Yes, yes, McCain is a lying piece of work who has spent his career basically acting the character of the heroic Top Gun maverick who flew a little bit too close to the sun, got burned and then spent the rest of his career pretending to seek redemption by becoming a reformer of the system that almost destroyed him. It’s crap. He’s corrupt, always has been.
But this latest doesn’t just indict McCain. It indicts the press corps too:
[T]he Ethics Committee’s was not the only investigation into the scandal. There were two other probes at the time that got barely any public attention–both of which largely focused on McCain himself. These were probes into illicit leaks about the proceedings of the Ethics Committee–leaks that repeatedly benefited McCain and hurt his Keating Five colleagues. One of those senators described the leaks at the time as a “violation of ethical behavior at least as serious as anything of which we senators have been accused.” The leaks, if they were coming from a senator, were also illegal. All five senators–including McCain–had testified under oath and under the U.S. penal code that the leaks did not come from their camps. The leaks were also prohibited by rules of the Senate Ethics Committee; according to the rules of the Senate, anyone caught leaking such information could face expulsion from the body. These, then, were not the usual Washington disclosures: Discovered, they could have stopped the career of any Washington politician in his tracks.
Golly, if only we’d known.
I’m going to call this The Scooter Paradigm, wherein the press reports stories that feature the press (sometimes even themselves personally) as if they are reporting on tribal chieftains in Afghanistan. In other words, as if they are reporting on something foreign and unknowable. The fact is that there are some people who know the truth about this from the beginning and they’re called “reporters.” They knew then and they know now that they were being leaked to by a lying creep who was trying to cover his ass. And, in their minds, that’s exactly the same as protecting the identity of some low level whistleblower at the SEC who discovers that powerful people are committing crimes. Nobody said a word.
I will never understand why reporters think it’s so important that they protect people who lie to them and use them for nefarious political reasons. They sit idly by while a man like McCain creates a completely phony persona, wines and dines them and treats them to his “unvarnished” off-the-record musings all the while at least some of them (and their editors) know that he is completely full of shit.
He’s run for president twice now. And it took until four days before the election for this story of McCain’s perfidious treatment of his fellow senators and cover-up of his crimes to surface? A story about leaks to the press? Can we all see the problem here?
Terrible news. The day before an historic election, Barack Obama’s grandmother, the woman who raised him for a good portion of his youth, has passed away. He took time off the campaign trail in the final weeks to say his last goodbyes. Unfortunately she could not make it to Election Day.
This was a woman who went from the secretarial pool to the Vice President of a bank, a woman who worked on assembly lines during World War II. Here’s the statement from Barack Obama and his sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng:
“It is with great sadness that we announce that our grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, has died peacefully after a battle with cancer. She was the cornerstone of our family, and a woman of extraordinary accomplishment, strength, and humility. She was the person who encouraged and allowed us to take chances. She was proud of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren and left this world with the knowledge that her impact on all of us was meaningful and enduring. Our debt to her is beyond measure.
“Our family wants to thank all of those who sent flowers, cards, well-wishes, and prayers during this difficult time. It brought our grandmother and us great comfort. Our grandmother was a private woman, and we will respect her wish for a small private ceremony to be held at a later date. In lieu of flowers, we ask that you make a donation to any worthy organization in search of a cure for cancer.”
RIP.
…I should also note that the Nevada State Director of the Obama campaign died from a massive heart attack at the age of just 44. Much of my volunteer efforts for Obama supported Nevada. This is also a tragic loss.
…It is sadly typical of the knuckle-draggers in the California Republican Party that they picked today to file a lawsuit over Obama’s travel to Hawaii to visit Mrs. Dunham for the last time. The RNC jumped on this lawsuit filing today as well.
I consider MAD magazine to be the greatest influence in my life. It’s true. When I was a kid I pored over every page like like it was the world of God himself. I know that makes me a very strange person. But I think a fair number of us baby boomers suffer from the same disease.
Wired got a sneak preview of MAD’s election issue.
Here’s an example of McCain’s greatest historical moments:
In the heat of an election, amidst the media din, sometimes everyone forgets why they’re undertaking the fight. The contest becomes one of personalities and soundbites instead of issues and solutions. In this election, there is a definitive reason for that; the rot at the core of our government has a bipartisan patina and has been met by official silence across the political spectrum. There are serious assaults on our Constitution and our civil liberties that haven’t had so much as a 30 second glance in the traditional media. And yet they are very deep problems that will not go away with a new Administration in Washington.
