Month: September 2013

Big Money Agit-Prop posing as principle

by digby

Eric Boehlert has written up an excellent primer on the right wing propaganda campaign against Obamacare. It’s really quite astonishing when you see it all together. It even goes so far as to say that it will will allow “forced home inspections” by government agents and sex police questioning your sex life. (Obviously, that meant to scare the Limbaughian wingnut men because they clearly have no problem invading the sex lives of women.)

But Boehlert sees bigger implications for our political culture in all this and I think he’s right. (I wish I didn’t):

[T]he right wing’s almost hypnotic, monomaniacal focus on opposing health care reform has been matched, if not outstripped, by its relentless desire to purposely lie about the new law year after year after year. That’s not passion, that’s propaganda. It’s using mass media to spread willful lies and misinformation about public policy in hopes of advancing your own partisan cause…

The permanent misinformation model built to try to tear down Obamacare has troubling implications for future policy fights. Just as the Republicans’ radical attempt to shut down the entire federal government in an effort to defund an existing law has no precedence in modern American history, the accompanying four-year propaganda campaign is likely unmatched, too.
[…]
Based on the sheer breadth of these fabrications, taken in tandem with the duration over which they been told and retold, today’s health care scare campaign certainly ranks among the most intense ever produced in the U.S. It also represents an almost seamless production between the Republican Party and its dedicated allies in the press who have worked tirelessly as flaks and mouthpieces.

Over the years, the propaganda production has been built into a self-sustaining cottage industry that’s purposefully impervious to the truth. It’s also an enterprise that provides never-ending fundraising opportunities for Republican politicians, as well as endless hours of phony outrage for right-wing media outlets.

But here’s what is disturbing. Unlike sprawling controversies under the previous Democratic administration, in which Bill Clinton’s professional enemies at least pretended to follow a paper trail that eventually led nowhere with regards to Whitewater and Travelgate and other manufactured “scandals,” today’s myth-makers largely turn a blind eye to that model.

There’s no “investigation” that’s fueling the health care freak out. There are no new revelations that would logically prompt this kind of hysterical strategy for a law that hasn’t even been implemented yet. (In fact, unfolding news about the plan has often been quite positive.) Instead, it’s a propaganda campaign designed to inhabit the conservative bubble that has come to define Republican failures under Obama. [my emphasis — d]

If right-wing media consumers wanted to delude themselves into thinking Mitt Romney would win the White House in a “landslide,” of wanted to waste years focusing on the transparently false allegation that the president was born in Africa, that was their choice. Those needless pursuits often provided comic relief for those who watched conservatives be knowingly conned by their media heroes.

But the deceitful health care propaganda campaign is different. It’s a muscular, relentless attempt to undo an historic piece of legislation that affects tens of millions of Americas, and it’s a campaign built upon an armada of lies. Whitewater, and the assembled “scandals” around it, was a concerted effort to destroy the Clinton presidency. This production is designed to do real damage to America’s health care system, and with the shutdown threat, to harm the economy, too.

I would guess this has more to do with the gerrymandering and the stovepiping of information through right wing media than anything else. Staying in their far right bubble is actually the smart move for these guys (and gals.) All their constituents are hearing are these lies…er, propaganda through this destructive feedback loop. They have no good reason to get out of it and, frankly, most of them don’t want to.

We keep going back to 1859 and 1860 to draw parallels, not because we’re on the verge of a shooting civil war but because just as the antebellum South lived in its own little world believing each of its men had the fighting ability of 10 northeners, so too does the modern conservative movement believe it has the power to take over the government through hostage taking and sheer will. It’s a very strange state of mind and perhaps it’s a universal one, I don’t know. I do know that it is an “exceptional” All-American attitude among a certain subset of egomaniacs who have been with us for a long, long time.

The right wing objection to Obamacare is built on a huge stack of lies and propaganda. It is a conservative policy originally designed by the Heritage Foundation. This tactic of hostage taking, in their hands, undertaken for dishonest, purely political reasons, is therefore inherently illegitimate.

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A little reminder about the biggest economic problem in America

by David Atkins

It’s easy to get so bogged down in the latest outrageous news of the day that one can forget about the context in which the daily arguments on Capitol Hill play out.

