Month: February 2010

The Plan

by digby

Jonathan Cohn helpfully gives us the quick and dirty overview of the Obama health care proposal. It’s pretty much the Senate bill with the reconciliation fixes everyone’s discussed. The regulation of insurance rates was apparently a part of the discussions early on but was dropped in order to get the “cooperation” of the insurance industry, something which they have finally figured out isn’t worth doing. All in all, no surprises.

The big show on Wednesday will probably be to publicly corner recalcitrant Dems into supporting the bill and to make the Republicans look bad, a la the Obama appearance at the GOP retreat last month. It remains to be seen as to whether or not any of that will work. I’m skeptical.

Anyway, of you are looking for the right wing reaction to the plan (dutifully set forth 72 hours in advance, as they demanded,) here’s their first response:

h/t to strange apparatus

Lies And Damned Bloggers

by digby

Ron Fournier wrote in yesterday’s WaPo about the lying rightwingers at CPAC and the equally dishonest liberal activists who hate them. His theme is that Real Americans are sick of all this lying by the partisans of both sides and just want the truth.

He then takes an example of each side’s lies to illustrate this. The first is Mitt Romney, whom many people consider to be the front runner for the Republican nomination, at CPAC. He points out that Romney lied about the Democrats’ policies on taxes, jobs, deficits, tort reform, and the treatment of terrorist suspects in his speech to the faithful. For the Democrats he used as an example an anonymous diarist at DKos who wrote that Dick Cheney was a “self-confessed war criminal,” insisting that’s a lie because Cheney has not been charged with a war crime, nor has he confessed to one.

Aside from the bizarre asymmetry of a top tier presidential candidate and an anonymous blogger being used as equal examples of bipartisan lying, he didn’t even get it right. It’s true that Cheney has never been formally charged with a war crime, but Dick Cheney did go on national television just a week ago and blithely admit, “I signed off on it; others did, as well, too,” when he was asked about waterboarding.

Waterboarding is a war crime. Here’s just one example out of many that have been prosecuted:

Chase J. Nielsen, one of the U.S. airmen who flew in the Doolittle raid following the attack on Pearl Harbor, was subjected to waterboarding by his Japanese captors. At their trial for war crimes following the war, he testified “Well, I was put on my back on the floor with my arms and legs stretched out, one guard holding each limb. The towel was wrapped around my face and put across my face and water poured on. They poured water on this towel until I was almost unconscious from strangulation, then they would let up until I’d get my breath, then they’d start over again… I felt more or less like I was drowning, just gasping between life and death.”

Cheney can say that he doesn’t believe that waterboarding should be a war crime but that doesn’t mean it isn’t one. And every Justice Department coming along behind him can cover up for his war crime by failing to charge him with it, but that doesn’t mean that he didn’t confess to signing off on waterboarding on national TV last week-end — which, again, is a war crime. Therefore, Dick Cheney confessed to a war crime and just because our political system is too weak to prosecute him for it doesn’t mean it’s a lie to point that out.

But hey, by all means, let’s pretend that Mitt Romney’s lies and this anonymous blogger’s truth are both to blame for the fact that the country has no faith in politicians. Luckily we have the village arbiters of reality to help us work our way through it.

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Destroying For The Greater Good

by digby

Mark Kleiman wonders why Glenn Reynolds hates America. The answer is that he doesn’t. He hates liberals. And if the American economy has to be destroyed in order to destroy liberals, that’s just the price America will have to pay.

And then we can reconstitute ourselves into a nation of gun-toting, libertarian Supermen (and the parasites who serve them) just as God and Rand intended.

One can’t help but wonder, however, why these defenders of individual liberty are always so worked about money and property rights, but never seem to get up any energy to fight things like this, even in Goldwater country:

State lawmakers are moving to make couples who have decided their marriage isn’t working wait four months longer to divorce.

And those with children would first have to go through education programs telling them about alternatives to divorce and the resources available to improve or strengthen their marriage.

Rep. Nancy Barto, R-Phoenix, the sponsor of HB 2650, said she believes that requiring couples to wait 180 days will result in more people deciding they actually should stay together. As proof, she said the divorce rate is lower in states with longer waiting periods than it is in Arizona where a marriage can be ended in as few as 60 days.

I suspect that the only thing that would make these freedom fighters give a damn would be if someone proposed to tax couples who want to divorce or require that they register their firearms in order to gain a decree. Then you’d see some patriotic defenses of liberty. Otherwise, the parasites are on their own.

