Month: September 2010

Creepy Image of the Day

by digby

From TPM

Former U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said in his video message that Park51 is a “strange enterprise” that basically is telling the American people, “we’re going to increase religious tolerance and understanding whether you like it or not.”

I think that basically says it all: fuck religious tolerance and understanding.

It is, of course, their all American right to hate all they want. But they haven’t been quite so upfront about it before. I find it rather refreshing, actually.

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Objectively Pro-Taliban

by digby

There’s been a lot of chatter this morning about Newtie’s comments touting Dinesh D’Souza’s absurd new book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage setting forth the idea that Obama inherited some sort of African Colonial philosophy from the father he never knew. (It’s in the blood dontcha know.) I know this has absolutely nothing to do with race on Newtie’s part because racism in America is dead and Republicans would never try to exploit it anyway, certainly not by promoting the idea that that Obama is a primitive angry black man. He’s just being his usual “intellectual” self, giving us all (poison) food for thought, sort of like when he blamed liberals for Susan Smith drowning her children.

D’Souza’s book will appeal to all those who are dying to explain their visceral loathing of Obama’s blackness on something other than racism (which they just know has nothing to do with them because if they were racist they’d hate all black people instead of only the “bad” ones.) But D’Souza’s agenda is actually much more interesting than that. He’s the author of the book The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 described by Booklist this way:

D’Souza once again turns his eye for social criticism to liberals, this time asserting their responsibility for the rise of anti-Americanism abroad and perhaps even the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The cultural Left in the U.S., by pressing for sexual freedom for women and gays through birth control, no-fault divorce, and support for gay marriage, has not only undermined American culture but also provoked the ire of religious conservatives in other nations, most prominently Islamic fundamentalists. Contrary to President Bush’s assertions that terrorists and their supporters hate American freedom, D’Souza asserts that what they really hate is our licentious culture. He notes that American conservatives have more in common with Islamic Fundamentalists than with American liberals.

Oh my. He’s also recently been named the president of The King’s College, a Christian school dedicated to training students to carry forth the “biblical worldview”:

The college, a subsidiary of Campus Crusade for Christ,[11] claims the “Protestant evangelical tradition” as its own. It “seeks ambitious students who want to make a difference in the world,” and who “seek a rigorous undergraduate education that is rooted in the Christian liberal arts tradition” in order to educate them for “principled leadership.” “Through its commitment to the truths of Christianity and a biblical worldview,” the TKC mission statement reads, “The King’s College seeks to transform society by preparing students for careers in which they help to shape and eventually to lead strategic public and private institutions, and by supporting faculty members as they directly engage culture through writing and speaking publicly on critical issues.”

Not that there’s any reason to worry about far right Christian extremists and their vastly wealthy funders gaining power in America. It’s rude to even contemplate it as a serious problem. Still, it’s interesting to see what some of them believe if only out of curiosity.

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Shhh. Don’t Tell Anyone But They’re Liars

by digby

It’s obvious from watching the gasbags this morning that the conventional wisdom about the economy has the entire Village tied up in knots. They know the Republicans are poised to reap big political rewards this fall, but they can’t figure out a way to explain it without revealing that they are lying sacks of garbage. And that just isn’t done.

So we end up with gobbledygook like this AP story:

The number of people in the U.S. who are in poverty is on track for a record increase on President Barack Obama’s watch, with the ranks of working-age poor approaching 1960s levels that led to the national war on poverty.

[…]

Among the 18-64 working-age population, the demographers expect a rise beyond 12.4 percent, up from 11.7 percent. That would make it the highest since at least 1965, when another Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, launched the war on poverty that expanded the federal government’s role in social welfare programs from education to health care.

Demographers also are confident the report will show:

_Child poverty increased from 19 percent to more than 20 percent.

_Blacks and Latinos were disproportionately hit, based on their higher rates of unemployment.

_Metropolitan areas that posted the largest gains in poverty included Modesto, Calif.; Detroit; Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Fla.; Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

“My guess is that politically these figures will be greeted with alarm and dismay but they won’t constitute a clarion call to action,” said William Galston, a domestic policy aide for President Bill Clinton. “I hope the parties don’t blame each other for the desperate circumstances of desperate people. That would be wrong in my opinion. But that’s not to say it won’t happen.”

