Month: August 2009

How (And Why) To Make Your Own Yogurt

by tristero

Here’s a really easy walk-through of how to make yogurt (and no, you don’t really need one of those yogurt makers):

There are more meticulous and complicated methods around but this one does the job. They use a handheld electric blender, which I for one don’t have, but gently stirring the yogurt starter into the lukewarm milk with a whisk or fork will do just fine.

Now, there are at least three damn good reasons to make your own yogurt:

1. It tastes oh so much better than, say, Dannon yogurt products from the store.
2. It’s a helluva lot cheaper.
3, Dannon still advertises on Glenn Beck, supporting a far-right demagogue who, among many other things, called the president of the United States a “racist.”

So…as the lifelong liberal and progressive Julia Child said, Afiyet olsun!

Rolling Redux

by digby

I think it’s time for a repeat of what Rick Perlstein wrote to me just before Senator Kennedy died this week:

The Republican old bulls will say they’re honoring EMK’s memory by voting against cloture for what they’ll say is a failed bill that he would never have happened had he been alive and kicking… It’s how they roll.

What Perlstein understands about the right wing, that nobody else ever seems to get, is that they always take the left’s icons and use them for their own ends. Reagan used to famously quote Roosevelt as a great example of conservative values. And just as John Kennedy and Martin Luther King have been recently appropriated by conservatives, we can expect Ted Kennedy to be transitioned from history’s most hated liberal into the Great Compromiser, who knew how to “make the right concessions.” They’re really good at this stuff.

There is another part to this, however, as we are seeing right now. The media villagers, who automatically assume that anyone who is beloved by the people is someone who reflects their own values (it’s all about them) are saying that Kennedy always compromised because he was committed to bipartisanship as a governing principle.

He wasn’t, of course. That’s completely absurd. He was committed to liberal goals, which he advanced at every opportunity. Under conservative reign he got his foot in the door, eked out whatever advances were possible get and stopped the Republicans from their worst if he could. But in a moment of liberal opportunity he would never have compromised simply out of silly beltway convention, particularly on a signature issue like health care. He would have used every lever of power at his disposal to get it done.

As far as Kennedy being a great example of their beloved village consensus, everyone loving each other even as they played out some sort of ideological kabuki, maybe they need to take a step back from the unctuous paeans of the conservative marketers and remind themselves of what the conservatives really thought of him. That’s the most intellectually honest piece about Kennedy I’ve read from a conservative since he died.

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The Costs Of Reductive Thinking

by dday

Barack Obama had an interesting moment last week during that Organizing for America strategy session on health care. Trying to put in perspective the price tag of reform, he said this:

“Now, one thing that’s very important to remind people, because you notice there’s been a talking point from opponents — ‘trillion-dollar health care bill’ — they love repeating that. ‘Trillion-dollar health care bill.’

“First of all, it’s important to remind people that when they say ‘trillion dollars,’ they’re talking about over 10 years. So this — we’re talking about $100 billion a year — which is still a significant amount of money. But just to give you a sense of perspective, I mean, the amount of money that we’re spending in Iraq and Afghanistan is — what’s the latest figure, Debbie? You figure $8 billion to $9 billion a month, right?

“So for about the same cost per year as we’ve been spending over the last five to six years, we could have funded this health care reform proposal, just to give you a sense of perspective.”

I don’t know if I was the only one, but my immediate reaction was, “Um, well, why don’t you do something about that?” I mean, sure, the costs of an unnecessary war in Iraq and a war headed toward quagmire in Afghanistan could have paid for the front end of health care reform. But they’re both still raging, at a time when we have few national security interests in those regions, and certainly nothing that could not be handled with a diplomatic, law enforcement and intelligence approach rather than a military one. So if the cost of the wars from 2003-2009 could pay for health care, the future costs from 2009-2019 could go a pretty long way in their own right.

It’s particularly pernicious to find the President making this argument, when as commander-in-chief he has the ability to draw down forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. If he wants to make that kind of comparison, he ought to back it up. Yet this transcript from Bruce Reidel, who managed a lot of the policy reviews on Afghanistan and Pakistan for the White House, might offer an explanation of why he won’t go that far.

