Month: January 2009

Is Bill O’Reilly Evil, Stupid Or Crazy?

by digby

… or all three?

Last night I had the TV on in the background and I heard a promo for one of the Access Hollywood type shows about Caroline Kennedy. I didn’t know what they were referring to and so I asked Mr Google and what came up first? This unctuous, dishonest piece of rotting compost from Bill O’Reilly.

I knew nothing of this rumor and I don’t care about it. The reason that I’m noting this transcript is because of O’Reilly’s amazing intellectual gyrations. His inconsistency, sometimes in the same sentence, is so astonishing that you have to wonder why his head doesn’t explode. No wonder he’s so angry. The dissonance must be very painful.

Here he is, alone in discussing a scurrilous rumor on national TV (I honestly had heard nothing of this until I read this transcript and I watch a lot of cable news, including a fair amount of FOX.) He announced it, made a bunch of assumptions about what it meant, twisted the story into all kinds of knots that had no bearing on reality and then blamed “smear web sites” for doing exactly what he had just done. Brilliant.

But why would any credible journalist ever appear with him?

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Mr Geoghegan Goes To Washington

by digby

I just got this from Adam Green and I thought I would pass it on to any of you who are in the DC area, or who would like to “virtually” attend by donating to Geoghegan’s campaign:

Hi, I’m co-hosting an event this coming Monday evening at Local 16 in support of a really inspiring progressive who is running in a special election to replace Rahm Emanuel in the House. Can you make it?

Tom Geoghegan is a famed labor lawyer who wrote pro-worker books like “Which Side Are You On?” David Sirota calls Tom “one of the greatest living progressives in America” and a writer at The Nation wrote “Tom could be the next Paul Wellstone.”

There will be happy hour drink specials, and a raffle at the event will include autographed books by Rick Perlstein, David Sirota, Jerome Armstrong, and the January 21st Obama Inauguration issue of the New York Times.

Tom has already raised over $100,000 in mostly small-dollar contributions, but he’ll need $500,000 to win. Tickets are $30. Raffle tickets are $20 each in advance, $25 at the door. Every dollar really goes a long way, so the more you can give, the better.

Would be great if you could make it, and help support this progressive candidate. Just click here to sign up (oh, and if you can’t make it, you can still donate at the link

Thanks so much. I hope to see you Monday!

Adam

Howie Klein has another great Geoghegan fundraiser going for those of you who might be ready to part with your precious music collection:

I hope everyone who wants strong proponents of America’s working families will contribute to Tom’s campaign. You can do it through ActBlue here. As an incentive for some I spoke with an old friend, Scott McLean, who has made a very generous offer to Geoghegan donors. Scott buys large collections of records and CDs. He’s especially interested in rock, soul, vintage country, personality and original shows. He pays high prices and has been in business for 30 years. He’s agreed to donate between 10 and 20% (20% for collections he pays over $1,000 for) to Tom’s campaign. In other words, sell him your record collection and wind up with, say $2,000– and he will donate another $400 to Tom’s campaign. Contact Scott at jaideeone@yahoo.com and tell him DownWithTyranny sent you. If you don’t have a record collection to sell, please consider even a $5 or $10 contribution to Tom’s campaign.

And by the way, Kathy G has been following Geoghegen’s campaign with some great writing and enthusiasm. She’s also been contributing to his website and compiling some of the new items about Tom and the campaign. For instance, she notes this story about Geoghegan’s “day job” which explains why Geoghegan has so many people in the progressive world gaga over the prospect of having him in the congress:

[T]he Chicago Tribune is reporting that Tom is edging closer to victory in a lawsuit he filed on behalf of over 1,000 city workers cheated out of back pay by the Daley administration. Says Tom in the story, “[The Daley administration] ought to pay people the money they worked for. That is especially important at this time, as the value of people’s homes and investments has declined. They should not be trying to nickel-and-dime these retirees.”

This isn’t just political rhetoric for this guy. He actually does this stuff.

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It’s Not Over/It’s Over

by digby

Via Crooks and Liars

Matthews: How do you read that…what he just said?

