Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Legitimate Beef

by digby

Matt Stoller has an excellent op-ed on The Politico site about the FOX debate issue that I think is worth reading:

We argued that Fox News is not a news channel, but a propaganda outlet that regularly distorts, spins, and falsifies information. Second, Fox News is heavily influenced or even controlled by the Republican Party itself. As such, we believe that Fox News on the whole functions as a surrogate operation for the GOP. Treating Fox as a legitimate news channel extends the Republican Party’s ability to swift-boat and discredit our candidates. In other words, Fox News is a direct pipeline of misinformation from the GOP leadership into the traditional press.

Thankfully, Fox News immediately proved our point with a press release after the debate cancellation that made the following remarkable claim: “News organizations will want to think twice before getting involved in the Nevada Democratic caucus which appears to be controlled by radical, fringe, out-of-state interest groups, not the Nevada Democratic Party.”

That certainly sounds like an unbiased news network, doesn’t it?

It is incomprehensible to me that we even have to make the argument that FOX News is a white house propaganda outfit and Republican Party adjunct. It is obvious to anyone with eyes and ears. You can argue that that’s ok, that they have a right to have a “point of view” and that conservatives feel they don’t get a fair shake in the media so they need an outlet that speaks to their concerns. Fine. But please, please don’t try to sell me this nonsense that they aren’t biased or that they are a legitimate news organization. It’s ridiculous on its face.

Eric Boehlert has another good piece on this today. Here’s a little taste:

Fox News is still fighting the last war. Busy arguing that it truly is fair and balanced, Fox News execs haven’t noticed that, thanks to the Nevada showdown, the real question now on the table is not about Fox News’ fairness. It’s about whether or not Fox News is a legitimate news organization. That’s precisely where Ailes does not want this media branding debate to go. And that’s why the Fox News team has exerted so much energy in recent years trying to bully any doubters. It’s the reason a Fox News flack swung back wildly in October 2003, when a former producer there, Charlie Reina, wrote publicly about the daily internal Fox News memo that instructs staffers how to spin new stories, often in a partisan manner. Rather than address Reina’s factual points, in what must have been a corporate media first, Fox News VP-news operations Sharri Berg issued a public statement in which she quoted an anonymous Fox News employee who belittled Reina as being a nobody and worse, he “NEVER had a job in the newsroom,” which was supposed to raise doubts about Reina’s credibility. (Reina tells me Berg had to resort to using an anonymous quote because Berg herself knew the statement about Reina never working in the newsroom was false.) It’s why when Ben Smith, blogging for the New York Daily News, observed that Fox News projects an “unmissable, insistent slant,” Fox News responded with an oddly personal, schoolyard-quality taunt: “Ben has struggled to regain relevance since leaving the New York Observer, which is why you need a blood hound to find his column. We’re happy he’s making more than the $29,000 he made at the Observer … then again, you get what you pay for.”

As they say, read on, if only for an amazing rundown of nasty, puerile FOX tantrums whenever anyone criticizes them. I think Ann Coulter must be advising them on rhetoric.

Unfortunately there are some establishment political and media figures who are also up in arms about this because the crazy fringe has infiltrated their friendly little club and insisted that Democratic primary candidates not play ball with a Republican propaganda arm. Well, boo hoo. I have rarely heard the kind of derisive, contemptuous language used by the mainstream media (or certainly the Republicans) to describe the base of the GOP that I hear commonly used to describe people like me. I don’t make a huge deal out of that, if they feel they need to disparage me in order to be accepted by Americans who don’t support them then I guess there’s not much I can do about it.

And there’s probably not much we can do if the media and party establishment wants to kiss Rupert Murdoch’s butt and brownnose Drudge on an everyday basis. It makes no sense to me for either commercial or political reasons, but I guess it’s part of their social network and they are such conformists they can’t even look out for their own interests.

But I am damned if I’m going to fail to exercize legitimate grassroots political power in the nomination process of my party, which is what happened in this case. It’s called “democracy” and if certain political poohbah’s and media mavens don’t like it, that’s just tough. Candidates vying for the nomination of the Democratic Party have to respond to the voters. Contrary to Kondracke and O’Reilly’s hysterical rantings, that’s as far from Stalinsim and Nazism as you can get.

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Seeding The Future

by digby

I have speculated that Rove was pursuing a phony voter fraud strategy for 2006 and was thwarted by his boy’s catastrophic governance and some US Attorneys who refused to file charges.

Here’s what one the ousted US Attorney from Washington has to say on that:

Former U.S. Attorney John McKay said Monday night he was “stunned” to hear President Bush told Attorney General Alberto Gonzales last October that Bush had received complaints about U.S. attorneys who were not energetically investigating voter-fraud cases.

