We’ll Always Have Tom
by tristero
First, we need a president who can speak English and deconstruct and navigate complex issues so Americans can make informed choices.
Then, we need pundits who can write good.
"what digby sez..."
Month: November 2008
No To Prop Hate: Volunteers Desperately Needed
by tristero
Digby also posted on this, but it’s so important, I’d also like to jump in. No On Prop 8, the pushback on the despicable anti-marriage initiative on the California ballot desperately needs 1000 volunteers to GOTV. I would join up in a heartbeat if I lived anywhere near California (I’ll be doing GOTV on election day in Pennsylvania after I vote in NYC).
Sign up here to work to defeat Prop Hate. In an email, they told me they are in a dead heat. Prop Hate will deny marriage to loving couples. It is rank discrimination of the ugliest sort.
I’d like point to out that while opposition to Prop Hate is a civil rights issue of critical importance to the GLBT community, the right to marry the person you love is a fundamental civil right that impacts everyone. Oppressive societies throughout history have discriminated against couples not only on the basis of sexual orientation but also because of race, creed, religion, political views, and nearly any other difference bigots happen to obsess over. It is not a Christian principle to oppose marriages but a cynical political initiative fueled by well-funded extremists with a purely secular will to power. It would be not only a moral outrage if Prop Hate passes, but deeply dangerous to the always fragile wall of separation between Church and State.
Vote NO on Prop Hate. And people in or near California, sign up to volunteer now to GOTV and help defeat rightwing extremism.
Saturday Night At The Movies
The Docu-horror Picture Show
By Dennis Hartley
Whatever happened to Fay Wray?
In honor of Halloween weekend (we can call it that, when Halloween falls on a Friday, right?), and in a desperate search of a theme for this week’s post (heh), I thought I’d eschew the usual “Top 10 Horror Films” tact in favor of something REALLY scary-real life. Because, let’s face it. Try as they might, Hollywood can never really match the thrills, the chills and grotesqueries of, say, reading the newspaper, watching CNN, going online to look at your 401k, popping into a Denny’s at 3am, or waiting for next Tuesday’s results. Documentary filmmakers have been on to this little secret for years.
So forget the exploding squibs, the fakey Karo syrup blood and severed prosthetic limbs-here’s my Top 10 list of creepy, scary, frightening, haunting, spine-tingling tales that you literally could not make up (as per usual, in no particular ranking order). Er….”enjoy”?
The Atomic Cafe
Brother’s Keeper
The Corporation
The Cruise
The Devil and Daniel Johnston
, stumbles innocently and repeatedly into the right place at the right time, steadily amassing a sizeable grass roots following. Everything appears to be set in place for his Big Break, until an ill-advised tryst with hallucinogenic substances sends him (literally) spiraling into complete madness. While on a private plane flight with his pilot father, Johnston has a sudden epiphany that he is Casper the Friendly Ghost, and decides to wrest the controls, causing the plane to crash. Both men walk away relatively unscathed, but Daniel is soon afterwards committed to a mental hospital. The story becomes even more surreal, as Johnston is finally “discovered” by the major labels, who engage in a bidding war while their potential client is still residing in the laughing house (only in America). By turns darkly humorous, sad, and inspiring.
Grey Gardens 
In the Realms of the Unreal
An Inconvenient Truth
Sicko 
Zoo 
Previous posts with related themes:
Oh come, all ye Pagans: DVDs for All Hallows Eve
Divine Trash, Hidden Jewels-Part 2: Klaus Kinski
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California Emergency
by digby
I know you’re tired of hearing this from me, but it’s important. The ban gay marriage amendment, prop 8, is in a dead heat right now and the campaign is having a hard time getting people fired up to help GOTV. In this historic, progressive year it is just unthinkable that we in California would let a bunch of backwards, segregationist, religious extremists actually take away fundamental civil rights.