Woodward: No. In other words he’s not going to, he doesn’t want investigations. I mean if, first of all in some of these things, it’s so ambiguous and uh, he has got to get beyond the past. He does not want to create the feeling, which in a sense this week he did create by saying he’s going to close Guantanamo, that the war on terror is over. It is not over. What he said is some of the tactics, namely torture and harsh interrogation tactics are gone but the war continues and if there is a, some sort of perpetual investigation of these things the message will be we’re going soft and I tell you those in the intelligence world and the military and I think Obama himself doesn’t want to send that message.

Matthews: Well let’s talk about the Republicans on the Hill. What are they worried, aren’t they trying to hold Eric Holder’s feet to the fire and say “Promise you won’t launch an investigation as our new Attorney General”.

O’Donnell: Well one of the problems is if they do dig back into all of these things you do lose some of the Republicans support and President Obama’s trying to reach out. You also reinforce what detractors of the Bush/Cheney years already think. So there’s very little political upside. And so Eric Holder has been certainly tested and they definitely, Republicans definitely want to be able to feel like they can stick with their strong principle of defense without having to worry about digging back into some of those things.

Matthews: Yeah. Anne obviously the people on the left, the netroots people, John Conyers up on the Hill, they want action. They want some kind of at least an extra-legal kind of truth and reconciliation commission like you had in South Africa that doesn’t prosecute but does investigate.

Kornblut: And yet we haven’t heard any signal from Obama or the White House itself that they would authorize that, encourage it. Even something that would be as sort of as benign as a truth and reconciliation commission, every indication is they want to leave that to reporters, historians. They want to move on, you know the Hill can do what the Hill can do, but they’re not behind it.

Matthews: Well why did we prosecute people at Abu Ghraib for abusing prisoners if we’re not going to prosecute people who may have authorized that kind of treatment?

Fineman: It is an issue. But Obama has to run the country and he and the leaders of the Democratic Party on the Hill have said “It’s not worth the cost”. I mean I know that Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate wants no parts of this. Whatever John Conyers is going to do on the House side, he’s going to do and you’ll hear a lot of noise from him and maybe some investigations. But it’s not going to be backed up by the Democratic leadership in Congress. It just isn’t.

(crosstalk)

Woodward: Well who would you investigate and prosecute? I mean the people who did these interrogations and so forth believed with good reason they had authority from the President.

Matthews: They had orders.

Woodward: Now you know it’s too late to impeach Bush. It’s over.

According to Bob Woodward, Obama “implied” the War On Terror is over, which he didn’t. And also according to Woodward, since Bush is out of office “it’s over” which is isn’t. The disaster he created will be with us for a very long time, but the official record of the Bush years of war and torture and economic disaster will apparently be left to “reporters and historians” which means that, in the near term at least, the villagers will clean everything up.

Maybe this will be where the internet makes a difference. As frustrating as it is to watch current story lines being written by liars and con artists and taken up by the press as if they are received wisdom, the past is documented in thousands and thousands of pages that were written in real time. They can no longer rework the past the way they used to, at least not unchallenged.

You can certainly understand why they would want to. Bob Woodward has a vested interest in letting the past go and telling everyone to “get over it.” So does Howard Fineman — and Chris Matthews, for that matter, although in this case he is at least playing Devil’s Advocate. They were cheerleaders for Bush’s torture regime and his manly, muscular, macho leadership style which nearly drove them insane with yearning and admiration. They enthusiastically enabled what happened and in some cases strongly endorsed it.

I went back and looked at Bush At War, Woodwards’ first book about the “war president.” I recalled being appalled at the time by this interview he did for the book, printed in the Washington Post. But in retrospect the giddy reaction in the press to his cartoonish, Buck Turgidson style is downright scary:

On Wednesday, Sept. 26, just two weeks after the terrorist attacks, Bush surprised his war cabinet, which had been debating when to begin the bombing of targets in Afghanistan, by declaring: “Anybody doubt that we should start this Monday or Tuesday?”

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld eventually convinced Bush that planning was incomplete and the bombing should not begin for another week. Bush said he was intentionally prodding his aides.

“One of my jobs is to be provocative,” he said. “Seriously, to provoke people into — to force decisions, and to make sure it’s clear in everybody’s mind where we’re headed. There was a certain rhythm and flow to this, and I was beginning to get a little frustrated. . . . It was just not coming together as quickly as we had hoped. And I was trying to force the issue without compromising safety.”

