Month: October 2008

Eye On Eagle Eye

by digby

In case you’re wondering what the right wing bloggers are obsessing about these days, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to know that they have an ACORN in their bonnets:

Michelle Malkin: ACORN Watch: RICO suit filed in Ohio RedState: More On The Non-Existent Threat Of Voter Fraud Hot Air: Now Minnesota joins the ACORN parade

National Review Online – The Corner: ACORN Ace Of Spades HQ: Minnesota Investigating ACORN, Too Riehl World View: What To Watch For In MN ACORN Investigation Instapundit: Still more on what ACORN is doing.

Here’s a taste:

Wizbang: Outright Fraud v. Phantom Suppression:

“ACORN – An ever cooperative organization with standards so lofty they struggle to meet them. They are merely providing a public service.”

A convenient loop when your very defense is your offensive strategy: Overwhelm the local systems and staffs, thereby increasing the likelihood of fraudulently inflating vote totals with multiple-instance voters completing multiple ballots. But rest assured, ACORN is cooperating fully and eager to assist in investigations. With so much to cross-check and verify, they should have internal findings for investigators in a timely manner. Sometime around, say, January 30th.”

Back in the day I used to get criticized by certain people for not talking more about the black box voting and touch screen systems. I always replied that I thought it would take a whistleblower of epic gravitas to prove such a thing, but in the meantime we were developing a theme of stolen elections that the right wing would gleefully appropriate the minute they were in danger of losing an election. And I knew this would gall me beyond belief since the one consistent thing conservatives of both parties have done since the beginning of popular voting was to try to keep the riff raff from casting a vote. When the Democrats were the southern party, they certainly did their best to keep blacks from voting. But ever since the Southern Strategy, it’s been the Republicans who made a fetish of it.

Here’s a little history lesson from Perlstein:

The “vote fraud” fantasies are tinged by deeply right-wing racial and anti-urban panics. I’ve talked to many conservative who seem to consider the idea of mass non-white participation in the duties of citizenship is inherently suspicious. It’s an idea all decent Americans should consider abhorrent. It is also, however, a very old conservative obsession–one that goes back to the beginnings of the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party itself. Let me show you. Read this report from 1964, running down all the ways how Barry Goldwater’s Republican Party was working overtime to keep minorities from voting. The document can be found in the LBJ Library, where I researched my book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus:

