Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The Republican Party’s Biggest Problem

by digby

Here’s another dispatch from Bill Sher who’s blogging from CPAC. It may surprise you but it’s actually quite true:

Today through Saturday, when Republicans and conservatives gather in Washington for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, will they face up to the biggest obstacle preventing them from connecting with voters? Their “secular problem.”

Lots of ink has been spilled about how Democrats and liberals suffer from a “religion problem” — a perceived hostility towards Christianity and religion in general. But Pew Research Center exit poll data from the 2006 midterm elections shows the opposite.

Democrats crushed Republicans among secular voters, broadly defined as those who attend church seldom (favoring Democrats 60% to 38%) or never (67% to 30%). Republicans retained strong support among those who attend church more than weekly. But among those who only go weekly — the larger portion of the religious vote — the Republican lead shrunk from 15 points to 7.

In short, Republicans failed to be competitive among secular voters, while Democrats were at least competitive among regular churchgoers. And since the secular vote is roughly equal to the regular churchgoing vote, according to the last several national election exit polls, that means Republicans and their conservative base have a far bigger secular problem than their rivals have a religion problem.

How might the conservative activists conferring in Washington this week address their secular problem?

I can’t speak for all secular voters, only myself. But I would suggest it’s not an issue of language. Stripping all references of God and faith from conservative political rhetoric would only be dismissed as superficial and pandering. Sincerely conveying how faith shapes one’s views, in and of itself, does not turn off most secular voters.

One symbolic act that might be useful would be to have some conservative politicians come out of the closet and announce they are atheists or agnostics. If it was clear that conservatism fully embraced religious diversity, including those who do not worship God, that would allay concerns that conservatism is about installing a soft theocracy.

Now this is so jarringly outside conventional wisdom as to be laughable. But the numbers are correct. And people who follow religious trends in this country are worried about the fact that the fastest growing religious group in this country is the unchurched:

Since 1991, the adult population in the United States has grown by 15%. During that same period the number of adults who do not attend church has nearly doubled, rising from 39 million to 75 million – a 92% increase!

These startling statistics come from the most recent tracking study of religious behavior conducted by The Barna Group, a company that follows trends related to faith, culture and leadership in America. The latest study shows that the percentage of adults that is unchurched – defined as not having attended a Christian church service, other than for a holiday service, such as Christmas or Easter, or for special events such as a wedding or funeral, at any time in the past six months – has risen from 21% in 1991 to 34% today.

This is not to say that the unchurched have no religion or aren’t involved in religious activities, once again proving that seculars aren’t hostile to religion:

Neither is there a way, yet, to measure the impact of this increasingly restless spirit on society — in debates on cloning, prayer in schools, abortion or the death penalty, in votes for president of the nation or the local school board, in the community roles played by churches, synagogues, mosques and temples.

Look at two traditional venues of religious expression: charity and values education.

Giving USA, which tracks philanthropy, says about half of all charitable dollars go to religious purposes. Sylvia Ronsvalle of empty tomb inc., in Champaign, Ill., which studies church giving, worries that if “religion doesn’t teach the basic lessons of personal giving, where will people learn it?”

However, Carl Dudley of the Hartford (Conn.) Seminary’s Institute for Religion Research, which issued a study last year examining the nation’s 350,000 congregations, says unchurched America, for all its glorification of individuality and spiritual exploration, still puts mighty volunteer time and financial muscle into programs to help communities. Programs such as literacy training, scouting or AIDS walks “attract a lot of people who act out their faith even if they don’t confess it.”

“A huge number of people see volunteering for a soup kitchen or tutoring children as a religious activity,” Dudley says. “This is the kind of altruism nurtured by the church but not exclusive to it.”

The Republicans may want to rethink their commitment to the social conservative religious right for other reasons as well. It is limiting their ability to reach out to voters beyond their base in the south and midwest:

Attendance levels are still higher in the “Bible belt” areas – the South and Midwest – than in the Northeast and West. 54% of those in the Midwest and 51% of those in the South and attend church in a typical week, compared to 41% of those in the Northeast and 39% of those in the West. (2006)

Pastordan at Street Prophets had a great post this week discussing this very thing.

I know the Republicans won’t address this looming problem in their convention this week, mired as they are in the culture war battles that define their identity. But this is a real problem for them, like it or not, and they are going to hit a wall very soon. A large and growing group of secular religious and non-religious alike are not liking what they are seeing in the Republican Party.

I expect to see a bunch of articles on the Republican Party’s Secular Problem, very soon. Right after I return from my trip to the fifth dimension.

