Month: October 2008

The Fall Of Iceland

by dday

There may not be another nation in the world I have more of an interest in visiting than Iceland; friends have described it as an entire country run by young indie music fans. It’s very distressing to see them on the business end of this financial crisis.

Iceland is on the brink of collapse. Inflation and interest rates are raging upwards. The krona, Iceland’s currency, is in freefall and is rated just above those of Zimbabwe and Turkmenistan. One of the country’s three independent banks has been nationalised, another is asking customers for money, and the discredited government and officials from the central bank have been huddled behind closed doors for three days with still no sign of a plan. International banks won’t send any more money and supplies of foreign currency are running out.

People talk about whether a new emergency unity government is needed and if the EU would fast-track the country to membership. On Friday the queues at the banks were huge, as people moved savings into the most secure accounts. Yesterday people were buying up supplies of olive oil and pasta after a supermarket spokesman announced on Friday night that they had no means of paying the foreign currency advances needed to import more foodstuffs.

They bought up lots and lots of international credit in the late 1990s and now the debt is mounting and the currency is plummeting. And this is happening, albeit to a lesser degree, throughout Europe, suggesting that this is a global crisis which is moving in waves.

This is going to be a painful few years. Many more banks will fail, and the resultant fallout will leave a financial industry with bigger firms than ever, hardly eliminating the number of those that are “too big to fail.” The Treasury Department buyout of those toxic assets is going to be slow and unlikely to do anything but put a tourniquet on things, and this line is astonishing:

Even after working feverishly over the last two weeks, the Treasury will not buy its first distressed asset from a bank for roughly six weeks, and almost certainly not until after the Nov. 4 elections.

Good thing we rushed into action, then, and put together such an expansive authority.

This is the final reckoning of a corrupt bargain that deindustrialized this country (for the sake of world peace, so it was told to us) while maintaining our quality of life through borrowing. Ultimately we created a market for all that debt, magnifying the consequences exponentially when the financial industry could no longer cover its bets. This is drowning the entire world as they try to recoup their losses and make back some of the money from their American counterparts.

The deindustrialization legacy can be best seen right now from Reykjavik, walking through an empty aisle at the supermarket. The next half-decade will be a time to rebuild.

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Depressing

by digby

… but not surprising:

The presidential campaign, in the almost all-white counties of southwestern Virginia, has produced an outcome that few people expected: a frank discussion of race. Voters sometimes sound as if they are reasoning with themselves and working through their own complex views as they talk through the choice they face this November.

“I’ve never been prejudiced in my life,” said Sharon Fleming, 69, the wife of a retired coal miner, who spends hours at the union hall calling voters on behalf of Obama. “My niece married a black, and I don’t have a problem with it. Now, I wouldn’t want a mixed marriage for my daughter, but I’m voting for Obama.”

Obama beat Hillary Rodham Clinton convincingly in the Virginia Democratic primary, but his supporters have known they face a challenge in this part of the state, just as Obama has faced challenges elsewhere among white voters from rural and working-class households.

He took 64% of the primary vote statewide but just 9% here in coal-rich Buchanan County, for instance, and 12% in neighboring Dickenson County. Though he is now the Democratic nominee, many voters are cool to him — even some of the party’s own leaders and precinct captains.

“I haven’t found in my precinct one out of five that will vote for Obama,” said Tommy Street, the party’s vice chairman in Buchanan (pronounced buck-AN-in) County.

Street, 78, counts himself among the doubters, citing Obama’s alliance with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). He has always voted Democratic, he said, but this year plans to leave the presidential ballot blank.

Some here blame Obama’s troubles on his mixed-race background (his mother was a white Kansan, his father a black Kenyan). Others say his journey from Hawaii and Indonesia to Harvard and big-city Chicago politics makes him an oddity.

[…]

Ben and Beth Bailey sat in the back and clapped politely, but they remained unpersuaded. They said they were likely to break from their tradition of voting Democratic and might well not vote at all.

Obama “just doesn’t seem like he’s from America,” said Beth Bailey, 25. Ben Bailey, 32, noted that Obama’s middle name is Hussein, “and we know what that means.”

Beth’s father, Josh Viers, is the party’s Whitewood precinct chairman, responsible for working the polls and urging Democrats to vote the party line. He came around to backing Obama only recently, and reluctantly.

“Am I racial? Am I prejudiced? No, I’m not,” said Viers. Still, he is frustrated that his job is to persuade other Democrats to back a black man.

“Somebody in Buchanan County or in the United States can look at him and say, ‘He’s not my color,’ ” said Viers. “Why put yourself in that position? We had a shot four years ago, and the people listened to lies, rumors, negative ads and got us beat. Bush got him a second term, and look what it got us.”

Viers said he will do his best to help Obama on election day. But local Democratic leaders said they could not rely on all of their precinct chairs to follow suit.

These attitudes are dying out, but they obviously aren’t gone yet. I heard an NPR report from rural Pennsylvania he other day in which the people interviewed sounded very much like this, so it isn’t just the south. But we knew that.

