Month: June 2010

The Sage Of MSNBC

by digby

Just think of all the good journalists who are out of work when you watch this slipshod performance by Li’l Luke:

Aside from the sheer obviousness of the patented Russertesque analysis, don’t you think somebody could have pointed out to him during this “report” that Joe Barton is not the Chairman of the Committee, but rather the ranking member of the minority party? Does he not know that or does he have visions of his dad’s elections night whiteboards dancing in his head and think the Republicans have already won?

Either way, this is just wrong. Send the kid to Kansas City for a while and let him learn how to be a real reporter before putting him on TV and pretending he’s some kind of reincarnation of their dear departed leader. It’s just embarrassing for everyone.

h/t to ptd

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Let’s Not Play The Blame Game: Round 6

by digby

Marc Ambinder reports:

It’s clear that Obama’s war cabinet (I’m told this includes Vice President Biden) is quietly advising him NOT to fire McChrystal. Sec. Gates’s statement makes clear that Gates does not believe McChrystal committed a firing offense. He pivots very quickly to the need to demonstrate “unity” and talks about “going forward,” as if McChrystal’s comments were part of a larger pattern. Whether Obama thinks the article stems from malevolence or from staff frustrations compounded by McChrystal’s lack of political sophistication, I don’t know.

Predictably, many Congressional skeptics of the war effort are calling for POTUS to fire McChrystal; many supporters are making a distinction between publicly differing over strategy and complaining/mocking the commander in chief. I’m not sure that’s a very good distinction to make, however, because the latter could in some circumstances be more harmful than the former.

If Obama doesn’t accept the resignation, I’m guessing this is some kind of “woodshed” moment where there will be reports of an angry president telling his General that he won’t stand for any more of this kind of thing and a chastened General taking his punishment like a good soldier. Obama and war cabinet think they look magnanimous while the military and the Republicans take him for a weakling and a fool. Maybe that doesn’t matter. (Obama the Muslim, socialist thug doesn’t have control over his Generals. What kind of picture does that paint, I wonder?)

BTW: I can’t speak for anyone else, but my belief that he should fire McCrystal or at least accept his resignation (which is as far as he should go to appease the military) has nothing to do with any skepticism of the war. It has to do with respect for the constitutional requirement that the military be subordinate to the civilian executive. The military has been acting more and more as a rogue political faction with its own power base for quite some time. No president of either party should allow that (although it must be said that Bush’s fetishizing of “the Generals on the ground” and The Man Called Petraeus has contributed greatly to this problem.)

This isn’t something to play with. Obama should accept his resignation.

Update: Greenwald tweets that he thinks this from NRO will probably be the way it goes. I’d bet so too:

One Way Obama Could Save Face . . . [Daniel Foster]

Refuse McChrystal’s resignation. The general is a man of honor, and no idiot. There’s a good chance he’ll show up in Washington with a resignation letter in hand. President Obama could refuse it, and then go to the public and say something like, “our efforts in Afghanistan are too important to let an unfortunate lapse of judgment like this undermine them. So I told General McChrystal that he must finish his task, and that I would not accept his resignation at this time.”

This might allow Obama to look like the bigger man while having it both ways. He’d avoid adding instability to his command structure at a crucial juncture in the war in Afghanistan, and avoid looking weak by not dismissing an insubordinate general.

The messaging would be: McChrystal knew he goofed up, and came to me with his gun and his badge. But this was my call, and I did what was best for the country.

Notice that it’s Obama who will be “saving face” by doing this.

Imagine if McChrystal had done this under Bush. They’d be calling for this “man of honor” to be Court Martialed.

On the other hand, Howard Kurtz is absolutely right about this too (tweet):

If McChrystal not cashiered, I predict new round of stories questioning Obama’s toughness, with obligatory references to Truman.

And if he does do it, the very same people will call him a thuggish dictator who has no respect for the military.

This isn’t something for political calculation because he can’t win on that basis. He should just do the right thing. And the right thing is to protect the constitution.

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The Inevitable Narrative

by digby

This is cute:

Republicans have turned to satire and the new media to expose what they see as the persistent and corrosive role of Chicago-style politics in President Obama’s administration.

The Republican National Committee on Tuesday launched a website for the mock “Obama’s Chicago Network: It’s not TV, it’s reality.”

