Month: December 2008

Fergawdsake

by digby

So, some soothsaying professor has looked deep into Al Gore’s soul and decided that he’s just as nuts as Dick Cheney:

More than that, he asks a simple question: Had he been elected, would Al Gore have taken the same path as George Bush? He concludes, overwhelmingly, that he would have.

Given the prevailing mood in the aftermath of 9/11, the institutional structures that surround the president, the political and social pressures of the time, the accepted wisdom regarding Saddam Hussein and the international factors at work, says Harvey, Gore “[would have been] compelled … to make many of the same interim (generally praised) decisions for many of the same reasons. Momentum would have done the rest.”

There are several threads to Harvey’s argument, which you can read in its entirety here. At the risk of oversimplifying a very detailed examination, here are a few of the arguments he makes:

• Despite its universal acceptance, the prevailing theory of the war, which Harvey calls “neoconism” “remains an unsubstantiated assertion, a ‘theory’ without theoretical content, an argument devoid of logic or perspective … Even the most superficial review of its central tenets reveals serious logical, empirical and theoretical flaws.”

For instance, he notes, it presumes that Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and a few like-minded ideologues “had the intellectual prowess and political skills to manipulate the preferences, perceptions and priorities” of non-neocons such as Tony Blair and Colin Powell; the majority of both parties in both houses of Congress; the leadership of foreign policy and intelligence committees in the House and Senate — including every senior Democrat; most European leaders; “every member of the UN Security Council (including France, Russia and China) who unanimously endorsed UN Security Council Resolution 1441; and 60%-70% of the American people at the time.

• The “neocon” argument presumes Gore, in the same circumstances, would not have been presented with similar advice or faced pressures to act in a similar way. Harvey suggests this is wishful thinking. “In fact, all of the relevant evidence from Gore’s entire political career – his speeches on Iraq, contributions to the 2000 campaign debates on foreign affairs, policy announcements and interviews” argue Gore would have been at least as aggressive as Bush. As Harvey points out:

“Gore was a foreign policy hawk. He consistently opposed efforts to cut defense spending, supported Reagan’s decisions to bomb Libya, invade Grenada, aid the Contras in the 80s, and fund the B-1 and B-2 bomber and MX missile programs.” Gore and his running mate, Senator Joe Lieberman, both backed the 1991 Gulf War. As Vice President, Gore supported military actions in Bosnia and Kosovo, and “consistently adopted the hardest line in the Clinton administration when dealing with Saddam Hussein.” When President Clinton decided to abort his four-day bombing of Iraq in 1998, Gore opposed backing down “despite the absence of UN Security Council endorsement.”

Gore was surrounded by advisers who shared his hawkish views, whose speeches, statements and policy positions at the time give no hint they were reluctant to use force to bring Saddam Hussein into line.

• Bush did not invent the conditions or attitudes at the time. Gore would have been presented with the same flawed intelligence on Iraq’s weapons capabilities, faced the same public fears and pressures and the same international concerns. “Every member of the UN Security Council (including the war’s strongest critics, France and Russia)” unanimously endorsed the belief that Saddam had maintained proscribed weapons and was actively frustrating UN efforts to find them, Harvey writes.

“Anyone looking for reasons to be worried about Iraq could easily ignore speeches by Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld and focus instead on those delivered by Clinton (Bill or Hillary), Gore and Kerry; they could ignore the 2002 [National Intelligence Estimate] and read the NIEs published over the previous five years; or they could simply read the reports by UNMOVIC’s chief weapons inspector Hans Blix, or UNSCOM’s inspector Scott Ritter (one of the war’s strongest critics).”

• The faulty intelligence was backed up by Saddam’s bizarre efforts to encourage such beliefs, in hopes it would reduce the danger of a second conflict with Iran. There is no reason to believe Saddam would have acted differently under a Gore administration.

Uhm, no. We know that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were considered to be nutso on the subject by almost everyone who had any sense, especially the counterterrorist types like Richard Clark who was stunned that they actually seemed persuaded by kooks like Laurie Myelroie. We know that they “stovepieped” the intelligence and creatively edited the NIE. We know, in fact, that they just made stuff up. We don’t know what motivated Tony Blair, but it may have just been that he didn’t want to buck the Americans at a time when they were acting irrationally. (Or maybe he just agreed with Cheney.) We know that most of the world disagreed with Bush and forced him to invade without the sanction of the UN.

