No Interest
by digby
I am, sadly, in an airport with no TV tuned to the debate in the whole damned concourse, so I’m missing this one too. Please feel free to chatter in the comments.
Tonight’s drinking game word is “crisis.” I hope you have a 12 pack.
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Broken Faith
by digby
Finally, the Uighur prisoners in Guantanamo have been allowed to awaken from their kafkaeque nightmares:
Today, for the first time, a federal court ordered the release into the United States of 17 innocent Uighur men who have been imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay for nearly seven years. The men are refugees who would face persecution and imprisonment, if not death, if returned to their native China.
“In the history of our Republic, the military never imprisoned any man so harshly, and for so long, let alone men who are not the enemy. We have broken faith with the rule of law, and been untrue to the generosity of spirit that is our national character,” said Sabin Willett, Partner at Bingham McCutchen who argued the case for the detainees today.
“This is a historic day for the U.S. Finally, we are beginning the process of taking responsibility for our mistakes and fixing them,” said CCR Attorney Emi MacLean. “For years, the United States has begged other countries to clean up the mess we made in Guantanamo, but the hypocrisy of this appeal was evident abroad. Perhaps now other countries will be less reluctant to come to our aid.” MacLean continued, “Allowing these wrongfully detained men a fresh start would also provide the U.S. a fresh start – an opportunity to turn a page and finally take a position of leadership in closing Guantanamo.”
Religious and community leaders from both Tallahassee, Florida and the Washington D.C. area offered to the court detailed plans for the support of the men, from housing and counseling to employment and car insurance. In this stunning show of goodwill and solidarity, 20 leaders from faith-based communities in Tallahassee, Florida, and a network of refugee resettlement agencies and other religious groups, have pledged to help settle the men in local communities. Many members of the Uighur community came to court today to lend support.
Said Mr. Willett, “The volunteers who come to court today from church and community, from synagogue and mosque to offer sanctuary to these men bear true faith to that character, and give us hope that the better angel of our nature can yet return.”
On the day of the hearing, Congressmen Bill Delahunt (D-MA) and Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) also reiterated their June call for the U.S. to grant protection to the imprisoned Uighurs.
The 17 men currently imprisoned at Guantanamo left China amid increasing political oppression and found their way to Afghanistan, where they lived in small Uighur communities. In late 2001, they were forced to flee the aerial bombardment of the surrounding areas. Eventually, they made their way to Pakistan in the belief that they would be safer there. After crossing into Pakistan, the Uighurs were welcomed and fed by Pakistani villagers who then turned them over for generous bounties offered by the United States.
Last week, after years of litigation, the U.S. government finally conceded that none of these men would be treated as “enemy combatants.” All were cleared for release long ago. However, because of the stigma of their detention at Guantánamo and for fear of offending China, no other country had agreed to offer these men safe haven. Despite this failure to find a third country to take them, the government argued that the court could not release them into the U.S. and, therefore, that the men would have to stay at Guantanamo indefinitely.
I suppose we’ll probably have some sort of witch hunts in the neighborhoods where these men will live — it’s just too tempting for the xenophobe know-nothings. (Tune into talk radio…) But anything’s better than Gitmo. And good for the religious and community leaders who stepped up. The government actually owes them reparations, but in the meantime at least they will be out of that hellhole.
This is yet another in a long line of moral stains on this nation perpetrated in our names these past few years. It makes me feel ashamed and embarrassed.
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Delegitimization Project
by dday
The polls are surging, the fundamentals of the election are in the favor of the Democrats, and time is running out. That’s why today, the Republicans kicked their ground game into high gear.
Nevada state authorities are raiding the Las Vegas headquarters of an organization that works to get low-income people to vote.
A Nevada secretary of state’s office spokesman said Tuesday that investigators are looking for evidence of voter fraud at the office of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, also called ACORN.
No one was at the ACORN office when state agents arrived with a search warrant and began carting records and documents away.
ACORN, which is going to supplant the ACLU as the organization conservatives blame for all the world’s ills, routinely flags suspicious voter registration applications for election officials generated by their registration drives. This does not sound like the work of an organization dedicated to stealing elections – the whole “we turn ourselves in” part works against that. This is from ACORN’s statement today:
Election officials routinely ignored this information and failed to act. In early July, ACORN asked to meet with election officials to express our concerns that they were not acting on information ACORN had presented to them. ACORN met with Clark County elections officials and a representative of the Secretary of State on July 17th. ACORN pleaded with them to take our concerns about fraudulent applications seriously. One week later, elections officials asked us to provide them with a second copy of what we had previously provided to them. ACORN responded by giving election officials copies of 46 “problem application packages,” which involved 33 former canvassers.
