Month: November 2008

Disgusting Failure

by digby

Mark Halperin just gave notice that the honeymoon is over and the media must redeem itself by turning on Obama:

Media bias was more intense in the 2008 election than in any other national campaign in recent history, Time magazine’s Mark Halperin said Friday at the Politico/USC conference on the 2008 election.

“It’s the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war,” Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. “It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage.”

This is from the man who wrote, without irony, “Drudge rules our world.”

This isn’t the first time Halperin has addressed the notion of press bias, of course. His book discusses the charges that the press was biased in the 2000 election in some depth:

HARRIS/HALPERIN (page 129): No one who kept a close eye on the media coverage of the 2000 campaign would deny that the press corps assigned to Gore was more aggressive and more hostile toward the candidate than those assigned to Bush …This discrepancy made Old Media reporters much more likely to buy into political party press releases, late-night comic jokes, and the general story line that mirrored the Bush campaign’s crafted version of Gore.

A number of members of the Gang of 500 are convinced that the main reason George W. Bush won the White House and Al Gore lost was that Gore’s regular press pack included the trio of Katherine “Kit” Seelye (of the New York Times), Ceci Connolly (of the Washington Post), and Sandra Sobieraj (of the Associated Press)…

But he didn’t actually blame the press for this:

Those three influential reporters—and the influential news organizations for which they worked—certainly played their part in churning out negative copy about Gore, but they were more representative of Gore’s problem than they were the cause. At some point along the way, those reporters contributed to the vice president of the United States losing control of his public image. Seelye, Connolly and Sobieraj most assuredly never resolved to confer with the Gore campaign to help the candidate recover his image. But a more adept campaign (and candidate) would have worked to defuse the danger early on.

[…]

The main Trade Secrets to be learned from Gore’s experience are: If your traveling press corps is hostile to you and the Old Media has settled on a negative meta-narrative about your candidacy, you cannot make real progress in any part of your campaign until you address those problems.

Somerby, needless to say, has throughly examined this in detail.

So, in Halperin’s view the Gore campaign is held responsible for its own bad coverage while the McCain campaign was terribly victimized by biased coverage. But this should not surprise us. We’ve known for a long time that Halperin is very, very concerned that anyone might think he is some sort of liberal.

I am going to quote at length from one of Glenn Greenwald’s classic posts to illustrate the absurdity of paying attention to Mark Halperin on this subject. He’s discussing Halperin’s three hour interview on Hugh Hewitt’s show:

First, Halperin pleas with Hewitt to recognize that Halperin shares his core world view, and to convince him, Halperin couples that with some drooling praise for Hewitt:

HH: And so why is she…I think this is going back to media again. I think my giant unified field theory here is that liberal media has destroyed the necessity of the left having to debate, having to reach a message across, because you guys have always papered over the weakness of their arguments. And so, in essence, by creating an echo chamber, and by allowing them to get away with saying silly things, you’ve destroyed the incentive to be smart and facile.

MH: I agree.

HH: (laughing) That’s too easy. I’ve stormed the castle.

MH: Hugh, you and I have agreed on a lot during this show. For the purpose of jacking up your already sky-high ratings, occasionally you pick fights with me where they don’t exist. But you and I agree about that basic premise. I’m keeping notes here on the things we disagree on.

Halperin, on the goodness and innocence of the victimized Karl Rove and the terribly unfair media depictions of him:

MH: Let me say one thing we say in the book about Karl Rove, who I respect and enjoy…I enjoy his company. If you look at the allegations of Karl Rove that have been propagated in Texas and in Washington by the media, the liberal media, and by Democrats, and you look at the allegations, there’s…except for the useful indiscretions to which Karl has admitted, there is no evidence for the allegations against him.

And the ability of the press to paint him as this evil guy, and say that accounts for his success, is fundamental and outrageous. Maybe he did the things he’s accused of, but to have this guy’s image portrayed and defined by things that are accusations that are unproven, we say in the book is really outrageous.

Halperin, trying to convince Hewitt that he is not like those horrible biased lefties who dominate the media, because at least Halperin confesses the sickness:

MH: If, though, you want to in a casual introduction, lump me in with people in my business who are liberally biased and don’t seem to care about it, I think that’s doing your listeners a disservice. They should read the book and what we say in The Way To Win about how the media’s been liberally biased in presidential campaign coverage, what needs to be done to try to fix it, and why the current system may not be any better with new media. But to lump me in with everybody else, I think, is doing people a disservice, because most of my colleagues, as you know, are in denial about it, or blind to it.

Halperin, begging Hewitt to recognize that his new book is appropriately reverent of the Leader:

MH: Number two, you keep saying how much nice stuff there is in the book about Bill Clinton. The book writes at length, in fact, half the book is about Karl Rove and George W. Bush, and I would believe is one of the most favorable, in terms of judging them, and not treating them as evil, things that have been written about Karl Rove since he came to Washington.

Halperin, desperately displaying his contempt for the handful of White House journalists who are not sufficiently reverent of the Leader, including his own colleague:

HH: Mark Halperin, is David Gregory [Halperin’s colleague at ABC News] a buffoon?

MH: Define buffoon for me.

HH: Oh, just use your own operational definition.

MH: I wouldn’t use that word, no.

HH: Is he a journalist?

MH: He’s definitely a journalist.

HH: Does he make you proud of being a journalist?

MH: I think that the relationship between the Bush White House Press Corps, and the Bush White House press staff has not produced a pretty picture for either side. . . .

HH: Does Helen Thomas make you proud?

MH: She…the questions she asks, that represent a point of view, have no place in the briefing room.

