Month: October 2008

Is There Anyone Worse Than Alan Colmes?

by dday

In this clip, Robert Gibbs is humming along with the perfect response to Sean Hannity’s Ayers obsession, asking if Hannity is an anti-Semite because he had a known anti-Semite as the centerpiece of his recent smear job on Barack Obama, and Alan Colmes throws the lifeline:

Hannity is bobbing and weaving, knowing that he’s caught, hiding behind this idea that he’s a “journalist” and he talks to a lot of people with whom he disagrees, which is completely besides the point because he made this Andy Martin guy the centerpiece of his show and completely agrees with his thoughts about Obama (Greenwald has much more on Martin), and being forced to confront the toxic sewer in which he and his right-wing cohorts swim every single day… and along comes Colmes, defending his partner by saying “Sean is not an anti-Semite.”

That’s not the point, Alan. The point is how the common winger guilt by association tactic is simply idiotic. It’s called a logical construct. But I guess Hannity was feeling too much heat, and somebody in the booth zapped Colmes and told him to do his duty as the Fox News “liberal” lickspittle.

Pathetic. But good on Robert Gibbs, if you’re going to go on TV with these clowns, this is how to do it.

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Immolation

by dday

There’s a story out today that the Presidential campaign has somehow “shifted back” to the economy because John McCain didn’t run out last night and tell Barack Obama to his face that he was a Muslim terrorist. And the Politico got these very nice little quotes from McCain staffers that “proved” this.

After days of attempts to persuade voters that Obama’s ties to ‘60s radical Bill Ayers are a crucial character issue, McCain didn’t mention Ayers’ name during the 90 minutes of Tuesday’s forum. His top aides suggested afterward that, going forward, the candidate wouldn’t focus on the former domestic terrorist nor invoke the name of Obama’s controversial pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Nicolle Wallace, a top McCain adviser, hinted McCain would not bring it up. “If asked about it, of course [he’ll talk about Ayers],” she said.

McCain’s chief strategist, Steve Schmidt all but said the controversial pastor remained off-limits.

“What Sen. McCain has said is that it’s not an issue he intends to talk about in the race,” said the aide, though he did note that Obama himself had called Wright ‘fair game.’

But Schmidt did say without prompting: “You’ve not seen Sen. McCain advertise on [Wright].”

Apparently, the institutional memory of the Washington press corps has been erased. These things aren’t meant to be frontal assaults – George H.W. Bush only brought up Willie Horton in a debate in 1988 after Dukakis approached the subject first. These things happen in the background, over email, through whisper campaigns, and once they’re in the ether they don’t need to be hyped again and again. It’s “out there.”

But McCain’s campaign isn’t as deft as those in the past, for a particular reason which I’ll get to in a moment. As for the idea that the McCain campaign’s given up on the character attacks, um, no:

ARLINGTON, VA — Today, John M. Murtagh made the following statement on Barack Obama’s relationship with William Ayers:

“When I was 9 years-old the Weather Underground, the terrorist group founded by Barack Obama’s friend William Ayers, firebombed my house. Barack Obama has dismissed concerns about his relationship with Ayers by noting that he was only a child when Ayers was planting bombs at the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol. But Ayers has never apologized for his crimes, he has reveled in them, expressing regret only for the fact that he didn’t do more […]

“Barack Obama may have been a child when William Ayers was plotting attacks against U.S. targets — but I was one of those targets. Barack Obama’s friend tried to kill my family.”

John McCain has a problem. He isn’t trusted by the base and so he must appeal to their darkest instincts, but every time he does so he turns off independents. Indeed, during the debate, every time he launched an attack, such as they were, the dials plummeted. But without his base he’s sunk and he has no ground game, so attack he must. That’s why Sarah Palin is taking the Agnew role and whipping crowds into a frenzy (and Joe Biden is right to call her on it), but McCain is backing away and hedging. That’s why his campaign is taking tentative steps in the water with the Ayers and Rezko and Wright stuff but never full steps. They know they must take the campaign into the gutter, but every time they do they destroy this carefully cultivated “honorable” brand, which was never true in reality, but also the only way he could ever win in a down Republican year.

The further problem is that the tentative steps are ugly enough to provoke anger and distaste. And of course, these are ill-suited times for the Republican playbook of smear and fear. Heck, even the racists are undecided.

An Obama supporter, who canvassed for the candidate in the working-class, white Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown recently, sends over an account that, in various forms, I’ve heard a lot in recent weeks.

“What’s crazy is this,” he writes. “I was blown away by the outright racism, but these folks are f***ing undecided. They would call him a n—-r and mention how they don’t know what to do because of the economy.”

