Month: August 2010

If They Were All I Knew Of Liberals, I’d Hate Them Too

by digby

In case you ever wondered why everyone hates liberals so much, this would be it:

Dana Milbank, who has been writing the “Washington Sketch” feature for nearly six years, is moving to the editorial page, where he will be free to opine at will. But Milbank says his writing will still be rooted in reporting and observation.

“Anybody reading my column would make an informed judgment that I’m left-of-center, and I wouldn’t quarrel with that,” he says. “But strongly ideological people on the left do not recognize me as one of their own.”

Well thank God for that. Otherwise he’d be unemployable.

The fact is that we don’t recognize him because he’s not center, left or left of center — he’s just a snotty, condescending Villager who sees himself as above this silly political fray. Unfortunately, the Washington Post is selling him as a liberal, just as they sell Richard Cohen as a liberal and just as Fox sells Pat Caddel as a liberal and the NY Times sells Maureen Dowd as a liberal. In other words, they balance out their doctrinaire conservatives like Krauthammer and Kristol with Villager assholes who nobody outside the beltway can stand. Hence, nobody likes liberals.

It’s one of the most frustrating aspects of the Villager mentality. Liberals are misrepresented terribly in the media and it’s glacially slow in changing. I’m hopeful that it is happening, but the social and professional structure of organizations are very difficult to change without a consciousness of the problems. And I don’t see much media consciousness of this problem. And to the extent they understand it, they are misapplying the lessons.

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Wacky Today, Law Tomorrow

by digby

Paul Ryan is a Randian nutjob but he’s considered quite the up and comer. Therefore, it stands to reason that other up and comer nutjobs are glomming onto his nutjob ideas, particularly the NRCC “young guns” who pride themselves on being nuttier than their nutty grandpas. Amanda Terkel has compiled a full list of the top tier candidates who have endorsed Ryan’s “roadmap.” Here’s just one of them:

– Martha Roby, AL-2: On June 4, Roby put out a statement criticizing Democrats for refusing to move forward with a budget proposal. “The American people deserve better. They deserve solutions,” said Roby. “Conservative leaders like Rep. Paul Ryan are offering real solutions to cut wasteful spending, such as canceling unspent TARP and stimulus funds, cutting non-defense spending back to 2008 levels, and reducing the government workforce. I endorse these solutions and other common sense approaches to start getting our fiscal house back in order.” Roby is one of the National Republican Campaign Committee’s “Young Guns,” the party’s top new prospects.

They all sound like kooks, to be sure. But I would remind everyone that we spent nearly 20 years battling back privatization (and still are) because a previous “Young Gun” pushed it, even though it sounded completely crazy at the time, as I pointed out a few weeks ago:

There’s a lot of chatter this morning about this article in the WaPo about Paul Ryan and how much heartburn his economic plans are causing the Republicans. I was immediately reminded of a famous article about Newt Gingrich back in 1988 which featured this observation:

His recognition and his gathering power were not the result of the legislation he drafted or helped to pass, which, in fact, was negligible. And he was scorned by detractors for some of his wackier notions –which ranged from the off-the-wall (plans for statehood in outer space) to potential political dynamite (he once proposed abolishing Social Security and replacing it with mandatory I.R.A.’s).

The latter “wacky notion” was, of course, eventually adopted by the entire GOP establishment as “privatization,” which the last administration made a very serious attempt to implement. Paul Ryan still pushes it, even in the face of the recent Wall Street meltdown and as a member of President Obama’s deficit commission, will undoubtedly be proposing “reforms” which may include some elements of that plan once again. What was once a wacky notion is now a zombie article of faith on the right, just waiting for the opportune moment to rise again.

It may help the Democrats in this election to depict these people as nuts, and it has the benefit of being true. But they should not do what they usually do and rest on their laurels if they manage to pull it off. Ryan’s roadmap is going to be GOP boilerplate for a long time to come. Pretending that one election can vanquish it is as nutty as he is.

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Past Lives Reincarnated

by tristero

The New York Times this Sunday had a long article about a creepy trend: shrinks who believe in past lives. I was gonna write something about it but Jerry Coyne saved me the trouble.