If you’d like to see the depth of problem the Republicans are facing, this handy map to which I’ve linked before can show you the religious make up of every state in the union.

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Phantom Centrism

by digby

We hear a lot these days about politicians who polarize the electorate or how the people in the country just want everyone to get along. The conventional wisdom is the the nation is desperate for a leader who can reach across party lines and rule in a bipartisan fashion. Like Joe Lieberman. Or John McCain. I wrote about this ad nauseum after the election as this CW was taking hold, in the hope that the Democrats were not taking it seriously..

It just ain’t true. The country is polarized because it’s polarized. We actually believe different things depending on how we identify ourselves politically. I know this comes as a shock to those who think that the entire country is a nation of swing voters waiting to be drawn in by our fabulous arguments, ads or beer drinking companions, but this study says differently:

The story of 2006 was that regular Americans were sick of partisan divisions in Washington. The vast and consensus-hungry middle asserted itself in November, the narrative went, finally ordering the parties and their childish politicians to stop fighting and to work together.

After the vote, bipartisanship was all the buzz, and moderation the wave of the future. But something happened on the way to the evening campfire and s’mores. House Republicans started complaining about Democrats riding roughshod into the majority, refusing to consider their amendments to legislation. President Bush announced that he wasn’t going to let the opposition of congressional Democrats stop him from sending 21,500 more U.S. troops to Iraq. Meanwhile, Democratic leaders trashed most of Bush’s domestic policy proposals as soon as they were announced in his State of the Union address.

One explanation for all this is that politicians are acting against the will of their compromise-loving constituents. Another is that Republicans and Democrats are simply being good representatives. We think the evidence supports the second interpretation.

The Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) surveyed more than 24,000 Americans who voted in 2006. The Internet-based survey compiled by researchers at 30 universities produced a sample that almost perfectly matched the national House election results: 54 percent of the respondents reported voting for a Democrat, while 46 percent said they voted for a Republican. The demographic characteristics of the voters surveyed also closely matched those in the 2006 national exit poll. If anything, the CCES respondents claimed they were more “independent” than those in the exit poll.

[…]

When we combined voters’ answers to the 14 issue questions to form a liberal-conservative scale (answers were divided into five equivalent categories based on overall liberalism vs. conservatism), 86 percent of Democratic voters were on the liberal side of the scale while 80 percent of Republican voters were on the conservative side. Only 10 percent of all voters were in the center. The visual representation of the nation’s voters isn’t a nicely shaped bell, with most voters in the moderate middle. It’s a sharp V.

The evidence from this survey isn’t surprising; nor are the findings new. For the past three decades, the major parties and the electorate have grown more divided — in what they think, where they live and how they vote. It may be comforting to believe our problems could be solved if only those vile politicians in Washington would learn to get along. The source of the country’s division, however, is nestled much closer to home.

The worship of moderate centrism is something of a fetish among Washington pundits who are said to represent “the left” like Cokie Roberts and David Broder, while an unabashed conservatism is evident in most right wing pundits like George Will and Charles Krauthamer. Among the Sunday Bobbleheads it is taken as an article of faith that the country is unhappy with Democrats who appear to be too partisan and equally unhappy Republicans who fail to adhere to their principles by not being partisan anough. I think we can all see what that adds up to.

Here’s an article from a FAIR by Peter Hart and Steve Rendall from a few months back that lays out the evidence:

While few commentators would disagree with the conventional wisdom that Republican success depends on the care and feeding of the GOP’s conservative base—GOP leaders would laugh at them if they did—pundits who make the same argument for the Democrats are virtually non-existent in national media. Instead, many of the most prominent political journalists in the country have made it their business to press the Democrats to move the party rightward.

Media advocates of centrism typically call on Democrats to reject their natural supporters, often denigrated as “special interests”: liberals, unions, civil rights and feminist groups, and environmental and consumer rights organizations. Meanwhile, corporate-friendly policies and conservative-leaning “moral values” are presented as the road to electoral success. Many political pundits say going centrist is not only the right thing—it’s the only way Democrats can win.

[…]

By April, Kerry had cinched the Democratic nomination, and George W. Bush looked vulnerable. The war was rapidly losing domestic support and a majority—53 percent—told a CNN/Gallup poll (3/28/04) they thought Bush had lied to the American people. That might have seemed to some like a good time for Democrats to accentuate the differences between themselves and their opponents—but not to Time’s Klein. In a column calling for bipartisan cooperation (4/4/04), Klein made a passionate case for Kerry to name Republican Sen. John McCain, who has one of the most conservative voting records in the Senate, as his vice presidential running mate.