I’m from Philly and I know Fishtown, and that rings very, very true.

The end result is that you get this lurching, haphazard, erratic campaign. Last night we saw the “compassionate conservative” asking for the government to buy out struggling mortgages (an idea that is far less than meets the eye – he would buy homes at full face value instead of what they’re actually worth – a huge payoff to the banks). In the same breath, by the way, he calls for a spending freeze on all but the most vital programs. And by this morning, there are Ayers attacks and new ads calling Obama “secretive”. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of it because of the enormous self-generated bind, having to please the wingnuts and simultaneously cut them off, having to strike a populist tone and simultaneously please his corporate paymasters and lobbyist staff, having to play to win while every attack hurts his own image.

McCain is running a self-negating campaign.

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Pwnership Society

by digby

Having learned the lessons of Herbert Hoover, the Republicans are working overtime to solve the financial crisis. They are creating a full blown PR offensive to blame Democrats:

American Issues Project is launching the second phase of a major television advertising campaign today spotlighting the role congressional liberals played blocking oversight and reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which spurred the housing bubble and led to the failing economy. The initial ad buy is one million dollars and will begin running today on FOX News, CNN and CNN Headline News.

“Our ad seeks to set the record straight and let the American people know who is responsible for this $700 billion catastrophe,” said Ed Martin, the organization’s president. “While liberals and some in the media try to affix blame to the Bush Administration for the housing crisis and resulting financial meltdown, this is one case where the real impetus for all these troubles is crystal clear. It was not the free market but government supported and propped-up institutions Fannie and Freddie that are the root cause. All roads for this failure lead back to liberals and their close ties to these two government institutions.”

Keep in mind that this isn’t really about the election at all. This an attempt to shape the narrative about the economic meltdown and the very real possibility of Republicans being in the wilderness for some time to come. They may not have learned from their historical economic errors, but they certainly learned from their historical political errors.

And, as we’ve noted before, this is one of the crudest racist attacks we’ve seen in a while. The liberals who ran Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac gave mortgages to blacks and Mexicans who everybody knows can’t be trusted to manage their money and they ruined the economy for hardworking Real Americans.

As others have already noted, it’s important that everyone remember this:

Fact Sheet: America’s Ownership Society: Expanding Opportunities

“…if you own something, you have a vital stake in the future of our country. The more ownership there is in America, the more vitality there is in America, and the more people have a vital stake in the future of this country.”

-President George W. Bush, June 17, 2004

The Challenge: America’s Changing Society

Life in America is changing dramatically, and President Bush believes that the Federal government should change too to help meet the challenges of our times. American families should have choices and access they need to affordable health care and homeownership; Americans should have the option of managing their own retirement; and small businesses, which employ over half of all workers, need lower taxes and fewer government mandates so they can grow.

President Bush’s Policies Promoting the Ownership Society

* Expanding Homeownership. The President believes that homeownership is the cornerstone of America’s vibrant communities and benefits individual families by building stability and long-term financial security. In June 2002, President Bush issued America’s Homeownership Challenge to the real estate and mortgage finance industries to encourage them to join the effort to close the gap that exists between the homeownership rates of minorities and non-minorities. The President also announced the goal of increasing the number of minority homeowners by at least 5.5 million families before the end of the decade. Under his leadership, the overall U.S. homeownership rate in the second quarter of 2004 was at an all time high of 69.2 percent. Minority homeownership set a new record of 51 percent in the second quarter, up 0.2 percentage point from the first quarter and up 2.1 percentage points from a year ago. President Bush’s initiative to dismantle the barriers to homeownership includes:

o American Dream Downpayment Initiative, which provides down payment assistance to approximately 40,000 low-income families;

o Affordable Housing. The President has proposed the Single-Family Affordable Housing Tax Credit, which would increase the supply of affordable homes;

o Helping Families Help Themselves. The President has proposed increasing support for the Self-Help Homeownership Opportunities Program; and

o Simplifying Homebuying and Increasing Education. The President and HUD want to empower homebuyers by simplifying the home buying process so consumers can better understand and benefit from cost savings. The President also wants to expand financial education efforts so that families can understand what they need to do to become homeowners.

Now, we all know that George W. Bush is a dirty liberal from way back, so perhaps this doesn’t count. Of course he would promote homeownership for lazy minorities who are trying to steal your money.

But it wasn’t just him:

Before this year, officials here enthusiastically praised subprime lenders for helping millions of families buy homes for the first time. “I was aware that the loosening of mortgage credit terms for subprime borrowers increased financial risk,” Mr. Greenspan wrote in his recent memoir, “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World.” “But I believed then, as now, that the benefits of broadened home ownership are worth the risk.”

