Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The Village Throws Down

by digby

In today’s Washington Post, David Broder lays out the problems that a president Obama would face from the moment he takes office — massive global economic turmoil and foreign mistrust of American leadership. And then he lays down the law about what he’s allowed to do about it.

Here it is, right up front, no frills, no sprinkles:

If, as seems likely, the economic crisis swells the ranks of Democrats in the House and Senate, the new president will face an early test: Repair the battered financial system or move ahead on the Democrats’ domestic agenda.

The numbers in the first budget Obama would have to prepare will look scary indeed. The deficit could approach an unimaginable trillion dollars. His economic advisers would undoubtedly counsel him that he must, at all costs, signal to the world that he will impose the kind of discipline needed to prevent runaway inflation and a run on the dollar.

But the larger the Democratic majorities, the greater the pressure will be to deliver promptly on the promises Obama has made in the campaign.

When pressed in the two debates, he has reiterated the goals of a massive new alternative energy program, expansion of health-care benefits and investment in education at all levels from pre-kindergarten through college.
This Story

With revenue depleted and the costs of Medicaid, welfare and unemployment benefits boosted by the threatened recession, it will take legerdemain to keep those promises.

And that hardly allows for the costs of an expanding war in Afghanistan and a continuing commitment to Iraq — and God knows what other international crises may develop.

A few forward-looking Democrats have begun to focus on what could be the first test for a President Obama with a Congress controlled by his own party: whether to insist on a pay-as-you-go rule for the budget.

That rule, which provided the discipline behind the Clinton administration’s balanced budgets, was abandoned by the Republicans — with disastrous fiscal results. Pay-go was revived last year when the Democrats took over Congress. But the requirement that any new or increased spending be offset by comparable cuts or new revenue has been a source of frustration for many in the party. And it will pinch much harder if applied next year.

I realize that building safe roads and bridges is nothing but socialistic, nanny state coddling and that creating alternate forms of energy is a pie-in-the-sky hippie fantasy. And while it does not surprise me that David Broder would put “fiscal responsibility” ahead of the betterment of his fellow Americans in normal times (I’m sure he thinks “tough love” is good for the shiftless losers who can’t get health care and that the businesses who are drowning in insurance costs should just throw their employees to the curb) I guess I assumed that international economic meltdown, an energy crisis and catastrophic global warming would be enough for him to grant that the government might not want to obsess about balanced budgets right this minute. I had certainly thought someone of Broder’s age and experience would at least remember the lessons of Herbert Hoover.

If the village could cheer on George W. Bush and his ignorant thugs as they turned the country into a pariah nation and destroyed the global financial system, I think they must let a new administration have a little room to clean up the fetid mess they left in their wake without standing on the sidelines like a bunch of schoolmarms scolding anyone who brings up the name of that horrible cad John Maynard Keynes.

The Village elder of Village elders has thrown down the gauntlet and says a president Obama must choose between the American people and fixing the financial system. He’s wrong, both on the politics and the economics. By helping the American people, he will be rescuing the economy so that the rapacious greedheads can live to pillage another day.

After 30 years of Republican dominance these elites simply can’t wrap their minds around the fact that the old paradigm is dead — deregulation, cutting taxes for rich people and running a taxpayer funded war manufacturing system is a failed governing philosophy. Broder says it right out:

If Obama wins, he may have the shortest honeymoon in history.

In other words, the new president is on notice — he had better follow the paygo blue dogs and the right wing purists over the cliff of “fiscal responsibility” or he will lose any support from the political establishment. I guess we have to actually live through another great depression before they will let go of their cherished shibboleth that it’s the liberal spendthrifts who always ruin everything for the Real Americans.

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Iraq

by tristero

The horrors continue:

Hundreds of Christians are fleeing Mosul in the wake of a string of killings that appear to be singling out Christians in the northern Iraqi city, where many had taken refuge from persecution in other parts of the country.

At least 11 and perhaps as many as 14 Christians have been killed in Mosul since the end of August, according to government officials and humanitarian groups. The victims have included a doctor, an engineer, two builders, two businessmen and a 15-year-old boy, who was shot dead in front of his house. In the last week alone, seven Christians were killed.