John M Baley, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, charged today that “under the guise of setting up an apparatus to protect the sanctity of the ballot, the Republicans are actually creating the machinery for a carefully organized campaign to intimidate voters and to frighten members of minority groups from casing their ballots on November 3rd. “‘Let’s get this straight,’ Bailey added, ‘the Democratic Party is just as much opposed to vote frauds as is the Republican party. We will settle for giving all legally registered voters an opportunity to make their choice on November 3rd. We have enough faith in our Party to be confident that the outcome will be a vote of confience in President Johnson and a mandate for the President and his running mate, Hubert Humphrey, to continue the programs of the Johnson-Kennedy Administration. “‘But we have evidence that the Republican program is not really what it purports to be. It is an organized effort to prevent the foreign born, to prevent Negroes, to prevent members of ethnic minorities from casting their votes by frightening and intimidating them at the polling place. “‘We intend to see to it that the rights of these people are protected. We will have our people at the polling places–not to frighten or threaten anyone–but to protect the right of any eligible voter to cast a secret ballot without threats or intimidation.’ Bailey said the Republican program, called “Operation Eagle Eye,” is really “a program to cut down the vote in predominantly Democratic areas by harassing, frightening, and confusing the voters.” He continued: “‘The strategy is to help Senator Goldwater by cutting down the vote in large cities in states with many electoral votes. “‘As such, it is an admission to the American people that if all Americans were free to vote they would overwhelmingly elect Lyndon B. Johnson, but if millions of Americans could be prevented from voting, Senator Goldwater might succeed.’ “‘Operation Eagle Eye’ was publicly established by the Republican National Committee on October 13. To make the program nation-wide a ‘ballot security’ official–the very name suggests that voting is illegal or at least dangerous–was named in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. “‘In one state, Minnesota, ‘Operation Ballot Security’ issued a seven-page single-space private memorandum detailing a variety of methods for challenging voters at the polls, with instructions to discourage helpful judges in Democratic precincts, to cut off waiting lines in Democratic precincts but not in Republican precincts, and to encourage stalling in Democratic precincts while preventing stalling in Republican precincts. “‘The Minnesota document goes so far as to state its purpose, not as encouraging each American to exercise his right to vote freely but ‘to safeguard the investment of time, money, and effort that the Republican Party, its volunteers, its candidates, and their volunteers have made in this election.’ “As for specific instructions, the Republican memorandum says: “‘If any questions or dispute arises, refer to the pertinent authority cited below and (when it is to your party’s interest) insist that the law be followed.’ (Emphasis added). “‘Stalling in booths is a common trick when lines are long in order to discourage those waiting. In GOP precincts, keep lines moving.’ “Memorandum like this leave no doubt in my mind that the Republican strategy for November 3 is the excessive, indiscriminate and unnecessary challenge of every voter. “How else will ‘Operation Eagle Eye’ work? A Wall Street Journal article of October 22 by Stanley Penn told how. “Penn quoted one ‘ballot security’ official as saying he planned to equip his poll watchers with cameras to frighten people into believing that voting irregularities can be photographed. He wrote: ‘The official notes that even if poll watchers don’t now how to use the cameras, potential Democratic wrong-doers may be frightened off.’ Here is an example of using a camera to intimidate a voter. “‘Another example used by Penn was a booklet written by Louisiana Republican ‘ballot security’ chief James A. Reeder, who urged his party to make all efforts to enlist the help of sheriffs and local police on eleciton day. The booklet explained why: ‘We are advised that all sheriffs in the State of Louisiana, except one, are sympathetic with Senator Goldwater’s election. We should take full advantage of this situation.’ “This booklet is one of the most damning aspects of this so-called ‘Operation Eagle Eye.’ When a political party publicly aligns itself with law enforcement officers in behalf of its candidate, this is certainly not the best way of promoting freedom of choice among the voters. this is the worst sort of intimidation. “‘Operation Eagle Eye’ is not the only Republican group that is working along these divisive lines. “In Chicago, the Republican ‘Operation Double Check’ was responsible for the charge by Elroy C. Sanquist Jr., GOP candidate for attorney general, that more than 4,000 voters on the city’s Democratic rolls were ineligible. “Then there is the ‘Honest Ballot Association,’ which Journal reporter Penn unknowingly described as ‘nonpartisan’ in its plans to send 500 lawyers and volunteers to New York precincts alone. “But the ‘Honest Ballot Association’ was the prime force in a voter intimidation campaign conducted in Detroit two years ago, a campaign that now appears to have been a dry run for the Republicans nation-wide effort this year. “In Detroit, less than a month before election day in 1962, an organization called ‘The Committee for Honest Elections’ was established and immediately proceeded to: “–Mail 159,000 copies of a letter misrepresenting the Michigan election law to ‘high mobility’ areas that were predominantly Democratic. The letter created the impression that anyone who had moved 30 days before the election could not vote. It also appealed for informers to come forward and report suspected cases of voter fraud. “–Plan to flood these Democratic areas with fliers that said: ‘WANTED–FOR VOTER FRAUD.’ “–Recruit 600 ‘challengers’ who would use ‘Honest Ballot Association’ credentials to indiscriminately challenge voters on election day. “‘Fortunately, sufficient publicity and court action blocked these measures for the most part and the planned voter harassment and intimidation was rendered ineffective. “I deeply resent ‘Operation Eagle Eye’ and these other programs that seek to deprive our citizens of their Constitutionally guaranteed right to vote. “‘Operation Eagle Eye’ is not even founded on the principles of freedom of choice and freedom to vote. It speaks only of alleged frauds, alleged wrongdoings. Even the press release announcing its formation did not seek to encourage voters. It sought to frighten them with this headline: ‘GOP Launches Nation Wide Campaign To Prevent “Any Repetition of 1960 Voting Fraud Scandals.”‘ “I believe the only way to have a fair election in this country is to encourage voters of both parties–not just of one party–to come forward, along with independent voters. This has been the basis on which the Democratic National Committee has conducted the entire 1964 campaign. “We want Americans to exercise their right of freedom of choice.”

plus ça change…

It’s not like this ACORN bs is unprecedented, is it? They do this stuff over and over and over again and they’re doing it again. After Jesse Jackson’s 1980s registration drives, they totally professionalized Operation Eagle Eye and now it’s a national program. The right wing bloggers can pretend that vote suppression is a phantom all they want, but the evidence is clear. (On the other hand, the evidence of systematic voter fraud is simply non-existent.)

It appears that Obama is on course to win big enough that this won’t work. And although the wingnuts have learned a thing or two about how to extend these themes beyond election day and keep their base riled up to obstruct and delegitimize the new president, the country is facing an economic crisis which tends to focus people’s minds a bit. So, I’m hopeful that this won’t have salience beyond a few cranks.

Still, we’ve never been in this particular place before. Obama is black and that seems to make the lizard brains on the right start foaming at the mouth even more than usual. And even if that weren’t so, they have developed a conceit ever since Reagan that they are entitled to the presidency and a Democrat simply cannot legitimately win the White House. They will be tested this time out, but I doubt they’ll give it up.

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Dear Glenn

by tristero

Dear Glenn:

Is there anything at all going well for the Right this year? The whole edifice appears to be crumbling faster than one can celebrate its demise.

It’s nice to think so, but don’t kid yourself. When the American Enterprise Institute folds, when Limbaugh loses his show due to poor listenership, then let’s break out the brie, red wine, and skim lattes to celebrate the imminent marginalization of the extreme right.

Moreover, it’s far from clear which version of Barack Obama will end up governing…

There are no chickens to count yet, my dear friend, only some eggs. At this stage in the campaign, I’ll take any version of Barack Obama as president over McCain/Bush/Palin.

