Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Cards On The Table

by digby

If more of these people would admit what they really believe we could have an honest debate in this country:

West Jordan Republican Sen. Chris Buttars scoffed at McCoy’s suggestion that the legislation might force teens to other states for abortions or into their bathrooms to attempt the procedure on themselves.

“Abortion isn’t about women’s rights. The rights they had were when they made the decision to have sex,” Buttars said. “This is the consequences. The consequence is they should have to talk to their parents.”

Too bad if her father is the one who impregnated her:

Current Utah law – which was adopted in 1974 – requires doctors to notify a girl’s parents before ending her pregnancy. HB85, sponsored by Ogden Republican Rep. Kerry Gibson and Peterson, would change state code to require doctors to get at least one parent’s permission 24 hours before the procedure. Doctors could proceed without consent in medical emergencies or to protect the health of the mother.

The bill would allow girls to ask a judge to bypass the parental consent requirement if she fears abuse or is pregnant as a result of incest. At the same time, the legislation still would require a doctor to notify a girl’s parents of the abortion, effectively nullifying the judicial bypass.

Salt Lake City Democratic Sen. Scott McCoy tried to amend the bill Monday to grant an exception to the notification requirement in “very narrow situations” where a girl’s father also is the father of her baby.

Peterson argued that parental notification “hasn’t been a problem” for 30 years. Why would notification after a judicial bypass be a problem? “What we’re trying to do is allow a parent a say in what happens in this youth’s life,” he said.

But Sen. Patrice Arent said Peterson was closing his eyes to the “real world.” The Murray Democrat said Utah lawmakers are setting up a situation where a girl who has been raped by her father would go to court to avoid telling her parents of her abortion. But the doctor still would notify one or both of those parents who could be complicit in the incest.

I find this refreshing. These Republicans admit that women give up their rights when they have sex. Good to know. And they believe a child molesting father’s parental rights are more important than the daughter he impregnated. Also good to know.

Our equally religious Muslim fundamentalist friends take this argument to its logical conclusion:

A large number of women in Afghanistan continue to be imprisoned for committing so-called “zina” crimes. A female can be detained and prosecuted for adultery, running away from home or having consensual sex outside marriage, which are all referred to as zina crimes. The major factor preventing victims of rape complaining to the authorities is the fear that instead of being treated as a victim, they themselves will be prosecuted for unlawful sexual activity.

During its recent visit, AI found that a large number of female inmates in prisons across Afghanistan are incarcerated for the crime of “running away” and for adultery, as well as for engaging in unlawful sexual activity. Amongst many judges and judicial officials, there was a prevailing lack of knowledge about the application of zina law.

In many instances, there was a lack of basic legal skills among legal professionals interviewed. In addition, in relation to many offences, sentencing is left to judges’ unfettered discretion and they often had down arbitrary sentences to women. A majority of imprisoned women have been charged or are imprisoned for transgressing social norms and mores.

Utah girls should realize how lucky they are. They are just as guilty of having sex as their muslim sisters and yet their leaders are generous and only seek to punish them with the forced childbirth of their own siblings and the offspring of their rapists. That’s because America is civilized.

One of these fine leaders puts it this way:

“There is a life inside of this life. And how that life is taken care of is very important to me,” said Sen. Darin Peterson, R-Nephi.

How the life it’s inside of is taken care of — not so much. That life apparently gave up any claim to being cared for when she allowed her father to rape her.

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Wedgie A La Carte

by digby

I’m with Kevin on this. I’ve never thought that a la carte cable was all that because I know that I’ll probably end up paying the same for fewer channels. It’s just the way these things work. But if Pat Robertson and Jerry Fallwell are against it, I’m for it. These hucksters prey on lonely dupes in their homes, take their money and then use it to support corporate Republican politics.

Nothing would make me happier than to cancel all the religious programming from my cable line-up. And I would particularly like to tell ABC Family that I am cancelling their channel specifically because it carries the 700 Club.

I suspect that the religious programmers understand something that a lot of people in the media do not. What people say they want and what they will do are different things. Americans like to say they are religious, but many more want their MTV than want the 700 club.