We know many things they did that a Gore administration wouldn’t have been motivated to do. Most importantly, we know what Gore actually did, which was speak out against the war at the time. And he did it at a time when it was widely expected that he would run for president in 2004. On September 23, 2002, when the Bush administration was rolling out its new product ion earnest, Gore gave a speech before the Commonwealth Club of California that began with this:

Like all Americans I have been wrestling with the question of what our country needs to do to defend itself from the kind of intense, focused and enabled hatred that brought about September 11th, and which at this moment must be presumed to be gathering force for yet another attack. I’m speaking today in an effort to recommend a specific course of action for our country which I believe would be preferable to the course recommended by President Bush. Specifically, I am deeply concerned that the policy we are presently following with respect to Iraq has the potential to seriously damage our ability to win the war against terrorism and to weaken our ability to lead the world in this new century.

Nothing had changed in terms of Iraq since Gore had left left office, except the perception among a bunch of pantswetting neocons that 9/11 made all countries which might someday pose a threat subject to immediate invasion. Perhaps the cynics can persuade themselves that any president would have done what Bush and Cheney did, just because they could. But Al Gore’s speech that day, at a time when the Democratic nomination was his for the taking, laid out the case against the war in both practical and principled terms that have since proven to be correct in every detail. It was based upon a fundamental difference in the way he, and many others, understood the United States’ power.
It concluded with this:

Does Saddam Hussein present an imminent threat, and if he did would the United States be free to act without international permission? If he presents an imminent threat we would be free to act under generally accepted understandings of article 51 of the UN Charter which reserves for member states the right to act in self-defense. If Saddam Hussein does not present an imminent threat, then is it justifiable for the Administration to be seeking by every means to precipitate a confrontation, to find a cause for war, and to attack? There is a case to be made that further delay only works to Saddam Hussein’s advantage, and that the clock should be seen to have been running on the issue of compliance for a decade: therefore not needing to be reset again to the starting point. But to the extent that we have any concern for international support, whether for its political or material value, hurrying the process will be costly. Even those who now agree that Saddam Hussein must go, may divide deeply over the wisdom of presenting the United States as impatient for war. At the same time, the concept of pre-emption is accessible to other countries. There are plenty of potential imitators: India/Pakistan; China/Taiwan; not to forget Israel/Iraq or Israel/Iran. Russia has already cited it in anticipation of a possible military push into Georgia, on grounds that this state has not done enough to block the operations of Chechen rebels. What this doctrine does is to destroy the goal of a world in which states consider themselves subject to law, particularly in the matter of standards for the use of violence against each other. That concept would be displaced by the notion that there is no law but the discretion of the President of the United States. I believe that we can effectively defend ourselves abroad and at home without dimming our principles. Indeed, I believe that our success in defending ourselves depends precisely on not giving up what we stand for.

Gore’s speech wasn’t based only upon some idealistic understanding of American “goodness” although he clearly It was based upon the idea that after 9/11 it was damned dangerous for the US to turn itself into a pariah nation by telling the world that its president could do anything he damned well pleased. It’s the central practical argument against what they did.

The Bush administration took its 70% approval rating (built on breathless gasbag hagiography) and steamrolled the political establishment into a war the neocons had long been looking for an excuse to start. That is indisputable. And Al Gore was the most prominent opponent of that war at the time. The idea that he would have taken the same path is ludicrous.

h/t to BB

Coal In The Stocking – And The Drinking Water

by dday

The water main break in Montgomery County, Maryland had some compelling visuals to it, with water pouring from the ground and drivers trapped in their cars, so it received some treatment on the cable shoutcasts today. It’s a good thing, too, because the rupture of a 44 year-old pipe causing this kind of chaos does show the need for infrastructure repairs, not only as part of a larger fiscal stimulus, but to avoid catastrophes and their ancillary costs, and to maintain vital services which will have tangible benefits for years to come.

But a massive coal ash spill like we saw today in Tennessee – the result of a burst dam at a private coal processing plant – is actually far more dangerous with far more lasting consequences, even if the visuals aren’t as stellar.

You’re talking about hundreds of acres of toxic sludge, the residue plants create by burning coal to produce energy, which includes mercury, arsenic and lead, spilling into the tributaries of the Tennessee River, poisoning the water supply for multiple communities, including Chattanooga.

And it’s a direct result of our continued reliance on an industry that makes us sick but uses slick PR terms like “clean coal,” happily parroted by politicians of both parties, to maintain viability.

“This spill shows that coal can never be ‘clean,’” said Kate Smolski, Senior Legislative Coordinator for Greenpeace. “If the Exxon Valdez was a symbol of pollution 20 years ago, the Tennessee Coal Spill of 2008 is the symbol of it today.”

Incredibly, this spill occurs at a time when the Bush Administration is trying to loosen environmental rules that would allow the coal industry to dump rock and dirt from mountaintop mining into nearby streams. In other words, they want to make a disaster like this the norm. Environmental groups are suing to stop them, but what will stop the coal companies from their inattention to basic safety?