Lawrence M. Mead, a New York University political science professor who is a conservative and wrote “The New Politics of Poverty: The Nonworking Poor in America,” argued that the figures will have a minimal impact in November.

“Poverty is not as big an issue right now as middle-class unemployment. That’s a lot more salient politically right now,” he said.

But if Thursday’s report is as troubling as expected, Republicans in the midst of an increasingly strong drive to win control of the House, if not the Senate, would get one more argument to make against Democrats in the campaign homestretch.

The GOP says voters should fire Democrats because Obama’s economic fixes are hindering the sluggish economic recovery. Rightly or wrongly, Republicans could cite a higher poverty rate as evidence.

Democrats almost certainly will argue that they shouldn’t be blamed. They’re likely to counter that the economic woes — and the poverty increase — began under President George W. Bush with the near-collapse of the financial industry in late 2008.

Although that’s true, it’s far from certain that the Democratic explanation will sway voters who already are trending heavily toward the GOP in polls as worrisome economic news piles up.

[…]

Beyond this fall, the findings could put pressure on Obama to expand government safety net programs ahead of his likely 2012 re-election bid even as Republicans criticize him about federal spending and annual deficits. Those are areas of concern for independent voters whose support is critical in elections.

Experts say a jump in the poverty rate could mean that the liberal viewpoint — social constraints prevent the poor from working — will gain steam over the conservative position that the poor have opportunities to work but choose not to because they get too much help.

Can you figure out what they hell they are saying there? There’s so much he said/she said equivocating that I got whiplash.

The bottom line is that the financial crisis and subsequent slump caused a huge rise in poverty, for which Obama is being held responsible. The Republicans plan to take advantage of that to win the election and then institute policies which will make it even worse.

This is, after all, what they did before. And it’s right there in the story:

The all-time high was 22.4 percent in 1959, the first year the government began tracking poverty. It dropped to a low of 11.1 percent in 1973 after Johnson’s war on poverty but has since fluctuated in the 12-14 percent range.

You remember that failed experiment the Great Society? Yeah, well it actually worked. And the right has been fighting to kill every last remnant of it ever since. When they say they want their country back, that’s what they’re actually talking about — the country that had 22% poverty. And if they manage to seize power in the middle of this slump, there’s a fairly good chance a lot of us will be taking that nostalgic trip down memory lane.

It’s fairly clear the AP reporter knows that the Republicans are planning to demagogue their way into office and then exacerbate poverty and further decimate the middle class with their policies. He hints at the fact that this state of affairs should help Democrats, but doesn’t say why they won’t. What comes out of that story is nothing but confusion.

Update: Of course, politics is just a spectator sport with nothing to be done except wait for the people to spontaneously “discover” what it is they want to do and then elect politicians who spontaneously “discover” what it is they can do. Go back to watching TV everyone. You will wake up one morning just knowing what you think and believe without any need for politics at all.

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h/t to reader mk

Playing Favorites

by digby

Former Montana Governor Judy Martz gave an interview about her activities post-politics:

She’s also on the board of the Alpha Omega House, a Christian college house for 28 students at the University of Montana, and the board of directors of Taser International, which she said is her favorite board seat.

Why would it be her favorite? Do you suppose they all sit around watching those hilarious tasering Youtubes? Or is it the time they all spend evaluating the thousands of lawsuits against the company for killing people?

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Saturday Night At The Movies

The Gaulfather

By Dennis Hartley

French twisted: Vincent Cassel as Mesrine

In November 1979, a truck full of police sharpshooters ambushed and killed France’s “Public Enemy #1” as he drove down a busy Parisian boulevard with his girlfriend (who was wounded, but survived). Although this violent dispatch was, in essence, a public execution without trial, very few people grieved for the demise of murderer, bank robber, kidnapper, and serial prison escapee Jacques Mesrine. Over the course of his 20 year “career”, Mesrine (who was a sort of French John Dillinger) managed to wreak major havoc, not only in his native France, but in Canada and the U.S. as well. A folk hero to some, Mesrine fancied himself to be a sort of underworld Renaissance man-master of disguise, self-styled “revolutionary”, and author (he composed an autobiography during one of his numerous prison stints, which was later adapted and published). If there was one thing he loved more than the thug life, it was watching and reading about himself in the media (he once nearly killed a French journalist for writing an unflattering article). I suspect that he would have been especially gratified to have lived to see the day that he became the subject of an epic crime film diptych, currently in limited release in the U.S.

