Needless to say, Dennis Miller is in no position to condemn anyone for cocaine use, and even he seems to realize just how hypocritical that would be.
But the rest is well, disgusting. This is Miller and e-Oklahoma governor Frank Keating on Miller’s radio show:
MILLER: It’s the most liberal, let’s just say that. We’re talking to Frank Keating, former Oklahoma Governor, John McCain supporter. Frank, let’s just say, it’s the most liberal. The thing that bothers me the most about all this with Barack Obama is not the — I know he’s the most liberal guy. You know, I know he’s gotten this close to the White House and I know most people don’t realize he’s probably the most liberal senator we have. The thing that bothers me the most is I recognize the obfuscation and the smoke and mirrors as Clinton-esque. When I hear him reduce Ayers to “this is a guy who lives in my neighborhood” or Rev. Wright, “I was there 500 times and never saw him.” The acts themselves don’t bother me as he’s starting to treat me like an idiot too when he’s blowing this smoke my way. He ought to just come clean and say, “listen, I came up through Chicago, you make some errors there.” I’d almost be able to absolve it more easily then. KEATING: Well, and that’s what concerns me, Dennis, because when I was in the State Senate and statehouse of my state, if someone had voted against the entire state budget because it had too much money for corrections, all of us would have, you know, strained our necks to find out who is this because that would have been a very extreme position, basically saying to a law enforcement officer as I was or my son was a state trooper, “you know, you make an arrest, you risk your life, for nothing” because we’re going to make sure that person doesn’t go to prison even though the laws of the state require it. So, that puzzles me. Just he ought to admit, “you know, I’ve got to be honest with you. I was a guy of the street. I was way to the left. I used cocaine. I voted liberally, but I’m back at the center.” I mean, I understand the big picture of America. But he hasn’t done that…MILLER: He’s copped to that… KEATING: Jeremiah Wright is… MILLER: Wait, I’ve got to jump in Frank. He has copped to the blow use, right? I mean, he did so in his own book he said he did blow. KEATING: Oh yes, he did. MILLER: Well, I’m just saying that doesn’t enter this to me.
the GOP talking point, coming from McCain on down today is that Obama needs to “come clean” and be honest with the American people. I assume that’s the best focus grouped way to bring in all this filth.
I know I’m sounding like a broken record, but what we are really seeing is the beginning of a right wing story line about the next president of the United States — he is a drug user, a foreigner, a terrorist and a traitor. And the importance of that is that it gives permission to the right wing machine to do anything and everything to destroy him. He will not really be president, you see. He will be illegitimate — a usurper.
The Mormon Church and their allies who have taken over the Yes On 8 campaign aren’t hiding it anymore. Their entire argument for banning same-sex marriage has nothing to do with taking away the right of gay people to marry – if it was they’d straight-up lose. Instead, they are offering a whole array of residual effects, like claiming that this would force homosexuality to be taught in public schools (not true) and churches will lose their tax exemptions (not true) and your son will be forced at gunpoint to gay marry the neighbor boy (not true, and not what they’re claiming, but it might as well be).
The entire point is to allow people an outlet to hide their prejudices and to make it seem like a vote to ban the protected rights of hundreds of thousands of citizens is actually a vote to protect their own rights. It’s Machiavellian and really ugly. The No side is fighting back, finally presenting a spot calling out the lies.
Until now, this had been a weird meta-campaign where nobody was talking about the real issue, just their “feelings” and their faulty assumptions of scenarios that would never happen. Hopefully this will change the debate. Because there’s a lot of concern right now. Two recent polls show Prop. 8 winning, though not over 50% yet. Their ads are having an effect and they have lots of money, a big chunk of it from Utah. The Mormon Church is trying to buy the California state Constitution and they’re sending in an amry to see to the job.
Mormons living outside California have been asked to volunteer for a telephone campaign to help pass a ballot initiative banning same-sex marriage in the state.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is part of a coalition of conservative groups backing Proposition 8, which would amend California’s constitution to limit marriage to a man and a woman.
