Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Southern Idol

by digby

This article in Facing South asks why it is that all the American Idol favorites are southerners:

One theory points to the South’s rich music tradition, and the fact that most forms of American music — jazz, blues, country, gospel, and their progeny such as rock — can be traced back to the region. The Southern church alone is a crucible that has cast many singers, especially the working-class, small-town kids like those who end up on Idol. Says Nigel Lythgoe, one of the producers of Idol:

I think there’s a lot of church-going [in the South] where they literally learn their craft and they’re singing there every single week and [perfecting] the performance that goes with that. And I think there’s a lot of soul there.

But Ken Warwick, another Idol producer — who says “we’ve asked this question ourselves time and time again” — has a different explanation, related to the economics of the music industry:

The thing is, if they’re [from the] North and they’re talented, then they tend to go professional. They go to New York, they come to L.A., they go to San Francisco and they get jobs. But if they’re in the South, maybe there’s a little less opportunity, so there’s more talent … floating around. And that’s what we’re after. We like the fact that the kid comes from nothing and becomes a huge star.”

Then there’s the “fanatic voter” theory, which postulates that Southern voters just get more excited about things like Idol and are more motivated to vote (the Post dismisses speculation that more Southerners are watching Idol — while it’s true the show rates high in areas like Birmingham and Raleigh/Durham, the actual number of watchers this translates into is dwarfed by the millions tuning in from California and New York).

What do I think? I think all of the above have some merit, although I’ll throw in a fourth theory. As writers like John Egerton and later Peter Applebome have noted, the South holds an idealized place in our culture. Like family farms or Norman Rockwell paintings, the South is held up as a symbol of what’s real and authentic about America — a simpler place that, like “roots music,” is a “roots place” with an enduring soul able to withstand the glitter and insanity of mass culture.

Given the spread of Wal-Marts, bank towers, and other influences in the South, it’s often more myth than reality. But it’s a powerful myth, one that the country especially yearns for when the frenzied pace of “progress” feels out of control. That makes a plain-speaking, down-to-earth American Idol kid from the South — and maybe even a Southern presidential candidate — so appealing, not just in the South but across the country.

I think it’s because the roots of all great American popular music come from the south. It’s no surprise to me that southerners would be the leaders in a vocal talent show.

But there’s also merit in that last argument. For whatever psychological reasons, contrary to myth, most Americans of all stripes actually like southern culture, southern people, southern music — all of it. (I like the food, which isn’t good for me.) It’s their politics the rest of us (and that includes at least 40% of southerners themselves) aren’t so crazy about.

Viva Dixie, baby. Go Taylor.

Update: John Tierney used to think that Idol was like watching a car crash. Now he
thinks … this:

I no longer think the Nascar theory is sufficient. “Idol” taps deeper emotions. My new Meistersinger hypothesis is that the “Idol” formula for success comes from Wagner, the composer who turned timeless passions into endless operas.

Wagner created the “Idol” format in “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” his opera about a 16th-century song contest that has traditionally been judged by the guild of master singers according to their own set of convoluted rules. But a burgher named Sachs, arguing that singers should instead be wooing the “untutored” hearts of the masses, proposes letting the winner be chosen instead by a young woman named Eva along with the rest of the public.

The prospect of a “Bavarian Idol” appalls the guild members, who warn that their art will be ruined “if it runs after the favors of the people.” They also reject Sachs’s suggestion that the contest include an outsider, a handsome young knight with an unorthodox singing style.

But after much scheming (this is a five-hour opera), Sachs manages to open up the competition, first by arranging for the guild’s ultraconventional singer to suffer through a Nascar-style flameout. The crowd laughs at his song and mocks him as a “booby” with no sex appeal.

Then Sachs explains to the crowd that it’s actually a beautiful song that has been “distorted” by the performer. (Or, as Simon Cowell put it to one “Idol” contestant: “I think you just killed my favorite song of all time.”) Sachs brings on the handsome knight to perform the song. The crowd loves the rebel in shining armor — “No one can woo like him!” — and he ends up winning the competition and Eva’s hand.

OK…

.

Tinker to Evers to Chance

by digby

If you’d like to have some fun, check out Rick Perlstein, David Sirota and Mike Stark sticking it to the conservatives on the radio show Beyond the Beltway. (Left column, second hour)

Liberals can be good at this if they aren’t full ‘o cocktail weenies.

.