McKay doesn’t know if Republican unhappiness over his handling of the 2004 election cost him his job as U.S. Attorney for Western Washington, but the new revelations contained in a Washington Post story are sure to reignite questions about McKay’s dismissal and whether it was connected to Washington state’s hotly contested governor’s race.

“Had anyone at the Justice Department or the White House ordered me to pursue any matter criminally in the 2004 governor’s election, I would have resigned,” McKay said. “There was no evidence, and I am not going to drag innocent people in front of a grand jury.”

For those who didn’t follow the whole saga in Washington state (like me) this article gives a full rundown of what happened and the Republicans’ insistence that the election was stolen by the Democrats despite no proof that any such thing happened. The Justice Department never “ordered” the US Attorney to do anything. Rove isn’t that bold. He had local surrogates do it, just as he did in New Mexico. And when Mckay refused to play ball he was first denied a federal judgeship and then fired.

As Josh Marshall noted last night, the GOP cries of voter fraud go back a long way. It’s an extension of their old habits of disenfranchising blacks in the south and latinos in the southwest (as Joe Conason outlines here.)

But since the 2000 election the Democrats have been the ones complaining about voter irregularities and I think that Rove recognized that he could deftly twist the public awareness we created and turn it back on us. His problem was that the Democrats won the election by too wide a margin in 2006 for them to cry fraud in any systematic way — and some US Attorneys refused to play ball.

If Rove had been successful, however, I suspect that he could have pulled off something even more subversive for 2008. He could have had in place pliant US Attorneys who are willing to keep open all of these cases of “voter fraud” and pursue new ones from the 2008 election. If a Republican wins the presidency, no harm no foul, they just keep pressing, suppressing the vote and pushing the new meme about Democrats stealing elections. If a Dem wins, they exert political pressure to keep these US Attorneys in place for reasons of “justice department integrity” and a Democratic president finds him or herself battling their own Justice Department — which has been salted with Karl Rove’s partisan clones who cannot be fired.

The problem for Karl was that a handful of US Attorneys with integrity wouldn’t be pressured with the usual inducements and so they had to be forced out. The problem for Democrats, however, is that if they don’t handle this carefully, the scenario I outlined above could happen anyway. You can bet that nothing any Republican says now will stop them from screeching like rabid howler monkeys if a Democratic president tries to replace even one Bushh appointed US Attorney in 2009.

Remember, Republicans have retired the concept of hypocrisy. Consistency and intellectual integrity are for losers.

For instance, Marshall notes today:

I’m not sure if it’s more a matter of entertainment or just grim confirmation, but it is worth cataloging all the Republicans who are now willing to come forward and spin out arguments about how federal prosecutors always pursue political investigations and are little more than cat’s paws for the party apparatus of the president who appointed them. Rule of law. Rule of law. Rule of law. I’ve said it a number of times in recent months: the rule of law and creeping authoritarianism has to be at the center of any sensible politics today. The degradation is so great and the bar has fallen so low.

No kidding. And keep in mind that these same people were saying just last week that the administration should not have allowed a special prosecutor to handle the Libby matter and should have left it to career prosecutors who can be trusted because they are sworn to uphold the law over all political concerns.

It’s surprising they don’t get whiplash.

Update: Marshall caught Pat Buchanan saying that there was nothing wrong with the president passing along his concerns about “crimes” being committed to the AG. No word on whether there’s any problem with the president asking his AG to pursue completely bogus claims of voter fraud in order to maintain his party’s political power, do favors for cronies and punish his enemies.

But then Buchanan was one of Nixon’s favorite boys, isn’t he? Using the Justice Department to punish your political enemies and cover up your own crimes is SOP to these guys.

And they wonder why we balked when it was revealed that they were doing surveillance on American citizens without any oversight…

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Smokin’ The Good Stuff

by digby

Yesterday on The Situation Room, JC Watts insisted that the Democrats are just as unhappy with their candidates as Republicans are:

WATTS: Wolf, this is typical primary politics, I think on the Republican and Democrat side.

I can say the same thing for a Democratic candidate. But it doesn’t mean that the Democrats are not going to be united when they get a candidate.

(CROSSTALK)

WATTS: And I — and I think the Republicans are going to be the same way. We’re…

CARVILLE: But, J.C., I’m saying something different.

WATTS: We’re going to…

CARVILLE: Democrats are satisfied, by and — by and large, are satisfied with their choices. Republicans are dissatisfied with their choices.

WATTS: Well, I — I think you probably would find the same dissatisfaction on both sides, because, you know, you’re always going to find about 20, 25 percent of the electorate on either side is going to be unhappy, regardless of who you have in the race.