Klein wasn’t the only one imagining a Democrat/Republican ticket. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (3/27/04) fantasized, “I want to wake up and read that John Kerry just asked John McCain to be his vice president.” Friedman explained that’s the only way to tackle the country’s problems, “with a bipartisan spirit and bipartisan team.”

[…]

But after the election, the storyline that Democrats lost because they were insufficiently “moral” was set in stone. In October 2005, the New York Times’ Bai claimed (10/2/05) that “all but the most obstinate liberals now realize that traditional values matter to American voters more than they thought. Gradually over the past couple of decades, the Democratic Party has ceded issues of faith and morality to the Republicans.”

Ron Brownstein (L. A. Times, 11/4/04) cited unnamed Democrats making this point immediately after the election. “To many Democratic analysts,” wrote Brownstein, the message of 2004 was that “the party will find it virtually impossible to reach a presidential or congressional majority without regaining at least some ground with socially conservative voters.” The only Democratic analyst quoted by name was the Democratic Leadership Council’s Al From, who affirmed, “We’ve got to close the cultural gap.”

None of this is news to those of us who have been following politics for the last 25 years from outside the narrow social confines of the DC establishment. This polarization is the result of the rise of the ideological thugs of the modern conservative movement. The deed was done a long time ago and after years of trying to appease, persuade and cajole, the Democrats in this country — at least the rank and file — finally realized the futility of such actions and are fighting back. Apparently the media find this distateful. Try to imagine how little I care.

Update: Speaking of rightwingnuts.

UpdateII: Oh fergawd’s sake. And after I was so nice to Joe Klein, here he goes again with his world class wankerosity. Sigh. Old Dog, old tricks, fleas.

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The Crazy Aunt In The Basement Speaks

by digby

… at the big CPAC convention:

“If our coalition withdrew before Iraqis could defend themselves, radical factions would battle for dominance. The violence would likely spread throughout the country and be very difficult to contain. Having tasted victory in Iraq, the (militants) would look for new missions. Many would head for Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban,” Cheney said.

He said others would head for capitals across the Middle East and work to undermine moderate governments. “Still others would find their targets and victims in other countries on other continents. Such chaos and mounting danger does not have to occur. It is, however, the enemy’s objective,” Cheney said.

“In these circumstances, it’s worth reminding ourselves that, like it or not, the enemy we face in the war on terror has made Iraq the primary front in that war,” he added. Then, to laughter and applause, Cheney said, “To use a popular phrase, this is an inconvenient truth.”

And like it or not, the abject failure of the Bush administration’s unnecessary and illegal war in Iraq which led them to incompetently wage the war in Afghanistan means that the Taliban and al Qaeda still exist and Osama bin laden and Mullah Omar are still at large. You’d think this notion that we’re fighting them in Bagdad so we don’t have to fight them in Kabul and elsewhere would sound a little bit silly considering that Cheney himself was targeted in Afghanistan just this week, but logic has never been their strong suit.

He’s very worried that terrorists are going to think we’re weak and attack us. Call me crazy but it seems to me that the fact that we made fools of ourselves with all the faulty WMD talk and have bungled the occupation of Iraq so badly that the country has devloved into civil war is a much more obvious object lesson in American weakness. In fact, we have exposed ourselves as so inept that we are far more vulnerable than we were before 9/11 on a strategic global level. When a great and powerful nation reveals itself to be the gang that couldn’t shoot straight, minor despots and rival powers tend to make some dangerous calculations.

“If you support the war on terror, then it only makes sense to support it where the terrorists are fighting us,” Cheney said.

And due to the Bush administration’s malfeasance, error and corruption, Muslim fanaticism and terrorism have become far more powerful and pervasive today than when Bush and Cheney took office.

Meanwhile, elsewhere at CPAC, the GOP faithful of faithful seem a little bit blah this year. Bill Sher is blogging it here. Ben Shapiro tries to get lathered about lesbianism but he ends up sounding a little bit wistful:

When society tolerates deviance … it normalizes deviance … lesbianism among young women has risen dramatically in the last 10 years alone. And that is certainly due to media and advertising, and certainly also because of the fact that we decide to tolerate it.

It’s really not up to his usual standards.

