Month: December 2010

Dispatches from The war On Christmas

by digby

Embedded reporters at Talking Points Memo filed an in-depth report from the front lines of the War on Christmas. It’s a harrowing tale of horrible “holiday” skirmishes and battles throughout the land. Some of the war stories are well known, others not so much. I hadn’t heard about this one, for instance:

The First Lady’s Stealth Campaign

Former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO), who ran for governor this year, told TPM in September that his distrust of the Obamas comes from “little things:”

“I remember a little thing, like Ms. Obama saying she didn’t want any Christian artifacts in the White House during Christmas time,” Tancredo said. Another problem, Tancredo said, is “hosting Ramadan events there.”

Well, I suppose since she and the President are both Muslim terrorists, this makes perfect sense.

It must have been Tancredo’s heroic charge that made the difference because it seems that Michelle Obama has backed down:

The Obamas did host an iftar, a Ramadan dinner, at the White House. First Lady Michelle Obama also decorated the residence with 19 Christmas trees, a 350-pound gingerbread house and thousands of Christmas decorations, many made with reusable materials to fit with the theme, “Simple Gifts.”

God bless Tiny Tom. And God bless the United States of Christmas.

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Press Think Good Reads

by digby

If you’re looking for an interesting read, try Jay Rosen’s year-end retrospective of his best work of 2010. These are the essays that informed me the most, but all are worthwhile:

The Quest for Innocence and the Loss of Reality in Political Journalism (PressThink, Feb. 21, 2010). “The quest for innocence means the desire to be manifestly agenda-less and thus ‘prove’ in the way you describe things that journalism is not an ideological trade. But this can get in the way of describing things! What’s lost is that sense of reality Isaiah Berlin talked about…” # Wherein I finally nail down a key term in my criticism of the political press: its innocence agenda, which interferes with truthtelling. # Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right: On the Actual Ideology of the American Press. (PressThink, June 14, 2010) “That it’s easy to describe the ideology of the press is a point on which the left, the right and the profession of journalism converge. I disagree. I think it’s tricky. So tricky, I’ve had to invent my own language for discussing it.” # An attempt to bring some clarity to the most confused and contentious of all debates in press criticism: the bias question. # The Afghanistan War Logs Released by Wikileaks, the World’s First Stateless News Organization. (PressThink, July 26, 2010) “In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new.” # I rarely claim that something is new. But I think it was warranted in this case. #. The Citizens Agenda in Campaign Coverage (PressThink, Aug. 15, 2010) “The idea is to learn from voters what those voters want the campaign to be about, and what they need to hear from the candidates to make a smart decision. So you go out and ask them: what do you want the candidates to be discussing as they compete for votes in this year’s election?” # An idea that has not been adopted by our political press because our political press prefers horse race journalism. # Certainly the most viral thing I wrote in 2010, with over 200,000 views at my Posterous. # The View from Nowhere: Questions and Answers. (PressThink, Nov. 10, 2010) “American journalism is dumber than most journalists, who often share my sense of absurdity about these practices. A major reason we have a practice less intelligent than its practitioners is the prestige that the View from Nowhere still claims…” # This was the year that my construct, The View from Nowhere, went mainstream. # From Judith Miller to Julian Assange (PressThink, Dec. 9. 2010) “Today it is recognized at the Times and in the journalism world that Judy Miller was a bad actor who did a lot of damage and had to go. But it has never been recognized that secrecy was itself a bad actor in the events that led to the collapse, that it did a lot of damage, and parts of it might have to go. Our press has never come to terms with the ways in which it got itself on the wrong side of secrecy as the national security state swelled in size after September 11th.” #

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Placebo Effect

by digby

This is just strange:

It might sound strange to some, but a new study published in the most recent issue of PLoS One may have turned the conventional idea of a placebo on its head. Researchers found that placebo pills benefited patients, even when doctors explained that they were only taking sugar pills.

“Until now, doctors have thought they had to lie about the placebo pill in order to tap into the effects,” said Dr. Ted Kaptchuk of Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center in Boston. “But we said, ‘Let’s see if placebos can work when they’re applied in an honest way.'”

And, according to this study, it seems they did.

Researchers divided 80 study participants who suffered from irritable bowel syndrome, or IBS, into two groups. One group received no treatment for their condition while the other received sugar pills that they took twice a day.

Three weeks later, 59 percent of study participants who knowingly took the placebos reported reduced symptoms and adequate relief for their IBS symptoms, while only 35 percent of the control group reported similar results.

The article goes on to say that 50% of doctors report that they give patients placebos (presumably lying to them) which is really surprising. (How do they do it — give them an envelope full of pills? Or do they prescribe something that won’t work for the illlnes, like antibiotics?)