I had a conversation with a gay friend of mine last night who is extremely political and simply didn’t realize that a big Obama win here in California might not translate into a victory for No on Prop 8. It doesn’t scan, right? Liberals in liberal California voting in big numbers means support for gay marriage. But the fact is that there a quite a few conservative Democrats and “moderate” Republicans who may very well vote for Obama this time out, but who are opposed to gay marriage. Obama himself is opposed to gay marriage, although he did quietly announce his opposition to Prop 8.
We especially need the young voters to turn out big in California. They instinctively understand this as a basic issue of discrimination and fairness and have the most stake in the future. They need to vote and they need to help get out the vote. We all do.
If you think I’m being hyperbolic, here’s the ad about “The Call” again so you’ll know just what kind of crazy we are dealing with:
Here’s where to go if you can help. Send the link around to anyone you know who can help.
As much as I will be proud and excited if Obama wins this election, it will not be a truly progressive victory is we let these forces of the dark ages succeed in changing the constitution of the most populous state in the union — a state which Obama is poised to win hugely — to expressly discriminate against its citizens. It shouldn’t happen.
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Because I Need It
by digby
I’m a little bit stressed out and I expect that many of you are too. I need a little break. (If you are an animal-phobe or a serious cynic, don’t bother to read further.)
For the rest of you, I offer cute zoo animals eating birthday cake:
More at the link.
And here.
ok, I’m done.
Sharp Tip
by digby
This is such a great idea, I hope all the Randites adopt it and it sweeps the nation:
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee and author of the blog “Instapundit.” His wife, Helen Smith, is also a blogger as well as a forensic psychologist who writes this blog. Yesterday she came up with an idea to deal with uppity Obama voters, at least those who are waiters and waitresses. In a post, linked to by her husband, entitled “Should You Tip Less in an Obama Administration?”, she writes:
I often tip generously both because I have been a waitress and because I think it is important to reward people who work. However, if Obama gets in (and it is still an if), perhaps tipping less or not at all would be a good way to save money as a way of “going John Galt.” Yet, is it fair to the person who is stiffed? What about a compromise, just tipping less? What do you think?
So Dr. Helen’s idea for “going John Galt” is to get and other “Atlases” (picture of her husband) to not only stop holding up the world but stop tipping those who only hold up plates and trays for these world carriers.
That will teach them to vote Obama! To be fair, she doesn’t actually advocate stopping the practice, well common courtesy, of tipping. She is simply proposing “just tipping less.” Don’t stiff them, just cut their wages down. After all, they’re paid a whopping $2.01 per hour to bring you your lunch.
As if this weren’t arrogant enough, she then goes even further, suggesting that along with a lower tip, other “Atlases” should leave notes, referencing Obama:
I’ve been thinking. If Obama is elected, maybe in lieu of a tip I should leave a note like the following:
HOPE AND CHANGE FOR AMERICA: Spreading the Wealth Around.
In lieu of a tip, $_____ has been donated to the Re-Elect Obama for President Campaign. Thank you for supporting the man and the movement that are bringing America together!
If enough people leave notes like this, I’m sure it will galvanize waitpeople everywhere in support of The One!
That’ll teach ’em to vote for Obama. Why all those dumb waitresses will get so mad at Obama because their customers are giving him their tips that they’ll never vote for a Democrat again! A wicked, cunning plan, it is.
It’s a good thing that Dr Helen is a psychologist who studies dead people because her understanding of living human behavior is seriously lacking.
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White Noise
by digby
The New York Times does a nice feature today on Media Matters, running down how it works and speculating about its effect on the election.
But the most interesting, and predictable, part is this:
“I don’t pay any attention to them,” said Stuart Rothenberg, editor of The Rothenberg Political Report, a Washington newsletter. “Whether it’s conservatives evaluating the media, or liberals evaluating the media, I just have no confidence in any of the ideological stuff.”
Moreover, for all the organization’s culling, the sheer number of items it pumps out can be overwhelming to those reporters who cover the news media, or the campaign.
“At the risk of incurring their wrath,” said Mark Z. Barabak, a political reporter for The Los Angeles Times who has covered the Obama and McCain campaigns, “I think it does become, at a certain point, white noise.”
