Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Flower Shops and Bodegas

by digby

Via Crooks and Liars

What planet does this man live on?

MATTHEWS: Welcome back. Antonio—Antonio Villaraigosa?

MAYOR ANTONIO VILLARAIGOSA (D), LOS ANGELES: Villaraigosa.

MATTHEWS: Villaraigosa. Is the first Latino mayor of Los Angeles since, catch this, 1872. He’s also been picked, more importantly, to deliver the Spanish-speaking response to the president’s State of the Union address next week. Well, the big question is, will it sound different in a different language, your response, from the Democrats’ response of the Governor Tim Kaine of Virginia?

VILLARAIGOSA: Well, the answer is I made it absolutely clear that I had to have control of the editorial content of this response, since it’s mine. And I thought it’s important—I think any message should be a hopeful message, a positive message, one that speaks to the American dream for more people.

MATTHEWS: What’s the difference in tenor when you speak in English and Spanish? Is there more of a—a more of a—I don’t want to be derogatory, but I know it sounds better. It’s more upbeat? It’s more positive? What would be—call it—more romantic?

VILLARAIGOSA: No, I try to—well, first of all, I was born in the U.S., so my English is a lot stronger than my Spanish, but I say that the message is the same

Is he drunk? The State of the Union response will sound more romantic in spanish? Jesus H.Christ. Maybe we can get Marc Antony and J-Lo to sing the motherfucker, Chris. With a taco in one hand and a pinata in the other.

This is why we cannot have people ever thinking this man is a Democrat. It’s rich, pampered beltway bubble boys like him who are killing us.

But that wasn’t all. Tweety, the voice of the manly working man, had this to say about immigrants:

MATTHEWS: When I think of people who have come to this country from other countries where they speak Spanish—Puerto Rico is not another country, but it’s the commonwealth—hardest working people, they are extremely entrepreneurial. If it’s just owning a flower ship, it’s owning a small business, a bodega, right? Puerto Ricans come to this country to start business. Cubans certainly come here to start businesses. The hardest working people in the United States are people who just got here from Mexico, the first day they get here. Everybody knows—they don’t want a big social democracy. They want free enterprise and entrepreneurialism, don’t they?

VILLARAIGOSA: I think what they want…

MATTHEWS: They sound like they’re natural Republicans to me.

That’s certainly the first time I’ve heard “needing to earn a dollar so I can eat today” described as being “entrepreneurial.” Or Republican.

Poor people are natural Republicans because they work hard to survive. I assume the opposite is true as well. Rich people are natural Democrats because they sit on their asses all day like parasites living off of other people’s hard work. No? Oh that’s right. Rich people are the most productive people in the economy so they shouldn’t be asked to pay a fair share of their income — because they’d lose their motivation to work so hard. See how this works? Everybody who works or hires people who work is a natural Republican in Tweety’s world. Fifty percent of the nation just doesn’t know it. Except for the fags, of course. And the bitches. And the blacks.

Tweety likes to see himself as a man of the people and he is. He’s a man of the rich celebrity people. But even in his little beltway bubble he still has his finger on the pulse of one fine group of regular Americans: the bigots:

The mayor got a firsthand look at the different values held by some Americans as he was peppered with questions about immigration from callers on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal.”

After saying that Los Angeles is not going to follow the lead of Costa Mesa and involve police officers more in identifying illegal immigrants, a caller from Arkansas said not enough was being done to counter illegal immigration.

The woman declared: “It’s only after the influx of illegals that you were elected, sir. How is this possible?”

Clearly stunned, Villaraigosa responded, “Are you kidding?” After a long silence, he added, “I was born in the United States.”

The mayor of the second biggest city in the nation has to inform bigoted assholes from Arkansas and big money celebrities on MSNBC alike that he was born in America and English is his first language. Unbelievable.

