There’s been a lot of speculation about how responsive the Obama administration is going to be toward their supporters and a lot of work is going toward the “change.gov” mechanism to facilitate it. Ari Melber at The Nation has a good suggestion:
The Obama transition team is taking questions again at Change.gov, throwing open the site this week for citizen input. The first run of this experiment was a mixed bag. The platform was open and transparent, but the official answers felt more like old boilerplate than new responses. When the submitted questions parrot toics in the traditional media, of course, the exchange can feel like a dated press conference. But here’s a vital question that few reporters have ever presented to Obama: Will you appoint a Special Prosecutor (ideally Patrick Fitzgerald) to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush Administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping? That question ranked sixth in voting last time — out of over 10,000 submissions — but the transition team only answered the top five questions. Now that Vice President Cheney confessed his support for waterboarding on national television, flouting the rule of law, the issue is even more urgent. Activist Bob Fertik, who has submitted the question twice, explains how you can vote to press this issue on the transition team:
Sign in at http://change.gov/openforquestionsSearch for “Fitzgerald” […and] find our question Look right for the checkbox, mouseover it so it goes from white to dark, then click to cast your vote
While the press has fixated on the criminal allegations against Gov. Blagojevich, for some reason, the (even more serious) allegations of torture by officials in the current administration receive scant attention. I have not heard one question about this during Obama’s transition press conferences, and the traveling press corps almost never pressed Obama on the issue during the general election campaign.
(Melber does give a shout out to Will Bunch for being the only reporter who’s actually done their job on this issue.)
This is really worth doing. If Obama wants to do the right thing here, he needs some political support and according to the polls he doesn’t have much. It could be really helpful for liberals to apply their awesome powers to choose CIA chiefs to this issue as well.
Former administration underlings depict President Bush as a “Sarah Palin-like” leader with a short attention span who deferred on big decisions.Larry Wilkerson, a top aide to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said Vice President Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld promoted the notion they were a national security “dream team” to guide the foreign-policy amateur Bush. “It allowed everybody to believe that this Sarah Palin-like President – because, let’s face it, that’s what he was – was going to be protected by this national security elite, tested in the cauldrons of fire,” said Wilkerson.
Yeah well, some of us repeatedly pointed this out from the get-go and we were endlessly lectured by the breathless media that the American people wanted a moronic “regular guy” rather than some boring egghead for president and that his election meant the “grown-ups” were back in charge, even though he clearly had the emotional maturity and judgment of a testosterone overdosing teenager.
And then, for years after 9/11 they actually tried to make us believe that he was some kind of Churchillian savant, whose “gut” was so brilliant that brains were irrelevant. I’m sorry, but from the moment the Republicans trotted out that brainless brand name in a suit and passed him off as a leader (“I’m a leader cuz ah’ve led!”) I’ve been agog with wonder at the sheer audacity of their scam. It makes Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme look like a small time grift.
(And frankly, the demonization of Palin after their deification of Bush struck me from the beginning as nothing more than class and gender snobbery. There really is no substantial difference between them except that Palin actually had more government experience than Bush did. She was his natural successor.) I have to admit that this is really rich, though:
Former Bush media adviser Mark McKinnon said the administration was in trouble even before taking office in the aftermath of the 2000 recount in which the Supreme Court effectively ruled that Bush had won Florida. “The recount poisoned the well from the beginning,” McKinnon said.”A good number of people in this country didn’t believe Bush was a legitimate President. And you can’t change the tone under those circumstances.”
Oh please. It’s not like Bush ever tried to change the tone. He swaggered into DC and behaved like he’d won a landslide. This is from February 2001, right after he took office:
When President Bush was asked recently by a reporter about his judicial selection process, he responded that his election was a mandate for putting conservative judges on the bench. Stumping for his $1.6 trillion tax cut, Bush declares that voters endorsed it when they chose him to be President. And why stop there? Bush has claimed a mandate for everything from changing the tone in Washington to building an antimissile shield in outer space.
Mandate? This from the first President in more than 100 years to win the office without garnering the most votes? But heck, Bush isn’t about to let the election results get in the way of a good mandate. True, he lost the popular vote to Al Gore — and in the eyes of many Democrats lost the electoral vote, too. The Pundit Elite was quick to portray the Texas governor as a “permanently scarred” leader after December’s Supreme Court decision that made him the 43rd President.