It’s key that we use the opportunity of major fiscal stimulus to improve crumbling infrastructure. It would also be nice if, in the process, we started taking a critical look at companies whose very existence threatens public health and the future of a sustainable planet. And making sure that existence doesn’t continue. Coal is not clean.

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Hold That Pardon

by digby

Scooter’s pals are obviously ratcheting up the pressure on Junior to pardon him again. I even heard the foul nutball Pat Robertson going on and on about it (in the same breath as he followed Gingrich’s manipulatively unctous directive to slather Obama with praise during this period — bleccch.) But the villagers may not want to draw attention to this again. Murray Waas has a scoop:

Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a still-highly confidential FBI report, admitted to federal investigators that he rewrote talking points for the press in July 2003 that made it much more likely that the role of then-covert CIA-officer Valerie Plame in sending her husband on a CIA-sponsored mission to Africa would come to light. Cheney conceded during his interview with federal investigators that in drawing attention to Plame’s role in arranging her husband’s Africa trip reporters might also unmask her role as CIA officer. Cheney denied to the investigators, however, that he had done anything on purpose that would lead to the outing of Plame as a covert CIA operative. But the investigators came away from their interview with Cheney believing that he had not given them a plausible explanation as to how he could focus attention on Plame’s role in arranging her husband’s trip without her CIA status also possibly publicly exposed. At the time, Plame was a covert CIA officer involved in preventing Iran from obtaining weapons of mass destruction, and Cheney’s office played a central role in exposing her and nullifying much of her work. Cheney revised the talking points on July 8, 2003– the very same day that his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, met with New York Times reporter Judith Miller and told Miller that Plame was a CIA officer and that Plame had also played a central role in sending her husband on his CIA sponsored trip to the African nation of Niger. Both Cheney and Libby have acknowledged that Cheney directed him to meet with Miller, but claimed that the purpose of that meeting was to leak other sensitive intelligence to discredit allegations made by Plame’s husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, that the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information to go to war with Iraq, rather than to leak Plame’s identity. That Cheney, by his own admission, had revised the talking points in an effort to have the reporters examine who sent Wilson on the very same day that his chief of staff was disclosing to Miller Plame’s identity as a CIA officer may be the most compelling evidence to date that Cheney himself might have directed Libby to disclose Plame’s identity to Miller and other reporters.

Of course he did. I’m just surprised he hasn’t openly admitted it on his “yeah I ordered torture, whatcha gonna do about it?” tour. I honestly don’t know what Cheney cares about except the big money boyz getting access to the federal treasury, so he may push for a pardon — or not. I don’t think he gives a damn one way or the other.

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Don’t Divorce Us

by digby

Beltway elites almost always hate talk about messy civil rights issues and icky reproductive freedom policies because they just make social events so unpleasant. It get’s so tiring listening to those people whine, whine, whine about being free and equal. Can’t they just be patient and wait until the appropriate time instead of being so rude all the time?

But every once in a while you’ll find one who takes the liberal side of one of these issues because their lives are somehow touched by an American with a problem. Every once in a while you’ll see a hard core right winger who pushes funding for a particular health initiative because his granddaughter happens to get the disease or a mushmouthed centrist type who rails against police state tactics when his nephew is harassed by the cops.

Today we have Richard Cohen with a column about Rick Warren’s anti-gay bigotry, which I feel confident he wouldn’t have written were it not for the fact that his much loved sister is gay. He’s certainly not known for his grasp of abstract issues. But when you think about it, there are a lot of people like Cohen out there, aren’t there, and you have to wonder just how thrilled they are about Warren being warmly welcomed into the big tent. Cohen certainly doesn’t seem to like it much.

And I wonder how all the families of the 18,000 Californians who are being forcibly divorced feel about it:

“Please don’t divorce…” Courage Campaign community photo project Infamous prosecutor Ken Starr has filed a legal brief — on behalf of the “Yes on 8” campaign — to nullify the 18,000 same-sex marriages performed in California between May and November of 2008. It’s time to put a face to Ken Starr’s shameful legal proceedings. To put a face to the 18,000 couples facing forcible divorce. To put a face to marriage equality. Because, gay or straight, YOU are the face of the Marriage Equality Movement.

Please click through the photos in the slideshows below and then submit your own photo, as an individual, a couple or in a group (perhaps with your family over the holidays). Take a picture holding a piece of paper that says “Please don’t divorce us,” “Please don’t divorce my moms,””Please don’t divorce my friends, Dawn and Audrey,” “Please don’t divorce Californians” or whatever you want after “Please don’t divorce…” and send it to: pleasedontdivorce@couragecampaign.org.

If you like this slideshow, please tell your friends about it by clicking here to use our simple and easy invite page.

Click here to see the pictures. They will break your heart. how anyone can say that these loving families do anything but strengthen the institution of marriage is beyond me.