“If you think it’s hot outside, just wait until you see this summer’s lineup on the Obama Chicago Network,” says the voiceover on the accompanying video. Among the shows featured on the mock network is “Dancing with the Law,” a takeoff of the popular ABC reality show “Dancing with the Stars.”

“You knew he had a way with words, but wait until you see Robert Gibbs dance this week,” says the voiceover as an animated version of the White House spokesman dances around what appears to be a copy of the Constitution — an obvious take on Mr. Gibbs saying the administration broke no laws in offering Rep. Joe Sestak a job to drop out of the midterms.

Another mock show is “I’m a Politician, Get Me Out of Here,” intended to highlight recently revelations that administration Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, then an Illinois congressman, appeared to attempt to trade favors with Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich when he was in office, according to newly disclosed e-mails obtained by the Associated Press.

“Get ready for the most outrageous reality show on TV … starring Rod Blagojevich,” says the voiceover before a caricature of Mr. Emanuel appears.

“When you add the new guy to the gang, you know there will be drama,” says the voiceover.

The sleazy gang of Chicago thugs narrative was predictable. They signaled it early on. At this point they are going for mockery and building a vague theme around Obama being a threatening gangster and Democrats being crooks. When they get the chance to really go for it with investigations and charges of real corruption, they’ll have plowed the field for it.

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Paper Trail Of Tears

by digby

Louisville Courier-Journal

“What struck me most about Rand Paul is that he is like a Supreme Court candidate with a long paper trail,” said Professor Stephen Voss of University of Kentucky. “He will have to defend his long legacy of statements.”

Kentucky Educational Television analyst John McGarvey, a Louisville lawyer, said Paul could struggle as voters come to know his record in more detail.

“How is the farmer going to feel about a guy who wants to wipe out agricultural subsidies?” McGarvey said. “How will a senior citizen who usually votes Republican feel about Paul’s views on Social Security? Or a business Republican who knows he is going to need help from Washington?”

Michael Baranowski, who teaches political science at Northern Kentucky University, said Paul’s pronouncements — including his controversial comments to The Courier-Journal editorial board and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — make sense if considered in the context of his libertarian political philosophy.

But Baranowski said, “Candidates who expect voters to consider their view in context generally don’t win elections.”

Paul faces another challenge, UK professor Ernest Yanarella said.

“Ideologically, he prefers to live in a bygone era that is no more, due to mammoth changes in society, politics, culture and especially the economy,” Yanarella wrote in an e-mail. “The problem is many Americans, perhaps a majority, like a balance between individualist principles and effective government, even Big Government when it provides Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.”

Still, said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, independent-minded voters may be attracted to the fact that Paul is a “square peg that refused to fit into a round hole.”

“Many of his past positions, on both right and left, would have been enough to defeat a candidate for high office in the past,” Sabato said. “If you go issue by issue, and focus just on which people will disagree, you can add up the opponents into a very large majority of the population.”

Sabato goes on to say that people don’t perceive Paul as a politician so they may not care, but I doubt anyone with his long history of controversial political statements can get away with that. Most people tribally identify with parties and politicians based on perceived shared values. Paul doesn’t fit in with anything they recognize on a visceral level — he’s a theoretical politician who can’t connect in the way most politicians connect because it feels inconsistent. Identifying with the tea party may not get him very far once they find out what he really thinks. (They are extremely tribal, and some of the things he believes, such as letting Veterans fend for themselves is heresy.)

Add that to the fact that he doesn’t appear to be all that quick or all that savvy and he’s going to be on the defensive throughout the campaign.

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Just Fade Away

by digby

The Runaway General

No president can afford to let the military run roughshod over them. And yet, Democrats seem to have this problem fairly frequently, since Roosevelt at least, because the officer corps is rife with right wing Republicans who simply don’t feel they shoulod have to answer to a DFH. It’s one of the great underlying dangers of our political system and one which has, so far, been handled fairly deftly by each president who has confronted the threat.

The most famous one, of course, is General MacArthur who wrote a letter at the height of the Korean conflict criticizing Truman’s war plans with words that I’m sure most of us will find awfully familiar:

It seems strangely difficult for some to realize that here in Asia is where the Communist conspirators have elected to make their play for global conquest, and that we have joined the issue thus raised on the battlefield; that here we fight Europe’s war with arms while the diplomats there still fight it with words; that if we lose the war to communism in Asia the fall of Europe is inevitable, win it and Europe most probably would avoid war and yet preserve freedom. As you pointed out, we must win. There is no substitute for victory.

