Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Crisis Management

by digby

There’s a lot of chatter in the blogosphere about Obama not picking enough progressives for his cabinet, some of which I’ve participated in backstage, although I haven’t written a lot about it on this blog. I tend to see this in a couple of ways. First, as I said, I think Obama was pretty clear during the campaign that he was not an ideologue but rather a pragmatic technocrat. You’ll all recall this quote:

“What I’m saying is I think the average baby-boomers have moved beyond the arguments of the 60’s but our politicians haven’t. We’re still having the same argument… It’s all around culture wars and it’s all … even when you discuss war the frame of reference is all Vietnam. Well that’s not my frame of reference. My frame of reference is “what works.” Even when I first opposed the war in Iraq, my first line was I don’t oppose all wars, specifically to make clear that this is not an anti-military, you know, 70’s love-in kind of approach.”

“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was ‘we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.'”

There’s no need at this point to relitigate whether or not he was professing admiration for Reagan’s policies, so please resist the temptation. It is irrelevant to my point. What is clear from his comments is that he sees himself as a pragmatist (“my frame of reference is ‘what works'”) who isn’t driven by political ideology.

And if it were normal times, we might expect him to fulfill the Village’s “center-right” domestic dreams based upon where the center of political gravity has been these last few years. But these are not normal times and conservative economics are completely inoperative in a severe economic crisis. So, he’s likely to be more liberal in that area than any of us ever dreamed he’d be, as will all of his neo liberal economic advisors. There is just no other choice available than massive government intervention, which is a fundamentally liberal concept. The only question is if they will be competent at carrying out liberal economic policies,or if they will persist in the current program of badly structured bailouts of badly run companies. Let’s hope it’s the former, because the latter is just more of what Bernanke calls “finger in the dike” economics and they ain’t working.

On foreign policy Obama campaigned on getting out of Iraq, escalating in Afghanistan and setting the world’s mind at ease that the United States is no longer a rogue superpower, and I have no reason to believe that’s not going to be the way it goes. I would worry a lot about the military — they tend to give youthful Democrats a hard time — but as with the economy, the military is falling apart too, so they may have limited choices there as well. We’ll see.

The world is in crisis on all fronts and it was conservative philosophy and policies that brought us here. They have nothing to offer but more crisis, so by default liberalism is on the rise. What lucky duckies we all are.

However, (and it’s a big however) I find this very disturbing. I have been sort of jokingly calling this bipartisan fetish among the establishment a “one party state” but this isn’t funny:

A senior Obama campaign official shared with The Washington Note that in July 2008, the McCain and Obama camps began to work secretly behind the scenes to assemble large rosters of potential personnel for the administration that only one of the candidates would lead. Lists comprised of Democrats and Republicans were assembled, sorted into areas of policy expertise, so that the roster could be called on after the election by either the Obama or McCain transition teams. This kind of out-of-sight coordination is rare between battling presidential camps and provides some indication that both Obama and McCain intended to draw expertise into their governments from both sides of the aisle — or at least they wanted to appear interested in doing so if the information leaked out about the list development process. Fascinating tidbit on cooperation behind battle lines.

Yeah, it’s fascinating — and horrifying. These two people allegedly ran on entirely different visions of where to take the country and were backed by millions of people who thought they were making a serious decision between the two. And yet according to this account months ago (before the current meltdown) they were secretly coordinating to assemble a common roster of people to run the government no matter who won the election. What the hell did we bother having a campaign for? If this is true it validates every political crank out there, including Ralph Nader, who says there’s literally not a dime’s worth of difference between the two parties.

I hope someone pursues this further. As sanguine as I am about Obama’s hand being forced by the economic crisis to govern further from the left than we might have expected, this would be a very bad sign if proven to be factual. It’s fundamentally dishonest, untransparent partisan collusion that means the presidential campaign was far more of a kabuki entertainment than even the worst cynics imagined. It’s one thing to pledge bipartisanship and cooperation. It’s quite another to secretly create a bipartisan government with your opponent in a presidential campaign. It’s an anti-trust violation in more ways than one. I sincerely hope it’s not true.

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Warrantless Pillow Talk

by digby

Well, well, well. What a shocker:

A former communications intercept operator says U.S. intelligence snooped on the private lives of two of America’s most important allies in fighting al Qaeda: British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Iraq’s first interim president, Ghazi al-Yawer. David Murfee Faulk told ABCNews.com he saw and read a file on Blair’s “private life” and heard “pillow talk” phone calls of al-Yawer when he worked as an Army Arab linguist assigned to a secret NSA facility at Fort Gordon, Georgia between 2003 and 2007. Last month, Faulk and another former military intercept operator assigned to the NSA facility triggered calls for an investigation when they revealed U.S. intelligence intercepted the private phone calls of American journalists, aid workers and soldiers stationed in Iraq. Faulk says his top secret clearance at Ft. Gordon gave him access to an intelligence data base, called “Anchory,” where he says he saw the file on then-British prime minister Tony Blair in 2006. Faulk declined to provide details other than to say it contained information of a personal nature.

