success in the battle to curb Iraq’s sectarian violence. Today, Jabouri is a symbol of how uncertain that success is.

Last month, Jabouri quietly left Tal Afar, an ancient city near Iraq’s desert border with Syria where he was the police chief and the mayor, collected his wife and four children and flew to safety in the United States.

It needs to be pointed out that the surge has reduced violence in Iraq to the point where, if it was happening in the US, we would describe it as “a total unrelenting horror-show.”

Obama And Maddow

by tristero

Rachel Maddow Interviews Barack Obama. It’s a fascinating, and utterly refreshing, experience to listen to an American politician answer direct questions in a reasonably direct way. One hopes she gets a chance to sit down and talk to him many, many more times. These two are meant for each other.

The viewer interested in psychology may want to focus on the opening 3 minutes or so when both participants are clearly nervous and marking their territory. For Maddow, it’s because this surely is a major “get” in her career. As for Obama, he seemed off his game at first, perhaps because he was facing potentially awkward questions from the “left,” which he has hardly ever encountered, and certainly not in front of an audience as large as the one Maddow reaches. (In fact, Maddow is a liberal, hardly a leftist, at least on tv.)

But soon, the frozen grins and banter disappear – with Obama trotting through a thankfully abbreviated version of his bipartisan talking point – and they settle down to business. [UPDATE: I should add that Obama very graciously provided Maddow a nice gift; the incompetent part of the GOP quote.] Unlike many of her interviews I’ve seen, this wasn’t a discussion, with Maddow actively expressing opinions and disputing the guest’s assertions. Instead, Maddow let Obama talk in detail about issues like improving the electrical grid or chemical plant safety. She did offer Obama an opportunity to go political but for the most part, Obama skillfully sublimated the political to wonkery. The message was clear: We know that the lack of chemical plant safeguards is a “classic” case of interest group influence and there’s no reason to dwell on that. How do we go about fixing it?

Obama’s answers on Afghanistan/Pakistan clearly concerned Maddow (and me). He dwelled almost exclusively on the need for more American troops in Afghanistan and failed to answer her question about an exit strategy. The situation is fiendishly complex: the threat of a nightmarishly chaotic Pakistan – with Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal only one of the alarming confounding variables – is very, very real. Only after a long, rambling answer on the need for more troops – the part about rotating in new people to prevent the use of stop-loss was persuasive, I thought – did Obama choose to mention diplomacy.

Clearly, a President Obama – we should be so lucky – will have to work long and hard to avoid extending the quagmire that already is Afghnaistan and make sure it isn’t extended into Pakistan. I’m not sure, at present, he quite grasps the entire situation and how to approach it. I don’t blame him, however. The catastrophe Bush created – with the help, of course, of Karzai, Musharraf, the Taliban, and bin Laden – is so out of control there may not be anything truly helpful to be done there for a very long time. Obama is an intelligent man, to be sure, but of all the difficult challenges he will face if he becomes president, this one may be the most intractable and dangerous.

(It goes without saying that McCain has neither the intellectual capacity nor the temperament to do anything about this disaster except make it 10 times worse. Palin? Jebus, the mind reels.)

Qua interview, this was very good work on Maddow’s part. She managed both to respect her subject -clearly, both a serious person and an awesomely canny politician – and also illuminate issues where Obama’s thinking is by no means as focused as it must be. Could she have been more forceful and probing? Of course, but let’s not forget that Maddow has already dug far deeper into Obama’s thoughts on Afghanistan/Pakistan than came out, say, in the debate questions.

UPDATE: Slightly restructured after first posting. No content added or changed.

Halloween Horror

by tristero

Nobel Prize Edition:

The long-feared capitulation of American consumers has arrived. According to Thursday’s G.D.P. report, real consumer spending fell at an annual rate of 3.1 percent in the third quarter; real spending on durable goods (stuff like cars and TVs) fell at an annual rate of 14 percent.