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Curmudgeon Of The Moment

by digby

Can someone tell my why Jack Cafferty doesn’t have his own show on CNN? They should put him up against O’Reilly. He’s the guy who’s riding the zeitgeist right now. Between him and Lou “I’m having an aneuryism” Dobbs, CNN could siphon off some of the FoxNews “Dad who is always mad” audience they’ve coveted for so long.

GOP and Bush worship is so 2004. Fox’s ratings are falling…

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Take This Survey And Win A Million Bucks

Not really.

But, Blogads is doing a survey and the results are always interesting. If you’d like to take it and you want to put this blog on line #23, use the word Hullabaloo.

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Neocon Pipedreams

by digby

Robert Hutchings, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council from 2003 to 2005, said the October 2003 study was part of a “steady stream” of dozens of intelligence reports warning Bush and his top lieutenants that the insurgency was intensifying and expanding.

“Frankly, senior officials simply weren’t ready to pay attention to analysis that didn’t conform to their own optimistic scenarios,” Hutchings said in a telephone interview.

[…]

In Congress on Tuesday, Army Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, testified that the insurgency “remains strong, and resilient.”

Maples said that while Iraqi terrorists and foreign fighters conduct some of the most spectacular attacks, disaffected Iraqi Sunnis make up the insurgency’s core. “So long as Sunni Arabs are denied access to resources and lack a meaningful presence in government, they will continue to resort to violence,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

That view contrasts with what the administration said as the insurgency began in the months following the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion and gained traction in the fall. Bush and his aides portrayed it as the work primarily of foreign terrorists crossing Iraq’s borders, disenfranchised former officials of Saddam’s deposed regime and criminals.

[…]

As recently as May 2005, Cheney told a television interviewer: “I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.”

White, who worked at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, said of the administration: “They’ve gone through various excuse phases.”

Now, he said, “The levels of resistance are pretty much as high as they were a year ago.”

Hutchings, now diplomat in residence at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, said intelligence specialists repeatedly ran up against policymakers’ rosy predictions.

“The mindset downtown was that people were willing to accept that things were pretty bad, but not that they were going to get worse, so our analyses tended to get dismissed as `nay-saying and hand-wringing,’ to quote the president’s press spokesman,” he said.

The result, he said, was that top political and military officials focused on ways of dealing with foreign jihadists and disaffected Saddam loyalists, rather than with other pressing problems, such as growing Iraqi anger at the U.S.-led occupation and the deteriorating economic and security situation.

This certainly put the lie to one of the (many) excuses as to why they screwed up on WMD: that they had underestimated Saddam’s capabilities before the Gulf War and were being prudently skeptical of those who said he wasn’t close to having nuclear weapons in 2002. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that they just don’t believe anything they don’t want to believe. In this case the intelligence was “too pessimistic.” And here they’ve been saying that 9/11 changed everything and you can’t be too careful.

I have long said that the neocons have always been wrong about everything, and this is but another example. They have always refused to accept things that don’t fit their preconceived notions. This goes back to the 70’s and Team B and the missile gap. Rummy was up to his neck in that too and was just as wrong then as he is now. They were still fighting the cold war as late as 1992.

This has gone on long enough. Any “liberal hawk” who goes along with these nuts in the future should be required to prove, on his own, with no data from them, that his position is correct. Never again should the political establishment take these people at their word for anything — and their data should be independently checked more than once. The old birds in the GOP defense establishment used to know this and they kept these nutballs at a distance. After all, if they’d have had their way during the cold war they would have launched a pre-emptive nuclear war. They have shown themselves willing to do anything and believe anything that comports with their worldview even if it has no basis in fact. They think they can change reality by sheer will — or politics. They can’t.

Update: Clearly, their propaganda arm is still with the program.

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Best Friends

by digby

Yesterday:

Bush said there was intense discussion inside his campaign when the 15-minute videotape was released, which he described as “an interesting entry by our enemy.”

“I thought it was going to help,” Bush told the author. “I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden doesn’t want Bush to be the president, something must be right with Bush.”