Did he ever explain what he was doing?

“Of course not,” he said. “I’m the commander — see, I don’t need to explain — I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”

In a normal world, the media would have reported that we had a childish, maniac running the country in a time of national crisis. (Did anyone seriously believe that Bush was playing some psychological game with his staff when he wanted to rush ahead with that bombing campaign before it was ready? Please…) Instead, the press chered his puerile chest thumping and begged him to take the gloves off. And now that it’s been shown to be both immoral and counterproductive, now that the country is in serious crisis, they want to avoid their part of the responsibility as well by sweeping everything that happened under the rug.

They are telling us to “get over it.” Again.

They backed Bush’s regime from the beginning and with everythi8ng they had, from draining the treasury to war in Iraq to deregulation to torture to Guantanamo. And they did it consciously:

Although Donahue didn’t know it at the time, his fate was sealed a number of weeks ago after NBC News executives received the results of a study commissioned to provide guidance on the future of the news channel.

That report–shared with me by an NBC news insider–gives an excruciatingly painful assessment of the channel and its programming. Some of recommendations, such as dropping the “America’s News Channel,” have already been implemented. But the harshest criticism was leveled at Donahue, whom the authors of the study described as “a tired, left-wing liberal out of touch with the current marketplace.”

The study went on to claim that Donahue presented a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war……He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” The report went on to outline a possible nightmare scenario where the show becomes “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”

Donohue was the highest rated show on the network and its numbers were growing, so that decision was never about ratings or “competitors.” It was about conforming to a perceived public fervor that was being created by the networks themselves with conservative propaganda. It was quite the clever, self reinforcing circle jerk. (Greenwald ran down a number of similar examples in this post.)

This was just the latest in a series of epic institutional media failures that contributed to the hellish situation in which we find ourselves today. It goes back many, many years but their behavior during the past 16 has been catastrophic.

And from what we’re seeing right now, they are still at it. Once again, they are running with conservative propaganda and misinformation without even a passing thought. I must have heard this misinformation (via Steve Benen) at least 25 times coming from reporters and gasbags over the week-end:

It appears that the preliminary, incomplete numbers put together by the CBO were distributed to a small handful of lawmakers in both parties earlier in the week. Someone (Republican congressional offices) then passed the misleading data onto the AP, which predictably ran with the incomplete numbers, telling the public that it “will take years before an infrastructure spending program proposed by President-elect Barack Obama will boost the economy.”

Other major media outlets quickly followed, and voila, Republicans had a talking point: “Boehner and other Republican aides roamed the Capitol press galleries, flogging the CBO numbers.”

Of course they did. And within a few days, this incorrect information has become conventional wisdom. According to Cokie’s Law, at this point the facts don’t matter. It’s out there.

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Recovering

by tristero

I understand from Digby that many of my friends here have been wondering why I haven’t posted anything since the election. To make a very long, very awful, story short, I had a serious health emergency but am now much better than I was, and should recover fully.

To add a little more detail, I have a long history of abdominal troubles. On November 6, I was at a meeting of Americans United for Separation of Church and State in Washington when I developed a very serious small bowel obstruction. It was a situation that required surgery within a few hours or I could easily have died. The operation was long and complicated; I then spent 11 days on a ventilator in an Intensive Care unit and, when released from the hospital, learned I had developed anemia. A few weeks of iron pills cleared that up and since then, I’ve been slowly, slowly recovering.

I still lose entire days when my stomach decides to act up, but I’m back to my old level of energy. All that permanently remains is a truly spectacular scar which should scotch any ambitions I might have had to be a swimsuit model. I also lost some thirty pounds. However, I can’t recommend a long stay in the ICU as a weight-loss program. While my experience wasn’t as dreadful as the worst ones described in this article – and no one tried to get me out of bed when I was on the ventilator! – I did have some amazingly vivid hallucinations. One of my favorites was an elaborate international jihad I organized against Sean Combs’ music empire. I also spent at least one wonderful night collating and organizing the symbolism in Agatha Christie’s novels with the help of a nurse’s aide. Perhaps most bizarre of all, I had this persistent delusion that an African-American with an unusual name was elected president. High levels of painkiller will do that to you, sometimes.

