Month: October 2008

No One Could Have Anticipated

by dday

That actions have consequences.

The Syrian government has broken relations with Baghdad. It has completely opened its border. This article in Al-Arabiya (Al-Arabiya is generally fairly reliable) says that the Syrians have reduced their forces on the border. That’s NOT what I’m hearing from BOTH sides of the border. What I’m hearing from very trustworthy sources whom I’ve known for years is that the Syrians have completely withdrawn their forces from the border.

• No troops.
• No border guards.
• No police.

While the total number of foreign fighters in Iraq was never that large, they have often been deadly, particularly for US troops. And Syria was actually doing a fair job of tightening the border. But no more. Funny how air-dropping commando units into a sovereign nation can clarify the mind a bit.

So our reward for getting rid of maybe one tiny group of foreign agitators is a target on the backs of 140,000 US troops as well as untold numbers of Iraqis. That’s why they call it blowback.

Heckuva job.

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The Long March

by digby

Boehlert catches TNR patting the press corps on its collective heads because it’s so darned tuckered from the long campaign it can’t even think of anything to write about anymore. And he reminds us that he warned this would happen a long time ago:

The arrival of my year-end issue of Newsweek in December was accompanied by a palpable sense of dread. Featuring Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) on the cover with the headline, “The Race is On,” the issue landed with a thud, like an unwanted fruitcake amidst the holiday season. How else to respond to a 2008 campaign preview package published 98 weeks before Election Day and nearly 400 days before a single registered Democrat would vote in a primary? That, plus the fact the 2008 drumbeat was sounding just six weeks after the all-consuming midterm elections had been completed.

Am I the only one who thinks it’s madness to turn White House campaigns into 22-month press events? Or is it sacrosanct along the New York-Washington, D.C., media corridor, where pontificating about politics can pay very well, to suggest that there is such a thing as too much mainstream media election coverage?

The press truly has embraced the notion of the nonstop campaign and I think has done so for increasingly selfish reasons. For political scribes, presidential campaigns used to be the sports car their parents let them take out for a spin once every four years to show off. Now it’s become a case of incessant cruising, with endless preening and posing. Specifically, White House campaigns can be career-making seasons, when high-profile promotions, book deals, TV punditry contracts, and teaching positions can be pocketed.

For news media companies, presidential campaigns meanbig business; relatively inexpensive content that can be endlessly rehashed. In other words, they’re good for the bottom line.

The never-ending analysis for 2008, though, has already morphed into a deafening background noise. And the press’ often shallow performance last week does not bode well for the long term.

No kidding. They turned this thing into a marathon spectacle that now seems longer than world war II. And I’m quite sure that people are excited and engaged in spite of the coverage rather than because of it, which is a testament to Obama’s great appeal (and the hideous reality of what the conservatives have wrought.)

The TNR article congratulates the press for behaving like adults and not hating either of the candidates, which is about the faintest praise I’ve ever seen. how proud they must be. But, you know, that’s just another form of the village disease: when Republicans are riding high, the press buys into their entire narrative and shows outright loathing for the Democrat. When the Republicans then fail in spectacular fashion, the media boys and girls rediscover their “professionalism” and treat both parties with equal, cynical skepticism. It is a slight improvement, to be sure, but I think we can all see some problems with that formula can’t we?

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Their Story

by digby

Just so you know:

RUSH: We either are what we are or not. The dirty little secret is, the vast majority of the people in this country live their lives as conservatives; and given conservative leadership, they respond to it in droves. Landslide droves.

CALLER: One reason that that difference is there is because Democrats and liberals specifically have a lot easier time in public of espousing their views regardless of what other people think.

RUSH: Right, because they don’t have to worry about dignity…They don’t have to worry about it. That’s what J.R. Ewing said, “Once you get rid of the ethics and dignity, the rest is easy…You know, they’ve gotten away so long as being the caring party; they’re the party that cares about the downtrodden. They have destroyed… They have created the downtrodden. Liberalism has created the downtrodden and the unhappy and the miserable, and then the liberals set themselves up as their champions, say, “Only we can fix them because only we care.” They don’t care. They loathe them! There is contempt, by the way, for these little people. Real compassion…

By the way, we have to do a far better job of PR. I’m not denying this. Real compassion is conservatism. Real compassion cares for the individual. Real conservatism wants every individual to be the best he or she can be, with nobody standing in the way.

