Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Springing A Leak

by dday

I don’t know if these 11th-hour smears are going to work at a time when the total financial meltdown tends to focus the mind a bit. But if undecideds were looking for an excuse to vote against Senator Obama, they’ve been handed it. It appears that Obama has an aunt from Kenya who is living in Boston illegally after her request for asylum was denied four years ago. Illegal!!!1! By the way, Barack Obama doesn’t seem to know this aunt well or have any sort of relationship with her.

(Also, she apparently gave a small amount of donations to the campaign, which Obama has just given back.)

The interesting part of this is how the asylum denial was discovered. The quoted portion is from this AP story.

“Information about the deportation case was disclosed and confirmed by two separate sources, one of them a federal law enforcement official. The information they made available is known to officials in the federal government, but the AP could not establish whether anyone at a political level in the Bush administration or in the McCain campaign had been involved in its release.”

To quote Josh Marshall:

That’s about as transparent a red flag as an outfit like the AP is usually willing to give. And there you have it. Quite likely working in concert with the McCain campaign, a Bush administration official is leaking details on an immigration case to try to help McCain three days before the election. It’s shades of Bush I’s riffling through Bill Clinton’s passport files just before the 1992 election in a desperate last minute gambit as they were swirling down the drain.

Guess what? THAT’S illegal. And unlike some random relative who has no relationship to Obama, it’s likely this was carried out at the highest levels of either the Bush Administration or the McCain campaign.

We’ll see if it has any impact – I think it will be minimal. But the circumstances of the leak ought to be investigated as well.

…By the way, here are some things that could have driven the news cycle as last-minute revelations about McCain that were ignored by the larger media:

1) A mysterious donor who gave $70,000 to John McCain in one day and $269,000 over the course of a year.

2) John and Cindy used military jets for vacation trips to Bermuda back in 1993.

3) A potential fatal car crash back in 1964.

4) McCain pushed regulators to approve a land swap for a key contributor.

Any or all of these could have been in the genre of these last-minute smears, but you know, that wouldn’t be sporting.

…and John Conyers weighs in on this leak:

I was startled to read in today’s Associated Press that a “federal law enforcement official” has leaked information about an immigration case involving a relative of Senator Obama. Even more troubling, the AP reports that it “could not establish whether anyone at a political level in the Bush administration or in the McCain campaign had been involved,” a very disturbing suggesting indeed. This leak is deplorable and I urge you to take immediate action to investigate and discipline those responsible.

I note that this is not the first leak of law enforcement information apparently designed to influence the coming Presidential election — in recent weeks law enforcement sources leaked information about an alleged investigation of a community services organization, a leak that the Department of Justice informs me has been referred to the Department’s Office of the Inspector General and Professional Responsibility.

Such leaks are deeply harmful to the political process, and the American people expect and deserve better from their government and its law enforcement agencies.

.

Ah, Comity!

by tristero

Attention, all you Emily Post trolls who need smelling salts after encountering the nasty vicious netroots:

“Now, listen, I’ve voted ‘present’ two or three times in my entire 25-year political career, where there might have been a conflict of interest and I didn’t feel like I should vote,” Boehner said. “In Congress, we have a red button, a green button and a yellow button, alright. Green means ‘yes,’ red means ‘no,’ and yellow means you’re a chicken shit. And the last thing we need in the White House, in the oval office, behind that big desk, is some chicken who wants to push this yellow button.”

That’s right. John Boehner said Obama’s a chicken shit.

And this is why, girls and boys, all talk about a less toxic political atmosphere with the current Republican party is sheer nonsense. Oh sure, Obama – if we are lucky enough to wake up Wed and find him elected – could find a spare Hagel lying around, or a Jim Leach to nail into his Cabinet,and that’s probably a good idea in the long run. But the reality staring us straight in the face is that the leadership of the Republican party – and a huge GOP majority having influence in the party’s ideological and strategic direction -have no interest in anything remotely resembling bipartisanship.