But, if they hadn’t done anything wrong they didn’t have anything to worry about, right?

And the government would never do such things to political enemies or anything like that. Why, that wouldn’t be right at all.

First Draft Of History

by digby

Read this story in the New Yorker called The Anatomy of a Meltdown. Be sure you’re sitting down.

This too.

What a mess.

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Taser Tort
by digbyThis report from the Las Vegas Sun about their police department’s experience with tasers is fascinating. (Too bad the Brits didn’t read it before deciding to arm their entire police force with these torture devices.) One of the most interesting thing about it is that nearly all the information police receive is from the Taser company itself.

Several cops got on their knees on a rubber gym mat. Kneeling in a line, they linked arms, interlaced hands, and looked up. All they knew of what comes next is this: It’s going to smart.This was called the “daisy chain.” It was part of the Metro Police Taser training program, the alternative to hitting a single individual with thousands of volts from the weapon. It was the option officer Lisa Peterson chose, a decision she regrets. The officers were at a training seminar in November 2003 to learn how to use the newest weapon on their belts, a device the manufacturer claimed would incapacitate a person but not do permanent harm. You can’t really comprehend the Taser, students were told, until you’re Tasered. So an instructor attached alligator clips to each end of the daisy chain. Two officers became electrical bookends, strung at the shoulder by wires feeding back into a Taser gun. Pull the trigger and the daisy chain shudders, seizes and pitches forward, the pile of police officers becoming a portrait of Taser’s selling point: neuromuscular incapacitation. In the middle of the chain, hands locked at her sides, Peterson had only her face to absorb the impact. She fell hard on her neck and fast into the rabbit hole – traumatic internal disc disruption, steroid injections, surgical reconstruction, temporomandibular derangement, persistent dizziness, cognitive defects, numbness, vertigo. Officer Peterson sued Taser International Inc. So did two other Metro cops who were seriously injured after being shocked with Tasers during other training sessions in 2003. In their lawsuits they say Taser failed to adequately warn the police department of the potential for injury and minimized the risks of being shocked, which officers had been assured was not only safe but advisable.[…]Metro’s initial approach to Taser instruction can be summed up like this: Almost everything the police knew about Tasers, and taught officers about Tasers, they learned from Taser.[…]Today, Taser warns that the device can cause burns. Moreover, the company acknowledges these burns can become infected. It warns that people who are shocked by Tasers can suffer bone fractures, hernias, ruptures and dislocations. Today, Taser suggests students be Tasered while lying facedown on the floor, eliminating falling hazards and stray Taser probes to the eye.

And yet, police use these things indiscriminately.

And nobody seems to think there’s anything wrong with the police inflicting horrible pain on people on the thinnest of pretexts. As long as there’s no permanent damage, there’s no harm in it. Heck, even if there is permanent damage, it’s the victim’s fault for failing to be properly cooperative — or agreeing to do it as part of their job.

You can see why waterboarding is now considered perfectly acceptable. The authorities only use it when they believe they need to (and ok, sometimes just because they’re in a bad mood) and it doesn’t leave any permanent damage either. No harm no foul. What’s the problem?

H/T to pastordan and barb

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Beating Torture

by digby

Wasn’t Michael Isikoff supposed to be a crack “investigative” reporter? Why then is he nearly plagiarizing the work of Salon writer Mark Benjamin?

Isikoff today:

Despite the hopes of many human-rights advocates, the new Obama Justice Department is not likely to launch major new criminal probes of harsh interrogations and other alleged abuses by the Bush administration. But one idea that has currency among some top Obama advisers is setting up a 9/11-style commission that would investigate counterterrorism policies and make public as many details as possible. “At a minimum, the American people have to be able to see and judge what happened,” said one senior adviser, who asked not to be identified talking about policy matters. The commission would be empowered to order the U.S. intelligence agencies to open their files for review and question senior officials who approved “waterboarding” and other controversial practices. Obama aides are wary of taking any steps that would smack of political retribution. That’s one reason they are reluctant to see high-profile investigations by the Democratic-controlled Congress or to greenlight a broad Justice inquiry (absent specific new evidence of wrongdoing). “If there was any effort to have war-crimes prosecutions of the Bush administration, you’d instantly destroy whatever hopes you have of bipartisanship,” said Robert Litt, a former Justice criminal division chief during the Clinton administration. A new commission, on the other hand, could emulate the bipartisan tone set by Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton in investigating the 9/11 attacks. The 9/11 panel was created by Congress. An alternative model, floated by human-rights lawyer Scott Horton, would be a presidential commission similar to the one appointed by Gerald Ford in 1975 and headed by Nelson Rockefeller that investigated cold-war abuses by the CIA.