If you are unfamiliar with the psycho-convention that calls itself CPAC, read this fantastic article about the 2003 convention from Michele Goldberg in Salon:

Bush is revered so intensely among CPACers that all successes seem to issue from him, while failures are the fault of others unworthy of the great man. Jason Crawford, a 23-year-old who works in business development in New York, formed his group Patriots for the Defense of America right after Sept. 11 to promote “moral clarity” in the war on terror. Now, convinced that moral clarity requires attacking North Korea and fomenting revolution in Iran, he’s disappointed in the administration. Yet speaking along with Oliver North (who ranted against the “brie-eating, foie gras-sucking French”) at the “What Are We Fighting For?” panel, he put the blame not on Bush, but on some amorphous “us” who failed to rise to Bush’s challenge. “Today we can see from our actions that we lack moral clarity,” he told the crowd. “We are betraying the principles of the Bush doctrine!”

Rev. Lou Sheldon, the founder of the Traditional Values Coalition and sworn enemy of homosexuality, put it best. Asked if Bush was in sync with his agenda, he replied, “George Bush is our agenda!”

But Sheldon, a plump, pink man with pale blue eyes, wasn’t out celebrating the Bush presidency. Instead, the man who has pledged “open warfare” against all things gay, stood in the exhibitors hall before a makeshift carnival game called “Tip a Troll,” in which players were invited to throw gray beanbags at toy trolls with the heads of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Hillary Clinton and Tom Daschle, or trolls holding signs saying, “The Homosexual Agenda,” “Roe V. Wade” and “The Liberal Media.”

Sheldon, like the rest of the right, isn’t letting success distract from a monomaniacal focus on its foes. Indeed, the overwhelming message at CPAC was that it’s time to toughen up.

At a Thursday seminar titled “2002 and Beyond: Are Liberals an Endangered Species?” Paul Rodriguez, managing editor of the conservative magazine Insight, warned that the liberal beast wouldn’t be vanquished until conservatives learn to be merciless. “One thing Democrats have long known how to do is play hardball,” he intoned, urging Republicans to adopt more “bare-knuckle” tactics.

I hear that they’re having a big 71% off sale on last year’s biggest selling item:

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“It Could Potentially Be Like Rwanda”

by tristero

Salon has an interview with Evan Kohlmann, founder of globalterroralert.com. He says a bunch of interesting things which many of us agree with, namely that the upper-echelon involvement of Iran in US military deaths has been hyped and that Saudi Arabia probably plays more of a role in arming insurgents that have killed Americans than Iran has. Kohlmann agrees that the latest escalation has no chance of working, by which I think he means that it won’t reverse the slide into sheer chaos or prevent the citizens of Iraq from being the hapless victims of atrocities.

But I would like to focus on the following and would appreciate hearing your opinions in comments. After the quote, I’ll try to rephrase Kohlmann’s comments, breaking them down into the most urgent issues he raises. I’ll also give you my opinion which, I hasten to add, is not locked in stone. If you think I’m wrong, and you probably will, please don’t simply throw up your hands. I am more than happy to change my mind so let me know what you think.

Do you think the U.S. should withdraw from Iraq?

I’m afraid not. If we withdraw from Iraq right now, there’s no doubt what will happen. First there’s going to be a war for control of Baghdad and then once Baghdad is ripped to the ground, the battle is going to spread across Iraq. It could potentially be like Rwanda. Right now, hundreds of people are being killed each month, which is awful and horrifying in itself. Imagine if that figure was 100 times bigger. Also, if we withdraw, a widespread war is going to be entirely our responsibility. It’s easy to say it’s Iraqis killing Iraqis. But nobody else is going to see it that way. Everyone is going to affix blame to us. We will ultimately cause a situation that forces us to reinvade Iraq and create even more casualties. It’s an awful Catch 22.

Kohlmann’s comments break down into the following predictions and assertions about what will happen if American troops leave Iraq now:

1. There will be a “war” to control Baghdad, ie the most important city – economically, at least – in Iraq.

2. Once Baghdad has been secured -he doesn’t say by whom, or even if it will be a Shia or Sunni group – that war will spread all over Iraq leading to a 100-fold increase in killings.

3. This larger war, and the resulting human catastrophe, will be entirely the responsibility of the United States.

4. Regardless of whether Sunni or Shia groups commit atrocities (or both do), both the combatants and the world will blame the US.

5. Ultimately, the US will be forced to reinvade Iraq as the situation spirals down to the lowest depths of a Hobbesian state of nature.

My opinion is as follows, and as I said, you probably won’t like it.

The escalation has no chance to do any good. Any gains in stability are little more than pr stunts that will evaporate. However, there isn’t a chance in hell that US troops in Iraq will withdraw as long as Bush is president. Therefore, Kohlmann’s discussion above is essentially meaningless.

But let us assume, for the moment, that Bush actually did order a withdrawal. Okay… I’ve assumed it, but I simply cannot imagine it happening in the real world. Now, predicting what would happen if we lived in a different universe is an entirely pointless exercise, except to get us all angry at each other. It would be like arguing about the number of angels on the head of a pin.