On September 23, ACORN had received a subpoena dated September 19^th requesting information on 15 employees, all of whom had been included in the packages we had previously submitted to election officials. ACORN provided our personnel records on these 15 employees on September 29.
Today’s raid by the Secretary of State’s Office is a stunt that serves no useful purpose other than discredit our work registering Nevadans and distracting us from the important work ahead of getting every eligible voter to the polls.”
So you have 46 bad applications out of 80,000 new voters registered in Clark County. And of course the thing about bad voter registrations is that they are easily flagged and almost by definition cannot result in a fraudulent vote. If someone submits a registration form with the names of the Dallas Cowboys on them, that won’t result in the Dallas Cowboys voting in Nevada. The same with duplicate voter registrations. It would be the most time-consuming and least likely to be successful vote stealing effort in history.
But that’s hardly the point. The Bush Administration sought to make this a priority months ago by creating joint task forces to investigate voter fraud. The Attorney General of Wisconsin, in a bid to become the next Katherine Harris or Ken Blackwell, openly boasted about taking action – with the Justice Department – over this non-existent problem at the RNC (how nonpartisan of him):
“We are out there front and center everyday and you’ll be hearing much more from the Department of Justice in the coming months about doing what we can to make sure that those people who have illegally and illegitimately registered to vote, don’t have the opportunity on election day to show up and take away your vote by casting one that is not legal,” he continued.
This isn’t about stopping the scourge of voter fraud. It’s about using that as a crutch to stop people from voting, to put up obstructions and increase the burden among Democratic communities. They put fliers in black neighborhoods warning of prosecution if black people vote, and they distribute false information designed to get students to be afraid to vote at their colleges. Voter fraud is the hook on which they hang this cloak of suppression.
Here’s Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
A recently unearthed e-mail from a Republican strategist in New Mexico shows the unbridled cynicism that underlies claims about fraudulent voting. Patrick Rogers, former lawyer for the New Mexico Republican Party, was among the party hacks pushing for criminal investigations into alleged voter fraud. He clearly was hoping that the threat of legal sanctions would intimidate Democrats and aid Republicans, including U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.), who was in a tight race for re-election. According to a new report from the U.S. Justice Department’s inspector general, Rogers wrote in September 2004:
“I believe the [voter] ID issue should be used at all levels — federal, state legislative races and Heather’s race. … You are not going to find a better wedge issue. … This is the single best wedge issue, ever in [New Mexico].”
The McCain campaign is doing the same thing with this perverse charge that Barack Obama’s contributions are “shadowy” and “suspect.” Because donors under $200 don’t have to be itemized on FEC reports, they are essentially attacking the strength of Obama’s small-donor base in much the same way that these bogus fraud allegations attack the strength of Democratic voter turnout.
This may not be enough to turn the tide of the election, but will certainly be enough of a seed of doubt for the right wing noise machine to cultivate for years, delegitimizing an Obama victory and setting the stage for another wave of backlash politics. If you thought the right had a persecution complex while in the majority, wait until you see it in the minority.
…it’s been brought to my attention that the Secretary of State and the Attorney General of Nevada are Democrats. The investigation is part of a joint task force with the US Attorney of Nevada and the FBI, in addition to state officials. I seem to remember the US Attorney scandal being about firing prosecutors who wouldn’t vigorously pursue voter fraud allegations. I’ll leave it to you to decide who’s running the show here, the state or the feds.
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Joe Six-Pack
by digby
…hasn’t had much of a raise in years.
Bob Herbert makes a point today that I expect we’ll be hearing again over the next few months:
We’ve been living for years in a fool’s paradise atop a mountain of debt. The masters of the universe on Wall Street lost all sense of reason, no doubt. But most of us have been living above our means through the magic of easy credit, ever lower taxes, ever rising property values, stock market bubbles and the gift of denial, which we used to assure ourselves that the bills would never come due. We’ve even put our wars on a credit card.
The burden of debt for a typical middle-income family, earning about $45,000 a year, grew by a third in just the few years from 2001 to 2004, according to the Center for American Progress. The reason for this unsustainable added weight was the rising cost of such items as housing, higher education, health care and transportation at a time when wages grew only slightly or not at all.
In other words, work was not enough.
As for the debt burden of the federal government, don’t ask. (But you might want to ask your grandchildren how they plan to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.)
