Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

New Clear Terrorism

by tristero

If Jeffrey Goldberg was right, but he isn’t, that the chance of a radical Islamist nuke detonating in a major American city in the next 10 years is between 10% and 50%, then:

The only acceptable platforms for either party to run on are proposals to mass convert the United States to Taliban-style Islam and swear loyalty to Osama bin Laden.

That’s because even a 10% chance of a nuclear attack in the next ten years is unacceptably, frighteningly, paralyzingly high and the only effective way to stave off such an attack would be to capitulate completely and bet that radical Christianist terrorists will take far longer to develop nukes to threaten the Islamist States of America.*

I carefully looked into this issue a while ago – after all, as a New Yorker and a parent, I have a vested interest in the subject. I concluded, for a variety of reasons, that the actual likelihood of an attack was probably far lower, but definitely not zero.** Of course, since risk equals probability times consequences, the risk is so exceedingly high, even if the probability is very low, that nuclear terrrorism should be a legitimate worry near the front of everyone’s mind, particularly whomever leads the country.

But Goldberg’s analysis is simplistic. A truly effective response to nuclear terrorism would include not only effective intelligence and pre-emption.*** It would also include a sane foreign policy including a thorough re-evaluation, and major re-adjustment, of the US policies towards corrupt, oppressive Arabic regimes like Saudi Arabia.

Only one candidate has the intelligence, expertise, attitude, and strength of character to attempt fundamental and sensible change in American foreign policy, and therefore, lower the chances for a terrorist nuclear attack. That candidate is, of course, Barack Obama.

The McCain/Bush ticket has demonstrated that they are unfit for command, having given the US and the world 8 unbearably dangerous year when international and US security has alarmingly deteriorated. Bottom line: To vote for McCain/Bush is to vote actually to raise the prospect of nuclear terrorism to 10% or much higher.

At which time, we better start breaking out the burqas because nothing McCain/Bush is capable of doing will prevent or pre-empt a nuclear holocaust on American soil.

**Among those reasons, and there were others, was the sheer complexity of the task of designing, acquiring materials, building, storing, transporting, and actually detonating a nuclear bomb which was, back in 2003 when I looked into it, far beyond the capabilities of al Qaeda (although the desire was there to do so). Now, after Bush/McCain has guaranteed that nearly every Muslim in the world hates our guts, and they’ve radicalized countless Iraqis by killing their friends and relatives, the probability of nuclear terrorist attack is higher, but still doesn’t reach the mindboggling likelihood of 10%. Of course, if McCain/Bush extends the madness of the past eight years, all bets are off.

*Cue some reactionary illiterate suffering from severe cognitive distortions not unlike a permanent salvia trip to argue that I’m saying it’s a good idea for the country to convert rather than fight. I’ll say it real slow: What I’m saying, using common figurative linguistic devices well known to most English speakers who aren’t ideologically deranged, is that the likelihood of a nuclear terrorist threat is probably quite overstated. But keep reading: I also state that the risk is extremely high even if the probability is very low.

**As Goldberg well knows, no one in their right mind would argue against the pre-emption of an imminent nuclear attack. This is one of many distracting strawmen Goldberg erects to pretend that Obama/Biden and McCain/Bush have equivalent strengths and weaknesses. He drags in Bush/Iraq, a conflict which he supported, and which throws his posture of objectivity between Obama and Bush/McCain into serious jeopardy. (An objective examination of the facts makes it quite clear, of course, that a McCain/Bush presidency would catastrophically extend the disasters of the Bush/McCain presidency. (Cue the conservativs amongst us to snort that I don’t perceive the irony in this. Well, guess what? I don’t. I am being objective))

How To Lose, Lesson XXXIX

by dday

Can everybody in the Democratic leadership in the Congress be required to take a political science class?

Congressional Democrats have scrapped plans for another vote on expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, thus sparing Republicans from a politically difficult vote just weeks before elections this fall.

Before the summer recess, Democrats had vowed repeatedly to force another vote on the popular program. But Democrats say they have shifted course, after concluding that President Bush would not sign their legislation and that they could not override his likely veto.