I guess he was tippling that morning with Andrea Mitchell, because he was just as wrong as she was when she insisted later that a majority of people want Scooter Libby pardoned. When in doubt, repeat what you overheard in the powder room at Fred Hiatt’s house, I guess.

It is really incomprehensible to these people that Republicans are unpopular or are at each other’s throats. They are still the “grown-ups” as far as DC is concerned, while the grubby American public are all a bunch of wild-eyed revolutionaries who just don’t get it.

And speaking of living in an alternate universe, check out what Carville said in the same segment:

CARVILLE: And — and I also think that there’s a good chance that the Republican nominee is not even in the race yet.

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: So, give me some names.

CARVILLE: Jeb Bush. He’s — he’s the only person I know who could unify the Republican Party.

Carville really needs to stop listening his wife (or sharing the bottle with Watts and Mitchell.) She is practically the last fan of the Bush family in the entire country, having been their glorified servant for most of the last two decades. Even Republicans (other than Mary Matalin and Fred Barnes) would rather stick kabab skewers in their eyes than have another Bush for president. These people are more out of touch than I realized.

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Hats Off In Swamp

by digby

Jay Carney at TIME takes his hat off to Josh Marshall and the blogosphere for “having been right in their suspicions about this story [the US Attorney purge] from the beginning,” while he was rudely dismissing their claims with this:

Of course! It all makes perfect conspiratorial sense!

Except for one thing: in this case some liberals are seeing broad partisan conspiracies where none likely exist.

It’s good of Carney to admit his mistake. It’s far more than most MSM writers ever do when dealing with the blogosphere.

But this episode perfectly illustrates the problem with the mainstream media’s coverage during the last six years. The Bush administration has been the most secretive and ruthlessly partisan in recent memory and yet the Washington bureau chief for TIME reflexively assumed a benign explanation for what was obviously at least a questionable process.

Here’s Carney:

When this story first surfaced, I thought the Bush White House and Justice Department were guilty of poorly executed acts of crass political patronage. I called some Democrats on the Hill; they were “concerned”, but this was not a priority.

One of the silliest conventions of modern journalism is that the press can’t tell a story if “the other side” isn’t screaming about it. Republicans are always screaming (and often are the ones feeding the scandal to the press in the first place) so it’s very easy to find that hook. Democrats don’t have the institutional infrastructure to successfully manufacture scandals and are often slow off the mark in seeing real ones, so the press doesn’t feel they have any reason to pursue them. (And I guess stories about crass political patronage, even in the justice department, just aren’t considered news anymore. That’s a sad comment all by itself.)

In the case of the US Attorney purge, it was left to the victim to be brave enough to come forward before the mainstream press saw a story — and likely it was mostly because the man who did it was an evangelical Christian and a Republican that made them take notice.

The problem here is that many in the press seem to see their role as some sort of referee and conduit for the two parties instead of independent fact finders and purveyors of truth.

Here’s an echo of that from Richard Wolff a couple of weeks ago:

in my humble view, I think the press here does a fantastic job of adhering to journalistic standards in covering politics in general. And the, um, the interesting thing in, in looking at the political coverage as people try to guess what we do is, is that they want us to play a role that really isn’t our role.

Our- our role is to ask questions and get information. But it- the press briefing isn’t Prime Minister’s question time. It’s not a chance for the opposition to take on the government and grill them to a point where they hand- throw their hands up and surrender. Now, obviously there’s a contentious spirit there- we’re trying to get information, but, it’s not a political exercise, it’s a journalistic exercise, and I think often the blogs are looking for us to be political advocates, more than journalistic ones.

I like Wolff and Carney generally and they aren’t the worst offenders by far. But this attitude is pervasive in Washington circles and it’s causing some serious problems. (Partisan impeachments against the will of the people. Illegal wars. Out of control executive branch.) It comes at least partially from the fact that journalists think that by simply telling the public what the politicians are saying (much of it on double super-secret backround) they are doing their jobs. They allow both sides to play out their political games in the mainstream media and then provide running color commentary on who’s “winning.” In their minds, if the Democrats aren’t as good at stoking scandals or creating an atmosphere of political terrorism, then it’s not their job to uncover what the Republicans are doing. Democrats need to “play better” if they want to “win.” (You often see a kind of admiration for the bold machismo of the Republican character assassins in the press — they are winners.)

The fact that the Republicans are better at dirty politics and hand-feeding the kind of scandals to the press that they like should not be what controls the coverage of politics. A nose for news should be and it’s clear that some combination of intimidation, laziness, commercial concerns, habit and, yes, political and cultural bias (see the disparate degrees of MSM revulsion shown toward the Democratic base and the GOP base when they exert their influence on their party)have tilted this ridiculous “playing field” waaay to the right.