Ok, ok. Those guys are now discredited bleeding heart liberals. But what about this guy:

Grover Norquist, an influential conservative tactician, said the ownership society could solidify the Republican Party just as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society were the foundation of a Democratic Party majority for generations.

“If this is successful, this will define the Bush administration for the next 100 years,” Mr. Norquist said. “People who are more independent and don’t feel dependent on the government are more likely to be available to the Republican Party.”

That didn’t go as planned, did it? It was a scam, as most Republican policies are, to benefit a few rich operators and aristocrats. It’s the oldest story in the book.

And when it falls apart the only thing they have to fall back on is blaming liberals and their lazy clients, racial minorities.

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Les Misbarack

by tristero

Good one. Enjoy:

Another Dimension

by digby

As we try to grok this financial crisis, it’s important to remember that there is a larger economic challenge beyond just the immediate fallout from the mortgage meltdown.

To that end, the Institute for America’s Future has taken out the following ad in the NY Times:

Big problems need big solutions. You can go here for some progressive thinking on the issue.

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South Dakota Pro-Coathanger Law Redux

by tristero

Lunatics in South Dakota are trying again to bring back coathanger abortions bigtime. The first time, it failed by a distressingly small margin because there were no exceptions in the case of rape and incest. This time they have indeed written “exceptions” into the law. But they’re bogus exceptions:

According to Marvin Buehner, a pro-choice Rapid City doctor who specializes in high-risk pregnancies, the law, even with these exceptions, would ‘amount to a total ban.’ As Dr. Buehner told the Washington Post, ‘If there’s a risk of a Class 4 felony if I don’t meet the ambiguous standard of ‘serious risk of substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily organ or system,’ there’s no way I would consider doing an abortion for health reasons. This represents incredible government interference in the practice of medicine.’

It is high time to corner McCain and Palin on the South Dakota initiative, pin them down as to whether or not they support it.

Won’t You Come Home, Tom Clancy?

by tristero

Having just finished Jane Mayer’s awesomely infuriating account of America’s descent into torture and murder, The Dark Side, I was struck by how mundane the really effective anti-terrorism tactics are. If you have a high-value prisoner, you don’t need perverse and complex torture regimens but you do need to establish rapport. You don’t need elaborate high tech monitoring, but you do need native-language speakers (if I remember Mayer’s book correctly, on 9/11, the FBI had exactly 5 translators fluent in Arabic). And you need plain luck coupled with a quick mind, the two factors that thwarted the millennium attacks, for example. Of course, it also helps if you upgrade your internet phone connection from 14.4 to 28k – or even higher – and can make a pretty good google, but mostly, it’s the simple ideas that make the difference.

It turns out that, in addition to torture and murder, two other anti-terrorism tactics so enamored of the right (remember Total Information Awareness, run by a former Iran/Contra criminal?) have no scientific basis and can, in fact make us less safe:

Two methods the federal government wants to use to find terrorists — “data mining” and “behavior detection” — are dubious scientifically and have “enormous potential” for infringing on law-abiding Americans’ privacy, a consortium of scientists said.

Some Transportation Safety Administration officers use behavior detection at U.S. airports.

Data mining involves searching databases for suspicious and revealing relationships and patterns. But while the technique is useful in commercial settings to detect credit card fraud, it is questionable whether data mining can detect and pre-empt terrorist attacks, the National Research Council said.

Behavior detection, used by the Transportation Security Administration and some police departments to isolate possible criminals from crowds, likewise falls short of meeting scientific standards, the group said.

“There is not a consensus within the relevant scientific community” that behavior detection is “ready for use … given the present state of the science,” the group said.

The group cautioned that “inappropriate … responses to the terrorist threat … can do more damage to the fabric of society than terrorists would be likely to do.”

However,

Behavioral observation techniques have “enormous potential for violating the reasonable expectations of privacy of individuals,” the report says.

And therefore we can expect the McCain/Cheney/Palin rightwing to embrace it wholeheartedly.

Rerun

by dday

Big ups to Tom Brokaw for structuring the debate in the same order, with practically the exact same questions, as the first debate a week and a half ago. Thanks for spending 90 minutes providing the same information that Jim Lehrer did. Great work, Tom.

The only things that stood out to me, that weren’t practically the same canned responses as last time, were these:

• Obama called health care a right and not a commodity, and brought a moral dimension to the issue that calms my nerves about him on the topic.