Mr. Bush vetoed two earlier versions of the legislation, which he denounced as a dangerous step toward “government-run health care for every American,” and the House sustained those vetoes […]

Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said: “We are not going to change any votes on the children’s health insurance bill. We still don’t have enough to override a veto. Those who opposed this bill can face the voters and explain why they believe 10 million kids should not get health coverage.”

Yeah, no kidding, Rahm, and it’ll be easier for Democratic challengers to draw this contrast if YOU PUT THE BILL UP FOR A VOTE AGAIN and showed yet again the callousness of the Republican caucus.

There were 2 SCHIP votes over a year ago. In news cycle time that might as well have been during the Eisenhower Administration. Everyone knows that SCHIP wouldn’t pass – the point is to make the Republicans vote on it. It’s part of the perks of being in the majority, forcing the opposition to make inconvenient votes in an election year. You might want to look up the vote for military force in Iraq (2002), the Homeland Security bill (2002), the Military Commissions Act (2006), and on and on…

Because there’s no way the bill would pass, it’s a free vote. You could tie the revenues to removing tax breaks for the oil companies and make the vote a two-fer. “Congressman X would rather give oil executives a new yacht than help sick children!” But alas, the leadership sees no reason why that would be a useful vote.

Thanks for making life harder for the dozens of challengers trying to unseat the bozos on the other side. Really nice work. Be sure to pass an offshore drilling bill while you’re at it, because we should definitely play on Republican turf with our votes in an election year when we hold the majority. Great strategery.

UPDATE: There’s a counter-claim to my view, in the comments and elsewhere, that the Democrats canceled the vote because it would just give an opportunity for some threatened Republicans to vote for SCHIP.

That would be compelling if many of those vulnerable Republicans that they’re talking about didn’t already vote for SCHIP in 2007. They got to 265-270 votes in the House before, after all.

Don Young – already voted for it. Chris Shays – already voted for it. Jon Porter – already voted for it. Dave Reichert – already voted for it.

What you want to do is draw out the hardcore wingnuts who could then be hammered over their vote. There are quite a lot of them, many in competitive races, and to them, voting against SCHIP is a matter of principle – they think it’ll give illegal immigrants health care or something. There aren’t enough slots for all of them to escape because then they’d get to the 289 votes needed for a veto override. This is particularly true because many of the retiring GOP Congressmen, lots of them moderates – Gilchrest, Wilson, Ramstad, etc., etc. – voted for the bill last time around and have no reason not to do so again.

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Holy Donahue!

by tristero

Rachel Maddow was terrific last night in the debut of her new show. Watch it, tivo it, enjoy it. I never thought I’d see it again: A real, genuine, left of center liberal actually has a tv show on a network (albeit far from a major one). It was a great pleasure to watch and I look forward to much more.

Don’t Worry, Be Liberal

by digby

The LA Times featured a piece today about the science of happiness. I thought this part was particularly interesting:

Although happiness is largely up to the individual, new research shows that what’s going on around you — specifically how much personal freedom you have — also plays a role.

In a paper published in the July issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, lead researcher Ronald Inglehart, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan, refuted the long-held belief that happiness among societies is constant. His research concluded that significant and enduring changes in happiness can occur not only for individuals, but also for entire societies.

The study, which Seligman calls the best he’s seen on happiness in five years, analyzed polls taken from 1981 to 2007 by the World Values Survey. The surveys consisted of 88 countries containing 90% of the world’s population, and measured happiness and overall life satisfaction. Among the 52 countries that completed all the surveys over the 17-year period, happiness rose in 45 of them, or 86%. In six countries, it declined, and in one (Australia), levels showed no change. Overall, happiness increased 6.8 percentage points.

Inglehart credits economic development, democratization and increasing social tolerance for the happiness bump. Economic gains that bring more food, clothing, shelter, medical care and longer life can result in a substantial increase in subjective well-being for poor societies, he says.

But once a society reaches a certain threshold, further economic growth brings only minimal gains. Among the richest societies, increases in income are only weakly linked with higher levels of subjective well-being.