Similarly, David Folkenflik, the media correspondent for National Public Radio, said: “They’re looking at every dangling participle, every dependent clause, every semicolon, every quotation — to see if it there’s some way it unfairly frames a cause, a party, a candidate, that they may have some feelings for.”
That said, Mr. Folkenflik said the organization was a source of useful leads, in part because of the “breadth of their research.”
Yes, they are ridiculously thorough, which is the kind of thing mainstream reporters and political analysts just hate. Stuart Rothenberg simply discounts all information that doesn’t come from allegedly neutral sources. I’d love to know what he thinks those are. (I guess all those videos and documentation from Media Matters are just so booooring to have to look through to evaluate if what they are saying is true. So much easier to just put your fingers in your ears and your faith in Cokie Roberts.)
But this is really funny coming from one of Newtie’s creations:
“I think they are one of the most destructive organizations associated with American politics today,” said Frank Luntz, a pollster for Rudolph W. Giuliani and Newt Gingrich who this year has led on-camera voter focus groups on Fox News, a frequent Media Matters target. “They are vicious. They only understand one thing: attack, attack, attack.”
“If I were a Democrat, I would tell them to shut up,” Mr. Luntz said. “If I were a Republican, I would tell my candidates to ignore them.”
Pollster Frank Luntz is crying foul after MSNBC canceled his long-scheduled focus group two days before the debate. Luntz, who is under contract to MSNBC, had already spent $30,000 on recruits for several focus groups and invited reporters in Florida to watch — only to be told that the network didn’t want to declare a winner in the debate.
“I think they buckled to political pressure,” says Luntz, who has advised Republicans from Newt Gingrich to Rudy Giuliani but says he’s done no GOP work since 2001. “They caved. . . . Why is it that Democrats are allowed to do this” after leaving politics, “but Republicans aren’t?”
But MSNBC spokesman Jeremy Gaines says: “We made a decision not to use focus groups as part of our debate coverage. This decision had nothing to do with Frank’s past work or politics. We think our viewers should be able to make up their own minds without ‘scientific’ help” — despite the fact that the network has prominently featured Luntz and his on-air focus groups for four years.
Luntz has criticized President Bush on occasion, and his non-televised focus group, ironically, favored Kerry in the debate. Some NBC executives find him extremely fair but believe his longtime GOP links create a perception problem.
“For me, nothing is more important than getting it right,” Luntz says. He says MSNBC bowed to pressure from conservative-turned-liberal activist David Brock in dumping him and that the network hasn’t even agreed to use him as an analyst — sans focus groups — in this week’s debates.
Luntz, of course, never left Republican politics. And he never stopped being a jackass:
LUNTZ: I always use the line for Nancy Pelosi, “You get one shot at a facelift. If it doesn’t work the first time, let it go.”
Just in case anyone wonders about the tedious “white noise” Media Matters is boring reporters with, here are just a few headlines from today:
Who cares about all that icky stuff? What I want to know is whether or not Obama snapped at reporters for dogging him and his daughter on their way to a Holloween party. Now that’s important stuff.
Update: I’d forgotten that Rothenberg was embarrassed by Media Matters quite recently for saying this:
Voters shouldn’t judge a candidate by his skin color. Maybe, but is it any more unfair than, for example, saying that because McCain and President Bush are both Republicans that a McCain administration would produce a third Bush term? No, it isn’t.
I think he probably believes that.
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The President Speaks
by digby
Man, they really are getting desperate:
He’s been hidden away in his secure location for months and what with all the Republicans endorsing Obama in these last days as the ship makes its final descent to the ocean floor, I thought maybe he was keeping his options open…
Update: They aren’t even mentioning his name anymore. And I’m not talking about Bush:
Looking around the Fantasy of Flight aircraft hangar where the rally took place, there were all the usual reminders that it was a pro-McCain event. There were two large “Country First” banners hung on the walls along with four enormous American flags meant to conjure the campaign’s underlying patriotic theme. Many of the men and women in the audience wore McCain hats and t-shirts.
But on closer inspection, the GOP nominee’s name was literally nowhere to be found on any of the official campaign signage distributed to supporters at the event.