In contrast to the undignified and biased Helen Thomas and David Gregory, here is Halperin paying homage to the objective, unbiased journalist Brit Hume (while obediently adopting Hewitt’s idiotic nomenclature of the “center-right” versus “the left”):

HH: Do you watch Special Report?

MH: With Brit Hume?

HH: Yeah.

MH: I do.

HH: Do you admire it?

MH: Do I admire it? I like it. It’s an entertaining program.

HH: Why do you think Brit Hume has the trust of the center-right?

MH: Because the center-right is looking for voices who are experienced journalists, who aren’t liberally biased. And Brit is not liberally biased.

HH: Coming right back. That’s exactly right.

Halperin eagerly and self-consciously touting his Red America roots to a disbelieving Hewitt:

HH: And so, I want you to finish off by telling me about your project…Nick Lemann’s got a project where he’s going to add another extra year of power skills, and it’s not going to work, because everyone who enters the place is a hard lefty. You’ve got an ambition, but you’re not transparent. The media keeps hiring from the Harvard Crimson. It keeps self-perpetuating from self-elected elites.

MH: Can I introduce you to my interns from Bob Jones University?

HH: I’m glad that you have one. They must feel like a stranger in a strange world.

MH: No, because within my unit, we’re all about being fair and non-partisan [ed: like Brit Hume].

Halperin, like a battered wife, blaming himself and his colleagues — and defending Bush and Rove — for the endless, vicious attacks from the Bush administration on journalists:

The founders saw the importance of a free press. What this country has now is a press that no one likes, and which is weak. And the reason George Bush and Karl Rove found the way to win in dealing with the old media, which Richard Nixon dreamed of doing, but couldn’t do, is because they recognized that we were seen as a spoiled, corrupt, biased, special interest that wasn’t interested in the public interest, and they’ve taken advantage of that.

I deplore it, or I decry it in the sense that I wish everybody was helping build up the media, but I don’t blame them from a tactical point of view, because their supporters do not trust the old media, and do not like the way we behave in the briefing room, the output that we produce, and conservatives are trying to deal with an America more on their terms. And I understand why they’re doing that, and like I said, we are responsible for that, not George Bush and Karl Rove, not Richard Nixon.

Halperin, explaining how Bill Clinton destroyed the dignity of Washington and drowned politics in tactics of personal destruction — trends which Bush has heroically reversed (seriously):

HH: Did [Bill Clinton] radicalize politics by inventing the politics of personal destruction?

MH: I think what Bill Clinton did, we say in The Way To Win is, he helped usher in this freak show. The politics of personal destruction was part of it, but it was also making the office of the presidency undignified, wearing shorts into the Oval Office, answering boxers and briefs…

HH: That was hardly how he made the Oval Office undignified.

MH: Well, there’s that, too. But we’re talking about early on in his presidency, with the birth of the freak show, in the early 90’s when he got elected. Obviously, he did more to further this along later on through his personal conduct. But the ability of this president, and certainly this first lady, as we write in the book, to restore some of the dignity, personal dignity to the office, has been quite an achievement in the wake of what Bill Clinton did, given the freak show environment in which we live.

Halperin, teaching us who the serious and unserious people are in Washington:

HH: Do you see any evidence of superior brainpower in places like Nancy Pelosi and John Murtha, as opposed to Rove and Cheney?

MH: Those specifically?

HH: Are they on the same playing field?

MH: You want me to compare those specific four people?

HH: Yeah, because you’ve got two leaders…

MH: If I were running for president, I’d hire Rove and Cheney over Pelosi and Murtha.

It goes on and on like that. I had other selected excerpts but reading these engenders a strong urge (one could even say a need) to stop reading them. The intrepid Halperin, for instance, bravely refused to take a position one way or the other on whether The New York Times should have published the story of the President’s warrantless NSA eavesdropping program (“In this case, without knowing the arguments that were made, it’s hard to know which it is”) and repeatedly affirms the right-wing view that the media is hopelessly stacked against them (“for forty years, conservatives have rightly felt that we did not give them a fair shake”).

In sum, Halperin, in one interview, illustrated the crux of the sickness of the national media — every tenet of right-wing mythology, embraced. Every opportunity to debase himself before Hewitt in the hope of getting a little head pat as one of the Good Boys, seized. Every left-wing bogeyman, bashed. Every right-wing hero, glorified and praised and treated with intense reverence.

And the funny thing is that Hewitt continued to bash Halperin as a liberal causing Halperin to write him a petulant complaint:

Again, I respect much about you, but I am mystified by your determination to lump me in with others. Acknowledging the liberal bias that exists in the Old Media — as John Harris and I do in The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008 doesn’t necessarily prove that I am not liberal, but I would think you would be open to giving me the benefit of the doubt, when you have no actual evidence to the contrary.

I’m mystified too. How much more does the poor guy have to do to prove that he isn’t a liberal?

Today, Halperin put the press on clear notice. He said that the coverage of Obama during the campaign was a “disgusting failure” and an example of “extreme bias” and the “most disparate of any campaign” he’s seen, by far. And the press will get the message, no doubt, that they’d better straighten up and fly right.

Halperin made them feel embarrassed today. The article says that nobody on the panel strongly disagreed with him. They know what they have to do.

* And by the way, the trope about Bush bringing “dignity” to the White House is a crock:

He loves to cuss, gets a jolly when a mountain biker wipes out trying to keep up with him, and now we’re learning that the first frat boy loves flatulence jokes. A top insider let that slip when explaining why President Bush is paranoid around women, always worried about his behavior. But he’s still a funny, earthy guy who, for example, can’t get enough of fart jokes. He’s also known to cut a few for laughs, especially when greeting new young aides, but forget about getting people to gas about that.

