Month: March 2010

“I have a sentimental weakness for my children and I spoil them, as you can see”

by digby

There’s so much wrong with this I hardly know where to start:

Fox News’ founder is asking the network’s Glenn Beck haters to stop “shooting in the tent,” claiming the in-house anti-Beck vitriol is unprecedented in the company’s 14-year history.

Roger Ailes dropped by Fox’s Washington bureau Wednesday to give his staff a pep talk before the annual Radio and Television Correspondents’ dinner, mediabistro.com reports.

The topic of conversation quickly turned to conservative commentator Glenn Beck, whose hyper-opinionated commentary is a ratings boon for Fox — but also a recently revealed source of tension for the network’s other journalists.

A column in the Washington Post on Monday revealed that some Fox staffers are concerned the celebrity pundit is “becoming the face of the network.”

Ailes pointed out that the information in The Post’s column was leaked by Fox’s Washington bureau.

“For the first time in our 14 years, we’ve had people apparently shooting in the tent, from within the tent,” he told them.

But the Fox chairman clarified that Beck’s opinions were not that of the network and were firmly within his rights as a commentator.

“We prefer people in the tent not dumping on other people in the tent,” he added.

Ailes warned that people who found it hard to stand in Beck’s shadow had another option besides denigrating their own team.

“If I couldn’t defend the family, I’d leave,” he said. “I’d go to another family.”

I’ve written before that I thought Ailes operates like a mafia Don. But I’ve never seen it so explicitly expressed before:

Don Corleone: What’s the matter with you? I think your brain is going soft with all that comedy you are playing with that young girl. Never tell anyone outside the Family what you are thinking again. Go on.

The other shocking thing about this is that we are allegedly talking about a news organization, not a “family” mafia or otherwise. And the credibility of news organizations is supposed to rest on their loyalty to the truth, not their loyalty to one another.

I realize, naturally, that Fox isn’t actually a news organization but rather a political organization, but still, this is rather stunning, even for them. Ailes always says there’s a difference between the opinion shows and the news broadcasts. If that’s so, then the other opinion shows should have the privilege of expressing differences of opinions with Beck, and the few “news” people should be in the business of debunking him if he requires debunking (and he does — oh, how he does.) If nobody is allowed to “shoot inside the tent” they all become little Glenn Becks.

Maybe that’s the plan.

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Intensity Gap

by digby

Markos has some new polling out and this is quite interesting:

Three weeks ago, 40 percent of Democrats were likely or definitely going to vote, compared to 51 percent of Republicans — an 11 point “intensity gap”. Two weeks ago, as the battle for health care reform heated up, and GOP obstructionism came in full view, the numbers were 45 percent for Democrats, 56 percent for Republicans — both sides equally riled up.

This week, the numbers are 55 percent for Democrats, 62 percent for Republicans. While both sides saw big spikes in their numbers, Democrats were particularly energized, with that intensity gap narrowing from 11 points to a far more manageable seven. First the first time in over a year, Democrats have a reason to get excited about their party, and are newly engaging in the political process.

This intensity gap will bear tracking the rest of this cycle. Democrats can continue to close the gap by ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, passing tough financial regulatory reform, make progress on comprehensive immigration reform, and continue to talk tough against the obstructionist GOP.

And without this gap, Republicans will be hard pressed to make anything more than just marginal gains this November.

From his lips. If the Democrats decide to do those things they will have broken the Village edict that you must turn right in order to win the independents. (It’s a center-right country, dontcha know?) And that really would be a big deal.

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Best Defense

by digby

… is an offense. It looks like the Republicans aren’t the only ones with an aggressive PR campaign:

Vatican Denounces Media’s ‘Smear Campaign’

You have to admire the chutzpah. The pope (the pope!) is accused of covering up for pedophiles and when the excuse that the Church’s statute of limitations had run out doesn’t close the case, they cry “smear:”

The first case involves Wisconsin Reverend Lawrence Murphy, who was accused of molesting as many as 200 deaf boys while working at a school from 1950 to 1974, according to The New York Times. An office the Pope oversaw then, the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, blocked Reverend Murphy’s defrocking case after Murphy wrote to the Pope, who was then Cardinal Ratzinger, asking for leniency. “I simply want to live out the time that I have left in the dignity of my priesthood,” Father Murphy wrote near the end of his life. Murphy died in 1998, still a priest.