Church elder L. Whitney Clayton said members may be asked to call friends and family at home in California before the Nov. 4 election to encourage support for the measure. The out-of-state phone campaign would be on an “if-needed” basis.
The words “tax” and “exempt” come to mind, but that’s a battle for another day. A ban in California would set the equality movement back for a long time.
California initiatives are battles waged more on the airwaves than on the ground. The No campaign has to be able to compete. If you can, donate to No on 8. That’s number one. And give some of your time. Pass around this ad from the Courage Campaign. Spread the word. We have to defeat any and all attempts to enshrine discrimination into our state constitutions.
The other day, I criticized John Roberts of CNN for acting like the church lady and scolding the campaigns’ economic advisors for injecting politics into their debate. He wasn’t pleased that I called him an empty suit and wrote back to tell me that he would continue to call out these people for their bad manners. (He also forwarded some emails from his fans also congratulating him for not putting up with any guff — for some people “seriousness” is defined by how calm you are when you completely you miss the point.)
I admit that I was hard on Roberts. In fact, I edited my post substantially after I wrote it because I felt I was too rude in my criticism. The reason for this is because Roberts is a particularly offensive purveyor of Village CW. As Glenn Greenwald reminded me in an email, he is the guy who said this about the Frost family who was being stalked by right wing nuts for needing public health care for their sick child (video at the link):
CNN’s John Roberts reported: “Some of the accusations [against the Frosts] may be exaggerated or false. But did the Democrats make a tactical error in holding up Graeme as their poster child?” A CNN political analyst then placed the blame squarely on the Democrats’ shoulders:
I think in this instance what happened was the Democrats didn’t do as much of a vetting as they could have done on this young man, his situation, his family. […]
Right. It’s the fault of the Democrats, of course, who according to John Roberts didn’t “vet” this family. Except, of course, they did, as has been incessantly disseminated by the progressive blogosphere and the mainstream media over the course of four days.
So why did Roberts say that the family hadn’t been properly vetted?
ABC News reported earlier in the week that an e-mail sent to reporters by “a Senate Republican leadership aide” in McConnell’s office suggested that “GOP aides were complicit in spreading disparaging information about the Frosts.” A McConnell spokesman refused to deny the office’s involvement in the affair. ThinkProgress has obtained an email that congressional sources tell us was sent to reporters by Sen. McConnell’s communications director Don Stewart. On Monday morning, Don Stewart sent an email with the following text to reporters:
Seen the latest blogswarm? Apparently, there’s more to the story on the kid (Graeme Frost) that did the Dems’ radio response on SCHIP. Bloggers have done a little digging and turned up that the Dad owns his own business (and the building it’s in), seems to have some commercial rental income and Graeme and a sister go to a private school that, according to its website, costs about $20k a year ‹for each kid‹ despite the news profiles reporting a family income of only $45k for the Frosts. Could the Dems really have done that bad of a job vetting this family?
In the email, Stewart attacks Democrats for allegedly doing a bad job “vetting this family.” That effort to blame Democrats for the smear campaign seems to have swayed some reporters, as CNN this morning claimed that the real story is that “the Democrats didn’t do as much of a vetting as they could have done.”
I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that Roberts used exactly the same language and then chalks it up to some sort of tepid “they all do it” sort of thing.
Aside from the almost comic illustration of journalistic malpractice this shows, it also proves what many of us have been saying for years: the press parrots right wing talking points — in this case verbatim. It’s rare that we actually can see a copy of the memos they send out, because the press “protects its sources” but it’s right there in this case. Does anyone think this is unique? I suspect that if it hadn’t been for liberal bloggers relentlessly speaking out in horror over the course of many days, this nasty little smear would have been passed along by everyone else exactly as John Roberts passed it along, implying that the Frosts were con artists.
Nice work CNN. How much are you paying this guy?
This was one of the lowest points of the right wing smear machine in recent years. Sliming that family was reprehensible. And there was our friend Mr Roberts — the new Miss Manners of CNN — blithely passing along Republican talking points, probably without even knowing what he was doing.