The Retreads Strike Again

by digby

Yesterday when reading Jason Vest’s interesting historical post about the young Dick and Don agitating for executive infallibility back in the 70’s, I clicked over to this story in Mother Jones and read this article about how Dick n’ Don also had been in favor of “privatising” government functions back in the 70’s:

In 1969, President Richard Nixon appointed Rumsfeld, a 37-year-old congressman from Illinois, to head the Office of Economic Opportunity, which was responsible for overseeing the War on Poverty. Nixon wanted the agency restructured, and Rumsfeld, with the assistance of his chief aide, Cheney, quickly began bringing in management contractors to do the work of the agency’s top civil servants.

In The Shadow Government, a 1976 book about the federal consulting industry, Daniel Guttman and Barry Willner quote Cheney as saying, “Don found himself with a bureaucracy that hated him…. [He] was forced to seek outside help. I remember Don reciting to me the Al Smith statement, ‘If I don’t look to my friends for help, who do I look to, my enemies?'”

[…]

Rumsfeld’s successor at the agency was Frank Carlucci, who later became Ronald Reagan’s Defense secretary. In 1971, Carlucci told Congress that he was dramatically curtailing the agency’s spending on management contractors, which amounted to $110 million between 1965 and 1971. “We did not think we were getting our money’s worth,” Carlucci testified.

There’s a surprise.

Fast forward to today and this article by Greg Palast:

… the snooping into your phone bill is just the snout of the pig of a strange, lucrative link-up between the Administration’s Homeland Security spy network and private companies operating beyond the reach of the laws meant to protect us from our government. You can call it the privatization of the FBI — though it is better described as the creation of a private KGB.

The leader in the field of what is called “data mining,” is a company … called, “ChoicePoint, Inc,” which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts.

Worried about Dick Cheney listening in Sunday on your call to Mom? That ain’t nothing. You should be more concerned that they are linking this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration. Five years ago, I discovered that ChoicePoint had already gathered 16 billion data files on Americans — and I know they’ve expanded their ops at an explosive rate.

They are paid to keep an eye on you — because the FBI can’t. For the government to collect this stuff is against the law unless you’re suspected of a crime. (The law in question is the Constitution.) But ChoicePoint can collect if for “commercial” purchases — and under the Bush Administration’s suspect reading of the Patriot Act — our domestic spying apparatchiks can then BUY the info from ChoicePoint.

[…]

And now ChoicePoint and George Bush want your blood. Forget your phone bill. ChoicePoint, a sickened executive of the company told us in confidence, “hope[s] to build a database of DNA samples from every person in the United States …linked to all the other information held by CP [ChoicePoint]” from medical to voting records.

[…]

” And that scares the hell out of me,” said the executive (who has since left the company), because ChoicePoint gets it WRONG so often. We are not contracting out our Homeland Security to James Bond here. It’s more like Austin Powers, Inc. Besides the 97% error rate in finding Florida “felons,” Illinois State Police fired the company after discovering ChoicePoint had produced test “results” on rape case evidence … that didn’t exist. And ChoicePoint just got hit with the largest fine in Federal Trade Commission history for letting identity thieves purchase 145,000 credit card records.

But it won’t stop, despite Republican senators shedding big crocodile tears about “surveillance” of innocent Americans. That’s because FEAR is a lucrative business — not just for ChoicePoint, but for firms such as Syntech, Sybase and Lockheed-Martin — each of which has provided lucrative posts or profits to connected Republicans including former Total Information Awareness chief John Poindexter (Syntech), Marvin Bush (Sybase) and Lynn Cheney (Lockheed-Martin).

This has the ring of truth to it. Regardless of the outcome of investigations into NSA programs, this is probably the wave of the future. (Rumsfeldian Zombie conservatism apparently will not die.) Heckuva job cronies are making big bucks collecting and selling data and they may very well continue to do it after these bozos are long gone. We are seeing the creation of an Information Industrial Complex.

Privacy is going to be a new battleground in the culture war and it’s a fight that we on the left civil libertarian side are going to have to lead. The rightwing religions are already trying to invade the bedroom and the hospital room (not to mention women’s uteruses.) And people do not recognise yet that collection of data to find out what brand of yogurt you prefer is not all that benign in the hands of businesses with government contracts. This is the twin Big Brothers of Corporate America and Government creating a new industry of legal convenience to buy and sell your data for whatever reasons they deem necessary — and use your own tax dollars to fund it.

Oh, and Porter “Brownie” Goss and his pals are going to be running the thing.

.