On Friday, a pharmacist was shot to death by a man who pretended to be an undercover police officer and asked for the man’s identification card, said Khisroo Koran, deputy governor of Nineveh Province, which is in northern Iraq. Mosul is the province’s capital.

Louis Sako, the archbishop of the Chaldean Catholic Church in Kirkuk, said Friday that the killings were an example of “a campaign of cleansing, killing and threatening” that Christians faced in Iraq….

In Sadr City on Friday, thousands of followers of the rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr shouted anti-American slogans as they marched along a funeral convoy carrying the body of Saleh al-Ugaili, a member of Parliament representing the Sadrist party who was killed on Thursday by a roadside bomb.

In a statement, Mr. Sadr blamed the United States for Mr. Ugaili’s death. The United States Embassy and the American military condemned the killing as “an attack on against Iraq’s democratic institutions.”

Also on Friday, a car bomb exploded in the Abu Dshir neighborhood of Baghdad, killing at least 12 people.

There’s something dreadful about that last sentence, appended at the end of the article, just a footnote to the epic carnage unleashed by George W. Bush – aided and abetted by the American media, most of the foreign policy establishment who either signed on or kept their traps shut, and some 2/3rds of the American public. Those are 12 lives no less important than our own, nothing but an oh-by-the-way, soon to be forgotten by everyone except the survivors, who will never forget.

And who will blame all of us for opening the gates of Hell.

Fair And Balanced

by digby

Sarah W. Palin got booed. As planned.

Here’s Perlstein to explain:

Sarah Palin will drop the ceremonial first puck at the Philadelphia Fliers’ season opener, and we liberals have been laughing at what a terrible idea this is: Philadelphia sports fans are notoriously crude and boorish. They may well start throwing things at Sister Sarah, shout obscenities, start chanting about how Alaska’s First Milf ought to show us her…well, you get the idea. Ha! How stupid can the McCain campaign be?

Well, as my longtime readers know, whenever I see a liberal laughing at a conservative, I reach for my buzzkill gun.

I know I promised not to flack my book anymore today. But I’ve got NIXONLAND on the brain. Maybe the McCainiacs—with a Rovian assist?—know what they’re doing. Maybe they chose Philadelphia because they WANT lunks throwing things at her and all the rest, to stage a morality play about how big-city lib’ruls are uncivil punks who disprect the virtuous true womanhood of the heartland (this year’s GOP’s version of “feminism”). Maybe this is Haldeman letting a few dozen hippies into the Nixon rally so he could–well, turn to page 531 in your red and black hymnal. Here’s old RN on the campaign trail in 1970 in Green Bay, Wisconsin….

read on …

He concludes with this:

As I noted earlier today, right-wing crowds are getting pretty surly heading into the home stretch of this election, perhaps even unto the point of imminent violence. Wouldn’t it be convenient if the sage solon McCain, if and when his supporters somewhere get too frisky, he could intone thoughtfully from a platform how much all Americans should regret and rebuke the violence on both sides this year?

It wouldn’t surprise me a bit.

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Saturday Night At The Movies

Choke: Shades of Ashby

By Dennis Hartley

At the risk of sounding like your sage Gramps, wistfully pining for the halcyon days of yore, I’m going to go ahead now and sound like your sage Gramps, wistfully pining for the halcyon days of yore. There was a time, not too far removed, when the descriptive phrase “character study” was not necessarily the American film industry’s code for “box office poison.” Okay, I’ll stop beating around the bush. I’m talking about the 1970’s, when maverick directors like Hal Ashby, Robert Altman and Bob Rafelson made quirky, compelling “character studies” that audiences actually went out of their way to see. The protagonists were usually iconoclastic fringe dwellers or workaday antiheroes who, like the filmmakers themselves, questioned authority, flouted convention and were generally able to convey thoughts and feelings without CG enhancement. The films may not have always sported linear narrative or wrapped up with a “Hollywood ending”, but they nearly always left us a bit more enlightened about the human condition.