However, I will gladly have this second discussion with you 1 second after – we should be so lucky – Barack Obama is sworn in.

Love,

tristero

Everything You Write, Everything You Say

by dday

Yesterday I drove in to work listening to Democracy Now and drove home listening to Fresh Air. Both had James Bamford on as a guest. He’s the investigative reporter who has covered the National Security Agency for the past 30 years and just finished his third in a trilogy about them, called The Shadow Factory. It is from Bamford’s book that we learned last week about the two whistleblowers, intercept operators at a facility in Georgia who were told to listen to, record and transcribe personal conservations of all the phone calls innocent Americans, members of the US military, journalists and members of aid organizations and NGOs. They would listen to them and pass around the more salacious bits, intimate conservations between spouses or lovers, for their own amusement. And that’s really just the beginning.

On Democracy Now (which had those two whistleblowers on the show back in MAY) Bamford described the enormity of the effort:

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Well, let’s talk about Adrienne Kinne’s allegations, spying on Americans and international aid workers in Iraq. What’s wrong with this?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, there’s a lot of things wrong with it. First of all, they’re wasting their time, when they should be spying on or trying to intercept communications to and from terrorists. That was one of the complaints that Adrienne had and also Murfee Faulk had, that they didn’t join the military to listen to Americans doing pillow talk, because a lot of this was intimate conversations between Americans and their spouses back in the United States. They’ve been separated a long time, and you can imagine what a lot of those conversations dealt with. They were very personal matters dealing with finance, affection, and so forth. So they felt that they were morally wrong by eavesdropping on these people and then just wasting government money and wasting their time by listening to things that had nothing to do with the war on terrorism.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, it’s interesting. One of the things Adrienne Kinne told us was that she was spying on journalists at the Palestine Hotel. She knew they were journalists. She heard what they were saying over time. Here she was in Georgia, but spying on those people, those journalists, in Iraq. And she said she saw a document, she saw an email that put the Palestine Hotel on a—as a bombing target, and she immediately went to her superiors, because she was spying on them, she knew that they were journalists. She said, “But there are journalists in that hotel.”

Yes, we’re talking about finding journalists and directly targeting them. In fact, this small facility in Georgia, where all of the communications for the Middle East were swept up, was charged with making determinations on bombing targets. And they are making snap decisions on whether or not a communication is code. There weren’t any speakers in the many Arabic dialects spoken in Iraq at the facility. There were NO Pashto speakers, the main language of Afghanistan, at the facility. And this was the “intelligence” center for the Middle East.

This was going on for SIX YEARS and is still going on. The two whistleblowers, Adrienne Kline and David Murfee Faulk, did not work for the NSA at the same time, never met, but had the same exact story to tell.

And there’s more to make you sick:

AMY GOODMAN: Jim Bamford, can you talk about how the NSA picked up the very first clues about the 9/11 attacks well before the 9/11 attacks?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, the very first clue to the 9/11 attack occurred in late December 1999, when the NSA picked up a message from a house in Yemen. The house was being used by bin Laden as his operations center. He didn’t have much capability to operate out of Afghanistan, so all the phone calls, all the messages, email and all that would go to this house in the city of Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. NSA had been eavesdropping on that house for a number of years, and in late December 1999, it picked up a particular intercept, picked up a particular phone conversation.

And the phone conversation said that—send Khalid and Nawaf to Kuala Lumpur for a meeting. So, NSA picked that up, and they—first of all, they figured that Nawaf and Khalid had to be very important potential terrorists, because they were being assigned by bin Laden out in Afghanistan to go to a meeting in Kuala Lumpur. That seemed like a terrorist summit meeting. NSA gave that information to the other intelligence agencies, and the CIA set up a surveillance in Kuala Lumpur, and then they lost them in Kuala Lumpur.

After they lost them, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi went to California. They got in without any problem. NSA, even though they had the last name of Nawaf al-Hazmi in their computers, they never bothered to check, so they both got in without any problem into the United States. They went down, and they lived in San Diego. And they began calling back and forth to that house in Yemen, the house that NSA was eavesdropping on. So NSA is picking up their conversations to the house in Yemen, translating them and then sending out the conversations to—or summaries of the conversations to the CIA without ever telling anybody that they were in the United States. And they were in the United States for almost two years. Al-Hazmi was there from January 2000 to September 2001. And again, they’re communicating back and forth; NSA is picking up but not telling anybody that they’re in the US.

AMY GOODMAN: You say that they set up their final base of operations almost next door to the NSA headquarters in Laurel, Maryland?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, that’s the ultimate irony, was they eventually travel across country from San Diego, and they set up their final base of operations—these are the—this is the crew that was about to attack the Pentagon—about a month before, they set up their base of operations in Laurel, Maryland, of all places, that happens to be the same city that NSA is headquartered. So they set up their base of operations in this Valencia Motel, and almost across the Baltimore-Washington Parkway is NSA headquarters. The director’s office is on the eighth floor, and, except for some trees, he could almost see the motel where they’re staying. So, NSA is over there trying to find terrorists, and here is the 9/11 terrorists sitting right opposite the NSA on the other side of the parkway making their final plans.

