Beavis And Butthead Republicans
by digby
I’m beginning to think that Limbaugh is doing this in order to make clowns like Cantor and Steele look statesmanlike by comparison. It’s working.
h/t to bill
"what digby sez..."
Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
Too Rich To Fail
by digby
The financial giant Goldman Sachs spent tens of millions of dollars to bail out two senior executives last fall who were short on cash, according to the bank’s proxy statement filed on Friday. In an unusual move, Goldman bought back stakes in some internal investment funds from Jon Winkelried, the bank’s co-chief operating officer, and Gregory K. Palm, its general counsel. Both executives are among the largest shareholders in the bank, owning more than a million shares each, and directors were concerned that a large sale of Goldman shares by the two men would alarm investors during a period of market turmoil, according to a person briefed on the matter. To avoid the stock sales, Goldman paid Mr. Winkelried, who retired last month, $19.7 million to purchase about 30 percent of his investments in internal hedge funds and private equity investments. The bank paid $38.3 million to Mr. Palm for about a quarter of his investments. Soon after the bank aided the two executives, Warren E. Buffett invested $5 billion in Goldman, and the bank’s top four executives agreed not to sell more than 10 percent of their stock for three years. […]
Goldman was the last Wall Street firm to go public, and many partners there, current and former, have held onto their stock since the offering 10 years ago because they did not want to pay the large tax bills attached to the profits that would accrue from sales of their shares. Some partners and other employees there borrowed against their stock for living expenses or to make other investments in areas like hedge funds and private equity funds. In a much-noticed sign of the times, Mr. Winkelried, a former investment banker, put his estate in Nantucket on the market last fall for $55 million. He has since lowered the price. He also owns a home in Short Hills, N.J., and a horse farm in Colorado. Mr. Winkelried spent 27 years at the bank, working in areas like leveraged finance and rates and commodities before being named a senior executive. Mr. Palm still works at Goldman, where he has been head or co-head of the legal department since 1992, when he joined the bank from the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. In 2007, he endowed a professorship in economics at his alma mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Last fall, he represented Goldman before a Senate panel that focused in part on bank compensation.
What a great business for the guys at the top. No matter what happens they always wind up getting bailed out to the tune of millions of dollars.
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The Bucks Stop There
by digby
Via Atrios, I read this little tale of “bonuses”, a story which is happening in different businesses all over the country:
Though the company teetered on the verge of bankruptcy at the time, this past December Philadelphia Media Holdings awarded bonuses to CEO Brian P. Tierney, vice president of finance Richard Thayer and Daily News publisher Mark Frisby. PMH board chair Bruce Toll confirmed bonuses of $350,000 for Tierney and $150,000 each for Thayer and Frisby in a phone conversation on Friday. Reached by phone, Frisby told Philadelphia, “The numbers are wrong. But I’m not going to give you a number.”[…]“I forgot,” he said. “I’m involved with something like 20 companies, and [when Philadelphia first called] you were asking me to remember what happened in December. But when I asked around, some other board members reminded me we had approved the bonuses.” PMH filed for bankruptcy in February. Toll, of the homebuilding Toll Brothers company, confirmed that the PMH board knew the company¹s fiscal situation was dire. “The financial condition of the papers was obviously not good,” said Toll. “We knew what was going to happen sooner or later.” So why give out $650,000 in bonuses? “We thought it was deserved,” he said. “But we can’t get into the details because we’re involved in bankruptcy proceedings.” It had earlier been revealed that Tierney received a raise in December, just before Christmas, boosting his pay roughly 40 percent to $850,000. The company initially defended the raise, which was revealed in its bankruptcy filing, by saying that Tierney had taken on extra responsibilities since his initial deal had been struck. [He later gave back the raise when it was publicly revealed.]