The triumph of jihadism or the jihadism of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in driving NATO out of Afghanistan would resonate throughout the Islamic World.This would be a victory on par with the destruction of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. And, those moderates in the Islamic World who would say, no, we have to be moderate, we have to engage, would find themselves facing a real example. No, we just need to kill them, and we will drive them out. So I think the stakes are enormous.

That’s extremely dangerous thinking, as Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum make clear. It’s also not new thinking – it’s basically what kept us in Vietnam for so long, as President after President didn’t want to be tagged as the one who lost a war. So they talked themselves into inane theories like this, psychological projections about “losing face” and “denying the enemy a rhetorical victory,” and 58,000 Americans died as a result. Hundreds and thousands more will die this time, because this kind of philosophy leaves us no out. We cannot leave so long as one member of the insurgency wants us to go, because otherwise we would be giving them a great victory.

It’s not surprising to see establishment figures embrace such a reductive theory based on image and manliness. But the guy who just made the connection between the costs of war abroad and the betterment of the lives of citizens at home? As Barney Frank said at a recent town hall meeting, “If we hadn’t gone to the war in Iraq, which I thought was a terrible mistake and voted against, we would have had more than enough money to pay for health care.” You cannot say things like that and still send soldiers into the battle. Not if you mean them.

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Taste

by digby

Mike Huckabee has always had a really nasty streak, but I think he may have outdone himself with this one:

The 2008 Republican presidential candidate suggested during his radio show, “The Huckabee Report,” on Thursday that, under President Obama’s health care plan, Kennedy would have been told to “go home to take pain pills and die” during his last year of life.

“[I]t was President Obama himself who suggested that seniors who don’t have as long to live might want to consider just taking a pain pill instead of getting an expensive operation to cure them,” said Huckabee. “Yet when Sen. Kennedy was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at 77, did he give up on life and go home to take pain pills and die? Of course not. He freely did what most of us would do. He choose an expensive operation and painful follow up treatments. He saw his work as vitally important and so he fought for every minute he could stay on this earth doing it. He would be a very fortunate man if his heroic last few months were what future generations remember him most for.”

As it happens, Huckabee made his remarks shortly after he derided Democrats for using Kennedy’s death to make the pitch that “Congress must hurry and pass the health care reform bill and do it in his memory,”

“That not only defies good taste,” said Huckabee, “it defies logic.”

You’ll note that Huckabee said “he freely did what most of us would do, he chose an expensive operation.” “Most of us” must be referring to those who are lucky enough to have insurance like Kennedy had — paid for by the government and among a huge choice of policies — because “many of us” would have to fight our insurance companies to get that “expensive” treatment or would face bankruptcy. That’s if “we” were lucky enough to have insurance at all.

Huckabee has properly defined the problem but he doesn’t seem to realize that it’s the problem with the current system, not the proposed one. It’s an excellent way to confuse people, of course, if you’re trying to scare them, but it’s a bit rich to speak of logic in the same breath.

And to evoke “good taste” in the same moment you are lying through your teeth with an outrageous claim that President Obama said seniors should consider going home and taking pain pills instead of getting an operation is just plain sickening and in a perfect world would disqualify him from ever holding public office again.

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Ok For Me, But Not For Thee

by digby

I’m sure every one remembers the Townhall “strategy memos” put out by the tea bag people earlier this summer. Here’s one example:

– Artificially Inflate Your Numbers: “Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half. The objective is to put the Rep on the defensive with your questions and follow-up. The Rep should be made to feel that a majority, and if not, a significant portion of at least the audience, opposes the socialist agenda of Washington.”

– Be Disruptive Early And Often: “You need to rock-the-boat early in the Rep’s presentation, Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep’s statements early.”

– Try To “Rattle Him,” Not Have An Intelligent Debate: “The goal is to rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda. If he says something outrageous, stand up and shout out and sit right back down. Look for these opportunities before he even takes questions.