All the military experts said it wasn’t insubordination. Truman fired him the next day — and faced a full blown hissy fit and crazed right wing overreaction. Indeed, everyone assumed that MacArthur would face him in the election and win handily.
But he did the right thing by preserving the constitutional order. As with McCrystal, it wasn’t MacArthur’s first transgression of the line of authority. It was a brave thing to do politically, but he did it and took the hit with the public who adored MacArthur — and ended up being vindicated by history.

If McCrystal has any integrity he will resign and Obama will accept it. If he doesn’t then Obama should fire him. This habit of running end runs around the president as he did last fall with his words in London and now this makes it imperative that he go.

And it’s also imperative that the US Military get its act together. Something’s gone very wrong when you’ve got a General and a cabal of backstabbing aides running their mouths to Rolling Stone Magazine. If they speak that way to the press, what in the hell are they saying to politicians and foreign leaders they deal with overseas?

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Even Stepvhen

by digby

Classic Colbert Carell “Even Stephen” sketch “looking back” at the Iraq war debate:

I have a feeling we may be seeing another one of those in a couple of years — looking back on the Austerity Program.

h/t to Greg Mitchell)

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Hey, Some Good News

by digby

In the continuing saga of the Fin-Reg conference negotiations, they managed to get a pretty good deal on the credit card swipe fees. Lord knows what the banks got in return, but this is good news for small businesses:

Wall Street reform negotiators struck a deal Monday to regulate the swipe fees that major banks and credit card companies can charge to merchants — costs that are passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. The cost to merchants of using credit cards has more than doubled since 2003 even as merchants’ profits have declined, a contradiction only explained by the monopolistic system that lets banks continuously raise swipe fees. The deal, struck between Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and key House negotiators, leaves out some elements that consumer advocates had been fighting for. It allows fees charged to reloadable, prepaid debit cards — generally used by the poor — to remain unregulated. And it allows an exemption for states that use debit cards to dole out benefits. But, for the first time, banks and credit card companies will face restrictions on the fees they can charge merchants for the privilege of accepting credit and debit cards. (Read a summary of the deal here.)

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If Money Equals Speech Then Speech Equals Money

by digby

Headline ‘O the day:

High court upholds anti-terror law prized by Obama

Here’s professor David Cole on the NY Times blog on that “prized” law:

For the first time ever, the Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment permits the criminalization of pure speech advocating lawful, nonviolent activity. The court reasoned that it is conceivable that such speech might burnish a designated group’s image, and thereby “legitimize” it, and therefore Congress can make all such speech a crime.

In the past, the Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment protected even the right to advocate criminal activity, so long as one’s advocacy was not intended and likely to produce an imminent crime. And it ruled that citizens had a right to associate with a group engaged in both legal and illegal activities, as lone as they intended to further only the group’s lawful activities. Today, by contrast, the court rules that speech advocating only lawful, nonviolent activity can be made a crime, and that any coordination with a blacklisted group can land a citizen in prison for 15 years. The decision has deeply disturbing implications. It means that when President Jimmy Carter did election monitoring in Lebanon, and met with all of the parties to the election — including Hezbollah, a designated “terrorist group” — to provide them with his advice on what constitutes a fair election, he was committing the crime of providing “material support,” in the form of “expert advice.” It means that when The New York Times and The Washington Post published op-eds by a Hamas leader, they were engaged in the crime of providing “material support” to a designated terrorist group, because to publish the op-ed they had to coordinate with a spokesperson from Hamas. And it means that my clients, a retired judge and an established human rights group, cannot continue to work for peace and human rights without risking long prison terms. Those who defend this law often focus on the provision of funds — not at issue before the Supreme Court — and argue that money is fungible, and can be used for any purpose. But human rights advocacy is not fungible. It cannot be turned into guns and bullets. It is designed to persuade, not coerce. It is, in short, what the First Amendment is all about. But it is now a crime, and according to this Supreme Court, the First Amendment poses no obstacle to its suppression. The only way the court could reach this result was by failing to subject the law to the skeptical scrutiny traditionally applied to content-based prohibitions on speech. Once the government invoked the “terrorist” label, the court deferred, rather than require the government to meet the heavy burden that prohibitions on speech generally require. This is the same sort of deferential approach that the Supreme Court took to anti-Communist laws in the early days of the McCarthy era. It was not until Senator McCarthy was censured, and McCarthyism was on the wane, that the court began to enforce the First Amendment rights that were so gravely threatened by the anti-Communist laws of that time. I had hoped that we would have learned from the errors of that period. Apparently not.