And then the other day other day I see him jabbering about how he wouldn’t stand for any “name calling” to two presidential economic advisers in the midst of an economic crisis — and smugly congratulating himself for keeping them in line.
Everyone’s favourite stun gun manufacturer Taser has unveiled it’s latest loving piece of “non lethal” technology, The Taser Shockwave.
The new weapon is significantly different to the Tasers currently used by police in that it has six different electrified charges and is designed to target crowds rather than individuals.
The cartridges are tethered by 25-foot wires, which can be fired from a distance of up to 100 meters in a 20-degree arc. The “probes” on the end of the cartridges can pierce through clothing and skin, emitting 50,000 volts of electricity in the process.
“Full area coverage is provided to instantaneously incapacitate multiple personnel within that region” Taser explains.
[…]
Clearly it is anticipated that these things will be used on sizable crowds, meaning an increased likelihood of indiscriminate targeting.
The Shockwave isn’t the only new development on Taser’s books either. The Extended-Range Electronic Projectile (XREP) is touted as the first electric shock weapon that can be fired from a normal gun, in this case a 12-gauge shotgun. It delivers a 20-second shock, compared with the default setting five-second shock of a traditional taser X26.
[…]
Watch a demonstration:
Both the Taser Shockwave and the XREP are scheduled to go into full production by the end of this year.
Taser has been the subject of much controversy and outrage. One year ago the UN’s Committee Against Torture issued a statement on the TaserX26, which read: “The use of TaserX26 weapons, provoking extreme pain, constituted a form of torture, and that in certain cases it could also cause death, as shown by several reliable studies and by certain cases that had happened after practical use.”
These bleeding hearts don’t seem to understand that torture isn’t torture if it doesn’t leave a mark. It isn’t even illegal for police to put 50,0000 volts of electricity to anyone they choose at any time they choose, even when people are shackled or incapacitated. There are no limits. Police are almost never even reprimanded for tasering completely innocent people.
So, I would assume that any peaceful assembly which the authorities determine needs to be dispersed (at their total discretion) will be subject to weapons like these new ones. If a few protesters get trampled, well that’s the price they pay for failing to follow orders. And if citizens understand that they will likely suffer excruciating pain when they protest, maybe they’ll think twice about doing such unamerican things in the future. After all, the police have much better things to do than waste time dealing with political activities and people shouldn’t waste the taxpayers money on this stuff in the first place.
Maybe, if we’re lucky, we can end this silly political protest business once and for all with these modern advances in mass torture. I think that’s what we call freedom.
Since the revelation of the illegal surveillance program in December 2005, the fundamental question – who has the government been spying on? – has yet to be answered, and with the FISA legislation providing immunity for the telecoms we thought it would forever fade into the background. But it’s more likely that the truth will come out in drips and drabs; maybe not the whole truth, but enough of it to shock the conscience. Today we have another fallen domino:
Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia […]
“These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones,” said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA’s Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003.
Kinne described the contents of the calls as “personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism.”
She said US military officers, American journalists and American aid workers were routinely intercepted and “collected on” as they called their offices or homes in the United States.
But, we were told that it was a Terrorist Surveillance Program, and Obama Osama bin Laden (darn it, I just always mix them up) would come to our ballgames and sell tainted Dodger Dogs to us if we didn’t allow wise and benevolent Government access to every piece of communication in the world!
Funny how that worked out.
Turns out that the ordinary grunts listening to this stuff were passing around audio snippets to each other:
Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of “cuts” that were available on each operator’s computer.
“Hey, check this out,” Faulk says he would be told, “there’s good phone sex or there’s some pillow talk, pull up this call, it’s really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, ‘Wow, this was crazy’,” Faulk told ABC News.
And then there’s this amazing statement, which kind of sums up life in the 21st-century surveillance state:
Asked for comment about the ABC News report and accounts of intimate and private phone calls of military officers being passed around, a US intelligence official said “all employees of the US government” should expect that their telephone conversations could be monitored as part of an effort to safeguard security and “information assurance.”
“They certainly didn’t consent to having interceptions of their telephone sex conversations being passed around like some type of fraternity game,” said Jonathon Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University who has testified before Congress on the country’s warrantless surveillance program.