And I hereby fearlessly predict that what you will see if the Democrats gain control of the government in 2008 will be a revival of 90’s style “crusading” journalism in which the press will take every ginned up scandal the Republicans come up with and run with them like they are the reincarnation of Edward R. Murrow, thus proving in their own minds that they aren’t servants of power after all. And they will say it’s what we wanted during the Bush years and now we are complaining which proves we are partisan and they aren’t.

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Stealin’ It

by digby

Before the election last November I wrote a post about what I thought Karl Rove might have up his sleeve. I wrote:

We have created an ear worm that the Republicans are going to appropriate — and they will use it much more aggressively and effectively than our side did. They are already gearing up for it. As I mentioned a month or so ago, Karl Rove was at the Republican Lawyers Association talking about how the Democrats are stealing elections:

QUESTION: The question I have: The Democrats seem to want to make this year an election about integrity, and we know that their party rests on the base of election fraud. And we know that, in some states, some of our folks are pushing for election measures like voter ID.

But have you thought about using the bully pulpit of the White House to talk about election reform and an election integrity agenda that would put the Democrats back on the defensive?

ROVE: Yes, it’s an interesting idea. We’ve got a few more things to do before the political silly season gets going, really hot and heavy. But yes, this is a real problem. What is it — five wards in the city of Milwaukee have more voters than adults?

With all due respect to the City of Brotherly Love, Norcross Roanblank’s (ph) home turf, I do not believe that 100 percent of the living adults in this city of Philadelphia are registered, which is what election statistics would lead you to believe.

I mean, there are parts of Texas where we haven’t been able to pull that thing off.

(LAUGHTER)

And we’ve been after it for a great many years.

So I mean, this is a growing problem.

The spectacle in Washington state; the attempts, in the aftermath of the 2000 election to disqualify military voters in Florida, or to, in one instance, disqualify every absentee voter in Seminole county — I mean, these are pretty extraordinary measures that should give us all pause.

The efforts in St. Louis to keep the polls opened — open in selected precincts — I mean, I would love to have that happen as long, as I could pick the precincts.

This is a real problem. And it is not going away.

I mean, Bernalillo County, New Mexico will have a problem after the next election, just like it has had after the last two elections.

I mean, I remember election night, 2000, when they said, oops, we just made a little mistake; we failed to count 55,000 ballots in Bernalillo; we’ll be back to you tomorrow.

(LAUGHTER)

That is a problem. And I don’t care whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, a vegetarian or a beef-eater, this is an issue that ought to concern you because, at the heart of it, our democracy depends upon the integrity of the ballot place. And if you cannot…

(APPLAUSE)

I have to admit, too — look, I’m not a lawyer. So all I’ve got to rely on is common sense. But what is the matter? I go to the grocery store and I want to cash a check to pay for my groceries, I’ve got to show a little bit of ID.

Why should it not be reasonable and responsible to say that when people show up at the voting place, they ought to be able to prove who they are by showing some form of ID?

We can make arrangements for those who don’t have driver’s licenses. We can have provisional ballots, so that if there is a question that arises, we have a way to check that ballot. But it is fundamentally fair and appropriate to say, if you’re going to show up and claim to be somebody, you better be able to prove it, when it comes to the most sacred thing we have been a democracy, which is our right of expression at the ballot.

And if not, let’s just not kid ourselves, that elections will not be about the true expression of the people in electing their government, it will be a question of who can stuff it the best and most. And that is not healthy.

QUESTION: I’ve been reading some articles about different states, notably in the west, going to mail-in ballots and maybe even toying with the idea of online ballots. Are you concerned about this, in the sense of a mass potential, obviously, for voter fraud that this might have in the West?

ROVE: Yes. And I’m really worried about online voting, because we do not know all the ways that one can jimmy the system. All we know is that there are many ways to jimmy the system.

I’m also concerned about the increasing problems with mail-in ballots. Having last night cast my mail-in ballot for the April 11 run-off in Texas, in which there was one race left in Kerr County to settle — but I am worried about it because the mail-in ballots, particularly in the Northwest, strike me as problematic.

I remember in 2000, that we had reports of people — you know, the practice in Oregon is everybody gets their ballot mailed to them and then you fill it out.

And one of the practices is that people will go to political rallies and turn in their ballots. And we received reports in the 2000 election — which, remember we lost Oregon by 5000 votes — we got reports of people showing up at Republican rallies and passing around the holder to get your ballot, and then people not being able to recognize who those people were and not certain that all those ballots got turned in.