And after 9/11, in the wake of this massive failure, they started sweeping up everything. Everything in the entire world. They are recording everything, building a giant facility in Texas the size of the Alamodome to store all the data. The warrantless eavesdropping was authorized at the very top be Justice Department legal opinions so secret that the NSA’s OWN LAWYERS were not allowed to look at them. They are getting this information by setting up big rooms at telecommunications facilities to tap the major switchers of the top companies (they have outsourced the tapping to a group of tiny companies, many from Israel), and they even built a large submarine to directly feed into the undersea cables which house overseas communications.

It is an unbelievable and infuriating story. What I am writing right now, what all of you are writing, every word you say on the phone, every text message, every email – the government has it. Locked up in a room in Texas. And the legality is so murky that it’s basically indemnified.

An Obama Administration faces challenges in the economy at home and with failing occupations abroad. But there’s the very real question of whether there’s a functioning Constitution to begin with. If the government can sweep up the communications of every man, woman and child on the planet, if the government can sign off on torture and indefinite detention, and if the Congress can essentially indemnify the government for doing so, what is this state that Obama would inherit?

If this isn’t discussed openly before the election, it becomes that much harder to actually reverse these policies, which have been growing through inertia for at least six years, if not longer, and which Congress has basically rubber-stamped. Obama has agreed to look at every executive order and throw out the ones that are unconstitutional. That is not a specific enough answer. Signals intelligence and the NSA needs to be addressed. Torture and rendition need to be addressed. We practically don’t have a country to lead anymore, or at least one worth leading. The Constitution, the founding document, has become a non-issue in this election or really any election. No President has tarnished it as much as this one, and yet we continue on, muddling through, talking about tax cuts or who has the more comfortable demeanor. This election may repudiate conservatism but it’s necessary to define terms. Is it a rollback of torture? A rollback of the surveillance state? A rollback of official secrecy and lost civil liberties? I don’t think we know. And I think we need to have that conversation out in the open.

Are we ever going to talk about our loss of honor as a nation?

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Liberal Baloney? Baloney!

by tristero

I don’t know a single liberal who thinks what PZ objects to here has anything to do with liberalism. Let’s be clear: I certainly agree that the Salon article was prime grade stupid on a bun. But it has nothing to do with liberalism.

Also, let’s be clear that a deep understanding of nearly any system of knowledge or cultural outlook, including science or liberalism, is no vaccine against teh stupid. Examples? James Watson, Edward Teller, and Norman Mailer.

When will people learn that only musicians truly see the world as it is?

Are You An American Citizen?

by tristero

Are you an American citizen? Yes? Then, as far as the world’s concerned, you signed your name to this:

The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency’s use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects — documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public.

The classified memos, which have not been previously disclosed, were requested by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet more than a year after the start of the secret interrogations, according to four administration and intelligence officials familiar with the documents. Although Justice Department lawyers, beginning in 2002, had signed off on the agency’s interrogation methods, senior CIA officials were troubled that White House policymakers had never endorsed the program in writing.

The memos were the first — and, for years, the only — tangible expressions of the administration’s consent for the CIA’s use of harsh measures to extract information from captured al-Qaeda leaders, the sources said. As early as the spring of 2002, several White House officials, including then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney, were given individual briefings by Tenet and his deputies, the officials said. Rice, in a statement to congressional investigators last month, confirmed the briefings and acknowledged that the CIA director had pressed the White House for “policy approval.”

Not my fault! I didn’t vote for Bush! I hate torture , I only saw 24 once!

Nobody cares. Are you an American? You live in a country that tortures people as official policy (no, the present tense is not a careless mistake), it’s your responsibility. That is how the world sees us. And we will – not may, will – pay a heavy price for our failure of outrage when this first started to ooze out. Even those of us, like myself, who spoke out loudly in opposition? Yes.

For more on what each and every one of us will be held accountable for, read Jane Mayer’s book. This should be assigned reading for every senior in high school, to impress upon kids that under no circumstances should the government of the United States be permitted to degenerate into a torture regime again.

Ever.

UPDATE: Emptywheel asks a good question: Who signed the memo authorizing torture? Did Bush? Cheney?

The Lizard Brain Awakens

by digby

He’s just letting it all hang out now.

From Amato:

Limbaugh: We know that technological advancement is going along at light speed. And yet during this period of time, whether it be the last 57 years or be it the last 20 years, it seems that a majority of the black population has remained angry, frustrated, and behind. They’ve been left behind. They are acting like they’ve been left behind, and of course we’ve heard that this is because of racism, natural systemic institutional racism in America, that we are unfair, that this country is just horrible and rotten. …The federal government became the father. The father didn’t have to hang around in order for the kids to be okay, depending on how you define okay. But as you study more and more of this ACORN stuff, you find that it has been part of an entire movement that has been going on for two, maybe three decades, right under our noses. We thought that it was just liberal welfare policies and all that that kept blacks from progressing while other minorities grew and prospered, but no, it is these wackos from Bill Ayers to Jeremiah Wright to other anti-American Afrocentric black liberation theologists with ACORN, and Barack Obama is smack dab in the middle of it, they have been training young black kids to hate, hate, hate this country, and they trained their parents before that to hate, hate, hate this country. It was a movement. It was a Bill Ayers, anti-capitalist, anti-American educational movement. ACORN is how it was implemented, right under our noses. It has been a movement, it has been a religion, and Obama and Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers were all up to their big ears in it.