As House Republicans plan on shutting down the government to oppose expanded access to corporate health insurance while demanding cuts to social safety nets, it’s important to remember that we’re already in an era of record income inequality that the vast majority of Americans can sense somewhat, but still don’t realize:

We are living in another gilded age of rampant greed. Conservative talking points that inequality doesn’t matter because the economic pie can expand infinitely have been proven to be a joke. We have a moral and economic crisis on our collective hands.

But Republicans are so crazy that all we can talk about is how much to cut from our safety net in order to placate them lest they shut down the government and throw the economy further into tailspin.

It’s totally insane.

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Chris Hayes explains Obamacare For Fox and Friends

by digby

Not that they have any interest in reality at the moment. The Republicans have worked themselves into a frenzy that resembles the adolescent girls who accused the Salem townspeople of witchcraft at this point. This is how they look:

I doubt they can attribute the GOP’s mass hallucination to some kind of grain fungus but maybe someone should investigate whether somebody put some acid in the brownies or something.

Just Get Me Home

by tristero

Spoilers ahead.

Up ’til the end, Breaking Bad told us to expect that not all was right with the world. But the last episode told us:

1. There is a cosmic scale of justice where the bad guys all die and the good guys all live.

2. The rich can be scared, but never seriously harmed.

I could not have predicted that such an unpredictable show – where everything was called into question, including the very notion of calling everything into question – would end in such a conventional fashion.

Oh, and “Felina” turned out just to be an anagram for “Finale.”

But really, it was just one episode, and not an important one at that. The entire series is an extraordinary achievement.

By the way, why is Buffy  rarely if ever mentioned these days when critics tick off the masterpieces of TV’s Golden Age? I have my theories…

Ashleigh Banfield, still kicking the right asses and taking the right names

by digby

Ashleigh Banfield hands two of the most odious MOC’s a righteous smackdown — and they do not like it.

Banfield destroyed her career by telling the truth a few years back. She’s made a long slow comeback and it’s good to see that the lesson she learned from all that wasn’t to be a nice little girl and keep her mouth shut.

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Who’s hurting national security now?

by digby

So it turns out that insider bragging about thwarted terrorist plots has proved more harmful to our national security than the Snowden leaks:

As the nation’s spy agencies assess the fallout from disclosures about their surveillance programs, some government analysts and senior officials have made a startling finding: the impact of a leaked terrorist plot by Al Qaeda in August has caused more immediate damage to American counterterrorism efforts than the thousands of classified documents disclosed by Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor.

Since news reports in early August revealed that the United States intercepted messages between Ayman al-Zawahri, who succeeded Osama bin Laden as the head of Al Qaeda, and Nasser al-Wuhayshi, the head of the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, discussing an imminent terrorist attack, analysts have detected a sharp drop in the terrorists’ use of a major communications channel that the authorities were monitoring. Since August, senior American officials have been scrambling to find new ways to surveil the electronic messages and conversations of Al Qaeda’s leaders and operatives.

“The switches weren’t turned off, but there has been a real decrease in quality” of communications, said one United States official, who like others quoted spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence programs.

That’s not to say that the “senior” government officials aren’t much more upset about Snowden’s revelations. After all, they were embarrassing and that’s the worst possible thing that could ever happen. Because: credibility, message sending, face-saving, all the things that really matter:

Senior American officials say that Mr. Snowden’s disclosures have had a broader impact on national security in general, including counterterrorism efforts. This includes fears that Russia and China now have more technical details about the N.S.A. surveillance programs. Diplomatic ties have also been damaged, and among the results was the decision by Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, to postpone a state visit to the United States in protest over revelations that the agency spied on her, her top aides and Brazil’s largest company, the oil giant Petrobras.

The communication intercepts between Mr. Zawahri and Mr. Wuhayshi revealed what American intelligence officials and lawmakers have described as one of the most serious plots against American and other Western interests since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. It prompted the closing of 19 United States Embassies and consulates for a week, when the authorities ultimately concluded that the plot focused on the embassy in Yemen.

Just sayin’ …

Update: A different perspective offered here by McClatchy although it doesn’t change the point that the Snowden revelations have embarrassed the NSA and the government rather than harmed national security.

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QOTD: Felix Salmon

by digby

Besides, banks shouldn’t be obscenely profitable: they’re intermediaries, and in an efficient economy their profits should be quite easily competed away. When bank profits are high, that’s a sign that the bank in question is extracting rents from the economy, rather than helping it to grow.

Important point, don’t you think?

Anyway, that’s just a throwaway line in a must-read post about a CNBC appearance by Alex Pareene (what were they thinking?) in which he takes these delusional greedheads downtown.  It’s awesome all the way around.