I’m not saying that the character study ever really went away; it just became increasingly more marginalized as the era of the Hollywood blockbuster juggernaut encroached. Indie films of more recent vintage like Buffalo 66, Jesus’ Son and SherryBaby are direct stylistic descendants of episodic 70s fare like Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, Altman’s California Split, and Ashby’s The Last Detail, and prove that the genre is alive and well. The main difference between then and now, of course, is that when you venture out to the multiplex to seek such a film these days, you almost feel like donning dark glasses and a raincoat. When I went to a weekend matinee to catch Clark Gregg’s Choke, I counted exactly 4 other patrons in the postage stamp auditorium. It just made me feel so…dirty.

Choke is one of the most original comedy-dramas I have seen this year, undoubtedly due in no small part to the fact that Gregg’s screenplay is based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, whose previous book-to-screen adaptation was 1999’s Fight Club. Choke, similar to Fight Club, serves up a mélange of human foibles (addiction, perversion, madness and deception, to rattle off a few) and tops it all off with a dark comic sensibility. To put it another way, it’s a sort of a screwball romantic comedy for nihilists.

In his work life, Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) is employed as a “historical re-enactor” in a theme park that replicates American colonial life. Victor’s personal life, as we soon come to learn, is more akin to some kind of a psycho-sexual Disneyland. In his off-hours, Victor regularly attends support group meetings for sex addicts, along with his pal/co-worker, the Portnoy-like Denny (Brad William Henke). Victor doesn’t appear to be making much headway toward recovery, as he customarily spends most of the session time furtively (and joylessly) humping fellow group member Nico (Paz de la Huerta) on the restroom tiles. The rest of his spare time is spent working a very specialized hustle. In order to help foot the private hospital bill for his ailing mother Ida (Anjelica Huston), he goes to restaurants and feigns choking fits. He carefully pre-selects his “saviors” based on the likelihood of them having wallets that are as big as their bleeding hearts.

Ida is suffering from dementia, and subsequently fails to recognize her son most of the time. During her rare moments of lucidity, Victor attempts in vain to learn more about his unknown father, a subject Ida has always been reticent to discuss in any detail. Through episodic flashbacks of Victor’s childhood, we glean that the somewhat free-spirited Ida has raised her son in, shall we say “a creative fashion” (in the interest of avoiding spoilers). One thing that does become clear is that, insomuch as Victor’s abilities to run a skillful con game go, it looks like the apple has not fallen very far from the family tree.

The plot thickens when Ida’s doctor, a pretty, enigmatic young woman named Paige (Kelly MacDonald) counters Victor’s inevitable horndogging attempts with an invitation to assist her with some medical “research”. Paige’s proposed method for propagating the stem cells for her experiment requires Victor’s um, interactive participation, and is medically unorthodox, to say the least. So is it love, or purely science? I can say no more.

Rockwell gives a nicely nuanced turn in the lead performance, and is well-supported by Henke and MacDonald. Anjelica Huston is excellent, as always. In a tangential sense, she is reprising the character she played in The Grifters. In fact, the dynamic of the mother-son relationship played out between Huston and Rockwell in Choke shares many similarities to the one she had with John Cusack’s character in the aforementioned film, particularly concerning some unresolved “abandonment issues” on the part of the son.

This marks the directorial debut for Gregg, who is probably most recognizable for his work as a TV actor (The New Adventures of Old Christina). Gregg casts himself as a self-important “lord high” role-player in the faux-colonial village where Victor and Denny work; it’s a small but very interesting part. Also look for the great Joel Grey (who we don’t see enough of these days) as a battle-scarred member of the sex addiction group.

This is not a popcorn movie. Challenging and thought-provoking, it does demand your full attention; and even though it offers a fair share of entertaining chuckles, it is not really designed to be taken lightly. There’s a hell of a lot of ideas packed into 90 minutes here, ranging from Oedipal conflict to Christ metaphor. There’s even a sense of twisted cinematic homage to Tom Jones when we are treated to the occasional fast-cut montage of bodice-ripping flashbacks depicting Victor, replete in leggings, waistcoat and tri-corner hat, having it off “on the job” with a few of his more comely fellow re-enactors.