Benjamin, November 13th:

With growing talk in Washington that President Bush may be considering an unprecedented “blanket pardon” for people involved in his administration’s brutal interrogation policies, advisors to Barack Obama are pressing ahead with plans for a nonpartisan commission to investigate alleged abuses under Bush.The Obama plan, first revealed by Salon in August, would emphasize fact-finding investigation over prosecution. It is gaining currency in Washington as Obama advisors begin to coordinate with Democrats in Congress on the proposal. The plan would not rule out future prosecutions, but would delay a decision on that matter until all essential facts can be unearthed. Between the time necessary for the investigative process and the daunting array of policy problems Obama will face upon taking office, any decision on prosecutions probably would not come until a second Obama presidential term, should there be one.The proposed commission — similar in thrust to a Democratic investigation proposal first uncovered by Salon in July — would examine a broad scope of activities, including detention, torture and extraordinary rendition, the practice of snatching suspected terrorists off the street and whisking them off to a third country for abusive interrogations. The commission might also pry into the claims by the White House — widely rejected by experienced interrogators — that abusive interrogations are an effective and necessary intelligence tool.A common view among those involved with the talks is that any early effort to prosecute Bush administration officials would likely devolve quickly into ugly and fruitless partisan warfare. Second is that even if Obama decided he had the appetite for it, prosecutions in this arena are problematic at best: A series of memos from the Bush Justice Department approved the harsh tactics, and Congress changed the War Crimes Act in 2006, making prosecutions of individuals involved in interrogations more difficult.

Blogger ethics panel anyone?

As for the substance, I wrote about it back when Benjamin first broke the story. I still don’t know what it means. The presumed appointment of Holder gives me a little bit more optimism that they won’t just let this drop. His statements are so strong and unequivocal on the subject that it makes me think a commission might actually happen.

Naturally, I would prefer prosecutions but they’ve pretty much ruled that out — so this would be better than nothing. And frankly, I’ll still be surprised if there is any official effort to expose the scope of the torture regime — the intelligence community will do everything in their power to prevent it and their power is considerable. But still, it’s good news alone that there are people from the new team who are leaking this stuff. It means there are advocates for accountability from within.

Pushing The Argot Of The Left

by digby

David Sirota has written an intriguing post about the potential “ghettoization” of politics and policy in the Obama administration:

“This is the violin model: Hold power with the left hand, and play the music with your right,” David J. Rothkopf, a former Clinton official who wrote a history of the National Security Council, said on Friday, as news of Mrs. Clinton’s and Mr. Geithner’s appointments leaked.

This quote, from the New York Times story asserting that Barack Obama will govern from the center-right, highlights a very important dynamic in politics: the tendency of politicians to use the argot of progressivism in their public presentations (to “hold power”) – all while wielding conservative policy (“playing the music with your right”).

There’s nothing surprising about this – the reason endangered politicians of both parties start airing populist progressive themes around election time is because they know those themes are popular among rank-and-file voters – they know, in other words, that this is a decidedly center-left country, and when they have to answer to that country come election day, they go left. But once these politicians get into office and are far away from all of us, the unwashed masses, the pressures of money and media – ie. the Establishment – unleashes incredible pressure for them to actually write the details of policy in a way that preserves the conservative status quo.

[…]

The potential ghettoization in the Obama administration – and I stress again, it’s only the potential – is one where the policy sculptors are center-right Establishmentarians, and where the policy marketers (ie. the political team) is comprised of people who know how to package and sell policies in the language of progressivism, and sell those policies to progressive activists, a progressive-dominated Democratic congressional caucus and a center-left public at large.

I’m actually hopeful that he will not choose center-right policies (or at least not be able to choose them out of necessity)but I’m actually quite happy if they decide to consciously sell anything using the argot of progressivism, particularly movement progressivism, outside of the stump. One of the biggest challenges for the left is disrupting the soothing comfort people feel when they hear conservative bromides that have been so thoroughly internalized they don’t even recognize them as political anymore. If you want progressives to have a long run you have to create a language of progressivism that becomes a default, mainstream way of thinking. Conservatives have been massively successful at that with things like “government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem” and “it’s your money.” People hear that and it just sounds … true. Changing the rhetoric is as important to a movement as changing government policies.

So, if Obama is going to continue using the more progressive and populist argot that Sirota correctly observes politicians often use at election time, then I think it’s good news for the long term prospects of the progressive movement.

As for the policies, we’ll have to wait and see. I suspect that on the economy, it’s going to have to be a hell of a lot more progressive than anybody dreamed it would be even three months ago. There are no conservative solutions to economic meltdown except just letting it happen — and I don’t think anyone expects Obama to do that.