• Darfur got mentioned, which was one of the few new ones.

• McCain basically called for a version of a new HOLC, with the government stepping in to buy up failing mortgages and work them out with struggling homeowners. This is completely at odds with his record, and I’d like to see him explain it to fiscal conservatives. Also, why now and not during the bailout negotiations?… late update: the bailout bill already has this option, though it’s completely at the discretion of the Treasury Department.

• Fountains of conventional wisdom like Brokaw still think there’s a problem with entitlements completely out of proportion to the actual problem. Social Security is not in crisis and Medicare’s crisis has directly to do with skyrocketing health care costs and should not be viewed in a vacuum.

• Obama’s line on why insurance markets should be deregulated because the credit card industry moved all their businesses to low-regulation states like Delaware was… you know, interesting, considering his Vice Presidential nominee.

• Both candidates remain out to lunch on Afghanistan and were totally non-responsive on the plain fact that our presence there has become toxic. McCain thinks we can do a “surge” there, which turns “surge” into less a tactic than a pretty word, and Obama is slightly better but still needs to recognize that Afghanistan in 2008 is not Afghanistan in 2002.

No changes in the polls from this, as very little new things were revealed.

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No Interest

by digby

I am, sadly, in an airport with no TV tuned to the debate in the whole damned concourse, so I’m missing this one too. Please feel free to chatter in the comments.

Tonight’s drinking game word is “crisis.” I hope you have a 12 pack.

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Broken Faith

by digby

Finally, the Uighur prisoners in Guantanamo have been allowed to awaken from their kafkaeque nightmares:

Today, for the first time, a federal court ordered the release into the United States of 17 innocent Uighur men who have been imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay for nearly seven years. The men are refugees who would face persecution and imprisonment, if not death, if returned to their native China.

“In the history of our Republic, the military never imprisoned any man so harshly, and for so long, let alone men who are not the enemy. We have broken faith with the rule of law, and been untrue to the generosity of spirit that is our national character,” said Sabin Willett, Partner at Bingham McCutchen who argued the case for the detainees today.

“This is a historic day for the U.S. Finally, we are beginning the process of taking responsibility for our mistakes and fixing them,” said CCR Attorney Emi MacLean. “For years, the United States has begged other countries to clean up the mess we made in Guantanamo, but the hypocrisy of this appeal was evident abroad. Perhaps now other countries will be less reluctant to come to our aid.” MacLean continued, “Allowing these wrongfully detained men a fresh start would also provide the U.S. a fresh start – an opportunity to turn a page and finally take a position of leadership in closing Guantanamo.”

Religious and community leaders from both Tallahassee, Florida and the Washington D.C. area offered to the court detailed plans for the support of the men, from housing and counseling to employment and car insurance. In this stunning show of goodwill and solidarity, 20 leaders from faith-based communities in Tallahassee, Florida, and a network of refugee resettlement agencies and other religious groups, have pledged to help settle the men in local communities. Many members of the Uighur community came to court today to lend support.

Said Mr. Willett, “The volunteers who come to court today from church and community, from synagogue and mosque to offer sanctuary to these men bear true faith to that character, and give us hope that the better angel of our nature can yet return.”

On the day of the hearing, Congressmen Bill Delahunt (D-MA) and Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) also reiterated their June call for the U.S. to grant protection to the imprisoned Uighurs.

The 17 men currently imprisoned at Guantanamo left China amid increasing political oppression and found their way to Afghanistan, where they lived in small Uighur communities. In late 2001, they were forced to flee the aerial bombardment of the surrounding areas. Eventually, they made their way to Pakistan in the belief that they would be safer there. After crossing into Pakistan, the Uighurs were welcomed and fed by Pakistani villagers who then turned them over for generous bounties offered by the United States.

Last week, after years of litigation, the U.S. government finally conceded that none of these men would be treated as “enemy combatants.” All were cleared for release long ago. However, because of the stigma of their detention at Guantánamo and for fear of offending China, no other country had agreed to offer these men safe haven. Despite this failure to find a third country to take them, the government argued that the court could not release them into the U.S. and, therefore, that the men would have to stay at Guantanamo indefinitely.

I suppose we’ll probably have some sort of witch hunts in the neighborhoods where these men will live — it’s just too tempting for the xenophobe know-nothings. (Tune into talk radio…) But anything’s better than Gitmo. And good for the religious and community leaders who stepped up. The government actually owes them reparations, but in the meantime at least they will be out of that hellhole.

This is yet another in a long line of moral stains on this nation perpetrated in our names these past few years. It makes me feel ashamed and embarrassed.

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