Or this:

George W. Bush slipped a piece of cheese into his mouth. “Let’s order first.” He took a quick glance at the day’s menu prepared for him and his guest, saw nothing on it he cared for, and announced to the steward, “I’ll have a hot dog. Low fat hot dog.”

[…]

His hot dog arrived. Bush ate rapidly, with a sort of voracious disinterest. He was a man who required comfort and routine. Food, for him, was fuel and familiarity. It was not a thing to reflect on.

“The job of the president,” he continued, through an ample wad of bread and sausage, “is to think strategically so that you can accomplish big objectives. As opposed to playing mini-ball. You can’t play mini-ball with the influence we have and expect there to be peace. You’ve gotta think, think BIG.” he said as bread crumbs tumbled out of his mouth and onto his chin.

And he didn’t just behave this way when he was in private.

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Pisto Sour

by digby

Oh Boy.

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Saturday Night At The Movies

Eat them up, yum: Top 10 Food Flicks

By Dennis Hartley

I was originally going to do a post this week about my “top 10 Thanksgiving movies”, but after pondering it for a spell, all I could come up with was The House of Yes, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Ice Storm , Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Alice’s Restaurant. After that, I had nuthin’ (A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving ? But that’s TV.) Oh, I suppose there are many more titles out there (wasn’t there like, a Walton family Thanksgiving thingie?) but apparently they would not be among my favorites. One movie theme that I can more easily relate to, however, is movies about food (or containing at least one memorable eating scene). Hey, everyone’s gotta eat, right? So, chew on these:

Big Night-This is one DVD that I have brought along to many a social gathering and repeatedly foisted on friends and relatives, because after all, it’s important to “…take a bite out of the ass of life!” (as one of the film’s characters points out with great veracity). Two brothers, one an enterprising businessman named Secondo (Stanley Tucci, who also co-wrote and co-directed) and his older sibling Primo (Tony Shalhoub), a gifted chef, open an Italian restaurant but quickly run into financial trouble. Possible salvation arrives via a dubious proposal from a more successful competitor (played with much aplomb by Ian Holm). The fate of their business hinges on Primo’s ability to conjure up the ultimate godhead Italian feast. And oh, what a meal he prepares (you’d better have some pasta and ragu handy-or your appestat will be writing checks that your duodenum will not be able to cash, if you know what I’m sayin’). The wonderful cast includes Isabella Rossellini, Minnie Driver, Liev Schreiber, Allison Janney, and Campbell Scott (who co-directed with Tucci). A virtually unrecognizable Marc Anthony (the Latin pop superstar) lurks in the kitchen throughout as Primo’s cooking/prep assistant, with nary a line of dialogue.

Comfort and Joy-Another delightful, quirky trifle from Scottish writer-director Bill Forsyth (Local Hero, Gregory’s Girl). An amiable Glasgow radio personality (Bill Paterson) gets unceremoniously dumped by his girlfriend on Christmas Eve, which throws him into an existential crisis, causing him to take a sudden and urgent inventory of his personal and professional life. Soon after lamenting to his GM that he wants to do something more “important” than his chirpy morning show, serendipity drops him into the middle a of a potentially hot “investigative journalism” story-an escalating “war” between two local rival ice-cream dairies. Chock full of Forsyth’s patented low-key anarchy and extremely dry one-liners. As a former morning DJ, I can tell you that the scenes depicting “Dickie Bird” doing his show are very authentic, which is rare on the screen. It will take days to get the ice cream van’s loopy theme music out of your head.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover-A gamey, visceral and perversely piss-elegant fable about food, as it relates to love, sex, violence, revenge, and uh, Thatcherism from writer-director Peter Greenaway (who I like to refer to as “the thinking person’s Ken Russell”). Michael Gambon really chews up the scenery (figuratively and literally) as a vile and vituperative British underworld type who holds nightly court at his “front” business, a gourmet restaurant. When his bored trophy wife (Helen Mirren, in a fearless performance) becomes attracted to one of the regular diners, a quiet and unassuming bookish fellow, the wheels are set in motion for quite a twisty tale, culminating in one of the most memorable scenes of “just desserts” ever served up on film. The opulent set design and cinematographer Sacha Vierny’s extraordinary use of color combine to lend a rich Jacobean texture to the proceedings. Look for the late, great 80s pub rocker Ian Dury (“Sex & Drugs & Rock ’n’ Roll”) in a small part as one of the crime lord’s associates.

Delicatessen -This film is so…French. A seriocomic vision of a food-scarce, dystopian future society along the lines of Soylent Green, directed with great verve and trademark surrealist touches by co-directors Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro (The City of Lost Children). The pair’s favorite leading man, Dominique Pinon (sort of a sawed-off Robin Williams) plays a circus performer who moves into an apartment building with a butcher shop downstairs. The shop’s proprietor seems to be appraising the new tenant with, shall we say, a “professional” eye? In Jeunet and Caro’s bizarro world, it’s all par for the course (just wait ‘til you get a load of the vegan “troglodytes” who live underneath the city streets). One particular sequence, involving a wildly funny, imaginatively staged sex scene, stands on its own as a veritable master class in the arts of film and sound editing