And, as we’ve seen, opponents of reform have carried those instructions out all across the country.

Proponents of health care reform, slow off the mark, recently distributed their own manual. And the right is outraged. Here’s the Traditional Values Coalition:

A Democrat Health Care Reform Now (HCAN) manual describes how to disrupt Town Hall meetings and to undermine the efforts of grassroots Americans to challenge their legislators on Obama’s government-run health care plans.

The manual was sent out to HCAN agitators by Margarida Jorge, who is a former labor organizer for the Service Employees International (SIEU). Jorge has long been involved in leftist politics and her Facebook lists the gay marriage group “Marriage Equality” as one of her favorite organizations. Jorge was an agitator for the Missouri Citizen Education Fund that accused John Ashcroft of supporting white supremacists. She’s clearly a hard-core leftist.

Her manual, “HCAN – Responding To Right-Wing Attacks In The Field” describes Americans who attend Town Hall meetings as “tea-baggers” – a gay pejorative – and as “right-wing activists” who are supposedly arriving at Town Hall meetings to be as disruptive as possible.

She advises HCAN agitators to:

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Contact Members of Congress to let them know HCAN agitators will be present.
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Plan with a Member of Congress ahead of time to help control the format of the Town Hall meeting.
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Choose a venue that is difficult for the opposition to access without being noticed. Make sure conservatives are kept as far away from the stage as possible.
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Bring more people than the other side has.
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Arrive earlier than the opposition to down them out. “Stack our folks in the front to create a wall around the Member.”
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Bring more signs and leaflets than the other side. Hold signs where TV cameras can see them.
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Don’t let the “right-wing” hijack the message of the meeting. Directly approach reporters and give them your story. Videotape the events and give the video to the TV stations.
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Encourage HCAN activists to interrupt conservative Americans who are speaking out.
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Phrase questions to strategically move the Obama message.
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Demonstrate by chanting slogans.
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Collect signs and leaflets that are not provided by you or your organization. “Another way to limit protesters’ ability to hijack your event is to confiscate signs or leaflets that they may be bringing into the venue from outside.”

All of these tactics are fascist in nature and are designed to stifle free speech and open debate on Obama’s socialist health care reform agenda.

TAKE ACTION: Attend a Town Hall event and give a copy of the HCAN action plan to a reporter when you enter the room. Explain how HCAN plans on stifling free speech at Town Hall meetings throughout the U.S. Give copies of the HCAN plan to your friends before the meeting to alert them to the tactics that will be used against them.

I’d laugh it weren’t so serious. What do you with people like this?

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Renewed Faith

By digby

I have,sadly, become something of a cynic in my old age and it’s not a happy thing to be. The world is darker, inspiration harder to find and humans are constantly disappointing me. But today, my faith in the goodness of human nature was renewed.

Howie Klein asked John Amato and I to an event last night at the Grammy Museum, which is in downtown LA near the Staples center and the convention center. It was a fabulous Q&A and concert with the great Jazz trumpet player Terrance Blanchard and his band. Unfortunately, when I got back in my car after the event I found that my wallet was missing. This venue is huge, tens of thousands of people are there at any given time from all over the area and all over the world. Whether stolen or lost, I had no hope that I would ever see it again. Just another night in the Naked City. I felt very down.

This morning I got a call from the Santa Monica Police telling me that a good Samaritan had found my wallet and they had called the police to tell them they would like to return it. (My phone number wasn’t in it.) I was stunned. And I also felt a little bit elated. It’s been a while since something surprised me in quite this way. (That cynicism again.) So I happily took the Good Samaritan’s number and called him.

This man’s name is Kurt Thompson, and he works for an aerospace supplier in Gardena, a few miles south from where I live. He told me that his employee Albert Garcia had found the wallet last night, brought it to work and asked his boss to help him track me down so he could return it. They spent the morning trying to figure out a way to get my number when they finally decided that the best route would be to call the police and see if they could get it to me. I was thrilled and immediately agreed to drive down and pick it up.