Probably of more importance is the fact that Virginia, like virtually all the swing states is very likely to be the scene of some shenanigans with the electoral system itself:

On July 31, 2008 Montgomery County held 47,604 voters. On October 1, the number increased to 51,796 voters. While the number may not seem like a titanic increase, Wertz said that, on average, voter rolls stay roughly consistent from year to year, especially in more transient communities such as those that house large universities. This influx of voter registration forms filled up by students is causing hassle in the Montgomery County Government Center. At one point, Wertz had received 3,000 in one week’s time. Registrars from other districts and volunteers have been staffing the registrar’s office nearly around the clock, often working through the weekends and until 7 p.m. or 8 p.m. to process all of the new registrations. Wertz said he “can’t even fathom the number” of eventual registrations.In the 2004 election, 45,079 citizens were registered to vote in Montgomery County, up from 41,063 in 2000. In Blacksburg alone the tally was 14,779 on July 1, 2008. The number rose to 14,821 on Aug. 1, 2008 and 15,401 on Sept. 1, 2008. The total number of registered voters in Blacksburg in the 2004 election, as of Sept. 1, 2004, was14,166.These numbers may have been exacerbated by a surfeit of misinformation from voter registration drives concerning absentee balloting. Wertz expressed concern over reports reaching him from students and parents about misinformation coming from campaigners. Campaigners are reported to have been “telling people that they should not vote absentee. That by voting absentee their votes would not be counted. ‘The only time that absentee ballots are counted is when it’s a tight race,’ (campaigners) were telling people,” Wertz said.[…]
Republican Del. Dave Nutter said that he had seen polling data suggesting that 80 percent of Virginians may turn out to vote on Election Day. The high voter registrations in the several different districts is sure to cause long lines on Election Day, Wertz said. Further, a spike in registrations from the E-1 district, encompassing the majority of student residence halls on the south side of campus, from 3,526 registered voters on June 3 to 4,829 on Oct. 1, makes E-1 the largest voting precinct in Montgomery County.Elected officials, political parties and poll workers alike foresee a crowded Nov. 4. …To quicken the pace at the polls, students should attempt to bring their voter registration card, mailed to the address at which they registered, with them to the polling site. Failing this, any first-time voter will have to produce a form of government-issued identification — a driver’s license or a Hokie Passport — or proof of their local residence, such as a utility bill or car registration …
First-time voters, however, without some form of identification will be asked to fill out the identity statement. Then, these voters will cast a provisional ballot, a paper ballot that will be counted along with absentee ballots at the close of polls if no irregularities arise.[…]
An issue that could thwart these preventive measures is a practice known as voter caging. The procedure for challenging a voter’s registration in Virginia is as follows: Virginia Code 24.2-651 states that “any qualified voter may, and the officers of election shall, challenge the vote of any person who is listed on the poll book but is known or suspected not to be a qualified voter.” Officers of elections can, however, remove anyone from a polling place for being unduly disruptive of the voting process, Wertz said.A political tactic with a history of challenging minority voters, the practice involves the challenging of voter rolls of a given locale in the hopes of disenfranchising legitimate voters. While not necessarily illegal, challenging can pose significant problems in terms of discounting those without documentation and may cause general frustration, leading to longer lines. In Ohio in 2004, 35,000 people were challenged while going to the polls. While representatives of both Republican and Democratic parties have said that neither side has plans to challenge voters, the flood of student voters and students’ typical leftward leanings may leave the question of voter caging heavy on the minds of some.”If Virginia proves to be, as many speculate, a battleground state, the stakes are higher. The games are dirtier. If we see come Election Day, Virginia could come in play; unfortunately we will probably see some attempts to prevent people from voting,” Willis said.

John Fund, who wrote a book recently about the (bogus) right wing issue of voter fraud, is talking constantly about how the Democrats are going to try to get election officials to count the votes of people who are unregistered via the provisional ballots.One of the reasons why they would want to do this, aside from making the lines so long that people will not be able to devote the time, is to throw the election into doubt and have the courts intervene, (which we know they are willing to do.) I suspect that it isn’t going to be close enough at this point to work, but if it is, the fact that Obama will be winning with a lot of new younger voters and minorities is likely to create the myth that he is an illegitimate president.

The Right loves nothing more than to take a liberal complaint and project it back into our faces like a laser beam. If the jokers over at the Corner can shriek about sexism against Palin, as if they all wear funny hats every day in solidarity with Bella Abzug, then they can surely claim that the Democrats stole the election. You know they’re going to if they can.

Here is a web site with state by state election laws. If you aren’t registered, you need to do it quickly and you need to read carefully about what the state law requires at the polling place. You may have to bring a DNA sample and the family Bible in some states these days, since the Supreme Court decided that even though there are no known cases of systematic voter fraud, the Republicans should still be able to suppress the vote by making it a royal pain in the ass.