The boyz take care of each other. That’s what the club is for. There’s nothing particularly unusual about rewarding failure like this and it’s certainly not unique to this period in time:
Embattled Home Depot Chief Executive Robert L. Nardelli, under fire from stockholders for earning hundreds of millions at the same time the company’s stock fell and market share dropped, resigned suddenly today and will walk away with a severance package of $210 million, the company announced….During his tenure, Nardelli earned $240 million in salary, bonuses and stock options. ….During his leadership of the nation’s second largest retail chain after Wal-Mart, Home Depot lost market share to home-improvement rival Lowe’s Cos. and its stock price declined almost 8 percent.
In the case of the auto companies (GM and Chrysler) or the behemoth financial and insurance companies we now have the taxpayers footing the bills for this nonsense, which makes it a matter for public debate and scrutiny. In the past, the excuse was that if the shareholders of public corporations don’t mind getting repeatedly taken to the cleaners by a bunch of incompetents, it’s not really a public problem. And hey, a high tide lifts all boats, so if these guys skim a nice, huge dollop of the cream for themselves, there’s no harm in it if the economy is growing strong.
Except there is, if you care at all about justice. Even in the best of times, wages were rising for average workers at a snails pace and the only thing keeping them from actually losing pace was easy credit. All that’s gone now and businesses of all kinds are in distress and trying to cut costs. And yet the fat cats are still giving each other big bonuses.
Meanwhile, back in Philadelphia:
Now comes news of the bonuses, which were awarded just two months after the company’s unions voted to postpone $25-a-week raises for each of its members at the request of PMH.
This is the behavior that brings out the pitchforks.
People are being asked to make all kinds of concessions these days. They are being asked to cut back hours and pay and forego raises and benefits. They are taking on extra work because the companies aren’t replacing employees who leave. Reports of mistreatment in the workplace are way up. They are trapped in jobs they hate, with houses they can’t afford, desperately afraid to get sick because if they lose their jobs they lose their health care. And yet highly paid executives are insisting that they are entitled to huge sums of money.This attitude of entitlement is what’s infuriating average citizens and legitimately so. These people are supposed to be masterful leaders and they are instead acting like pampered Chinese princes cloistered from the rest of the world behind the darkened windows of their limousines and the walls of their gated communities. They honestly don'[t understand just how angry people are at this display of arrogance and aristocratic privilege. It’s astonishing. .
Creating Jobs
by digby
So this morning David Gregory, in the great tradition of his forebear Tim Russert, was just a regular workin’ dude interviewin’ the big wigs about the troubles of average Murikins jess like him:
MR. GREGORY: My mother out in California, I presume, is watching this morning. She’s like a lot of Americans, worried about her job and wondering why not just bank lending, but something called nonbank lending, securitization–what is that, and why does that matter to her?
Just like Joe and Jane American everywhere, Dave’s mom is fearing for her financial future and would like an explanation for why she finds herself feeling so insecure.
I have an idea. Maybe Dave could get his wife, the former General Counsel for Fannie Mae, to explain all this high flying financial mumbo jumbo to her mother-in-law. And if worse comes to worse and Ma Gregory loses her job, maybe Dave could hire her to clean his multi-million dollar Nantucket vacation home.
Torture Metrics
by digby
Dick Cheney is going to hell. But we knew that. And so are Bush and Rice and all the rest who insisted on torturing Abu Zubaida, a brain damaged man who was so desperate that he made up fantastical terrorist plots just to make the torture stop. They not only committed a war crime, they made us all less safe by sending investigators all over the world on wild goose chases.
This story was always pooh-poohed by administration officials, who insisted that the information this man with serious memory problems gave under torture was vital in stopping many terrorist attacks. But they lied. The Washington Post provides some new details in this story in today’s paper:
When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of him. The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads. In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida — chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates — was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said. Moreover, within weeks of his capture, U.S. officials had gained evidence that made clear they had misjudged Abu Zubaida. President George W. Bush had publicly described him as “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations,” and other top officials called him a “trusted associate” of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and a major figure in the planning of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. None of that was accurate, the new evidence showed. Abu Zubaida was not even an official member of al-Qaeda, according to a portrait of the man that emerges from court documents and interviews with current and former intelligence, law enforcement and military sources. Rather, he was a “fixer” for radical Muslim ideologues, and he ended up working directly with al-Qaeda only after Sept. 11 — and that was because the United States stood ready to invade Afghanistan.