Baby Huey vs The Dauphin

by digby

They really didn’t need to do this poll on whether Clinton outperformed Bush. It’s obvious to anyone who lived through the era. What the story fails to mention is that Clinton outperformed Bush while fighting off the rabid, slavering GOP congress of Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott that was determined not only to thwart his program but used every institutional lever of power they had to destroy him personally. He wasn’t perfect, but the guy had the most amazing grace under pressure I’ve ever seen. He even showed good humor about it most of the time:

“I’m a lot like Baby Huey. I’m fat. I’m ugly. But if you push me down, I keep coming back.”

Bush by contrast has had a free hand. He had an historical moment that could have brought the country and the entire world together — which he decided instead to use as an opportunity to aggressively assert arrogant partisan and American power. Rather than being a “uniter not a divider” as he promised in the campaign, he roared into office with his one vote majority and treated the Democrats like lackeys, behaving as if he had a mandate to enact the most extreme items on the GOP agenda. He used patriotism as a bludgeon to intimidate all dissent against his inexplicable war with Iraq. At every turn he behaved with insolence and hubris and his failure has been manifest. Now he lives in a bubble, wandering around dazed and confused about what is happening to him — which is not the result of Democratic partisanship, I might add, but rather the assessment of the American people. (The Democrats were paralyzed during most of his term.) Perhaps that’s why his fall has been so steady — the slow realization among the people that being a leader takes more than a manly swagger and a down home accent.

Bill Clinton may have been an imperfect human being but he was a president. This guy is, and always was, just a brand name in a suit.

.

Terror Management

by digby

Here’s an interesting post at Thought Theatre about something called Terror Management Theory, which is a fascinating study of how people react to the knowledge of their own mortality. It’s particularly relevant to this ongoing sense among some Americans that terrorism is an existensial threat even if they live in Topeka (or especially because they live in Topeka.)

When looking at the fact that nearly two thirds of Americans polled seemingly accept a program of widespread domestic surveillance, the theory offers a plausible explanation. Essentially, anything that helps assuage the fear of death can potentially be seen as an acceptable situation whether it be rational, real, or imagined. To offer an analogy, one might look at those who refuse to fly in an airplane…despite statistics demonstrating that flying is safer than driving, the fear of what is perceived to be a more certain death can overcome the logical data. I suspect this same thinking is, to a degree, at play in these otherwise confounding numbers.

In fact, after the 2004 election, a number of psychologists speculated that fear of death may have actually given President Bush the needed edge.

Michael Tomasky over at TAPPED also attributes the public’s evident acceptance of the NSA spying on citizens to a fear of terrorism. Perhaps that’s true. I would certainly agree that it was true in the first years after 9/11. (Ezra says the public hasn’t thought it through and Greg Sargent says the Washington post poll is flawed.)

I suspect, however, that we are dealing with something completely different: people are just not shocked at having their personal information in a data base. After all, it seems like any Tom, Dick or Ravi has access to your financial information, your shopping habits and your online surfing habits. Perfect strangers can google your name and find the term paper you wrote in the 8th grade, along with your last four addresses and your current phone number. You can call up that satellite mapping thing and zoom in right on your house — and find out how much it and all your neighbors’ houses are worth. It just doesn’t seem like a big deal in America anymore to have strangers know your habits.

What Americans are not used to, however, is a government invading their privacy and using the long arm of the law against them for its own purposes. Corporate Big Brother is mostly just an opportunity to sell you things or to deny you the ability to buy things — a pain in the neck, but rarely ruinous. Government Big Brother is a whole different animal. You get caught in that maw and you might just not come out. I don’t think they understand the difference.

The key way to talk about this, I think, is to focus on the fact that they’ve been lying about it for no good reason. For instance, it’s quite strange that they keep making the bizarre argument that terrorists didn’t know their phones were being tapped. Is there anybody above the age of six who believes that? (And anyway, if they’re that stupid, they’ll reveal themselves in some other way and the FBI can just get a court order like they would with any other stupid criminal.) If this program is legal then there’s really no logical reason why they didn’t make it public. They must be hiding something.

That’s something the public can understand. They don’t trust this administration but they just haven’t been shown a good reason why allowing the government to handle the same private information that Verizon and Bell South has is more dangerous to their health than the terrorist boogeyman coming to Topeka to kill them in their beds. You’ve got to raise their suspicions, not rely on principle. In this age of no privacy, they don’t see why it’s a big deal.

.

Groundhog Day

by digby

This premature poll in the Wapo this morning has predictably led the little kewl kidz to conclude that the nation is so afraid of terrorism that they will go along with any number of invasions of their civil liberties. That may be true (although I have my doubts.)