Prepare yourself for a lot of sexual frankness, not visually graphic, necessarily, but still the uncompromising, in-your-face kind that makes a lot of people squirm in their seats. Warning: one scene that some may find very disturbing takes place between Victor and a woman he has met through the personal ads. She “enjoys” acting out rape fantasies. In the context of the narrative, it is not as sick as you may assume; it is actually an important and pivotal moment in the protagonist’s journey. This trip can be psychically brutal at times, but if you’re open-minded and willing to take the whole ride, it may blindside you with genuine warmth, humanity, and yes, even some redemption.

Mommy issues: The World According to Garp, Harold and Maude, The Loved One, Marty (1955), Mask, Psycho, Ed and His Dead Mother, Suddenly Last Summer, The Glass Menagerie, The Subject Was Roses, The Manchurian Candidate (1962), East of Eden, New York Stories, Crumb, Mother (1996), Next Stop Greenwich Village, Laurel Canyon, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, 8 Mile, Elvis (1979), Nixon, Alexander, Oedipus Rex (1957), The Lion in Winter, Titus, Hamlet (1996), Life of Brian, Blue Velvet, Throw Momma from the Train, Strangers on a Train, White Heat, The Krays, Bloody Mama, No Way to Treat a Lady, Breakfast on Pluto, Forrest Gump, Ordinary People, Spanking the Monkey, Luna (1979), What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? Where’s Poppa?

Previous posts with related themes: The Hoax/Color Me Kubrick

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Spite Politics

by digby

Kit Seelye has a rather silly article about Karl Rove in today’s NYT, wherein he’s describes as something of a celebrity Wizard of Oz who’s making good money now as a commentator and still driving people crazy. but the tone is typical Sellye, trivial and fluffy and doesn’t really get to the heart of what is wrong with the cult of Rove. Fortunately, Matt Taibbi, tackling the same subject matter, has no problem defining exactly what “Rovian” actually means:

Rove is not a genius, or even very clever: He’s totally and completely immoral. It doesn’t take genius to claim, as Rove ludicrously did last fall, that it was the Democrats in Congress and not George W. Bush who pushed the Iraq War resolution in 2002. It doesn’t take brains to compare a triple-amputee war veteran to Osama bin Laden; you just have to be a mean, rotten cocksucker. The reason Rove continues to survive is the same reason that Johnnie Cochran was called a genius for keeping a double-murderer on the golf course — because this generation of Americans has become so steeped in greed and social Darwinism that it can no longer distinguish between cheating and achieving, between enterprise and crime, and can’t bring itself to criticize winners any more than it knows how to be nice to losers. He survives because an increasing number of Americans secretly agree with Rove’s vision of rules, laws and “the truth” as quaint, faintly embarrassing rituals that only a sucker would let hold him back. Rove’s comeback is evidence that the attack on our civic institutions in the Bush years wasn’t an isolated incident, something we can pin on a specific group of now-deposed politicians. It’s a trend, a thing that grows in direct proportion to our greed and ignorance. We may be a country at war, facing one of the greatest financial meltdowns of all time. But in the end, the thing that could be our undoing is the kind of generalized boredom with legality and honor that empowers Rovian behavior. If we let it.

It’s true that the problem with this isn’t really Rove or even his clients. The problem is that there is such a large market for what they are selling.

Hopefully it’s not a majority this time. (It barely was even in 2004, and certainly wasn’t in 2000.) But as we’ve seen during this last week of thuggish cretinism at GOP rallies, the Rovian politics of spite is alive and well among a substantial number of Americans.

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Pallin’ Around With Extremists, McCain-Style

by tristero

From Media Matters

Now: G. Gordon Liddy. Liddy served four and a half years in prison for his role in the break-ins at the Watergate and at Daniel Ellsberg’s psychologist’s office. He has acknowledged preparing to kill someone during the Ellsberg break-in “if necessary.” He plotted to kill journalist Jack Anderson. He plotted with a “gangland figure” to murder Howard Hunt in order to thwart an investigation. He plotted to firebomb the Brookings Institution. He used Nazi terminology to outline a plan to kidnap “leftist guerillas” at the 1972 GOP convention. And Liddy’s bad acts were not confined
to the early 1970s. In the 1990s, he instructed his radio audience on how to shoot Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agents (“Go for a head shot; they’re going to be wearing bulletproof vests.” In case anyone missed the subtlety of his point, Liddy also insisted: “Kill the sons of bitches.”) During Bill Clinton’s presidency, Liddy boasted that he named his shooting targets after the Clintons.
What does Liddy have to do with the presidential election? As Media Matters has noted:

Liddy has donated
$5,000 to McCain’s campaigns since 1998, including $1,000 in February 2008. In addition, McCain has appeared on Liddy’s radio show during the
presidential campaign, including as recently as May. An online video labeled, “John McCain On The G. Gordon Liddy Show 11/8/07,” includes a discussion between Liddy and McCain, whom Liddy described as an “old friend.” During the segment, McCain praised Liddy’s “adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great,” said he was “proud” of Liddy, and said that “it’s always a pleasure for me to come on your program.”

McCain even backed Liddy’s son’s congressional bid in 2000 — a campaign that relied heavily on the elder Liddy’s history.To sum up: John McCain is “proud” of his “old friend” Gordon Liddy –an old friend who plotted to kill one of the most respected journalists in American history, and who urged listeners to kill federal agents and advised them on how to do so. McCain campaigned for Liddy’s son, and Liddy has even hosted a fundraiser for McCain at his home.So McCain’s relationship with Liddy is pretty much a direct parallel to Obama’s relationship with Ayers. Except that McCain and Liddy have apparently spent time together more recently than Obama and Ayers. And Liddy’s extremist activities continued well into the 1990s, at least. And Liddy says he and McCain are “old friends,” while The New York Times says Obama and Ayers aren’t close. And Obama has never said Ayers adheres to “the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great.” Other than all that, it’s a direct parallel.Yet even as they obsess over Barack Obama and Bill Ayers — just as the McCain campaign tells them to –the news media have all but ignored John McCain’s close ties to Gordon Liddy. A Nexis search** finds fewer than 100 news reports that have mentioned McCain and Liddy this year.As Chicago Tribunecolumnist Steve Chapman –who has criticized Obama’s relationship with Ayers — has noted:

Liddy, now a conservative radio
host, has never expressed regret for this attempt to subvert the Constitution. Nor has he developed any respect for the law. … Yet none of this bothers McCain. Liddy has contributed thousands of dollars to his campaigns, held a fundraiser for McCain
at his home and hosted the senator on his radio show, where McCain said, “I’m proud of you.” Exactly which part of Liddy’s record is McCain proud of? While Obama has gotten lots of scrutiny for his connection to Ayers, McCain has never had to explain his association with Liddy. If he can’t defend it, he should admit as much. And if he thinks he can defend it, let him.

To repeat:

• 2008 news reports that mention
  Obama and Ayers: more than 4,500.

• 2008 news reports that mention
  McCain and Liddy: fewer than 100.

Incredibly, The Atlantic‘s Ambinder today suggests that the media have not covered Ayers: “To truly drive Ayers into the public conversation, to trick what they consider an irredeemably biased press corps into biting, McCain has three vehicles gassed up and ready to go. …So far, McCain has done none of those things.” There are 1,800 Nexis hits for Barack Obama and Bill Ayers in the past week,
and yet Marc Ambinder thinks the media have not bitten on the Ayers “story” — and that McCain, who is running ads about Ayers, isn’t “really serious” about pushing it, anyway. Even Steve Schmidt would likely be too embarrassed to try to claim that the media have not covered Bill Ayers. Incidentally, Ambinder doesn’t seem to have ever mentioned McCain’s relationship to Liddy.Not only have the media avoided stand-alone reports on McCain and Liddy, they consistently fail to bring up the connection when reporting on McCain’s attacks on Obama’s ties to Ayers, or in interviews with McCain staff who bring up Ayers. The McCain/Liddy relationship is such an obvious parallel — except arguably much worse — that it’s hard to imagine how any evenhanded journalist could possibly justify ignoring it. Yet it happens again and again. And, needless to say, McCain aides do not get badgered about Liddy the way Time‘s Mark Halperin badgered Obama aide Robert Gibbs about Ayers.Just this morning, NBC’s Chuck Todd said he is “sure” Ayers will come up during the final presidential debate next week, adding that moderator Bob Schieffer “may feel no choice but to bring it up” in light of the “TV ads” the McCain campaign and Republican National Committee are running. Setting aside the absurdity of the suggestion that a debate moderator is compelled to bring up a topic simply because John McCain is running ads about it, if Schieffer does ask about Ayers, basic fairness demands that he ask McCain about Liddy as well.