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“The Banks Are Very Emotional”

by digby

Bill Maher picked up on one of my pet peeves about these Wall Street bankers — their very delicate sensitivity about criticism. I also find it fairly incongruous with the square jawed Randian heroics with which they like to associate themselves. Who knew John Galt was such a raving, drama queen?

He also interviewed Elizabeth Warren, who said she once had high hopes that financial reform would happen, but is now fairly cynical about its prospects. She said:

The problems couldn’t be more obvious and quite frankly, the solutions couldn’t be more obvious, but we just can’t seem to get the two together right now.

Maher said he thought that Obama had made his soothing remarks about “savvy” bankers and baseball players because the delicate John Galts would crash the stock market at the least sign of any kind of interference. Warren corrected him: it’s the swarming banking lobbyists, overbearing and relentless that are the real problem. I think it’s both. Wall Street has certainly made no secret of its threats to take their balls and go home if it doesn’t get what it wants. The lobbyists probably carry that message as well.

(Ooops, Youtube pulled. Oh well… you can go here to see it.)

Here’s a substitute Maher that is also quite good:

H/t to JT.

America Punk’d

by digby

Eric Boehlert’s column this week about the ACORN videos is a must read. As I have written before, I was one of those who thought that O’Kefe and Gilese had gone into the ACORN offices dressed as they were shown in that endless loop on TV and was shocked to find out that O’Keefe had actually been dressed in a white shirt and khaki pants when they did the original sting.

This is a big deal for a couple of obvious reasons and one not so obvious reason. The first is that it resulted in ACORN being delegitimized and defunded (at least temporarily.) This was a huge blow to the people ACORN serves and politically to progressives who would like to see the poor enfranchised, something that the right wing rightly sees as a political threat. Anyone on the left side of the dial should be concerned that they were able to do this so easily.

The second obvious reason this is a big deal is because after the “story” broke, the major media donned a metaphorical hair shirt and loudly announced their shame at failing to follow the wingnut radio and Fox news agenda more closely, and in rushing to that judgment they also failed in their journalistic duty to figure out if this story was true. I’ve rarely seen them issue mea culpas so quickly and decisively and one should wonder why.

But the less than obvious reason this is a big deal is that the pimp and ho costumes were a send-up of over-the-top racial stereotypes that both reinforced some very ugly notions about the African American community, but more importantly, made these ACORN workers look as though they were so dumb they shouldn’t be allowed to cross the street, much less handle tax dollars. And this was done for a reason. The little dirty tricksters,it turns out, had relied on some other stereotypes to perform this sting — he had dressed like a nice, young, preppie fellow, just trying to help this unfortunate young white girl caught in a bad situation in order to gain the ACORN workers’ trust and compassion. He used his stereotypical innocent, youthful, studiously upstanding looks to create a false impression with the ACORN workers and then turned around and filmed some bogus footage of him dressed in a ridiculous pimp costume to give a false impression to the mostly white audience. It was a very clever way to use racial stereotypes on both groups to get what he wanted.

This story is important. There’s a long tradition of undercover muckraking that’s initiated many an important social change in this country. But this isn’t muckraking, it’s political theatre. The level of cynical deception in this “story” runs several layers deeper than anything I’ve ever seen before, tapping into some really nasty, subterranean veins of stereotype, prejudice and racism — on everyone’s part — to make what ends up being a completely distorted point. The fact that what should have been instantly seen as an obviously absurd proposition was taken at face value even by the US congress and the major media institutions of this country should inform us a little bit about how tenuous our racial progress might just be. This was a shameful episode deserving of more scrutiny than it’s gotten so far.

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Beck At CPAC

by digby

Excerpt from C&L

Glenn Beck gave testimony at CPAC and basically told everyone that the basic problem with Americans today is that they haven’t suffered enough and they fail to blame the right people for their suffering. Basically, he described a country that needs to “hit bottom” and them exterminate the vermin that put it there. The vermin, in this case, are progressives.

Obviously, this is not a new approach. But it may be the first time that someone has used the vernacular of the recovery movement to do it. It’s quite clever.

Adele Stan at Alternet deconstructs his 12-step call to arms.