Even Ben Stein agrees with that much. From John Amato:

Neil Cavuto and Ben Stein got into a screaming match over the state of the economy after the bailout Saturday morning on Fox’s Cavuto for Business. I’ve never seen them go at it like that before. It started immediately when Cavuto opened up the segment by saying we’ve spent 2 trillion dollars so far to fix the problem, which is patently false, and Stein called him out on it. (rough transcript.)

Stein: The $2 trillion dollar number you cited at the beginning is a completely made up number, I don’t know where you got it from.

Cavuto: What do you think it is?

Stein: Closer to $300 billion…

Cavuto: Oh, no, no, no, Ben I gotta stop you there…

Stein: Could I answer your question?

Cavuto: When you are supporting one institution after the other …

Stein: You are doing the classic post hoc ergo prop drop fallacy. You may as well say because there was a World Series, the market dropped 4000 points. The Federal government has to stabilize this economy.

Cavuto: No it doesn’t, Ben. No, no, and by the way…

Stein: The Federal government is the only one that can stabilize this economy.

Cavuto: It is a slippery slope Ben…

Stein: Then otherwise we fall into a great depression. Maybe not a problem for you, but a problem for everybody else.

Cavuto: Oh, stop the nonsense.

Stein: It isn’t nonsense.

Cavuto: Where do you draw the nonsensical line.

Stein: We go in for as much Federal stimulus as it takes keep us out of a great depression. That is basic common sense … We need to bail out the auto companies, we need to have a massive stimulus package. This economy is about to fall off a cliff. We need major stimulus.

That is so disorienting I think I need to go have a drink.

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Disgusting Failure

by digby

Mark Halperin just gave notice that the honeymoon is over and the media must redeem itself by turning on Obama:

Media bias was more intense in the 2008 election than in any other national campaign in recent history, Time magazine’s Mark Halperin said Friday at the Politico/USC conference on the 2008 election.

“It’s the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war,” Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. “It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage.”

This is from the man who wrote, without irony, “Drudge rules our world.”

This isn’t the first time Halperin has addressed the notion of press bias, of course. His book discusses the charges that the press was biased in the 2000 election in some depth:

HARRIS/HALPERIN (page 129): No one who kept a close eye on the media coverage of the 2000 campaign would deny that the press corps assigned to Gore was more aggressive and more hostile toward the candidate than those assigned to Bush …This discrepancy made Old Media reporters much more likely to buy into political party press releases, late-night comic jokes, and the general story line that mirrored the Bush campaign’s crafted version of Gore.

A number of members of the Gang of 500 are convinced that the main reason George W. Bush won the White House and Al Gore lost was that Gore’s regular press pack included the trio of Katherine “Kit” Seelye (of the New York Times), Ceci Connolly (of the Washington Post), and Sandra Sobieraj (of the Associated Press)…

But he didn’t actually blame the press for this:

Those three influential reporters—and the influential news organizations for which they worked—certainly played their part in churning out negative copy about Gore, but they were more representative of Gore’s problem than they were the cause. At some point along the way, those reporters contributed to the vice president of the United States losing control of his public image. Seelye, Connolly and Sobieraj most assuredly never resolved to confer with the Gore campaign to help the candidate recover his image. But a more adept campaign (and candidate) would have worked to defuse the danger early on.

[…]

The main Trade Secrets to be learned from Gore’s experience are: If your traveling press corps is hostile to you and the Old Media has settled on a negative meta-narrative about your candidacy, you cannot make real progress in any part of your campaign until you address those problems.

Somerby, needless to say, has throughly examined this in detail.

So, in Halperin’s view the Gore campaign is held responsible for its own bad coverage while the McCain campaign was terribly victimized by biased coverage. But this should not surprise us. We’ve known for a long time that Halperin is very, very concerned that anyone might think he is some sort of liberal.

I am going to quote at length from one of Glenn Greenwald’s classic posts to illustrate the absurdity of paying attention to Mark Halperin on this subject. He’s discussing Halperin’s three hour interview on Hugh Hewitt’s show:

First, Halperin pleas with Hewitt to recognize that Halperin shares his core world view, and to convince him, Halperin couples that with some drooling praise for Hewitt:

HH: And so why is she…I think this is going back to media again. I think my giant unified field theory here is that liberal media has destroyed the necessity of the left having to debate, having to reach a message across, because you guys have always papered over the weakness of their arguments. And so, in essence, by creating an echo chamber, and by allowing them to get away with saying silly things, you’ve destroyed the incentive to be smart and facile.

MH: I agree.

HH: (laughing) That’s too easy. I’ve stormed the castle.