As the Bush administration enters its final months with no apparent plan to close the Guantánamo Bay camp, an extensive review of the government’s military tribunal files suggests that dozens of the roughly 255 prisoners remaining in detention are said by military and intelligence agencies to have been captured with important terrorism suspects, to have connections to top leaders of Al Qaeda or to have other serious terrorism credentials.
Senators John McCain and Barack Obama have said they would close the detention camp, but the review of the government’s public files underscores the challenges of fulfilling that promise. The next president will have to contend with sobering intelligence claims against many of the remaining detainees.
“It would be very difficult for a new president to come in and say, ‘I don’t believe what the C.I.A. is saying about these guys,’ ” said Daniel Marcus, a Democrat who was general counsel of the 9/11 Commission and held senior positions in the Carter and Clinton administrations.
The strength of the evidence is difficult to assess, because the government has kept much of it secret and because of questions about whether some was gathered through torture.
If you hadn’t guessed, this is (to me, anyway) a signal that the CIA and the intelligence community is going to go to the greatest lengths possible to bury George Bush and Dick Cheney’s mistakes on a variety of fronts. The unspeakable tragedy of the Uighurs, innocent bystanders wrapped up in sweeps in Afghanistan, who have been dismissed of any charges and told by a federal judge that they should be released, but who today will be told that they are likely to spend the rest of their lives in prison, is but one example. The rule of law has taken a beating over the past eight years, as federal statutes and international conventions and war crimes resolutions have been totally ignored, and illusions of security took great precedence over liberty. I don’t remember this getting much mention at all over the past week:
WASHINGTON — An operation in 2004 meant to disrupt potential terrorist plots before and after that year’s presidential election focused on more than 2,000 immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries, but most were found to have done nothing wrong, according to newly disclosed government data.
The program, conducted by the Department of Homeland Security, received little public attention at the time. But details about the targets of the investigation have emerged from more than 10,000 pages of internal records obtained through a lawsuit by civil rights advocates. Parts of the documents were provided to The New York Times.
The documents show that more than 2,500 foreigners in the United States were sought as “priority leads” in the fall of 2004 because of suspicions that they could present threats to national security in the months before the presidential election and the inauguration. Some of those foreigners were detained and ultimately deported because they had overstayed their visas, but many were in this country legally, and the vast majority were not charged.
We’re talking about massive ethnic and racial profiling, enormous data mining schemes, a near-total ignoring of relevant statutes on privacy and civil liberties, all done in a systematic fashion and guarded zealously by elites throughout Washington. The courts can offer a bit of relief here, by asking for secret documents providing the legal basis for the illegal wiretapping program, for example, but considering that the Congress immunized telecoms who participated in the program, that relief is small indeed.
There are stakes to this election but they don’t end on November 4. I think Glenn Greenwald, as usual, put this best:
It certainly seems, by all appearances, that Barack Obama and Joe Biden will win on Tuesday (though anything can happen, don’t assume anything, etc. etc.). For reasons I’ve explained many times before, I consider that to be a good and important outcome (principally due to the need to excise the Right from power for as long as possible). But the virtually complete absence from the presidential campaign of any issues pertaining to the executive power abuses of the last eight years — illegal eavesdropping, torture, rendition, due-process-less detentions, the abolition of habeas corpus, extreme and unprecedented secrecy, general executive lawlessness — reflects how much further work and effort will be required to make progress on these issues no matter what happens on Tuesday.
Much of this is deeply embedded in the political culture. Very few people in the political and media establishment object to any of it; most either tacitly accept or actively believe in it. And the natural instinct of political officials — especially new arrivals determined to achieve all sorts of things — is to consolidate, not voluntarily relinquish, extant political power. It will help to have in the Oval Office someone who has, at least at times, evinced the right instincts on these matters (even though during other times he has acted contrary to them), and the better outcome on Tuesday (the defeat of John McCain) will likely ensure some very modest, marginal improvements in terms of the rule of law, executive power abuses and constitutional transgressions. But that outcome is merely necessary, not remotely sufficient; the election by itself will not produce fundamental changes in most of these areas. That’s going to take much more than a single election, standing alone, can or will accomplish.
That work will go on beyond 2008 and into 2010, as the progressive movement matures and seeks to hold accountable those who directed, engaged in, or tacitly accepted the worst of the abuses of the Bush Administration. Elections end with confetti drops but they really represent a beginning and not an end. As we seek together to change the country and not just the nameplate in the Oval Office, it’s going to get more difficult. But the importance of it, in the looks on the faces of those Uighur prisoners, in the eyes of the Muslim immigrants questioned for no good reason, from the lips of the innocent phone-callers whose communications have been captured and stored, is too vital to forget.