But I wonder what the nation would think if they knew that the very same people who initiated this program in the name of the war on terror tried this long before there was any war on terror: more than 30 years ago. From Jason Vest at POGO blog:

None too pleased about AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth doing the National Security Agency’s (NSA) bidding, Arlen Specter says he’s going to haul the three telecom companies before the Judiciary Committee for some pointed questions. Deja vu; in 1976, the now-deceased Rep. Bella Abzug did the same thing with three telegraph companies for their similar handmaiden-to-NSA roles. Looking back to those events, we can’t help but wonder if there’s more history that will repeat itself–will the Bush Administration try, as the Ford Administration did, to extend executive privilege to private industry.

After the Church Committee revealed the existence of NSA’s Project SHAMROCK, Abzug, the chair of the House Committee on Government Operations Subcommittee on Government Information and Individual Rights, wanted to go deeper. Abzug promptly subpoenaed not just current and former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and NSA officials involved in SHAMROCK, but also the CEOs of Western Union, ITT and RCA Global.

The Ford White House responded by ordering, on the grounds of executive privilege, the FBI and NSA employees to remain silent before Abzug. But Ford also went one amazing step further: “For the first time in history,” James Bamford wrote in The Puzzle Palace, “the concept of executive privilege was extended to a private corporation.” Attorney General Edward Levi actually asked Western Union’s president not to comply with Abzug’s subpeona as a means of “honor[ing] this invocation of executive privilege.” He later making a similar request of RCA.

While the FBI and NSA officials did as ordered by Levi and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Western Union and RCA didn’t, with both companies’s executives testifying and furnishing the Abzug Subcommittee with documents. (Apparently acknowledging their failure, Ford officials refrained from trying to muzzle ITT, which also cooperated with the committee.)

When the history of this period is written, one of its most important characteristics will be this zombie conservatism. Their leader, Richard Nixon, was destroyed by hubris at the very zenith of his power but it didn’t stop them. They just keep coming back with the same imperial presidency theory whenever they get the chance.

Vest quotes an old intelligence hand who recalls meetings at the time:

There were some meetings, he said, that were particularly memorable because of the vehement opposition voiced by two men who were intractably hostile to the notion that executive privilege did not allow for things like surveillance without oversight and gagging civil servants and CEOs before Congress.

“Their great fear was that oversight and procedures and legislation would fatally undermine the presidency by neutering executive privilege,” he recalled. “I don’t know where all of this will ultimately go, but I don’t think this Administration would be at all unhappy for hearings that have NSA and telecom [company] guys subpeoaned, which they’d regard as an opportunity for a showdown over executive privilege.”

Those two men? Guess who…

In light of this history, I think Specter’s plan to haul the telcos before the committee is the best approach, just as Abzug did in the 70’s. Many people may not think there’s anything wrong with the government collecting their phone records, but I seriously doubt that they will be happy to see the government claiming executive privilege to keep a telco corporation from having to testify before congress.

I’ll bet money they are going to do just that. These zombies just keep doing the same stuff over and over and over again. Who on earth ever said they were the ones with the new ideas?

.

More Bad Guys

by digby

This diary over at DKOS illustrates why we should be worried about the administration asserting they are only targeting “the bad guys.”

We stood with about 50 others on rte 674 and when the motorcade came by there was assault rifle OUT the window pointing at ALL of us and the cars all looked like I remember seeing in the Hitler motorcades in the movies when I was a child, all boxy and black and one had the Pres seal and American flag on the sides. It was absolutely chilling!

[…]

Mary, Nic, and I were there as well; and yes, it went down exactly as Barbara and John have said below. I don’t think I’ve ever felt such a sense of foreboding in my life as when I saw that automatic rifle pointed at us, peaceful protesters.

At the time September 11th happened, I worked at a military base near where I used to live before we moved to FL. Immediately after 9/11, our base was at Threatcon D, meaning that the military personnel guarding our base had to be armed. Yeah, I saw sharp-shooters and automatic rifles; but I took some kind of comfort in the notion that these measures were meant for the “bad guys.”

On Tuesday, the message that the sniper hanging out the window with his automatic weapon had for us was that we peacefully-protesting Americans were the “bad guys.” And that thought alone gave me the chills.

Which is exactly what they want us to feel. This isn’t about security, national or otherwise. It’s about intimidation.

.

And The Deaths Continue

by tristero

Four Marines killed in Iraq when their tank rolled off a bridge into a canal. We’ve been assured their deaths were not the result of hostile attack.