Let a person use what their God-given talents are, combined with their ambition and their energy and their desire and their dreams, and get out of their way. We want people to amount to the most they want to be and can be. But for those who have a legitimate problem, they have some sort of problem that prevents them from succeeding; we are all for taking care of those people. But we do not want to take normal, healthy Americans and turn them into wards of the state, turn them into dependents. We do not want to look at them with arrogant condescension. We don’t look at them and say, “You’re worthless. You’re stupid. You’re not part of the smart group. You can’t get anywhere without us.” We don’t look at people that way. We look at people with respect, hope. You talk about hope? We hope for this country to be the best damn country it can be and you need the best damn individuals for that to happen. Conservatism is about the individual. Liberalism doesn’t care about the individual. This is simple. We just have to tell the story about it.

Rush is the epitome of a conservative sweetheart — hopeful, dignified and ethical:

The problem is just that conservatives haven’t been allowed to tell their story — they have bad PR. Maybe someday, one of them will have a radio show with over 20 million listeners for over two decades to tell it. Until that day, we can only dream of a time in the future when conservatism will have its day in the sun.

Meanwhile, be sure to take the compassionate, ethical, dignified Rush’s advice or you could be brainwashed:

“I do remember reading that the highly educated are the most susceptible to being hypnotized, so that would put me in the risk group, ladies and gentlemen. And yet, I’m going to watch Obama tonight.”

“If you do watch Obama tonight, here’s the sign that I want you to make for your TV: ‘Do not be hypnotized. You are listening to a socialist.'”

In case you’re wondering, the highly educated Rush isn’t using “hypnotized” as a metaphor. He means it literally.

Update: Here’s some more of that compassionate conservatism from another one of the silenced majority who can’t get their story out:

“[t]he reason people are poor in America is not because they lack money, it’s because poor people in America lack values, character, and the ability to work hard.”

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Stevens v. Those Liberal Elite Jurors

by dday

Digby can maybe speak to a more personal experience with Alaska, but I’ll tell you, this is exactly what I expected to happen upon his (triumphant?) return.

But the crowd at his Anchorage rally seemed to harbor little doubt that Stevens, who showed flashes of both humility and defiance, would beat his challengers. They include Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich, a Democrat, who was holding a dueling rally at a union hall at the same time as Stevens’ event.

There was undisguised hostility toward the federal government and the FBI at the Stevens event, with people wearing T-shirts that said “F*#@ the feds, vote for Ted.”

“Anyone who thinks you can get a fair trial in the heart of liberalism, Washington, D.C., is smoking dope. He was railroaded,” said Mark Kelliher, a retired engineer.

Talk radio host Rick Rydell told the crowd he knows Stevens, a D.C. jury doesn’t.

“I don’t particularly like it when outsiders tell me what to do,” Rydell said, before Stevens took the stage. “You can kiss my Alaska moose-hunting behind.”

This is just backlash politics played perfectly. The fact that Stevens has spent the bulk of the past FORTY years in Washington as a US Senator is apparently besides the point.

Obviously being convicted of a felony is a strike against your record, but it would probably be more damaging to an unknown back-bencher instead of the guy who the Anchorage airport is named after. Stevens still has a really good chance to win, even though his Republican colleagues are publicly telling him to resign. And we know that there’s a credible scenario of electoral victory followed by resignation that could lead us to Senator Sarah Palin.

So help out Mark Begich if you can. He’s at the Blue America page.

(h/t davenoon at LGM)

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Retreating Into Paranoia

by digby

Ari Melber has written an interesting article about how the web has impacted the use of dogwhistle politics by deconstructing and exposing them. That tracks with Drew Westen’s thesis that the the key to dealing with these lizard brain tactics is to lay them out so people can see exactly what they mean and then reject them.