I’m listening to Sarah Palin right now and she no longer has an accent. She’s not droppin’ her gs (she didn’t even say “workin’ instead of working) or talking in the strange cadence that makes her sound like a combination of Lawrence Welk and Annie Oakley.
Why, if I didn’t know better I’d say she’s forgetting who she is.
We’ve all heard a lot about vote fraud, vote suppression and are expecting some activity at the polls tomorrow. luckily, there are organizations out there to help tomorrow if you see something weird or have a problem. The Election Protection coalition has put together a free hotline and a web site dedicated to tracking voting irregularities.
Yesterday alone, the 1-866-OUR-VOTE hotline received over 8,000 calls from across the country.Some key issues:
Katrina displacement: People who moved out of their damaged homes after hurricane Katrina are reporting confusion about their registration status and voting precinct to Election Protection’s 866-OUR-VOTE hotline. Voting rights experts are working to resolve these questions to ensure that all eligible voters from the New Orleans area can exercise their right to vote in this historic election.
Absentee voting problems are being widely reported, with particularly high rates in Virginia, Ohio and Florida. In one example, a caller from Florida had requested absentee ballots for herself and her husband, a stroke survivor who is unable to go to the polls. Neither ballot has arrived and if they don’t, she will be unable to vote as she is unable to leave her husband’s side to go to the polls.
Polling place problems – such as extremely long lines– areof great concern to voters in Florida and Georgia, particularly in Miami-Dade and Broward counties in Florida, and Fulton County in Georgia.
I hope Dennis won’t mind my straying yet again onto his beat. I just saw Changeling, the new Clint Eastwood film starring Angelina Jolie and I think it’s one of his best films – not on the level of Unforgiven, to be sure, but still an excellent movie. I’d be curious to get his take on it (Dennis, have you reviewed it? I couldn’t find anything).
I was curious about the story behind the movie so I tried a google. The ways in which it differs from the actual true story confirmed some thoughts i had about some of the subtexts Eastwood works with.
The rest of this post is now under a Severe Spoiler Alert. Please see the movie first.
To simplify, Eastwood went far further than he had to in order to sanitize the story. Partly, that’s because what really happened was so ghastly it comes close to Ed Gein territory and that, for Eastwood’s audience today, wouldn’t work commercially. Gone, of course, are unnecessary complications, like Collins’ jailbird of a husband (complete with a perfectly serviceable red herring that her son was kidnapped by an ex-con seeking revenge on her husband). But Eastwood also dramatically cleaned up the sordid tale of the Northcott mudererers, eliminating, for example, Gordon Stewart’s mother, who, unlike her son, actually was convicted of the murder of Walter Collins. (Stewart was convicted of other murders). Also missing from the film is the sexual abuse and the tortures of the poor children. And to top it off, Eastwood further cut a stomach-churning tale of incest as well as other family perversions including a truly insane level of pathological lying.
By eliminating most of the uniquely bizarre details of the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders, Eastwood went further than needed, I think. After all, this is Dirty Harry and the producer of the lurid Tightrope. In Changeling, however, he stripped the murders of nearly all of their fascination for us morbid voyeurs. True, they don’t become exactly generic slasher murders, but they don’t stick in the craw the way, say, the murders in Zodiac do. Tamping down our interest in seeing/hearing about unique ways to perpetrate atrocities enables him to place the main focus of the film on Christine’s story, as she desperately calls the cops and becomes victimized by what passed for law enforcement in Los Angeles at the end of the 20’s.
And that’s when things get interesting, because in a very real sense, Changeling becomes a film about a corrupt, violent, law-ignoring government, contemptuous of those it rules, manufacturing fake feelgood stories to deflect criticism and investigation of its abuses. It is also the story of a compliant, lazy press far too eager to print those stories: they easily fit standard sentimental journalistic narratives of how a “tough love” law-and-order government should behave. Should you dare to question the government and/or the press accounts of their behavior, you risk being publicly declared insane and disappeared. Finally, it is only through the incessant, nearly obsessional rants disseminated by a new, relatively inexpensive, but very powerful alternative mass media that the torture, corruption, and incompetence of the rogue government is exposed and denounced.
Sound familiar?