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Sleepy Little Village

by digby

Keep in mind that the man who wrote this is the dean of the Washington punditocricy, the Village elder of Village elders:

In a session that was faster-paced and friendlier than the presidential debate, Palin and Biden smiled often at each other while exchanging glances and verbal blows. It was a reminder that politics can be fun — as well as informative.

But it created a mystery of its own. Why in the world has the McCain campaign kept Palin under wraps from her debut at the Republican National Convention until this debate? What were they afraid of?

I guess it was somebody other than Sarah W. Palin who made everyone in the country recoil in appalled disbelief that someone who answered Katie Couric’s softball questions so ignorantly could possibly believe she was ready to be president. (Either that or Broder was taking a nap.)

The McCain campaign had every reason to be afraid that Sarah W. could fall on her face. In fact, she did, repeatedly, when she was unable to simply parrot talking points in her confident and irritatingly non-responsive (or starburst inducing) rhetorical style and was forced to deal with actual questions. George W was very similar all during his campaigns and his presidency, but was able to filibuster effectively and simply bore his interlocutors to sleep before they could get to a follow-up. It’s a technique that his natural successor in wingnut mediocrity will surely develop.

I have an email acquaintance from Alaska who has some experience in Alaskan politics and is familiar with her style. His view is that she should not be discounted as some sort of a clown, which I was certainly tempted to do after her disastrous Couric interview. In fact, I began to believe that we were dealing with a Chauncey Gardner sort who had accidentally stumbled onto some popular “maverick” position in Alaska at a time of GOP disarray. I even thought she might be exactly what she presented herself as being — a “working mom” who treated the Governorship as just another 9 to 5 job and relied heavily on a competent staff.

My reader suggests otherwise —- that she is not only fully in control, but that she is an extremely ambitious politician who has her own compass and whose primary confidant is her husband. She is not an innocent. Obviously, she has demonstrated that she is completely unqualified, deeply lacking in the knowledge one needs to be a national leader, and has no business even thinking about the presidency. But from what he says, we can be very sure that parochial Alaskan politics are going to seem quite boring and restrictive to Sarah W if her ticket fails to win the election. She’s a comer.

The Politico’s Jeremy Lott reported this a few weeks ago:

Savvy readers might find cause for concern in Palin’s burning ambition, her ruthlessness or her complete lack of loyalty to political patrons. One sensible reason for Sen. Barack Obama’s not choosing rival Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as his running mate was the real worry that she would undermine and run against him. Palin has already done that to her patrons — twice.

Palin was encouraged to run for a City Council seat in Wasilla, Alaska, in 1992 by council member Nick Carney and was warmly welcomed into office by then-Mayor John Stein. Within months of taking office, she had voted against a pay hike for Stein and against a mandatory garbage collection ordinance that would have greatly enriched Carney. Four years later, Palin unseated Stein.

The new mayor found herself in protracted battle with Carney and much of the city government. She demanded resignations from all department heads and threatened to fill vacancies on the city council herself if the council couldn’t come to agreement. Regarding that last item, Johnson gingerly adds, “[I]t was questionable whether the city code allowed for such [mayoral] appointments. …”

The McCain campaign has made much of the fact that Palin opposed corrupt Alaska politicians. It’s undeniably true, but only part of the picture. Palin ran for lieutenant governor in 2002 at the urging of then-U.S. Sen. Frank Murkowski. He won the Republican gubernatorial nomination and the general election. She was the first runner up in the Republican lieutenant governor primary, because her campaign lacked the funds to compete.

Murkowski offered Palin two consolation appointments, as head of the state Department of Commerce and state parks director. She turned those down as not substantial enough, so he made a third offer: a seat on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. She accepted that one and proceeded to help undo his administration. read on…

She may not speak in coherent sentences and she may know nothing about the world around her and she may be completely unqualified to be president. But she’s a real politician, no doubt about it, and her nickname ‘Sarah barracuda” obviously doesn’t just refer to her High School basketball days. She may very well end up being the front runner for the Republican party in 2012. If I were Romney or Huckabee, I’d watch my back.

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Still Wallowing In Nixonland

by digby

What with all the current media activity about Obama and his acquaintance, former weatherman Bill Ayers (coming coincidentally on the heels of the McCain campaign launching a full blown character attack) Media Matters wonders why nobody has yet discussed McCain’s relationship with his old pal, convicted felon G. Gordon Liddy.