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It’s Over When We Say It’s Over

by digby

I know you’re all as excited as the news media is to hear all about the Obama transition team’s internal review this afternoon, but in case you aren’t able to drop everything and catch it live, let me just tell you what’s going to happen and you can continue with your holiday preparations or last minute work responsibilities.

The report will say that the Obama teams contacts with Blogojevich were all perfectly normal discussions about the possible replacements for Obama’s senate seat and included no quid pro quos or any other kind of inappropriate or illegal compensation. supBut … even though last week they had huge hissy fit over the fact that the Obama team delayed the release of this posedly vital document, the press corps will shrug its shoulders at the results saying that the report is meaningless because it’s an internal document which is now, by definition, unreliable and useless. They will intone very seriously that this story “will not go away” until the prosecutor weighs in.

And when and if the prosecutor weighs in, they will draw the distinction between “illegal” and “wrong” the latter of which they will define for us any number of ways. My favorite in this particular scandal is the AB Stoddard approach: if Rahm didn’t report all his conversations, regardless of their content, to the Depratment of Justice, he is guilty of “bad judgment” the most elastic of all media indictments, and often the most useful (“He may not have done anything illegal, unethical or inappropriate, but it showed bad judgment.”) Another good one is “it has the appearance of impropriety” — which is worse than actual impropriety because it showed (you guessed it) bad judgment.

Here’s Ed Henry from CNN:

Again, this is an internal investigation from team Obama, so it’s not likely to be the final word is likely to come from prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. But we need to stress that so far he’s given no indication whatsoever that there was any wrongdoing, criminal or otherwise in the president elect’s world so I think what this is more about is political exposure rather than legal exposure. Team Obama is eager to turn the page so they’re not associated with any of this pay-to-play politics back in Chicago that sort of contradict the message of change we’ve heard so much of from Barack Obama.

This story is over when the press corps says it’s over and not a minute sooner. It’s possible that they will let it go as a sort of honeymoon present, but the minute some other vague “corruption” story comes along (or they can find a way to tie in Rezko, Blago and —God willing — a prostitute or something) they’ll be right back here.

The best thing Obama has going for him is the fact that Fitzgerald does not leak. That’s a real pity for the scandal mongers — if they had a Ken Starr type, we’d be hearing all sorts of delicious little, out of context tid-bits being dribbled out at opportune moments to make Obama look bad. So they will fall back on their other method to keep these stories simmering —- endless, groundless speculation about what “could” have happened, which will, over time, color everyone’s perception until they assume that at least some of it must be true or it wouldn’t have garnered all this interest. (There’s a lot of important gossip reporters can’t talk about publicly, dontcha know.)

Now would be a really good time to read Gene Lyons and Joe Conason’s The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton and Michael Isikoff’s Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter’s Story. (Without any sense of self-awareness at all, Isikoff’s shows what happens when a president becomes a reporter’s white whale because he is credulous about all manner of cynical, character assassination from political players. He’s all over the Blago story too, so be advised …)

It’s not to say that things will unfold exactly the same way. Nothing ever does. But, as much as I am skeptical of the press corps, I have to admit that I’ve ben gobsmacked to see how closely they’ve been following the playbook with this Blago scandal. (Somerby is too.) Even I, in all my cynicism, didn’t expect them to fall back into their old patterns quite so cleanly. It’s as if they are on autopilot.

Obama is not Clinton and has many attributes that make him a different sort of subject. The political balance of power is far different as well. However, the same problems exist over the long term. As Lyons and Conason so brilliantly showed, the biggest problem (aside from the vast right wing conspiracy, which certainly did exist) was the media’s fascination with an exotic political culture they didn’t really understand and which took them for a ride.

There are quite a few of these exotic political cultures in America and Chicago is one of them. (I would say that Florida, Louisiana, Alaska, Arkansas, New Jersey and Pennsylvania are among them. There are others I’m sure.) Some places just generate strange political stories that leave the media open to all kinds of manipulation from those in the know — they are both naive and intrigued and that’s a very dangerous thing for any national politician.

Obama partisans want desperately to just ignore this thing, pointing to polls that say that none of it is having any effect on his popularity (even though nearly half think his team did something either unethical or illegal.) .Well, polls don’t tell the tale. Clinton remained very popular throughout his ordeal and it didn’t stop them. This is about Village power and if the public isn’t in tune with them, they will fight all the harder to convince them. It’s the worst kind of Catch 22 for a president.

And if you think it can’t limit his ability to get things done, you’re wrong. It’s a distraction and potentially a serious erosion of political capital. It needs to be aggressively challenged by all those who agree that the unelected members of the press shouldn’t be dictating the political agenda in this country. If the right gets its act together and cranks up the old noise machine to just the right pitch and the press continue to party like it’s 1997, we will have a problem on our hands that we just can’t afford.