Now, Eastwood is far too sophisticated a filmmaker for anyone to claim that the Bush administration is all that Changeling is about. The serial killer angle is more than just a huge Maguffin (btw, Eastwood quotes at least once from a Hitchcock film, Foreign Correspondent: check out the umbrellas on the steps). The film fits in easily to the genre of LA noir – Chinatown, L.A. Confidential, to name two examples – and that is certainly the main focus of the film, its principle narrative and plot.
However, what I’m suggesting is that Eastwood is much too subtle an artist in his late period to make a film “just” about LA lowlife anymore than Kurosawa was making movies only about samurai (and yes, of course, Kurosawa’s the greater filmmaker). The barely hidden subtext in Changeling is our present time and its hero a strong, even shrill, voice who fights the powers that be with everything she’s got. Why? Because they are complicit in failing to recover her “angel,” a deliberate verbal link by Eastwood to the illusion of a benign “City of Angels,” and a (police) force for good.
Like another great recent movie by a serious director – Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution – there is no mistaking the conscious effort in a period film to confront the opening of the gates of Hell over the past eight years. Eastwood’s film is more conventional than Lee’s, but that isn’t necessarily a criticism (although I have to be honest and admit I think Lust, Caution is the better film). Eastwood is making Hollywood movies with all the constraints on content that large budgets and a star like Jolie demand (by the way, I thought she did a wonderful job), the tradeoff being that he reaches a far wider audience than Lee ever will (at least in the US). Pace Adorno, all art is about constraints as much as it is about freedom and expression. In this discussion, popularity is, to a great extent, just one more factor an artist weighs when creating a work. (And yes, while one’s payday is another factor; for a variety of reasons, I think Eastwood would have made a vastly different film if raking in big bucks was all he had in mind.)
I gather Eastwood endorses McCain. Odd. If so, you’d never know that from seeing Changeling. I truly think the anti-rightwing themes here are deliberately played up to bring up parallels with movement conservatism of the kind the modern Republican party, including McCain of course, practice. (It goes without saying that nothing goes into his films that Eastwood isn’t aware of: I’m certain lefty writers didn’t sneak this stuff past him.)
My pal Bill sent me this article about how African American churches doing HIV outreach have problems with the use of condoms:
In Tampa’s black neighborhoods, the statistics scream: black family disease. More blacks have HIV than any other ethnic group. One in 85 blacks in Hillsborough County is infected. That is more than four times the rate for whites. The disparity is more pronounced among women. One in every 92 black women in Hillsborough is infected. That is 11 times the rate for white women.
This black family disease — that’s what Favorite calls it — preys on even fathers and mothers in the pews, children in Sunday school.
He wants the full gamut of services for his vulnerable congregation, and he wants it based in his landmark church, one founded in 1865 for freed slaves. He wants a partnership with the Health Department similar to one initiated by Florida’s black AME churches. AME’s Florida bishop has committed to providing a church for HIV screening in every county. They’re halfway to their goal.
But pastors whose beliefs are biblically founded get caught in a moral paradox. If they base an HIV prevention program on abstinence alone, they’re bound to fail. If they provide the common medically recommended option — condoms — they’ve compromised their principles. Religion has never been about options.
This, of course, plays into the problem we have with gay rights, specifically with the Prop Hate campaign here in California. A lot of black churches are socially conservative — like most of the southern based religions. It causes some dissonance. And it’s one of the reasons why I’m really not a big believer in faith based government programs replacing the secular ones. There has to be some place for “science based” solutions to social problems and a lot of these faith based organizations just can’t do that, evidently.
Blitzer: But did she make a mistake Donna by going to that fundraiser at the home of the woman who professes that there is no god?
Brazile: You know Wolf there are a lot of believers. I’m one of them. And there are people who just don’t believe in an existence of a god. I don’t know why because clearly there’s strong evidence that there’s a god but I believe that you serve all the people. Not just those that profess to have faith but those with little or no faith. That’s how you convert them.
There you have it. You serve all the people (even the heathens!) so you can convert them. I think that perfectly makes the case against faith based programs.
Newspapers Ignore Corddry’s Law And Readers Bid Them Adieu
by tristero
You do know the great Rob Corddry’s famous law? “Reality has a clear liberal bias,” he memorably intoned once on The Daily Show. A truly hilarious line has never, ever, been less of a joke, (I wonder: Did he write that?).