And neither does anyone I know personally who’s supporting Obama. Not with these murderous, corrupt clowns. We want the extreme right and their agenda out of our national politics, driven back to the margins of American discourse where it belongs. Maybe someone out there truly yearns for a less nasty politics, but not me, not now. Not with extremists who call me “traitor,” who have listed my friends as some of the 100 most dangerous people in America or placed them on terrorist watch lists, and who, from their seat as a US Representative pronounce a candidate for the American presidency a chicken shit.

Since I’m sure our resident rightwing friends will take what I just said out of context, let’s be clear. I am not saying that a robust, vibrant, and bipartisan effort on serious issues will remain ipso facto impossible or is necessarily undesirable. Nor am I saying that Democrats and only Democrats always have the “right” answer to a problem – clearly they don’t. I am saying, however, that it is absolutely impossible with the Republican party as it is now, and in its forseeable paleolithic palinized future, for Democrats to work together productively with the extremists at the top of (and throughout) the party except on the most circumscribed of issues. To get anything serious done, they will have to be fought. And that will not be pretty. I see no reason for Dems to back down and plenty of reasons to respond tit for tat, with interest.

You cannot “work with” the extreme right, but you can defeat them. Obama’s tactic appears to be to ignore them and isolate them from the atrophied remnants of the “moderate” Republicans, which he will encourage. Fair enough, that’s part of a strategy, but it’s not sufficient. To defeat Bushism and other trends of the American extreme right will take, as it always has, concentrated . sustained, and effective resistance in addition to Obama’s “divide and conquer” tactics. It requires us to denounce scoundrels like DeLay and humiliate buffoons like Boehner as well as a consistent, persistent, hounding of the media to do their job to expose these people for what they are.

These are incompetent frauds driven by a dangerously belligerent ideology grounded not in American values, but only sheer ignorance and fear. There is no reason to show them respect or kindness. They simply must be pushed away from the corridors of power, left to mutter in their plush think tanks and at their gun shows ’bout how Obama is using hypnosis, how the beginning of the end was fluoridated water, and how gay marriage is the only human factor that causes global warming.

Don’t Read This If You’re Drinking Coffee

by tristero

David Sedaris:

I don’t know that it was always this way, but, for as long as I can remember, just as we move into the final weeks of the Presidential campaign the focus shifts to the undecided voters. “Who are they?” the news anchors ask. “And how might they determine the outcome of this election?”

Then you’ll see this man or woman— someone, I always think, who looks very happy to be on TV. “Well, Charlie,” they say, “I’ve gone back and forth on the issues and whatnot, but I just can’t seem to make up my mind!” Some insist that there’s very little difference between candidate A and candidate B. Others claim that they’re with A on defense and health care but are leaning toward B when it comes to the economy.

I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

From The New Yorker. Yes, The New Yorker.

h/t, my friend MC.

Studs

by tristero

Studs Terkel died. He was a wonderful man. I had the privilege of being interviewed by him once, it must have been at least 10 years ago, and I’ll never forget his intensity and charm. A terrific host and a great progressive.

Youthquake And Prop Hate

by digby

Dday wrote about this last night, but I thought it was worth another push. Here’s the latest from California’s Field Poll (the best one) on the proposition to ban gay marriage:

Prop. 8 trailed in The Field Poll’s initial measurement in July by nine points (51% No to 42% Yes) taken shortly after it qualified for the ballot.

The No-side advantage increased to fourteen points (52% to 38%) in September, when voters were asked to react to its original ballot description, which referred to the measure as the “Limit on Marriage” initiative. However, following the state Supreme Court’s ruling that the state’s existing same-sex marriage ban was unconstitutional, thereby making it legal for same-sex couples to marry in California, state Attorney General Jerry Brown changed Prop. 8’s official ballot title to the “Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry” initiative. When voters were read this amended description in September, the No-side lead grew to seventeen points (55% No vs. 38% Yes).

Now, after more than a month of intensive campaigning on both sides, the initiative trails by just five points, 49% No vs. 44% Yes, with 7% undecided. Yes-side support has increased six points, and those opposed declining six points over the past month.

