Month: August 2010

Disaster Fatigue?

by digby

Did you know this? I didn’t:

The flooding just keeps getting worse and worse. On Saturday, the UN estimated that 4 million people were affected by the flooding in Pakistan. By Sunday they revised that estimate to 6 million people. Today, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that over 13 million people are affected. It is no wonder that a UN officials are saying this is bigger than the 2004 tsunami. In fact, that would make it bigger than the combined number of people affected by the Tsunami, Haiti earthquake and 2005 Kashmir earthquake…combined. Make no mistake: this is the worst natural disaster in recent history. Here is a map of affected areas from OCHA. That is alot of tragedy… [I]t is worth noting that as of 1 pm EST there is not a single, solitary mention of the biggest humanitarian disaster in recent history on the homepages of the Washington Post or New York Times.

I honestly don’t know why nobody gives a damn about this one. But we probably should, for more reasons than just the humanitarian tragedy, which is enough. But considering that this country is the focus of our foreign policy, the key to the Afghanistan war effort, the nexus of Islamic fanaticism and an unstable nuclear power, ignoring it would not seem to be a good idea.

Boehner Part Two

by digby

Blue America’s Beat Boehner billboard in Ohio has gotten a ton of local press. And so far, the local citizens seem to find it amusing as well. So, we’ve upped the ante and have decided to take our message to TV:

HuffPo reports:

After months of watching Republicans hammer President Obama for hitting the links on a weekly basis, Democrats are turning the tables. In an ad launched Monday morning, a duo of progressive groups go after House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) for a golf addiction rivaled by few others…

The White House, when pressed on Obama’s frequency on the links, has argued that it’s a productive way for him to find some relief from the wear and tear of the job. Boehner isn’t known as a particularly hard worker. And when asked about the more indulgent expenditures he has made through his political action committee, the response has traditionally been that it’s for the benefit of positioning the party for 2010. Golf, while a hobby, is also way to entertain donors and raise money.

Coussoule’s hope is that voters find the contrast between the lavish fundraising and the policy positions (raising the retirement age and opposing unemployment insurance) too objectionable — though considering the conservative makeup of the Ohio district, he has an uphill task.

The ad is not some cheeky effort for additional media recognition. It will be airing in Butler County on CNN, MSNBC, Fox (though not the Glenn Beck program) and Comedy Central and will be bolstered by a fundraising drive to keep it on air.

Howie says:

Yesterday’s appearance by John Boehner on Meet The Press was tantamount to an unpaid advertisement for Justin Coussoule’s campaign for the western Ohio congressional seat that Boehner has been squatting in since 1990 when Buz Lukens, his Republican predecessor, was caught buying the sexual favors of a sixteen year old girl. Apparently Boehner was so traumatized by the Lukens incident that he joined the one remaining golf club in the DC area that not only doesn’t admit women– but doesn’t even permit them on the premises! Burning Tree has been Boehner’s home away from home when he’s not on Meet The Press advocating raiding the Social Security Trust Fund to finance more tax breaks for multi-millionaires.

[…]

Thanks to our friends at People For the American Way and the AFL-CIO the BeatBoehner billboard contest raised more than we needed for the billboard we planned. We decided to put the extra money into more billboards and into the TV ad buy that repudiates Boehner’s lies about the content of our campaign. Please watch the ad again and if you’d like to see it up on broadcast TV… well, let’s put it like this: the DCCC is too busy with von Furstenberg designer totes and trying to save the asses of worthless Blue Dogs like Frank Kratovil, Bobby Bright and Travis Childers to help true blue progressives like Coussoule or to even make an effort to defeat their own worst enemies, like Boehner. They won’t help. Can you? If you can, everything donated on this ActBlue page goes into defeating John Boehner. Not one cent for Blue Dogs and not one cent for consultants.

Check out the tan on Boehner from yesterday’s MTP. And from the stats in our ad, he got it honestly — on the links.

If you’d like to see our ad played in Boehner’s district, where his neighbors and friends can have a good laugh (or a good cry) in these tough times —and realize they have a great alternative — you can contribute here.

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Argumentum Ad Douthatem

by tristero

As I read this, I kept on muttering, “I don’t think I’ve ever read anything in the New York Times so incompetently argued.” Of course, once I had recovered from the brain-curdling altered state that Douthat’s column induced in me, I knew immediately I was wrong – equally demented examples from the writings of William Kristol, Matt Bai, David Brooks, and Thomas Friedman instantly sproinged back into consciousness from whence I had so usefully banished them.