In short, the situation in Iraq will, and I say this with genuine dismay and dread, deteriorate further and further as long as the Bush administration remains in power. It will continue to worsen if Americans elect a president in 2008 who is committed in any way, shape, or form to the goals and/or ideology advocated by Bush.

Once Bush is back fulltime in Crawford, fishing in his well-stocked cement pond for bass (and Cheney has been safely committed to whatever psyciatric hospital would be nuts enough to accept him), serious discussions can begin about what the world can do to reverse the catastrophe Bush has perpetrated on the people in Iraq.

At that time, when Bush leaves office, there is no doubt in my mind that the situation in Iraq will be radically different than it is now. Undoubtedly, it will be worse, but specifically, how will it be worse? I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. There are too many variables. To speculate now on what course of action in 2009 will be best for Iraq – and for the US – is more pinhead angel-counting.

True: In principle, the US in 2009 will have as much legitimate reason to remain in Iraq as it does now, ie none. But principles of that sort mean nothing when faced with a situation that could lead to a genocide. A genocide which, like it or not, will be blamed on every American, including those of us who opposed the war. And I think that it is entirely plausible that in 2009, Iraq will be on the verge of, if not in the middle of, a genocide.

Likewise, I think it is entirely plausible that the situation in 2009 – complicated by the continued incompetence of Bush as well as the unpredictable actions of, say, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, and others – will make it clear that the US can best address the situation by leaving, and fast.

In short, we have no way of knowing what Iraq will be like in 2009, except that it will be disastrous. And that is not enough to advocate a specific policy. That is a horrible thing to contemplate – there is no hope until (maybe) 2009 – but I see no other realistic way to look at it. Please contradict me.

In a perfect world, George Bush and his government would resign today, an interim US government would schedule elections six months hence (with unrigged voting machines) and we could all discuss the nuances and complications of imminent withdrawal with confidence. The potential for a sizeable bloodbath would certainly have to figure prominently in such discussions as would, somehow, finding a way to involve the entire international community in stabiliizing a region we all have a stake in.

But the world is not perfect. Barring the publications of photos of Bush and Cheney in a 3-way with Jeff Gannon/Guckert (eeeeuw!), Bush is going nowhere, and neither are American soldiers, until 2009. While the rest of the interview makes interesting reading Kohlmann’s position on withdrawal, therefore, is pointless. Inadvertently, simply by engaging the subject, I think Kohlmann is diverting energy from the main problem facing Iraq and the US which is Bush’s occupation of the White House.

Now, the likelihood of the following happening is small, but if you want to know what I think actually could be helpful now, here it is (admittedly, it’s not much):

1. We need a serious, organized, and sober movement to impeach the Bush administration and remove it from office. Given the current politics, I don’t think it will succeed, but I think it is important to do anyway. It is important to show the rest of the world that not only does the Bush government not represent the American people, but that a substantial number of Americans are quite serious about opposing them.

2. Bush must be prevented at all costs from attacking Iran (or any other country)*. There are good reasons to worry that such an attack will entail nuclear strikes. But even conventional attacks will simply hasten the region’s slide into sheer anarchy far worse than what we are already seeing.

3. Congress must do everything within its power to oppose the Bush/Iraq war, both financially and philosophically. And Congress should make every effort to separate itself, and the rest of the country, from the unavoidable actions of the Bush administration which are beyond its control.

4. Congress should explore all options to “internationalize” the problem of Iraq – eg, via recourse to the UN and other organizations – even if the Bush administration is reluctant to do so itself.

Some of these steps are exceedingly dangerous, given Bush’s desire to play chicken with the Constitution. But in short, it must be made perfectly clear that as long as he is in office, Bush will no longer be permitted to exceed his legitimate powers. If he does, Congress must be prepared and willing to confront him, even if it means that Bush precipates a serious Constitutional crisis.

I’ve gone on far longer than I expected to. Your thoughts. And please, don’t attach too much importance to the forceful way I’ve asserted my opinion. I’m eager to hear what you think and I’m very eager to have my mind changed. It’s a terrible thing to believe the Iraq situation is utterly hopeless and I’d be happy to adopt a more optimistic attitude if I thought such optimism reasonable.

I won’t be able to respond to your comments until later tonight, but I will read them all as soon as I can.

*Note to rightwing nuts: Yes, that’s right. Bush should be prevented from attacking any other country. Even if they attack us first? Put it this way:

1. The Bush administration has demonstrated over and over again that it will lie about anything. I have no reason to believe any assertions by the Bush administration regarding a first strike.