MH: Hugh, you and I have agreed on a lot during this show. For the purpose of jacking up your already sky-high ratings, occasionally you pick fights with me where they don’t exist. But you and I agree about that basic premise. I’m keeping notes here on the things we disagree on.

Halperin, on the goodness and innocence of the victimized Karl Rove and the terribly unfair media depictions of him:

MH: Let me say one thing we say in the book about Karl Rove, who I respect and enjoy…I enjoy his company. If you look at the allegations of Karl Rove that have been propagated in Texas and in Washington by the media, the liberal media, and by Democrats, and you look at the allegations, there’s…except for the useful indiscretions to which Karl has admitted, there is no evidence for the allegations against him.

And the ability of the press to paint him as this evil guy, and say that accounts for his success, is fundamental and outrageous. Maybe he did the things he’s accused of, but to have this guy’s image portrayed and defined by things that are accusations that are unproven, we say in the book is really outrageous.

Halperin, trying to convince Hewitt that he is not like those horrible biased lefties who dominate the media, because at least Halperin confesses the sickness:

MH: If, though, you want to in a casual introduction, lump me in with people in my business who are liberally biased and don’t seem to care about it, I think that’s doing your listeners a disservice. They should read the book and what we say in The Way To Win about how the media’s been liberally biased in presidential campaign coverage, what needs to be done to try to fix it, and why the current system may not be any better with new media. But to lump me in with everybody else, I think, is doing people a disservice, because most of my colleagues, as you know, are in denial about it, or blind to it.

Halperin, begging Hewitt to recognize that his new book is appropriately reverent of the Leader:

MH: Number two, you keep saying how much nice stuff there is in the book about Bill Clinton. The book writes at length, in fact, half the book is about Karl Rove and George W. Bush, and I would believe is one of the most favorable, in terms of judging them, and not treating them as evil, things that have been written about Karl Rove since he came to Washington.

Halperin, desperately displaying his contempt for the handful of White House journalists who are not sufficiently reverent of the Leader, including his own colleague:

HH: Mark Halperin, is David Gregory [Halperin’s colleague at ABC News] a buffoon?

MH: Define buffoon for me.

HH: Oh, just use your own operational definition.

MH: I wouldn’t use that word, no.

HH: Is he a journalist?

MH: He’s definitely a journalist.

HH: Does he make you proud of being a journalist?

MH: I think that the relationship between the Bush White House Press Corps, and the Bush White House press staff has not produced a pretty picture for either side. . . .

HH: Does Helen Thomas make you proud?

MH: She…the questions she asks, that represent a point of view, have no place in the briefing room.

In contrast to the undignified and biased Helen Thomas and David Gregory, here is Halperin paying homage to the objective, unbiased journalist Brit Hume (while obediently adopting Hewitt’s idiotic nomenclature of the “center-right” versus “the left”):

HH: Do you watch Special Report?

MH: With Brit Hume?

HH: Yeah.

MH: I do.

HH: Do you admire it?

MH: Do I admire it? I like it. It’s an entertaining program.

HH: Why do you think Brit Hume has the trust of the center-right?

MH: Because the center-right is looking for voices who are experienced journalists, who aren’t liberally biased. And Brit is not liberally biased.

HH: Coming right back. That’s exactly right.

Halperin eagerly and self-consciously touting his Red America roots to a disbelieving Hewitt:

HH: And so, I want you to finish off by telling me about your project…Nick Lemann’s got a project where he’s going to add another extra year of power skills, and it’s not going to work, because everyone who enters the place is a hard lefty. You’ve got an ambition, but you’re not transparent. The media keeps hiring from the Harvard Crimson. It keeps self-perpetuating from self-elected elites.

MH: Can I introduce you to my interns from Bob Jones University?

HH: I’m glad that you have one. They must feel like a stranger in a strange world.

MH: No, because within my unit, we’re all about being fair and non-partisan [ed: like Brit Hume].

Halperin, like a battered wife, blaming himself and his colleagues — and defending Bush and Rove — for the endless, vicious attacks from the Bush administration on journalists:

The founders saw the importance of a free press. What this country has now is a press that no one likes, and which is weak. And the reason George Bush and Karl Rove found the way to win in dealing with the old media, which Richard Nixon dreamed of doing, but couldn’t do, is because they recognized that we were seen as a spoiled, corrupt, biased, special interest that wasn’t interested in the public interest, and they’ve taken advantage of that.

I deplore it, or I decry it in the sense that I wish everybody was helping build up the media, but I don’t blame them from a tactical point of view, because their supporters do not trust the old media, and do not like the way we behave in the briefing room, the output that we produce, and conservatives are trying to deal with an America more on their terms. And I understand why they’re doing that, and like I said, we are responsible for that, not George Bush and Karl Rove, not Richard Nixon.