I always thought that the Clinton scandals were a terrible indulgence that could only be afforded by a country that was living in a time of peace and prosperity. After the last couple of weeks, I’m not convinced that’s true anymore and if I’m right, the consequences could really be awful.

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The Shootings At Algiers Point

by dday

Allow me to break with all journalistic convention and mention Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans, which would be more than what was done during the entire Presidential election. One predictable outcome of that tragedy was the extent to which the conservative noise machine hyped incidents of looting and mayhem, broken down exclusively along racial lines, to “prove” that black people resort to animal instincts in a time of panic. It was not only completely offensive and wrong, but now an astonishing report by The Nation shows that in at least one case, the opposite was true – white vigilantes shot African-Americans in the aftermath of the storm.

The way Donnell Herrington tells it, there was no warning. One second he was trudging through the heat. The next he was lying prostrate on the pavement, his life spilling out of a hole in his throat, his body racked with pain, his vision blurred and distorted.

It was September 1, 2005, some three days after Hurricane Katrina crashed into New Orleans, and somebody had just blasted Herrington, who is African-American, with a shotgun. “I just hit the ground. I didn’t even know what happened,” recalls Herrington, a burly 32-year-old with a soft drawl.

The sudden eruption of gunfire horrified Herrington’s companions–his cousin Marcel Alexander, then 17, and friend Chris Collins, then 18, who are also black. “I looked at Donnell and he had this big old hole in his neck,” Alexander recalls. “I tried to help him up, and they started shooting again.” Herrington says he was staggering to his feet when a second shotgun blast struck him from behind; the spray of lead pellets also caught Collins and Alexander. The buckshot peppered Alexander’s back, arm and buttocks […]

Herrington, Collins and Alexander’s experience fits into a broader pattern of violence in which, evidence indicates, at least eleven people were shot. In each case the targets were African-American men, while the shooters, it appears, were all white.

The new information should reframe our understanding of the catastrophe. Immediately after the storm, the media portrayed African-Americans as looters and thugs–Mayor Ray Nagin, for example, told Oprah Winfrey that “hundreds of gang members” were marauding through the Superdome. Now it’s clear that some of the most serious crimes committed during that time were the work of gun-toting white males.

So far, their crimes have gone unpunished. No one was ever arrested for shooting Herrington, Alexander and Collins–in fact, there was never an investigation. I found this story repeated over and over during my days in New Orleans. As a reporter who has spent more than a decade covering crime, I was startled to meet so many people with so much detailed information about potentially serious offenses, none of whom had ever been interviewed by police detectives.

The vigilantes came from Algiers Point, a white enclave in the middle of the city, where the residents stockpiled guns and ammunition after the storm, fearing that blacks would flock to their area, which was relatively unhurt by the storm. They assembled a small group of white males with instructions to shoot anything that moved. The hysteria created by the lurid details of chaos and gang activity led to paranoia and the “frontier justice” that ensued.

Three-plus years later, this is largely an untold story. As AC Thompson says in his story (which should be read in full), no investigation has ever been opened, nobody has been arrested or even interviewed about the multiple shootings and even deaths. If this sounds like something out of the 1950s to you, well I agree.

John Conyers has now responded to the report.

Responding to an investigation published in The Nation into vigilante violence after Hurricane Katrina, Rep. John Conyers Jr. issued a public statement Thursday, expressing concern. The investigation details how, after the storm struck, some white residents in the Algiers Point neighborhood of New Orleans repeatedly attacked African-American men.

In interviews, eyewitnesses–including some of the vigilantes themselves and two men who were blasted with a shotgun–describe a string of shootings in which at least eleven people were wounded or killed. A video accompanying the report features interviews with some of the vigilantes, including one who says, “It was great! It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it.”

“I am deeply disturbed by the reported incidents in Algiers Point, Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina,” said Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, and chair of the House Judiciary Committee.

Color of Change, who brought the traditional media around to covering the Jena 6 case after months of activism, is distributing a petition calling for a full investigation into the Algiers Point shootings. Because this was at least in part caused by the media failure of hyping the “black menace” that led to the vigilantism, it’s going to take even more pressure to get them involved. Please sign the petition.