I have several things I want to blog about regarding what is coming up for me, and, of course, about political/cultural issues. But I’ll keep this post short.

I would like to thank the wonderful staff at George Washington University Hospital for their dedicated professionalism and compassion. I was extremely lucky to have such a great team of people available; they saved my life. I’d also like to thank my exceptional long-term care and surgery team at New York Presbyterian Weill/Cornell Hospital for their ongoing management of my condition. Mere words, even music, cannot convey how grateful my family and I for their combined efforts on behalf of my health.

Saturday Night At The Movies

The Whole Bolivian Army

By Dennis Hartley

BOSCH
A series about a bunch of bank-
robbing guerillas?

SCHLESINGER
What’re we going to call it —
the Mao Tse Tung Hour?

DIANA
Why not? They’ve got Strike
Force, Task Force, SWAT — why
not Che Guevara and his own
little mod squad?

-from Network (by Paddy Chayefsky)

No…wait! I’ve got it. How about a full-length feature film ABOUT Che Guevara? No, wait….two full-length feature films, combined as a 4 ½ hour epic? We’ll throw Fidel into the mix, and make it a buddy movie. We’ll show how these two young, rugged and idealistic Marxists sowed the seeds of the Cuban Revolution with little more than a couple of guns, a rag-tag band of rebel soldiers, and a leaky boat. Then, we’ll move the action over to Bolivia, where Che plays cat and mouse in the jungle, Rambo-style, with, like, the whole Bolivian Army looking for him…then he goes out in a blaze of glory! I can see it now. How’s this for a working title: “Butch Castro and the Argentine Kid”? We could get what’s his name…that guy who just directed another Oceans 11 sequel? Oh yeah, Soderbergh. That means he’s due for one of his Art House Cred films? Perfect!

Well, as far as Art House Cred flicks go, you could do worse than Che, Steven Soderbergh’s new biopic about one of the most iconic figures in the history of revolutionary politics. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Sure, you’ve got your Thomas Jefferson, with the intellectualized ideals and that Declaration thingie; you’ve got your Mahatma Gandhi, with the passive resistance and the civil disobedience, but let’s face facts: Whose mug do you see on all the T-shirts and the dorm room posters? The stately, bewigged gentleman farmer? The lovable, bespectacled uncle? That’s not sexy. The bearded guy with the beret and the bandolier, leading his own little mod squad through the jungle like Robin Hood and his merry band, sticking it to The Man in the name of the People. Now THAT’s sexy. (Hmmm…was Robin Hood the original Marxist? Discuss.)

Let’s get this out of the way first. Ernesto “Che” Guevara was no martyr. By the time he was captured and executed by a unit of CIA-directed Bolivian Special Forces in October of 1967, he had played judge and jury and put his own fair share of people up against the wall in the name of the Revolution. He was Fidel Castro’s right-hand man; some historians have referred to him as “Castro’s brain”. That being said, there is no denying that he was a complex, undeniably charismatic and fascinating individual. By no means your average run-of-the-mill revolutionary guerilla leader, he was also well-educated, a physician, a prolific writer (from speeches and essays on politics and social theory to articles, books and poetry), a shrewd diplomat and had a formidable intellect (he “palled around” with the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir; like many native Argentines, he was fluent in French as well). He was also a brilliant military tactician.

Soderbergh and his screenwriters (Peter Buchman and Benjamin A. Van Der Veen) have adapted their two-part story from a pair of Guevara’s own autobiographical accounts (respectively): Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War and The Bolivian Diary. Part 1 begins with Guevara (Benicio Del Toro) preparing to address the U.N. in 1964, in his capacity as the head of the Cuban delegation. It was during this brief yet significant visit where Guevara’s cult of personality was first seeded here in America; he made a TV appearance on Face the Nation and was even feted by Senator Eugene McCarthy (both events are recreated in the film). Guevara also famously met with Malcolm X during this New York junket; although the film curiously skips over that.