If you’ve ever wondered why these California propositions are so absurd, that should tell you why. Thank God for Jerry Brown, or we’d be losing this one big. The religious right is moving hard and fast with some of the most dishonest campaigning I’ve ever seen. (They are all going straight to a fiery, burning hell for it too.)

But there’s another little wrinkle. I’ve grown a little bit concerned about the stories I’m reading about the youthquake failing to materialize in the early voting.

Gallup polling in October finds little evidence of a surge in young voter turnout beyond what it was in 2004. While young voter registration may be up slightly over 2004, the reported level of interest in the election and intention to vote among those under 30 are no higher than they were that year. What’s more, 18- to 29-year-olds continue to lag behind Americans aged 30 and older on these important turnout indicators. As a result, 18- to 29-year-olds now constitute 12% of Gallup’s traditional likely voter sample, basically the same as the estimate in the final 2004 pre-election poll (13%). Gallup’s expanded likely voter model, which defines likely voters differently (on the basis of current voting intentions only), estimates a slightly higher proportion of young voters in the electorate (14%). However, even if the share of the youth vote were adjusted upward, doing so has little or no impact on the overall Obama-McCain horse-race numbers using either likely voter model. It is possible that the 18- to 29-year-old share of the likely voter electorate will grow in the final days of the election. Although interest in the election and voting intentions usually increase as Election Day grows nearer, Gallup did not observe much of an increase from mid- to late October 2004, because interest was already at high levels (as it is this year). A second possibility for heightened youth turnout would be voter mobilization efforts. Such efforts can convince people with little motivation or interest in the campaign to actually vote on Election Day. Gallup has been measuring voter contact in its daily tracking poll this week in an effort to gain a better understanding of this important component of the “ground game” in the final days of the campaign. As of Oct. 27-29 polling, 39% of 18- to 29-year-olds had been contacted by either the Obama or McCain campaigns. That is the same contact rate seen among 30- to 49-year-olds, but is well below that of Americans 50 and older. So thus far, in a general sense, mobilization efforts have not reached the young voters to the same extent that they have older voters.

It goes on to discuss the fact that the Obama campaign has been far more aggressive and successful at outreach to all age groups than the McCain campaign and then concludes:

While Gallup data do suggest that voter turnout among young people will be high this year (as it was in 2004) compared to historical turnout rates, the data do not suggest that it will be appreciably higher than in 2004. Even if more young voters are registered this year, they do not appear to be any more interested in the campaign or in voting in the election than they were in 2004. Unless turnout rates among older age groups drop substantially from what they were in 2004, young voters should represent about the same share of the electorate as in the last presidential election. And Gallup’s data suggest interest in the campaign and voting are the same or higher among older voters compared to what they were in 2004.

It concerns me that with Obama looking like he’s winning the young voters may have another reason to blow off voting on Tuesday. I don ‘t think this will affect an Obama victory. I’m sure they factored in the historical data that shows the youth vote to always be a little bit hyped. And the fact is that if the same percentage of the total vote as did in 2004, with the huge growth in voters of other age groups, that spells a very comfortable victory (assuming these numbers hold up, of course.)

But I am concerned about things like Prop 8 where the young people are far more liberal and open minded than the oldies and some conservative African Americans who may vote for Obama, but also vote for a constitutional amendment to discriminate against gays. It doesn’t feel like much of an election here in California — Obama’s ahead by 22 points. But it’s very, very important for the young and the liberal to vote anyway to make this election a truly historic, progressive victory.

If you have time to help with GOTV on Tuesday, and help defeat the latest attempt to discriminate against people the right wing doesn’t like, you can go here.

If you have some time to do a little phone banking this week-end, the campaign to stop forced childbirth and back alley abortions for 14 year olds, could use your help too. This one’s losing at the moment.

Both of the propositions are ones where the young voters could really make the difference. If you know any 18 to 29 year olds in California or elsewhere, give them a call on Tuesday and make sure they get their asses down to the polls.