Halperin, explaining how Bill Clinton destroyed the dignity of Washington and drowned politics in tactics of personal destruction — trends which Bush has heroically reversed (seriously):

HH: Did [Bill Clinton] radicalize politics by inventing the politics of personal destruction?

MH: I think what Bill Clinton did, we say in The Way To Win is, he helped usher in this freak show. The politics of personal destruction was part of it, but it was also making the office of the presidency undignified, wearing shorts into the Oval Office, answering boxers and briefs…

HH: That was hardly how he made the Oval Office undignified.

MH: Well, there’s that, too. But we’re talking about early on in his presidency, with the birth of the freak show, in the early 90’s when he got elected. Obviously, he did more to further this along later on through his personal conduct. But the ability of this president, and certainly this first lady, as we write in the book, to restore some of the dignity, personal dignity to the office, has been quite an achievement in the wake of what Bill Clinton did, given the freak show environment in which we live.

Halperin, teaching us who the serious and unserious people are in Washington:

HH: Do you see any evidence of superior brainpower in places like Nancy Pelosi and John Murtha, as opposed to Rove and Cheney?

MH: Those specifically?

HH: Are they on the same playing field?

MH: You want me to compare those specific four people?

HH: Yeah, because you’ve got two leaders…

MH: If I were running for president, I’d hire Rove and Cheney over Pelosi and Murtha.

It goes on and on like that. I had other selected excerpts but reading these engenders a strong urge (one could even say a need) to stop reading them. The intrepid Halperin, for instance, bravely refused to take a position one way or the other on whether The New York Times should have published the story of the President’s warrantless NSA eavesdropping program (“In this case, without knowing the arguments that were made, it’s hard to know which it is”) and repeatedly affirms the right-wing view that the media is hopelessly stacked against them (“for forty years, conservatives have rightly felt that we did not give them a fair shake”).

In sum, Halperin, in one interview, illustrated the crux of the sickness of the national media — every tenet of right-wing mythology, embraced. Every opportunity to debase himself before Hewitt in the hope of getting a little head pat as one of the Good Boys, seized. Every left-wing bogeyman, bashed. Every right-wing hero, glorified and praised and treated with intense reverence.

And the funny thing is that Hewitt continued to bash Halperin as a liberal causing Halperin to write him a petulant complaint:

Again, I respect much about you, but I am mystified by your determination to lump me in with others. Acknowledging the liberal bias that exists in the Old Media — as John Harris and I do in The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008 doesn’t necessarily prove that I am not liberal, but I would think you would be open to giving me the benefit of the doubt, when you have no actual evidence to the contrary.

I’m mystified too. How much more does the poor guy have to do to prove that he isn’t a liberal?

Today, Halperin put the press on clear notice. He said that the coverage of Obama during the campaign was a “disgusting failure” and an example of “extreme bias” and the “most disparate of any campaign” he’s seen, by far. And the press will get the message, no doubt, that they’d better straighten up and fly right.

Halperin made them feel embarrassed today. The article says that nobody on the panel strongly disagreed with him. They know what they have to do.

* And by the way, the trope about Bush bringing “dignity” to the White House is a crock:

He loves to cuss, gets a jolly when a mountain biker wipes out trying to keep up with him, and now we’re learning that the first frat boy loves flatulence jokes. A top insider let that slip when explaining why President Bush is paranoid around women, always worried about his behavior. But he’s still a funny, earthy guy who, for example, can’t get enough of fart jokes. He’s also known to cut a few for laughs, especially when greeting new young aides, but forget about getting people to gas about that.

Or this:

George W. Bush slipped a piece of cheese into his mouth. “Let’s order first.” He took a quick glance at the day’s menu prepared for him and his guest, saw nothing on it he cared for, and announced to the steward, “I’ll have a hot dog. Low fat hot dog.”

[…]

His hot dog arrived. Bush ate rapidly, with a sort of voracious disinterest. He was a man who required comfort and routine. Food, for him, was fuel and familiarity. It was not a thing to reflect on.

“The job of the president,” he continued, through an ample wad of bread and sausage, “is to think strategically so that you can accomplish big objectives. As opposed to playing mini-ball. You can’t play mini-ball with the influence we have and expect there to be peace. You’ve gotta think, think BIG.” he said as bread crumbs tumbled out of his mouth and onto his chin.

And he didn’t just behave this way when he was in private.

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Pisto Sour

by digby

Oh Boy.