Members of the audience proudly waved “Country First” placards as Palin delivered her stump speech. Those signs were paid for by the Republican National Committee.
The other sign handed out to supporters read “Florida is Palin Country,” but those signs were neither paid for by the Republican National Committee nor the McCain campaign. In small print, the signs were stamped with the line “Paid for and authorized by Putnam for Congress” — as in, the re-election campaign of Florida congressman Adam Putnam, whose district skirts Polk City.
In fact, Putnam’s name was considerably more prominent than was McCain’s — his campaign had placed a number of large “Putnam for Congress” banners around the event site.
Update II: Heh. Here’s Obama’s response:
President Bush is sitting out the last few days before the election. But earlier today, Dick Cheney came out of his undisclosed location and hit the campaign trail. He said that he is, and I quote, “delighted to support John McCain.”
I’d like to congratulate Senator McCain on this endorsement because he really earned it. That endorsement didn’t come easy. Senator McCain had to vote 90 percent of the time with George Bush and Dick Cheney to get it. He served as Washington’s biggest cheerleader for going to war in Iraq, and supports economic policies that are no different from the last eight years. So Senator McCain worked hard to get Dick Cheney’s support.
But here’s my question for you, Colorado: do you think Dick Cheney is delighted to support John McCain because he thinks John McCain’s going to bring change? Do you think John McCain and Dick Cheney have been talking about how to shake things up, and get rid of the lobbyists and the old boys club in Washington?
Colorado, we know better. After all, it was just a few days ago that Senator McCain said that he and President Bush share a “common philosophy.” And we know that when it comes to foreign policy, John McCain and Dick Cheney share a common philosophy that thinks that empty bluster from Washington will fix all of our problems, and a war without end in Iraq is the way to defeat Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda terrorists who are in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
So George Bush may be in an undisclosed location, but Dick Cheney’s out there on the campaign trail because he’d be delighted to pass the baton to John McCain. He knows that with John McCain you get a twofer: George Bush’s economic policy and Dick Cheney’s foreign policy – but that’s a risk we cannot afford to take.
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Springing A Leak
by dday
I don’t know if these 11th-hour smears are going to work at a time when the total financial meltdown tends to focus the mind a bit. But if undecideds were looking for an excuse to vote against Senator Obama, they’ve been handed it. It appears that Obama has an aunt from Kenya who is living in Boston illegally after her request for asylum was denied four years ago. Illegal!!!1! By the way, Barack Obama doesn’t seem to know this aunt well or have any sort of relationship with her.
(Also, she apparently gave a small amount of donations to the campaign, which Obama has just given back.)
The interesting part of this is how the asylum denial was discovered. The quoted portion is from this AP story.
“Information about the deportation case was disclosed and confirmed by two separate sources, one of them a federal law enforcement official. The information they made available is known to officials in the federal government, but the AP could not establish whether anyone at a political level in the Bush administration or in the McCain campaign had been involved in its release.”
To quote Josh Marshall:
That’s about as transparent a red flag as an outfit like the AP is usually willing to give. And there you have it. Quite likely working in concert with the McCain campaign, a Bush administration official is leaking details on an immigration case to try to help McCain three days before the election. It’s shades of Bush I’s riffling through Bill Clinton’s passport files just before the 1992 election in a desperate last minute gambit as they were swirling down the drain.
Guess what? THAT’S illegal. And unlike some random relative who has no relationship to Obama, it’s likely this was carried out at the highest levels of either the Bush Administration or the McCain campaign.
We’ll see if it has any impact – I think it will be minimal. But the circumstances of the leak ought to be investigated as well.
…By the way, here are some things that could have driven the news cycle as last-minute revelations about McCain that were ignored by the larger media:
1) A mysterious donor who gave $70,000 to John McCain in one day and $269,000 over the course of a year.
2) John and Cindy used military jets for vacation trips to Bermuda back in 1993.
3) A potential fatal car crash back in 1964.
4) McCain pushed regulators to approve a land swap for a key contributor.