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The Wingers

by digby

It seems like it comes sooner every year…

Nominate here for the 2008 Golden Winger Awards for Excellence in Wingnuttery:

Chickenhawk of the Year – bravest keyboarder

1. David Horowitz, “Every day is Islamofascism Awareness Week“
2. Modern Conservative, “You are Leonides!“
3. Tony Blankley, “We won!“
4. Orsen Scott Card, “Time for a new Civil War!“
5. Keith Arnold, “I am John Galt!“
6. American Neocon, “The Destruction of America“

The Fluffy – most disgusting, worshipful defense of powerful wingnut

1. Ace, “The media should ignore what Scott McClellan says about the President of the United States, and instead report what Alice Walker’s daughter says about her mom!“
2. Andrew Sullivan, “You never forget your true love“
3. Fred Hiatt, “The Intelligence Committee says whatever I says it says“
4. John J. Miller, “Jesse Helms was a civil rights hero“
5. Hugh Hewitt, “Dubya: Hero of Bipartisanship“
6. Buttrocket, “Dubya: Master of Public Speaking“

Purple Teardrop with Clutched Pearls Cluster – for enduring the cruelest butthurt

1. Jonah Goldberg, “The White Man is the Jew of Liberal Fascism“
2. Michelle Malkin, “John McCain won’t return my calls!“
3. Michael Gerson, “Al Franken used bad words!“
4. KJ Lopez, On Republican Political Correctness
5. Libertarian Republican, “The Day America Died“
6. Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, “The Treatment of Bush Has Been A Disgrace“
7. Graeme Bird, “Americans Embrace Irrationalism“
8. Nice Doggie, “Wake Up, White People!“
9. Vox Day, “Welcome to the USSA“

The Creamy Baileys – for science reporting

1. Chad Myers, “Global warming is a cover-up for ACID OCEANS!!”
2. Camille Paglia, “A new blog will bring scientific rigor to the global warming debate“
3. (Yes, that) Charlie Daniels, “Global warming is a yankee conspiracy!“
4. Gregg Easterbrook, “Global warming is a cover-up for KILLER ASTEROIDS!!!“
5. Gregg Easterbrook, “Global warming is a cover-up for GOVERNMENT-FUNDED HADRON DEATH ORGIES!!!“
6. Gregg Easterbrook, “Global warming is a cover-up for LIGHTSPEED ALIEN NUCLEAR ATTACKS!!!“

Soggy Biscuit – biggest group wank

1. The Jingosphere, “American troops are LYING about supply problems in Afghanistan!!“
2. The League of Pundits, “Barack Obama must denounce everything ever said by any black people, and whatever he says isn’t good enough“
3. The Washington Press Corps, 2008 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner
4. The Jingosphere, “Ayers ghost-wrote Obama’s book!“
5. The Jingosphere, “10-year-old Obama seduced child molesters!!“

Wank of the Year – biggest single act of wanking of 2008

1. Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism
2. Mike Huckabee, “America is Nazi Germany“
3. Lisa Schiffren, “Miscegenation is symptomatic of Communism“
4. Instapunk, “I am sick to death of black people“
5. Ann Althouse, “The pyjamas of the child in the campaign ad for Hillary Clinton called Barack Obama “ni**er”!“
6. Tony Zirkle, “The Great Jew Porn Dragon“
7. Fred Hiatt, “The Intelligence Committee says whatever I says it says“
8. Larry Johnson, The Unreleased Whitey Album
9. Sarah Palin, “Disagreeing with me is unconstitutional!“
10. Velociman, “Obama will get us drunk and interracially buttrape us“
11. Dennis Prager, “Equality is unAmerican“
12. Rush Limbaugh, “Obama is a huge racist!“
13. Matt Margolis, “Finding suburbia dull is racist!“
14. Right Wing News, “Obama is like Hitler times Jim Jones PLUS NUKES!!“

The Palme D’Haire – biggest wanker of 2008

1. Jonah Goldberg
2. Sarah Palin
3. John McCain
4. Joe Lieberman

Use the comments for new nominations, new categories, assorted suggestions, holiday recipes, and pictures of cats in Christmas oufits.

Please go over to The Poorman for links to the listed blog posts and vote for your favorites among them — or nominate some more of your own.

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Blogospherics

by digby

Haha:

This is James Bennet, editor of The Atlantic.

Most readers know that the views expressed on Jeffrey’s blog are his own and don’t always reflect the views of The Atlantic. Such is the case with regard to Jeffrey’s comments on the relative merits of hummus and baba ghanoush. Our institution has partnered with the makers of baba ganoush, as well as tabouleh and fattoush, on a number of projects, and we have a great deal of respect for their excellent work product, including the entire spectrum of Middle Eastern salads and paste-like foods, with the exception of halvah. We at The Atlantic do not take sides in the ongoing dispute between partisans of hummus and partisans of baba ghanoush. These food products are key leaders in the Middle East food products industry, and we look forward to eating them in the future.

*for those of you who don’t follow bloggy insider controversies, click the link inside the quote and you’ll see what this is all about.
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One Way Street

by digby

I saw something very interesting today on MSNBC. Barnicle, filling in for Matthews on Hardball, hosted Reverend Eugene Rivers, a well respected, uncontroversial African American preacher, and Mike Rogers, strident gay activist.