Diner-This wondrous, episodic slice-of-life dramedy marked writer-director Barry Levinson’s first feature film back in 1982, and it remains his best, IMHO. A small group of twenty-something buddies converge for Christmas week in 1959 Baltimore. One is recently married, another is about to get hitched, and the others are still playing the field and deciding what to do with the rest of their life. They are all slogging fitfully toward that last, “no turning back” portal to “adulthood”. The most entertaining scenes take place at the group’s favorite meeting place, a local diner, where the comfort food of choice is French fries with gravy (mmm…French fries with gravy). Levinson has a great gift for writing dialog, and it’s all the little details that make the difference here; like a cranky appliance store customer who refuses to upgrade to color TV because he saw Bonanza at a friend’s house, and decided that “…the Ponderosa looked fake”. This film was more influential than it gets credit for; Tarantino owes a debt of gratitude (see below) as well as the creators of TV’s Seinfeld. It also helped launch film careers for Kevin Bacon, Mickey Rourke, Ellen Barkin, Daniel Stern, Timothy Daly, Steve Guttenberg and Paul Reiser.

Eat Drink Man Woman-Or as I once dubbed it: “I Never Stir-Fried for My Father”. This was director Ang Lee’s more substantive follow-up to his enjoyable, but relatively fluffy crowd-pleaser The Wedding Banquet (another good food flick). Lee treads on Wayne Wang territory in this beautifully acted dramedy about the clash of traditional vs. modern values within Chinese culture. An aging master chef, who is losing his sense of taste (ah, savor the irony) stringently follows a tradition of preparing an elaborate feast every Sunday, which his three grown (and single) daughters are required to attend. Dysfunctional family angst ensues around these mandatory gatherings, as you might expect. As the story unfolds, Lee reveals the bittersweet truths and universality of family dynamics, which transcends culture and geography. Only caveat: An hour after you watch it, you’ll be hungry for a second feature (I’m KIDDING). You know I’m a kidder.

My Dinner with Andre– Boy, this one is a tough sell to the uninitiated. “An entire film that nearly all takes place at one restaurant table, with two self-absorbed New York intellectuals pontificating the whole time- ‘yak, yak, yak, yak’? This is entertaining?!” Actually, um, yes-it is. Quite surprisingly so. The late great director Louis Malle took a bold artistic gamble with this movie that pays off in spades. Although ostensibly a work of “fiction”, Malle’s two stars, theatre director Andre Gregory and actor-playwright Wallace Shawn, essentially play themselves (the pair collaborated on the screenplay). A rumination on art, life, love, the universe and everything, the film is not so much about the food itself, but more of a love letter to the lost art of erudite dinner conversation.

Pulp Fiction -Although the universal popularity of this Quentin Tarantino opus is largely owed to its hyper-stylized mayhem and the ultra-hip, creatively salty iambic pentameter spouted by the characters, I have always felt it to be a closer cousin to Diner than to, say, The Asphalt Jungle(I know that sounds crazy, but hear me out). Think about it: The film’s crucial opening and closing scenes take place in a diner, with characters conducting animated, eclectic conversations over plates of food. In Mia and Vincent’s protracted sequence at the theme restaurant, the camera gives us fetishistic close-ups of their decidedly all-American eats (“Douglas Sirk steak. And a vanilla coke.”). There’s that classic exchange between Vincent and Jules regarding “Le” Big Macs in France, Jules’ voracious hijacking of poor hapless Brett’s “Big Kahuna” burger, and Fabienne pining wistfully about her longing for blueberry pancakes. Even the super efficient Mr. Wolfe takes a few seconds out of his precisely mapped schedule to reflect on the pleasures of a fresh-brewed cup of coffee. I think this definitely qualifies as a food flick!

Tampopo-Self billed as “The first Japanese noodle western”, this 1987 entry from writer-director Juzo Itami (A Taxing Woman) is all that and more. Nobuko Niyamoto is superb as the title character, a widow who has inherited her late husband’s noodle house. Despite her hard work and sincere effort to please customers, Tampopo struggles to keep the business afloat, until a deux ex machina arrives-a truck driver named Goro (Tsutomo Yamazaki). After one taste, Goro pinpoints the problem-her noodles are bland (in his personal “code of the east”, bland noodles are an aesthetic crime). No worries-like the magnanimous gunslinger of the old west, Goro decides to take Tampopo on as a personal project, and mentor her on the Zen of creating the perfect noodle bowl. A true delight from start to finish, offering keen insight on the relationship between food, sex and love.

Tom Jones (-Truly, doth I really need to explain? Good sirs and madams, I prithee, just watch this morsel…and enjoy:

Anyone for seconds? Here are 10 more personal recommendations for your delectation: Babette’s Feast, Like Water for Chocolate, Henry Jaglom’s Eating – A Very Serious Comedy About Women and Food, Ratatouille, The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie, Eating Raoul, Chocolat , 9 1/2 Weeks, La Grande Bouffe, GoodFellas .

Bon appetit!

Hair On Fire

by digby

Krugman:

The reason we’re making analogies with the Great Depression — and the reason I’ve come out with a new edition of The Return of Depression Economics — is the collapse of policy certainties. In particular, the Fed’s sudden impotence — its inability to cut rates any more, because they’re essentially zero — is a very real parallel with the Depression, and necessitates drastic responses.

Now, if all goes well the Obama stimulus plan will head off the worst. But that will be precisely because we understood that the current crisis is, indeed, like the Great Depression in important ways. Only those who learn from history can hope to avoid repeating it.

Boy I hope he’s right because I’m getting a little bit of that Richard Clark running around with his hair on fire sort of feeling right now.

The President -Elect’s Weekly Youtube Address

by digby

Isn’t that neat?