To appreciate the significance of these numbers, you need to know that American consumers almost never cut spending. Consumer demand kept rising right through the 2001 recession; the last time it fell even for a single quarter was in 1991, and there hasn’t been a decline this steep since 1980, when the economy was suffering from a severe recession combined with double-digit inflation.

Also, these numbers are from the third quarter — the months of July, August, and September. So these data are basically telling us what happened before confidence collapsed after the fall of Lehman Brothers in mid-September, not to mention before the Dow plunged below 10,000. Nor do the data show the full effects of the sharp cutback in the availability of consumer credit, which is still under way.

So this looks like the beginning of a very big change in consumer behavior. And it couldn’t have come at a worse time.

It’s true that American consumers have long been living beyond their means. In the mid-1980s Americans saved about 10 percent of their income. Lately, however, the savings rate has generally been below 2 percent — sometimes it has even been negative — and consumer debt has risen to 98 percent of G.D.P., twice its level a quarter-century ago.

Some economists told us not to worry because Americans were offsetting their growing debt with the ever-rising values of their homes and stock portfolios. Somehow, though, we’re not hearing that argument much lately.

Gulp.

Cutting Off Your Nose To Spite Your Base

by digby

As we approach this historic election — and watch the Village start to panic at the prospect of the dirty hippies coming to town to trash the place — I think the least we can expect from this congress is that Joe Lieberman, the man who has applauded as John McCain called Barack Obama a socialist and Sarah W. Palin as she said he “palled around with terrorists,” be expelled from the caucus. Sadly, it appears they want to reward his traitorous behavior and “let bygones be bygones” even after that perfidious putz gave a major endorsement speech at the Republican convention.

From Bold Progressives:

Today, the Hill reports:

One Democratic source said Lieberman is not likely to lose his position in the Democratic caucus, even if the party picks up several seats in next week’s election… “There’s no sense in cutting off our nose to spite our face,” one source said.

When will Democratic leaders realize that every time Joe Lieberman spouts right-wing talking points on TV as a “Democrat” or attends a Republican press conference as a “Democrat,” that spites their face big-time?

So here’s the plan. Immediately after Election Day, if Democrats don’t need Lieberman as their 60th vote in the Senate, progressive activists in Nevada will stand in front of Harry Reid’s office for hours and read your letters to Harry Reid about Joe Lieberman.

Media will be invited. It will be a grand spectacle, and Harry Reid will get the hint that in the progressive era, he needs to be bold. And the first step is to boot Joe Lieberman. Write your letter to Reid here.

It’s unfortunate that we are going to have to create spectacle to make them do the right thing but it appears that they are going to pretend that Joe Lieberman is still a member of the democratic party after having spent the last year trashing everything it stands for. They are telling the Democratic base of this country that they value his sorry ass more than they do ours. It’s unacceptable. There’s no excuse.

.

Jules Winnfield FTW

by dday

Two pieces of very good news for No on Prop. 8. First, the latest Field Poll shows the initiative failing:

Prop 8 is down by 5 points, 44% Yes, 49% No. While one would like to see these two numbers further apart, these are pretty good numbers. And as the campaign points out, Field is just about the only pollster that has a good track record on propositions, at about 94%.

All that being said, this is still going to be a tight race. One worrisome indicator is that for those who voted already, Yes is leading. So please, please, do not let up. The progressive position tends to fare better on election day, but that requires we do all the hard GOTV work. Do not quit at 6PM when some LGBT organizations in LA have ridiculously chosen to start their party. Do not quit until that last poll closes.

Absolutely correct. I don’t think this proposition will work like traditional ones, where all the undecideds break toward No. It’s going to come down to turnout. If you’re in the state, you can help with GOTV.

The other good news is this excellent ad, their best of the year, describing the history of discrimination in California for people of all stripes, and imploring viewers not to add to that sad legacy. And yes, that’s Samuel L. Jackson.

If you want to shame the Mormons and the Knights of Columbus who would rather write their intolerance into state Constitutions across the country, remember this ad. And help defeat this proposition.

.

Halloween Horrors

by tristero

h/t Firedoglake