Still, the sheer abundance of fallacy on display in Douthat’s latest published emission is truly something to behold. For example:

But if we just accept this shift, we’re giving up on one of the great ideas of Western civilization: the celebration of lifelong heterosexual monogamy as a unique and indispensable estate. That ideal is still worth honoring, and still worth striving to preserve. And preserving it ultimately requires some public acknowledgment that heterosexual unions and gay relationships are different: similar in emotional commitment, but distinct both in their challenges and their potential fruit.

Everyone together now! FALSE DICHOTOMY!!! I’ll leave it to you worthy souls of the commentariat to find the numerous other failures of basic reasoning Douthat commits.

A question. Let us assume that Ross Douthat is sincere… On second thought, let’s not. It’s a thoroughly ridiculous assumption.* More importantly, whether Douthat is sincere or not is irrelevant. Obviously, Douthat’s project is to find intellectually robust reasons to justify rightwing opinions, biases, and bigotries. It’s a mission, you know, like in a war! Operation Make Stupidity Respectable.

But if he can’t find any compelling reasons for some piece of rightwing nonsense – and so far, he’s been batting zero – Ross’ll settle for the simple appearance of intellectual heft. After all, he’s on a deadline and no one expects (or even wants!) Spinoza when you have to grind out 700 words once or twice a week. So, really, it matters not a wit whether he believes what he actually writes. He surely believes in The Cause with a deep sincerity- or at the very least, in the paychecks that belief in The Cause bestows upon him. If rational argument contradicts The Cause, well, The Cause über alles.

UPDATE: Glenn eviscerates some more of Douthat’s argumentation and notes that Douthat didn’t even understand what the judge, in fact, ruled. I’m not so sure about that. I think it is quite possible that Douthat well understood that the judge didn’t – and couldn’t- rule on the morality of gay marriage but only on the constitutionality. So, Ross simply decided to change the subject, a well-worn rightwing ploy.

*For what it’s worth my question wasn’t terribly interesting, just ye olde nature v. nuture redux: Was Ross born with an intellectual capacity roughly akin to Swiss Cheese, or did little Ross, a child of no less than average intelligence, merely acquire his bad reasoning skills from ingesting too much rightwing nonsense at an impressionable age?

The answer is clearly, “Yes.”

One Nation Indivisible

by digby

*I didn’t make this, it was sent to me without attribution. If you know who did, let me know and I’ll post it.

“The Answer Is Patently Obvious”

by digby

Limbaugh’s contribution to the wingnut hooplah around Michelle Obama’s vacation is to say that liberals and the media are being soft on her because we believe our “slave past” means she deserves a “taste of the wealth of America.”

I’d love to know if there is even one liberal in America who thinks that Michelle Obama should have a trip to Spain because she’s black and deserves a taste of American wealth. It certainly never occurred to me to think of it in those terms, but it’s interesting that Rush went there. It appears that he thinks liberals see everything the Obamas do in terms of the black experience, which may say more about him than it does about us.

By the way, George W Bush took more vacation time than any president in history. And it certainly wasn’t free to the taxpayer, as this ridiculous little screed seems to suggest.

Of course he just spent tens of millions so the White House could stage giddy Ralph Lauren style photo shoots, which was very important because it sent a message of macho exceptionalism.

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Catching Up

by digby

Someone asked me the other day if I thought that the liberal blogosphere had made progress with the mainstream media over the past few years and I answered that I thought there had been some in punditry but not so much in the mainstream news gathering.

But I may have been more pessimistic than necessary. This is basically the liberal media critique coming from a card carrying Villager:

The Sherrod story is a reminder — much like the 2004 assault on John Kerry by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — that the old media are often swayed by controversies pushed by the conservative new media. In many quarters of the old media, there is concern about not appearing liberally biased, so stories emanating from the right are given more weight and less scrutiny. Additionally, the conservative new media, particularly Fox News Channel and talk radio, are commercially successful, so the implicit logic followed by old-media decisionmakers is that if something is gaining currency in those precincts, it is a phenomenon that must be given attention. Most dangerously, conservative new media will often produce content that is so provocative and incendiary that the old media find it irresistible.