While economic growth helps promote happiness for some, democratization and rising social tolerance contribute even more. Democracy provides more choice, which promotes happiness. Support for gender equality and tolerance of people who are different from oneself are also strongly linked, not just because tolerant people are happier, but because living in a tolerant society enhances everyone’s freedom, Inglehart says.

This seems perfectly obvious to me, but then I’m a liberal and I’m happy*. It’s a fascinating article.

*Perhaps this is a good place to issue a disclaimer. I am personally a happy person. But I am not a cheerleader and those of you who want me to stop writing what I see about the election are going to be …. unhappy. I’m still optimistic about winning, but I’m not going to write that everything is hearts and flowers if I don’t think it is. I’m not into magical thinking — and I have no reason to believe, as some of you suggest, that this is all part of some Obama master plan and I need to close my eyes and ears and have faith. I don’t have “faith” in any politician, I’m sorry.

I want him to win and I’ll work for him to win and I have no doubt that every person who reads this blog will likely vote for him. But there are reasons this race is so close and I’m going to write about that even if it upsets some people.

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The Big Lie Strategy

by tristero

Now that’s more like it:

Gov. Ed Rendell Monday blasted the GOP and Republican presidential nominee John McCain for what he says is their ‘dishonorable’ attempt to mislead the American public about Barack Obama’s tax plan.

‘The entire Republican National Convention, virtually every speaker lied about Senator Obama’s tax plan,’ said Rendell, speaking on a conference call to reporters. ‘Their TV ads continue to lie.

‘It’s the big lie strategy,’ he continued. ‘Say if often enough and it will stick.’

Rendell said Obama’s tax plan would provide relief to 95 percent of American families, as opposed to McCain’s, which would continue to reward the rich, he said.

He spoke to reporters a day before McCain and his runningmate, Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin, campaign in Lancaster. The governor held a press conference there Monday to show a letter that asks McCain to stop ‘misleading the American people about taxes.’

A state committee member, Rendell said, will try to deliver the letter to McCain Tuesday.

BTW, this was also reported by Katharine Seelye of the NY Times, but after I caught her lying yesterday, I found an alternate site to link to. I’m sure she cares. Not.

UPDATE: This new ad is very nice, too:

UPDATE II This is also quite wonderful:

Ad Wars

by dday

I am not the kind of person that gets excessively worried from poll to poll, and I do think that the Obama campaign has a strategy for getting out the vote that is significantly different, which is why they aren’t pollwatching either. I think that the cries of “Obama needs to do X” aren’t something I presume to really know better than the next guy. It’s clear to me that the campaign is actually trying to hit back on media message – really, they send out about 20-30 news releases a day, all of them hitting the right spots – but to that a great extent that game is rigged (see the MSNBC demotions today).

Where I absolutely agree with those who are concerned is that the campaign ads have been poor, and I say that as someone who works for a living in the creative media. That’s not because they don’t attack McCain or they don’t tie him to Bush; it’s a question of style. Even the ones which have done a credible job from a content perspective are not innovative, getting bogged down with the same statistics and one-line shibboleths (“protecting our economy”) that pass for contemporary policy debate, instead of offering a vision or a compelling storyline in those 30 seconds. I’m not completely opposed to presenting factual information (the “McCain will overturn Roe” ad was fine), but in Obama they have an appealing candidate with unappealing advertising.

The Olympics ad that showed time-lapse footage of a house being built as a metaphor for getting the country back on track was a start, but there were all these stock images over the house-building, and the reveal of the finished house at the end wasn’t up long enough, so that completely ruined it. It’s the perfect example of how over-cautious and wedded to the old ways of political ads the campaign has been, even in the primaries (with a few exceptions).

Creatively their spots are dead. They often say the right things but in the wrong way, IMO. The campaign has to cut through the clutter. Nate Silver has a couple ideas, one of which I like.