With reality now caving in on us — banks and brokerage houses falling like tenpins, a trillion dollars or so in bailout money being added to the nation’s debt burden, families by the hundreds of thousands being driven from their homes by foreclosures — it might make sense to get back to basics. And in the United States, the basic economic component of a sustainable family life is a good job.
What we haven’t paid close enough attention to for many years (a period in which we’ve been oddly obsessed with the financial lives of the rich and famous) is the fact that there haven’t been enough good paying jobs to sustain what most working Americans view as an adequate standard of living. This is a fundamental flaw in the U.S. economic system.
With the latest financial meltdown, there has been widespread outrage over the excessive compensation of top corporate executives. Where has everybody been? The rich have been running the table for the better part of the past 30 or 40 years.
“Income inequality” is one of those phrases we’ve heard a lot about, but haven’t really seen why it matters. Well, this is it. Much of the American middle class, stuck with stagnant wages, inundated with consumer goods and easy credit, is in debt, big time. Popular culture has been celebrating the vast wealth of Britney or Trump, making it look easy and desirable. New goodies with deals at 0% interest, new consumer electronics that you can put on that credit card they just sent you in the mail without even asking. And all at a time when the rich were getting much richer and the average worker’s salary was standing still or going lower.
Nobody cared about income inequality when credit cards and home equity were covering up for the fact that there were no raises. Now, the party’s over and that reality is becoming much more clear. The raises (or property values) that were supposedly coming to cover all that interest aren’t coming after all.
My question is how the “conservatives” are going to convince everyone one more time that the government needs to cut their taxes so they’ll go out and spend money to stimulate the economy. I somehow doubt they will. Maybe this will all blow over and the party will get a second win, but I doubt it. This time people going to pay down debt. And that means the government is going to have to spend directly rather than encouraging citizens to spend mindlessly on new consumer goods if they want to stimulate the economy. That should make for quite the interesting political battle. It challenges every economic trope the conservatives have been spewing all these years.
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Into The Belly Of The Beast
by digby
Naomi Klein goes to the University of Chicago:
NAOMI KLEIN: When Milton Friedman turned ninety, the Bush White House held a birthday party for him to honor him, to honor his legacy, in 2002, and everyone made speeches, including George Bush, but there was a really good speech that was given by Donald Rumsfeld. I have it on my website. My favorite quote in that speech from Rumsfeld is this: he said, “Milton is the embodiment of the truth that ideas have consequences.”
So, what I want to argue here is that, among other things, the economic chaos that we’re seeing right now on Wall Street and on Main Street and in Washington stems from many factors, of course, but among them are the ideas of Milton Friedman and many of his colleagues and students from this school. Ideas have consequences.
More than that, what we are seeing with the crash on Wall Street, I believe, should be for Friedmanism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for authoritarian communism: an indictment of ideology. It cannot simply be written off as corruption or greed, because what we have been living, since Reagan, is a policy of liberating the forces of greed to discard the idea of the government as regulator, of protecting citizens and consumers from the detrimental impact of greed, ideas that, of course, gained great currency after the market crash of 1929, but that really what we have been living is a liberation movement, indeed the most successful liberation movement of our time, which is the movement by capital to liberate itself from all constraints on its accumulation.
So, as we say that this ideology is failing, I beg to differ. I actually believe it has been enormously successful, enormously successful, just not on the terms that we learn about in University of Chicago textbooks, that I don’t think the project actually has been the development of the world and the elimination of poverty. I think this has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor, and I think that they won. And I think the poor are fighting back. This should be an indictment of an ideology. Ideas have consequences.
Now, people are enormously loyal to Milton Friedman, for a variety of reasons and from a variety of sectors. You know, in my cynical moments, I say Milton Friedman had a knack for thinking profitable thoughts. He did. His thoughts were enormously profitable. And he was rewarded. His work was rewarded. I don’t mean personally greedy. I mean that his work was supported at the university, at think tanks, in the production of a ten-part documentary series called Freedom to Choose, sponsored by FedEx and Pepsi; that the corporate world has been good to Milton Friedman, because his ideas were good for them.
But he also was clearly a tremendously inspiring teacher, and he had a gift, like all great teachers do, to help his students fall in love with the material. But he also had a gift that many ideologues have, many staunch ideologues have—and I would even use the word “fundamentalists” have—which is the ability to help people fall in love with a perfect imagined system, a system that seems perfect, utopian, in the classroom, in the basement workshop, when all the numbers work out. And he was, of course, a brilliant mathematician, which made that all the more seductive, which made those models all the more seductive, this perfect, elegant, all-encompassing system, the dream of the perfect utopian market.