I don’t pretend to understand this, but the mind works in mysterious ways and if the doctor can just say take two sugar pills and call me in the morning, I’d say it’s good news. It could certainly save some money.

.

Woodward And Wikileaks

by digby

People have varying beliefs about Wikileaks, obviously, and it’s fair that your mileage may vary. But it’s unacceptable that we still have people out there spreading falsehoods about it as Jeffrey Toobin did on last night’s Spitzer Parker (with Naomi Wolf and Clay Shirky.)

TOOBIN: If you intend to simply blow out 250,000 documents that are at tremendous — putting individuals at risk, the United States government employees at risk, people who cooperate with the United States government at risk, that is not up to Julian Assange. That is up to the United States government.

WOLF: Scooter Libby did that.

SHIRKY: But Assange went with — went with “Guardian,” went through “Spiegel.” In this case, the “Times” by proxy and they redacted some of the documents and held some of the documents back.

TOOBIN: Some of it. They redacted some of it.

I don’t know why people persist in saying this, but it reveals either bad faith or just sheer journalistic malpractice at this point. And I think it’s at the heart of much of the dispute because it seems to have been believed quite widely at the time the diplomatic cables were first released, and it has colored the reaction to it.

Clay Shirky went on to correct Toobin, but his views on this are so set in stone that it made no difference. And he ended up intellectually twisting himself into a pretzel and revealing himself to be quite the authoritarian because of it, which is ironic to say the least, since he’s supposed to be a journalist and a legal scholar:

SPITZER: And back to Woodward, where does Woodward fit in to this?

SHIRKY: So I think that Woodward is not a criminal for publishing leaked documents but I also think that Assange is not a criminal for publishing leaked documents. However, I also, also think that if I’m wrong about that, that the way in which I would be wrong is going through the court system. Not through an extra legal running of WikiLeaks off the network.

The damage to me — Jeffrey to your earlier point about the slippery slope, the non-slippery slope argument is the State Department has currently committed itself to making it very difficult for autocratic governments to force information off the Internet. And we’re suddenly providing not just a recipe but a rationale that’s making everyone from Lubchenko (ph) to Kim Jong-il laugh.

TOOBIN: But see, you know, again, this is a slippery slope argument.

SHIRKY: No.

TOOBIN: It is, it is. Because the fact that someone takes United States government documents, secret, no foreign distribution, and says that shouldn’t be on the Internet. To say that North Korea shouldn’t have a free press, to say that Russia shouldn’t allow journalists to — I mean, I think it is easy to draw a distinction between the two.

WOLF: Jeff, can I talk about the Espionage Act because that’s really what’s at stake now that they’ve invoked it. I predicted in my book “The End of America” that sooner or later, journalists would be targeted with the Espionage Act in an effort to close down free speech and (INAUDIBLE) of government. And we have a president for that. In 1917, the Espionage Act was invoked to go after people like us who are criticizing the first World War. Publishers, educators, editors. Wait, and people were put in prison. They were beaten. One guy got a 10-year sentence for reading the First Amendment. And that intimidation effectively closed down dissent for a decade in the United States of America.

The Espionage Act has a very dark and dirty history. And when you start to use the Espionage Act, to criminalize what I’m sure you’ve handled classified documents in your time as a serious journalist, you know perfectly well that every serious journalist has seen or heard about classified information and repeated it. When you start to use the Espionage Act to say reporting is treachery, reporting is spying, it’s espionage, you criminalize journalism. And that’s the history that our country has shown.

TOOBIN: I recognize there is that history. And I’m familiar with the red scare, too. America is different now.

WOLF: Oh, it’s worse in some ways.

TOOBIN: Well, I would disagree.

SPITZER: I want to ask Jeff a question though, because I want to come back to this Woodward distinction. You would agree with Clay and Naomi, I think, that Julian Assange would be precisely Bob Woodward if he had been the recipient of these documents, is that correct?

TOOBIN: I’d have to know a lot more.

SPITZER: But it might be the case.

TOOBIN: It well might be the case.

SPITZER: OK. So you’re sort of clear articulation of the beginning that he clearly violated something maybe not so much.

TOOBIN: I’m not sure. Certainly the attorney general of the United States seems to think criminal — criminal activity was involved here. But I think the wholesale taking of enormous quantities of classified information and putting it on the Internet, even if you don’t put all 250,000 documents on, I think that is a meaningful distinction from what Bob Woodward does.