During the final night of Democratic Convention in Denver, the Obama campaign had seven or eight ‘ordinary’ people speak to the assembled crowd at Invesco Field. They were working class, middle-aged white and Hispanic voters, who conveniently all happened to be from swing states. But they were actually pretty persuasive, and produced some of the more moving moments of the convention:

So I would put together five or six of these spots, featuring these people or people like them speaking directly to camera, with interspersed images of their hometowns and their families, reserving 5 seconds at the end for a few phrases on blackscreen:

“The Obama Economic Plan”
“Tax Cuts for Working Families”
“5 Million New Green Energy Jobs”
“Health Care for Every American”
“The Change That We Need”

You get the idea. It’s a little unconventional but would be buzzworthy and would seek to counter some of Palin’s homespun appeal.

I don’t agree with the word blobs at the end, but you could surely do this in an entertaining and appealing way. It reinforces the message that the campaign is about ordinary people, too.

Failing that, I think one of the best things they can do is feature Barack himself. He’s the best message originator we have, and the riffs he makes on the campaign trail scream out for 30-second television ads. Instead of having him talk to the camera in a spot, just replay one of those riffs. For example, this one from today.

This will have the effect of actually offering some passion to the message. There’s no passion in his ads right now. They’re largely a litany. And so another possibility is this piece they cut internally for the DNC, which could be made into a 30 or 60-second spot. It has an emotional appeal, and is a positive way to push back on the “community organizing” slur. At some level I understand why the campaign is running away from the “movement” messaging in the general election, but I think it’s a mistake. If turnout and motivating the base is crucial, then something like this could be very successful.

Lastly, they could get out their core message on Sen. McCain in ways that go beyond citing statistics and a list of policies. You can fit them in to something that actually has a storyline, like this anti-Norm Coleman ad from the DSCC:

There are a number of ways you can go. Liberals have the creative community on their side but the campaign isn’t putting it to use, and the 527s have been defunded. Everyone talks about how the Obama campaign has reawakened some spirit to take the country back and put us on a better path. You wouldn’t know it right now from the ads.

UPDATE: As soon as I wrote this, I noticed this new ad, which is somewhat better:

At least the music is a little jarring, and some of the graphics are not totally standard. Overall, however, my criticism stands. Tell a story. Go off the omniscient voice. Add some passion.

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Turdblossom On Boardby digby
McCain’s whole campaign is now being waged on the basis of his being “a maverick.” This, if nothing else, should refute that claim:

Eight years after helping George Bush defeat John McCain in a bitter primary, Karl Rove appears to be playing a significant role in helping the Arizona Republican win the presidency.Rove has downplayed his contact with the McCain campaign, but the former adviser to President Bush met with GOP delegates from Colorado last Wednesday. Rove, who is now a Fox News analyst, told reporters after the meeting that he has friends in the McCain organization who occasionally seek his advice.
Colorado is a swing state. In an Aug. 14 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Rove wrote that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) must carry either Colorado or Virginia in addition to another small state to win in November.
Amid the media frenzy on the pregnancy of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s teenager daughter, Rove appeared on Fox to rebut published reports that the McCain campaign had not thoroughly vetted the Alaska governor.
He said the campaign “carefully vetted” Palin, claiming it was aware of all the revelations that have come out since she was announced as the running mate.
“They knew all of it. … They weren’t bothered by it,” Rove said.
Despite that insight, the McCain campaign denies that Rove has any kind of a prominent position. Asked if he has a major role and whether he has access to inside information, McCain campaign spokesman Tucker Bounds replied, “He’s doesn’t. He’s a Fox analyst.”

Rove knows that he’s a kiss of death to McCain’s maverick “I’m not Bush!” image, which is why he’s being coy. (And why Fox gave him a safe berth as an “analyst.”) But of course he’s helping McCain, and he’s doing it with the methods and tactics he learned at the feet of Lee Atwater back in the Nixon campaign. He’s a Republican. It’s what they do.

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Fun With Wingnuts

by digby

Jesus’ General writes to a conservative pastor about his call for McCain to die in office so that Sarah Palin might become president

[L]ike you, I’d rather see her than John McCain sitting in the Oval Office. Your recent blog post on that topic was very interesting. I think it’s probably the first time since 1860 that a Christian leader has publicly asked God to smite a Republican President (clearly, you want it to happen only if he is elected):

But, just a moment ago, as I went back to the post to get a link, I noticed that you changed number three to say:

3. Pray for John McCain’s salvation and pray specific imprecatory prayers if he fails to pro-actively defend the sanctity of human life.