It goes on to lay out Zubaida’s story in detail, and although it features one counterterrorism official who clings to the idea that the torture was effective, it quotes other high level officeials unequivocally saying the torture was counter-productive and wasted many valuable resources. Read the whole thing.
It highlights something that I haven’t seen discussed much, but which interests me as we try to get a handle on how something like this gets approves and becomes instutionalized. They report:
As weeks passed after the capture without significant new confessions, the Bush White House and some at the CIA became convinced that tougher measures had to be tried. The pressure from upper levels of the government was “tremendous,” driven in part by the routine of daily meetings in which policymakers would press for updates, one official remembered. “They couldn’t stand the idea that there wasn’t anything new,” the official said. “They’d say, ‘You aren’t working hard enough.’ There was both a disbelief in what he was saying and also a desire for retribution — a feeling that ‘He’s going to talk, and if he doesn’t talk, we’ll do whatever.’ ” The application of techniques such as waterboarding — a form of simulated drowning that U.S. officials had previously deemed a crime — prompted a sudden torrent of names and facts. Abu Zubaida began unspooling the details of various al-Qaeda plots, including plans to unleash weapons of mass destruction
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard that the Bush administration was obsessed with getting a volume of information, caring little about the quality or reliability of it. neither is it the first time that we’ve heard that this pressure came from the highest reaches of the administration itself. Back in 2005, I posted this:
Last week I wrote a post featuring Lt. Col Stephen Jordan and his testimony that the White House had been “impressed” with the “flow of information” coming out of Abu Ghraib. Today, Spencer Ackerman, pinch hitting for Josh Marshall at Talking Points, references this USA Today article about the same fellow, connecting many of the same dots and more.
There seems to be a great deal of emphasis placed on the numbers game. From the USA Today article:
Sergeant First Class Roger Brokaw, told the paper. “How many raids did you do last week? How many prisoners were arrested? How many interrogations were conducted? How many [intelligence] reports were written? It was incredibly frustrating.”
From the Christian Science Monitor article I referenced in my earlier post:
Specialist Monath and others say they were frustrated by intense pressure from Colonel Pappas and his superiors – Lt. Gen Ricardo Sanchez and his intelligence officer, Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast – to churn out a high quantity of intelligence reports, regardless of the quality. “It was all about numbers. We needed to send out more intelligence documents whether they were finished or not just to get the numbers up,” he said. Pappas was seen as demanding – waking up officers in the middle of the night to get information – but unfocused, ordering analysts to send out rough, uncorroborated interrogation notes. “We were scandalized,” Monath said. “We all fought very hard to counter that pressure” including holding up reports in editing until the information could be vetted.
General Ripper, as well, seems to have been mighty impressed with the quantity of intelligence he got from prisoners in Guantanamo after he “took the gloves off.” From January’s issue of Vanity Fair:
According to General Miller, Gitmo’s importance is growing with amazing rapidity: “Last month we gained six times as much intelligence as we did in January 2003. I’m talking about high-value intelligence here, distributed round the world.”
Daily success or failure in guerilla wars is notoriously difficult to assess. Unlike a war for territory you cannot say that you took a certain hill or town. Political types are always looking for some measurement, some sign that they are succeeding (or failing.)
Billmon noted this back in October in an interesting post on Rumsfeld’s angst at being unable to assess success or failure in the WOT:
Above all, Rumsfeld cries out for “metrics” that can be used to measure progress in such a war:
“Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror,” he wrote. “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?”
Billmon makes the obvious comparison between Rummy and the most recent war criminal sec-def, Robert McNamara, concluding:
The same mindset also spawned McNamara’s preferred metric: the infamous “body count.” In that earlier, more naive, era, it hadn’t yet occurred to management theorists that numeric targets can quickly become bureaucratic substitutes for real objectives, such as winning wars. So McNamara (and the military) had to learn it the hard way, as industrious field officers dispatched soldiers to count graves in Vietnamese civilian cemetaries in order to hit their weekly numbers.