The rest of the interview is a glorious exercise in watching CNBC anchors simply implode in disbelief when faced with the idea that JP Morgan in general, and Jamie Dimon in particular, might be anything other than a glorious icon of capitalist success. In the world of CNBC, the stock chart tells you everything you need to know, while the New York Times is a highly untrustworthy organ of dissent and disinformation.

A thing of beauty:

I hear tell that nobody under 55 watches CNBC anymore, not even the Wall Street cowboys. It’s just another insular little corner for rich white guys (and the money honeys who love them.)

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Premature anti-freakshow


by digby

I said this on twitter earlier, but  realized I needed to provide some examples. Many of the mainstream pundits who eye-rolled and tut-tutted bloggers and activists for failing to understand the ways of the world are now commonly recycling ideas we were discussing half a decade ago.

Bill Keller:

What’s happening here ain’t exactly clear. But I have a notion: The Republicans are finally having their ’60s. Half a century after the American left experienced its days of rage, its repudiation of the political establishment, conservatives are having their own political catharsis. Ted Cruz is their spotlight-seeking Abbie Hoffman. (The Texas senator’s faux filibuster last week reminded me of Hoffman’s vow to “levitate” the Pentagon using psychic energy.) The Tea Party is their manifesto-brandishing Students for a Democratic Society. Threatening to blow up America’s credit rating is their version of civil disobedience. And Obamacare is their Vietnam.

You don’t say.

Remember when they all had the vapors over Marcos calling his book American Taliban? Check out the Village Miss Manners Ruth Marcus calling the same folks “tiny terrorists”?


Ruth Marcus…

I won’t even mention those who spilled gallons of ink deriding liberal bloggers for being radical partisans just a few years back who are now lauded as oracles for their columns writing exactly what those liberal radicals were writing at the time.

I guess this is one of those times to remind yourself that nobody is ever rewarded for being the first to be right. I certainly won’t hold my breath waiting for an apology.  In the end it’s a good thing.  Still you have to wonder what might have happened if the mainstream media and the liberal establishment had paid closer attention before it got to this point. We were running around with our hair on fire and they told us hippies to go take a shower and get a haircut.

If the Republicans are now having their version of the 60s, the Democratic Party and its spokespeople like Marcus ran from the real 60s long after it made any sense. And in doing so they ended up enabling this crazed right wing we see today. Every move they made to the right in fear of being labeled “radical” made the right move even farther. Look where we are now.

I tend to think “generations” is a pretty useless term, but in this one sense it’s vitally important.  The 60s marked everyone who lived through them and we’ve been living in reaction to them in one way or another ever since. When the late cohort of baby boomers like myself finally die out (it won’t be that long …) maybe the country can finally reset.

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Where’s the process story media when you need them?

by David Atkins

Most of the critiques that partisan bloggers (particularly on the progressive side) make against traditional journalists can be boiled down to two main arguments. First is the “both sides do it” ethic that eschews facts in order to appear unbiased. Second is the focus on political process stories over substance stories.

To be sure, the “both sides do it” press has been dreadful in covering the impending shutdown, acting as though there were a negotiating stalemate at play rather than a one-sided hostage taking of the American government and economy.

But remarkably, the press’ beloved process stories are scarce in recent days. It’s easy to find substantive articles detailing the consequences of a government shutdown. But the usual process stories detailing the blow by blow moves and counter moves aren’t as ubiquitous as usual.

That’s partly because the process story here is very unusual but fairly simple: Republicans are using the power of the purse in the House in make hostage-taking demands they could not get under normal legislative circumstances. An analysis of the process at work here would look very bad for conservatives. Journalists in turn would worry about accusations of bias for telling the truth.

Which goes to show that the main reason we usually get process stories over substance stories is not just that they’re easier to write, but that substance stories about which side wants to provide health insurance to people versus which side wants to cut Social Security and ban birth control would look fairly damning to Republicans.

But when the usually dull process story makes Republicans look even worse, then suddenly the process story goes out the window.

It isn’t bias if it’s true. The traditional media should spend more pixels and ink making clear to the public just how unusual and outrageous it is for one party to holding the entire government hostage like this–particularly less than a year away from an election in which the hostage takers lost handily.

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Blue Sunday

by digby

Tonight some will be eating Blue Meth donuts:

I will be having Blue Meth margaritas:

Enjoy the ultra-violence.