When I arrived, Kurt took me on a tour of the plant (they make some kind of special bolt for Boeing aircraft) and showed me what my credit cards and ID all look like under the blacklight, which is the way the authorities determine if they are authentic. Then he took me to meet Albert, a handsome young guy who looks to be in his early 20s.(He might be older, but he looks young.)

Anyway, I thanked Albert profusely and offered him a reward — which he refused to accept under any circumstances. And again, I was surprised. I was happy to give it to him, the reward was well deserved and his returning my wallet saved me hours of trouble and money having to replace both my passport (don’t ask) and my driver’s license, not to mention the hell of dealing with credit cards and all the rest. His abject refusal to accept any money was unexpected and I was even more impressed. I just assumed that he would take it. Another chip of my hard cold cynicism broke off.

I spent a few more minutes chatting with Kurt, a very upbeat, friendly person with a huge smile and a contagious good humor and I discovered that he is mentoring Albert, helping him through school and guiding him in the workplace. (Albert, of course could have kept the wallet and never told Kurt about it, so Albert’s moral compass is all his own.) Kurt is a very good person.

And I also discovered that Kurt is a Republican. (He has a mixed marriage – his wife is a Democrat.) We chatted a bit about travels, music, the thrill of Obama’s election, the disillusionment of the Bush voter, the need for critical thinking, and then I took my leave. And I felt uplifted and happy in a way that I haven’t felt in some time. It’s not about the wallet which, after all, can be replaced. It’s that I felt good about human beings again.

The burden of cynicism wears me down — I don’t like to believe that people are fundamentally dishonest and cruel. I needed this blast of decency from total strangers to shake me out of my doldrums. So, I’m immensely grateful to Kurt and Albert, both for renewing my faith in human nature and reminding me that political affiliation doesn’t tell the whole story about anyone. It was a privilege to meet both of them.

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Sandbaggers

by digby

Susie at Crooks and Liars links to this Ezra Klein piece in which he explains that Chuck Grassley is sandbagging health care because his fellow GOP Senators are threatening to deny him his preferred committee assignments if he doesn’t. She asks:

Why are we negotiating with Republicans at all?

That’s a good question. But it raises another one: why aren’t the Democrats doing the same thing?

In a world in which you had two parties negotiating in good faith for a common goal, bipartisanship was certainly possible. In one in which one party is committed to obstructing the other’s agenda no matter what, even to the extent that they will punish their own members who cooperate, it’s unilateral disarmament for the other party to allow their own members to play by the old rules. It’s quite obvious that if Reid (and Obama) wanted to put an end to this nonsense, they would threaten their own members with the same thing. (Certainly, they would require them to shut down the filibuster, even if they let them vote against the plan.)

This is, of course, assuming the Democrats actually want to pass their own agenda. If they don’t, this behavior is merely political malpractice, whereby they allow themselves to be trapped into opposing their own initiatives and being blamed for their failure. In this case, you get crappy health care reform and look like a bunch of sell-out losers in the eyes of the American people. Heads you lose, tails they win.

I’ve always said that the Republicans are an extremely effective opposition party and manage to advance their agenda even when they don’t have institutional power, but this is ridiculous. If this works, they will never have to work to win another election — the corporate Democrats will do their dirty work for them and they can just sit on the sidelines lobbing tea bags until it becomes clear to the American people that no matter how bad the Republicans are, they can’t possibly be as lame as the Democrats.

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The Meaning Of Compromise

by dday

I think everyone expected Republicans to pre-emptively accuse Democrats of politicization in the wake of Ted Kennedy’s death. (By the way, please politicize my death.) But that’s just the far edge of the Overton window, the bluff so Democrats won’t try to take comfort and inspiration to pass the cause of Kennedy’s life. The far more insidious tactic, proffered by the right in a coalition with the bipartisan fetishists in the media, is to revise Kennedy’s legacy as that of the ultimate centrist, in a fashion, the bipartisan dealmaker, the Great Compromiser. They’ve done a full-court press on this:

Senator Judd Gregg is already hinting at the idea. In an interview with the Boston Globe, Gregg hailed the bipartisan support for legislation he and Kennedy created together, adding that Kennedy knew how to “move the ball down the road with conservatives like myself.”