The phrase “deflationary spiral” coming from our new president should wake everybody up a little bit, I think. We are in deep shit.

A New Era Of Comity And Bipartisanship

by dday

Somebody forgot to tell Mitch McConnell.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Friday sent a message to Democrats that Republicans are not prepared to bend to a stronger majority.

In a letter to Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), McConnell urged Reid to adopt a more conciliatory tone and warned him that Republicans will unite against Democrats if he does not. The letter was signed by all 40 GOP senators and two Republican incumbents who are awaiting the results of elections in Georgia and Minnesota.

This is the Senate GOP that obstructed practically every major bill that Democrats tried to bring up for the last two years. That’s not going to stop, regardless of how many Republicans are planted in the Cabinet or throughout the federal bureaucracy. At this point, Republicans aren’t interested in winning the next election, they’re interested in stopping any popular policy and beating this country into the ground.

“Recently, I stumbled across this analysis of how nationalized healthcare in Great Britain affected the political environment there. As Norman Markowitz in Political Affairs, a journal of “Marxist thought,” puts it: “After the Labor Party established the National Health Service after World War II, supposedly conservative workers and low-income people under religious and other influences who tended to support the Conservatives were much more likely to vote for the Labor Party when health care, social welfare, education and pro-working class policies were enacted by labor-supported governments.”

Passing Obamacare would be like performing exactly the opposite function of turning people into investors. Whereas the Investor Class is more conservative than the rest of America, creating the Obamacare Class would pull America to the left. Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute, who first found that wonderful Markowitz quote, puts it succinctly in a recent blog post: “Blocking Obama’s health plan is key to the GOP’s survival.””

They have to block health care reform because people will like it. And if government produces, the entire GOP worldview is lost. Bill Kristol said this a long time ago.

The sad thing is that these threats might just work. Reid has an election coming up in 2010 and he’ll be thinking about his own political future. And let’s just say the Lieberman fiasco didn’t exactly inspire confidence about how Senate Democrats deal with the opposition. Now McConnell is trying to set the Congressional agenda:

The minority leader also held an unusually long news conference Friday to reiterate points made in his letter. He said Republicans are not sorry to see President Bush leave office, given his unpopularity, and praised Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for running a “fabulous” campaign “under very, very difficult circumstances.”

McConnell pressed Democrats to address the future of Social Security and urged Republicans to defeat ‘card-check’ legislation that would allow workers to bypass secret-ballot elections when organizing unions.

“What I’m saying to the new president and the new administration: ‘Do big things, and do them in the center, and you’ll be surprised at how much support you might have,’ ” he said at the news conference.

Otherwise, McConnell warned, his party would stand together and block a far-left agenda.

“You’re likely to have very significant unity among Republicans,” he said.

(under the Employee Free Choice Act, if 30% of the workforce wants an secret ballot election they get one. Thought I’d put some facts into the mix)

This is what Barack Obama is stepping into. He’s going to offer a hand of friendship and Senate Republicans are going to bite it off. They are thoroughly disinterested in compromise. They view it as a threat.

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It’s What They Do

by digby

Or what Karl Rove does anyway. John Emerson reports on the Franken Coleman recount:

But Coleman is a Rovian. Even though he hasn’t won yet, legally speaking, he’s already declared victory three times. He’s proposed that Franken waive the “unnecessary” recount. He’s blamed Franken for the cost of the recount required by law. He’s smeared Secretary of State Ritchey. He’s smeared several local election boards. He’s made a stink about the 32 votes (which were never lost and were never in the trunk of a car), and about the routine correction of a hundred-vote mistranscription, and about the next-morning report of one county’s votes, and so on ad nauseum. Whenever the count has turned against him, he has immediately, without checking, insinuated the possibility of fraud. (In this he has been joined by Minnesota’s labile, amnesiac Congresswoman Michele Bachmann . Michele may not bother to get her facts right, but “she knows her heart is right”). The Coleman allegations have been refuted in Minnesota, but they’re still alive and well nationally. The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, MSNBC, and other outlets have succeeded in convincing millions of people that Franken is trying to steal the election. Even the New York Times has relayed erroneous Coleman charges. Some Republicans — and many media people — are even hinting that Minnesota is Florida all over again, with Secretary of State Ritchie as the Katherine Harris figure. (Are the Republicans really finally admitting that the 2000 election was stolen?)

Emerson wonders what Coleman hopes to get out of this except a totally poisoned atmosphere since he is likely to hold on to a slim lead and end up winning. The fact is that in close elections, the Rove method is very explicit. This is Republican election stealing 101:

Newspaper coverage on November 9, the morning after the election, focused on the Republican Fob James’s upset of the Democratic Governor Jim Folsom. But another drama was rapidly unfolding. In the race for chief justice, which had been neck and neck the evening before, Hooper awoke to discover himself trailing by 698 votes. Throughout the day ballots trickled in from remote corners of the state, until at last an unofficial tally showed that Rove’s client had lost—by 304 votes. Hornsby’s campaign declared victory. Rove had other plans, and immediately moved for a recount. “Karl called the next morning,” says a former Rove staffer. “He said, ‘We came real close. You guys did a great job. But now we really need to rally around Perry Hooper. We’ve got a real good shot at this, but we need to win over the people of Alabama.'” Rove explained how this was to be done. “Our role was to try to keep people motivated about Perry Hooper’s election,” the staffer continued, “and then to undermine the other side’s support by casting them as liars, cheaters, stealers, immoral—all of that.” (Rove did not respond to requests for an interview for this article.) The campaign quickly obtained a restraining order to preserve the ballots. Then the tactical battle began. Rather than focus on a handful of Republican counties that might yield extra votes, Rove dispatched campaign staffers and hired investigators to every county to observe the counting and turn up evidence of fraud. In one county a probate judge was discovered to have erroneously excluded 100 votes for Hooper. Voting machines in two others had failed to count all the returns. Mindful of public opinion, according to staffers, the campaign spread tales of poll watchers threatened with arrest; probate judges locking themselves in their offices and refusing to admit campaign workers; votes being cast in absentia for comatose nursing-home patients; and Democrats caught in a cemetery writing down the names of the dead in order to put them on absentee ballots. As the recount progressed, the margin continued to narrow. Three days after the election Hooper held a press conference to drive home the idea that the election was being stolen. He declared, “We have endured lies in this campaign, but I’ll be damned if I will accept outright thievery.” The recount stretched on, and Hooper’s campaign continued to chip away at Hornsby’s lead. By November 21 one tally had it at nine votes. The race came down to a dispute over absentee ballots. Hornsby’s campaign fought to include approximately 2,000 late-arriving ballots that had been excluded because they weren’t notarized or witnessed, as required by law. Also mindful of public relations, the Hornsby campaign brought forward a man who claimed that the absentee ballot of his son, overseas in the military, was in danger of being disallowed. The matter wound up in court. “The last marching order we had from Karl,” says a former employee, “was ‘Make sure you continue to talk this up. The only way we’re going to be successful is if the Alabama public continues to care about it.'” Initially, things looked grim for Hooper. A circuit-court judge ruled that the absentee ballots should be counted, reasoning that voters’ intent was the issue, and that by merely signing them, those who had cast them had “substantially complied” with the law. Hooper’s lawyers appealed to a federal court. By Thanksgiving his campaign believed he was ahead—but also believed that the disputed absentee ballots, from heavily Democratic counties, would cost him the election. The campaign went so far as to sue every probate judge, circuit clerk, and sheriff in the state, alleging discrimination. Hooper continued to hold rallies throughout it all. On his behalf the business community bought ads in newspapers across the state that said, “They steal elections they don’t like.” Public opinion began tilting toward him. The recount stretched into the following year. On Inauguration Day both candidates appeared for the ceremonies. By March the all-Democratic Alabama Supreme Court had ordered that the absentee ballots be counted. By April the matter was before the Eleventh Federal Circuit Court. The byzantine legal maneuvering continued for months. In mid-October a federal appeals-court judge finally ruled that the ballots could not be counted, and ordered the secretary of state to certify Hooper as the winner—only to have Hornsby’s legal team appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which temporarily stayed the case. By now the recount had dragged on for almost a year. When I went to visit Hooper, not long ago, we sat in the parlor of his Montgomery home as he described the denouement of Karl Rove’s closest race. “On the afternoon of October the nineteenth,” Hooper recalled, “I was in the back yard planting five hundred pink sweet Williams in my wife’s garden, and she hollered out the back door, ‘Your secretary just called—the Supreme Court just made a ruling that you’re the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court!'” In the final tally he had prevailed by just 262 votes. Hooper smiled broadly and handed me a large photo of his swearing-in ceremony the next day. “That Karl Rove was a very impressive fellow,” he said.

If you haven’t read the article that’s excerpted from, take the time, especially if you’re tempted to start feeling warm and fuzzy about these Republicans who are becoming born again Obamaphiles. All of those people, from Colin Powell on down, benefited for years from tactics like these — they knew about it, we all did, and they said nothing. If you want to trust people like that, be my guest. I never will.

Clinging To Their Reality

by digby

From David Sirota:

When I wrote my first column about the “center-right nation” and subsequently launched the “Center-Right Nation Watch” series on this blog I predicted that the news media would actually increase its usage of this term after Obama won. I did a Lexis-Nexis search of the term, and was the first to note the trend and make the prediction that “if Obama wins, expect more frantic talk from the fringe about how electing a black man billed as an Islamic Karl Marx obviously means our country is more conservative than ever.” Feeling like I was out on a limb (and remember, this was almost 2 weeks before a group of major progressive pundits belatedly started writing about the trend), I asked a friend out here in Denver who works with a company called Trendrr to officially track whether my prediction was right – and you can see from the results above, it was – more so than I ever expected. As the graph shows, the use of the exact term “center-right nation” spiked immediately after election day (point “0” is the day my column published, point “1” is election day). While it’s true – this trend study doesn’t tell us how many of the “center-right nation” references are saying this is “not a center-right nation.” But a look through Lexis-Nexis shows it’s safe to assume that the vast majority of these references are asserting this is a “center-right nation.”

Meanwhile back on planet earth:

I don’t know if the term “center-right” just spontaneously burst forth from the media after the election in a whiplash reaction to the shocking possibility that the American people might have voted for something other than mushy, faux provincial, conservatism. Perhaps it was a sort of mass delusion. But I suspect it was something a little bit more conscious than that, don’t you?

This has actually been an article of faith among the gasbags for a very long time, it’s just that until recently, what they proclaimed (without qualification) was that this was a “conservative country.” The election of a Democrat with a popular mandate required them to change their rhetoric. But it hasn’t changed their belief.

Here’s historian and highly respected thought leader Jon Meachum just before theelection:

It is easy—for some, even tempting—to detect the dawn of a new progressive era in the autumn of Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency … But history, as John Adams once said of facts, is a stubborn thing, and it tells us that Democratic presidents from FDR to JFK to LBJ to Carter to Clinton usually wind up moving farther right than they thought they ever would, or they pay for their continued liberalism at the polls. Should Obama win, he will have to govern a nation that is more instinctively conservative than it is liberal—a perennial reality that past Democratic presidents have ignored at their peril. A party founded by Andrew Jackson on the principle that “the majority is to govern” has long found itself flummoxed by the failure of that majority to see the virtues of the Democrats and the vices of the Republicans.