2. The Bush administration has demonstrated over and over again that even though they have available the most powerful military force ever, their ability to respond militarily is utterly inept. I have zero confidence that even if the US was attacked without provocation, Bush could respond in a genuinely effective manner by ordering a military response. Exhibit A: Afghanistan today.

(As for the conquest of Baghdad, I remind you that Saddam didn’t attack the US. And furthermore, the battle for Baghdad never ended. Bush merely prevailed, partially, during its earliest days.

Creating The Space

by digby

I am a big believer in the blogosphere as alternative media. We do many things, from analysis and commentary to live coverage to investigative journalism and more. One of the blogs that is doing something extremely interesting and unusual is my longtime advertiser BagNewsNotes. Michael Shaw examines visual images and discusses them, exposes photography from some of the best photo journalists around who can’t always get their photos into the mainstream press and generally teaches us new ways of understanding the impact and meaning of the visual in our political and cultural environment. The community that gathers at his place engages in fascinating discussion of all these things.

I love having his thought provoking ads on my blog — they are arresting and interesting and bring new depth to many stories that I’m covering and often inspires me to cover ones that I’ve missed.

He has a new project in mind that I think is well worth supporting. If the blogphere is going to support a new media infrastructure, then photography need to be in the mix:

Over the past year, I have made it a priority to meet and get to know many photojournalists. Talking to one incredibly talented, under-appreciated and under-compensated photographer after another, the response to what we’re doing has been fantastic. Oppressed by what is commonly referred to, world-wide, as “the filter,” the professionals see this site as something revolutionary. Simply put, this screen offers an open window between you — the informed and rapidly growing progressive audience — and the freelance photojournalist.

And why, specifically, is our mission and medium so intriguing?

Whereas a photographer might sell a few pictures to the MSM based on weeks, months or even years worth of effort, we have the space, format and focus to study and appreciate any number of images.

Whereas the photographer is typically pigeonholed as the purveyor of pictures alone, we can offer photojournalists reporter and witness status, accommodating visual and verbal accounts ranging from news to commentary to personal reflection.

Whereas a photo in the print medium might reach a couple thousand people, a resonant image, boosted by a link or two, can easily reach tens of thousands of receptive viewers in the blogosphere. (For example, the post featuring Alan Chin’s amazing Katrina images has had nearly 33,000 visitors as of this morning.)

Whereas a photo story, run once in print, can be used up forever, the blogosphere — as a narrative form — thrives on continuity, almost demanding a photographer follow up or keep ongoing track of a story.

Finally, the blog, as a discussion medium, allows you and the photojournalist to share a dialogue, expanding the experience, exchanging ideas, answering questions and providing encouragement.

Over the past year, I have steadily increased the amount of original photojournalism here at BAGnewsNotes. Besides our regular contributers, Alan Chin and Tim Fadek, you have lately seen work by a number of Spanish photographers, including Lourdes Segade, Héctor Mediavilla and Ariadna Arnés.

Still, we could do more. Much more. Although many photographers are willing to informally collaborate with The BAG, the one factor that would make a significance difference is compensation. I am not proposing anything beyond our means, but if Firedoglake readers could raise the funds for the site to cover the Libby trial, why can’t we — the BAGnewsNotes community — create our own media fund, offering good will payments to photojournalists in exchange for particular collaboration or ongoing relationships?

So, what exactly am I asking for?

I’m asking your help to fund more original photojournalism for BAGnewsNotes.

If we can raise enough money to show we’re serious, it would allow me to develop informal affiliations with individuals and cooperatives, underwrite a few ongoing photo projects, and even help subsidize some photographers on assignment.

If you think new media is important, a modest (or not so modest) contribution to Michael’s project is worth your while.

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Traditional Values

by digby

Ever since passing what its Legislature promoted as the nation’s toughest laws against illegal immigration last summer, Colorado has struggled with a labor shortage as migrants fled the state. This week, officials announced a novel solution: Use convicts as farmworkers.

The Department of Corrections hopes to launch a pilot program this month — thought to be the first of its kind — that would contract with more than a dozen farms to provide inmates who will pick melons, onions and peppers.

Crops were left to spoil in the fields after the passage of legislation that required state identification to get government services and allowed police to check suspects’ immigration status.

“The reason this [program] started is to make sure the agricultural industry wouldn’t go out of business,” state Rep. Dorothy Butcher said. Her district includes Pueblo, near the farmland where the inmates will work.

Prisoners who are a low security risk may choose to work in the fields, earning 60 cents a day. They also are eligible for small bonuses.