I’m not sure what the equivalent might be today, although Rumsfeld’s memo points in a possible direction when it suggests the creation of a private foundation that could fund “moderate” madrassas (Islamic schools) to counteract the radical ones. Perhaps someday we’ll have a “moderate student count,” in which hard-pressed CIA officers dispatch agents to count child laborers in Pakistani sweat shops in order to hit their weekly numbers.
It looks to me as if they found a simpler metric than that. Like the mediocre, hack bureaucrats they are, they decided that they would guage success or failure — certainly they would report to the White House success or failure — based upon the sheer numbers of raids, arrests, interrogations, reports, confessions and breakdowns achieved, regardless of whether any of it resulted in good intel or enhanced security anywhere.
This was the only metric they could conceive of and in order to get those numbers up they had to detain large numbers of innocent people and torture them for false information to fill the endless reports of success on the ground in Afghanistan, Gitmo and Iraq. They could hoist up a huge pile of paper in a meeting with their president and say, “look at how much intelligence we’re getting. We’re really getting somewhere.”
McNamara quotes TS Eliot at the end of The Fog Of War:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first timeWell, not everybody apparently. Thirty years after the hell of Vietnam, it’s the same shit, different fools. Lyndon Johnson is laughing his ass off in hell.
In the case of Zubayda there seems to be another element as well. They were desperate to keep up the fiction that Al Qaeda was the outsized foe they’d built them up to be. If they were merely a dangerous little gang of criminals rather than a deadly global army of supervillians, it would be hard to justify the spending of trillions on unnecessary wars and suspending inconvenient portions of the constitution. These Vietnam chickenhawks didn’t want to hear anything that would imply that they weren’t fighting the war of all wars.
They knew these were false confessions and fictional plots and cynically used them to keep up the sense of panic — even among themselves — that fueled their global ambitions and fed their damaged egos. Ultimately they failed in that, not because they actually did anything that kept the babies safe, but because the American people just don’t have the attention span to stay panicked about anything for very long. Once the spell broke, there was nothing left but the metrics.
Saturday Night At The Movies
Flowers of bro-mance
By Dennis Hartley
Oh, bloody hell…not another Rush tribute band
Humorist Matt Groening once observed: “Sex is funny. The French are a funny people. Then why is it that no French sex comedies are funny?” On the other hand, you have Roger Ebert, who once lamented about “a trend in which Hollywood buys French comedies and experiments on them to see if they can be made into English with all the humor taken out.” I generally concur with both those sentiments, but I think I have found the exception to Groening’s and Ebert’s rules- in the guise of a smart, funny and warm French comedy, that has inspired an equally smart, funny and warm American remake.
Okay, so Patrice Leconte’s Mon Meilleur Ami (which I reviewed here) was not a “sex” comedy, nor was it a huge hit with critics or audiences (I caught flak from some readers for including it in my Top 10 films list for 2007). I’m not here to gloat-but obviously, “someone” grokked Leconte’s film to be worthy of a Hollywood makeover, and as a vehicle for Paul Rudd, who has become the “go to” guy to portray wry romantic comedy leads. I’m here to tell you that I Love You, Man is all that (and a large orange soda).
Rudd is Peter Klaven, a somewhat self-effacing yet amiably good-natured Los Angeles real estate agent who has decided to pop the question to his ladylove, Zooey (Rashida Jones). The bubbly Zooey immediately begins enthusiastically phoning up a bevy of close girlfriends to share the happy news. When she asks her new fiancé why he isn’t jumping right on the horn to tell all his pals as well, he mumbles some vague excuse and appears eager to change the subject. It turns out that while Peter is adept at meeting women, he is more diffident when it comes to interacting with other guys; he can’t readily name anyone who qualifies as a “bro”, nor can he seem to cough up a candidate to be Best Man at their wedding. Someone is going to have to come up with an Action Plan.