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Saturday Night At The Movies

Eat them up, yum: Top 10 Food Flicks

By Dennis Hartley

I was originally going to do a post this week about my “top 10 Thanksgiving movies”, but after pondering it for a spell, all I could come up with was The House of Yes, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Ice Storm , Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Alice’s Restaurant. After that, I had nuthin’ (A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving ? But that’s TV.) Oh, I suppose there are many more titles out there (wasn’t there like, a Walton family Thanksgiving thingie?) but apparently they would not be among my favorites. One movie theme that I can more easily relate to, however, is movies about food (or containing at least one memorable eating scene). Hey, everyone’s gotta eat, right? So, chew on these:

Big Night-This is one DVD that I have brought along to many a social gathering and repeatedly foisted on friends and relatives, because after all, it’s important to “…take a bite out of the ass of life!” (as one of the film’s characters points out with great veracity). Two brothers, one an enterprising businessman named Secondo (Stanley Tucci, who also co-wrote and co-directed) and his older sibling Primo (Tony Shalhoub), a gifted chef, open an Italian restaurant but quickly run into financial trouble. Possible salvation arrives via a dubious proposal from a more successful competitor (played with much aplomb by Ian Holm). The fate of their business hinges on Primo’s ability to conjure up the ultimate godhead Italian feast. And oh, what a meal he prepares (you’d better have some pasta and ragu handy-or your appestat will be writing checks that your duodenum will not be able to cash, if you know what I’m sayin’). The wonderful cast includes Isabella Rossellini, Minnie Driver, Liev Schreiber, Allison Janney, and Campbell Scott (who co-directed with Tucci). A virtually unrecognizable Marc Anthony (the Latin pop superstar) lurks in the kitchen throughout as Primo’s cooking/prep assistant, with nary a line of dialogue.

Comfort and Joy-Another delightful, quirky trifle from Scottish writer-director Bill Forsyth (Local Hero, Gregory’s Girl). An amiable Glasgow radio personality (Bill Paterson) gets unceremoniously dumped by his girlfriend on Christmas Eve, which throws him into an existential crisis, causing him to take a sudden and urgent inventory of his personal and professional life. Soon after lamenting to his GM that he wants to do something more “important” than his chirpy morning show, serendipity drops him into the middle a of a potentially hot “investigative journalism” story-an escalating “war” between two local rival ice-cream dairies. Chock full of Forsyth’s patented low-key anarchy and extremely dry one-liners. As a former morning DJ, I can tell you that the scenes depicting “Dickie Bird” doing his show are very authentic, which is rare on the screen. It will take days to get the ice cream van’s loopy theme music out of your head.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover-A gamey, visceral and perversely piss-elegant fable about food, as it relates to love, sex, violence, revenge, and uh, Thatcherism from writer-director Peter Greenaway (who I like to refer to as “the thinking person’s Ken Russell”). Michael Gambon really chews up the scenery (figuratively and literally) as a vile and vituperative British underworld type who holds nightly court at his “front” business, a gourmet restaurant. When his bored trophy wife (Helen Mirren, in a fearless performance) becomes attracted to one of the regular diners, a quiet and unassuming bookish fellow, the wheels are set in motion for quite a twisty tale, culminating in one of the most memorable scenes of “just desserts” ever served up on film. The opulent set design and cinematographer Sacha Vierny’s extraordinary use of color combine to lend a rich Jacobean texture to the proceedings. Look for the late, great 80s pub rocker Ian Dury (“Sex & Drugs & Rock ’n’ Roll”) in a small part as one of the crime lord’s associates.

Delicatessen -This film is so…French. A seriocomic vision of a food-scarce, dystopian future society along the lines of Soylent Green, directed with great verve and trademark surrealist touches by co-directors Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro (The City of Lost Children). The pair’s favorite leading man, Dominique Pinon (sort of a sawed-off Robin Williams) plays a circus performer who moves into an apartment building with a butcher shop downstairs. The shop’s proprietor seems to be appraising the new tenant with, shall we say, a “professional” eye? In Jeunet and Caro’s bizarro world, it’s all par for the course (just wait ‘til you get a load of the vegan “troglodytes” who live underneath the city streets). One particular sequence, involving a wildly funny, imaginatively staged sex scene, stands on its own as a veritable master class in the arts of film and sound editing

Diner-This wondrous, episodic slice-of-life dramedy marked writer-director Barry Levinson’s first feature film back in 1982, and it remains his best, IMHO. A small group of twenty-something buddies converge for Christmas week in 1959 Baltimore. One is recently married, another is about to get hitched, and the others are still playing the field and deciding what to do with the rest of their life. They are all slogging fitfully toward that last, “no turning back” portal to “adulthood”. The most entertaining scenes take place at the group’s favorite meeting place, a local diner, where the comfort food of choice is French fries with gravy (mmm…French fries with gravy). Levinson has a great gift for writing dialog, and it’s all the little details that make the difference here; like a cranky appliance store customer who refuses to upgrade to color TV because he saw Bonanza at a friend’s house, and decided that “…the Ponderosa looked fake”. This film was more influential than it gets credit for; Tarantino owes a debt of gratitude (see below) as well as the creators of TV’s Seinfeld. It also helped launch film careers for Kevin Bacon, Mickey Rourke, Ellen Barkin, Daniel Stern, Timothy Daly, Steve Guttenberg and Paul Reiser.