That’s Mark Halperin. Let’s hope he has a heart to heart talk with some of his new pals at NBC like Chuck Todd and David Gregory. If people like him have truly begun to see the various moving parts of this phenomenon there may be hope.

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This Is Arizona

by digby

Tucson, Arizona: On August 2, 2010 around 3:15 p.m. Officer Zinn and Officer Koontz of the Tucson Police Department called Border Patrol on a woman during a traffic stop. Border Patrol came and took her into detention.

This is Arizona.

Injunction or No Injunction. SB1070 or Not. We face this every day.

It’s hard to see this as anything but a campaign to drive Hispanic people out of Arizona. Indeed, SB1070 pretty much comes right out and says it:

The provisions of this act are intended to work together to discourage and deter the unlawful entry of unlawful persons and economic activity of persons unlawfully present in the United States.

In practice, this amounts to ethnic cleansing. Sure, they don’t say “Latinos” but even if you are an American citizen of Latino descent you have to ask yourself whether or not it’s worth it to stay in Arizona if you’re going to be subjected to this kind of harassment. Plenty of them are leaving (although it’s up in the air whether it’s the law or a combination of the law and general economic conditions.)I don’t blame them. But it’s hard to see how this ends well. We are, after all, always going to share a border with Mexico, which is a very different thing than any of the earlier “assimilation” controversies.

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Taking On The Prince of Cable

by digby

So the word is that at Kentucky’s Fancy Farm political gathering Rand Paul stultified the audience so badly that they shouted “boring, boring, boring.”

Jack Conway, on the other hand, gave a barn burner of a speech:

Conway: But the accident that the nation and Kentucky cannot allow to happen would be the election of Rand Paul. This race presents a clear choice. A clear choice between my proven record and our responsible proposals for the future… and the risky and radical ideas of my opponent. As Kentucky’s chief law enforcement officer, we’ve taken 70,000 child porn images off of the internet, we’ve gone aggressively after the drug dealers and sex predators and those who prey on our seniors. We helped shut down that prescription pill pipeline from Florida and we cracked down on the oil companies and we increased Medicaid fraud collections by 600% by going after the drug companies that lied to us. That’s a record. That’s a record of taking a public office and treating it as a public trust. And that’s just what I’ll do as your next United States Senator.

Kentuckians are hurting. Too many are out of work. That’s why I have a detailed jobs plan that will create 11,000 jobs here in Kentucky. Too many small businesses can’t get a loan. That’s why we’ve got a program to get small and community banks lending again to small and medium-sized businesses who create the jobs in this Commonwealth of Kentucky. The government spends too much. That’s why I have a deficit reduction plan that would save taxpayers nearly half a trillion dollars. And you can actually read it on my website. I understand. I understand that Kentuckians face serious challenge. And I’ve seen it first hand. I’ve seen it in small business owners who can’t get a loan or our farmers right here in Western Kentucky who are concerned about this year’s crop. But to those families and to those challenges my opponent offers only out-of-touch radical views that are risky and even scary. Views that would hurt Kentucky families. And he waffles and he backpedals when his risky ideas are exposed. Just listen… Rand Paul is against nearly all federal spending except that which feathers his own nest. Rand Paul pledged not to take money from Senators who supported the bailout… until they were willing to line his coffers. Rand Paul is for term limits… except when they apply to him. And Rand Paul says he’s going to balance the entire federal budget next year… he’s just not going to tell you how he’ll do it this year. And why is Rand Paul waffling? Because he knows you. And you will not buy his risky agenda ladies and gentlemen. He’s shown a callous disregard for the poorest among us… saying they just need a little tough love. He’s shown that same disregard for our farmers, our students and our veterans. He would eliminate the farm support programs and he would prevent our students from getting student aid. And Rand Paul even opposes the American with Disabilities Act which provides for basic rights when our disabled veterans return home from these wars. Folks, Rand Paul plays to your fears rather than to your hopes. He even rails that in America today, we’re like the fall of Rome. Well, you know what, I say he’s wrong. I say our best days are ahead of us. And you what, I’ll quote Bill Clinton. “There’s nothing wrong with America that can’t be fixed with what is right with America.” This is an important election. It’s not about me. And it’s not about a waffling pessimist who just wants to be the Prince of cable tv. It’s about the people of Kentucky. It’s about the people of Kentucky who are hurting and they need someone to stand up for them. My roots run deep in western Kentucky. I will carry your hopes and your values to the United States Senate and I humbly ask for your support.