DP Peter Andrews shoots the footage of the 1964 trip in a stark, B&W verite style, which gives it a faux-documentary vibe and cleverly instills an effective period flavor. It also makes an eye-catching contrast to the beautifully photographed full-color flashbacks that make up the bulk of Part 1, which covers Guevara’s involvement in the Cuban revolution, beginning with his initial introduction to Castro in 1955, and culminating with an expansive, rousing, Sergio Leone-worthy recreation of the decisive battle of Santa Clara in 1958. Regardless of how you may stand on Guevara’s significance as a historical figure (or Castro’s, for that matter), what ensues in the movie’s first half is nothing less than a thoroughly absorbing, and at times downright exhilarating, piece of ace filmmaking. What comes through most clearly, and what I found most fascinating about this part of the story, is the amazing amount of sheer determination and force of will that can be summoned up by people who are so thoroughly and immovably committed to an ideal (for better or for worse). Intellectually, it helps you grok the romanticism of “revolution” and the curious rock star appeal that leaders of such movements can possess. Again, however, Castro and Guevara were no saints. They “freed” the Cuban people from an oppressive dictatorship, only to turn around and install their own particular brand of oppressive dictatorship (meet the new boss, same as the old boss). And so endeth Part 1.

Now, Part 2 is a slightly different bailiwick. In late 1966, following an unsuccessful attempt to stir up a people’s revolution from the disarray caused by a civil war in the Congo (mentioned only in passing in the film), Guevara headed for Bolivia to see what kind of trouble he could scare up there (never content to rest on his laurels, he was nothing if not committed to his principles). Unfortunately for Guevara, this venture was to lead to his final undoing. Compared to the relative cakewalk of a small island nation like Cuba, the rugged, desolate vastness of landlocked Bolivia proved to be a more daunting logistical hurdle for his preferred method of using “armed struggle” in order to win over the hearts and minds of the peasants; consequently this revolution didn’t “take”.

Since we know this going in, and after checking our watches, we also know that the film still has 135 minutes to go, the question is: How can Part 2 be as engrossing as Part 1? Well, it depends on how you look at it. If you’re the completist type (like me), naturally you’re going to want to know how the story ends. Personally, I found Part 2 to be equally involving, but in a decidedly different vein. Whereas Part 1 is a fairly straightforward biopic, Part 2 reminded me of two fictional adventures with an existential bent, both of which also happen to be set in similarly torrid and unforgiving South American locales-Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear and Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Like the doomed protagonists in those films, Guevara is fully committed to his journey into the heart of darkness, and has no choice but to cast his fate to the wind and let it all play out.

A word about the presentation. My review is based on the “special road show edition” of the film that I saw here in Seattle (now playing in selected cities). This was presented as a 4 ½ hour film (ow, my ass), with a 15-minute intermission, and no opening or closing credits. I understand that when it goes into wider release, it will be presented as The Argentine (Part 1) and Guerilla (Part 2), with individual admissions. I also noticed (to my chagrin) that it has now popped up on PPV in two parts (if your lineup includes the “IFC in Theaters” feature). I would recommend seeing it as a whole; but if your budget and/or attention span dictates otherwise, at least try to catch The Argentine if you can.

La Revolucion no sera televisada: The Motorcycle Diaries, Che! (1969), Che (1998), Fidel, Comandante , I Am Cuba, Before Night Falls, The Lost City, Havana (1990), Cuba, The Godfather Part II, Missing, Blame It on Fidel, The Official Story, Evita, Machuca, Buenos Aries Vice Versa, La Amiga, Kamchatka, Under Fire, Four Days in September, The Comedians, Bananas, Moon Over Parador, Torrid Zone, Crisis, Simon Bolivar (1969), Viva Zapata, The Professionals, Vera Cruz, Duck, You Sucker (aka A Fistful of Dynamite), The Wild Bunch – The Original Director’s Cut, Villa Rides, The Devil’s Backbone, Spirit of the Beehive, Land and Freedom , For Whom the Bell Tolls, Confidential Agent, Behold a Pale Horse, The Disappearance of Garcia Lorca

Previous posts with related themes:

The Good Shepherd/638 Ways to Kill Castro

Pan’s Labyrinth

Reds/The Internationale

Chicago 10

Monkey Warfare

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The Refs

by digby

The Opinionator in the NY Times is well worth reading today, because it’s all about Obama’s executive orders on Guantanamo and the political establishment’s response to them. It’s an interesting overview with a lot of good links to various points of view. (Never mind that the writer calls me a “current darling” in spite of the fact that I’m so stale and out of fashion at this point that I might as well be Elaine Benes. It’s informative anyway.)