In explaining the decision to block the trial, Ratzinger’s deputy at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith noted that the alleged offenses had occurred outside the church’s statute of limitations. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is the Vatican’s doctrinal body that decides whether accused priests should be given full canonical trials and defrocked. The second sexual abuse case the Pope had a role in is Reverend Peter Hullermann’s case. Reverend Hullermann was first removed from his Essen, Germany congregation in 1979 after multiple accusations of molesting young boys. The New York Times reports that then the future Pope approved sending Hullermann to therapy in 1980 to overcome his pedophilia. Next, Ratzinger was reportedly copied on a memo that informed him that Reverend Hullermann would be transferred to another parish just days after beginning that psychiatric treatment. Hullermann was later convicted of molesting more boys at another parish and removed from his duties.

I thought the statute of limitations was eternity.

You have to admire the fact that these people who claim they have standing to morally instruct the entire human race would use legal defenses and then cry “smear” when the evidence is overwhelming that this rot goes to the very heart of the Catholic hierarchy. It’s very, very revealing.

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Talk To The Man

by digby

The other day I did a little interview and they asked me who my favorite politician was. I tend not to think of politicians in those terms generally, but this one wasn’t tough: Alan Grayson. Obviously, I’m not alone. He’s a great favorite among many of us in the netroots because he’s smart, savvy and not afraid to be controversial. And he knows how to give a floor speech and question a witness, skills you would think would be required (and common, since so many politicians are lawyers) but clearly aren’t.

Grayson is trying to create a new paradigm for Democratic politicians: someone who is funded by the grassroots and netroots rather than the big money lobbyists. If it works, others will see that it’s possible and follow suit. More decent people will likely decide to run for office if they can do it without having to prostitute themselves for wealthy interests. It might just change the composition of the congress over time to provide a counterbalance to the current big money domination of the system which I think we can all agree is the most fundamental problem we face.

So far, the Republicans can’t find anyone to run aginst Grayson. But the teabaggers have:

Here’s the story:

Less than a week after Sarah Palin directed her zombie army to “take out” Congressman Alan Grayson, one of her undead minions has risen to the challenge. Peg Dunmire has filed to run as the Florida Tea Party’s candidate against Grayson in November. Dunmire evidently is the first person to qualify as an official Tea Party candidate in any House race in the country.

“I read Dunmire’s announcement,” said Grayson. “I then forwarded it to the Guinness Book of World Records, for consideration under the category ‘Most Consecutive Cliches.’ This kind of right-wing drivel gave America $4-a-gallon gas and two endless wars, and drove us all to the brink of national bankruptcy. Was she living in a cave for eight years?”

He went on to point out that he doesn’t actually blame Dunmire for going tea party since the Florida Republican party is so corrupt that she had to know tht themoney she rqised would go into the pockets of the local bosses.

As you probably know, Grayson has a money bomb set to go off tomorrow. Today he is going to chat with Blue America over at Crooks and Liars at 11 am PST, which is guaranteed to be a fun and interesting conversation as always. Please join us.

Blue America ran successful fundraising campaign for Grayson a few month back, when he was being vilified for correctly pointing out that the GOPs health care plan was “Don’t get sick”. And he was our first endorsee for Blue America ’10. We hope you’ll throw a few dollars his way this week-end as well.

This is an interesting and bold experiment. Grayson is on the top of the GOP’s hit list and they will do everything they can to destroy him even if they have to secretly back that tea party candidate.

Join us at C&L, and donate here. Grayson is a great friend to the Blue America community and the netroots at large and deserves our continued support.

Update: Many apologies. I was mistaken about the time. Check back a C&L later this afternoon. Oy …

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The Politically Correct
or Mirror, Mirror: The Prequel

by tristero

One of the hoariest examples of rightwing projection is the notion of political correctness, that things shouldn’t or can’t be said by liberals or the Left because of an absurdly rigid value system. I first heard it when Young Churchill’s father was campaigning for the presidency; he wielded the charge of “politically correct” to dismiss and belittle substantive objections to the extreme right agenda he espoused. It worked though even back then, it was obvious to anyone who was paying attention that it was bullshit, that the examples the GOP was using were of political non-entities of no consequence on the national stage, and that already the Reagan Republican party was quite intolerant of ideological impurities.