On October 4, The New York Times published a 2,140-word front-page article about Sen. Barack Obama’s association with former Weather Underground member William Ayers — at least the 18th Times article this year mentioning that association. But the Times has yet to mention, let alone devote an entire article to, Sen. John McCain’s relationship with radio host and convicted Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy. Indeed, in its October 4 article, the Times quoted Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman denouncing Obama’s association with Ayers but did not note that Chapman has described Liddy as McCain’s “own Bill Ayers” and has written that “[i]f Obama needs to answer questions about Ayers, McCain has the same obligation regarding Liddy.” The Times, moreover, quoted McCain criticizing Obama for his association with Ayers without noting that Chapman has faulted McCain for what Chapman described as McCain’s “howling hypocrisy on the subject.” As Media Matters for America has noted, Liddy served four and a half years in prison in connection with his conviction for his role in the Watergate break-in and the break-in at the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Liddy has acknowledged preparing to kill someone during the Ellsberg break-in “if necessary”; plotting to murder journalist Jack Anderson; plotting with a “gangland figure” to murder Howard Hunt to stop him from cooperating with investigators; plotting to firebomb the Brookings Institution; and plotting to kidnap “leftist guerillas” at the 1972 Republican National Convention — a plan he outlined to the Nixon administration using terminology borrowed from the Nazis. (The murder, firebombing, and kidnapping plots were never carried out; the break-ins were.) During the 1990s, Liddy reportedly instructed his radio audience on multiple occasions on how to shoot Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents and also reportedly said he had named his shooting targets after Bill and Hillary Clinton. Liddy has donated $5,000 to McCain’s campaigns since 1998, including $1,000 in February 2008. In addition, McCain has appeared on Liddy’s radio show during the presidential campaign, including as recently as May. An online video labeled “John McCain On The G. Gordon Liddy Show 11/8/07” includes a discussion between Liddy and McCain, whom Liddy described as an “old friend.” During the segment, McCain praised Liddy’s “adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great,” said he was “proud” of Liddy, and said that “it’s always a pleasure for me to come on your program.

Liddy, of course, was mainstreamed long ago and is a perfectly legitimate DC dinner guest, advisor and pundit. He ran for the senate. He has a successful radio show and appears frequently on television.

The right is proud of its miscreants and felons and ascribes their motives to Goldwater’s dictum, “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Celebrated right wing pundit Ann Coulter even went so far as to say:

My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.

The Republicans and the mainstream media (masochistically) call that a joke. But I have a sneaking suspicion if anyone tried to joke about William Ayers, we’d have a hissy fit the size of Hurricane Katrina on our hands.

The fact is that what many people would call violent, eliminationist rhetoric is common among the right wing, but has become so mainstream that the country doesn’t even see it anymore. Instead, it’s being projected onto the ghosts of a small handful of leftist radicals who in reality are now placid, aging academics musing about their former glories before an audience of 13 English majors.

A couple of years ago, I linked to this article about a study which had been done by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger:

Looking at the data from 1992 to 2004, Shellenberger and Nordhaus found a country whose citizens are increasingly authoritarian while at the same time feeling evermore adrift, isolated, and nihilistic. They found a society at once more libertine and more puritanical than in the past, a society where solidarity among citizens was deteriorating, and, most worrisomely to them, a progressive clock that seemed to be unwinding backward on broad questions of social equity. Between 1992 and 2004, for example, the percentage of people who said they agree that “the father of the family must be the master in his own house” increased ten points, from 42 to 52 percent, in the 2,500-person Environics survey. The percentage agreeing that “men are naturally superior to women” increased from 30 percent to 40 percent. Meanwhile, the fraction that said they discussed local problems with people they knew plummeted from 66 percent to 39 percent. Survey respondents were also increasingly accepting of the value that “violence is a normal part of life” — and that figure had doubled even before the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks.

Lumping specific survey statements like these together into related groups, Nordhaus and Shellenberger arrived at what they call “social values trends,” such as “sexism,” “patriotism,” or “acceptance of flexible families.” But the real meaning of those trends was revealed only by plugging them into the “values matrix” — a four-quadrant plot with plenty of curving arrows to show direction, which is then overlaid onto voting data. The quadrants represent different worldviews. On the top lies authority, an orientation that values traditional family, religiosity, emotional control, and obedience. On the bottom, the individuality orientation encompasses risk-taking, “anomie-aimlessness,” and the acceptance of flexible families and personal choice. On the right side of the scale are values that celebrate fulfillment, such as civic engagement, ecological concern, and empathy. On the left, there’s a cluster of values representing the sense that life is a struggle for survival: acceptance of violence, a conviction that people get what they deserve in life, and civic apathy. These quadrants are not random: Shellenberger and Nordaus developed them based on an assessment of how likely it was that holders of certain values also held other values, or “self-clustered.”

Over the past dozen years, the arrows have started to point away from the fulfillment side of the scale, home to such values as gender parity and personal expression, to the survival quadrant, home to illiberal values such as sexism, fatalism, and a focus on “every man for himself.” Despite the increasing political power of the religious right, Environics found social values moving away from the authority end of the scale, with its emphasis on responsibility, duty, and tradition, to a more atomized, rage-filled outlook that values consumption, sexual permissiveness, and xenophobia. The trend was toward values in the individuality quadrant.

That didn’t happen because of Bill Ayers pontificating from his Hyde Park living room about revolution. That happened because of people like Rush Limbaugh who have audiences of 20 million people a week, and who described Abu Ghraib like this:

This is no different than what happens at the skull and bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?”