Keeping an open mind is not the same as wasting time over stupidities. No, 75% of the oil BP spewed into the Gulf did not magically disappear. No, Rand Paul’s libertarianism is neither workable nor desirable. And no, you never were Queen Elizabeth I unless. of course, you were Queen Elizabeth I, in which case you would be in no condition to be reading this.

Trust me on this: People have not had past lives, never have, never will. That is a fact. How do I know? Simple. I consulted the I Ching, and its answer was unequivocal… well, as unequivocal as the I Ching gets. And yes, all you doubters, I didn’t just toss the coins, I threw the yarrow sticks which everyone knows gives a far more accurate reading.

Sheesh! What an untrusting, narrow-minded bunch.

Do you know about Howie?

by digby

I was doing some googling earlier and realized that some of my readers might not know the story of my good pal Howie Klein, Blue America partner in activism, scourge of Blue Dogs everywhere. You all undoubtedly know him as the author of Down With Tyranny.

But for anyone who’s even mildly familiar with the music industry, he’s a legend. This short article written upon his departure from Warner Brothers a few years ago will fill you in:

A Champion Of Punk Rides Off Into The Sunset
Neumu’s Michael Goldberg writes: He was the champion of punk rock, back in ’76 when no one quite knew what to make of it. He helped The Ramones and Blondie play a San Francisco club, showed The Clash and the Sex Pistols around when they hit town, introduced Romeo Void, Translator and Wire Train to the world and brought Lou Reed to the White House. For the past six years he’s been president of Reprise Records, the AOL Time Warner label with such credible artists as Neil Young, Depeche Mode, Nick Cave, Green Day, Chris Isaak and Wilco. Next Friday is his last day at Reprise. His name is Howie Klein, and for the music business, his departure is not a good thing. As far as I know Howie, who will be a “consultant” to the Warner Music Group, has no plans to run another label. My sense though I could be wrong is that he’s had his fill of the music business. Howie is a friend of mine. We first met in 1975, as I recall, when he was working as a publicist, promoting an experimental album by former Monkee Mike Nesmith. We became friends then, and 26 years later we’re still friends. To see Howie now, you might not realize that he’s the guy who played singles by Crime and The Nuns on the punk radio show “The Outcaste Hour,” which he once hosted on San Francisco radio station KSAN (back in the day when KSAN was a pretty good “progressive” rock station). When KSAN went country, Howie headed for college radio; at KUSF he continued to play punk singles. In 1978 he co-founded 415 Records, ran it out of his 16th Street apartment (the one my wife and I passed on to him when we moved), and managed against all odds to score a hit with Romeo Void’s “Never Say Never.” He was an unmistakable figure on the San Francisco scene in the late ’70s with his shaved head, shades and black leather jacket. You’d find him hanging at the Mabuhay Gardens, talking it up with Sally Mutant or Avengers singer Penelope Houston (who he signed to a Reprise contract as a solo artist two decades later). Based on the success of Romeo Void, Columbia Records did a deal with 415, and suddenly Romeo Void, Translator, the Red Rockers and Wire Train had a real shot at success. That’s when Howie got his first taste of working with the corporate music business. If working the business is an art, Howie is a master artist, because even though none of the 415 acts broke through in a big way, by the time the Columbia/415 deal had run its course, Howie was seen as one of the key rising young record guys. He soon had a new job as General Manager at the very cool Sire Records, the label that had signed Talking Heads, The Ramones, Depeche Mode, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Dead Boys, the Flamin’ Groovies and others. At one point Howie and I, plus Neumu’s Cinematronic editor Michael Snyder, collaborated on a Flamin’ Groovies compilation CD, Groovies Greatest Grooves, which remains (in my very biased opinion) the single best representation of the Groovies’ genius. Howie was one of the few people in the established music business who recognized the importance of the Internet, and he was unequivocally supportive when I came to him in 1994 and told him about a new thing I was going to start, an online magazine called Addicted To Noise. He immediately said he’d advertise, and proceeded to run an ad in ATN every month for the next two years until I sold the company. One time when Neil Young was playing this bar just north of Half Moon Bay called the Old Princeton Landing, Howie flew up from L.A. and brought me along. There’s nothing quite like seeing Neil Young and Crazy Horse rock a bar that holds maybe 100 people. I know it was particularly meaningful for Howie having Lou Reed on Reprise; Howie was a Velvet Underground fan going back to the ’60s, when the Velvets’ first albums were released. Howie was also a journalist for a time, in the mid-’70s, and he remains an excellent writer. In fact, he wrote a record review column for me in the early ’80s, when I was managing editor of a city magazine called Boulevards. When Joey Ramone died earlier this year, Howie sent out an email to express his grief, but also because he didn’t want anyone to forget the import of The Ramones. This is what Howie wrote, and I think it says a lot about him, and the faith in the power of music that he’s maintained through all his years in the business: “I can’t overemphasize the importance of Joey Ramone in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. He was, in the truest sense of the term, a genuine revolutionary. By the time The Ramones stormed the music scene, the fun and meaning had been wrung out of rock ‘n’ roll. The excitement and courageousness of teenage angst and rebellion had given way to ‘professionalism’ and to a quantifiably controllable corporate assembly line. To pick up a guitar in front of an audience you had to try to be as good as Jeff Beck; you had to have been an ‘expert’ and a veteran virtuoso. Or you needed to cede all creativity to a proven producer. The idealism [and] excitement of FM Radio had already turned into complete shit all it had come into existence to defeat. And suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, The Ramones were causing a tremendously noisy stir on the NYC Bowery. Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy made it OK for fun-loving fans to get onstage again. Rock ‘n’ roll was being re-born again. And everywhere The Ramones went they were like the Johnny Appleseeds of the punk rock movement In the wake of a Ramones tour bands would pop everywhere. In many ways they were as important to Popular Music as Elvis, the Beatles and the Stones. That important.”