11Th Commandment

by digby

Seeing The Forest has a great piece today on the Al Gore electricity smear:

There’s a tragic but true old expression that a lie can make it half way around the world before the truth can even get its pants on. Sadly, this has been proven true again this week with the $mear attack on Vice President Al Gore and his energy consumption. Today, we noticed that the lie has made it to Germany. How did this happen and, more to the point, why does it continue to happen?

It’s a good question that Dave Johnson and James Boyce go a long way toward answering in their post. There are many factors, but this is, I think, what it really comes down to:

Where was the Democratic National Committee on Tuesday and Wednesday as these lies gained hold? Where was any Democratic-oriented Group? There were the progressive bloggers, Media Matters and CAP’s Think Progess and very few others — the usual suspects — and this is all that Gore and our other leaders have watching their backs. They sure aren’t watching each other’s.

I recognize that there is an intense primary underway and that everyone is choosing up teams. But unless the Democratic establishment bands together to condemn this stuff en masse it will be used against every one of them. And it is very, very foolish to use any of these tactics against each other.

STF ends the post with this:
First the wingnuts came for Bill Clinton,
I remained silent;
I am not Bill Clinton. When they made up stuff about Gore,
I remained silent;
I am not Gore. When they lied about John Kerry
I didn’t speak up for him;
I complained about how he ran his campaign. When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out;
I am a Democrat.
Ronald Reagan famously invoked an 11th Commandment: thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican. Democrats should invoke one of their own: thou shalt not use Clinton Rules against fellow Democrats and will defend fellow Democrats when they are used against them.

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Wasted Outrage

by digby

From Atrios, I see that John McCain has really stuck his foot in it now:

Discussing the war with Letterman, McCain repeated his assertion that U.S. troops must remain in Iraq rather than withdrawing early even though the war has been mismanaged.

“Americans are very frustrated, and they have every right to be,” McCain said. “We’ve wasted a lot of our most precious treasure, which is American lives.”

Or has he? I haven’t heard a thing about this on the news so far today.

This is the clearest example of a double standard I’ve seen in some time. Barack Obama sais something a couple of weeks back that caused a huge brouhaha:

OBAMA: We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged and to which we have now spent $400 billion and has seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.

The winuttosphere went crazy with Malkin leading the charge:

Sen. Barack Obama’s nutroots are showing. RedStateLady has the video of Obama arguing that each and every member of the military who volunteered to serve and died in Iraq wasted his/her life.

And James Taranto of the WSJ was shocked:

On Sunday Sen. Barack Obama, speaking at Iowa State University, made this jaw-dropping statement…

Wasted! Hard to believe anyone would say such a thing, but there it is on video.

Obama quickly apologized. Ron Fournier, editor in chief of the online morgue called “Hotsoup” wrote this for MSNBC:

Obama got his candidacy off to an inauspicious start by saying last weekend that the war “should have never been authorized, and should have never been waged, and on which we’ve now spent $400 billion, and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.”

[…]

He was asked Monday whether military families deserved an apology. “Well as I said, it is not at all what I intended to say, and I would absolutely apologize if any of them felt that in some ways it had diminished the enormous courage and sacrifice that they’d shown. You know, and if you look at all the other speeches that I’ve made, that is always the starting point in my view of this war.”

That’s true; none of his previous speeches declared that the lives of slain U.S. soldiers were wasted. He saved that gem for his first day as a presidential candidate.

The Freerepublic lizard brains took a slightly different tack:

“Four Ho’s and 7 smokes ago, soldiers lives are being wasted….oops a slip of the tongue!”
posted on 02/14/2007 10:04:14 AM PST by Bommer (Global Warming: The only warming phenomena that occurs in the Summer and ends in the Winter!)

(Thank goodness racism is dead, eh?)

I personally think those lives actually were wasted in Iraq, as well as hundreds of thousands of Iraqis as well. I know that military families probably hate to think that their loved ones were as like disposable political weapons, but they were and I don’t fault either Obama or McCain for saying what is a common sense, everyday statement of fact that is said every day around water cooolers and dinner tables all over this country. All that loss of life is a horrible, horrible waste.

But I do hate hypocrisy and just once I’d like to see the rightwing held to the same standard that they hold Democrats. Just for kicks — for the sheer thrill of actually seeing it happen.

Update: Media Matters notes the double standard among the major papers:

The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times all published March 1 articles reporting McCain’s announcement on the Late Show, with The New York Times and the Post directly quoting McCain from the program — but none of these articles noted his claim that “we’ve wasted” American lives in Iraq. Yet when Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) made similar comments in Iowa on February 11, the Post and the Los Angeles Times reported the remarks the following day. The New York Times, meanwhile, devoted a February 13 article to Obama’s subsequent apology and clarification.