But it’s easy to forget how ephemeral things can be in the world of politics. Today, Bush’s personal approval rating hovers around 70%. A majority of Americans supports his tax cut. And the new President is out to prove that a mandate is what you make it. “Essentially, a ‘mandate’ is what you can get away with,” says Princeton University political scientist Fred Greenstein. “Bush is very good at claiming victory. He has a ‘Marlboro Man’ approach to communication. His idea of having a mandate is to say ‘I have a mandate.'”
And the press went into paroxysms of delight over his assertion of manly dominance, while the Democrats seemed to be so shell shocked and paralyzed by his outrageous chutzpah they just stood there while he bulldozed over them. It took Jeffords actually leaving the Republican party for them to even blink. (And then 9/11 happened…) Meanwhile, those of us out here in the hinterlands, aghast at the way the Republicans seized power, were snidely admonished by the villagers to just “get over it.”
I’m sorry, these insiders dishing on Bush is fun and all, but I will always have a sour taste in my mouth from the years of being forced to listen to so many elites try to sell me on the absurd idea that George W. Bush was capable of being president in the first place and then force me to listen while they absurdly extolled him as one of the greatest leaders the world has ever known.
It was obvious from the first time I saw him slumped in his chair like a surly delinquent at a Republican primary debate that the man had no more business being president than my cat (who is far more dignified and has better table manners.) It was an insult that they even recruited him for the job and and even worse insult that the press destroyed Al Gore on his behalf and managed to help him eke out a victory by presenting him as the rightful winner from election night on. Why I’m supposed to be impressed by these belated observations now I can’t imagine.
In other not-yet-decided Senate news, the Minnesota Canvassing Board, which is not really a body I ever wanted to hear a lot about, basically certified the victory of Al Franken today, putting him ahead by 50 votes with only a handful of wrongly disqualified absentee ballots left to count. The working rule from the state Supreme Court is that both the Franken and Coleman campaigns have to agree on allowing a ballot to be counted, and that is predictably going unwell. Of the 1,360 ballots that local election officials have cited as eligible for counting, Coleman is asking for just a portion to be counted, and most of them come from areas that voted for him in big numbers. They also want to look at ballots that officials did not put on the list. So Coleman is re-litigating the election, while Franken is perfectly content to have those 1,360 ballots counted and to leave it at that, which considering that he’s only 50 votes ahead is something of a risk, although the absentees in general are thought to favor him.
Meanwhile, Coleman’s strategy is to bash election officials and claim that the election is tainted as he moves into what will certainly be a contested election and a series of lawsuits. Funny, I don’t hear anyone, inside or outside of Minnesota, saying that the election is over and the state needs time to heal, and for the sake of comity and bipartisanship Coleman needs to step aside. In fact, Senate Republicans are making every effort to block Franken from being seated, and using zombie lies to do it.
It now looks like the Senate GOP could end up trying to block the seating of Al Franken, assuming he is declared the winner next week in the Minnesota recount. NRSC chairman John Cornyn put out a statement accusing the Franken campaign of falsely declaring victory, and denouncing the idea of provisionally seating him while the expected legal dispute of the election is resolved:
“Al Franken is falsely declaring victory based on an artificial lead created on the back of the double counting of ballots. His campaign’s actions in the last several days on the issues of rejected absentee ballots are creating additional chaos and disorder in the Minnesota recount. Those actions, coupled with the recent comments by Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who suggests seating someone even if there is an election contest, are unprecedented. Minnesotans will not accept a recount in which some votes are counted twice, and I expect the Senate would have a problem seating a candidate who has not duly won an election.”
The double-counting issue, dubious to begin with, was shot down by the state Supreme Court. The Coleman campaign has been the one cherry-picking the ballots. And the Congress can ultimately do what it wants regarding seating members after elections, and indeed they have on a number of occasions, most recently to Vern Buchanan in FL-13 in 2007, when thousands of electronic votes just went missing in an extremely close race against Christine Jennings.
But consistency is the hobgoblin of those in the reality-based community. Those unwritten “rules” just don’t apply when you’re a Republican. Washington is actually the best example of asymmetric warfare, in that one side practices it, and the other worries that elites will be mad at them if they do the same.
You have to give Blagojevich credit — he knows how to make politics interesting. This latest gambit is a real pip. But there is some method to his madness, I think. He’s trying to divide the Democrats both in Illinois and Washington and he did it using a powerful tool.