Director Jean-Francois Richet and his co-writer Abdel Raof Dafri adapted Mesrine’s autobiography, L’instinct de mort, into two films-Mesrine: Killer Instinct and Mesrine: Public Enemy #1. With a combined running time of 4 hours and change, you are going to need a dynamic leading man in order to keep your audience riveted, and the edgy, explosive Vincent Cassel (La Haine , Eastern Promises ) proves to be up to the task here.

Despite having the luxury of such a broad canvas, Richet doesn’t linger much on roots and formative years; opting instead to kick off the first film with a brief glimpse of Mesrine’s hitch in the French army, during which he served in the Algerian conflict. In an uncompromisingly brutal, tough-to-watch scene (which sets the tone for both films) the young Mesrine beats a captured Algerian insurgent nearly senseless at the behest of his commanding officer, who is conducting the interrogation. When this treatment fails to yield the desired information from the dazed prisoner, the man’s sister is paraded out, and Mesrine is commanded to commit a horrible act of cold-blooded murder. For the only time in either film, Mesrine seems reticent to follow through; suggesting, for one infinitesimal moment, that he actually has a conscience. Once he pulls the trigger, however, Mesrine (and the viewer) knows, in no uncertain terms, that he has crossed over to the dark side, from which he will never return. Whether the director is inferring that the military breeds sociopaths, or that water seeks its own level, is open to interpretation.

There is quite a bit left open for interpretation, throughout both films, vis a vis what made Mesrine tick. With the possible exception of the aforementioned scene in Algiers, we are presented with Mesrine the fully formed career criminal-type, straight out of the box, as it were. He gets out of the army, meets and marries his second wife, a beautiful Spanish woman (Elena Anaya), and takes a half-hearted stab at a few straight jobs. However, once he falls under the mentorship of a powerful local gangster (Gerard Depardieu) he comes to realize his true calling-taking what he wants, when he wants, and by any means necessary. The first film follows his activities in Europe through the late 60s and then his North American crime sprees with partner Jean-Paul Mercier (Paul Dupuis) from 1969-1972, including bank robberies, the murder of two Canadian forest rangers, and a failed attempt to break friends out of jail (following their own escape from yet another facility).

The second film covers Mesrine’s return to France in 1972, when he picked up where he had left off-participating in bank robberies, kidnappings, and brazen jailbreaks, which finally earned him his “public enemy #1” moniker from the exasperated French law enforcement authorities. The second film is a little more compelling than part one, as it provides an interesting nemesis for Mesrine, commissioner Broussard (Olivier Gourmet). The two men have a sparring relationship of begrudging mutual respect, much like the (fictional) characters played by Al Pacino and Robert deNiro in Michael Mann’s Heat. Part two also benefits mightily from the presence of one of my favorite French actresses, Ludivine Sagnier (as Mesrine’s girlfriend at the time of his death), who has that kind of earthy, sexually-charged intensity that Ellen Barkin brought to many of her early roles.

Taken as a whole, the 4-hour narrative begins to run out of steam about ¾ of the way through, mostly due to the rote sequencing and repetitive nature of Mesrine’s exploits; he robs a bank, gets caught, goes to jail, breaks out of jail, robs more banks, gets caught…well, you get the picture. Cassel’s performance, as good as it is, teeters on the edge of becoming a one-note acting exercise. Maybe we didn’t need to inventory every crime the man ever committed. I could have used a bit more insight into Mesrine’s motivations. That being said, Richet is a promising filmmaker, showing a particular penchant for kinetic action sequences, and his recreation of France’s 1970s socio-political milieu is quite canny (I was reminded at times of Fred Zimmerman’s The Day of the Jackal).

So is this a recommendation? If you are a true-crime buff, I think you will like this. The real Mesrine, repellant as his actions were, was a fascinating character, and it is almost mind-blowing at what he got away with, and for how long (especially considering how much he enjoyed the spotlight, courting the media whenever he got the opportunity). And how was he able to escape so many times? Couldn’t they figure out a way to keep this guy locked up, especially after the first 3 or 4 escapes and re-apprehensions/trials? Or maybe if the director had asked himself some of these questions, the film(s) could have been that much more interesting? Well, you know what the French say… C’est la vie.