During those years Howie was spinning discs at KSAN, my blog contributor Dennis Hartley and I were hanging out in Dennis’ apartment at 9th and Irving, listening avidly, and spending every spare nickel watching bands in the those same clubs. Not that I knew Howie. But I knew of him and we may have rubbed shoulders (or slammed into each other, more likely.) He changed music then and now he’s changing politics. Some people just have the shining.

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Kerfuffles

by digby

Jonathan Alter has written a long article on the right wing lies about Obama and tells us that to counter it they’re going to have him talk about Jesus and appear on The View more often. Yeah, that’ll work.

This is evidently how they see it:

For Axelrod, the challenge is to choreograph adept responses to media feeding frenzies but not confuse them with something deeply important and lasting: “So much of governing in this hair-trigger media environment is not chasing rabbits down a hole. We have to react to the kerfuffle of the moment but not buy into the hysterical notion that every story is a defining event, because they’re not.” The BP oil spill, for instance, while still serious, has not turned out to be “Obama’s Katrina.” Health-care reform was seen by many cable chatterers as shaping the outcome of the November midterm elections but almost certainly won’t. Nor will the flap over the planned mosque and Islamic center near Ground Zero. To make sure, Obama defended the constitutional principle at stake, but backed off on the specific siting. Why get tied down by another hot-button distraction, especially one that keeps the Muslim story alive in ways that help no one but the media? The collapse of the Greek economy, by contrast, is an example of something real, not hyped by cable news, whose reverberations first spoiled Obama’s PR plan for a “Recovery Summer” and now could sink the Democrats in the midterms.

You know, I get that all the DC yuppies just loved the “no drama Obama” thing and find him to be unalterably cool and awesome but this is just nuts.(Alter writes at the end: But at least the president is keeping his legendary cool… It’s a measure of the very otherness that harms him that Barack Obama is not “any person” and that he remains consistently sane as he works this fall to paint himself out of his corner.) Get a room.

Axelrod’s problem is that he fails to understand that these “kerfuffles” are symbols of much bigger cultural and social fault lines — and the damage they inflict have cumulative effect. Does he actually think that the health care battle was just a kerfuffle? Is this spreading hatred towards Muslims, blacks and Hispanics a kerfuffle? (Meanwhile, Alter says the Greek crisis ruined Recovery Summer. Oy vey …)

The country is going to hell in a frigging handbasket because of bad decisions piled upon bad decisions, years in the making, and the White House acts like the country’s various expressions of its fear and angst are inconvenient side trips that they just have to avoid or barrel through on the way to reelection. There’s a very real sense that they just don’t get it, which is, in my view, the thing that’s making people very, very nervous. One person’s cool under pressure is another’s cold and indifferent.