And these American prisoners of war — have you people noticed who the torturers are? Women! The babes! The babes are meting out the torture…You know, if you look at — if you, really, if you look at these pictures, I mean, I don’t know if it’s just me, but it looks just like anything you’d see Madonna, or Britney Spears do on stage. Maybe I’m — yeah. And get an NEA grant for something like this. I mean, this is something that you can see on stage at Lincoln Center from an NEA grant, maybe on Sex in the City — the movie. I mean, I don’t — it’s just me.

That study was a very revealing portrait of today’s America and explains some things about why the right has been so successful. And it’s the opposite of what the political analysts insist it is. It isn’t because they’ve become more moral and religious. It’s because they’ve fostered and exploited cruelty and anger. For all their crowing about traditional values, it’s the right that has embraced decadence, sadism, nihilism and corruption under the cover of religion. We’ve come to the point where the president of the United States decrees that activities that have been described as torture for thousands of years are perfectly moral and legal.

I have little doubt that most of the people who listen to Rush also believe that they are good practicing Christian conservatives. And many Christian conservatives probably don’t listen to him. But they do listen to this:

You know, I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war.

And this:

How about group marriage? Or marriage between daddies and little girls? Or marriage between a man and his donkey? Anything allegedly linked to civil rights will be doable, and the legal underpinnings for marriage will have been destroyed.” Now, that’s more or less a prophecy. Not a divine prophecy, but a prediction.

Notice how Limbaugh and the conservative preachers pander to the depraved imagination? It’s not religious values these people are selling. They are selling a brutal, domineering, degenerate culture, making their listeners and viewers wallow in it, plumbing the depths of the subconscious, drawing forth Goyaesque images of bestiality and violence and death. That’s a feature of some religions, to be sure, but it’s not the nice upright Christian morality everybody’s pretending it is.

If the culture is careening into a crude, dog-eat-dog, corrupt “Pottersville” it’s because the greedheads and the juvenile authoritarian thugs, whether in street gangs or talk radio or K Street (or right wing web-sites) have takenover the discourse. And it is hard for liberals to counter this because our values include tolerance, free expression and personal autonomy which perversely enables the right’s rhetorical domination. But let’s make no mistake, it is only on the right that current purveyors of brutal, sadistic, depraved political discourse are routinely welcomed into the houses, offices and beds of the nation’s top political leadership.

Recall that when when Limbaugh came under fire for his vulgar comments about Abu Ghraib, the leading lights of the Republican party didn’t distance themselves from him. They quickly came to his defense.

Rush’s angry, frustrated critics discount how hard it is to make an outrageous charge against him stick. But, we listeners have spent years with him, we know him, and trust him. Rush is one of those rare acquaintances who can be defended against an assault challenging his character without ever knowing the “facts.” We trust his good judgment, his unerring decency, and his fierce loyalty to the country he loves and to the courageous young Americans who defend her. For millions of us, David Brock is firing blanks against a bulletproof target.

— Kate O’Beirne is Washington Editor for National Review.

Both Bush presidents and Jeb recently appeared on his show.

So, I’m not surprised that John McCain is a close friend of convicted felon G. Gordon Liddy. For the right, eliminationism and right wing extremism fall under the same umbrella of patriotism as McCain’s POW experience. Liddy is a hero too.

It should be noted that Liddy isn’t McCain’s only connection to the Watergate gang, of course. The whole Republican establishment is peppered with them. But McCain hired one of the more notorious directly into his campaign:

On April 3, Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) 2008 presidential campaign announced that it had hired former Nixon staffer Fred Malek as its national finance co-chairman. However, as David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation, noted in an April 3 entry on his Capital Games weblog, the McCain campaign’s press release “left out an interesting piece of Malek’s history: when he counted Jews for President Richard Nixon.” As Corn reported, Nixon suspected that a “cabal” of Jews at the Bureau of Labor Statistics was skewing economic figures to make the administration look bad and assigned Malek to report back on how many Jews were employed at BLS. When former President George H.W. Bush hired Malek as a top official at the Republican National Committee (RNC) in 1988, revelations in the press regarding Malek’s work for Nixon reportedly led him to resign. McCain’s hiring of Malek would seem to warrant the same disclosures from the media, but so far, only one news outlet other than The Nation has reported it.

If William Ayers’ youthful radicalism is relevant to this campaign, you’d think that people would question why McCain is involved with former Nixon henchmen from the same era. Ayers was exiled to the far corners of Illinois academia where a young state senator might cross paths with him at a local event, but would never dream of hiring him to work on his campaign. And Bill Ayers was certainly never feted with awards for his national radio show where he alludes to his desire to kill the President of the United States.

Out of the ashes of Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, the right regenerated and created a political movement based upon the ugly ressentiment that characterized the right of the 1960s. Rush Limbaugh was their avatar. And over the years, as that Envirotec study showed, we unsurprisingly ended up with a political discourse that celebrated coarseness, cruelty, nihilism, xenophobia, consumption worship, sexim, racism and rage.

The Democrats, meanwhile, marginalized their angry radicals and produced the post partisan pragmatist Barack Obama. America will have the choice in this election of whether to finally reject those conservative 60s politics of anger and backlash and move on. The left actually moved on some time ago.