That would, of course, explain this from March 13, 2002

Q: But don’t you believe that the threat that bin Laden posed won’t truly be eliminated until he is found either dead or alive?

BUSH: Well, as I say, we haven’t heard much from him. And I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don’t know where he is. I — I’ll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run. I was concerned about him, when he had taken over a country. I was concerned about the fact that he was basically running Afghanistan and calling the shots for the Taliban.

Hey heartland, I bet you didn’t know that bin Laden worked for the Bush campaign did you? He stayed silent throughout the lead up to the Iraq invasion, never stepping on Junior’s “Saddam is Satan” storyline. And then he stepped in just before a very close election and helped his pal Bush over the finish line. He owed him. Bush had let him go at Tora Bora, after all, and allowed his good friend Musharref to turn a blind eye for four years. And no enemy of the US could ever hope to have someone more dumb and ineffectual than the Codpiece in charge. He completes him.

Now, of course, Bush is focusing on his pal again because it ups the boogeyman meter to neon pink. He dropped in on Afghanistan today for the photo op:

“It’s not a matter of if they’re captured and brought to justice, it’s when they’re brought to justice,” Bush said. “I am confident he will be brought to justice. What’s happening is that we’ve got U.S. forces on the hunt. … There are Afghan forces on the hunt, not only for bin Laden but also those who plot and plan with him. We’ve got Pakistan forces on the hunt.”

I’m sure Osama will appropriately go “boo” at just the right moment. These guys could be “Dancing With The Stars” champions, they are so in sync.

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Bill Of Goods

by digby

John Kerry: What kind of message does it send to be sending money to open firehouses in Iraq, but we’re shutting firehouses who are the first-responders here in America…

The president hasn’t put one nickel, not one nickel into the effort to fix some of our tunnels and bridges and most exposed subway systems…

Ninety-five percent of the containers that come into the ports, right here in Florida, are not inspected.

This president thought it was more important to give the wealthiest people in America a tax cut rather than invest in homeland security…

George W Bush: I don’t think we want to get to how he’s going to pay for all these promises. It’s like a huge tax gap…

My administration has tripled the amount of money we’re spending on homeland security to $30bn a year.

John Kerry: The test is not whether you’re spending more money. The test is, are you doing everything possible to make America safe?

We didn’t need that tax cut. America needed to be safe.

George W Bush: Of course we’re doing everything we can to protect America. I wake up every day thinking about how best to protect America.

Where are we supposed to find the money for this so-called “Homeland Security?”

The White House said Thursday that it plans to ask Congress for an additional $70 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, driving the cost of military operations in the two countries to $120 billion this year, the highest ever.

Most of the new money would pay for the war in Iraq, which has cost an estimated $250 billion since the U.S. invasion in March 2003.

The additional spending, along with other war funding the Bush administration will seek separately in its regular budget next week, would push the price tag for combat and nation-building since Sept. 11, 2001, to nearly a half-trillion dollars, approaching the inflation-adjusted cost of the 13-year Vietnam War.

The cost of military operations in 2006 is $35 billion higher than what Congress had estimated a few months ago that the Defense Department would need this year. The higher costs are occurring even as the Pentagon is planning to reduce troop levels in Iraq in coming months, reflecting the continuing wear and damage to military equipment in desert combat, the need to upgrade protection for U.S. troops and the effort to train and equip Iraqi forces.

No large-scale reconstruction projects are included in the spending, officials said.

Currently, the Defense Department says it is spending about $4.5 billion a month on the conflict in Iraq, or about $100,000 per minute.

Oh, and then there’s this:

THE SKEWED BENEFITS OF THE TAX CUTS, 2007-2016: If the Tax Cuts Are Extended, Millionaires Will Receive More than $600 Billion over the Next Decade

Life is full of choices. The American people chose to go into Iraq and give huge tax breaks to millionaires through the year 2016 and are willing to pay the price for those priorities.

Aren’t they?

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Comforter

by digby

VARGAS: When you look back on those days immediately following when Katrina struck, what moment do you think was the moment that you realized that the government was failing, especially the people of New Orleans?