I’d just like to add this. As someone who followed Watergate so avidly, the notion that a madman like Liddy has regular access to the airwaves is simply appalling. The famous incident which sticks in my mind is the time Liddy was walking one night with a companion when he calmly pulled a gun and shot out a street lamp.

These are the kinds of people who have been driving American political discourse for at least a generation. They are the strange, diseased lunatics who helped Sarah Palin rise to power. They are dangerous and they must be marginalized. McCain’s proactive, wholehearted, and recent embrace of such fanatics, and their embrace of him, demonstrates once again that he does not have the seriousness of character, let alone judgment, to be president of the United States.

Or, for that matter, a senator.

Simple Answers To Simple Questions

by tristero

Tomorrow’s Times Book Review:

As James Traub asks in “The Freedom Agenda: Why America Must Spread Democracy (Just Not the Way George Bush Did),” his fast-paced and absorbing new book: “How, today, can we promote anything, much less democracy?”

We can’t.

This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions. (Homage to Atrios. )

Hey Kids, Let’s (Pretend To) Buy A Bank

by dday

There was a ridiculous amount of news for a Friday night, the foremost being that President Paulson is finally giving in and doing what should have been done in the first place, purchasing an equity stake in failing banks. The problem is that he is still doing it wrong.

WASHINGTON – Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Friday that the Bush administration will move ahead with a plan to buy stock in financial institutions.

Paulson said the program to purchase stock in financial institutions will be open to a broad array of institutions.

The administration received the authority to make direct purchases of stock in banks in the $700 billion measure Congress passed last week to rescue the nation’s financial system […]

Paulson said the government’s program would be designed to complement the efforts of banks to raise fresh capital from private sources. He said that the government’s stock purchases would be of nonvoting shares so that the government will not have power to run the companies.

Actually, we need the power to run the companies, or at least tell the bankers what to do, more specifically that they must lend to one another. They aren’t the kind of shares that Warren Buffett got from Goldman Sachs. If this doesn’t change bank behavior then it essentially will do nothing. A bank that refuses to lend is not a functional bank, and the government ought to take it over. As Krugman says, this is a half-Gordon – referring to Gordon Brown’s recapitalization plan (not the part about suing Iceland).

Worse, the G7 finance ministers aren’t coordinating their efforts.

Oct. 10 (Bloomberg) — Finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of Seven nations signaled reluctance to adopt a coordinated effort to shore up banks, risking a deeper crisis of confidence after this week’s crash in global stock markets.

As equities worldwide suffered their worst week since the 1970s, officials gathering in Washington said they were seeking new ways to stem the meltdown. Still, they argued that tailoring efforts to the needs of individual nations was better than a cross-border plan.

The G-7 is considering including in its statement saying that no bank of systemic importance will be allowed to fail, and may outline principles all nations should follow, two European officials told reporters in Washington. Still, the group is unlikely today to endorse a U.K.-style commitment to guarantee loans between banks, an official from a G-7 member said.

AND, it appears that Paulson is going to use Fannie and Freddie to kickstart the buy-up of troubled assets, essentially widening the money pool:

Federal regulators directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to start purchasing $40 billion a month of underperforming mortgage bonds as the Bush administration expands its options to buy troubled financial assets and resuscitate the U.S. economy, according to three people briefed about the plan.

Fannie and Freddie began notifying bond traders last week that each company needs to buy $20 billion a month in mostly subprime, Alt-A and non-performing prime mortgage securities, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are confidential. The purchases would be separate from the U.S. Treasury’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Because the $700 billion is going to go to recapitalization, yet he has to reward his banker friends by overpaying for their trash.