.

The Hillary Cluster

by digby

I was doing some research and came upon this article from 1998 by Christopher Caldwell, which I’ve blogged about before, but which now has a different set of implications from the one’s I’ve drawn over the past few years. Before, it always seemed that it felt right in theory, but had played itself out completely differently in fact. Now it seems as though it might have been ahead of its time. I’ll have to revisit in in another year and see what I think.

But in the meantime, there is a piece of this analysis that I found intriguing:

THERE is an ideological component to Clinton’s success and the Republicans’ failure. The end of the Cold War, the increasing significance of information technology, and the growth of identity politics have caused a social revolution since the badly misunderstood 1980s. It’s difficult to tell exactly what is going on, but in today’s politics such subjects for discussion as Communist imperialism and welfare queens have been replaced by gay rights, women in the workplace, environmentalism, and smoking. On those issues the country has moved leftward. In 1984 the Republicans held a convention that was at times cheerily anti-homosexual, and triumphed at the polls. In 1992 the party was punished for a Houston convention at which Pat Buchanan made his ostensibly less controversial remarks about culture war. Reagan’s Interior Secretary James Watt once teasingly drew a distinction between “liberals” and “Americans” while discussing water use, and pushed a plan to allow oil drilling on national wildlife refuges. By 1997 the New Jersey Republican Party was begging its leaders to improve the party’s image by joining the Sierra Club.

This is in part a story of how successful parties create their own monsters. Just as Roosevelt’s and Truman’s labor legislation helped Irish and Polish and Italian members of the working class move to the suburbs (where they became Republicans), Reaganomics helped to create a mass upper-middle class, a national culture of yuppies who want gay rights, bike trails, and smoke-free restaurants. One top Republican consultant estimates that 35 to 40 percent of the electorate now votes on a cluster of issues created by “New Class” professionals — abortion rights, women’s rights, the environment, health care, and education. He calls it the “Hillary cluster.” The political theorist Jean Bethke Elshtain calls it, more revealingly, “real politics.”

And with this new landscape of issues Republicans aren’t even on the map. Because of the Reagan victory, the Democrats went through the period of globalization and the end of communism amid self-doubt and soul-searching. The experience left them a supple party that quickly became familiar with the Hillary cluster.

I don’t buy for a moment that it was Reaganomics that built the mass upper-middle class, but the mass upper-middle class certainly did become Democrats who care about those issues. (In fact, the concerns of Caldwell’s Hillary cluster are what used to be called “women’s issues” Don’t tell anyone.) The irony, of course, is that this Hillary cluster is what turned into a large portion of Obama’s base ten years later — upper middle class professionals.

It would seem, looking back, that the Democrats were building their party around them — while keeping African Americans on board and enticing the hispanic Goliath.I would guess that if it weren’t for 9/11, it would have emerged sooner. As it stands, we are in uncharted financial waters and there’s no knowing what will happen to some of these upper middle class workers if things go south. But it’s as true today as it was then that the Republicans simply have no answers for their questions and no solutions to their problems — Bush won by first blurring the lines and then running as a warrior leader. It was all papered over for eight years. These people aren’t going anywhere. The question is, is what they want, what the country needs?

.

Stop The Presses. Drudge Is A Hack.

by digby

I think it’s just terrific that the media are finally seeing that Drudge is a hack, but Jesus H. Christ — he had to start screaming that Obama was a socialist before they saw it?

For Halperin to describe Drudge as “semi-defanged” and to rib his “fifth-to-last refuge” is a seminal moment of sorts. Recall that Halperin is the person who originally coined the “Drudge rules our world” phrase.
That’s not all. The Financial Times recently weighed in with a piece called “Shock: Drudge loses his grip on US media!” Traffic? HuffPo vaulted ahead of Drudge in September, as did Politico. While those outlets’ staffs are obviously far larger than Drudge’s, this still represents a blow to the former ruler of the Internets. It’s worth noting that the view that Drudge’s fearsome influence is a shadow of its former self was a pretty controversial view even during this cycle, the exclusive province of whacked out liberal bloggers. Eric Boehlert sounded the siren about Drudge’s tumble from the throne (as we did), and Hillary-spokesperson-turned-blogger Phil Singer has been flogging this argument, too. The simple truth is that whatever dominance Drudge had over the cable networks just doesn’t mean what it once did.