BUSH: When I saw TV reporters interviewing people who were screaming for help. It looked the scenes looked chaotic and desperate. And I realized that our government was could have done a better job of comforting people.

Bush has been using the “comfort” word since 9/11 and it gets more absurd the more time that passes. Karen Hughes came up with it during the 2000 campaign because she thinks it appeals to women and they trotted it out constantly after 9/11.

“The American people, obviously, if they see something that is suspicious, something out of the norm that looks suspicious, they ought to notify local law authorities. But in the meantime, they ought to take comfort in knowing our government is doing everything we possibly can.”

“And America is comforted by the fact that we are united as we stand to fight terror.”

“Americans should find comfort in knowing that millions of their fellow citizens are working every day to ensure our security at every level — federal, state, county, municipal.”

“We think differently about those who go to work every single day to protect us and save us and comfort us.”

I’ve been hearing it a lot again lately and wondered why.

“the more people learn” about the deal and the government’s scrutiny of it, “the more they’ll be comforted.”

Now I get it:

“The repetition of the news coming out of Iraq is wearing folks down,” Reed said. “It started with women and it’s spreading. It’s just bad news after bad news after bad news, without any light at the end of the tunnel.”

The women are the first out the door. I suspect it’s because many of them see Bush now and are reminded of the embarrassing, dumbshit macho boyfriend (or husband) they once had. His little verbal gaffes aren’t adorable any longer — they set her teeth on edge. His arrogant swagger nauseates her. His childish habits are sexually repellant. The word “comfort” coming from him makes her want to scream. It’s over.

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Limited Nativism

by digby

Tristero has already linked to this great interview with Mark Danner and I too recommend that you read it if you haven’t already. It’s interesting in dozens of different ways, but I wanted to highlight something specific:

TD: They’re really extreme American nationalists, though you can’t use that word in this country.

Danner: That’s true, and they combine with this belief in great-power America an almost nativist distrust of international institutions. That’s the difference between Truman America and this regime in its approach to foreign policy. They put international institutions in a similar class with terrorism –- that is, weapons of the weak.

Ah. Yes, they have very skillfully stoked this nativism with distrust of international institutions. This has long been an effective tool on the right from the Panama Canal to the UN black helicopter crowd. Recently, they have stoked this nativism with distrust of our allies too. I have been quite amused to see all of the rightwingers clutching their pearls about “alienating our friends” after their performance in 2003 in which some of them were actually agitating to attack France and Germany. Watching them stutter and dissemble about our great and valued ally the United Arab Emirates is just funny. Freedom falafels anyone?

But then this port deal doesn’t really fit the storyline, does it? It’s not about an international institution or a real ally. From what we’ve seen these last few years, they would never have gone to such lengths to defend it if it were. It’s about an international corporation and that goes beyond borders, beyond alliances and beyond institutions. That’s sacred ground to the big money boys of the Republican establishment.

I don’t know if people are consciously aware of this distinction, but if they were I don’t think they would be impressed by it. Basically, the Republicans are saying that we cannot trust long standing internatinal institutions, long standing international law or even long standing close allies — but we should take it on faith that international corporations, even those owned by dodgy middle eastern monarchies, can be trusted not to harm our national security. Their all encompassing belief in the market has extended to national security.

This nativist impulse that has been so skillfully exploited by the Republican party is not allowed beyond the boardroom door. Is this ok with the white working class Republican base? I wonder.

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Programmed Cynicism

by digby

I had noticed the propensity of the gasbags to characterize Democratic criticism of the Dubai ports deal as a craven political move to Bush’s right. Media Matters has gathered together quite a comepndium of quotes, many of them not coming from the openly right wing media. My favorite is this one, from Evan Thomas of Newsweak:

THOMAS: One thing that strikes me is — it is hilarious to watch the Democrats, who are all against racial profiling except in this case, where they’re racially profiling an entire country, and the Hillary Clintons — there’s a lot about Hillary Clinton in the other subtext here. Hillary and the Democrats need to get somehow to the right of President Reagan on something.

Nice of him to confuse Bush with St. Reagan. Those Republican talking points are potent, aren’t they?