But in case it wasn’t obvious before that the accusation of political correctness fits conservatives far better than liberals, David Frum’s exit from the locked-door psych unit known as the American Enterprise Institute, it should now be quite clear:

Frum tells Mike Allen that “donor pressure” related to his “Waterloo” post was indeed responsible for his termination. Frum claims “the core of the story is the kind of economic pressure that intellectual conservatives are under” — meaning AEI couldn’t risk displeasing its base by keeping Frum on after he criticized the Republican Party. “[T]he elite isn’t leading anymore,” said Frum. “It’s trapped.”

Earlier, Frum told Greg Sargent he and AEI parted ways over money, not ideology — they offered him the chance to continue on at a salary of zero…

And also :

…the conservative movement has a tendency to excommunicate anyone who breaks ranks, says Bruce Bartlett, who was fired by the National Center for Policy Analysis, another right-wing think tank, for writing a book critical of Bush policies. “In the years since, I have lost a great many friends and been shunned by conservative society in Washington, D.C,” Bartlett wrote in the wake of Frum’s resignation.

Bartlett, who served as a domestic policy aide for Ronald Reagan and a deputy assistant Treasury secretary under the first President Bush, claimed Frum told him privately a few months ago that conservatives on AEI’s payroll had been “ordered” not to speak to the media about health care reform “because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do.” Frum himself certainly violated that order.

Insert obligatory statement that liberals and the Left can also demonstrate an unhealthy rigidity on ideology… and hold it right there!

So what? None of the bozos who require purity tests in liberal and leftwing circles are anywhere remotely as powerful or as influential as the fanatical psychopaths who both fund and staff the conservative think tanks. Nor are they likely to become influential anytime in the forseeable future. I can’t think of even a moderately liberal group, let alone a genuinely leftwing group, that funnels staff that have been ideologically vetted into the government at anything close to the level at which the AEI and the Federalist Society pack presidential administrations with the politically correct. Nor does any liberal-leaning group – say, CEIP or CAP – require anything close to the purity of ideology the right does. It’s very simple:

The politically correct are conservatives. The politically correct are rightwingers. The politically correct are the teabaggers. The politically correct are Republicans.

Same as it ever was.

Mirror, Mirror

by digby

Billmon has emerged from his self-imposed exile to write a typically insightful post about the Republican wife beaters now claiming that the Democrats are provoking the teabag violence. What I describe as the “I know you are but what am I” tactic, he calls “Mirror image” and he offers some excellent examples of the phenomenon:

The specific disinformation technique in play is one I call “mirror image” (or, when I’m in a Star Trek mood, “Spock with a beard”). It consists of charging the opposing side (i.e. the enemies of the people) with doing exactly what you yourself have been accused of doing, typically with a hell of a lot more justification.

“Mirror image” was Rove’s standard response on those relatively rare occasions when the Bush White House seemed to be losing control of the media narrative.

Thus, when Richard Clarke blew the whistle on the Bush White House sleepwalking past the CIA’s warnings about Al Qaeda in the summer of 2001, the White House quickly constructed a competing story line in which Clarke himself was the official responsible for flubbing the response.

Likewise, when the Democrats began making noises in early 2004 about using Bush’s somewhat, er, questionable, accounts of his National Guard service against him, the Republicans quickly rolled out counterclaims that John Kerry had lied about his war record.

But the example I recall most clearly came during the Valerie Plame investigation, when Fox News suddenly tried to argue that Rove was the aggrieved whistleblower, and Joe Wilson and his wife where the sleazy insiders who had leaked classified information:

Rove warned [a reporter] away from the idea that Wilson’s trip had been authorized by CIA Director George Tenet or Vice President Dick Cheney. “He gave proper guidance to a reporter who got disinformation in a leak” meant to assign responsibility to Cheney, former Bush aide Ed Rogers told FOX News.

I have used the idea of “ear worms” (an admittedly unsavory image,) to describe how they use the same language and phrasing their critics use against them to confuse the public. And I think it also confuses their critics, us, who get upset at being accused of the heinous behavior of the right and defend ourselves against the charges, thus changing the subject.