Then Bobby Rush showed up. The south side congressman — the only man ever to defeat Barack Obama in an election — introduced the racial angle and dramatically raised the stakes.It must be said that Rush made an entirely fair point. In 2004, when they elected Obama, the voters of Illinois chose an African American senator. And so, in determining who should fill out his term, it’s reasonable that race count as a factor. He pointed to Illinois’ recent history as the only state that’s elected two black senators (Obama and Carol Moseley Braun), arguing that the state has a history on this score that’s unique. That’s all fair.But Rush wasn’t pleading. He was warning. He was daring Reid and the other senators to deny this black man the seat. I couldn’t quite believe my ears when he used the word “lynch,” but sure enough he did: he urged the members of the media “not to hang or lynch the appointee as you castigate the appointor.” He went on to say that he and his congressional allies would push Reid to reverse his position and said of the prospect of a bunch of white senators denying Burris the seat: “I don’t think they wanna go on record doing that.”I covered lots of racial-politics conflagrations in New York in the very racially heated 1980s and 1990s, and I’ve heard rhetoric like Rush’s before, and I’ve seen its effects. When a black figure issues a public challenge like this, including one of the most heavily freighted dog-whistle words in American political history, to a white politician, sides start to line up. Tempers start to inflame. Whether the white pol stands firm or assents, somebody is going to be really, really unhappy. Reid is in a spot. There’s a chance that is is going to be on black radio all over the country tomorrow morning, and if it is, it’s going to have nothing to do with Blago on those stations. It’ll have to do with whether the white Democratic leaders of the Senate, “who take our vote for granted in November,” etc., will spurn this obviously qualified black man.
Blago pointed to the press on his way out of the room and said “don’t lynch this appointee.” What a piece of work. Obama just made a statement condemning the appointment, so it will be interesting to see how this works out. Unfortunately, Ed Henry on CNN characterized this as a “rupture” in the Democratic Party. .
I’m watching stupid spokesmodels on MSNBC chortle and giggle and express shock and disgust at the idea of all the “pork” that the governors have put into their stimulus requests, openly siding with the Republicans who say that the only fiscal stimulus that’s allowed will be in the form of tax cuts. The idea of projects to create jobs are simply not acceptable because they are now all labeled “pork.” Meanwhile, I read over at Talk Left that the Politico is making up poll numbers suggesting that Americans are against the “unprecedented use of federal dollars to jolt the economy.” (Of course if they, like the talking robots on MSNBC, are brainwashed into believing that any spending that isn’t a tax cut or fixing a pot hole is considered “pork” then they may be right.)
What with Mitch deciding to obstruct everything in sight and the media lining up to call all government spending for stimulus “pork” we may have a little problem on our hands. As Krugman says, the problem isn’t that the government might spend too much — it’s that it will spend too little. And it looks like the media and the Republicans are going to join forces to make sure that the government is hobbled in this regard before they even start.
I hate to be a broken record, but this is another example of how the conservative movement work on rhetoric and propaganda over the past 30 years will continue to pay dividends even as they are out of power. Since people have not heard anything different during that period, as Democrats embraced the idea that government was the problem not the solution and that liberal ideology was “divisive” and wrong, they pretty much left the playing field to the conservatives. Now that the right wing ideologues have destroyed the economy, people don’t have any idea how a government is supposed to work and will be susceptible to tired, useless Hooveresque solutions because they simply don’t know anything else.
Ideology actually matters at times like this. The idea of massive government spending to stimulate the economy is not intuitive when individuals are being told to tighten their personal belts and pay off their debts. (When people hear for decades that the government should run like a household budget or a business, that’s to be expected.) If they had a simple faith that government is a solid, dependable actor, or were given a short primer in liberal economics as part of the political debate, they would know that this emergency requires serious government intervention. But they have been told for a quarter century that government is an irresponsible, spendthrift institution that stands in the way of individual prosperity and nobody has been saying otherwise, least of all Democrats who’ve also been fetishizing markets and praising tax cuts like a bunch of Ayn Rand groupies.
Obama will likely get some kind of large stimulus through the congress, but it’s probably going to take a huge amount of his political capital to get it done, which it shouldn’t, and will leave him with less than he needs to deal with the rest of this pile of compost the Republicans have left on his plate. And every incident of “pork” that is subsequently revealed will be exploited by the Republicans and gleefully reported by the press, thereby chipping away at the notion that the stimulus was the reason for any upturn, instead reinforcing the old saw about Democrats as feckless tax and spend liberals.
This is a dangerous development. This so-called pork is stimulus and it doesn’t matter if the states spend it on courthouses or if they spend it on a snow making machine for a ski resort. It’s about getting money into the economy, preferably by building and making investments in things that will provide jobs in the long run. But the most important purpose is to give the economy a quick, strong jolt that only the government is capable of giving. Obsessing about pork is entirely beside the point.