Nice.

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Economic Terrorism

by digby

Possibly one of the most depressing, yet entirely predictable, political moments in a long string of depressing moments is this summer’s obsession with Muslim and Mexican bashing (with a dollop of good old fashioned white on black racism) while the real miscreants in our system carry on unmolested and their apologists insist that we must appease them or risk even worse consequences.

Here’s Krugman:

I’m saddened but not really surprised by Robert Rubin’s declaration that we don’t need more stimulus. It has seemed to me from early on in this crisis that Rubin and his disciples wanted to believe that this world crisis was something like the 1997-98 Asian crisis, and amenable to similar solutions. For what the Committee to Save The World did in the Asian crisis was … not much. Some emergency loans to ease liquidity problems, some declarations that they were highly confident, a bit of interest-rate cutting; and once the panic was over, things recovered pretty much on their own. Hence the view that fiscal stimulus was just an insurance policy, that the big thing was to stop the economy’s headlong descent, and then unemployment would come down mostly of its own accord.

It’s even worse than that actually, as Krugman has laid out elsewhere. Rubin and friends have persuaded themselves that the only important government function in the economy is the care and feeding of the Wall Street banksters. After all, the whole underlying premise of his piece today is this:

A “major second stimulus” might create more uncertainty and undermine confidence, he said.

He’s not talking about the confidence that comes from getting a new job after you’ve been unemployed for months or the good feeling a small business gets when it turns a profit for the first time in years. He’s talking about the goddamned Masters of the Universe and corporate CEOs who need to be reassured that nobody’s going to make them pay for the carnage they caused.

This goes all the way back to the 90s when Clinton famously responded to Rubin and Summers’ admonitions about the deficits, with “You mean to tell me that the success of the economic program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?” (Evidently, they have also persuaded themselves that the Tech Boom was a result of that decision, which is highly debatable. In any case, there isn’t another boom of that magnitude likely to come along any time soon.)

When I read Rubin’s piece this morning I was reminded of this post I wrote from last fall:

I was just reading this interesting piece about narcissistic personality disorder and musing about the mindset that believes it’s ok to take down the world economy and then dictate the rules by which it is fixed.(Not to mention turn a profit at it!) And then I read this:

In recent days, in spite of public furor over huge bonuses paid at American International Group Inc., the administration has concluded that it needs the private sector to play a central role in fixing the economy. So over the weekend, the White House worked to tone down its Wall Street bashing and to win support from top bankers for the bailout plan announced Monday, which will rely on public-private investments to soak up toxic assets.

But weeks of searing criticism by politicians and the public had left bankers leery of working with the government. After brainstorming about what to do about that problem, the White House resolved to try to take control of the debate, according to several administration officials. In weekend television appearances, President Barack Obama and other administration officials tempered their criticisms of the financial sector.

President Obama met with members of the National Conference of State Legislature at the White House speaking adamantly about how his $787 billion dollar bailout must be used wisely and that wasteful spending will be avoided. Video courtesy of Fox News.

Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and his colleagues worked the phones to try to line up support on Wall Street for the plan announced Monday. They told executives they don’t favor using the tax code to retroactively penalize specific individuals who had received bonuses, according to people familiar with the calls. They asked officials to sign on “in pencil, not ink,” and to “validate” or “express support” for the plan, these people say.

Some bankers say they turned the conversations into complaints about the antibonus crusade consuming Capitol Hill. Some have begun “slow-walking” the information previously sought by Treasury for stress-testing financial institutions, three bankers say, and considered seeking capital from hedge funds and private-equity funds so they could return federal bailout money, thereby escaping federal restrictions.

Well that certainly clears this up:

“It’s almost like they’ve got — they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger,” President Obama said on Thursday of the banks he’s chosen to bail out. “You don’t want them to blow up. But you’ve got to kind of talk [to] them, ease that finger off the trigger.”

…The owners of America will be appeased or they will destroy everything in their wake. In another world, they would call this economic terrorism.