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Saturday Night At The Movies

First there is a mountain

By Dennis Hartley

The hills are alive: Florian Lukas and Benno Furmann in North Face

The language of cinema may be universal, but certain genres loom iconic in a more nation-centric vein. The American western, the Japanese samurai film and the French farce come to mind. Germany’s claim to fame in this context (arguably running neck-in-neck with Expressionism) would have to be the Alpine “mountain films” of the 1920s and 1930s, ruggedly adventurous tales pitting man (and occasionally, the ruggedly adventurous Leni Riefenstahl) against nature. The narratives generally deal with issues regarding moral fiber and strength of character (I bet you’re glad I didn’t say “triumph of the will”), as well as variations on the theme of “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Many entries in the film cycle hold up amazingly well today, mostly due to the genuinely exciting on-location climbing sequences, which obviously had to be filmed without benefit of modern tricks like CGI. Okay, there was some fudging with the really hairy stuff, but the actors and crew were often working in relatively perilous situations.

Unfortunately, my Blu-Ray player refused to facilitate access to any of the “making of” bonus features contained on the Region 2 disc I screened for this review, so I’m still in the dark as to how perilous the situations may have been during the production of Philipp Stozl’s remarkably authentic mountaineering tale, North Face (released in Germany in 2008 as Nordwand, but only just now making its theatrical debut here in the states). I will tell you one thing. Despite what I know in my heart of hearts about the “magic” of moviemaking-days later, I’m still asking myself just how in the hell they produced this film without any cast or crew members going “Whoopsie!” and plunging to their doom.

The film is based on the true story of four climbers (a pair of two-man teams, one German and the other Austrian) who tackled the previously unconquered north face of Switzerland’s legendary Eiger in 1936. This particular route to the summit of the formidable 13,000 foot peak was considered to be a suicidal prospect at best; especially due to its dauntingly sheer ascent, extremely dicey traversals, unforgiving exposure to mercurial weather conditions and relative scarcity of safe bivouacking options. Based on what I have gleaned from my research about the actual events, Stolzl and his three co-writers (Cristoph Silber, Rupert Henning and Johannes Naber) have definitely taken some artistic license in their dramatization, but have nonetheless delivered a riveting adventure.

For the purposes of the film, the hotshot German climbing team of lifelong friends Toni Kurz (Benno Furmann) and Andreas Hinterstoisser (Florian Lukas) are portrayed to be professional rivals of their Austrian counterparts, Edi Rainer (Georg Friedrich) and Willy Angerer (Simon Schwarz). Toni and Andreas have been persuaded by the government to represent Germany (and for Nazi propaganda purposes, the “superior” Aryan ideal) in a multi-European nation mountaineering competition to scale the Eiger. The two are much more enthusiastic about the potential opportunity to become the first to successfully navigate the north face than they are about scoring any political points for the Fatherland. In fact, neither are party members. Although they are in the German army, both men seem ambivalent about their military careers; whenever they’re addressed with a “Heil Hitler!”, their usual rejoinder is either a cheery “Good morning!” or a jaunty “Berg Heil!”

A female childhood friend of the pair named Luise (Johanna Wokelek), who is now an aspiring photojournalist, is assigned to accompany her editor (Ulrich Tukur) to cover the competition (for those who fret about historical accuracy, she’s a complete invention). It is intimated that Luise and Toni share a romantic history (although the torch has been smoldering for some time). For one reason or another, the Germans and the Austrians are the only two teams who end up making the climb; initially as competitors but eventually merging as one team due to unexpected circumstances. The ascent subsequently is aborted and becomes a harrowing survival tale that will have you on the edge of your seat (I nearly had an anxiety attack, but then I am a major wuss when it comes to heights).

Despite a melodramatic conceit or two, Stolzl has delivered a completely believable film; intensely immersive, exhilarating and heartbreaking. All of the mountaineering sequences are astounding, instilling a real sense of admiration for what these men were able to achieve, outfitted in their relatively primitive 1930s climbing gear (no Gore-Tex or GPS tracking devices in those days). The Nazi politics are downplayed, but the filmmakers do make a pointed juxtaposition between the porcine “spectators” and journalists reveling in warm and cozy opulence at the nearby “four-star” hotel, and the tortuous, sub-zero life-and-death struggles unfolding just a few miles away on the Eiger. Whether this was intended as political allegory is up for debate. There is a touch of Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole in one scene. When news reaches the journalists that the climbers have aborted the attempt and begun a premature descent, Luise asks her cynical editor why he has made an abrupt decision to abandon the story as well and immediately leave the hotel. He snorts, “You either need a glorious triumph…or a horrible tragedy. An unspectacular retreat is nothing more than a few lines on page 3.” (Sigh) The more things change…