On Election Day, I remember, in the city of Portland, Multnomah County — I’m going to mispronounce the name — but there were four of voting places in the city, for those of you who don’t get the ballots, well, we had to put out 100 lawyers that day in Portland, because we had people showing up with library cards, voting at multiple places.

I mean, why was it that those young people showed up at all four places, showing their library card from one library in the Portland area? I mean, there’s a problem with this.

And I know we need to make arrangements for those people who don’t live in the community in which they are registered to vote or for people who are going to be away for Election Day or who are ill or for whom it’s a real difficulty to get to the polls. But we need to have procedures in place that allow us to monitor it.

And in the city of Portland, we could not monitor. If somebody showed up at one of those four voting locations, we couldn’t monitor whether they had already cast their mail-in ballot or not. And we lost the state by 5,000 votes.

I mean, come on. What kind of confidence can you have in that system? So yes, we’ve got to do more about it.

My speculation about Rove’s plans was greeted with some rather intense skepticism and in fact I was proven wrong. Rove didn’t do a thing about voter fraud.

But that’s not to say he wasn’t trying. With the NY Times reporting tonight that Bush was personally involved in the New Mexico matter by complaining to Gonzales about Iglesias’ refusal to pursue voter fraud charges, Josh Marshall writes:

There’s a sub-issue emerging in the canned US Attorneys scandal: the apparently central role of Republican claims of voter fraud and prosecutors unwillingness to bring indictments emerging from such alleged wrongdoing. Very longtime readers of this site will remember that this used to be something of a hobby horse of mine. And it’s not surprising that it is now emerging as a key part of this story. The very short version of this story is that Republicans habitually make claims about voter fraud. But the charges are almost invariably bogus. And in most if not every case the claims are little more than stalking horses for voter suppression efforts. That may sound like a blanket charge. But I’ve reported on and written about this issue at great length. And there’s simply no denying the truth of it. So this becomes a critical backdrop to understanding what happened in some of these cases. Why didn’t the prosecutors pursue indictments when GOP operatives started yakking about voter fraud? Almost certainly because there just wasn’t any evidence for it.

And when they refused to pursue bogus charges of voter fraud and Democratic corruption, they were bounced.

I don’t know if Rove will ever be caught red handed — he’s masterful at dirty tricks. (He taught the art of it when he was in his 20’s.) But when you see stuff like this anywhere near his vicinity you know he’s up to his armpits in it.

Stay tuned. This is shaping up to be a very serious scandal.

Check out the Wapo tonight, too.
The Attorney General definitely lied to congress, as did two of his closest aides.

Dorky And Proud

by digby

This is probably superfluous since Atrios already mentioned it, but I think it’s such a fun idea that I want to flog it too:

Ever since Richard Nixon appeared on Laugh In, Bill Clinton played the sax on Arsenio Hall, and John Kerry rode onto the set of the Tonight Show on a Harley, late night television has become a staple of Presidential politics. Join us behind-the-scenes leading up to the big event: Senator Dodd on the Daily Show tonight!

Yes, as Atrios said, we are political dorks. But we also have Stewart and Colbert and they are definitely not dorks, so I suppose it somehow evens out.

Anyway, thanks to Dodd (and his online team) for putting this together for all of us pathetic P.D’s who enjoy such things.

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Big Henry

by digby

Sometimes I fail to appreciate what a privilege it is to have Henry Waxman as my congressman.

From Magnifico over at Kos:

Today, as Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Waxman sent this letter to Rice (pdf)

Since 2003, I have written 16 letters to you, either in your capacity as National Security Advisor or Secretary of State. According to Committee records, you have satisfactorily responded to only five of those 16 letters. Those five were co-signed by Republicans. Under the Bush Administration, several agencies followed a policy of not responding to minority party requests. Although I do not agree with this policy, I presume that you were also following it when you decided not to respond to my requests for information. I am now renewing my requests as the chairman of the chief oversight committee in the U.S. House of Representatives.

On March 17, 2003, two days before the start of Bush’s Iraq war, Waxman wrote:

In the last ten days … it has become incontrovertibly clear that a key piece of evidence you and other Administration officials have cited regarding Iraq’s efforts to obtain nuclear weapons is a hoax. What’s more, the Central Intelligence Agency questioned the veracity of the evidence at the same time you and other Administration officials were citing it in public statements. This is a breach of the highest order, and the American people are entitled to know how it happened.