“This story is to surveillance law what Abu Ghraib was to prison law,” Turley said….
“Information assurance.” How pleasantly banal.
See the beginning here for who was spied on – not just military and government personnel but journalists and aid workers. That’s exactly who I would target if I wanted to control the flow of information to the public. And there was no mistake here – members of the International Red Cross were surveilled and were “identified in our systems as ‘belongs to the International Red Cross’,” according to one of the intercept operators.
This is what everybody voted for in the Congress. Not to “protect America from harm,” but to maintain and indemnify a shadow spying system so the highest levels of government can maintain control and power. It’s against the law and many of our foundational principles and George Bush did it anyway, and the Congress – Democrats and Republicans – enabled him.
And they’re still doing it.
It goes without saying that such attention to the calls and communications of ordinary Americans actually hurts our capacity to deal with any terrorist threat as simply a function of time management and prioritizing. Bush’s Department of Homeland Security funded this report.
The government should not be building predictive data-mining programs systems that attempt to figure out who among millions is a terrorist, a privacy and terrorism commission funded by Homeland Security reported Tuesday. The commission found that the technology would not work and the inevitable mistakes would be un-American.
The committee, created by the National Research Council in 2005, also expressed doubts about the effectiveness of technology designed to decide from afar whether a person had terrorist intents, saying false positives could quickly lead to privacy invasions.
“Automated identification of terrorists through data mining (or any other known methodology) is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts,” the report found. “Even in well-managed programs, such tools are likely to return significant rates of false positives, especially if the tools are highly automated.”
This is true, but of course you would have to believe that the system Bush and his pals set up was in any way designed for terrorist surveillance. Based on the details we now know, I can’t imagine it was. The program is an example of how authoritarian societies maintain order and power.
You’ll be thrilled to know that Jay Rockefeller is going to begin an examination of this and request information from the Administration about it. I don’t know what’s more hysterical – that he thinks he can get one scrap of paper from the White House, or that he thinks we’ll buy that he’s about to sit down and investigate himself, in effect.
There’s no getting around it now. Every day the market seems to drop like a stone in the last hour. It closed below 8600. Yikes. I have recurring nightmares of falling from great heights and this feels a lot like that.
Apparently, Obama wasn’t only palling around with William Ayers, Ayres wrote his autobiography for him:
If my suspicions are correct, the ghost on this book shared many of Obama’s sentiments, spoke his language and spent considerable time reworking the text.
I bought Bill Ayers’ 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, for reasons unrelated to this project. As I discovered, he writes surprisingly well and very much like “Obama.” In fact, my first thought was that the two may have shared the same ghostwriter. Unlike Dreams, however, where the high style is intermittent, Fugitive Days is infused with the authorial voice in every sentence. What is more, when Ayers speaks, even off the cuff, he uses a cadence and vocabulary consistent with his memoir. One does not hear any of Dreams in Obama’s casual speech.
Obama’s memoir was published in June 1995. Earlier that year, Ayers helped Obama, then a junior lawyer at a minor law firm, get appointed chairman of the multi-million dollar Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant. In the fall of that same year, 1995, Ayers and his wife, Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, helped blaze Obama’s path to political power with a fundraiser in their Chicago home.
In short, Ayers had the means, the motive, the time, the place and the literary ability to jumpstart Obama’s career. And, as Ayers had to know, a lovely memoir under Obama’s belt made for a much better resume than an unfulfilled contract over his head.
The paranoid strain is alive and well. if you add up all the latest “evidence,” Obama was programmed to be a member of a Muslim sleeper cell when he was six years old and then joined up with his fellow terrorist Bill Ayers (who is also in cahoots with Muslim extremists, which is a bit odd for a leftist, but whatever.) Ayers then wrote Obama’s biography, with the idea that he would someday run for president, thus allowing Muslims to force Sharia law on Americans. (Oh, and in case you didn’t notice, the man is black.)