Because it’s there: Mountain of Destiny, The White Hell of Pitz Palu, The Holy Mountain (1926), Storm Over Mont Blanc,The Blue Light, Touching the Void, The Man Who Skied Down Everest, Steep, K2, Vertical Limit, The Eiger Sanction, This Ascent, Lost Horizon, The Razor’s Edge (original 1946 version), Seven Years in Tibet, Cliffhanger, The Climb (1986), The White Tower, Five Days One Summer, The Mountain, Alive, The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, For Your Eyes Only, Annibale, Careful , Women in Love, The Sound of Music.

Previous posts with related themes:

Man on Wire

War Crimes No Longer Exist

by digby

I’m sure most of you have already seen the Department of Justice OPR report on the Yoo memos. It’s even more sickening than I would have imagined. This bit is particularly horrible — and frightening:

The chief author of the Bush administration’s “torture memo” told Justice Department investigators that the president’s war-making authority was so broad that he had the constitutional power to order a village to be “massacred,” according to a report by released Friday night by the Office of Professional Responsibility.

[…]
The report, more than four years in the making, is filled with new details into how a small group of lawyers at the Justice Department, the CIA, and the White House crafted the legal arguments that gave the green light to some of the most controversial tactics in the Bush administration’s war on terror. They also describe how Bush administration officials were so worried about the prospect that CIA officers might be criminally prosecuted for torture that one senior official – Attorney General John Ashcroft – even suggested that President Bush issue “advance pardons” for those engaging in waterboarding, a proposal that he was quickly told was not possible. At the core of the legal arguments were the views of Yoo, strongly backed by David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal counsel, that the president’s wartime powers were essentially unlimited and included the authority to override laws passed by Congress, such as a statute banning the use of torture. Pressed on his views in an interview with OPR investigators, Yoo was asked: “What about ordering a village of resistants to be massacred? … Is that a power that the president could legally -” “Yeah,” Yoo replied, according to a partial transcript included in the report. “Although, let me say this: So, certainly, that would fall within the commander-in-chief’s power over tactical decisions.” “To order a village of civilians to be [exterminated]?” the OPR investigator asked again. “Sure,” said Yoo.

I wish someone had asked him about genocide, because he’s perilously close with this answer to legalizing it. After all, people have said for centuries that it was a form of “self defense.”

But this example is the one that tells me Yoo is not just one of those ordinary evil functionary types:

Recall that it came out last year that in a classified August 2002 memoranda, Yoo and Bybee approved such tortures to captured al-Qaeda detainee Abu Zubaydah as placing insects inside a “confinement box” along with the detainee, who was to be led to believe the insects were poisonous. They concluded such a move wouldn’t be torture. Here’s a snippet of how they reached such a conclusion. They use the bizarre nickname “Boo-Boo” for Abu Zubaydah:

On June 30 [2002], Yoo asked [NAME REDACTED] by email, “[D]o we know if Boo-boo is allergic to certain insects?” [NAME REDACTED] replied, “No idea, but I’ll check with [NAME REDACTED]” Although there is no record of a reply by [NAME REDACTED] the final version of the classified Bybee memo included the following, “Further, you have informed us that you are not aware that Zubaydah has any allergies to insects.”

That is the very definition of the banality of evil. I can’t believe that someone who wrote these opinions isn’t being tried for war crimes. And I suspect that nobody in the future is going to believe it either.

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Lucretia Quinn

by digby

Ms Sally Quinn seems to have embarrassed herself by letting her Queen Bee flag fly. The other day it was reported that she had purposefully scheduled her son’s wedding on the same day as her stepson, thus causing a deeper rift within the family she’s been ripping apart for decades:

The new date has caused some family friction because it’s the same day as the long-planned California wedding of lawyer Greta Bradlee, who very much hoped her grandfather would be there. Ben’s firstborn grandchild (he has 10) and the first to marry, she is the daughter of journalist and author Ben Bradlee Jr. of Cambridge, Mass., and his former wife, Washington-based ABC News correspondent Martha Raddatz. Ben Jr. is the oldest of the three children the longtime executive editor of the Washington Post sired during his two pre-Sally marriages.

The parents of the bride declined to comment on any aspect of the dueling weddings, but other sources told me there was no advance word from Sally about the scheduling change, nor any explanation provided as to why she had settled on a date for her son’s ceremony that will prevent her husband from attending his granddaughter’s wedding in California.