It was a mistake to make that change. Think about your audience. They aren’t the most imaginative bunch, and they’re pretty much opposed to book learnin’ in any form that doesn’t include the Bible–I mean for heaven’s sake, they believe God flooded the earth because demonic giants were after our white women and that Noah was too lazy to build an ark large enough to save the dinosaurs. Do you really think they’re capable of understanding that “specific imprecatory prayer” means “ask God to smite McCain’s sorry ass?” I don’t think so.I understand why you might have had second thoughts about calling for McCain’s death. It makes you appear a bit crazy to just about everyone but the Palins and their fellow dominionists. But I think there’s a way to get that message out to your target audience without anyone else catching on. All you need to do is “type in fingers” using God’s love language. That way, only the righteous will understand it.

Here’s how I’d write it:

3. Pray for John McCain’s salvation and boogaboogula nawdami gabba gabba hey! (Google The Forerunner’s articles on Imprecatory Prayer if you think this is harsh).

Very sound advice, I’m sure.

I hope nobody tells old Maverick about this. He’s been known to get a little bit hot under the collar when beeyotches get out of line. Future President Palin might just find herself on the receiving end of some of that uncontrolled McCainiac whoop ass, just for being the subject of such speculation. He’s been known to come a bit unhinged a time or two.

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Self Correcting Conservatives

by digby

You have all read the latest polls by now, I’m sure, and know that the race is currently anywhere from tied to McCain being ten points ahead. This is a somewhat surprising development to those of us who had thought this race couldn’t be lost because of the political fundamentals: a terribly unpopular Republican president, a Republican party in disgrace, a failing economy, a useless expensive war and an elderly, warmongering candidate from a bygone era. It was hard for me to see how even the Democrats could lose an election under those circumstances, even if they ran an inanimate object with a piece of algae as a running mate. But the built in advantage has disappeared. The race is back at parity, and it’s a letdown, particularly after all the months of excited talk about expanding the map, landslide and realignment etc. The race can certainly still be won, but the playing field is different than most observers expected.

For a time it was considered an act of heresy to even suggest that running a campaign purely on the basis of when you “came to Obama” might not hold up over the long haul. (And that’s not to say that running the campaign on “the sisterhood of the traveling pantsuit” would have been any more successful — the same problems existed for Clinton.) Democrats decided to take their shoe-in and turn it into a nail biter because they wanted a huge symbolic victory for either African Americans or women. I took pride in that — it’s a bold gamble. But I’ve never thought there wasn’t a cost.

And I always felt that Democrats should have run hard against conservatism itself so that a majority of voters would reject the GOP brand no matter who was wearing it. Instead we saw airy campaigns rife with symbols of liberal progress and the promise of some new post partisan agreement that only one side had signed on to. Indeed, they have all spent way too much time for the last year extolling the other side, genuflecting to their icons and pretending that there was some national consensus that everyone wanted Democrats to stop their vicious partisanship — when they hadn’t lifted a finger. It’s been maddening to watch.

So here we are. It doesn’t mean Obama will lose, of course. He probably won’t. Their side is even fundamentally weaker now than when the campaign began. But since both sides decided to run on personality and symbols we now have an empty campaign. McCain had no choice because his party is as decrepit as he is and their ideas are even more dessicated. But Democrats didn’t have to help them hide it. If they had worked a little bit harder at discrediting conservatism itself, people wouldn’t have felt so comfortable coming back to it, which is what Nate Silver thinks may have happened.

There’s much about the Obama campaign that I admire. But I have always believed it was a mistake to box themselves into a post-partisan trap. They probably had to be careful about the tone, so that people would feel “comfortable” with a young black presidential candidate, but I think they overcompensated. This was a partisan year and it should have been a partisan rout. But somebody had to make that case.

It’s probably too late to make the message of conservative failure stick at this point. It is now a 60 day dogfight fight between a gifted, young African American reformer and a grizzled old veteran … reformer. The Republicans are “coming home” even in the face of their massive, nearly unprecedented disaster at governance over the past eight years because there’s no price to pay as far as anyone’s concerned — the Republican brand is “self-correcting.”