As much as the rightwing and their enablers in the press try to ignore it, laws are laws and it’s come back to bite them, bigtime in many ways, from the ghastly to the farcical. However, Glenn notes that WaPo’s ombudsperson hasn’t yet figured that out:
Deborah Howell, today wrote a column claiming that one reason that The Post and other papers are losing money is because they are “too liberal”; have had “more favorable stories about Barack Obama than John McCain,” and “conservatives are right that they often don’t see their views reflected enough in the news pages.” To mitigate newspapers’ financial problems, Howell decrees: “the imbalance still needs to be corrected.” She adds: “Neither the hard-core right nor left will ever be satisfied by Post coverage — and that’s as it should be.”
What if the actual facts — i.e., “reality” — are consistent with the views of “the hard-core left” and contrary to the views of the “hard-core right”? What if, as has plainly been the case, the conservatives’ views are wrong, false, inaccurate? What if the McCain campaign was failing and relying on pure falsehoods and sleazy attacks, and The Post’s coverage simply reflected that reality? It doesn’t matter. In order to sell more newspapers, according to Howell, The Post’s news coverage must shape itself to the Right and ensure that “their views [are] reflected enough in the news pages” (I don’t recall Howell complaining when her newspaper — according to its own media critic — systematically suppressed anti-war viewpoints in its news pages and loudly amplified pro-Bush and pro-war views).
In Howell’s view, The Post shouldn’t determine its news reporting based on what is factually true. Instead, it should shape its coverage to please this discredited, failed political movement — in order to sell more papers. That corrupt formula is, of course, what is now meant by “journalistic balance” — say what both sides believe and take no position about what is true — and it is precisely that behavior which propped up this incomparably failed and deceitful presidency for so long. The establishment media bears much of the responsibility for what has happened during the last 8 years, and amazingly enough, the lesson many of them seemed to have learned is that they didn’t go far enough (“we’re too liberal; we need to accommodate the Right more”). If there is an Obama presidency, watch for them very quickly to re-discover the long-dormant concept of “adversarial behavior.”
Howie is doing all the heavy lifting, gathering information and putting together the pre-election round up over at his place. If you’re a Blue America donor this cycle and want to know how it’s going for our candidates, be sure to check in with him over the next couple of days and after the election for the full round up.
Yesterday, he wrote about Blue America’s media work in this cycle:
As I mentioned on Thursday at a story on how the Inside the Beltway Democratic Establishment is cynically using the “free trade” issue to win votes while already plotting to betray the voters they are wooing, Larry Kissell is not a man that will ever be brow-beaten by some corrupt corporate shill like Rahm Emanuel into selling out his constituents’ interests. For North Carolina voters, dramatically hurt by the job-killing trade policies of Bush and Emanuel, “fair trade” is a do-or-die issue.
Blue America decided to run a few thousand TV ads in North Carolina that addresses the issue head on. Take a look at the ad which, I’m told, has been hard to avoid for anyone in the district who watches cable TV:
While Jacquie was busily buying up every single available spot that Elizabeth Dole hadn’t already grabbed for her ad accusing Kay Hagan of being “godless,” she came up with another idea. “Why not run the ad on broadcast TV?” she suggested. She managed to get us a great deal for a few Sunday NASCAR and college football spots on ABC-TV. I hear a lot of people in NC-08 watch those programs.
Blue America also bought TV spots– different ads– to remind people what awful representatives Dave Reichert, Mean Jean Schmidt, Dana Rohrabacher, David Dreier, Charlie Dent, Joe Knollenberg and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen have been. We were depressed when we looked at the pricing of ads for NJ-05, where Dennis Shulman is in a close battle with one of the most heinous members of Congress, Scott Garrett. Look at the confirmation we got in the mail for a few of the spots we ran in Mean Jean Schmidt’s district just east of Cincinnati:
A 30 second spot on CNN costs $20 between 7pm and midnight and between 9am and 4pm, it’s $13. NJ-05 is in the most expensive media market in the country. A single 30 second spot for Dennis on CNN between 6pm and midnight costs $2,167 (and between 10AM and 6pm, $1,084).
This came through the Blue America SayMe campaign, which is the innovation of the future in online organization. It’s so good, I’m sure there will be many people clamoring to take credit for it down the road, but it was Howie Klein and Blue America — and all of you — who pioneered it in this election.
Stay tuned for more at Howie’s place. We are poised to bring some better Democrats to congress this time and all of you who donated to Blue America and our candidates over the past year or so can take a look in the mirror and be proud that you helped elect some real progressives to Washington. It’s not as sexy s Obamamania, but it’s important.