It seems clear that everyone is happy, whether it’s the left, which wanted Obama to repudiate the torture regime or the right (and the media) who are totally convinced that he is continuing those same policies. That seems like good politics. He certainly appears to have effectively sidestepped, at least for the moment, the danger that closing Gitmo and the rest would result in a “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” style hissy fit. (I think in this case it helped that there was a strong public argument formulated outside the presidential campaign on the issue.)

But as we have learned in the past half decade, reality bites eventually and it will be clear exactly what the result of these orders are at some point. And, as I’ve written before, the stakes are not just US adherence to the Rule of Law, but US moral authority and Obama’s ability to conduct a credible foreign policy. Winking and nodding may work in the beltway, but foreign governments aren’t quite so willing to believe what they want to believe.

The fact is that if Obama does what is right for American foreign policy, there are many on the right who are going to be very angry, there’s just no way around that. Perhaps it’s a good thing to put off that moment of reckoning, considering all the things he has to deal with in the near term. But it will happen. And if he decides to eventually allow a little bit of torture-lite or finds some “common ground” on indefinite detention, he will also be sandbagged by the right who will accuse him not only of hypocrisy, but of not going far enough. There is only one way to politically and substantively deal with this, and that’s to make a clean, clear break with the Bush administration.

One of the most thought provoking excerpts I came across in the Opinionator’s long post was from Brian Beutler, in which he points out that the media simply has a need for conflict and so creates it where there is none. I think that’s true as well, but in this case, the media is papering over the conflict and you have to ask yourself why that is. Aside from the fact that they are covering their own feelings on torture, I think it’s just that the right is back to seriously working the refs, and that is a far more complicated issue for us to deal with.

The problem has never been that members of the media are conservative, although plenty of them are. The problem is that they are subject to sophisticated manipulation by the permanent political establishment (which is conservative by definition) and live and work in a world in which conventional wisdom cannot be freely challenged. And after many years of being called the “liberal media” they are still sensitive to the charge that they are in the tank and feel the need to prove their credibility. (The left’s media critique has no similar slogan — or clout — unfortunately.) This ads up to a media which is now feeling the need to prove their “independence” — and that never works out well for the liberal program.

The political establishment and the right wing noise machine are very, very good at this. They’ve been doing it for decades and their methods are far more nuanced and subtle than Rush Limbaugh screaming that he wants Obama to fail (although Limbaugh plays a part in this by legitimizing those who are playing a smoother game but are no less hostile.) They have the ability to manipulate the press to sabotage the progressive agenda through the building of false expectations, propaganda, social pressure, tabloid scandal and a long term commitment to the indoctrination among the people of ideological dogma. It’s a very well-developed strategy and it doesn’t suffer from Republican political failure because it exists outside of, and in spite of, electoral politics.

The problem with the press is far more complicated than a simple matter of fairness or even stultifying conventional wisdom, which as Jay Rosen explains in this widely read and important post, is hugely influential. It’s also a matter of their own lack of self-awareness and inability to either see or fight the pressures to conform that are brought to bear by powerful interests and institutions.

Many members of the press clearly like Obama. But it won’t help him pass his program or convey the message he wants to convey because the majority of those who are charged with disseminating his message aren’t agents of change, they are agents for the status quo whether they know it or not. And they have the power to tilt the playing field.

There are exceptions, of course. There are examples of courageous journalists willing to challenge the CW and who are attuned to right wing tactics. But many times they are marginalized or forced to soften the edges of their reporting if they stray too far from the establishment line. The conservatives know how to use that weakness to their own advantage and in a brilliant bit of jiu jitsu have even managed to convince most of the country, and the media themselves, that they are actually the handmaidens of liberalism. It’s one of their finest achievements.

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Conservatism Can Never Fail

by digby

…it can only be failed. And St. Ronnie can never be wrong, he can only be betrayed.

Here’s the latest:

The Republican Party that is in such disrepute today is not the party of Reagan. It is the party of Rush Limbaugh, of Ann Coulter, of Newt Gingrich, of George W. Bush, of Karl Rove. It is not a conservative party, it is a party built on the blind and narrow pursuit of power.