Like I said, I’m glad he has lost his “credibility.” But somebody needs to do some soul searching about why such a blatant, over-the-top right wing whore had such a hold on the Village in the first place and everybody acted like it was perfectly normal. It’s 2008 fergawdsake and Drudge has been peddling wingnut oppo non-stop for over a decade. How he came to “rule their world” and how they came to openly admit such a bizarre outrageous thing should be the subject for an emergency blogger ethics panel. Stat.

How High Can It Go?

by tristero

By all knowledgeable accounts, the latest McCain smear target, Rashid Khalidi, is a very distinguished scholar with, agree or disagree, a very important perspective on the Israel/Palestine situation. That’s why I’ve just ordered Khalidi’s book. Perhaps more of us should.

h/t Ezra via Crooked Timber

Years In The Making: The Ground Game Revs Up

by dday

Chris Bowers says that Obama has already won the election. Thanks for depressing turnout, Chris Bowers! But looking at his methodology, he may well be right.

However, I know that the Obama campaign is not going to bask in the glory and all head off for spa treatments this weekend. They’re going to work their tails off right through till the last polls close on the West Coast on Tuesday.

To close the deal, Obama and his campaign must, in some ways, work opposite of one another.

The campaign’s ground forces, the likes of which this country has never seen, must make sure that the millions they helped register actually get to the polls. They have to continue knocking on doors to ensure that complacency doesn’t set in. Obama’s workers, paid and voluntary, have not traveled all this way to come up short.

As for Obama himself, he must maintain his steady, cool demeanor, which, ironically, was once viewed as a political liability. But now it has come to symbolize the candidate’s sure hand in the middle of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

“It’s extraordinary,” said Dee Dee Myers, a former Clinton White House press secretary and now a political analyst for CBS. “If you look back, there have been so few incidents where he’s been drawn off message, or resorts to getting involved with the attack of the day. He responds — but he does so in a rational, not emotional, way.

Obama will not get in the way of his campaign in these final days. There will be tens of millions of phone calls, millions of houses canvassed, millions of rides to the polls, seeking to extract every last voter and get them to their polling place. And it’s going to happen in every state in America. The ground game, which has long been Obama’s big bet, is bolstered by a strong union presence, which will do their own work to reach their membership. There are new media initiatives on Facebook and Twitter. But this starts and ends with the Obama campaign recruiting over a million volunteers for these last four days. As opposed to blowing your cash on attack ads and not bothering to expand turnout.

Sen. John McCain and the Republican National Committee will unleash a barrage of spending on television advertising that will allow him to keep pace with Sen. Barack Obama’s ad blitz during the campaign’s final days, but the expenditures will impact McCain’s get-out-the-vote efforts, according to Republican strategists.

McCain has faced a severe spending imbalance during most of the fall, but the Republican nominee squirreled away enough funds to pay for a raft of television ads in critical battleground states over the next four days, said Evan Tracey, a political analyst who monitors television spending.

The decision to finance a final advertising push is forcing McCain to curtail spending on Election Day ground forces to help usher his supporters to the polls, according to Republican consultants familiar with McCain’s strategy.

Wow, is that stupid. Especially in a year where turnout will mean everything. We don’t live in a culture where the electorate collectively watches TV and experiences the campaign in a one-way manner anymore.

This whole thing, the Democratic resurgence, the Obama campaign, is the realization of something started about five years ago in Burlington, Vermont, of all places, and continued in Washington after the Kerry loss, at a low point for Democrats.

His hypothesis was simple: To be a national political party, you have to compete everywhere. It was called the “50 state strategy,” and it was unveiled in 2005.

Remember 2005?