SPITZER: It seems to me that Bob Woodward arguably did something much more egregious. He took real-time decisions about why we were going to war in Afghanistan, the discussions are rationale, where we would go spoke to the most senior political and military officials in the nation and blasted that out in the book. A clear distinction.

TOOBIN: Well, again, there is a distinction in part because the president of the United States and the vice president are allowed to declassify anything they want at any time for any reason. So if the president declassified —

SPITZER: A lot of people who didn’t have that power were sourced in that book. Seemed to be speaking in clear violation. They, in fact, should be subject to criminal investigations.

TOOBIN: I always wondered why — why Woodward gets away with it. It’s an interesting question.

This is where the argument takes you folks, whether you like it or not. Toobin struggled mightily to figure out a way out of that without sounding like a total dolt and he was unable to. If you think that Assange is guilty of a crime then Bob Woodward (and countless other investigative reporters) are guilty too. There just isn’t any way around it.

I recommend that you read the whole exchange because it was very revealing. Shirky has taken the most nuanced view although to me it’s become nearly incomprehensible as it’s evolved. Naomi Wolf is a Wikileaks supporter (and has made some controversial statements as to the Assange Swedish charges, which were not discussed at all since they were irrelevant to the issue.) Toobin and Parker are both antagonists — and both trafficked in bizarre fearmongering and relied on awkward assertions of American exceptionalism to make their points. It’s interesting how that shakes out.

*And by the way — if I ever have to hire a TV lawyer for some reason, Spitzer, not Toobin, is my guy. His cross examination of Toobin there at the end was brilliant.

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It’s Cookie Time

by digby

‘Tis the night before Christmas Eve and if you aren’t shopping or wrapping you should be baking cookies.

Here’s an easy on to do if you aren’t a serious cookie baker but want to make something a little bit more special than the old Choco-chip (not that there’ sanything anything wrong with that.)

These are a little bit more old fashioned and “adult” than your usual sugar cookie:

* 2 1/2 cups flour, all purpose
* 1 teaspoon baking powder
* 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
* 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
* 1 1/4 cups granulated sugar
* 3/4 cup butter, room temperature
* 1/2 cup purchased eggnog
* 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
* 2 large egg yolks
* 2 to 3 teaspoons ground nutmeg (If you can grind your own nutmeg, it really makes a difference.)

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 300°. In a bowl combine flour, baking powder, cinnamon and nutmeg. Blend well with a whisk and set aside. In a large mixing bowl cream sugar and butter with an electric hand-held mixer. Add eggnog, vanilla and egg yolks; beat at medium speed until smooth. Add the flour mixture and beat at low speed just until dry ingredients are moistened. Drop by rounded teaspoons onto ungreased baking sheets, about 2 inches apart. Sprinkle lightly with nutmeg. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until bottoms are lightly browned. Remove to a flat surface with a spatula.

Or you could just put some rum or brandy in the eggnog and drink it instead. It’s all good.

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The Press And Social Security

by digby

Trudy Lieberman interviewed William Grieder about Social Security that’s worth reading in its entirety. But this point about media coverage is especially worth contemplating:

TL: Are reporters disconnected from the public?

WG: Reporters are so embedded in the established way of understanding things. They are distanced from people at large and don’t spend much time trying to see why ordinary people see things differently from the people in power—and why people are often right about things.

TL: Is this different than in the past?

WG: Yes. In the last twenty years, as media ownership became highly concentrated, the gulf between the governing elites, both in and out of government, and the broad range of ordinary citizens has gotten much worse. The press chose to side with the governing elites and look down on the citizenry as ignorant or irrational, greedy, or even nutty.

TL: Why is this so?

WG: The press is dangerously over-educated itself, in that reporters have developed different kinds of expertise themselves. And that brings them closer to their sources, more motivated to write for their approval. All this technocratic expertise encourages them to take a condescending view of the people they are writing for, especially in finance and economics. If all the elite experts assume Social Security is a problem, a reporter would lose respect if he or she seriously examined the counter arguments. Frankly, most political reporters don’t have a clue about the real facts. They write about Social Security as if it were just another welfare program. They do not seem to understand the surpluses are actually the savings of American workers—the money set aside for future retirement. This is virtuous behavior—the opposite of greed or the recklessness of financial elites.

[…}
TL: Who is representing the public in this debate?

WG: The same people who rallied the public against Social Security privatization in the Bush administration. They have organized again. Some are the same players. Labor is on the barricades. Some righteous members of Congress. But in general the mass media don’t go to those dissenting voices. Instead, they are reporting factual errors as correct opinion.

TL: What do you want the press to do?