Here’s the thing: This time, there was already the precedent of the Obama flap and yet, with the exception of the AP article I link above, they failed to make the connection.

Update: Blitzer just said:

He [McCain] said on the Letterman Show last night, he used the work “wasted.” He said today he meant to use the word “sacrifice.” Given John McCain’s record on military matters and the fact that he himself is a war hero, is this over with right now or are there legs on this story?

Interestingly, Bill Press said neither Obama or McCain should have apologized for telling the truth and Bay Buchanan says this is going to dog McCain because he is such a respected military person. Blitzer looked very confused and asked why social conservatives hate McCain so much.

.

The Iraq Effect

by tristero

Read this, please:

Our study yields one resounding finding: The rate of terrorist attacks around the world by jihadist groups and the rate of fatalities in those attacks increased dramatically after the invasion of Iraq. Globally there was a 607 percent rise in the average yearly incidence of attacks (28.3 attacks per year before and 199.8 after) and a 237 percent rise in the average fatality rate (from 501 to 1,689 deaths per year). A large part of this rise occurred in Iraq, which accounts for fully half of the global total of jihadist terrorist attacks in the post-Iraq War period. But even excluding Iraq, the average yearly number of jihadist terrorist attacks and resulting fatalities still rose sharply around the world by 265 percent and 58 percent respectively.

And even when attacks in both Afghanistan and Iraq (the two countries that together account for 80 percent of attacks and 67 percent of deaths since the invasion of Iraq) are excluded, there has still been a significant rise in jihadist terrorism elsewhere–a 35 percent increase in the number of jihadist terrorist attacks outside of Afghanistan and Iraq, from 27.6 to 37 a year, with a 12 percent rise in fatalities from 496 to 554 per year.

Of course, just because jihadist terrorism has risen in the period after the invasion of Iraq, it does not follow that events in Iraq itself caused the change. For example, a rise in attacks in the Kashmir conflict and the Chechen separatist war against Russian forces may have nothing to do with the war in Iraq. But the most direct test of The Iraq Effect–whether the United States and its allies have suffered more jihadist terrorism after the invasion than before–shows that the rate of jihadist attacks on Western interests and citizens around the world (outside of Afghanistan and Iraq) has risen by a quarter, from 7.2 to 9 a year, while the yearly fatality rate in these attacks has increased by 4 percent from 191 to 198.

This is utterly astounding. Not the fact that Bush/Iraq has increased terrorism worldwide. Everyone knows that’s so, even the liars that say otherwise. Nor is the fact that terrorism has increased so dramatically that shocking. Of course invading, conquering, and occupying an Islamic state would substantially increase jihadism. Add the numerous reports of torture and wholesale murder by American personnel (as well as people from other countries ) and it is a wonder the increase over pre-invasion isn’t much higher.

No. What’s astounding is that this study is, apparently, the first public attempt to quantify by how much terrorism has increased since Bush opened the gates of Hell. One would think, after all, that this would be a crucial fact for American citizens to know, seeing how our children are being killed and we’re paying through the nose. (And you can bet your bippy that had terrorism decreased we would certainly be hearing about it every day from the rightwing.)

What’s also astounding is that this study appeared not in the Times, not in the Post, not in Foreign Affairs, not in The Economist, but in… Mother Jones. Good for Mother Jones, of course, but WTF??? That’s a little like opening up Popular Science and finding out that they’ve published the first paper by Einstein on relativity because no one else would dare to. Indeed, these are no crackpots but rather Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank:

Research fellows at the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law. Bergen is also a senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C.

These are reputable people at reputable places, not hysterics or hacks. These are experts. So again, and with all due respect: Mother Jones???

Now, I don’t want to leap to conclusions, but I’m beginning to think there’s something seriously wrong with the media in this country.

ht, Sid Blumenthal by way of Jane Hamsher

Hey Y’Never Know! They Could Have Had A Uranium Program.

Josh Marshall on “a screw-up that staggers the mind:”

Because of a weapons program that may not even have existed (and no one ever thought was far advanced) the White House the White House got the North Koreans to restart their plutonium program and then sat by while they produced a half dozen or a dozen real nuclear weapons — not the Doug Feith/John Bolton kind, but the real thing.

And thus the consequences of Cheney’s fabled One Percent Doctrine.

Y’know something, people, the Bush administration? They are really bad news. Seriously bad news.