This is a very clever disinformatin technique and I’m glad to see Billmon define it as among the tricks of the trade. If you don’t believe it works beautifully, here’s his conclusion:

Me, above:

“The goal is to confront the public with two sides hurling identical charges at each other — the better to convince them that it’s just another partisan mudfight and who the hell knows…anyway.”

The New York Times, tonight: Accusations Fly Between Parties Over Threats and Vandalism Eric Cantor, in my imagination: “Mission accomplished, baby. Mission accomplished.”

When people say they hate partisanship, this is what they hate. It’s not that one side is passing legislation they don’t like or that one side has values with which they disagree. It’s this “mirroring” which is confusing and uncomfortable. They can’t tell who’s telling the truth or which side is right because both sides sound like they are saying the same things — and they are.

And the press, like the NY Times up there, is more than happy to confuse them further with their reliance on lazy he said/she said journalism. And I’m fairly sure that’s something on which the Republicans know they can rely and plan accordingly.

This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s just a very sophisticated public relations technique as damage control. It’s not personal, it’s strictly business.

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Making Daddy Mad

by digby

I can hardly believe it, but apparently America’s wife beaters have actually decided to use the defense that these Democrats are “asking for” death threats from the right wingers because they are “making them mad.” I documented Sere and Cantor’s warnings this morning, but there are more:

Breitbart: Congressional Black Caucus members went “searching for … racism” by walking through Tea Party crowd

Graham tells Beck — Beck! — Tea Partiers “get mad” because they “don’t like being called racist

Michael Graham: Pelosi was “asking for” response by carrying Medicare gavel

Rove warns Dems that discussing threats against them may “inflame emotions”

Beck clarifies his theory: If violence breaks out from the right, it will have been intentionally provoked by Obama

Beck: You see, what they’ve done is they’ve radicalized The Man. These people are in the center, but who’s down here? They know that these people always lose — because they experienced it. The crazy teabaggers in the streets.

Why would a government continue to poke you, and poke you, and poke you, and poke you? Why would they say these things? Why have these people said these things about good Americans? Because they need to separate these people from these people.

They know that serious violence is very likely. They are simply inoculating themselves against the charge that it was their inflammatory rhetoric that caused it. It will be the Democrats complaining about their inflammatory rhetoric that made the teabaggers snap. If they’d just stayed quiet and not made daddy mad, he wouldn’t have had to hit them.

The only thing these people should be doing is calming down their crazies. Instead they’re ginning them up. Heckuva job.

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“Whatever Happened to Hope?”

by digby

Perlstein on why Obama cannot become a transformational president. Fascinating stuff.

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The Hard Core Right

by digby

In case anyone’s still thinking that the teabaggers are “independent” middle of the road types who disdain both the right and the left equally,this new Quinnipiac Poll should finally put that to rest.

Ed Kilgore summarizes:

…the Tea Party folk [are] basically, very conservative Republicans determined to pressure the GOP to move to the right or suffer the consequences–in other words, a radicalized GOP base.

The alternative explanation has been that the Tea Partiers represent independent voters who are fed up with government and will join with Republicans to create a stable majority in this “center-right nation” if and only if Republicans stop talking about cultural issues and focus on lower taxes, smaller government and the economy. Nothing in the Quinnipiac poll supports that proposition. On question after question, self-identified Tea Partiers (13% of the total sample) are much closer in their views to self-identified Republicans than to self-identified independents. Most notably, the approval/disapproval rating for the Republican Party is 60/20 among Tea Partiers and 28/42 among indies. Among those voting in 2008, Tea Partiers went for McCain by a margin of 77/15; indies split down the middle (going for McCain 46/42). Tea Partiers have a favorable view of Sarah Palin by a 72/14 margin (significantly higher than among Republicans), while indies have an unfavorable view of her by a 49/34 margin. Tea Partiers self-identify as Republicans or Republican-leaners by a 74/16 margin. These are not the same people by any stretch of the imagination.