To which, he adds: “To this day, however, I have not received an adequate explanation to my question. The President did not respond to my letter, nor did you respond to multiple letters I sent you about this matter.”[…]

It was subsequently revealed, however, that the CIA had sent a memo directly to you and your deputy at the time, Stephen Hadley, raising doubts about the Niger claim months before the President’s State of the Union address. According to Mr. Hadley, the CIA sent a memo directly to the White House Situation Room addressed to you and him on October 6, 2002, that described “weakness in the evidence” and that stated “the CIA had been telling Congress that the Africa story was one of two issues where we differed with the British intelligence.” Mr. Hadley also reported that the CIA sent a second memo to him a day earlier, and that George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, personally telephoned him to ask that the reference be removed from a speech the President delivered in October 2002.

As a result of your failure to respond, the Committee still does not know what you knew about the fabricated Niger claim and when you knew it. We also do not know how the fabricated claim made it into the President’s State of the Union address. We continue to learn in a piecemeal fashion about other explicit warnings received by White House officials about this bogus claim. According to one recent press account, for example, CIA briefer Craig R. Schmall wrote a memo to Eric Edelman, Vice President Cheney’s national security advisor, warning that the “CIA on several occasions has cautioned … that available information on this issue was fragmentary and unconfirmed.” Yet we still do not know who at the White House kept resuscitating this claim after intelligence officials questioned its veracity. I respectfully request a complete reply to my questions and document requests relating to the fabricated Niger claim by March 23, 2007.

You all see where this is going don’t you? Perhaps Mr Fitzgerald was bound to stick to charges which he could prove in a court of law and had no mandate to expose the administration’s lies and distortions in the run-up to the war. But the Democrats are under no such restraints. Indeed, they have that mandate, conferred by the people in November of 2006.

The Republicans want to rend their garments over poor little Scooter having been found guilty of lying even though there was “no underlying crime.” Well, it depends on what the definition of crime is, doesn’t it? Perhaps this White House didn’t break the law when it “stovepiped” the intelligence to take this country into war, but damned well committed a political crime and it should be held to account for thet.

It will all come out — every clumsy, stupid lie they told, and they’ll pretend that up is down and black is white and their true believers will believe it. But the nation as a whole seems to be getting a little bit tired of feeling disoriented by the Republicans’ insistence that they should ignore what their eyes and ears are telling them. This clarifying process is long overdue.

Go Henry. You make me proud to be a citizen of Santa Monica.

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Becoming Irrelevant

by digby

This is interesting. It looks like some of the evangelicals are not going to be led around by Republican operatives like James Dobson and Gary Bauer anymore, no matter how much they try to throw their weight around.

Rebuffing Christian radio commentator James C. Dobson, the board of directors of the National Association of Evangelicals reaffirmed its position that environmental protection, which it calls “creation care,” is an important moral issue.

Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, and two dozen other conservative Christian leaders, including Gary L. Bauer, Tony Perkins and Paul M. Weyrich, sent the board a letter this month denouncing the association’s vice president, the Rev. Richard Cizik, for urging attention to global warming.

The letter argued that evangelicals are divided on whether climate change is a real problem, and it said that “Cizik and others are using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time,” such as abortion and same-sex marriage.

If Cizik “cannot be trusted to articulate the views of American evangelicals on environmental issues, then we respectfully suggest that he be encouraged to resign his position with the NAE,” the letter concluded.

The Rev. Leith Anderson, the association’s president, said yesterday that the board did not respond to the letter during a two-day meeting that ended Friday in Minneapolis. But, he said, the board reaffirmed a 2004 position paper, “For the Health of the Nations,” that outlined seven areas of civic responsibility for evangelicals, including creation care along with religious freedom, nurturing the family, sanctity of life, compassion for the poor, human rights and restraining violence.

On Friday, the association’s board approved a 12-page statement on terrorism and torture. Anderson said that Cizik gave a report to the board on his work in Washington as vice president for governmental affairs and that there was no effort to reprimand him. “I think there was a lot of support from me, from the executive committee and from the board for Rich Cizik,” Anderson said.

Well, well, well. Now, I’m not sure what is meant exactly by “religious freedom, nurturing the family, sanctity of life, compassion for the poor, human rights and restraining violence” (the devil is in the details, as it were) but there is nothing in those words that I inherently disagree with. I assume that we do not see eye to eye on “sanctity of life” although if they are coming around on capital punishment, then we agree at least on half of that equation.

Ed Kilgore comments on this rebuff:

…a paragraph from the letter that I find fascinating …:

Finally, Cizik’s disturbing views seem to be contributing to growing confusion about the very term, “evangelical.” As a recent USA Today article notes: “Evangelical was the label of choice of Christians with conservative views on politics, economics and biblical morality. Now the word may be losing its moorings, sliding towards the same linguistic demise that “fundamentalist” met decades ago because it has been misunderstood, misappropriated and maligned.