Meanwhile, Karl Rove hailed Kennedy on Fox this morning for being “willing to compromise.”

Other GOPers are floating the idea in The New York Times anonymously, in a discussion of how to navigate the politics of Kennedy’s death:

Republicans also noted that Mr. Kennedy, though an ideological liberal, was a legislative pragmatist who worked with Republicans to strike compromises on difficult subjects like health care, education and immigration. They said they saw little such reaching across the aisle in his absence.

Any member of the United States Senate with a long record will have many moments of compromise, whether between the parties or intra-party. But the idea that Kennedy should be remembered for “making the right concessions,” solely in the context of bipartisanship, is a media projection helped along by a right wing who wants to blame Kennedy’s absence for political polarization and the eventual death of a health care bill. We see this today with Steven Pearlstein’s eleventy-billionth column arguing for the wise, high Broderist, split-the-baby approach:

And while there will be plenty of liberal Democrats who will be fuming about all the compromises forced upon them, somewhere from above will come a familiar voice with that distinctly Boston accent, whispering, “The dream will never die. Take the deal.”

Notwithstanding the fact that Kennedy’s staff wrote the HELP Committee version of the bill, and Kennedy himself labored over it, and that includes a public option, misses the point of Kennedy’s legislative style, which continued to focus on broadening his goals and moving ever forward even when the odds weren’t on his side. As Jonathan Cohn writes:

But this notion that Kennedy’s liberal reputation somehow belied his pragmatism–a notion already gaining traction in the media, which has turned non-partisan accommodation into a fetish– misses the point. Kennedy compromised on means, not ends. He would negotiate because it helped achieve his broader goals–signing on to NCLB, whatever its cookie-cutter standards, because it would send money to schools in poor, underfunded districts; embracing the Medicare drug benefit because, however poorly designed, it’d save senior citizens from having to choose between medicine and food.

It was precisely because Kennedy’s devotion to his notion of social justice was so clear and dependable that he could make such deals stick. Liberals trusted him because we knew he wouldn’t sell out the broader cause. If it was good enough for Kennedy, we figured, it was good enough for us. We knew he didn’t see pragmatism as an alternative to ideology. It was just a necessary method of fulfilling it […]

In the hours since Kennedy’s passing, his speech to the 1980 Democratic convention–his most memorable oration, along with the RFK eulogy–has gotten a lot of play. Typically the networks show the final quote, in which he promises to continue his crusade even as he gives up his quest for the presidency. But the more important passage is where he invokes Franklin Roosevelt as an unabashed defender of the common man against the forces–and, yes, the people–who would disregard his well-being. Like FDR, Kennedy was not afraid to talk about values, to talk about right and wrong. Now that Kennedy is gone, who will pick up that torch?

Blue Dogs and ConservaDems have high praise for compromise these days, but their version of it basically preserves corporate goals and sells out their constituents in the exchange. Kennedy’s version was precisely the opposite. His concern was “the least among us,” the poor, the elderly, the disabled, the sick, the oppressed, the downtrodden, the less fortunate. He tried to get something for them, whenever possible. Pundits can call that “bipartisanship” but they ought to understand what that means.

The deviousness of the conservative project, to lament Kennedy’s passing because now wild-eyed ideologues (like Max Baucus?) will go crazy, is clear. The true scoundrels, however, are those in the press trying to position the life of the man who did as much to advance the causes of the voiceless as anyone in the history of the Senate as someone who preferred half a loaf. Democrats should take a better lesson.

No, mere words cannot honor Ted Kennedy’s memory. To pretend otherwise would be to cheapen his legacy, to lie about who Ted Kennedy really was. He was, for the vast majority of his life, a fiercely ideological public servant. It was his commitment to that New Deal social compact which defined him, which made him relevant to you and me. And his actions, not his words, were what marked him as the greatest Senator of his era. To attempt to honor Ted Kennedy without striving to further his life’s work is simply impossible.