Loaded for bear, Rivers came out firing, very aggressively and derisively attacking the gay community for being intolerant and asserting that Warren is a thoroughly acceptable mainstream preacher. (“This is a pseudo-controversy that’s been fabricated by the anti-religious left. Fact: Rick Warren is not a divisive figure, there’s not one shred of empirical, statistical data to support this unfounded
claim.”) That’s obviously untrue, but that’s not what made me take note of the interview.

The problem was that Rogers took a very unusual tack and said that Rivers coming on the show to defend Warren shows how powerful the gay community is and that he was very happy to see Warren changing his web site just today (to hide his more outrageously homophobic content.) He characterized this as a big victory for gay rights. (“I compliment Rick Warren on seeing the error of his ways and changing his web site.”) Rivers was agitated by this and seemed to be frustrated that the dialog wasn’t taking the predicted path, rather sarcastically saying things like “well we’re all happy now, I guess.”

But the really interesting reaction came about when Rogers suggested that if Warren is to be seen as a man who builds bridges between the right and the left that he should quietly and without any kind of fanfare meet with leaders of the gay community and listen to their concerns. Rivers reacted very badly.

Rogers: What I would like to see, and I’d like to hear you agree with it, is that Rick Warren convenes and sits down, again, behind closed doors, not on the stage trotting everybody out, but sits down with the leadership of our community, the gay leadership, and says “I’d like to build a bridge.” Sit down with the Human Rights Campaign, sit down with National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Religious Roundtable, and show me that your speech is really about reaching out and that it’s really about uniting America. And if you can’t sit down and have those meetings with the community, then I think that shows what you’re really about.

Rivers:(upset) No, no, no. Mr Rogers, listen …

Rogers: sure

Rivers: It would be presumptuous of you to suggest that if Reverend Warren doesn’t sit down with your particular crew, that’s an act of bad faith. That’s a political trick…

Rogers: If Warren is a so-called leader in the evangelical movement who represents the evangelical movement on a national level, certainly it’s appropriate for him to sit down with the national leaders of the gay and lesbian movement…

Barnicle interrupted there to close the segment.

Rogers’ suggestion seemed eminently reasonable to me (and his tone was exceedingly measured) but Rivers went ballistic. Now, I would suspect that this is because he knows very well that Warren is unlikely to agree to such a thing, thereby proving that his thesis about Warren being the reasonable one is complete nonsense. But there’s no reason why Warren shouldn’t be asked to do such a thing. If President Obama is going to reach out to evangelicals in a spirit of cooperation and comity, shouldn’t America’s new Pastor be willing to do the same thing?

Earlier in the day on the channel, New York Magazine reporter John Heileman and some others were all snickering like grade school bullies knocking younger kids down on the playground over the fact that Barack Obama did himself immeasurable good by kicking liberals in the teeth. Perhaps Rivers heard that exchange and expected some more of that good fun and was disappointed. But one could also be forgiven for suspecting that he was also upset because Rogers failed to be the proper foil thus proving that the gay community is a bunch of intolerant freaks while he and Warren are the reasoned, middle of the road Real Americans. It certainly appeared that way.

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Moving The Goalposts

by digby

This was inevitable. Last week I noted that there was some thought among the Village media that if it turns out that Rahm didn’t run to the prosecutors with any suspicions that Blago wanted something in return for appointing (presumably) Valerie Jarrett, then he is guilty of a political crime if not a legal one. Not that it matters. Monica Crowley predicted on the McLaughlin Group this week-end that he’s toast:

“Regardless of whether or not Rahm Emmanuel is found guilty to have done anything on these tapes, Barack Obama needs a sacrificial lamb on this scandal. He will ask Emmanuel to step aside as chief of staff and be his point man in the Congress.”

Somerby tells us today that over the week-end the gasbags believe that because Obama said his staff didn’t have any inappropriate contact he opened himself up to charges of being evasive. (Seriously)

Today we hear from the Politico that if Obama doesn’t release the content of all the emails and phone calls, he will still be under suspicion. Apparently, there is some rule which says that transition documents are not subject to FOIA requests, something which good government groups find appalling and which the press is seizing on in advance as some sort of sign that the Obama team is stonewallikng — even before they issue their report. Typical stuff.

But this is really too much:

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a leading advocate for government transparency, is considering legislation to retroactively apply the Presidential Records Act to the Obama transition team.

Leslie Phillips, a spokeswoman to Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), who chairs the committee that oversees the Presidential Records Act, all but brushed off Cornyn’s idea.

“Sen. Lieberman has been pleased with the Obama transition team’s commitment to transparency and is hopeful the Obama administration will also maintain a high level of openness,” Phillips said.