That’s when Karl Rove was building a permanent Republican majority, and when President George W. Bush was going to save Social Security by privatizing it.

In 2005, Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, campaigned among grass-roots activists to become chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Campaigned to be head of the DNC? That’s an establishment job, hand-picked.

Howard Dean? What a loser.

But politics is all about a little prescience and a little luck. Dean had both. He had the wisdom to know Democrats could win in a lot of places if they bothered to show up and make an argument. The lucky part: The public has turned on the Republican Party.

It’s a simple formula, but this article doesn’t fully capture what Dean did. He put paid staffers into those 50 states so he could capitalize on any opportunity. He revitalized moribund state parties and created the neighbor-to-neighbor tool that can make Democrats a presence in people’s lives all year round, not just before Election Day. He helped build a voter file that now rivals Republicans’ vaunted data bank. He laid all the groundwork for Obama to build on and surpass.

In many ways, Tuesday could be Howard Dean’s victory as well.

…Sean Quinn at 538 has more on the McCain campaign’s ground game FAIL. They aren’t funding it because they don’t have anything to fund.

[ Find Your Polling Place | Voting Info For Your State | Know Your Voting Rights | Report Voting Problems ]

.

Got Hypocrisy?

by digby

I often say that Republicans have retired the concept of hypocrisy and people titter politely, but I suspect they think it’s a sort of glib slogan and not a serious observation. But I mean it literally.

Recently Michelle Malkin went ballistic over Joe the plumber’s privacy being invaded. And many people pointed out that she was hardly the best messenger for such a complaint considering her own notorious history of stalking low income families to prove they weren’t actually in need of government subsidized health care when they had the nerve to speak out politically.

One would have thought that would be enough for her to slither off in an embarrassed funk and let someone else carry the hypocritical wingnut banner personal privacy, but it apparently spurred her on to write a big op-ed in the mainstream media instead.

[W]hen freelance members of the Obama Goon Squad take it upon themselves to do opposition research on The One’s citizen critics and rummage through government databases, where are all the privocrats? And how safe will your state tax and IRS records be if Dear Leader is elected? Welcome to Obama’s America.

Now, as it happens, I think that public employees searching through Joe the plumber’s governmental records is absolutely wrong and that people should lose their jobs if they did it. It creeped me out too. And I thought the press treatment was overkill as well — right up until the moment that Joe started grandstanding for the cameras, got an agent and started talking to people about a recording contract.

But, again, Malkin is hardly the right person to complain considering the absolutely horrific invasion of privacy she perpetrated against the Frost family. It’s mind-boggling that, of all people in the right wing blogosphere, she has appointed herself to be the one to lead this story. The sheer brass of it, the unreflective audacity, is simply breathtaking.

This is why I say that they have retired the concept of hypocrisy. It goes far beyond double standards or duplicity or bad faith. There’s an aggression to it, a boldness, that dares people to bring up the bald and obvious fact that the person making the charge is herself a far worse perpetrator of the thing she is decrying. There’s an intellectual violence in it.

In a world in which the conservatives weren’t such post modern shape shifters, we could come to a consensus on certain issues in this country — like privacy, for instance. We could agree that it’s wrong for government employees to use private information for partisan purposes — or for the media, including bloggers, to stalk and publish private information of anyone who dares speak out for a political cause. But we don’t live in a world like that.

We live in a world where the right wing ruthlessly and without mercy degrades and attacks by any means necessary what they perceive as the enemy, and then uses the great principles of democracy and fair play when the same is done to them. They leave the rest of us standing on the sidelines looking like fools for ever caring about anything but winning.

it’s not that I believe liberals are purely good and decent. We have many, many faults and are almost preternaturally talented at seizing defeat from the jaws of victory before we even get finished celebrating. But failing to truly grok just how pernicious this right wing rejection of hypocrisy really is and how much power it gives them is a foolish mistake.

I think we’re about to get schooled. Again. The torture loving right is dusting off its completely hypocritical “government is full of jack-booted thugs” playbook — and it’s going to drive us all completely crazy.

.