Someone should alert the media.

Update: more from glenzilla on the same topic.

Update II: They’ve got Sarah W. Palin out there saying that Obama is “palling around with terrorists who want to harm their own country.” And while CNN rebuts the charge in its entirety, Cokie’s Law is in effect. It’s out there.

Mission Accomplished. But as with Bush’s earlier aircraft carrier pas de deux, it may not be that easy. Let’s hope it isn’t.

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Fast4Equality

by dday

Here in California we’re fighting the fundie right as they try to pass Prop. 8 and eliminate the right to marry for same-sex couples. The Yes campaign has been completely taken over by an alliance of religious extremists, in particular the Mormons, where 35% of the funds for the Yes on 8 campaign have originated. They’ve certainly been successful financially, outraising the no side to this point.

But the strategy to pass the proposition is mixed. Part of it concerns intimidating and threatening whoever doesn’t support them…

I am a Mormon High Priest. My bishop is a long-time family friend, and he has come to see me a couple of times recently, but each time he has come by assignment of his church supervisor. On the first visit, my bishop offered me a chance to resign my membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. When I declined, he told me a church disciplinary council would be held. On the second visit, just a couple of days ago, he brought me a letter informing me that I am charged with conduct unbecoming a member of the Mormon Church, and being “in apostasy.”

…and here’s another one…

Turns out the aptly-named “Church of the Divide” in faraway Placerville had sent a group of hate-mongering protesters to the church where (Sacramento mayoral candidate Kevin Johnson) and his family worships, complete with signs blaring “SODOMY” (and worse), to protest Kevin’s decision to oppose Prop 8.

‘Course, personally threatening millions of Californians is going to get time-consuming, so there’s also the “shock and awe” strategy. The first idea was to plant a million yard signs in the largest mass visibility action in American history. Weeks after this was supposed to occur, the signs still aren’t here.

It seems that the signs, some of them outsourced overseas, didn’t all arrive in time for the September event. And many still haven’t reached supporters of the measure that would amend the state Constitution to ban gay marriage.

“It takes longer to get a million than we thought,” said Sonja Eddings Brown, deputy communications director for the Protect Marriage coalition […]

Brown tried to spin the production glitch as a positive thing for the campaign — a sign, so to speak, of the overwhelming demand for lawn signs by voters who wanted to participate in “the most unprecedented and largest grass-roots effort ever attempted in California.”

That’s some tasty spin!

The next big event seeks to pass a ballot initiative through fasting and praying (I don’t buy the 100,000 figure below, by the way, it sounds like more bluster):

Hundreds of pastors have called on their congregations to fast and pray for passage of a ballot measure in November that would put an end to gay marriage in California.

The collective act of piety, starting Wednesday and culminating three days before the election in a revival for as many as 100,000 people at the San Diego Chargers’ stadium, comes as church leaders across California put people, money and powerful words behind Proposition 8.

Some pastors around the state and nation are encouraging their flocks to forgo solid food for up to 40 days in the biblical tradition.

Well, not quite. In a remarkable catch by skippy, this 40-day fasting period would be somewhat unusual.

the gathering, called the call, will conclude a 40-day fasting period for california that begins sept. 24. christians are being asked to fast in some way, either the entire 40 days or perhaps by using team relays to cover the entire 40 days. running parallel to the 40-day fast is a 100-day prayer effort, which was scheduled to start july 28.

Um… team relays?

Let me get this straight. If I last from lunch to dinner without a morsel, then tag off to my partner in prayer, I can go ahead and eat dinner then? Is that really a fast, or is it, I don’t know… just not snacking?

Just the notion of fasting to pass a ballot initiative is kee-razy to the extreme. Well, if they can do it, so can we.

Calitics, one of my other blogosphere haunts, has decided to set up a Counter-Fast For Equality. Participants can fast for 1 minute, 10 minutes, half an hour, whatever you can spare. At the Counter-Fast For Equality website, you can sign up for the amount of time you’ll be fasting (hey Jews, don’t pick Yom Kippur, you’re fasting anyway). And much like a charity race, you can get sponsored for your time and trouble for fasting at the rate of a dollar a minute. At the Fast4Equality ActBlue page, you can donate as little as $1 (or one minute’s worth of fasting) to the No on 8 campaign. We also have a Twitter feed set up. If you send a tweet with the #fast4equality hashtag, it’ll appear on our site.

Just to get you in the swing of things, we put together this video detailing the ins and outs of a short-term fast. Actually, our volunteer faster had a little trouble with it:

Hey, if the religious right can pull off a largely symbolic show of support based on meaningless displays of piety, why not us? So stop by and help us out.

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Take Me Out To The Ballgame

by digby

… and then shoot me.

Here’s a recap of every Sunday gasbag discussion about the VP debate last Thursday and the next presidential debate on Tuesday:

After the Republicans successfully worked the refs and lowered the bar, last Thursday Sarah W Palin was in her wheelhouse and kept her eye on the ball. While she didn’t hit it out of the park, she proved that she could take a punch and serve an ace when it counted. Biden meanwhile, showed that he’s a team player right out of the gate by avoiding time in the penalty box and probably won on points. But with her humor, personality and confidence, Palin hit the trifecta.