Previous posts with related themes:

The Baader-Meinhof Complex

Inside The Towers

by digby

After watching all the coverage of 9/11 and talking and listening to New Yorkers who were there, trying to get a handle on the experience, it took this book,102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers released in 2006 to fully bring home just how unimaginably horrible it was for the people who went through it.

If you haven’t read it, prepare yourself before you do. It’s the most graphic account of being inside a disaster of this magnitude I’ve ever read. It might even give you nightmares. It did me.

The people of New York deserve a lot of credit for keeping their wits about them on that day. It’s too bad the government didn’t stay as cool and instead decided to use it as an excuse to bring their neocon wet dream to life.

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If We Build It They Will Use It

by digby

Notice how there’s no limit to how much money we can spend on this sort of thing:

In line with its “enforcement only” approach to immigration, the Obama administration has increased the number of border patrol agents, most recently as part of a $600 million border bill that passed without much ado this summer. But the rapid expansion appears to have come at a cost. The Los Angeles Times reports that there’s been a surge in sexual misconduct and assault cases against Border Patrol agents—a development that some attribute to the increased militarization of the border and greater numbers of inexperienced officers.

…”They see themselves as a quasi-military body defending the country,” one political scientist at the University of Texas at El Paso tells the Times reporter. “Add to that the fact that they are expanding rapidly, and you have thousands of rookies who have very little experience.”

That’s just great. No need to be cool under pressure in this overheated environment. Just hire a bunch of yahoos, give them a gun and immunity and let ’em loose.

The story also points out that the Border Patrol is the second largest police agency in the country after the New York City Police Department, having grown by 9,000 agents from 2005 to 2009 and currently employing 21,000. But there’s far less transparency than in most major police departments: unlike most big cities, Border Patrol does not reveal how often it uses force and under what circumstances. And there’s very little accountability, because “agents are loath to report peers and juries are reluctant to convict those standing guard along the country’s borders.”

I’ve been worried about the encroaching police state — for which unlimited government spending is untouchable for some time. This, for instance, is from 2006:

I’m personally horrified by the excesses of this administration and terribly worried that the huge bureaucratic domestic surveillance apparatus they are building is going to be impossible to control. I hear tales from all over the country of wads of DHS pork going to local and state police departments to use to spy on their own citizens and we know that at the national level they’ve pretty much discarded the fourth amendment and have enabled both the foreign and military spy agencies to work within our borders. There’s a lot of money and power involved, it’s secret and it’s fundamentally anti-democratic. We are building a police state and I firmly believe that, politics aside, if you build it they will use it.

That all this has been done by the alleged libertarian small government Republicans is no surprise to me. They have always been about big bucks and authoritarianism over all else.

And sadly, on this issue most starkly, the Democrats have shown that they are no different. In fact, it’s something that Obama can point to as the great success of his administration: he solidified a fully bipartisan consensus on the police state. (Not that there had ever been much daylight — but there was a moment of hope for change for a while there.)

*I also argued in that old post that the Democrats should make a pitch for privacy and populism with consumer protection arguments. It wasn’t a bad idea. Too bad they never tried it.

George W. Bush and the Tinhorn Terrorist Folks

by digby

I’ve been hearing a reprise of that nonsensical trope that George W. Bush was at his finest on 9/11, leading us through the darkness of those early hours with strength and purpose.

First, consider this first statement after the towers were hit, a statement which he claimed to the 9/11 commission were written entirely by him. (You can see the video of it here.)

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a difficult moment for America.

I, unfortunately, will be going back to Washington after my remarks. Secretary Rod Paige and [the] Lt. Governor will take the podium and discuss education. I do want to thank the folks here at — at Booker Elementary School for their hospitality.

Today, we’ve had a national tragedy. Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country.

I have spoken to the Vice President, to the Governor of New York, to the Director of the FBI, and have ordered that the full resources of the federal government go to help the victims and their families, and — and to conduct a full-scale investigation to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.

Terrorism against our nation will not stand.

And now if you [would] join me in a moment of silence.

May God bless the victims, their families, and America.

Thank you very much.