Michael Tomasky approached this question in his column on Friday, posing several possible reasons for the disconnect between the campaign and the governance. I’ll let you read it and consider whether any of them are reasonable. (Number six for me. I’ve always thought they were highly overrated.) But regardless of the reasons, I think Tomasky hits the nail on the head with this:

I did expect much more out of these people. I still think Obama can be an accomplished president. Maybe a great one. Way too early to write him off. But the political thinking in that White House is just way off right now.

Rudy Crew, a former New York City schools chancellor, once described a really interesting image to me. I asked him what the job felt like. He came to New York from Tacoma, Washington, maybe 1/30th the size.

He paused. Then he started talking: Imagine you’re on a moving walkway, like at the airport. And it’s fine, it’s nice. But then it starts moving faster. Then, a few arrows start coming at you. Then the walkway goes faster and faster and faster, and the arrows start coming faster and faster and faster. That’s what nearly every day is like.

I’m sure that’s what nearly every day is like. But you have get off the walkway and reflect and plan. It’s hard, but you have to. I don’t see them doing that, from the Potus on down.

During the first year I remember having a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach every time I saw that Obama promo for The George Lopez show. I could see the arrows flying, but it seemed as though they thought they were made of armor. From what Axelrod said above, I’m not sure they still don’t think so.

Bitching about how much the modern media enables criticism isn’t going to do it, btw. Rebut, refute, confront or agree with the criticism. But whining about it is weak.

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Beck and the Cross

by digby

I have mentioned before that a couple of months ago I appeared on a panel about the Tea Party and the far right and afterward was chatting with Sarah Posner and Adele Stan, who both pointed out to me that we had completely omitted the Religious Right from the discussion. And we had.

People who are well informed about the right wing commonly missed the thread that binds the Beck teabaggers, even as we confidently proclaimed that this far-right movement was nothing new. I think it’s because Beck speaks as much in modern language of pycho-babble and recovery than traditional religious talk. But with the exception of writers like Posner and Stan, who follow the religious right closely, I think most of us assumed the tea party was a far more secular movement than it actually is. As we’ve been piecing together over the past few months, it’s actually an amalgam of John Bircherism, crude Libertarianism, neo-confederatism and Christian Reconstructionism — the creepiest marriage of far right ideology imaginable.

Alternet’s Peter Montgomery has put together a convenient primer on all the religious fanatics who appeared at yesterday’s Triumph of the Wingnut rally. They may have sounded bland and predictable on that stage yesterday, but scratch a little deeper and you have an epic collection of far right religious kooks that will make your hair stand on end.

My favorite:

David Barton was Beck’s co-host. Barton is the Religious Right’s favorite pseudo historian and Beck’s new favorite person. After decades of plying his “Christian nation” history through books and evangelical churches, Barton has a huge new national audience thanks to Beck’s patronage.

Barton did what he does, which is to show off his collection of old speeches and sermons that in his telling prove America was based on Christian principles and was never meant to be a secular nation. Barton’s message was partly to the pastors in attendance, telling them that early American preachers were better at preaching on the news of the day. Beck told the pastors in attendance that the event was meant to stiffen their spines, because the church had “gone soft.”

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Suppressing November

by digby

I’ve written reams about rightwing voter suppression efforts over the years, and like other single subjects (like tasers) I get a fair amount of blowback from people who say “enough already, we get it.” Still it’s worth reminding even those in the know, if only to establish a record all over the internet that some archeologist may someday find in the virtual ether.

It’s important to be aware of this especially now that we have a an energized and batshit insane right wing ready to pull out all the stops. (We’ve already seen their capabilities with the destruction of ACORN.)The following story from Glenn Smith who’s been following this from the trenches in Texas for a long time sounds the alarm:

TrueTheVote’s video is well produced. Participants speak in calm and knowing tones, disguising the racist agenda behind their project. We don’t yet know where the group’s money comes from. But they have money.