Desperate to find himself a good bud on such short notice, Peter seeks assistance from his gay brother (SNL’s Andy Samberg), who encourages him to try some “man dates”. Zooey pitches in as well, helpfully brokering a “poker night” invite for Peter from her best friend’s reluctant husband (a skulking Jon Favreau, hilariously effective here playing a supreme dickweed). Most of these intros and invites end in embarrassment and/or some form of social disaster. Just when all seems lost, a Dude ex Machina arrives in the form of a free-spirited man child named Sydney Fife (Jason Segel). Teach me to dance, Zorba.
In its best moments (and this is high praise), I was reminded of Barry Levinson’s Diner
Rudd and Segel (who previously teamed up in Forgetting Sarah Marshall 
Can Of War Crimes
by digby
Dday is blogging like a madman over at Washington Monthly so be sure to check in over there to see what he and the rest of the gang are up to.
He references this amazing story about Spain potentially indicting the Cheney Gang for war crimes and writes.
The amount of material connecting these six to the creation, authorization and direction of state-sanctioned illegal torture, based on perverse and discredited reasoning, is voluminous, and given the record of Garzon, I would imagine this will lead to arrest warrants. This story shows once again the growing global unease with the implicit policy of the United States to conveniently forget the torture and other abuses of the Bush regime. In England, police are investigating whether British intelligence officers knew about and prolonged the torture of Binyam Mohamed, the recently released Guantanamo detainee. As Glenn Greenwald notes, other countries have not abandoned their commitment to the rule of law.[…]The end of the NY Times article shows why the US can hardly claim that Spain is acting irresponsibly beyond its own borders and violating the soveriegnty of other nations, because in one recent case we did almost exactly the same thing:
The United States for the first time this year used a law that allows for the prosecution in the United States of torture in other countries. On Jan. 10, a Miami court sentenced Charles Taylor, the former Liberian leader, to 97 years in a federal prison for torture, even though the crimes were committed in Liberia. Last October, when the Miami court handed down the conviction, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey applauded the ruling and said: “This is the first case in the United States to charge an individual with criminal torture. I hope this case will serve as a model to future prosecutions of this type.”
So do I.
Me too.
I honestly think they opened a can of worms that the United State government may end up wishing they’d dealt with themselves. Wars have been started on less provocation. We’ve even started some of them.
Compromise
by digby
Fred Clarkson, doing his usual superlative job of tracking the religious right, has noticed a new approach to framing the abortion issue by some Catholic groups. It illustrates once again just how sophisticated the anti-abortion industry has become in shifting its marketing tactics to fit changing political circumstances. They operate strategically in both the long term and the short term, constantly reevaluating their tactics and tweaking them as necessary. (American business could learn something from them at this point.)
Clarkson has seen a new set of talking points emerge that builds upon some of the changing rhetoric on the culture war in the last couple of years as Democrats rushed to embrace the notion that they need to find a middle ground on abortion rights (and absurdly held that anti-abortion zealots would sign on to increasing access to birth control as a compromise.)
He writes:
I first encountered their screed in the form of an op-ed in the Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper, which was promoted by the abortion reduction advocacy group, Faith in Public Life. Then it was featured on SojoNet and promoted in an e-blast to their national list. This article is titled: “What Makes Liberals and Conservatives Angry? Abortion Reduction”. In this article I learned that any of us who disagree with the authors are ipso facto, making “`the perfect’ the enemy of `the good.'”
This is very clever stuff. They are piggy-backing on the Obama campaign’s rhetoric of post-partisanship and are placing their position as being the common sense “middle ground” that conventional wisdom has been telling us for the last year is exactly what the people want. Clarkson continues:
Common sense tells us that just because Gehring and Campbell claim to represent a moderate and responsible middle between two alleged extremes, does not necessarily mean that in fact they do. And indeed, the amount of invective they were able to cram into a short space in the service of their strawman arguments, should give pause to anyone who might be inclined to consider whether their views are, in fact, moderate or reasonable. Here is a sampler of terms they use in discussing those of us who disagree with them: “malign,” “righteous zeal,” “absolutist devotion,” “predictable to the absurd,” “demonization” “hardened agendas” and – my personal favorite — a “scorched earth rhetorical style.” They conclude with a call to the rest of us to “embrace a spirit of greater humility, compassion and critical introspection…” It was not hard to figure out where I, (as one of those who has written critically about the politics of abortion reduction) fit on Gehring and Campbell’s enemies list. I must be among that notorious lot of unnamed “liberal bloggers” who allegedly “slam Catholics and evangelicals working on this approach as radical ‘anti-choice’ hardliners cozying up to the Religious Right.” I say “allegedly” because Gehring and Campbell offer no examples and make no effort to actually address any of our points.