He goes on to cherry pick facts about Democratic presidents to show that they were all failures — even Roosevelt!

This is an article of faith among the political establishment. In fact, it’s one of the greatest successes of the conservative movement to persuade these villagers that Democratic presidents are doomed to failure before they even begin.

So, this “center-right” trope is just their way of preserving their belief system in the face of a repudiation by the people. It’s not a problem in and of itself, except to those of us who actually identify as liberals and progressives and feel that it’s useful to take political credit for policies that actually help humans. The problem is that Democrats take them seriously.

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Half The Battle Is Showing Up

By digby

Following up on my post earlier, here’s a video from yesterday: when asked why the congress was avoiding its responsibility and kicking the can down the road on the crisis in the auto industry, Harry Reid said:

What kind of a message are we sending the American people by having a bunch of failed votes here? We do not have the votes. What happened here this week in Washington has not been good for the auto industry. I know it wasn’t planned but these guys landing here in their corporate jets does not send a good message to people in Searchlight Nevada or Las Vegas or Reno or anyplace else in this country.

Oh please. We’re not going to figure out a way to forestall the horrifying meltdown of the auto industry and potentially throw millions of people out of work because of some trumped up PR problem? Fine — structure a deal where the CEOs all have to march through the streets of Detroit in their underwear singing “Whistle While You Work,” whatever. But don’t say that you have to throw in the towel because you don’t have the votes over some trivial bullshit when the fact is that you and the white house are at loggerheads about what account the money should be withdrawn from. Here’s a clue — that’s paper work. Nobody cares about that — it’s all taxpayer money, no matter which little designated pile it comes from.

But people are going to care quite a bit if the country goes into a depression. This is fiddling while Detroit burns.

And by the way, here’s how people who listen to talk radio are going to think about this:

Rush’s Advice for the Big Three, Dems Who Caused Dow Crash

RUSH: I have some questions. You know, Pelosi, Reid, that crowd, they sent the auto execs home yesterday and they said, “You come back with a plan. We don’t have the votes and you’re not going to make us look bad. It sends a bad signal to the American people. We don’t have the votes. So you come back with a plan. You tell us what you want for the $25 billion.” Okay, I have some questions for the people like Pelosi and Reid and these other liberal hacks, just tough questions for you to ponder. With gasoline prices now under two bucks in most places and dropping, and the price of oil (I checked it right before the program) below $50 now ($49 a barrel it was earlier today.) So with the gas price under two bucks and oil plummeting, what would you say, Pelosi and Reid, if the car companies could become profitable by selling SUVs or go broke by turning out the green cars that you’re going to demand they make? What would you say, Pelosi and Reid, if the best auto executive in the world could come in and fix the Detroit problem but he demands a hundred million dollars a year in income? Would you insist that they hire somebody who has no clue what they’re doing and earns less than $400,000?

If the auto executives came back to you and say that they can turn profits if they tear up all existing labor — this is what I wish they’d do, I wish Nardelli and Wagoner and Mulally would come back and say, “You want our idea? You want know to know what we need to succeed? Fine. We need to tear up all our existing labor contracts. We need to eliminate all these CAFE standards that you placed on manufacturing. That’s what we need; that’s what we need to do. We can turn this business around if you get the shackles off of us.” What would they say? You know damn well what they would say. They’d say, “Screw you, because we’re going to run the auto business now.” Barney Frank is going to say it — and I have another question for these liberals. You’ve been attacking the Big Three auto companies all of your political careers. Why are you defending them now? You’ve been attacking them, you have been making them out to be the enemy just like Wal-Mart’s the enemy, just like Big Drug is the enemy. Big Oil is the enemy. Anything big corporate has been the enemy of Ted Kennedy on down. Now, all of a sudden, you find a need after you’ve had your role — and let’s make no mistake about this. Congress has had a role in destroying these companies, or harming them greatly, and now all of a sudden you want to defend ’em? Why? Why are you defending these companies that you told everybody else were evil?

There is no point in avoiding fights over important things. There will always be people like Rush out there with big microphones who will tell the American people incoherent nonsense like this and sway many of them, no matter what you do. The right wing, including the ghost administration that now resides in the white house, wants the Big Three to fail and they want it to fail because they hate unions, they hate environmental laws and they hate safety regulations and they are eager to blame all the pain to come on those things. They will happily put millions of people out of work if that’s what it takes to “prove” their point.

The Democrats need to realize right now that they do not have partners in dealing with this economic crisis. And they are going to have a lot of trouble keeping the American people on board with all the things that have to be done because it goes against everything they’ve heard for the last 30 years. And while the right won’t help solve any problems, it will continue to hammer home its soothing, familiar lies over and over again to counter everything the Democrats need to do. There is a lot of work to be done right now — political work and governing work. They can’t just sit on the sidelines waiting for Obama to wave his magic wand and make it all magically go away.

Reid is wrong. The message they would be sending to the American people if they stayed on the job and fought this out, even if they had failed vote after failed vote, would be that they take this situation seriously and are trying to fix it. They go home and the only people talking about this are Rush and his army of evil yakkers.