As I mentioned below, I’m not bringing any of this up because I take it as a serious threat to the election. Events are in the driver’s seat and I don’t think any of this is going to stick with a majority of voters right now. But that’s what makes it so insidious: it’s being done more with an eye toward an Obama administration than a McCain victory.
This is upsetting. John McCain and Sarah W. Palin know that Barack Obama is not a terrorist (well, maybe Palin doesn’t … she’s Queen of the tribe that believes this crap) and yet they are purposefully inciting people who are obviously dumb enough to believe it.
I think this is dangerous stuff and far beyond the pale. We saw what happened in Tennessee recently. It was the act of a mentally disturbed person, for sure. But it was also explicitly political — he had been trained to blame liberals for his woes and so when he went out searching for someone to shoot, he knew who to target. He’d been reading books which claimed liberals are treasonous and unAmerican, written by people who are treated as being perfectly respectable on television and are welcomed into the highest circles of power. His act was his own responsibility, but those who turn normal political differences into bloodsport for personal profit contributed to the madness.
We are entering a turbulent period in our country. Validating a bogus accusation that your political rival is a terrorist in our current environment is the most irresponsible thing I’ve seen a campaign do in many a year. They know they are very likely going to lose this election. And McCain certainly knows that the main reason he is losing is because of the dramatic failures of fellow failed Republican George W. Bush. But even knowing that his candidacy was always very likely doomed is not stopping him from releasing this poison into the bloodstream of the body politic, a poison which will be with us for a long time to come. I guess that’s what McCain means when he says that Americans should fight for a cause greater than themselves. That cause, evidently, is him.
Noriel Roubini has a transcript of a colloquy between Barney Frank and Jim Moran that effectively informed the Treasury Department that they could go the route of partially nationalizing the banks instead of their craptacular troubled asset buy-up program:
At first, Congressional aides we contacted were confused on whether the wording in the legislation did allow such public recapitalization was permitted or not. They pointed out to us that several sections of the legislation could be interpreted as allowing such public capital injection. Specifically such senior Congressional aides argued that several sections of the bill could be used to argue that the purchased “assets” as used in these provision would include not only securities accounted for as assets on the balance sheet of the financial institution but would also include common and preferred share, warrants on common and preferred shares, as well as secured and unsecured and convertible debt in the financial institution itself, which would be accounted for as assets on the balance sheet of the US Treasury […]
But we pointed out that this interpretation of “assets” as including preferred shares, left to itself, was a real stretch of the meaning of the legislation as preferred shares and common shares and sub debt are liabilities – rather than assets – of the bank. Thus, it was important to clarify that “any other financial instrument” was not limited to assets but also included institution’s liabilities such as stock, preferred stock, subordinated debt, senior debt.
In other terms it was necessary to explicitly clarify that the definition of “assets” or “any other financial instrument” in the legislation did allow for such public injection of capital so as to ensure that the regulations following the legislation would allow for such interpretation and actual practice. Since it was too late – by Wednesday last week – to explicitly modify the legislation to allow for explicit wording on this matter and since Treasury was resisting such late explicit changes (that would have jolted the banking industry) the tool that was used (in full agreement with the House and Senate leadership) to allow for such interpretation was to have Representative Jim Moran use the October 3rd House floor debate right before the final vote to put on the legislative record such interpretation. See the following important exchange between Jim Moran and Barney Frank that is now on the legislative record of the House:
Mr. MORAN of Virginia. Thank you, Madam Speaker. I won’t take that much time. I do want to thank the chairman for his masterful leadership on this bill, and I do want to clarify that the intent of this legislation is to authorize the Treasury Department to strengthen credit markets by infusing capital into weak institutions in two ways: By buying their stock, debt, or other capital instruments; and, two, by purchasing bad assets from the institutions, in coordination with existing regulatory agencies and their responsibilities under this legislation, as well as under already existing authorization for prompt, corrective action and leastcost resolution.
Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Will the gentleman yield?
Mr. MORAN of Virginia. I’d be happy to yield.
Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. I can affirm that. As the gentleman knows, the Treasury Department is in agreement with this, and we should be clear, this is one of the things that this House and the Senate added to the bill, the authority to buy equity. It is not simply buying up the assets, it is to buy equity, and to buy equity in a way that the Federal Government will able to benefit if there is an appreciation.