When Paul Wellstone died they told us that we couldn’t celebrate him him as a political actor, that to do so would be crass and opportunistic. But the entire reason we knew Paul Wellstone, the reason we were crushed by his passing, was his political activism. It would have been a lie not to celebrate that legacy. It would have been crass to act as if Paul Wellstone hadn’t been first and foremost a progressive hero, to feign nonchalance over political concerns as we eulogized the man, and in so doing stripping him of his essence. Likewise, it would be a lie today to pretend that the reason we loved Ted Kennedy had nothing to do with his leadership for working people. And it would be crass to attempt to celebrate him with mere words, rather than the action he demanded from us in life. How can we not “politicize” his legacy? The man was who he was because of his wholehearted commitment to his politics. The real obscenity — the real opportunism — would be for his political opponents to now try and depoliticize a quintessentially political life.

…George Steph agrees: Kennedy would have ditched the public option. Amazing how Kennedy’s beliefs, after his death, line up perfectly with the beliefs of the blow-dried commentariat, n’est-ce pas? Lawrence O’Donnell, by the way, has a different perspective:

“Senator Kennedy…is not an easy compromiser on health care reform. In 1994, I was in the room when he told the president that he believed the strategy should be a Democrats-only strategy and that we should not be trying to reach out and get Republican votes.”

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If Obama Ain’t Exactly Hitler, He’s Certainly Ahmanidwhazzisname

by tristeor

I’m predicting that by the end of the day, if not way sooner, Republican Party leaders Limbaugh/Beck/Falafel Man will compare Holder’s decision to appoint a torture prosecutor to this.

I’m also predicting that no one comparable in the Democratic party has anticipated what to say in response.

Memories Of Bushian Obfuscation

by digby

Law.com interviews Alberto Gonzales. And he’s just as thick as I remembered:

TL: My question is loyalty versus being an objective counselor. I think a lot of my readers think, “Which one are you, loyal or an objective counselor to the president?”

Gonzales: You’re loyal. Look, someone like an attorney general wears two hats. You’re a member of the president’s team; you’re on his Cabinet. You have an obligation to promote the president’s law enforcement policies and priorities. He campaigned on those policies, and you have an obligation as a Cabinet official to make sure they’re implemented. But you also wear a different hat. You’re the chief law enforcement officer for the country. And if you have to investigate the White House for wrongdoing, you have to investigate the White House for wrongdoing, and I would have done that. And I think anyone who is unable to do that is not qualified to serve in these positions. So, there were times when I disagreed with the president, and I told the president. I think people have this notion that if you’re the attorney general, you can’t agree with anything, you can’t support anything of the president. That’s a naive understanding. That’s a misunderstanding of the world of the attorney general and our system of government. … So, my response to your question is I think everyone who works for the president and is appointed by the president should be loyal to the president and the president’s policies and priorities. But they take an oath and they’ve got to, of course, discharge their obligations under that oath, and I tried to do that every day.

Good grief. Talk about a straw man. Has anyone argued, ever, “that if you’re the attorney general, you can’t agree with anything, you can’t support anything of the president?” God, he sounds just like Junior.

With the exception of Rove, Bush’s personal lieutenants were all just dumb as dirt.
And this one was far too dumb to be Attorney General, which as he says has a sort of dual function, but one which is also obviously far too complicated for him to properly comprehend. Oy.

But lest we place the full blame for Bushian folly on Bush himself, let’s take a look at the latest from Dick Cheney, and his slavish biographer (who you have to give some credit for his willingness to continue to prostitute himself for his subject despite the embarrassment he must feel about this.)

Here’s Greg Sargent:

Hayes argues I was wrong to describe torture techniques as Bush/Cheney administration policy because “they were conceived and executed by senior CIA officals.” Is Hayes really arguing higher-ups didn’t sign off on torture techniques? Why on earth is he pointing out that Cheney himself didn’t “execute” the policies?

Breaking: Cheney himself didn’t waterboard! Just wow.

But I’ll bet he watched the videos.

h/t to bb