In other words, these Christian Right leaders are accusing Cizik of messing with their brand (or more specifically, with their claim to be able to deliver “evangelicals” to the GOP for its entire agenda). This is a rather audacious complaint, since the identification of the term “evangelical” with “conservative views on politics, economics and biblical morality” is of very recent vintage, and remains highly dubious.

I’m not so sure it has been highly dubious for some time. In fact, it seems to me that the right’s campaign to conflate evangelicalism with conservatism has been wildly successful. (They are really good at this — think what they’ve done to the word liberal.) But Kilgore’s point is correct. This new direction is challenging to the religious right leadership as Republican power brokers, which I believe is what Dobson et al really are.

If the evangelical movement decides to pursue its agenda as a special interest rather than as GOP soldiers, I predict they will find friends across the aisle on different issues. I would gladly support their social justice, human rights and environmental platform and I will fight them tooth and nail on a woman’s right to choose. That’s fair enough.

I will believe this when I see it, however. I believe that I have a right to be extremely skeptical of this group’s commitment to some of these issues. After all, I am a big believer and supporter of most of that agenda and yet I have been used as an example of Satan’s handiwork for decades now. I find it a little hard to believe that most of these people will ally themselves with godless liberals like me no matter what the cause. And ally with liberals they will have to do because there is no way in hell that they will get the Republicans to sign on to human rights, social justice and environmentalism. It’s unthinkable, not to mention economic heresy. The big money boys may put up with the social conservatives, but their only religion is profits and nothing will interfere with their worship.

In any case, it’s nice to see that the old poohbahs are feeling the squeeze. That’s something I think we can all agree is a very good thing.

Update: I heard CNN say that Giuliani is up 16 points now on McCain and that he is just as popular among social conservatives as other Republicans. This makes me wonder about the above. Giuliani holds the opposite views of these evangelicals on every single issue. He is an economic conservative, anti-family values, anti-environmentalist, pro-choice and pro-gay rights. On human rights and restraining violence, he is completely off the scale. There is literally nothing that the evangelicals in this article have in common with Giuliani — except, perhaps, his authoritarian leadership style, which is what I think controls most Republicans.

This should be interesting to watch sort itself out over the next year or so.

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Free To Think

by poputonian

Mithras reports on a special coming out announcement:

On Monday, March 12, the Secular Coalition for America will make history by announcing the name of the first openly nontheistic member of Congress.

Elected officials who do not hold a god-belief are a rarity and only a few nontheist politicians have been open about their beliefs. …

As put forward in law by the U.S. Constitution, “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” However, in practice politicians are compelled to expound on their religiosity, forcing nontheists to keep quiet about their beliefs or opt out of pursuing public office.

With next Monday’s historic announcement, the Secular Coalition for America hopes additional elected officials will self-identify as nontheists and establish that a god-belief is not a necessary prerequisite for public service.

Flashback to 1786, the year before the Constitutional Convention, and to the passage of a Virginia law and what Susan Jacoby describes as “the unequivocal guarantee of freedom of thought at the heart of the statute.”

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of Virginia that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or beliefs; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.

And though we will know that this Assembly, elected by the people for the purpose of legislation only, have no power to restrain the acts of succeeding Assemblies, constituted with powers equal to our own, and that therefore to declare this act irrevocable would be of no effect in law; yet we are free to declare, and do declare, that the rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind, and that if any act shall be hereafter passed to repeal the present, or to narrow its operation, such act will be infringement of natural right.

Jacoby continues in Freethinkers to describe the uniqueness of Virginia’s statute and why it alone was chosen as the model for the U.S. Constitution:

In America, where the great debate over the federal Constitution was just beginning, Virginia’s law was hailed by secularists as a model for the new national government and denounced by those who favored the semi-theocratic systems still prevailing in most states. As the Constitutional Convention opened in 1787, with George Washington as its president, legally entrenched privileges for Protestant Christianity were the rule rather than the exception in most states. The convention could have modeled the federal constitution after the Massachusetts constitution of 1780, which extended equal protection of the laws , and the right to hold office, only to Christians. And not all Christians: Catholics were only permitted to hold public office if they took a special oath renouncing papal authority “in any matter, civil, ecclesiastical or spiritual.” Even that restriction was not enough for the most committed descendants of the Puritans; sixty-three of Massachusetts towns registered official objections to the use of “Christians” rather than “Protestant,” bearing out a prediction by Adams that “a change in the solar system might be expected as soon as a change in the ecclesiastical system of Massachusetts.” State religious restrictions were grounded not only in old prejudices but in the relative political strength of various religious constituencies. The 1777 New York State constitution, for example, extended political equality to Jews — who, though few in number, had considerable economic influence in New York City — but not to Catholics (who were not allowed to hold public office until 1806). Maryland, the home state of Charles Carroll, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, guaranteed full civil rights to Protestants and Catholics but not to Jews, freethinkers, and deists. The possibility of equal rights for non-Christians had not even occurred to Carroll. In this old age, he wrote, “When I signed the Declaration of Independence, I had in view not only our independence of England, but the toleration of all sects professing the Christian religion, and communicating to them all equal rights.” In Delaware, officeholders were required to take an oath affirming belief in the Trinity, and in South Carolina, Protestantism was specifically recognized as the state-established religion.