Eat Drink Man Woman-Or as I once dubbed it: “I Never Stir-Fried for My Father”. This was director Ang Lee’s more substantive follow-up to his enjoyable, but relatively fluffy crowd-pleaser The Wedding Banquet (another good food flick). Lee treads on Wayne Wang territory in this beautifully acted dramedy about the clash of traditional vs. modern values within Chinese culture. An aging master chef, who is losing his sense of taste (ah, savor the irony) stringently follows a tradition of preparing an elaborate feast every Sunday, which his three grown (and single) daughters are required to attend. Dysfunctional family angst ensues around these mandatory gatherings, as you might expect. As the story unfolds, Lee reveals the bittersweet truths and universality of family dynamics, which transcends culture and geography. Only caveat: An hour after you watch it, you’ll be hungry for a second feature (I’m KIDDING). You know I’m a kidder.

My Dinner with Andre– Boy, this one is a tough sell to the uninitiated. “An entire film that nearly all takes place at one restaurant table, with two self-absorbed New York intellectuals pontificating the whole time- ‘yak, yak, yak, yak’? This is entertaining?!” Actually, um, yes-it is. Quite surprisingly so. The late great director Louis Malle took a bold artistic gamble with this movie that pays off in spades. Although ostensibly a work of “fiction”, Malle’s two stars, theatre director Andre Gregory and actor-playwright Wallace Shawn, essentially play themselves (the pair collaborated on the screenplay). A rumination on art, life, love, the universe and everything, the film is not so much about the food itself, but more of a love letter to the lost art of erudite dinner conversation.

Pulp Fiction -Although the universal popularity of this Quentin Tarantino opus is largely owed to its hyper-stylized mayhem and the ultra-hip, creatively salty iambic pentameter spouted by the characters, I have always felt it to be a closer cousin to Diner than to, say, The Asphalt Jungle(I know that sounds crazy, but hear me out). Think about it: The film’s crucial opening and closing scenes take place in a diner, with characters conducting animated, eclectic conversations over plates of food. In Mia and Vincent’s protracted sequence at the theme restaurant, the camera gives us fetishistic close-ups of their decidedly all-American eats (“Douglas Sirk steak. And a vanilla coke.”). There’s that classic exchange between Vincent and Jules regarding “Le” Big Macs in France, Jules’ voracious hijacking of poor hapless Brett’s “Big Kahuna” burger, and Fabienne pining wistfully about her longing for blueberry pancakes. Even the super efficient Mr. Wolfe takes a few seconds out of his precisely mapped schedule to reflect on the pleasures of a fresh-brewed cup of coffee. I think this definitely qualifies as a food flick!

Tampopo-Self billed as “The first Japanese noodle western”, this 1987 entry from writer-director Juzo Itami (A Taxing Woman) is all that and more. Nobuko Niyamoto is superb as the title character, a widow who has inherited her late husband’s noodle house. Despite her hard work and sincere effort to please customers, Tampopo struggles to keep the business afloat, until a deux ex machina arrives-a truck driver named Goro (Tsutomo Yamazaki). After one taste, Goro pinpoints the problem-her noodles are bland (in his personal “code of the east”, bland noodles are an aesthetic crime). No worries-like the magnanimous gunslinger of the old west, Goro decides to take Tampopo on as a personal project, and mentor her on the Zen of creating the perfect noodle bowl. A true delight from start to finish, offering keen insight on the relationship between food, sex and love.

Tom Jones (-Truly, doth I really need to explain? Good sirs and madams, I prithee, just watch this morsel…and enjoy:

Anyone for seconds? Here are 10 more personal recommendations for your delectation: Babette’s Feast, Like Water for Chocolate, Henry Jaglom’s Eating – A Very Serious Comedy About Women and Food, Ratatouille, The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie, Eating Raoul, Chocolat , 9 1/2 Weeks, La Grande Bouffe, GoodFellas .

Bon appetit!

Hair On Fire

by digby

Krugman:

The reason we’re making analogies with the Great Depression — and the reason I’ve come out with a new edition of The Return of Depression Economics — is the collapse of policy certainties. In particular, the Fed’s sudden impotence — its inability to cut rates any more, because they’re essentially zero — is a very real parallel with the Depression, and necessitates drastic responses.

Now, if all goes well the Obama stimulus plan will head off the worst. But that will be precisely because we understood that the current crisis is, indeed, like the Great Depression in important ways. Only those who learn from history can hope to avoid repeating it.

Boy I hope he’s right because I’m getting a little bit of that Richard Clark running around with his hair on fire sort of feeling right now.