They could have named me too. I do believe that Catholics and evangelicals who are working with the Religious Right to outlaw abortion are worthy of criticism. If they were operating in good faith, they would admit that.
I certainly don’t oppose greater access to birth control and better sex education and income assistance. As a liberal I was for such things before they were cool. But you don’t have to be clairvoyant to see that they believe this will lead to a “compromise” in which they agree to make birth control more accessible, and we agree that abortion should be illegal.But that’s not a compromise, it’s a capitulation on a fundamental human right to control your own body for the opportunity to have something (birth control) that people should have anyway as a matter of common decency. Despite what Lord Saletan insists, the need for abortion is not just a matter of stupid, promiscuous girls not understanding the seriousness of unprotected sex. Its the result of the most basic human drive there is and will always be necessary even, sometimes, for women who do everything “right.” And there is no judge on the planet, not even Will Saletan or the pope, who is in a position to judge which women those are.
This fantasy middle ground exists only for those who think that if only women would be responsible there would be no abortions. I think we already tried that. Before Roe vs Wade, unwed motherhood was verboten, female sexuality was considered dirty and women who got inconveniently pregnant were shunned. Society placed a very, very high value on female chastity and fidelity and women certainly weren’t stupid or lacked understanding of the consequences. And yet millions of women had sex and got pregnant and had back alley abortions anyway.
Now we have legal abortion, unwed motherhood is practically the norm, female sexuality is open and accepted and birth control is advertised on television. And yet millions of women still have sex, get pregnant and have abortions. The difference is that they don’t have to die in some seedy motel when they get one and they aren’t shunned and treated like whores for doing something that every human animal on the planet is programmed to do.
Brazil still outlaws abortion except in the case of rape or to save the mother’s life, as do a many other Catholic countries, with the predictably disasterous results:
The number of legal abortions of girls ages 10 to 14 more than doubled last year to 49, up from 22 in 2007, the Ministry of Health reported. That was out of 3,050 legal abortions performed last year in a country of more than 190 million. But the vast majority of Brazil’s abortions are not legal. The Ministry of Health estimates about one million unsafe or clandestine abortions every year. Brazil’s abortion laws are among the strictest in Latin America. Only Chile, El Salvador and Nicaragua, which have banned abortion outright for any reason, are stricter, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights, which supports abortion rights. In some parts of the region, most notably Mexico City, where first-trimester abortions are now legal, laws have been relaxed. But in other areas and countries, legislators have sought to toughen the restrictions on abortion.Twenty years ago, Brazil had just one center to perform abortions. Today, beyond the 55 clinics that can perform them, another 400 or so treat patients that have been sexually abused.
If anyonee belives that every one of those one million illegal abortions could have been prevented with better access to birth control, I want to know what they’re smoking.