WG: I am daring reporters to go and find out the truth about this and report it. I’m not asking them to draw big conclusions or to assert their opinions. Just be honest reporters. It’s so frustrating to see the coverage. I’m not asking reporters to change any minds. I’m just asking them to do some real reporting. I mean, go to the facts—the actuarial records—and talk to a variety of experts. Reporters ring up the same sources and ask them how to think about Social Security.

Sounds like a good idea to me.

But right now, you can’t feel very confident about any of that happening. This is from today’s Hardball:

Chris Matthews: Let me talk down the road the big stuff because we all know, gentlemen that the country has a 13 trillion dollar debt and we can talk about economic growth and we can all talk about economic growth the economy, we all know that sometimes it just doesn’t grow, some years it just doesn’t grow. There’s always going to be a business cycle, there’s always going to be downturns. So my question to you is, Todd, here’s the question. We saw what came out of that bipartisan commission just a few weeks ago. We saw the immediate knee jerk reaction of Nancy Pelosi, we saw the immediate reaction of some of the Republican members of the House. The president did get 14 of the 18 members, of that commission.

Is there a potential that he could cut deals with Coburn who is much respected on issues like fiscal policy and bringing in other leading Democrats as well, recognizing that that the appropriators won’t like it, that Pelosi won’t like it, that the unions won’t like it, that he has to get past those people or he will get nothing done on the fiscal area? If the president waits for the unions, if he waits for the usual interest groups to say yes, it will never get done. He has to form a coalition around them.

Todd Harris (GOP strategist): You’re absolutely right and I think the best way to do that will be to include some significant entitlement reform as part of that package

Matthews: Yeah

Todd Harris: .. because there’s no way to talk about deficit reduction without doing it. Until people in Washington are ready to have an adult conversation about entitlement all this talk about spending and the deficit is all a bunch of noise, because as we all know that’s where the money’s going.

Steve McMahon (Democratic strategist): I think you’re absolutely right. And for the president this year, coming out and basically saying that we’ve had some major accomplishments in the past two years and now we have to concentrate on the deficit and getting spending under control and working with Republicans just like he worked with them on the measures he just passed, he’ll benefit politically and the country will benefit over the long term. Because we can’t afford to continue on the path we’re on and it does seem to be that serious people on the left and the right are recognizing the importance of compromise. And the deficit commission had plenty in there for everybody to not like. But there’s also a path to fiscal sanity and I think we’ve got people ready to move that forward.

We’ve got Senator Corker and Senator Mark Warner in a bipartisan fashion to try to do something in the Senate working on that and I think we’re going to see some people like that who come from the business world into politics and who understand finance and understand the implications of what we’re doing.

Jesus, I sure hope Steve McMahon has just been spending too much time drinking the eggnog at Village holiday parties and isn’t speaking for the entire establishment. If he is, then my more cynical fears are correct and I’ve never wanted more to be wrong about anything more. (He did seem a little slurry, so maybe the nog was heavily spiked …)

If any of the reporters want to hear another view, here’s an excellent piece about the ramifications of that vaunted compromise payroll tax holiday by former congressman Robert Weiner.

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Clearing The Decks

by digby

Brian Beutler wonders why the Republicans didn’t fight harder on some of the lame duck agenda and concludes:

Republicans must at some level have understood that some of these things weren’t going away. DADT would’ve stayed on the agenda. 9/11 responders would have stayed on the agenda. DREAM will stay on the agenda. And I’m guessing they made the simple calculation that it would be easier and wiser to give Dems these victories now, rather than fight it out with them publicly next after the GOP takes over the House with a caucus that’s divided over these things.

Now the issues are off the table, and that creates more space for them to set the agenda.

I think this is right. And I think we know what that agenda is, don’t we?

I also believe that while DADT, START and the 9/11 responders bills were hostages they would have killed if they had to, they were ok with allowing them to live if they got the tax cuts, which set the table for everything that comes next. After all, DADT was endorsed by the military, START was endorsed by every Republican statesman dead or alive, including retired Generals by the bus load, and the 9/11 responders bill was to benefit a bunch of cops and firemen. At the end of the day, the GOP has always been a sucker for a man in a uniform.

Here’s how a Republican operative described the real dynamic today on MSNBC:

The reason that Republicans worked with Democrats this time around is because we’re talking about something like tax cuts, not the health care bill or the takeover of GM or some of the Big Government things that Republicans don’t philosophically agree with. We were finding compromises on things that Republicans already agreed with.

Karen Finney jumped in to say that the Republicans were left in a position of defending the wealthy at the expense of 98% of Americans to which the GOP operative replied: “yes and the Democrats jumped right on that.”