It was widely panned, for obvious reasons. Thanking the elementary school for its hospitality and calling the perpetrators “folks” seemed more than a little bit off key. Saying he “unfortunately” had to go back to Washington, under these circumstances, wasn’t inspiring (particularly since they subsequently flew all over the country, further panicking the nation.) It was later thrown about that he’d said on the plane that he wasn’t going to let some tinhorn terrorist keep him away from Washington, but nobody believed it.

Ok, he’s human. But then the plane landed briefly at Barksdale AFB in Louisiana where he made a speech in which he appeared a little bit more in control. However the 9/11 commission, which wasn’t allowed to interview the president without Dick Cheney present, pretty much concluded that Cheney forcefully took control of the government during this period.

It was only later that we saw the truly damning video. I think Michael Moore did the best job with it:

The press spent the next four years fetishizing Bush’s allegedly brilliant leadership on that day. Many people would insist that it was necessary in order to bring the country together in the aftermath of the attacks. But it wasn’t true and the dissonance and up-is-downism that was introduced in those early days brought us to the place we are today.

Strangely, Bush’s most impressive real achievement in that period was in tamping down the domestic backlash against Muslims. Too bad that was the one piece of his legacy that didn’t outlive his presidency.

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Are You A Parasite Or Gangrene?

by digby

This is one hell of a pitch from Georgia congressman Lynn Westmoreland at the Faith and Freedom coalition. I wonder how it’s going to go over with the public?

WESTMORELAND: If we hold the line, if we get those courageous men and women to be part of our majority. If we say look, the American people we’re listening to the American people, this is what we’re going to do. If government shuts down, we want you with us. We want you with us. We gotta have you because later on you all will call us and say look I didn’t get my check. Daddy can’t go to the VA. You know, the National Parks are closed.

We need to be sure that you are with us because let me tell you this, all Americans need to understand. We need to understand this and I hope you can help share this analogy with people. Just as when you talk about what is going to possibly happen, you know I was unfortunate to cut myself with a chainsaw. I don’t know how many of you have cut yourself with a chainsaw.

Chainsaw is not the cleanest instrument if you’re going to cut yourself. […] He said this is going to sting a little bit and it hurt like crazy. But you know what, if he didn’t clean out that wound, it would have never healed. I would have got gangrene. I would have died from it. And what has happened with this country, we have put bandaids on things that need to be cleaned out. It’s going to take some pain for us to do the things that we need to do to right the ship.

It’s the first time I’ve ever heard of sick veterans and old people referred to as “gangrene” but I think it fairly well describes how conservatives see sick, old and poor people in general.

I don’t know if they’ll be stupid enough to do this in the middle of a terrible economic slump, but they just might. And I think it will be an excellent demonstration of just how their philosophy plays out in real life. If the American people like it and reward them, then we’ll know that their dystopian Mad Max vision of America is a reflection of the desires of the citizens.

If people don’t like it, then perhaps it would be wise for Democrats to be prepared to offer some kind of specific message and agenda. I would expect that people might be willing to listen.

Via Think Progress

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Leave It To The Professionals

by digby

Brad DeLong asks once again “why, oh why, can’t we have a better press corps?” This one is pretty funny:

Round 1:

Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart used a tweet from Rep. Jack Kimble of California as a launching pad for a blog post on who is to blame for the current federal deficits…

Round 2:

There is no Rep. Jack Kimble; that Twitter account is a spoof…

Round 3: The Washington Post’s Chris Cilizza:

Twitter holds real peril for political reporters, too…. Jonathan Capehart…. [T]he double-edged sword that is Twitter…. The immediacy that has turned Twitter into an international phenomenon… presents major challenges for journalists trying to live by the “trust but verify” credo…

It is not Twitter’s fault that Washington Post reporters have no clue how to do their jobs.

Apparently the Huffington Post also referred at one point to Kimble as a real candidate, too.

I’m inclined to be sympathetic to Capehart — it’s easy to get duped by spoofs. But I am surprised that he would get duped by this one. And obviously any journalist or blogger should do some due diligence on a congressman he’s never heard of before. But I don’t think this is a matter of professional ethics alone. Any real blogger would automatically google the name of the alleged politician to find out what other stupid things he may have said in order to make a better blog post. And once you google the name you find out very quickly that he’s a phony.

It’s not that we have greater integrity, although sometimes we do. It’s that we know good blogging. There’s an art to the quick hit on the absurdities of political blather. It ain’t as easy as it looks.

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