The poll doesn’t ask enough questions to get at the details of Tea Party ideology, but it also doesn’t supply any ammunition to the common perception that Tea Partiers are libertarians at heart, and/or that they are displacing the Christian Right within the conservative coalition. Actually, 21% of self-identified white “born-again” evangelicals consider themselves part of the Tea Party movement, well above the 13% figure for all voters. And the the two categories of voters share a rare positive attachment to Sarah Palin (white “born-agains” approve of her by a 55/29 margin, Tea Partiers by a 72/14 margin).

At some point, the more questionable assumptions that pundits are making about the Tea Folk–they are right-trending independents, they are hostile to the Christian Right–need to yield to empirical evidence. Now would be a good time to start.

Considering the media just figured out that some of the opposition to the bill over the past few months was from liberals who wanted a public option or single payer, I’m not holding my breath on that.

But it really doesn’t take a poll to see that these tea partiers are ill-informed, Beck watching right wingers. All you have to do is read their signs and listen to what they say. They are the hardcore GOP base. And they are very, very sore losers. It’s one of their defining characteristics.

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Wall Street’s Public Option

by digby

The country is very skeptical of the financial sector and want the government to do something to curb its excesses. But for some reason, they don’t like the Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

Almost seven out of 10 people surveyed support using current bank regulators for consumer protection, backing positions held by the financial industry and Republicans over President Barack Obama’s proposal to establish an independent agency…

As the country struggles with a 9.7 percent unemployment rate while financial stocks surge, 57 percent of Americans have a mostly unfavorable or very unfavorable view of Wall Street, versus fewer than one-quarter who have a favorable opinion. Banks are viewed badly by 54 percent of poll respondents, and 60 percent have a negative opinion of insurance companies.

The poll also shows most Americans don’t like the nation’s top corporate bosses. Almost two-thirds say they have an unfavorable opinion of business executives, a rating that rivals the public’s disdain for Congress, which was viewed with disfavor by 67 percent of respondents.

Fifty-six percent of those polled say they would support government action to limit compensation of those who helped cause the financial crisis, or to ban those people from working in the banking industry.

“The amount of money that people on Wall Street make seems to be really out of bounds,” said Laure Sinclair, 52, a part- time accountant who lives in Dallas. “But I don’t know that the government can regulate that because we want to be a capitalist society.”

Obama’s proposal for a stand-alone consumer agency has been a main sticking point in negotiations between Senate Democrats and Republicans on broader legislation to increase oversight of Wall Street.

The majority of poll participants — 56 percent — say big financial companies are more interested in enriching themselves at the expense of ordinary people, while 40 percent say such firms play a vital role in enabling the economy to grow.

At the same time, Americans are divided over the scope of government regulation. More than 40 percent of Americans say the government has gone too far in measures to fix the financial industry; 37 percent say it hasn’t done enough. Almost six out of 10 people say Wall Street hasn’t gone far enough on its own to protect against future emergencies.

“Anything the government gets their fingers in, they mess it up,” said poll participant Norman White, 60, a community college electronics instructor who lives in Colfax, Louisiana. “I don’t have a very high opinion of the government running anything.”

It’s hard to know where people are getting their opinion of the CFPA — it’s not like it’s a household name. But the anti-government propaganda of the last 30 years has certainly done its work, at least in the abstract. On the specifics, however, most people think the government needs to curb the financial sector’s excesses — they just don’t seem to understand the problem.

I’m guessing that the congress thinks this will be a battle similar to the public option in which all the attention gets focused on that one aspect of the reforms while everything else slides under the radar. But I’m not sure that’s going to work. Nobody believes that financial reform is a once in a generation opportunity that will literally be life saving. It’s something the left could easily leverage with the right in the way they couldn’t with HCR.

On the politics, it would not hurt liberals to vote against it nearly as much as it would hurt conservatives. Playing against type makes this sort of thing work politically. Everybody already suspects Republicans of being the well paid whores of the wealthy, so if they vote against it they are automatically on the defensive. The liberals are the ones who are always trying to take the money from the right people to give to the dusky sorts who don’t deserve it. The GOP and the conservadems could get caught in their own web on this and have to make some difficult choices for a change.

We’ll see what happens, but one thing is for sure: either the Democrats find some way to channel the people’s anger and frustration or the right is going to do it for them. A few criminal indictments for the obvious fraud that took place would go a long way toward putting themselves on the right side of this issue.

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