Someday Democrats will learn that they need to make their own case to the people instead of repackaging warmed over Republican rhetoric. It puts them 20 points behind at beginning of every play. There may be enough good will toward Obama that they can get a serious stimulus through, but it shouldn’t take this scope of economic devastation for that to happen.
I think that you can find a fair amount of consensus across parties and ideologies that the country is in a mess. There are two wars, an economic crisis, rapid climate change, rising ranks of the unemployed and uninsured, etc. So to see one of the two major national political parties grappling with the question of whether it’s OK to send out a parody song called “Barack the Magic Negro” isn’t just a sad commentary on racial sensitivities. It suggests that conservative Republican “leaders” are simply living in an alternate universe, without any recognition of reality whatsoever.
Given this, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter who is elected as Chairman of the RNC. Hopefully they’ll move on to more pressing issues like the impact of clowns on children and whether or not cousins of illegal aliens should be allowed in national parks.
It’s been a rocky year for feminism, no doubt about it. First, the media let their sexist freak flags fly during the presidential campaign and lately we’ve been treated to the slick partriarchal gurglings of the good Pastor Rick Warren and the pathetic spectacle of the financial boys club strutting around as if they are wearing skins and wielding clubs as they marginalize and demean the female oracles who saw the writing on the wall (street.) It’s frustrating to say the least.
Still, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit uncomfortable when I heard Caroline Kennedy’s cousin say this:
KERRY KENNEDY, AUTHOR, “BEING CATHOLIC NOW”: … she‘s a mother and a woman. You know, we live in a country where one out of every five girls is sexually assaulted by the time she reaches the age of 21, where women still only make 79 cents on the dollar made by men; and we need a woman‘s voice and we need Caroline‘s voice and her strength and her determination in that seat. MATTHEWS: Do you think it‘s important—it sounds like you do—that a woman replace Hillary Clinton? KENNEDY: Absolutely. You know, there are only 16 women in the Senate right now, and Hillary Clinton is going, and we need Caroline to fill that seat.
What Kerry says about the Senate needing women’s voices is correct, but it doesn’t necessarily translate to Caroline, who hasn’t made any serious contribution to politics up to this point. Just being a woman and a mother isn’t really enough. (After all, Phyllis Schlaffley is a woman and a mother too …)
If I were a New Yorker, I’d be lobbying for Representative Carolyn Maloney to get the slot. She’s been in the congress for 16 years and is an unabashed liberal, feminist woman who has been fighting these battles for decades and knows whereof she speaks. Her recent book is called Rumors of Our Progress Have Been Greatly Exaggerated and it catalogs a list of institutional, political and cultural inequities which are still so embedded in our system that we hardly even know to question them.
For instance, after 9/11, when the government was putting together its compensation fund, the government was blithely planning to shortchange female victims’ families by hundreds of thousands of dollars because they were using discriminatory projected earnings tables that reflected the wage gap. It took a concerted campaign to persuade the government that the earnings estimates that determined the value of the payout should be gender blind. It wasn’t a matter of conscious discrimination. They just didn’t consider whether it made sense that the family of a woman who made the same salary as a man at the time of her death should be compensated equally. Maloney organized 11 members of the New York delegation to pursue the matter and reverse the policy. (Insurance companies around the country still use those outdated formulas, by the way.)
And speaking of Wall Street, Maloney compiles some stories about discrimination against women in the financial industry that make your hair stand on end. Morgan Stanley had paid out nearly $100 million in sex discrimination money to many of the top female employees in the past few years. Apparently, as with Sheila Bair and Brooksley Born, the common excuse was that these women just weren’t “team players” — mostly because they weren’t welcome at the strip clubs and golf courses where so many of the deals were made. And they just wouldn’t get with the program when it came to looking the other way at unethical or reckless practices. (The wimmin are always raining on the parade that way.) Maloney thinks that instead of giving tax deductions to companies for their strip club expenses, most citizens would prefer for that families be allowed to deduct their child care expenses — and has introduced legislation to do that.
I would expect that women are especially going to be facing some tough times in the near term as their lower level service jobs are going to be very hard hit and they tend to have less money in the bank to tide them over. An awful lot of them are hanging by a thread as it is. Having fewer women in the government right now hardly seems like a good idea (particularly when people need to be reminded that a fiscal stimulus that creates mostly construction and engineering jobs will only put money in the pockets of the 9% of women who work in those fields.) I think that if the argument is that women need a strong voice in the senate, we would probably be better served by a woman like Maloney who has a lifetime of experience in politics and a deep and thorough understanding of these issues than someone whose experience is very limited. I just wouldn’t expect Caroline Kennedy, no matter how dedicated and sincere, to be the kind of champion on these issues as someone like Maloney.