I actually think that’s been obvious for a while. And this time we’re dealing with something far more insidious than a one man crusade, which fell apart when he finally went too far. (Of course, that could end up happening too…)

The bottom line is that money is now considered equivalent to speech in more ways than just electioneering. If you believe that multi-national corporations are exercising a right to free speech by spending unlimited funds to influence elections to their benefit, then you would naturally assume that exercising your right to free speech to influence organizations is equivalent to giving them money. The consistent concept for this court isn’t free speech at all, it’s their belief that money equals speech. I don’t find this outcome surprising in the least. Once you make the leap then this is the logical outcome. And I would guess it won’t be the last time we see this.

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Thug Life On Pennsylvania Avenue

by digby

So Obama’s a “thug” now. But unlike Vladimir Putin who’s good at being a thug he’s not very effective, which makes it even worse. (Can’t “those people” do anything right?)

The right’s been waiting for the opportunity to use that term since Obama entered the presidential race but until he carjacked BP and shook it down for 20 billion, he hadn’t given them the opportunity. Up to that point, as Greg Sargent pointed out last week, he was Obambi:

Here, for instance, is The Post’s Michael Gerson:

The setting of the Oval Office creates an expectation of decisive executive action. It recalls memories of President Dwight Eisenhower dispatching federal troops to Little Rock or President John F. Kennedy announcing the naval “quarantine” of Cuba. This speech will not be confused with those precedents. Obama urges others to take action, kibitzes with corporate executives, shifts some government personnel and signals the start of a review process. A crisis is met with a study. The action verbs in this speech have somehow gone missing. It is all rather limp and weak.

Gerson, of course, worked for a president who swaggered decisively off the stage of history with some of the limpest approval ratings ever. And here’s Maureen Dowd, cattily mocking Obama because he recently acknowledged to Gulf residents that there are limits to his own power, which Dowd characterizes as so much whining:

“Even though I’m president of the United States, my power is not limitless,” Obama, who has forced himself to ingest a load of gulf crab cakes, shrimp and crawfish tails, whinged to Grand Isle, La., residents on Friday. “So I can’t dive down there and plug the hole. I can’t suck it up with a straw.”

See, Obama had to force himself to eat a plate of food in order to prove his heartiness. Get it?

That was last week. Now he’s Barry “Tupac” Obama, the Muslim gangbanger, fo shizzle.

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Letting Corporate America Know Who It’s Friends Are

by digby

Greg Sargent caught a gem this morning:

GOP Rep. Darrell Issa effectively pledged that if Republicans take back the House, corporate America will be able to breathe easy. The quote is buried in a Politico article about a recent speech Issa gave, in which he revealed he’s planning to hire reams of subpoena-wielding investigators as chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee if Republicans take back the House:

At a recent speech to Pennsylvania Republicans here, he boasted about what would happen if the GOP wins 39 seats, and he gets the power to subpoena. “That will make all the difference in the world,” he told 400 applauding party members during a dinner at the chocolate-themed Hershey Lodge. “I won’t use it to have corporate America live in fear that we’re going to subpoena everything. I will use it to get the very information that today the White House is either shredding or not producing.”

Issa’s making a big move to become a national GOP leader. And he’s doing it by promising to let loose the hounds of hell on the White House if he gets his grubby hands on subpeona power. Ok fine, GOP SOP, to be expected. But this is a new twist. He’s openly promising to go easy on corporations at the same time.

Issa is an interesting character. He reminds me a lot of Newtie, without all the cheap imitation professorial posing. At heart he’s an opportunistic backstabber with a boatload of ambition and a malfunctioning filter. He’s basically a McCarthyite, just like Gingrich:

(And it goes without saying, I hope, that he’s living in a glass house.)

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