Not too long ago, conservatives were thought of as the locus of creative thought. Conservative think tanks (full disclosure: I was one of the three founding trustees of the Heritage Foundation) were thought of as cutting-edge, offering conservative solutions to national problems. By the 2008 elections, the very idea of ideas had been rejected. One who listened to Barry Goldwater’s speeches in the mid-’60s, or to Reagan’s in the ’80s, might have been struck by their philosophical tone, their proposed (even if hotly contested) reformulation of the proper relationship between state and citizen. Last year’s presidential campaign, on the other hand, saw the emergence of a Republican Party that was anti-intellectual, nativist, populist (in populism’s worst sense) and prepared to send Joe the Plumber to Washington to manage the nation’s public affairs.

American conservatism has always had the problem of being misnamed. It is, at root, the political twin to classical European liberalism, a freedoms-based belief in limiting the power of government to intrude on the liberties of the people. It is the opposite of European conservatism (which Winston Churchill referred to as reverence for king and church); it is rather the heir to John Locke and James Madison, and a belief that the people should be the masters of their government, not the reverse (a concept largely turned on its head by the George W. Bush presidency).

Over the last several years, conservatives have turned themselves inside out: They have come to worship small government and have turned their backs on limited government. They have turned to a politics of exclusion, division and nastiness. Today, they wonder what went wrong, why Americans have turned on them, why they lose, or barely win, even in places such as Indiana, Virginia and North Carolina.

And, watching, I suspect Ronald Reagan is smacking himself on the forehead, rolling his eyes and wondering who in the world these clowns are who want so desperately to wrap themselves in his cloak.

The modern Republican Party is the party of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan both of whom built the party’s power through bigotry, martial know-nothingism and greed. There has been no betrayal. Both Nixon and Reagan ran on exclusion, division and nastiness. The Roves and the Gingrich’s learned their dark arts swerving those two masters.

American conservatism has always had a nativist and populist cast to it, but the Big Money Boyz and the aristocrats figured out about 35 years ago how to turn a profit at it. They finally got so greedy they nearly killed their own golden goose, but let’s not pretend that all of the enablers of the period were somehow betrayed. This stuff has been going on for a very long time.

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Harmless

by digby

The number of in-custody sudden deaths rose dramatically during the first year California law enforcement agencies began using stun guns, raising questions about the safety of the devices, according to a new study at UCSF.

The electronic weapons are intended to be a nonlethal alternative to the gun.

“Tasers are not as safe as thought,” said Dr. Byron Lee, one of the cardiologists involved in studying the death rate related to Tasers, the most widely used stun gun. “And if they are used, they should be used with caution.”

The researchers analyzed sudden death data from 50 law enforcement agencies in the state that use Tasers. They compared the death rate pre- and post-Taser deployment – analyzing data for five years before each agency began using Tasers and five years afterward.

They found a sixfold increase in sudden deaths during the first year of Taser use – amounting to nearly 6 deaths per 100,000 arrests.

“I didn’t expect what we found,” said Lee. “I thought we would find no difference in the rate of sudden death. But there was a rather dramatic rise.”

After the first year, the rate of sudden deaths dropped down to nearly pre-Taser levels, suggesting that police and others in law enforcement altered the way they were using the devices to make them less lethal.

[…]

Tasers, known as “conducted energy” devices, send out high-frequency pulses which can cause a very rapid, dangerous heart rhythm, said senior author Dr. Zian H. Tseng, an assistant clinical professor in cardiology.

He says that the lethality may be the result of holding the charge for a long time rather than using a short pulse. But that’s a very difficult

One would hope that law enforcement will see that the willy nilly, all purpose use of tasers must be stopped in light of these findings. This use of tasers to shut up someone who is already in custody (as in the “don’t tase me, bro” case) or when a traffic violator doesn’t respond quite quickly enough for the officer’s taste is much too risky. They are clearly lethal weapons and they have no way of knowing if the person they are tasing has heart condition or some other health problem that would turn even proper taser use into a deadly choice. If their use is continued, which I think is a mistake, the least they can do is ensure that they are only used as a form of self defense.

But I doubt they will curb their use based on common sense and now scientific evidence. It will probably take many liability claims before they learn their lesson on this. Sadly, that’s how we do things in America.