AND, GM is talking merger with Chrysler, just weeks after securing a $25 billion dollar loan from the Feds.

These are just the economic Friday news dumps. (we’re also taking North Korea off the terror watch list and agreeing to a timeline for withdrawal in Iraq, you know, little things like that)

And they worry me. Paulson is still trying to work a heist instead of fix the fundamentals. And the market has thus far responded very poorly to heists.

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Informative

by digby

This isn’t going away:

Obama Sign in West Plains
By KSPR News

A sign of the political times in the Ozarks has many questioning the message … And the source.

This billboard is on US 63 in the Howell County Community of West Plains. No one has claimed responsibility for putting up the sign, but Howell County democrats are upset at the image of Barack Obama in a turban.

Obama has fought internet rumors that he’s Muslim. He grew up in a Christian family.

The West Plains Daily Quill gave us this picture. The paper quotes billboard owner Ronnie ford as saying he doesn’t know who put up the provocative message.

The comments to the article are varied, but this one is a perfect example of how the conservatives are going to react throughout an Obama administration when people complain about things like this:

Very rarely does one see such an informative billboard. Ripping it down would just be another case of the Obama goon squad censoring free speech in America.

H/T to E.O.

The Fraud Of Fraud

by digby

It’s becoming clear that the fraudulent GOP “vote fraud” project is up and running at full speed and will likely be a huge story for well beyond the election. Rick Perlstein had an interaction with John Fund recently, who said right out that Democrats didn’t believe in election law and would try to count illegal votes. He’s selling books so perhaps his hyperbole is just salesmanship, but his prediction that a close election will be thrown into doubt because of Republican efforts to challenge every provisional ballot sounds quite plausible to me.

The process of turning ACORN into a terrorist sleeper cell has begun and I see little hope that they aren’t going to be successful. The press is clearly fascinated by the right wing caricature of a group of shiftless “community organizers” trading crack for Obama votes in the inner city and have done exactly zero research into the issue, so the reporting has been hysterical.

I have written many times about this report (pdf) from 2004 about the history of Republican vote suppression efforts and I urge you to take the time to read the whole thing if you haven’t. This has been a tool of conservatives of all parties since the beginning of the Republic, but it’s only been since the 1980s that the Republicans professionalized it with the formation of the Republican National Lawyers Association. The report shows that the Jesse Jackson campaign’s successful new voter registration efforts was a particular impetus for GOP efforts to promote the false allegation that there is systematic voter fraud in the land.

This is the first election where we may see the full effect of this project. The Republican National Lawyers association were a vital part of the Florida recount (they even give out an award to certain lawyers featuring some of the famous Florida chads) but this may be where the true genius of the project lies. We are going to have what appears to be a substantial Democratic victory by an African American with a strong minority constituency. The totals may not be close. But by ratcheting up this spectre of “voter fraud” in advance, they are helping to lay the groundwork for delegitimizing a president Obama in the eyes of a large number of Americans.

That the media is running after this story like a bunch of toddlers gleefully chasing puppies is typical, but still disheartening. It was only a couple of weeks ago that a special prosecutor was named in the US Attorney firings after the Inspector General found that that some of them, notably David Iglesias, were fired because they failed to prosecute bogus voter fraud cases. In light of that you would think that the press would be a bit skeptical of voter fraud allegations by Republicans.

Instead you have this:

CNN’s Drew Griffin took his network’s Special Investigations Unit to Lake County, IN yesterday in an attempt to document election problems in the area. Did he discuss the active and legitimate voter suppression campaign taking place there, in which local Republicans are blocking early voting in three Democratic leaning cities? Not at all. Instead, he focused on faulty registration cards submitted by the current bete noir of the conservative movement, the community organizing group ACORN. What’s worse, his report (and most other media accounts) grossly misrepresented the intent and professionalism of ACORN’s registration efforts. (video at the link) In the report, Ruthann Hoagland, a Republican member of the Lake Co. Board of Elections, tells Griffin that ACORN submitted 5,000 new registrations in the past two weeks. But during the verification process, employees found that about half were fraudulent, including multiple forms turned in with the same handwriting, one signed “Johns, Jimmy” using the address of a Jimmy John’s sandwich shop in Crown Point, and others with the name of registrants that are now dead. Nationwide, registrar’s offices have come across similar problems in recent days. What Griffin fails to note, however, is that ACORN made very clear that some registrations they gathered from canvassers in Lake County may have been faulty. An ACORN spokesmen explained this in an October 7 press release:

ACORN flags and turns in three kinds of cards, those that it can verify, those that are incomplete, and those that it flags as problematic. It turns those in labeled in a special way and are very conservative in terms of what it flags as problematic. It has stacks of problematic cover sheets. […] The Lake County Board knew about the questionable registrations today because ACORN flagged them for the board. For example, the Jimmy John’s card is one that a caller had flagged and labeled as problematic. ACORN can get that caller to talk to the press.

According to Regina Harris, the Director of Registrations for Lake County, this claim checks out. “It’s certainly true. They did have three batches separated.” she told me this morning. “There was a pile they knew were good, there was some they said had missing info — like no voter ID number or a missing birthday — and another batch they called ‘suspicious.’ ” Why would ACORN submit registration forms it had deemed “suspicious”? Because under most state laws, voter registration organizations are required to turn in all the forms they receive. In a phone conversation today, ACORN press coordinator Charles Jackson confirmed that this is the case in Indiana. So what explains all the faulty registration forms? There are two probable causes. One is that some registration forms can contain simple errors. That means the registrant didn’t intend to subvert the election process, but rather just made an honest mistake. The other scenario involves the canvassers themselves. If employees want to boost their performance in the eyes of their boss or simply don’t want to do the work of finding legitimate new voters, they could turn in forged or faulty registration forms.* This is illegal and can wreak havoc on registrar’s offices, but there’s no evidence these imaginary people turn around and vote in November. Given Indiana’s strict voter ID law, it would actually be next to impossible for anyone to cast a ballot under the name of a submarine sandwich chain or a dead person. But these facts haven’t stopped conservative critics and some in the media from incorrectly implying that ACORN’s faulty registrations prove the organization is trying to forge votes and steal the election in November. An editorial in the Investor’s Business Daily said, “[John] McCain would be wise to start preparing a challenge to voter registration rolls should he lose the race in a close contest.” CNN even set up Griffin’s segment with a graphic that read “Voter Fraud?”

I think it’s pretty clear at this point that he is.

McCain’s ad featuring ACORN (which dday discussed yesterday) has been removed from Youtube. But here’s the script:

JOHN MCCAIN: I’m John McCain and I approve this message.

ANNCR: Who is Barack Obama?

A man with “a political baptism performed at warp speed.”

Vast ambition.

After college, he moved to Chicago.

Became a community organizer.

There, Obama met Madeleine Talbot, part of the Chicago branch of ACORN.

He was so impressive that he was asked to train the ACORN staff.

What did ACORN in Chicago engage in?

Bullying banks.

Intimidation tactics.

Disruption of business.

ACORN forced banks to issue risky home loans.

The same types of loans that caused the financial crisis we’re in today.

No wonder Obama’s campaign is trying to distance him from the group, saying, “Barack Obama Never Organized with ACORN.”

But Obama’s ties to ACORN run long and deep.

He taught classes for ACORN.

They even endorsed him for President.

But now ACORN is in trouble.

REPORTER: There are at least 11 investigations across the country involving thousands of potentially fraudulent ACORN forms.

ANNCR: Massive voter fraud.

And the Obama campaign paid more than $800,000 to an ACORN front for get out the vote efforts.

Pressuring banks to issue risky loans.

Nationwide voter fraud.

Barack Obama.

Bad judgment. Blind ambition.

Too risky for America.

It looks right now as if the election might not be close enough for the Republicans to make a plausible case for outright theft of the election through voter fraud. But as I said, they are certainly laying the groundwork for a propaganda campaign to delegitimize Barack Obama. The beauty of the voter fraud fraud is that they win even when they lose.

The conservatives’ long term goal is to make citizens so cynical about the electoral system that they just don’t vote. the fewer people who participate in democracy the easier it is for the aristocracy to maintain control.