Wow. I’ve written quite a bit about the particular form of American racism that manifests itself in fear of the black mob but I haven’t seen it expressed quite so starkly though in a couple of decades.

I wrote this after Katrina:

Ever since 1791, there have been white Americans who get very nervous when they see a large number of angry black people in one place. That was the year that Haiti’s slaves rebelled and killed almost every Frenchman on the island. The fear of slave revolt — black revolt — entered the consciousness of the American lizard brain and has never left. From Gabriel Prosser to Nat Turner to Malcolm X to Stokely Carmichael and the long hot summers of 66 and 67, notions of barbaric vengeance being wreaked upon unsuspecting white people has lurked in our racist subconscious. During slavery it was the immoral institution itself combined with horrible inhumane treatment. After the civil war it was the knowledge of seething anger at Jim Crow. During the 60’s the anger became explicit and words like “by any means necessary” reached deep into the American psyche and fueled the backlash against the civil rights movement — and set the conditions for the Republican dominance of politics today.

Race is America’s deepest psychic wound that festers in different ways over and over again. It has lost much of its original blazing pain, but it is still there, buried and waiting to come to the surface.

The memories of Nat Turner are still fresh to many for whom the Lost Cause is their defining cultural benchmark:

Starting with a trusted few fellow slaves, the insurgency ultimately numbered more than 40 slaves and free blacks, mostly on horseback. The rebels traveled from house to house, freeing slaves and killing all the whites they could find; men, women and children alike. In all 55 whites were killed in the revolt.

In total, 55 blacks suspected of having been involved in the uprising were killed. In the aftermath, hundreds of blacks, many of whom had nothing to do with the rebellion, were beaten, tortured and murdered by hysterical white mobs.

In the summer of 67, the cities of this country went up in flames. The rhetoric was the same as what we heard coming from the right this past week. Peggy Noonan suggested that looters be summarily shot. And, in that summer of fire, they were. In large numbers. Only, it turned out, they weren’t necessarily looters or rioters — they were just black. Ordinary people, housewives, kids were gunned down by renegade cops and national guard who were given orders to shoot to kill. Every african american killed by police that summer became a symbol of collective punishment. If you were black, you could be asked to pay with your life for the sins of other blacks. That’s just the way it worked.

In Rick Perlstein’s (as yet unpublished) new book [Nixonland — ed], which I’ve had the privilege to read a bit of, this is the real crucible of the 1960’s. Here is just a little bit of what happened in Newark that long hot summer after the cops took off the gloves and started doing what Peggy Noonan and Jonah Goldberg have been agitating for this past week in New Orleans:

“The press was interested in making the carnage make sense. A turkey shoot of grandparents and 10-year-olds did not make sense. The New York Daily News ran an “investigation” of the death of the Newark fire captain [killed by police] and called it “The Murder of Mike Moran.” The Washington Post left his cause of death as more or less a blank. The alternative–that when law enforcement spent days spraying … rounds of ammunition, more or less at random, even white people can get killed–seemed too horrifying for mainstream ideology to contemplate. Twelve-year-old Joey Bass, in dirty jeans and scuffed sneakers, his own blood trickling down the street, lay splayed across the cover of the July 28 Life. The feature inside constituted a sort of visual and verbal legal brief for why such accidents might have been excusable. The opening spread showed a man with a turban wrapped around his head loading a Mauser by a window with the caption, “The targets were Negro snipers, like the one above.” In actual fact the photo had been staged by a blustering black nationalist by the name of Colonel Hassan, what the copy claimed was an upper-floor vantage onto the streets actually a first-floor room overlooking a trash-strewn back yard. “The whole time we were in Newark we never saw what you would call a violent black man,” Life photographer Bud Lee later recalled. “The only people I saw who were violent were the police.”

Obviously, we’re not in that place today and we have no reason to believe at this moment that we’ll go there again. But the impulse lives on inside people like Limbaugh and his listeners, who make up a non-trivial minority of population. That the first black president comes out of the liberal tradition creates a terrible threat to their worldview, and this whole ginned up controversy with ACORN registering minority voters, Ayers, Wright and the rest subsequently feeds into a very old narrative of blacks exacting revenge against their white oppressors.

It’s ridiculous, I know. But the history of this (thankfully) shrinking number of Americans is bloody and violent and they should be taken seriously. Limbaugh is inciting certain very ugly, primitive beliefs in his listeners and there’s nothing “entertaining” about it.