I don’t know how else to interpret this. Wall Street, the banks and the corporate CEOs are still saying that unless the government does what it wants it to do — austerity for average Americans so the wealthy can dine on their wasting carcasses — they will blow whole damned thing up. I guess they figure that if the Mad Max scenario comes to pass they’ll have enough money to hire one of those private armies Glenn Beck is angling for to keep the riff off off their islands.

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Harris Attends Sunday School

by digby

This Week’s round table discussed the absurdity of Huckleberry Graham’s Fourteenther Movement in some depth, with Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson leading the charges against the nativists, even going so far as to point out that the people who are allegedly so concerned about the constitution are the ones who want to destroy it. But fear not. There was someone to defend them — on grounds of political savvy, naturally. And he wasn’t even there as a conservative pundit or a Republican politician. He was there as a Villager:

John Harris: In fairness to the … I mean one argument you could make Michael is that uh, immigration reform is never going to happen unless this issue is at a boil. Perhaps that’s what Lindsay Graham is doing. Ok, let’s turn this up to a boil and only in that environment …

Ooooh, how savvy is that! Gin up a race war so that they can get immigration “reform.” That’s what “grown ups” would do.. And hey, it might even work. They destroyed the Democrats’ most valuable voter registration institution with a couple of doctored racist video tapes. Imagine what “compromises” the Dems will agree to with this? Indentured servitude? Mass deportation? The sky’s the limit.

Fortunately, a member of the Bush administration was available to pour some cold water on Harris’ argument. (Only Republicans have credibility on this issue according to the Village.)

Gerson: That is a deeply cynical approach. To take an issue this sensitive and this symbolic to use that to leverage other political reform, I think that would be very cynical.

But it doesn’t even occur to Harris that such a move is cynical and destructive. And he doesn’t care. He’s just “reporting” the game. The problem, aside from his empty, soulless moral perspective, is that he’s reporting it wrong. Graham’s cynical all right. But not in the way Harris thinks, as hideous as that is. Graham is trying to get back in the good graces of a bunch of tea party jerks in South Carolina who are squeezing him from the right. If he cared about immigration reform he wouldn’t be ginning up what’s basically an ethnic cleansing campaign by referring to undocumented pregnant people as animals who “swim across the river” to “drop their babies” in the United States.

The fact is that this immigration issue has been a prominent feature of the Tea Parties here in the west since they began. Howie reported from one of them over a year ago:

I arrived over 3 hours early and spent the day chatting amicably with teabaggers– it was before they knew what the word meant and proudly referred to themselves as such. They were basically all McCain voters (in a district that had voted 68% Obama) and they all seemed to get the entirety of their information from Fox and from Hate Talk Radio. Once you penetrated beyond the nonsense they had memorized from Glenn Beck’s chalkboard, there was no problem whose solution didn’t involve “anchor babies.”

I certainly grant, as Matt Yglesias does in this interesting op-ed today, that xenophobia, nativism, racism and all the rest often accompany economic fears and dislocation. I’ve written a whole lot about this, going way back, as well. It’s always been a fact of life in America that when the going gets tough the racists come out of the woodwork.

But we live in a very different world than we did just 50 years ago. When my father’s generation was growing up the whole culture was divided into ethnic, religious and racial groups. It was literally how they organized their world. I was watching a documentary about Toots Shorr, the NY restauranteur, the other night and virtually every person in it described himself by his ethnic ID, laughingly referring to each other as Dagos, Micks etc,often breaking it down to Jewish, Catholic and Protestant — and North and South. And it was considered perfectly acceptable to apply racial epithets across the board.

But times have changed. Even old men who spent most of their lives in that world know that it’s no longer ok to do this. And their kids, people my age, certainly know better. There’s no excuse for any baby boomer or Gen-Xer to turn to xenophobia as an answer to their economic distress. The world we grew up in was tumultuous but it wasn’t one that divided everyone on ethnic and racial lines the way it was in father’s day and any American who does this is reverting to a world which no longer exists. And anyway, it’s always been disgusting to blame people lower on the economic scale for your economic problems. Considering the vast amount of information available and the smallness of our world today it’s even more disgusting now than it was in the past.

Harris also tried to say that illegal immigration in places like Arizona has gotten so bad that they just have to act. That is utter nonsense. Not that Harris would know that. After all, he’s only the editor of the most influential political news organization in the nation’s capitol. Those are the kinds of details best left to wonks and activists who aren’t “savvy” enough to know what’s really important.

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