That story, btw, is actually about this, which renders the church unqualified to make moral judgments about any of this in my view:
While much of Brazil has been riled by the case of a 9-year-old girl who aborted twins this month after claiming her stepfather raped her, her ordeal was an all too familiar one at the clinic. The girl’s story of rape and pregnancy at such a young age seemingly caught the nation off guard, reviving a tense debate over reproductive rights in a country with more Catholics than any other. But doctors, clinic workers and other experts say her case is symptomatic of a widespread problem of sexual abuse of under-age girls — one that has long been neglected and may be getting worse. “Unfortunately, this is becoming more and more common,” said Daniela Pedroso, a psychologist who has worked here for 11 years.Weighing just 79 pounds and barely four feet tall, the 9-year-old girl, from Alagoinha, a town in the northeast, underwent an abortion when she was 15 weeks pregnant at one of the 55 centers authorized to perform the procedure in Brazil. Abortion is legal here only in cases of rape or when the mother’s life is at risk. The doctors’ actions set off a swirl of controversy. A Brazilian archbishop summarily excommunicated everyone involved — the doctors for performing the abortion and the girl’s mother for allowing it — except for the stepfather, who stands accused of raping the girl over a number of years.“The law of God is above any human law,” said José Cardoso Sobrinho, the archbishop, who argued that while rape was bad, abortion was even worse. The storm intensified when a high-ranking Vatican official supported the excommunications. But then a conference of Brazilian bishops overruled Archbishop Sobrinho, saying that the child’s mother had acted “under pressure” from doctors who said the girl would die if she carried the babies to term, and that only doctors who “systematically” performed abortions should be thrown out of the church. Finally, the Vatican’s top bioethics official, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, also criticized the initial stance, saying the “credibility of our teaching took a blow as it appeared, in the eyes of many, to be insensitive, incomprehensible and lacking mercy.”
Seriously, if they had this much trouble sorting out the correct moral stand on that, then I honestly don’t see how they can possibly have any credibility on this subjectat all. (You are, of course, allowed to believe whatever you want …)
Clarkson goes on to point out that the second of these new talking points is to frame the issue as between religious and non-religious, which is incorrect of course. Abortion rights are supported by a majority of Americans and a very large majority of Americans describe themselves as being religious. Anyone can do the math from there.
The third new talking point is that “President Barack Obama has made abortion reduction a priority of his Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.” That’s not correct. The Democratic platform went a different direction, which I wrote about here, and changed the emphasis to reducing unwanted pregnancies and therefore, the need for abortion. As Clarkson points out, this “reflects the view that under the law, the Constitution, the party platform and the view of the vast majority of Americans, abortion is a legitimate ‘need.'”
I prefer the language of civil liberties myself, but the fact is that the Democrats pulled back from the brink and stopped talking about the need to “reduce the number of abortions” and I hope we hold them to it. Reducing unwanted pregnancies is a laudable policy, and I support that 100%. I also know that it will never result in a 100% reduction in the need for abortion. Life is not that simple.
Finally, Clarkson reports that these new talking points claim that liberals are angry about the idea of reducing abortions. That’s drivel, of course. Nobody thinks that way. Pro-choice liberals simply live here on planet earth rather than in some clean utopian world where accidental pregnancy never happens and pregnant women are always thrilled at the prospect of either a lifetime commitment or giving their offspring up for adoption — as if all these things are simple, easy decisions compared to the moral darkness of the ugly alternative. On planet earth abortion reduction is a hopeful side effect of the reduction of unwanted pregnancy, not a goal in itself.
I don’t buy that passing out birth control will eliminate the need for abortion, which is quite obviously where these people want us to grant that this “middle ground” leads, and which obviously leads to a ban on the practice. (And anyway, if access to birth control were what they truly cared about, we wouldn’t have any need for abortion today. Condoms are available in every 7-11 in America. )
This is just another in a long line of very slick tactical moves by the anti-abortion movement. They are quite good at moving the debate their way in small increments, as they’ve been doing for decades now. And unfortunately, some in the Democratic party have all too often been their willing pawns particularly in their needy propensity to appear “reasonable.” It’s that neediness to which these talking points are designed to appeal (and sadly, which are being exploited by certain factions within the coalition who seek to expand their influence by being mediators.) Let’s hope the Dems have learned their lessons and don’t fall for it.
The shrill, unreasonable people are those who think the state should intrude on the most private, intimate matters of personal human sexuality and biology on the basis of certain religious beliefs. Reasonable people hold that everyone has a right to their own beliefs on these private matters but that the state cannot make just decisions on something so complicated and personal. Within that reasonable, if imperfect, framework a compromise was worked out long ago. It’s called Roe vs Wade.
.