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Unloseable

by digby

I’m superstitious about such things so I would never put it quite that way, but the polls are downright shocking. No wonder the conservatives are losing their heads and doing things like letting William F. Buckley’s own son Christopher go from National Review simply because he said he would vote for Obama.

Jacob Hacker explains it this way

What a difference a month makes. Four short weeks ago, McCain and Obama were running neck and neck, and concerned outsiders (like me and Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution) were calling on Obama to sharpen his message, especially on the economy. (Galston began his open letter to Obama: “You are in danger of squandering an election most of us thought was unlosable.”) The cover of the last issue of TNR had a picture of Obama next to a single word: “WORRY.” It all seems so long ago. The election really does look “unlosable” now. The economy is far and away the biggest issue for voters, and Obama is creaming McCain on it. If things stay as they are, we’re looking at a blowout of historic proportions–and the first clear mandate for economic reform since Reagan’s win in 1980. So what happened? The obvious (and correct) answer is the meltdown of our financial system. But why did it help Obama so immensely and destroy McCain so completely? The standard models of presidential elections can help a little here, but only a little. Most of them showed a strong Democratic year–more or less a two-thirds chance of a Democratic victory and a probable three- to four-point vote spread. But these models focus on overall economic growth or the job market, and Obama’s rise been much sharper, and his margin may well be much larger, than standard indicators would predict. To my mind, the financial crisis had two massive salutary effects for Obama. First, it has laid waste to two core tenets of conservative economic philosophy: the “ownership society” and trickle-down economics. As the housing and stock markets have plummeted while the job market falters and health security erodes, Americans are facing up to much graver economic risks than they have for more than a generation. The crisis has also put a vivid face on America’s winner-take-all inequality: the Wall Street fat cats who made out like bandits when the housing bubble was expanding by shifting risks (and now costs) onto the rest of us. There’s also a more specific reason for the turnaround: Obama stepped up to the challenge. On the economy, Obama has shown brilliance in the past (such as his remarkable speech on financial market regulation made earlier this year), and his policy proposals have been sensible. But there has been a lack of punch and vision to his critique of the economy’s direction. Indeed, it was McCain who was using concern about gas prices to keep the race surprisingly close. But Obama’s bland commitments on the economy now seem a distant memory. With focus and eloquence, he has been saying over the past few weeks that this election is about restoring economic security and opportunity to the heart of the American Dream-for the middle class and for those who aspire to be middle class.

I agree with that. I listened to him on the stump yesterday and he was utterly convincing on the economy, saying exactly what people need to hear and giving them a sense that there’s a way out of this mess. Hacker quotes this line, which I agree is just great:

“Together, we cannot fail. Not now. Not when we have a crisis to solve and an economy to save. Not when there are so many Americans without jobs and without homes. Not when there are families who can’t afford to see a doctor, or send their child to college, or pay their bills at the end of the month. Not when there is a generation that is counting on us to give them the same opportunities and the same chances that we had for ourselves.”

“There is a crisis to solve and an economy to save.” That is exactly what he needs to emphasize. People know there is more to this thing that some fat cats who screwed up their accounting and lost a bunch of money. This crisis has allowed them to admit that there is something fundamentally wrong with our economy that needs attention.
Obama is now taking exactly the right rhetorical approach to get the mandate he needs to end the thirty year experiment in marketing aristocratic snake oil to the middle class by presecribing tax cuts for everything that ails them. If he wins with the kind of mandate it looks like he’s going to get, he’ll have the political capital to truly put the trickle-down, ownership society nonsense in the past where it belongs. Where it always belonged.

Update: Ian Welsh says there’s no reason to believe that Obama will follow through on traditional liberal economics. I don’t know if we know that. The political context is now very different than it was just a month ago and I don’t know that the normal assumptions apply anymore.

I would grant that if Obama reinstitutes paygo, we’ll know that Reaganomics aren’t dead quite yet. If that happens, fasten your seatbelts (or jump out the window) because we’re all going to be heading over a cliff.

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What Actual Election Fraud Looks Like

by dday

In 2002, Republican operatives in New Hampshire jammed the phone lines of the state Democratic Party on Election Day while they were attempting to organize get-out-the-vote efforts. This impacted thousands of volunteers and party operatives who were trying to ensure their voters turned out to elect Jeanne Shaheen over Sen. John Sununu. Sununu ended up winning by a few percentage points*, close to the margin expected from a successful ground game. Allen Raymond, one of the architects of the scheme, went to jail for it and wrote a tell-all book called How To Rig An Election. Raymond acknowledged that there were dozens of phone calls between his team and Ken Mehlman in the White House leading up to Election Day. And today, James Tobin, another operative, was indicted for lying to the FBI about the operation.

That would fall under the category of ACTUAL election fraud. It was targeted at a specific race, and it sought to impact thousands of potential voters at once by disabling Democratic GOTV efforts in a form of voter suppression. Contrast this with registering one voter named “Mickey Mouse” at a time, telling election officials about it, and then hoping it slips past them and that someone in a mouse suit shows up to the ballot box on Election Day.