I don’t know much about New York politics, so maybe there is some other reason why Maloney couldn’t be the choice. But on the merits, she’s the one I’d choose if I were Patterson. The country badly needs the contributions of the Sheila Bairs and the Carolyn Maloneys if the government really means to clean up the mess the old boys club has made.
Update: It’s hard to believe, but I didn’t know there was a movement afoot to push Maloney when I wrote this. Here’s an article on the subject from the NY Daily News.
Progress by digbyFor all the talk about liberating the people of Iraq, nobody gives a damn about the half of the population that’s demonstrably worse off than before, even in the most basic social and cultural respects. (I suppose that’s to be expected from people who repeat the phrase “the surge was successful” like a mantra.)
But some are worse off in ways that are unimaginable:
Sheelan Anwar Omer, a shy 7-year-old Kurdish girl, bounded into her neighbor’s house with an ear-to-ear smile, looking for the party her mother had promised.There was no celebration. Instead, a local woman quickly locked a rusty red door behind Sheelan, who looked bewildered when her mother ordered the girl to remove her underpants. Sheelan began to whimper, then tremble, while the women pushed apart her legs and a midwife raised a stainless-steel razor blade in the air. “I do this in the name of Allah!” she intoned.As the midwife sliced off part of Sheelan’s genitals, the girl let out a high-pitched wail heard throughout the neighborhood. As she carried the sobbing child back home, Sheelan’s mother smiled with pride.”This is the practice of the Kurdish people for as long as anyone can remember,” said the mother, Aisha Hameed, 30, a housewife in this ethnically mixed town about 100 miles north of Baghdad. “We don’t know why we do it, but we will never stop because Islam and our elders require it.”Kurdistan is the only known part of Iraq –and one of the few places in the world–where female circumcision is widespread. More than 60 percent of women in Kurdish areas of northern Iraq have been circumcised, according to a study conducted this year. In at least one Kurdish territory, 95 percent of women have undergone the practice, which human rights groups call female genital mutilation.The practice, and the Kurdish parliament’s refusal to outlaw it, highlight the plight of women in a region with a reputation for having a more progressive society than the rest of Iraq. Advocates for women point to the increasing frequency of honor killings against women and female self-immolations in Kurdistan this year as further evidence that women in the area still face significant obstacles, despite efforts to raise public awareness of circumcision and violence against women.”When the Kurdish people were fighting for our independence, women participated as full members in the underground resistance,” said Pakshan Zangana, who heads the women’s committee in the Kurdish parliament. “But now that we have won our freedom, the position of women has been pushed backwards and crimes against us are minimized.”[…]Kurds who support circumcising girls say the practice has two goals: It controls a woman’s sexual desires, and it makes her spiritually clean so that others can eat the meals she prepares.
Read the whole article if you can stomach it. I couldn’t read it again.Women are dirty and their urges have to be controlled because they’re always tempting men to do things they shouldn’t do. Same as it ever was. The good news is that this practice helps preserve the ancient definition of marriage, so that’s good. Maybe we can start practicing it here at those purity balls. If the men in pulpits told them it was required, have no doubt that the social conservative women would run with this one without a second thought.
I don’t know what to say about what’s happening in Gaza. I’m frankly somewhat shocked that I’m watching explosions on CNN for a fourth straight day. The only thing I can recommend at this point is to sign this petition from J Street , demanding that the US support an immediate cease fire.
At this moment of extreme crisis, J Street wants to demonstrate that, among those who care about Israel and its security, there is a constituency for sanity and moderation. There are many who recognize elements of truth on both sides of this gaping divide and who know that closing it requires strong American engagement and leadership. Click Here
I support immediate and strong U.S.-led diplomatic efforts to urgently reinstate a meaningful ceasefire that ends all military operations, stops the rockets aimed at Israel and lifts the blockade of Gaza. This is in the best interests of Israel, the Palestinian people and the United States.
It’s really hard for me to believe that this is something people actually have to petition them to do, particularly after the birth pangs, cock-up in Lebanon. I guess that was considered a big success.
Meanwhile, I’m hearing the gasbags all speculate that this means the end of Obama’s domestic agenda for some reason. I’m not sure why they insist on that; I don’t actually think the domestic agenda can be shuffled off to the side even if he wanted to. It’s not like it’s expendable either. I’m pretty sure the president knows that he is going to have to do it all.