But it also raises an important question: what’s the Democratic agenda for the next congress anyway? There are certainly many things that would normally be on my wish list, but I don’t think a single one has even the slightest chance of passage.The tax deal was the one that set the template for more “getting things done.” And since the GOP is essentially a nihilist party and the president is anxious to get more of these bipartisan wins going into the election, it appears to me that liberals are going to find themselves in the unenviable position of having their main purpose being to stop bad compromises — which will squeeze them between their constituents and their president.

On the other hand, since the political establishment takes their votes for granted and frequently have rewarded the “sanctimonious purists” with derision and anger for failing to be proper cheerleaders (even as they dutifully fell in line) now that the House majority is gone, they don’t have a lot to lose. Maybe they’ll even come to relish being the flies in the ointment. Coalition building is a delicate game and it’s going to be very interesting to see if Obama and the Democrats can keep their factions balanced. I suspect they’ll be fairly successful at doing it, for a lot of reasons. But you never know.

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The Domestic Terrorists You’ve Never Heard Of

by digby

Nothing to see here folks, just move along …

Marion County jurors on Wednesday condemned Woodburn bank bombers Bruce and Joshua Turnidge to die by lethal injection for the 2008 murders of two police officers. The decision will send father and son to nearby Oregon State Penitentiary, the only cop killers on death row.

That’s where they belong, said Police Chief Scott Russell, who lost a leg in the explosion that ripped through the interior of a West Coast Bank branch in the town he’s sworn to protect.

[…]

More than 100 witnesses testified at the trials, which stretched from the first days of fall to the beginning of winter. Jurors heard a tale of two sad, dispirited men who were vocal in their contempt of government and police and thought the Obama administration would put increased restrictions on their right to bear arms.

The Turnidges were perpetually strapped for cash, facing yet another business failure as their biodiesel company bled money.

[…]

Prosecutors argued that the two men would pose a continuing threat to society — even in prison. Their crimes give them instant status in prison, they said, and other inmates might try to put their bomb-making knowledge to use once they were on the outside.

The state said the Turnidges’ views — described as racist, anti-government and anti-authority — were reasons to sentence the men to death. And they described the bombing as Bruce Turnidge’s “Timothy McVeigh moment.”

I hadn’t heard about this one. But you can add it to the growing list of domestic terrorists that nobody wants to acknowledge. But that’s just because they only hate black people and the government so it’s not like they’re “foreigners” or Muslims or anything scary.

It is ironic, however, that they were under tremendous financial pressure because their alternative energy company couldn’t get off the ground. Evidently, they were long time anti-government, gun nuts who were frustrated that they couldn’t make a buck on something that was promised as a big money maker by the lefty environmentalists these same people accuse of destroying their freedoms. Let’s just say that the confusion and panic among Americans is growing. Unfortunately, we have a demagogic right wing that’s appealing to people’s prejudices and fears and the results of that are sadly predictable.

(In case you’re counting, the right wing violence tally is well into double digits. But there was that nut who shot up the Discovery channel because he didn’t like overpopulation and thought all those Quiverfull and multiple birth shows were bad, so we’re supposed to think it’s even.)

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A Ray of Hope

by tristero

There’s been a bit of decent, ok, and not terrible news recently. But in a year that saw the passing of Captain Beefheart, not to mention the descent of our politics into realms even my most cynical and paranoid thoughts could barely imagine, there has been very little to crow about, let alone offer it any ice cream (Those In the Know understand my meaning).

Now along came this courtesy PZ Myers to brighten the holiday season:

Principal finding ‘We discovered that bumble-bees can use a combination of colour and spatial relationships in deciding which colour of flower to forage from. We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before. (Children from Blackawton)’.

Go ahead. Treat yourself and read the whole thing. You deserve it.

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Running For The Border

by digby

I’ve been predicting a full blown anti-immigrant election campaign for four years, so perhaps my credibility on this is shot. But it sure looks like 2012 might be the year it comes to pass:

It was billed, in part, as a forum for the 2012 Republican presidential field to speak directly to Hispanics — a replica of the vaunted Conservative Political Action Conference, but tailored to the fastest-growing slice of the electorate.

… the only potential presidential candidate confirmed to attend — so far — is Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney declined the invite. So did South Dakota Sen. John Thune, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and Texas Gov Rick Perry.

Evidently, Palin, Newtie, Barbour and the rest haven’t RSVPd, so there’s always a chance they won’t want the Pawlenty juggernaut to overwhelm them. But I have a sneaking suspicion they are most concerned with securing the Tea Party vote and they aren’t exactly … welcoming.

FYI: I’ve been receiving wingnut emails with stuff like this attached over the past month or so:

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