As I’ve said before, right-wing voter suppression campaigns are the most under-reported political scandal of the last 50-100 years. But there’s never been anything like the criminal destruction of all the voting machines in the nation’s fourth largest city. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to suspect the machines in Houston were destroyed by an arsonist. Warehouses don’t regularly and spontaneously combust at four in the morning, especially warehouses containing all the voting tools in a pivotal city in a pivotal election.

In other details, the suppression campaigns follow a familiar pattern: raise suspicions of widespread voter fraud. Accuse “others” of stealing elections from us (read: white people). Threaten would-be voters with criminal charges. Limit polling locations in poor and minority precincts. Distribute spurious “felon lists” that disenfranchise legal voters who happen to share a name with a felon. Staff phone banks that make election calls to minority and poor voters giving incorrect polling locations and dates. Dress up vigilantes in cop clothes to intimidate would-be voters.

Regular Huffington Post contributor Greg Mitchell wrote one of the best accounts of such a suppression and intimidation campaign in his book about the 1934 California governor’s race, The Campaign of the Century. At least since then, voter suppression has been a part of nearly every election cycle.

Here’s the slick video:

It’s important to keep a special eye on Hispanic precincts and border areas. I have a feeling we are going to see quite a few reports of “illegals” voting this time out.

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Palingenesis

by digby

I learned something new today from Rick Perlstein and it’s very, very interesting. It’s a theory called Palingenetic ultranationalism (and no, it was not coined for Sarah Palin.) But it could have been:

Palingenetic ultranationalism is a theory concerning generic fascism formulated by British political theorist Roger Griffin. The key elements are that fascism can be defined by its core myth, namely that of “national rebirth” — palingenesis. Griffin argues that the unique synthesis of palingenesis and ultra-nationalism differentiates fascism from para-fascism and other revolutionary ideologies. This is what he calls the “fascist minimum” without which there is no fascism.

It’s the “rebirth” theme along with the flag-waving that characterized the Beck Rally yesterday. The religious rhetoric is the common vocabulary of the American radical right and the talk of exceptionalism and the Black Robed Regiment, with its combination of Calvinism and the Founders, is a perfect American rendering of rebirth and ultra-nationalism.

If you haven’t seen this movie in a while, you should. If you can get past the frightening symbols you’ll see that the “rebirth” theme is central. (The ultra-nationalism we already knew.)

Update: Dave Neiwert has more on palingenesis.

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Wingnut Email of the Day

by digby

“The unions, the racebaiters and the welfare recipients may be in the minority but they are an active minority.”

Please watch this 7 minute video and stop Evil Obama and the Democrats from ruining America anymore.

Commie Racists Obama has Racists Attorney General Eric Holder in his hip pocket and has Commie Control over our Justice Department.

These guys are evil devils and must be voted out!

I guess we’re supposed to want civic engagement, but after watching this, I’m not sure it’s such a good idea after all.

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Black Robed Vita-Meat-A Vegemin

by digby

For those of you wondering about Beck’s ranting about a new “Black Robed Regiment” today, recall that our friends at the Donkey Edge attended Glenn Beck U and reported this back:

[M]y right-wing funhouse soon turned into a house of horrors, as I was treated to an approximately 30-minute lecture (presumably the outer limits of a wing-nut’s attention span) that covered our Founding Fathers and the birth of our nation. I had clearly picked the wrong day to give up drinking.

What unfolded was a “lecture” about the so-called “Black-Robed Regiment” – apparently a band of Evangelical Christian preachers that invoked from the Bible the political and moral underpinnings upon which the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were based and that single-handedly defeated the British at the battles of Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill. Ever heard of the “Black-Robed Regiment”? Me neither. It sounds like an obscure 1990s Steven Seagal film.

You can hear the clip from the lecture “>here.

A little googling shows that this is a major wingnut theocratic theme. (There are so many …)The basic concept is that it wasn’t the Enlightenment that informed the founders, it was fundamentalist preaching. Therefore, America was conceived as an “exceptional” Christian Theocracy.

Here’s the Beck U “professor” giving his lecture on YouTube, which is probably where Beck found it late one night while searching for that rare live versions of “Jim Dandy To The Rescue”

Beck is obviously just peddling far right nonsense in all its forms and this happens to be one of his little hobby horses. But among many right wingers, this is apparently an article of faith (no pun intended.)

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