The question for Tuesday is whether McCain will throw another hail mary or if Obama will fall on the ball and run out the clock. The one thing he needs to avoid is dancing in the endzone or spiking the ball before the final score is on the board. He needs to keep his eye on the ball. McCain, on the other hand, is behind on points, so he needs to strike out the side, get the ball over the plate and score a knockout.

As we go into the stretch, and the candidates are hitting below the belt and playing a little chin music, the most important thing to remember is that politics ain’t bean bag.

Did this enrich your understanding of the election as much as it did mine?

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LordiCaster

by tristero

Two thousand Euros and it’s yours. Courtesy Hellas Piano:

You do know who Lordi are, yes?

Saturday Night At The Movies

Too Much Heaven On Their Minds

By Dennis Hartley

Did you make mankind after we made you?
And the devil too! -Andy Partridge

“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. -Douglas Adams

I’ve always been a bit of a fence-sitter when it comes to religion. Undoubtedly, this is due to the fact that I was begat by a Jewish woman from Brooklyn and a Protestant man from Ohio (I can hear long-time readers now: “That explains a LOT of things about you, Dennis.”). Thank God (or Deity du jour) that my folks never endeavored to push me into one belief system or the other. To me, the conundrum of “Torah or Bible?” holds about the same degree of academic import as pondering “Paper or plastic?” I’m not an atheist, nor an agnostic. If pressed, I might admit that I’m a cautiously optimistic pan-spiritualist.

I believe robots are stealing my luggage. –Jack Handey

I just believe in me. Yoko and me. –John Lennon

And I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days. –Ron Shelton

“Logic” is the antithesis to any kind of fundamentalist belief. Setting off on a quest to deconstruct fundamental religious belief, armed solely with logic and convincing yourself that you are going to somehow make sense of it all, ironically seems like some kind of nutty fundamentalist belief in and of itself. But that’s exactly what star Bill Maher and director Larry Charles have set out to accomplish in their new documentary, Religulous.

Maher’s “spiritual journey” begins in America’s southeastern bible belt, highlighted by a roundtable discussion with several burly, Cat-hatted worshippers at a roadside truck stop chapel (you couldn’t make shit like this up). Maher gets his first walkout from one of the drivers, who takes major umbrage that Maher is “…disputin’ my God.” Fair enough. But as Maher says with a shrug after the fellow stalks out, “I’m just asking questions.” Another highlight is a visit to a Christian theme park in Orlando Florida, where Maher trades good-natured jibes with Jesus. Well, a Jesus impersonator, who is the star of what appears to be some kind of Bronco Billy road show-style reenactment of the crucifixion.

My favorite scene occurs in London’s Hyde Park. Maher disguises himself in Ignatius O’Reilly garb (complete with earflaps) and begins spouting a hodgepodge of tenets that are lifted verbatim from Scientology, Mormonism and the Witnesses. This gathers a crowd of bemused onlookers, naturally, who all seem convinced that Maher is just another crazy street person railing nonsensically at an unfeeling universe. Juvenile methodology, perhaps, but one can’t dispute that it seems to back up Maher’s frequently voiced assertion that unquestioning, dogmatic belief is a form of mental illness.

The journey culminates in Jerusalem, where Maher grills Orthodox Jews and Muslims. Perhaps not so surprisingly, Maher quite noticeably tones down his customary smug mode, particularly when visiting a sacred mosque (well, can you blame him?).

Maher is no stranger to controversy. In his various guises as actor, comedian, political satirist, author, and talk show host, he has managed to push a lot of buttons, proving himself to be a full spectrum, equal opportunity offender. It’s his special power. But what I found most interesting about the film is that Maher himself is not necessarily “mocking” religion here, although I know that he and Charles will be accused of doing so and roundly vilified by the self-righteously pious and the small-minded. To be sure, some of the more fringe interviewees and their belief systems are obviously milked for laughs; but Maher’s roots are in stand-up comedy, so naturally he’s not going to pass up an opening. It’s reflexive. These people make themselves look ridiculous, so mocking them is redundant. I think Maher and Charles are smart enough to figure that out. A similarly perceptive grasp of the state of the American idiocracy was what made Borat (Charles’ collaboration with comic genius Sacha Baron Cohen) such a brilliantly incisive satire.

The release of this film is timely. Maher brought up a good point during his appearance on The Daily Show earlier this week. When he mentioned Sarah Palin’s staunch Christian stance, Jon Stewart countered that Barack Obama claims to be deeply religious as well, to which Maher replied, “I hope he’s lying.” My sentiments exactly. Because, as Maher went on to point out, when anyone runs for president in the “United States of Stupid” they have to trawl for votes by toeing the spiritual line. It’s a given that McCain is paying lip service to piety, and I’d like to assume Obama isn’t some kind of secret crazy fundamentalist. But Palin? She is dangerous. I know that Digby, Dday and Tristero have been warning us about this from the get-go, but it is encouraging to hear someone saying it on a high profile television talk show. It can’t be said enough. All I can say is- go see this film, and then come November 4, everybody grab their hose and socks…and pray.