But let’s examine the entire statement for perfectly layered GOP spin, shall we? First of all, the Democrats’ response is “hilarious.” It’s absurd to think that they could be serious about national security. They are, as always, ridiculous. Especially compared to the suave, smoothtalking insiders like Thomas.

Second, the idea that this is racial profiling is right out of the wingnut playbook. It’s called the “I know you are but what am I” strategy. They accuse Democrats of being racists/sexist/ageist, whatever, to put them on the defensive. Democrats still care about hypocrisy and second guess what they are doing when this happens. The GOP, on the other hand, has no problem apeing liberal talking points on their own behalf (often with a snide smirk on their face) and pretending to be offended by things they are not offended by. Picture Orrin Hatch going on and on about Democrats being racist for opposing Janice Rogers Brown, the sharecropper’s daughter.

Dems could turn the tables if they would get all red in the face and start railing about political correctness and the right’s being in the pocket of arab terrorists and racial minorities, but they don’t play that game very well. It is, after all, fucked-up race baiting no matter how you slice it. I suspect that we are going to have to find a way to live with this nonsense and have faith that a majority of the American public can see through their little performance. Liberals have built up many, many years of credibility on this issue. We know who we are and so does everyone else. (And the idea of the Republicans defending Arabs from left wing prejudice is guffaw-inducing to anyone who isn’t drunk on 151 — or a member of the DC press corps. This alone clinches the argument.)

The most serious part of Thomas’ smug criticism is the part about the Democrats, particularly Hillary, desperate to “get to the right of Bush” on national security. It is evidently incomprehensible to Thomas and the rest of the beltway courtiers that the Democrats might be legitimately concerned about the topic. They persist in this ridiculous assumption even though we are dependent on what even they must finally be realizing is the most incompetent administration in history. Doesn’t that make these people, who live in New York and Washington, just a little bit nervous?

As the media themselves have told us ad nauseum, everything is narrative. If that’s so then this port deal is emblematic of the larger story of Bush’s incompetence in waging the war on terrorism — the lack of awareness, the wasted money, the wrong strategy, the failed execution — all of it. iraq showed the world that our intelligence is terrible and that our military is stretched by a simple war and occupation. Katrina showed the world that our response to an emergency is worse than it was before 9/11. For all the talk about loose lips sinking ships, I can’t think of anything any whistleblower has done that gives al Qaeda more information about our vulnerabilities than the terrible performance of this administration.

The Democrats have long been complaining about Bush’s laissez faire attitude toward homeland security, Hillary being at the forefront. That isn’t running to Bush’s “right” which makes very little sense when it comes to the war on terrorism. (To really run to his right a Democrat would have to endorse a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Finland.) It’s criticizing a very real flaw in Bush’s national security strategy. In Hillary’s case, if it’s politics, it the old adage “all politics is local.” She represents New York and there are ample pragmatic reasons for her to take on Bush’s lackadaisical approach to homeland security. In fact, I suspect that her constituents demand it, and for good reason. It already happened to them once. She has been talking quite sepcifically about port security for some time — as was John Kerry, who the media also ridiculed as being a hilarious, flip-flopping opportunist.

Perhaps if they would take their eyes off their mirrors for a minute or two, the elite media could entertain the thought that these Democrats are not talking out of their asses. This is a legitimate issue. The worst terrorist attack in American history took place on the Republicans’ watch and they’ve fucked up everything they’ve touched since then. Perhaps codpieces and trash talk aren’t adequate to the task at hand.

Thomas is one of the biggest purveyors of the smug, cynical conventional wisdom that permeates the political media. Long after it was rasonable to defend this unpopular president’s alleged prowess on national security they did it. And they refuse to let go of the notion that no matter how fucked up the Republicans are, the Democrats are worse. Winning elections may not even change this. I’m beginning to suspect that this is a generational identification with GOP political values, where good government or nuanced policy is always pooh-poohed by the these kewl kids who see governance through the lens of the puerile college Republican style of political combat. It may take a new generation of people who haven’t mistaken dorky DC hipster cynicism for insight.

Like this guy, for instance.

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