I think there is truth in this, but it’s also true that as much as the internet has made it easier to do expose political tactics, it has also created a monster with these email whisper campaigns that people believe because they tend to come from someone they know and are ubiquitous and untraceable.

This, for instance, is just amazing:

A University of Texas poll to be released today shows Republican presidential candidate John McCain and GOP Sen. John Cornyn leading by comfortable margins in Texas, as expected. But the statewide survey of 550 registered voters has one very surprising finding: 23 percent of Texans are convinced that Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama is a Muslim.

Obviously, most people are not subject to nonsense like this. But 23%?

I have to wonder what happens when the right wing paranoid strain truly begins to retreat to its already insular alternate universe, reinforcing its bizarroworld “facts” over and over again in a feedback loop. It can’t be good.

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Firsts

by digby

From the ACLU:

There is a human cost when gay couples are denied the fundamental right to marry. The stories of three couples from New Mexico demonstrate what thousands of couples in California stand to lose if their right to marry is taken away on Election Day. It is important that we save marriage in California so couples in other states can have the hope to marry, too. Please forward and share this video with everyone you know in California and ask them to vote NO on Prop 8.

I didn’t write one of those heartfelt prop 8 posts yesterday since dday did such a beautiful job of it. But I will repeat something I wrote once before that I think is important about this vote: young people have the opportunity to do something very special in casting their first vote for the first African American president. But if they come out in the huge numbers we’ve been expecting here in California, they could also cast their first vote to directly ensure equality for their fellow man in the great civil rights battle of the early 21st century. It’s a vote they will remember and be proud of for the rest of their lives.

This good for the country and good for them too. Once they’ve had the heady feeling of making a difference, they’ll know what it is to be part of something real and meaningful and they’ll stay engaged long after this election. That’s what this whole ground-up, people powered politics is all about.

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The Infomercial

by tristero

I generally agree with PZ that the most effective part of the infomercial was when Obama was talking about his ideas. I dislike human interest anecdotes when I think hard facts are more persuasive. It’s one of the major reasons TV news is as bad as it is.

However, when the middle-class woman with four kids pointed at the door of her refrigerator and told us that that was her family’s food for the week… that cut to the heart.

Looks Like Some Good News

by tristero

Yesterday, dday sounded the klaxon that Bush was gonna have the Justice Department intervene in an Ohio voting rights case. As dday wrote,”This is attempted voter suppression at the highest levels…”

Looks like good news:

The Department of Justice will not require Ohio to disclose the names of voters whose registration applications did not match other government databases, according to two people familiar with discussions between state and federal lawyers.

The decision comes about a week after an unusual request from President Bush asking the department to investigate the matter and roughly two weeks after the Supreme Court dismissed a case involving the flagged registration applications.

Federal law requires states to verify voter registration applications with a government database like those used for driver’s licenses or Social Security cards. Names that do not match are flagged for further verification. But the law provides little guidance on how these flagged registrations should be handled and discrepancies corrected.

Ohio Republicans had sought the lists to challenge voters, but the Ohio Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, refused the request, saying that numerical errors or misspellings are the probable reason for most of the discrepancies. Forcing these voters to cast provisional ballots would possibly disenfranchise thousands of eligible voters, she said, since these ballots are easier to disqualify.

Republicans then took their request to court, but were unsuccessful. The Justice Department has been in contact with Ohio election officials since early October and this week its lawyers determined they would not pursue litigation before the election, according to the sources familiar with the discussions.

Most studies by non-partisan groups have found little evidence that voter fraud is a wide-scale problem or that fraudulent or duplicate voter registration applications lead to ineligible voters casting ballots.

Maybe The Dog Ate It All

by tristero

Being essentially a craftsman by trade – ie, someone who makes stuff with his hands (and a few computers) – I often find the world of Big Money a deeply strange place. A.I.G., for example:

The American International Group is rapidly running through $123 billion in emergency lending provided by the Federal Reserve, raising questions about how a company claiming to be solvent in September could have developed such a big hole by October. Some analysts say at least part of the shortfall must have been there all along, hidden by irregular accounting.