Now, one of the things that comes up again and again in the writings of University of Chicago economists of the Friedman tradition, people like Arnold Harberger, is this appeal to nature, to a state of nature, this idea that economics is not a political science or not a social science, but a hard science on par with physics and chemistry. So, as we look at the University of Chicago tradition, it isn’t just about a set of political and economic goals, like privatization, deregulation, free trade, cuts to government spending; it’s a transformation of the field of economics from being a hybrid science that was in dialogue with politics, with psychology, and turning it into a hard science that you could not argue with, which is why you would never talk to a journalist, right? Because that’s, you know, the messy, imperfect real world. It is beneath those who are appealing to the laws of nature.
Now, these ideas in the 1950s and ’60s at this school were largely in the realm of theory. They were academic ideas, and it was easy to fall in love with them, because they hadn’t actually been tested in the real world, where mixed economies were the rule.
Now, I admit to being a journalist. I admit to being an investigative journalist, a researcher, and I’m not here to argue theory. I’m here to discuss what happens in the messy real world when Milton Friedman’s ideas are put into practice, what happens to freedom, what happens to democracy, what happens to the size of government, what happens to the social structure, what happens to the relationship between politicians and big corporate players, because I think we do see patterns.
Now, the Friedmanites in this room will object to my methodology, I assure you, and I look forward to that. They will tell you, when I speak of Chile under Pinochet, Russia under Yeltsin and the Chicago Boys, China under Deng Xiaoping, or America under George W. Bush, or Iraq under Paul Bremer, that these were all distortions of Milton Friedman’s theories, that none of these actually count, when you talk about the repression and the surveillance and the expanding size of government and the intervention in the system, which is really much more like crony capitalism or corporatism than the elegant, perfectly balanced free market that came to life in those basement workshops. We’ll hear that Milton Friedman hated government interventions, that he stood up for human rights, that he was against all wars. And some of these claims, though not all of them, will be true.
But here’s the thing. Ideas have consequences. And when you leave the safety of academia and start actually issuing policy prescriptions, which was Milton Friedman’s other life—he wasn’t just an academic. He was a popular writer. He met with world leaders around the world—China, Chile, everywhere, the United States. His memoirs are a “who’s who.” So, when you leave that safety and you start issuing policy prescriptions, when you start advising heads of state, you no longer have the luxury of only being judged on how you think your ideas will affect the world. You begin having to contend with how they actually affect the world, even when that reality contradicts all of your utopian theories. So, to quote Friedman’s great intellectual nemesis, John Kenneth Galbraith, “Milton Friedman’s misfortune is that his policies have been tried.”
McCain/Keating = McCain/Palin
by tristero
I agree with my blogging colleagues that this film about the McCain and Keating is a must see.
The story is very simple: Keating was a common thief who stole hundreds of millions of dollars directly from his own company. McCain and 4 other senators were paid by Keating to block inquiries into that theft. They were all caught, Keating was sent to the slammer while McCain and his colleagues were sternly reprimanded and publicly humiliated.
The lesson of the story is also simple. McCain doesn’t possess the moral and intellectual judgment to be president of the United States.
Nor has McCain learned better judgment over the years. Exhibit A: Sarah Palin, his first presidential-level decision and as spectacularly bad a failure of judgment as his befriending and support of Charles Keating. In a very real sense, McCain’s support of Keating and McCain’s choice of Palin are all of a piece: John McCain cannot make intelligent decisions.
Bottom line: John McCain does not have what it takes to be president.
Frustration, Anger, Incitement, Violence
by dday
Yesterday, at two major rallies for the Republican candidates, audience members yelled out that Obama is a terrorist and that he should be killed (or maybe that Bill Ayers should be killed, hard to know from the context, but when you’re talking about someone approving of murder in the presence of a Republican candidate, it’s a distinction without a difference). Today, an audience member screamed “Treason!”
The right has made a cottage industry of whipping up their side into a frenzy, demonizing liberals, blaming them for every ill of society and ramping up that rhetoric louder and louder until it essentially has no distinction from eliminationism. And as much as the conservative noise machine gets all wounded and indignant when you say this, such rhetoric does play itself out into acts of violence.
Indeed, John McCain has actively shielded domestic terrorists from prosecution through his votes in the 1990s. These are the characters, the Randall Terrys, the Chad Castagnas, that are never subjects of ads or whisper campaigns.