The Fatuous Gasbag And His Little Dog Bobby
by digby
Julia discusses the news that Little Bobby Jindal is doubling down with El Rushbo for the long haul. You can’t blame him. Rush is the only person in America who still takes him seriously.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, R, reignited the controversy surrounding the Republican Party and Rush Limbaugh Tuesday night when he said it is OK to hope President Barack Obama fails.
Speaking to a conference of Republican leaders, Mr. Jindal, a man who many believe has an eye on the White House in 2012, said it is appropriate to hope the president fails if it means the president’s policies will jeopardize the nation’s security and stability.
“My answer to the question is very simple: ‘Do you want the president to fail?’ It depends on what he is trying to do,” Mr. Jindal said.
…
“Make no mistake: Anything other than an immediate and compliant, ‘Why no sir, I don’t want the president to fail,’ is treated as some sort of act of treason, civil disobedience or political obstructionism,” Mr. Jindal said to a crowd of about 1,200. “This is political correctness run amok.”
No word on whether or not they feel “Betrayused.”
Meanwhile, Little Bobby’s BFF is talking some amazing gibberish these days. I’ve been able to keep up with the GOPs spiritual and intellectual leadership much better since Media Matters started the LimbaughWire. I can only actually listen to his bombastic blather for a few minutes before I literally get nauseous. It’s a great service (and entertainingly written too.)
The sheer volume of utter nonsense that the man spews out in just one program, much less each and every day for 20 years is amazing. It’s even more amazing his listeners’ heads haven’t exploded from the sheer amount of dissonance their brains have to process. These highlights just from the last hour of Friday’s show alone are awe inspiring:
LIMBAUGH: If the American people are ready for the destruction of capitalism, if the American people are ready for the destruction of the opportunity for the American dream, if the American people are ready to vote for an end to their chance to be prosperous, it must mean a lot of them want to sit around and do their doobies. But what’s the big disconnect?
[…]
LIMBAUGH: The Obama administration said it supports the Copenhagen treaty process if, in the words of a U.S. State Department spokesman, it can come up with an effective framework for dealing with global warming. In other words, damn the consequences.
If we can claim that it fights global warming, we will do it. It fits right in, ladies and gentlemen, with Obama’s plan to destruct the foundation of capitalism in this country and replace it with a giant government and a huge, huge welfare state.
[…]
LIMBAUGH: There is no global warming, so when you say that we have a solution to it, I — you know, I throw my hands up. There’s no solution to it, because there isn’t any global warming. And I don’t care if there is warming or cooling, there’s nothing we can do about it. We’re just human beings. There’s not a damn thing we can do to cause it or to stop it. We’re just prisoners here.
[…]
LIMBAUGH: It’s like I said yesterday: “Cheat on me, but don’t tell me. Obama can do” —
CALLER: Exactly. So —
LIMBAUGH: “Obama can do anything in the world. Just don’t tell me what he’s really doing, because I love the guy.”
He’s a cult leader. Battered liberal syndrome: “Cheat on me, just don’t tell me.”
[…]
LIMBAUGH: Nancy, honey, taxpayers are paying for health care. I don’t care if it’s coming [from] their company, their insurance — taxpayers — government health care is taxpayer-paid health care. The government can’t pay for anything without taking money from people who produce it, unless they print it, which is sadly what is happening now. The third person in line for the presidency in this country is a complete airhead.
(By that logic, taxpayers just paid for my lunch and filled up my gas tank too. And he calls Pelosi an airhead?)
Those excerpts represent just one hour out of the week.
While nobody knows if his numbers are actually rising (and there is good reason to suspect they’re not) I would expect that it won’t matter. If the media believes they are real we will see Limbaugh’s star actually rise, as ridiculous as that is. It’s his money and success that enthralls them.
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Pinch-Blogging
by dday
I’m substituting for my pal Steve Benen over at his site at The Washington Monthly for the next few days, and I have several posts up there, about Obama’s meeting with the banksters, another group press corps whine, and the dumbest argument against climate change legislation I’ve ever heard, among other things. Stop by and say hello if you like.
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