So Moran asks Frank to clarify that the explicit intent of the legislation is to allow the purchase of bank liabilities (stock, debt, or other capital instruments) not just assets; and Frank replies firmly that this is the case and that Treasury agrees with such interpretation. Done!
I know that there’s this knee-jerk response that we’re supposed to de facto assume that Democrats cave and aren’t worth a warm bucket of spit, but they appear to have back-doored the right idea on this crisis. And this is what must be done. Nationalizing the banks is the best way to both shore up the system and get the best deal for taxpayers. It may not what you’d want to do in a sustainable economy, but it’s the hand we’ve been dealt. And nobody’s going to argue with it. Hell, The Wall Street Journal is arguing in favor of this move.
The fact that the Treasury Department came to this realization now is helpful for a potential Obama Administration. He’s still going to inherit one heck of a mess, but at least the plan is in action and may be in motion.
For insight into the complicated, talented, politician Barack Obama is, you could do a lot worse than read this WaPo article about his years in the State Senate. I was particularly struck by this section, where Obama lost his temper. Or did he?
Obama’s poker buddies encouraged him to stand up to Hendon and Trotter, but he refused. Not his style, he said. And why sink to their level? When Hendon ridiculed Obama, his standard comeback was a dismissive shrug and a wave of his hand. Ah, Rickey, you’ve always got something to say.”I never would have called him a fighter,” Hendon said. “He used the silk gloves, and I used the iron fists.”
The tension between the two men peaked on June 11, 2002, after Hendon made an impassioned speech on the Senate floor urging his colleagues to preserve funding for a child welfare facility in his district. It was, Hendon remembers, “basically the most emotional speech of my life, and I was pulling out all the stops.” Every Republican still voted against him. Every Democrat voted with him — except Obama and three other members who made up a faction known in Springfield as “liberal row.”
Incensed by those four votes, Hendon walked across the floor and confronted Obama, who explained by saying “something about fiscal responsibility,” Hendon recalls. A few minutes later, after Hendon’s proposal had lost, Obama stood up and asked to have his previous vote changed to a “Yes” for the record, saying he had misunderstood the legislation. His request was declined, and Hendon stood to criticize Obama for political maneuvering.
Infuriated that Hendon had embarrassed him publicly on the Senate floor, Obama walked over to his rival’s seat, witnesses said.
“He leaned over, put his arm on my shoulder real nice and then threatened to kick my ass,” Hendon said.
The two men walked out of the chamber into a back room and shoved each other a few times before colleagues broke them apart, Hendon and other witnesses said. Obama and Hendon never talked about the incident with each other again, but they reached an awkward understanding. Hendon stopped teasing Obama; Obama started voting with Hendon more regularly. Hendon now supports Obama for president.
Some of the legislators on the floor that day believed Obama had finally snapped after more than five years of tolerating Hendon’s provocations. But Obama’s allies, the poker buddies and other friends who knew him best, wondered if his actions resulted from a deeper calculation. Had he actually reacted, so uncharacteristically, out of pure emotion? Or was his scuffle with Hendon a final, brilliant tactic in coalition-building?
“He finally met Rickey on his level, and that got him some respect,” Lightford said. “That’s what Barack needed to do, and it worked. They didn’t tease him so much after that. It was like they finally realized that Barack was more than some soft punk to push around. He could play tough to get his way.”
I suppose the right can spin this incident as a bug instead of a feature, but to me, this is jaw-droppingly intelligent politicking.
Is it possible the US could have a president that isn’t a hot-headed fool, that is slow to anger, and even when angry expresses only the exact amount needed to advance his purposes? A president who patiently builds friendships and coalitions, even with natural political enemies? I suspect there are very few people who read this site who would disagree that – policy disagreements aside – this is exactly the type of character traits we’d like to see in a president. Oh sure, you can Monday-morning quarterback this and argue that maybe a president needs to react faster in a crisis than Obama did with Hendon. But in the end, Obama got his respect and his support.