Blasphemous: Life of Brian, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Meaning of Life, Dogma, The Ruling Class, History of the World Part I, And God Spoke, The Passion of the Jew, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Bedazzled, Demonia, The Loved One, Jesus of Montreal, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Devils, Black Narcissus, The Night of the Iguana, Monsignor, The Thorn Birds, Agnes of God, The Boys of St. Vincent.

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Sinister Gibberish

by digby

Jonathan Chait wonders if this means something sinister or if Sarah W. Palin is too dumb to be president:

As we send our young men and women overseas in a war zone to fight for democracy and freedoms, including freedom of the press, we’ve really got to have a mutually beneficial relationship here with those fighting the freedom of the press, and then the press, though not taking advantage and exploiting a situation, perhaps they would want to capture and abuse the privilege. We just want truth, we want fairness, we want balance.

She’s too dumb to be president, although that’s no hindrance to becoming one and being very sinister indeed. We have proof. Here’s a similar example from a debate four years ago::

…I just told you the facts, sir. The quality of the air is cleaner since I’ve been the president of the United States. And we’ll continue to spend money on research and development, because I truly believe that’s the way to get from how we live today to being able to live a standard of living that we’re accustomed to and being able to protect our environment better, the use of technologies.

Or how about this:

Let me start with how to control the cost of health care: medical liability reform, for starters, which he’s opposed.

Secondly, allow small businesses to pool together so they can share risk and buy insurance at the same discounts big businesses get to do.

Thirdly, spread what’s called health savings accounts. It’s good for small businesses, good for owners. You own your own account. You can save tax-free. You get a catastrophic plan to help you on it.

This is different from saying, “OK, let me incent you to go on the government.”

Palin and Bush speak in the same tongue. It’s a very special language that only national conservative politicians (and toddlers) speak. It’s called “gibberish” and there’s something about it that certain people in our country find very reassuring to hear in the mouths of those who are running for the most powerful job in the world.

I don’t understand it. But then I’m not a conservative. It always confused me. But after the last eight years, the idea of another one scares the hell out of me.

Typical Day In Taserland

by digby

No harm no foul:

A 71-year-old man who was tased by police in September was found guilty and fined on multiple misdemeanor counts Friday, after a trial that raised the issue of widespread police use of Tasers in the city.During trial testimony in the case, one Waveland officer refused to say how many times he has shot people with an electronic weapon, which sends 50,000 volts through the body. Another estimated he has tased suspects at least 50 times.[…]
Parker drove his Ford F-250 pickup through the light to turn left, passing about two vehicle lengths from Waveland officer Clay Necaise, who was stopped in the westbound lane in his police cruiser. Necaise deemed the turn illegal and pulled Parker over into a parking lot off U.S. 90.That began a chain of actions that ended with Parker being subdued by three police officers and shot in the back with a Taser. His trial stemming from the Sept. 2 incident was held in Waveland Municipal Court on Thursday and concluded with a Friday guilty finding by Judge Frank Wittmann.[…]
Parker eventually was handcuffed and then, while in cuffs, was shot by Necaise with a Taser in the back. The device malfunctioned the first time and had to be used again to complete the electronic circuit, officers said.Parker then went down, suffering abrasions to his knees and skin injuries from the handcuffs on his arms and wrists.”We assisted him to the ground with the Taser applied to him,” Barber said.[…]
Necaise, who said he has been a Waveland Police officer since February, refused to say how many times he had used his Taser. “I cannot testify to that,” he repeatedly responded to questions from Moak.Eventually, he did answer he had used the Taser on people on “less than 100” occasions.Barber, who said he has been a Waveland police officer for 23 months, testified he had used a Taser “multiple times,” perhaps as many as 50 occasions.[…]
Waveland officers testified during the Parker trial their formal training with Tasers consists of a one-afternoon course taught by another department member. The training requires officers to be shot by Tasers themselves.Following the incident, Parker was treated by emergency medical personnel but declined a hospital visit. After being allowed to rise from the ground in the parking lot, “he said he was going to be a gentleman,” Necaise said.

That man will know better than to do anything but smartly salute and do exactly what he is told by a man in uniform no matter what in the future. And that’s the way it should be in the land of the free. Don’t meet their eyes, don’t say a word, just comply meekly, unless you want to be shot with 50,000 volts while in handcuffs and “be assisted to the ground” writhing in agony.

The police have a perfect right to do this with impunity whenever they choose. It’s true that some people die from tasers but you shouldn’t have anything to worry about if you don’t give the officer a reason to zap you. Of course, he could also zap you for no reason at all and there would be nothing you could do about it because courts do not hold them culpable even if it is an egregious misuse of police power.

Just a word to the wise.

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