But when looking at the reporting about these kinds of incidents, the very real election fraud isn’t mentioned, and examples of the system working, where election monitors catch bad registrations ahead of time and nobody fraudulent actually votes, becomes the scandal of the century. It’s enough to make you wonder if some outside force is driving the discussion other than the very independent media.

I eagerly anticipate the first mention of Tobin’s indictment on cable news.

* – Avenging this stolen election with a Shaheen victory in the rematch this year is just one of the things we can do on November 4.

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Let’s Not Go Congratulating Ourselves Just Yet

by dday

Ezra Klein is correct that the conservative response to the financial crisis has been just as discredited as the conservative policies that caused it:

By contrast, my take on this will make David Broder cry: The liberals were right. Not the Democrats. The liberals. They were right that deregulation had gone too far. They were right when they spent the last few years offering unpopular predictions that the Housing Bubble would pop. They were right that a liquidity problem had become a solvency problem. They were right that government intervention on a massive scale was needed to stabilize the capitalist system. They were so right, in fact, that Hank Paulson and George W. Bush couldn’t hold the line, and will now sign into law the most profoundly socialist measure this country has seen since the 1930s.

I make this point not to wrap myself in a warm blanket of Schadenfreude — there’s little joy in seeing your allies proven perspicacious by a catastrophe — but because it’s actually important. The liberal understanding of the economy and its problems has been, in recent months and years, superior to the conservative understanding of the country and its problems. And this has only sharpened in recent weeks, as the Republican Party has spun off into the Gamma Quadrant with laughable theories about ACORN and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. Their argument isn’t wrong in the sense that it’s a serious engagement with the situation that happens to be less empirically sound than competing theories. It’s just nonsense. And this isn’t a time when we can afford governance powered by nonsense. We need governance by people who understood the magnitude and nature of the problem, and have some idea how to go forward fixing it.

This is all true to varying degrees. But it isn’t clear that this effort to recapitalize the banks will prove sufficient to fixing the wreck that has been made of the economy. As Mr. Nobelist says, the credit markets still look tight. He’s also predicting a likely global recession as the pain caused by the credit crunch starts to trickle into the greater economy. Noriel Roubini is similarly pessimistic:

Oct. 14 (Bloomberg) — Nouriel Roubini, the professor who predicted the financial crisis in 2006, said the U.S. will suffer its worst recession in 40 years, causing the rally in the stock market to “sputter.”

“There are significant downside risks still to the market and the economy,” Roubini, 50, a New York University professor of economics, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “We’re going to be surprised by the severity of the recession and the severity of the financial losses.”

The economist said the recession will last 18 to 24 months, driving unemployment to 9 percent, and already depressed home prices will fall another 15 percent. The U.S. government will need to double its purchase of bank stakes and force lenders to eliminate dividends to save them from bankruptcy, Roubini added. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said today he plans to use $250 billion of taxpayer funds to purchase equity in thousands of financial firms to halt a credit freeze that threatened to drive companies into bankruptcy and eliminate jobs.

“This will be the first round of recapitalization of the banks,” Roubini said. “The government has to decide to intervene much more directly in the provision of credit and the management of these companies.”

All of which brings me to wondering whether or not the Bush Administration finally tried on the “liberal” solution after it became clear that no solution could limit major damage to the economy. They’re also implementing it in a fundamentally flawed way, as Roubini alludes to, by taking non-voting stock from the banks instead of making sure they can impact management decisions. Therefore, while this partial nationalization may stave off a depression, it will be insufficient to stop a deep recession, which will then be blamed on – the nationalization plan. If we only went ahead with tax cuts for the rich and capital gains tax holidays, everything would have been fine.

This seems to me to be the Great Switcheroo here. John McCain is out today with just such a tax cutting plan, and it’s at the front of the Republican “stimulus” package, which also calls for… well, offshore drilling, of course. (Didn’t anybody tell them the moratorium was lifted?) This, of course, won’t stimulate anything. But the point isn’t to get it enacted. The point is to offer something else that could have been tried. It’s a long game strategy.

We’re in for some hard times and Democrats ought to prepare the country for it. Sen. Obama did a half-decent job of that yesterday. But it’s clear that Republicans will try to wriggle off the hook and blame the solution as the problem. It’s just their way.

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Forgetting Yesterday

by digby

As we go down the rabbit hole of voter fraud once again, it seems as if it would be a good idea to revisit the recent history of GOP program of vote suppression. It’s almost incomprehensible to me that after the US Attorney scandals, which were tagged directly to illegal attempts to prosecute bogus voter fraud,that the press is swallowing this ACORN stuff whole.