Scarecrow over at FDL wrote this earlier:

Dean Baker, whose earlier excellent post provides a compelling argument for a bridge loan to the auto industry, reminds us (via TPM) that the economy needs much more to keep a likely deep recession from becoming another depression. Baker’s plea joins those we’ve seen from Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini (video at right — h/t Stoller) as well as 375 other economists signing a letter organized by the Center for Economic Policy Research. From Dean Baker:

We know how to keep the economy from collapsing. We didn’t have this information 80 years ago. The secret is to spend money, lots of it. CEPR just circulated a letter that garnered 375 economists’ signatures arguing for a stimulus between $300 billion and $450 billion. This might be too small given all the bad news that we are seeing. We may need to spend $500 billion or $600 billion a year to get the economy back on its feet, possibly more. The key point is that we can get the economy back on its feet; we just have to spend the money to do it.

So where are Congress and the Administration? Despite the growing economist consensus on what needs to be done, Thursday Congress was able only to pass a narrow bill extending unemployment benefits a few more weeks. The President says he’ll sign the bill. That’s good, but this effort, while undoubtedly worthwhile, is trivial compared to what the country needs.

no kidding.

I get the feeling that a lot of people (not Scarecrow obviously) still don’t quite get just what serious deep shit we are in right now. Here’s Roubini, who is not known for his sunny outlook to be sure, but who has also called this one down the line:

Our congress can’t kick the can down the road. Some of this stuff can’t wait until after we have a new president and people have a right to expect that their government is at least showing up to work. What are they thinking?”

The Guy Has Some Stones

by dday

I seriously hope that nobody is trying to rehabilitate Roger Stone as he attempts to repent over what he helped impose on the world. The guy was actively pushing the ‘Whitey’ tape as recently as this year’s Republican convention, for crying out loud.

The capstone of Stone’s career, at least in terms of results, was the “Brooks Brothers riot” of the 2000 election recount. This was when a Stone-led squad of pro-Bush protestors stormed the Miami-Dade County election board, stopping the recount and advancing then-Governor George W. Bush one step closer to the White House. Though he is quick to rebut GOP operatives who seek to minimize his role in the recount, Stone lately has been having second thoughts about what happened in Florida.

“There have been many times I’ve regretted it,” Stone told me over pizza at Grand Central Station. “When I look at those double-page New York Times spreads of all the individual pictures of people who have been killed [in Iraq], I got to think, ‘Maybe there wouldn’t have been a war if I hadn’t gone to Miami-Dade. Maybe there hadn’t have been, in my view, an unjustified war if Bush hadn’t become president.’ It’s very disturbing to me.”

He doesn’t regret crap. He’s looking to disappear Bush like the rest of the GOP. Stone saw the opportunity to increase his power as a prize GOP ratfucker and fixer and he took it. Now their golden boy, the man the party establishment plucked from the Governor’s mansion in Austin and lined up behind en masse for years, revealed himself to be an incompetent dullard with a knack for ruining everything he gets his hands on. And we’re supposed to let that stain, the blot on the records of all these willing dupes who backed him, to be washed out? Hell no.

Stone voted for Bush in 2004 as well (“John Kerry was an elitist buffoon”) but he pulled no punches in his assessment of the last eight years. Stone’s own political philosophy is libertarian, and he says it conflicts with Bush’s penchant for expanded executive power.

“I think across the board he’s led the party to its current position, which means losing both houses of congress and now the White House,” Stone said. “How can you be conservative and justify wiretapping people without a warrant? We’re supposed to be the party of personal freedom and civil liberties. Big brother listening in on your phone calls—I got a problem with that.”

Give me a break. Not one Republican member of the House or Senate raised an objection to the illegal wiretapping program ever. Not one time. And neither did scummy operatives like Stone. Hell, Stone bragged about doing his own surveillance during the Brooks Brothers riot:

“We set up a Winnebago trailer, right over here,” Stone said when we got out of the Jaguar and walked about a block away from the Clark center, on First Street. “I set up my command center there. I had walkie-talkies and cell phones, and I was in touch with our people in the building. Our whole idea was to shut the recount down. That was why we were there. We had the frequency to the Democrats’ walkie-talkies and were listening to their communications, but they were so disorganized that we didn’t learn much that was useful.”

Oh, by the way, Stone was apparently a reluctant warrior in the recount fight. He was just paying off debts:

That Stone joins Matthew Dowd, Scott McClellan, and Colin Powell in the group of disaffected ex-Bushies shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. Stone advised Donald Trump on his prospective bid for the presidency in 2000. According to Stone, he didn’t even want to get involved in the 2000 race at all until the GOP’s recount head, James Baker III, called him up and asked him for his help. Stone said that Baker had helped him out in 1981 by getting Reagan and Bush to lend support to New Jersey Governor Tom Kean, whose campaign Stone ran. He owed him a favor.

“In this business, if you don’t pay your debts you’re finished,” Stone said.

This is horseshit. And really dangerous horseshit besides. These people are running away as fast as they can from a legacy they helped create, and there is absolutely no reason to allow them to do so. Those dead American soldiers and Iraq children are YOUR children, Mr. Stone. You helped cause them, you helped send them to their deaths, and there is no way anyone should allow you to airbrush your own conscience. And in 5 or 10 or 15 years when you and the whole dirty cabal is back with some other empty suit, the REAL vessel of conservatism, we’re all going to remember who you backed the last time. George W. Bush is yours. You bought him and you own him. And you can’t take him to the return window.

…here’s Karl Rove terribly concerned about illegal political activities inside the Obama White House, extreme use of executive power, replacing US Attorneys like Patrick Fitzgerald (!) and overly political Administration appointments.

Karl Rove is concerned about that.

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