But the framers of the Constitution chose Virginia, not the other states, with their crazy quilts of obeisance to a more restrictive religious past, as the model for the new nation. The Constitution is a secularist document because of what it says and what it does not say. The first of the explicit secularist provisions is article 6, section 3, which states that federal elective and appointed officials “shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” No religious test. This provision, much less familiar to the public today than the First Amendment, was especially meaningful and especially sweeping in view of the fact that the necessity of religious tests and religious oaths for officeholders had been taken for granted by nearly all the governments of the American states (not to mention those of the rest of the world) at the time the Constitution was written. The addition of the affirmation is significant, because it meant that the framers did not intend to compel officeholders to take a religious oath on the Bible. The intent could not have been clearer to those who wanted only religious men — specifically, Protestant believers — to hold office. As a North Carolina minister put it during his state’s debate on ratification of the Constitution, the abolition of religious tests for officeholders amounted to “an invitation for Jews and pagans of every kind to come among us.”

So how did the world react to the secular politics of Virginia and America? Jacoby continues:

The significance of Virginia’s religious freedom act was recognized immediately in Europe. News of the law was received with great enthusiasm — not by the governments of the Old World, with their entrenched state-established religions, but by individuals who wished to promote liberty of conscience in their own countries. The Virginia law, translated into French and Italian as soon as the text made it across the Atlantic in 1786, was disseminated throughout most of the courts of Europe, and, as Jefferson wrote to Madison, “has been the best evidence of the falsehood of those reports which stated us to be in anarchy.” Expressing his pride in Virginia’s leadership, Jefferson observed that “it is comfortable to see the standard of reason at length erected, after so many ages, during which the human mind has been held in vassalage by kings, priests, and nobles, and it is honorable for us, to have produced the first legislature who had the courage to declare, that the reason of man may be trusted with the formation of his own opinions.”

Amen to that.

Can Rover Come Over?

by digby

I hate to say I’m prescient, but … I’m prescient.

The White House acknowledged on Sunday that presidential adviser Karl Rove served as a conduit for complaints to the Justice Department about federal prosecutors who were later fired for what critics charge were partisan political reasons.

House investigators on Sunday declared their intention to question Rove about any role he may have played in the firings.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Rove had relayed complaints from Republican officials and others to the Justice Department and the White House counsel’s office. She said Rove, the chief White House political operative, specifically recalled passing along complaints about former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias and may have mentioned the grumblings about Iglesias to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Iglesias says he believes he lost his job as the top federal prosecutor in New Mexico after rebuffing Republican pressure to speed his investigation of a Democratic state official.

Perino said Rove might have mentioned the complaints about Iglesias “in passing” to Gonzales.

“He doesn’t exactly recall, but he may have had a casual conversation with the A.G. to say he had passed those complaints to Harriet Miers,” Perino said, relaying Rove’s hazy recollection.

Perino said such a conversation would be fairly routine at the White House.

“Lots of people at the White House gets lots of complaints about lots of different people on a multitude of subjects,” she said. “The procedure is to listen and take the appropriate action to notify the relevant agency.”

Right. And it’s perfectly normal for people to call up the political director of the White House to complain about Republican US Attorneys failing to prosecute Democrats and for the political director to casually chat back and forth with the Attorney general of the United States about it.

The minute I read that the Arkansas replacement was one of Rove’s little minions and that Iglesias had been pressured before the election to indict a Democrat, it was clear that this was Rove deal all around.

The Dems want to question Rove ao I suspect we are going to see some executive privilege claims start flying. Rove seems to have developed a bad case of SMS (Scooter Memory Syndrome) in which he can’t remember a damned thing whenever it becomes clear that he was playing politics in the lowest most obvious way possible. In his case, once the investigations start, the disease will render him braindead so he probably won’t be much use to anyone from this point forward.

And have I menioned in the last few hours that we are paying this asshat’s salary?
Can’t they at least get one of those rich swift boat creeps to pony up some wingnut welfare and leave the taxpayers out of it? I can’t see what possible purpose he serves as a government employee.

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