Just as a reminder, here’s an article from Salon from a year or so ago about Rove and his legacy of election stealing:

By evil chance, I spent the Saturday night before Election Day 2000 at a jolly dinner for high-level Republicans. Most of the talk over the entrees concerned why then-candidate George W. Bush had been too pusillanimous to tell the voters that Al Gore was not just a liberal, but a Soviet-style Marxist-Leninist. But as the desserts circulated, so too did a piece of comic relief — an anonymous leaflet explaining to voters that because of heavy voter registration, the rules had been changed: Republicans would vote on Tuesday, Democrats and independents on Wednesday. I think of that dinner whenever I read about the widening scandal of the U.S. attorneys and the politicization of the Justice Department under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Gonzo is probably the most endangered man since William Tell’s son Walter. The pattern behind the scandal, however, transcends Gonzales’ fate or that of his underlings. At least part of the U.S. attorneys plot seems to derive from the “election fraud” hoax that Republicans are trying to perpetrate in order to gain control of the country’s voter lists. So nailing this inept crew of thugs won’t be good enough. We need laws protecting the right to vote from the kind of phony, partisan prosecutors that Gonzales, Rove and Co. were trying to put in place, and from the punitive, restrictive voter-ID laws that are a prominent part of the far-right political agenda. Republicans do cherish their little practical jokes — the leaflets in African-American neighborhoods warning that voters must pay outstanding traffic tickets before voting; the calls in Virginia in 2006 from the mythical “Virginia Election Commission” warning voters they would be arrested if they showed up at the polls. The best way to steal an election is the old-fashioned way: control who shows up. It’s widely known that Republicans do better when the turnout is lighter, whiter, older and richer; minorities, young people and the poor are easy game for hoaxes and intimidation. The latest and most elaborate of these jokes is the urban legend that American elections are rife with voter fraud, particularly in the kinds of poor and minority neighborhoods inhabited by Democrats. In 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that fraudulent voting would be a major target of the Department of Justice. As the New York Times reported last month, the main result of this massive effort was such coups as the deportation of a legal immigrant who mistakenly filled out a voter-registration card while waiting in line at the department of motor vehicles. But the administration has remained ferociously committed to suppressing voter fraud — as soon as it can find some. In April of last year, Karl Rove warned a Republican lawyers’ group that “we have, as you know, an enormous and growing problem with elections in certain parts of America today. We are, in some parts of the country, I’m afraid to say, beginning to look like we have elections like those run in countries where the guys in charge are, you know, colonels in mirrored sunglasses. I mean, it’s a real problem. “I appreciate that all that you’re doing in those hot spots around the country to ensure that the ballot — the integrity of the ballot is protected, because it’s important to our democracy.” One of the aims of the abortive purge of U.S. attorneys was to punish those who refused to toe the line on the new emphasis on alleged voter fraud. A few fired prosecutors would serve as examples to the rest –- either move to criminalize the election process or face dismissal. But the assault on voter fraud was a solution looking for a problem. As part of the Help America Vote Act, Republicans insisted on creating the Election Assistance Commission, which commissioned studies of the asserted problem. When the studies failed to turn up evidence of fraud nationwide, appointed Republican officials on the EAC insisted that the language say only that “there is a great deal of debate on the pervasiveness of fraud in elections” — the same approach to inconvenient evidence that’s made the Bush global-warming policy the envy of the world.

Today, they’ve trotted out Village Wise Man John Danforth, who almost certainly gave the entire village a collective thrill up their legs. He is a high priest of bipartisan seriousness and if he says there’s a problem with voter fraud I have little doubt that the establishment will immediately start fulminating about it despite the fact that Karl Rove and the GOP have been up to their necks in vote suppression for years. Danforth and Rudman (also on deck to help) wouldn’t lie. They are “above politics” don’t you know.

Their full blown propaganda campaign of the moment is aimed at furthering several different related goals. The first is to freak out the local registration offices, many of which are run by small town bureaucrats who are either subject to the propaganda or are GOP partisans themselves. They want to create a feeling of chaos around the voting processes and call the absentee ballots into question.

The second is to intimidate voters into not participating and making it difficult for those who do. They want people to believe that they will be grilled and scrutinized when they try to vote and perhaps make lines long and the process so arduous that people will give up.

Third, if the election is close, they will challenge its validity in court. After all, that worked like a charm in 2000. But barring that — and it looks like it won’t be close enough to do that — they are laying the ground work to delegitimize the victory. That is an essential tool for rebuilding their movement and crating justification for the kind of character assassination and obstructionism that is their specialty.

If Ann Kornblut on MSNBC a few minutes ago is any indication the press sees this as a “both sides do it” sort of thing. Democrats complained about Bush vs Gore and vote caging and phone jamming and the vote suppression program in Ohio over the past two very close elections. Therefore, it’s equivalent that the Republicans would complain about voter fraud and ACORN. The difference, of course, is that vote suppression was so inculcated in to the republican governing apparatus that they fired the US Attorneys for failing do their bidding and bring false voter fraud cases. That should be just a little bit of a heads up about who’s doing what here.

The media needs to talk to Iglesias and McKay and some of the others involved in that scandal to remind themselves about the kind of systematic pressure that was brought to bear to effect the outcomes of elections during the Bush years. It might just wise them up to how absurd this hissy fit about ACORN really is. (But I doubt it … )

Update: here’s a good overview on the voter fraud fraud.

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