“You don’t just suddenly lose $120 billion overnight,” said Donn Vickrey of Gradient Analytics, an independent securities research firm in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Well, yes, that’s what I would have thought. But here’s the thing: Why is this being brought up now? Isn’t, “Where the hell did that $120,000,000,000 go?” like, you know, a question you ask before you agree to a loan and write ’em a check?

Then there’s this:

Mr. Vickery and other analysts are examining the company’s disclosures for clues that the cushion was threadbare and that company officials knew they had major losses months before the bailout.

Tantalizing support for this argument comes from what appears to have been a behind-the-scenes clash at the company over how to value some of its derivatives contracts. An accountant brought in by the company because of an earlier scandal was pushed to the sidelines on this issue, and the company’s outside auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers, warned of a material weakness months before the government bailout.

The internal auditor resigned and is now in seclusion, according to a former colleague.

WTF? Seclusion? Since when do auditors go into seclusion? I thought only great authors did that. Has anyone bothered to check this guy’s bank account? Seems to me that $120,000,000,000 could buy a feller one heckuva lot of seclusion.

But we go on:

A.I.G. has declined to provide a detailed account of how it has used the Fed’s money.

Oh, really? An internal auditor who resigns, goes into seclusion, and a replacement who won’t provide details, when asked, on how the new loans are being used? Something smell a little strange here? Y’think?

Now, to be fair, “The company said it could not provide more information ahead of its quarterly report, expected next week, the first under new management.” Even so, one would think they would have these figures available on demand for those of us – American taxpayers – who are fronting them the cash. But let’s press on:

The Fed releases a weekly figure, most recently showing that $90 billion of the $123 billion available has been drawn down.

A.I.G. has outlined only broad categories: some is being used to shore up its securities-lending program, some to make good on its guaranteed investment contracts, some to pay for day-to-day operations and — of perhaps greatest interest to watchdogs — tens of billions of dollars to post collateral with other financial institutions, as required by A.I.G.’s many derivatives contracts.

No information has been supplied yet about who these counterparties are, how much collateral they have received or what additional tripwires may require even more collateral if the housing market continues to slide.

Now, to a financial dunderhead like myself, the phrase “what additional tripwires may require” sounds like trashtalk for, “GIMME MORE MONEY NOW, SUCKERS!”

And so it goes. If you read on, you’ll encounter a bewildering array of alarmingly high numbers that, as far as I can tell (admittedly, not far), really don’t add up. And then::

The swap contracts are of great interest because they are at the heart of the insurer’s near collapse and even A.I.G. does not know how much could be needed to support them.

“…even A.I.G. does not know how much could be needed to support them.” This doesn’t surprise me in the least.

But wait! There’s more:

When the expert tried to revise A.I.G.’s method for measuring its swaps, he said that Mr. Cassano told him, “I have deliberately excluded you from the valuation because I was concerned that you would pollute the process.”

Whoa.

I can’t help but think these loans and bailouts are nothing but turbo-charged financial suction pumps that are slurping up as much cash as the rubes – you and me – are prepared to leave lying around for the slurping.

The article ends:

“We may be better off in the long run letting the losses be realized and letting the people who took the risk bear the loss,” said Bill Bergman, senior equity analyst at the market research company Morningstar.

If he keeps saying things like that, Bill Bergman may have to join that “internal auditor” in seclusion. Sounds to me like there are a lot of people making out like bandits here who will not take kindly to that kind of talk.

UPDATE: Looks like A.I.G. isn’t, by far, the only bunch of creeps hoovering up the simoleons at an obscene rate.

Top Dogs

by digby

If you had a chance to see the infomercial and then the Midnight Rally with Obama and Bill Clinton, then you saw what Democrats look like when they’re winning. It’s been a while since anyone but conservatives have been in this position and it’s nice to see. They are firing on all cylinders right now, making the case with style, looking very confident.

I’m always hesitant to allow myself to get too excited, but tonight I felt that glow of anticipation when you start to believe the bad guys might really be vanquished and better days might be ahead. It’s heady stuff.

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