Pfotenhauer’s invocation of abortion clinic bombers in defense of McCain is ironic given that McCain has repeatedly voted against protecting Americans from domestic terrorists in the anti-choice movement. On multiple occasions throughout his career, McCain sought to limit the government’s ability to punish violent anti-choice fanatics by:
– Voting against making anti-choice violence a federal crime. As the Jed Report notes, McCain voted in 1993 and 1994 against making “bombings, arson and blockades at abortion clinics, and shootings and threats of violence against doctors and nurses who perform abortions” federal crimes.
– Opposing Colorado’s “Bubble Law.” McCain said he opposed Colorado’s “Bubble Law,” which prohibited abortion protesters from getting within 8 feet of women entering clinics [Denver Post, 2/27/00]. The law was later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
– Voting to allow those fined for violence at clinics to avoid penalties by declaring bankruptcy. NARAL Pro-Chioce America notes that McCain “voted to allow perpetrators of violence or harassment at reproductive-health clinics to avoid paying the fines assessed against them for their illegal acts by declaring bankruptcy.”
(This is to say nothing of Sarah Palin’s very direct ties to Jew-hating Christian Zionists or the extremist Birchers in the Alaska Independence Party, which until recently included her husband.)
It should be unsurprising that the McCain campaign is stopping reporters from mingling in their crowds – maybe it’s for their own protection. But riling up your base and demonizing your opponent to this degree – calling him un-American, for example – is bound to have consequences. Especially when we’re about to head into a protracted economic downturn and it will be blamed on liberals, gays, Hispanics, Arabs and black people, not necessarily in that order.
…more:
Worse, Palin’s routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric’s questions for her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.” At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”
They fail to understand the consequences of their actions. *
* – meaning this.
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Sounds From Mars
by digby
I can’t tell you how much Sarah W. Palin’s accent is bugging me. Alaskans do not have this accent. They don’t sound like North Dakotans and they don’t sound like Canadians and they certainly don’t have the weird, folksy drawl of Sarah W. Palin. Unless they are transplants, which Palin is not, Alaskans sound like other inhabitants of the Pacific Northwest, which is to say they sound like newscasters.
Julia has put together some clips which show that Sarah W’s accent isn’t only odd for someone who spent her life in Alaska — it comes and goes:
Of course, there’s nothing that the conservative base likes more than someone who sports a rural or southern accent. And in fact, they prefer it to be fake — it means the person who uses it understands how important they are and has even changed the way they sound in order to appeal to them. They squealed with delight at the Connecticut Yankee George W. Bush’s carefully cultivated Texas drawl.
There’s nothing wrong with Palin’s accent. In fact, it might even be charming if it were real. But I’m just not charmed by phonies and that exactly what she is.
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All Gone
by digby
In case you find yourself listening to the financial gasbags blather on hysterically about complex nothingness like they know what they’re talking about and it’s leaving you confused, may I present Atrios:
They Lost A Lot Of Money
Spending the day watching CNBC, it’s really quite stunning that they’re unable to grapple with the real problem underlying all of this instead of the consequences of that problem. There’s been a tremendous evaporation of housing wealth as a consequence of the bursting of the housing bubble. Lots of banks made bad loans and that money isn’t coming back. Dealing with home foreclosures is time consuming and expensive and a lot of houses are underwater. Other people lost money insuring mortgages. Still more people lost money buying up those mortgages. Still more people lost money lending to people to buy up more mortgages. Even more people lost money insuring those loans. Etc.
All of this babble about liquidity and short selling and blah blah blah just obfuscates all of this. A big reason that there is a liquidity problem is that… people lost a lot of money. All gone!
And he has the right alaphbet soup after his name and everything.
Honestly, watching CNBC makes me appreciate the staid, contemplative, thoughtful style of Chris Matthews.
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Wind-Up Doll
by digby
If anyone knows John Roberts on CNN, could you please tell him to cut the sanctimonious crap and stop interrupting and lecturing guests about “name calling” when they are arguing about important political differences? The two presidential candidates’ economic advisors Holz Eakin and Goolsbee had to endure being scolded by Roberts over and over again — and he was just wrong. They weren’t name calling, they were disagreeing over some pretty important things. They are both respected economists, not “political strategist” hacks and we are in the middle of a hotly contested, extremely important election. Roberts apparently can’t tell the difference between real political argument and swiftboating nonsense.
Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if Roberts weren’t the ditziest mannequin on cable TV (and that’s saying something.) But it’s extremely irritating to have to watch this empty suit treat his guests like children and then pat himself on the back as if he’s accomplished something. Ken dolls should be seen and not heard.
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