It’s a tie today (or very close) and if the Obama campaign focuses on the economy, does well in the debates and gets out the vote as well as the GOP’s re-invigorated churches do, they should win. But the days of arguing that this is a map changer or that “The Obama Movement” represents a seismic political shift are over. It’s a 50/50 fight, just like it was in 2004. Half of the country still doesn’t know that George W. Bush’s failed governance wasn’t a bug but a feature. And you certainly can’t blame them for not telling anybody.

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To Those Who Think The US Didn’t Encourage Georgia To Attack South Ossetia

by tristero

As discussed earlier, the blundering “diplomacy” of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney is all over the Georgian war. Here’s a little more evidence, from the oh so liberal Financial Times. By the way, do I need to remind anyone that one of McCain’s top foreign policy adviser is an ex- lobbyist for Georgia and that McCain started to make inroads into Obama’s lead when he began to act all presidential back when the war began and the press spun this as exclusively Russian aggression?*

The US military provided combat training to 80 Georgian special forces commandos only months prior to Georgia’s army assault in South Ossetia in August.

The revelation, based on recruitment documents and interviews with US military trainers obtained by the Financial Times, could add fuel to accusations by Vlad­imir Putin, Russian prime minister, last month that the US had “orchestrated” the war in the Georgian enclave.

The training was provided by senior US soldiers and two military contractors. There is no evidence that the contractors or the Pentagon, which hired them, knew that the commandos they were training were likely be used in the assault on South Ossetia.

A US army spokesman said the goal of the programme was to train the commandos for duty in Afghanistan as part of Nato-led International Security Assist ance Force. The programme, however, highlights the often unintended consequences of US “train and equip” programmes in foreign countries.

The contractors – MPRI and American Systems, both based in Virginia – recruited a 15-man team of former special forces soldiers to train the Georgians at the Vashlijvari special forces base on the outskirts of Tbilisi, part of a programme run by the US defence department…

US training of the Georgian army is a big flashpoint between Washington and Moscow. Mr Putin said on CNN on August 29: “It is not just that the American side could not restrain the Georgian leadership from this criminal act [of intervening in South Ossetia]. The American side in effect armed and trained the Georgian army.”

The first phase of the special forces training was held between January and April this year, concentrating on “basic special forces skills” said an American Systems employee interviewed by phone from the US army’s Fort Bragg.

The US military official familiar with the programme said the Pentagon hired the military contracting firms to help supplement its own trainers because of a lack of manpower.

The second 70-day phase was set to begin on August 11, a few days after war broke out in South Ossetia. The trainers arrived on August 3, four days before the conflict flared on August 7. “They would have only seen the inside of a hotel room,” quipped one former contractor. Neither MPRI nor American Systems would speak at length to the FT about the programme..

One US military official familiar with the programme said it emerged from a Georgian offer to the US in December 2006 to send commandos to Afghanistan to work alongside American special operations forces.

According to this person, the US told Georgia that the offer should be made through Nato, which welcomed the offer but informed Georgia that its forces would need additional training to meet the military alliance’s standards.

While the programme is not classified, there is a lack of transparency surrounding it, though US military officials said the lack of publicity was not part of an effort to keep the programme secret. Other US military training programmes in Georgia have their own websites and photo galleries…

Conflict in the Caucasus

The conflict between Russia and Georgia began on the night of August 7, when Georgian forces, including commando units, tanks and artillery, assaulted the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali.

Russia says that at least 133 civilians died in the attack, as well as 59 of its own peacekeepers, according to figures released this week.

In response Russia launched a mass invasion and aerial bombardment of Georgia, in which 215 Georgians have died, including 146 soldiers and 69 civilians.

*I am well aware that the situation is highly complex and that the Russians were lined up, waiting for, and even goading, the Georgians to attack. I am also well aware that the Russians, more likely than not, acted as atrociously as Americans did at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram air base at the secret CIA prisons.

That said, it seems to me quite clear that the Georgians, encouraged by the Americans, fell into a Russian trap. This war stinks of Cheney.