… Sally has some experience in wrangling wedding guests away from a competing event. In “The Party,” her 1997 book on entertaining, she wrote that after marrying Ben in a judge’s chamber in 1978, the newlyweds planned a celebratory dinner at their home for 30 or 40 friends. Trouble was, half of them had already committed to dining with the British ambassador, Peter Jay, and his wife Margaret. Ben and Sally were also invited, she makes clear, but had begged off. She might have simply explained to pals why they should bail on their diplomatic hosts, but she contends Ben “didn’t want to get scooped” by the rival Washington Star if word leaked out.

“When I called everyone to invite them to ‘dinner,’ they all declined, and I had to coerce them into coming without revealing why….What I did tell them in my sternest voice [was] that I was calling in my chits, that this was extremely important and I wanted them to get out of the Jays’ party and come to mine. They must have heard the resolve in my voice because they did it. We had to contend with a number of grudging guests at the beginning of the evening, but once they saw the wedding cake and the white lilies everywhere, heard a few mushy toasts, and drank several glasses of champagne, they were mollified, and it turned out to be a wonderful evening.” Quinn makes no mention of whether the jilted Brits were equally amused.

That story was so tawdry that she actually felt she had to explain herself in the Washington Post:

I’m going to discuss a drama unfolding in our family, and I’m discussing it only because others have made it public and messy. It’s a conflict that I hope readers can understand — and avoid in their own lives.

Our son Quinn Bradlee is marrying Pary Williamson in Washington on April 10. My husband’s granddaughter Greta Bradlee is getting married the same day in California. In the past few days there have been a spate of negative stories, both online and in print, about the “dueling weddings.” It’s been hurtful to all four of these wonderful young people. This “dueling” characterization couldn’t be further from the truth.

The unfortunate result of the dates being the same was an inadvertent mistake on my part. My error had nothing to do with the two couples who will wed that day.

I once wrote a book called “The Party,” which became the name of this column, and one of the things I wrote about was how even the so-called experts screw up. I am no exception. Greta, the daughter of my husband’s son Ben Bradlee Jr. and ABC’s Martha Raddatz, planned her wedding last fall and sent Save the Date cards. I gave ours to my husband to put the date on his calendar, and he did not. A warning to wives everywhere!

Quinn and Pary decided on Oct. 10, 2010, as their wedding date. Over Christmas, Greta’s mother and I came to an understanding that, because of existing tensions, it would be best for all if none of us attended Greta’s wedding. Then, in mid-January, we were thrilled to learn that Pary is pregnant, due Sept. 21, and decided to move up the date as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, our church does not do weddings during Lent or Easter. The only date we could arrive on when both church and minister were available was April 10, and the next wasn’t until after Memorial Day.

Frantically, I checked my calendar, my husband’s, Greta’s aunt’s, and her cousins’ — everyone had the date free. Each gave the go-ahead. We were also lucky enough to find that the band we had booked was able to make the date change, as well as the photographer, the planner and the attendants. Pary had found the perfect dress, which we bought. It all seemed serendipitous, so we booked everyone and ordered the invitations.

Anyone who has ever hosted a wedding knows the maddening details involved. Locking things down seemed such a relief. Then came the revelation. Two weeks or so later, my husband’s son learned of the new plan. Happily, we did not have a single overlapping guest. We had already decided not to go to the California nuptials. And, by then, it was too late to change the one in Washington. We decided to go ahead.

It never occurred to any of us that my mistake would be a story, much less a gossip item that proved so upsetting to the two couples.

Yah, sure. Blame the addled old gent whose home you wrecked years ago.

This is creepy family gossip and it’s fairly shocking that Sally Quinn is given space in the Washington Post to discuss it. But there you have it.

I wouldn’t give a damn except for the fact that for some reason this social vulture has tremendous power in this country as the arbiter of proper Village behavior. It’s hard to believe that such an classless biddy has the nerve to weigh in on others’ morality, but she does. Oh how she does. And the whole world pays a price for it.

Update: Jonathan at A Tiny Revolution reminds me of one of Lucretia’s elderly husband’s more significant recent atrocities. What a pair. The granddaughter should be thrilled not to have them at her wedding.

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How Do You Like Your Change Now?

by digby

… people are very upset.

I agree that they are “coming for the taxpayer.” But I think they are just a teensy bit misinformed about who is responsible:

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