But the aide familiar with Cornyn’s idea, who did not want to be identified talking about the Senator’s plans, said the need to regulate transition team records extends beyond the Blagojevich matter to policy plans and analyses done with the cooperation of federal agencies.

“To the extent that they are currently operating with public funds and with authority given to them by federal statute and courtesies given to them by federal agencies, they ought to be under the Presidential Records Act, if not the Freedom of Information Act,” said the aide.

Other than voluntary disclosure by Obama’s team, there aren’t a whole lot of ways that its Blagojevich-related records could come out.

The governor’s office might be compelled by Illinois’ public records law to release emails that may have passed between his aides and Obama’s, though the state has argued — unsuccessfully so far — that it shouldn’t have to release documents related to the U.S. attorney’s ongoing investigation.

Also, transition team correspondence related to both Blagojevich’s selection process and Obama’s internal review could become public as evidence in the case against Blagojevich, which is partly why some experts questioned the wisdom behind the Obama review.

May I be so bold as to predict that by the time this is all through that Joe Liberman will be convinced that Obama needs to release all transition records?

And is there any doubt that if Obama hadn’t conducted the review, he would have been accused of stonewalling?

The good news is that there is, so far, no sex involved, which means that certain members of the media are getting like, totally, boooored…

I miss the sex. The nation is engrossed in an orgy of scandal, a 24-hour cable news burlesque of greed, graft, cronyism and corruption, with appointed villains so lurid and over-the-top they could be characters in “Bleak House.” (Even their names, Madoff and Blagojevich, have a Dickensian ring, like Skimpole or Pardiggle.) The most salacious news stories pivot on money, not mistresses, prostitutes or toe taps in an airport men’s room. It’s the 10th anniversary of Monicagate and the impeachment of President Clinton, and even the Fox News Channel cannot summon the energy to dwell on Linda Tripp or the semen-stained dress. (At the moment, muckrakers are studying Clinton donors, not doxies.)

So, I guess there’s hope as long as nobody tried to tweet a page or diddle an intern.

Meanwhile, the pollsters are taking the public’s temperature. Here’s Ed Henry on CNN:

HENRY: That’s right. Two transition aides now say that we can expect that on Tuesday, tomorrow. We’ll finally get this internal investigation from the Obama team about their contacts with Rod Blagojevich, Illinois’s governor, his staff and everything, about the Senate seat, the controversy and all the allegations.

You see we have some new poll numbers out this hour from CNN, where we asked people what they think about the Obama team’s contacts. And basically, 12 percent say that they think there was something illegal here. Thirty-six percent say there was something unethical. Forty-three percent say nothing wrong. So you see, a clear majority in this CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll believe that the Obama team did nothing wrong, you know, that a large number of people believe that there was really nothing wrong.

Apparently, Henry doesn’t know what illegal and unethical mean because if those numbers ae correct, it means that 48% think something either illegal or unethical happened and only 43% think he did nothing wrong. Whatever. It has no real bearing on anything at the moment.

But the fact is that the drumbeat has undoubtedly led a lot of people to believe something unethical happened between the Obama team and Blagojevich. And there is no evidence of such a thing at all. Indeed, there is ample evidence of the opposite.

Even though he misreads the number, Henry goes on to say:

And that’s why it’s probably in the interests, politically, of the Obama team to get this out as soon as they can. They say they’ve been waiting because a prosecutor urged them not to jump out too quickly. But they’ve been facing some pressure to tell the whole story.

But we need to be clear, as well, that this is not going to be the final word on it. This is an [internal] investigation from the Obama team. So it should be no surprise that tomorrow, it’s very likely for this report to say, yes, there was some contact between the Obama and Blagojevich’s team but nothing illegal, nothing improper.

But we still have to see down the road what the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, says. That’s going to be more important than an [internal] investigation, Betty.

Oh my no, this won’t be finished once Obama does what they all said he had to do in order to finish it. Each revelation “raises more questions,” goalposts are moved, new angles explored. There’s never any resolution.

And more and more people begin to just “feel” that something untoward must have happened. After all, where there’s smoke there’s fire, right?

Update: Countyfair notes that the Wall Stret Journal spells it out explicitly. no matter what the report says, they aren’t going to let up:

…

the Journal, on behalf of the Beltway press corps, announces that it already has a back-up plan in order to hype the non-scandal [emphasis added]:

Regardless of how clean the Obama camp is, the release of the report isn’t likely to be clean. Thursday, former President Bill Clinton released a list of 205,000 donors — many of them foreign governments — to his foundation, which he had promised to do as a condition for his wife Sen. Hillary Clinton’s nomination as secretary of state. That set off a scramble to tie donors to policy predicaments facing the Obama administration.

See, similar to Isikoff, the Journal suggests Obama’s just like Clinton.

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