Any or all of these could have been in the genre of these last-minute smears, but you know, that wouldn’t be sporting.
…and John Conyers weighs in on this leak:
I was startled to read in today’s Associated Press that a “federal law enforcement official” has leaked information about an immigration case involving a relative of Senator Obama. Even more troubling, the AP reports that it “could not establish whether anyone at a political level in the Bush administration or in the McCain campaign had been involved,” a very disturbing suggesting indeed. This leak is deplorable and I urge you to take immediate action to investigate and discipline those responsible.
I note that this is not the first leak of law enforcement information apparently designed to influence the coming Presidential election — in recent weeks law enforcement sources leaked information about an alleged investigation of a community services organization, a leak that the Department of Justice informs me has been referred to the Department’s Office of the Inspector General and Professional Responsibility.
Such leaks are deeply harmful to the political process, and the American people expect and deserve better from their government and its law enforcement agencies.
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Ah, Comity!
by tristero
Attention, all you Emily Post trolls who need smelling salts after encountering the nasty vicious netroots:
“Now, listen, I’ve voted ‘present’ two or three times in my entire 25-year political career, where there might have been a conflict of interest and I didn’t feel like I should vote,” Boehner said. “In Congress, we have a red button, a green button and a yellow button, alright. Green means ‘yes,’ red means ‘no,’ and yellow means you’re a chicken shit. And the last thing we need in the White House, in the oval office, behind that big desk, is some chicken who wants to push this yellow button.”
That’s right. John Boehner said Obama’s a chicken shit.
And this is why, girls and boys, all talk about a less toxic political atmosphere with the current Republican party is sheer nonsense. Oh sure, Obama – if we are lucky enough to wake up Wed and find him elected – could find a spare Hagel lying around, or a Jim Leach to nail into his Cabinet,and that’s probably a good idea in the long run. But the reality staring us straight in the face is that the leadership of the Republican party – and a huge GOP majority having influence in the party’s ideological and strategic direction -have no interest in anything remotely resembling bipartisanship.
And neither does anyone I know personally who’s supporting Obama. Not with these murderous, corrupt clowns. We want the extreme right and their agenda out of our national politics, driven back to the margins of American discourse where it belongs. Maybe someone out there truly yearns for a less nasty politics, but not me, not now. Not with extremists who call me “traitor,” who have listed my friends as some of the 100 most dangerous people in America or placed them on terrorist watch lists, and who, from their seat as a US Representative pronounce a candidate for the American presidency a chicken shit.
Since I’m sure our resident rightwing friends will take what I just said out of context, let’s be clear. I am not saying that a robust, vibrant, and bipartisan effort on serious issues will remain ipso facto impossible or is necessarily undesirable. Nor am I saying that Democrats and only Democrats always have the “right” answer to a problem – clearly they don’t. I am saying, however, that it is absolutely impossible with the Republican party as it is now, and in its forseeable paleolithic palinized future, for Democrats to work together productively with the extremists at the top of (and throughout) the party except on the most circumscribed of issues. To get anything serious done, they will have to be fought. And that will not be pretty. I see no reason for Dems to back down and plenty of reasons to respond tit for tat, with interest.
You cannot “work with” the extreme right, but you can defeat them. Obama’s tactic appears to be to ignore them and isolate them from the atrophied remnants of the “moderate” Republicans, which he will encourage. Fair enough, that’s part of a strategy, but it’s not sufficient. To defeat Bushism and other trends of the American extreme right will take, as it always has, concentrated . sustained, and effective resistance in addition to Obama’s “divide and conquer” tactics. It requires us to denounce scoundrels like DeLay and humiliate buffoons like Boehner as well as a consistent, persistent, hounding of the media to do their job to expose these people for what they are.
These are incompetent frauds driven by a dangerously belligerent ideology grounded not in American values, but only sheer ignorance and fear. There is no reason to show them respect or kindness. They simply must be pushed away from the corridors of power, left to mutter in their plush think tanks and at their gun shows ’bout how Obama is using hypnosis, how the beginning of the end was fluoridated water, and how gay marriage is the only human factor that causes global warming.