Oh, and by the way:

A man tased by a Soddy Daisy police officer earlier this month has died after weeks in a coma.

According to his obituary, he died on Thursday at a local hospital.

An outside investigation is ongoing to determine what happened the morning he was injured. A police report shows Redden was tased because he appeared to be on some type of narcotic. It also states he wouldn’t obey verbal commands and was kicking and swinging at first responders.

The police report states he was tased three times, but family and friends believe it was more.

According to witnesses, the man was tased while he was restrained on a stretcher.

Update: Meanwhile, New Orleans goes all in.

h/t to many readers

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Factcheckers

by dday

In this economy, I guess the media isn’t hiring them:

Reports of a recent study by the Congressional Budget Office, showing that the vast majority of the money in the stimulus package won’t be spent until after 2010, have Democrats on the defensive and the GOP calling for a pullback in wasteful spending.

Funny thing is, there is no such report.

“We did not issue any report, any analysis or any study,” a CBO aide told the Huffington Post.

Rather, the nonpartisan CBO ran a small portion of an earlier version of the stimulus plan through a computer program that uses a standard formula to determine a score — how quickly money will be spent. The score only dealt with the part of the stimulus headed for the Appropriations Committee and left out the parts bound for the Ways and Means or Energy and Commerce Committee.

Because it dealt with just a part of the stimulus, it estimated the spending rate for only about $300 billion of the $825 billion plan. Significant changes have been made to the part of the bill the CBO looked at.

This was not only a major part of the GOP pushback on the recovery package the past couple days, it was trumpeted by all the usual suspects on cable news. At first I thought it odd that Republicans gave a damn whether stimulus spending happens quickly, considering they’ve spent the last several months blocking any stimulus at all. Of course it was just a way to undermine the plan, and the media played happily along. Thing is, the new head of the Office of Management and Budget promptly refuted this study, with numbers and everything, but he wasn’t really part of the news reports. He said/she said balance would have been an IMPROVEMENT upon this fiasco. But conservatives rule their world.

It’s pretty clear that the media has no ability to or interest in understanding this stuff, because then they wouldn’t have their precious “conflict”. So they regurgitate whatever some GOP staffer feeds them, just to spice things up. Cable news’ ratings soared this past year in the midst of an election based on change, but they haven’t changed one bit.

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Who’s Rooting For Failure Now?

by digby

Speaking of WATBs, Limbaugh is making a particular ass of himself this week:

We’re witnessing racism all this week that led up to the inauguration. We’re being told that we have to hope he succeeds. That we have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend forward, backward, whichever. Because his father was black, because this is the first black president.

He also said earlier:

So I’m thinking of replying to the guy, “Okay, I’ll send you a response, but I don’t need 400 words, I need four: I hope he fails.” (interruption) What are you laughing at? See, here’s the point. Everybody thinks it’s outrageous to say. Look, even my staff, “Oh, you can’t do that.” Why not? Why is it any different, what’s new, what is unfair about my saying I hope liberalism fails? Liberalism is our problem. Liberalism is what’s gotten us dangerously close to the precipice here. Why do I want more of it? I don’t care what the Drive-By story is. I would be honored if the Drive-By Media headlined me all day long: “Limbaugh: I Hope Obama Fails.” Somebody’s gotta say it.

As Think Progress noted earlier, Limbaugh himself repeatedly took liberals to task over the years for allegedly rooting for Bush’s failure, but mentioning hypocrisy in terms of conservatives is a useless exercise. They have no sense of shame apparently, so they just ignore such inconsistencies.

Still, Limbaugh’s comments are so outrageous that they can’t just be ignored. After all, it was only a few years ago that we were treated to non-stop hectoring like this, from the late Tony Snow:

If you root for failure, you’re rooting for American and Iraqi deaths. It’s a bit like the president’s 2002 State of the Union observation — either you’re with us or against us.

I never “rooted for failure” and I can’t find a record of anyone who did, certainly not in anything close to the blatant terms that Limbaugh uses. Yet, the right used this false claim as a weapon for years to subdue criticism of Bush and the Iraq war and it worked. The fact that Rush is openly rooting for Obama’s failure proves that bipartisanship, at least among the GOP faithful, is a one way street. He is still a hugely influential member of the conservative movement and I think it is unwise not to take him at his word.

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