Of course It was just an accident. What reason could anyone have for doubting that?

Quotes Of The Day

by tristero

Courtesy Salon:

The ideologists of the conservative revolution superimposed a vision of national redemption upon their dissatisfaction with liberal culture and with the loss of authoritative faith. They posed as the true champions of nationalism, and berated the socialists for their internationalism, and the liberals for their pacifism and their indifference to national greatness.

Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology by Fritz Stern. 1961.

Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ — to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness.

But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice.

It is dominion we are after. Not just influence.

It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time.

It is dominion we are after.

World conquest. That’s what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never settle for anything less…

Thus, Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land — of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ.

George Grant, The Changing of the Guard: Biblical Principles for Political Action. 1995

The Salon piece is an excerpt of Michelle Goldberg’s new book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism which looks to be a very useful introduction to the less well-known ultra-radical christianists whose ideas, a la Orcinus, get “mainstreamed” by more well-known political operatives like Falwell and Robertson.

Dinner With A Liberal Hawk

by tristero

Last night, I went to the annual dinner of a liberal group, and sat next to a very smart, very successful, and very well travelled man in his mid 60’s. I found him likable, talkative and in many ways, quite an interesting fellow.

He told us he supported the Bush/Iraq war because 9/11 was a wake-up call and it was inconceivable to him that the Bush administration would lie the United States into an invasion. Another reason: he had been in Cambodia and seen firsthand the capacity of human beings to do evil. Also, he said that during his lifetime, there was the Holocaust. If there was a chance to prevent that kind of horror from re-occurring, then he felt it was important to take that chance.

My mind started to reel from the effort of discerning what the connection was between Pol Pot’s atrocities and the September 11, 2001 attacks. Yes, they were both horrible and both were inflicted on innocents. But how did that lead one to conclude: “Invade Iraq?” And as catastrophic as the Holocaust was, I couldn’t figure out how the desire to prevent another such tragedy factored into his willingness to support the pre-emptive invasion and conquest of a country which, while brutal, had apparently given up gassing its citizens right around the time Donald Rumsfeld no longer was in a position to shake Saddam’s bloody hand.

There’s something about such reasoning that strikes me as profoundly illogical, as if history literally repeats itself and therefore we’re now getting a second chance to “get it right.” Time The Revelator (in Gillian Welch’s brilliant phrase) has other tricks up Her sleeve and never repeats, only cycles.

I tried to interrupt – as I said, he was talkative. But when he claimed that the Middle East had been “deadlocked for years,” I saw my chance, “What’s so bad about a deadlock? It certainly beats sheer chao…” and then he repeated everything in the first paragraph again. He seemed calm to me as he went through his reasons, but I noticed he spilled some wine on what looked to be a rather pricey shirt. He dropped his fork just a mite too loudly on his plate.

My friend on the other side managed to slip in, “Y’know, Tristero got it right from the start. He knew Bush was lying. He was right. And he was worried about the aftermath from the start.”

“So, you were right,” he said, a little bit of anger now creeping into his voice.

“Yes, I was right, and I knew I had to be right from the beginning, in 2002 and 2003,” I said, with not a trace of false modesty – or any other kind.

“Okay,” he rapidly wiped his lips with a napkin. “You know, a stopped watch is right twice a day.”

“True,” I said, “but I wasn’t a stopped watch about Iraq.”

Eyes blinked, but he didn’t skip a beat.

“Okay, you were right. I ‘ll grant you that. You were right when the rest of us were wrong…”

“Well, actually…” I was trying to tell him that in fact the majority of the world opposed the invasion and I was simply in the majority, but I couldn’t. He was angry and unstoppable.

“No, no, let me ask you a question. How come you, a musician, maybe a good one, maybe a well-read one, but a musician with no training in affairs of state – how come you of all people were right about Iraq but the most respected, most experienced, most intelligent, most serious thinkers in the United States got it wrong?”

“That is a question I ask myself every day, because it scares the daylights out of me,” I replied.

My eyes started to tear up and the winter of 02/03 raced through my head. That awful sense of dissociation watching every American media outlet try to outdo its rivals by printing lies, the unspeakable dread as I watched my country willingly go over the abyss. The shock of realizing that nearly everyone I knew had bought the myth of the Good War and that nothing I could say or do, nothing anyone could say or do could change their mind. It was too late.

I tried to say more, but I couldn’t, and then the subject changed and the dinner went on.

[Update: Link added to the great Gillian Welch’s album, Time (The Revelator), and my shameful misspelling of her name corrected. ]