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Thin Skin Tim

by digby

I hear the High Priest of Kewl Kid High is all upset that Arianna is reporting that the Carville radio talk show The Monsignor promoted on his show this past week-end is being produced by his own son — a fact which he omitted. But then he has a habit of omitting information — like the dozens of discussions on his show about the Plame leak without telling his viewers that he was a primary witness, for instance. (He’s since revealed that a reporter has no ethical obligation to tell the public what he knows if doing so might harm his relationships with his social class.)

But this thing with his son really is beyond the pale. How could Arianna delve into his private life like this … into his family for crying out loud? This is his son who has been outed as a radio producer on the pages of the mighty Huffington Post. For shame.

Of course there are times when it’s absolutely necessary to drag the family into it, as in this case: Russert’s first exchange with presidential candidate Howard Dean in his first appearance on Meet The Press in 2003 (via the Daily Howler)

RUSSERT: You said that your son got in a scrap. He was arrested for driving a car in which some of his friends broke into a beer cooler and stole some beer—

DEAN: Right.

RUSSERT: —and was indicted. How are you—

DEAN: He hasn’t been indicted, but he—

RUSSERT: Cited.

DEAN: He’s been cited, right.

Howard Dean had no expectation that his teenage son’s mortifying lapse in judgment would not be talked about on Press The Meat. I’m sure he was prepared for it, although he might have thought that something more important would open the discussion (or at least that Russert wouldn’t claim his high school aged kid was indicted.) Still, it’s part of the game, and public families know what they are getting into. Everybody is just doing their jobs, no matter how sleazy.

But apparently, if someone points out that Father Tim is shilling for his kid’s show on Press The Meat without revealing his son’s involvement, it’s out of bounds, deserving of a full PR push back from NBC News replete with sour grapes from none other than professional Republican sleazebag, Ed Rollins.

Interesting ethics you’ve got there, padre. I must have missed that day in Aquinas class.

Check out the Tim Russert Blog. Leave a comment and help push it to the top of Google search. His Holiness is a busy man and his assistants don’t have time to search for all the things people say about him. Let’s make it easy for him.

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What A Coincidence

by digby

So, Via Talk Left, I see that the lead prosecutor in the Abramoff case is leaving because Bush has appointed him to a federal judgeship:

The prosecutor, Noel L. Hillman, is chief of the department’s public integrity division, and the move ends his involvement in an inquiry that has reached into the administration as well as the top ranks of the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill.

….Colleagues at the Justice Department say Mr. Hillman has been involved in day-to-day management of the Abramoff investigation since it began almost two year ago. The inquiry, which initially focused on accusations that Mr. Abramoff defrauded Indian tribes out of tens of millions of dollars in lobbying fees, is being described within the department as the most important federal corruption investigation in a generation.

Shumer and Salazar are calling for a special prosecutor.

When I read this a minute ago, I was reminded of a similar story from a month ago:

The Florida prosecutor investigating radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh will soon be weighing cases rather than prosecuting them.

Gov. Jeb Bush has announced Assistant State Attorney James Martz has been appointed a Palm Beach County judge, filling a vacancy left after this year’s legislative session.

TOM

Senator Cauly apologized for not coming personally — he said you’d understand. Also, some of the judges. They’ve all sent gifts.

(then, toasting to the Don)

Salute!

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Whirlwind

by digby

With all of my politicking today I failed to note this unbelievable development in the mid-east: the terrists won an election in Palestine. And they won big time.

What does this mean for the preznits cartoon foreign policy? Here I thought that democracy was all like magic ‘n shit and we were spreadin’ freedom to everybody so they’d love us.

Here’s Juan Cole:

How do you like your democracy now, Mr. Bush?

Jan. 27, 2006 | The stunning victory of the militant Muslim fundamentalist Hamas Party in the Palestinian elections underlines the central contradictions in the Bush administration’s policies toward the Middle East. Bush pushes for elections, confusing them with democracy, but seems blind to the dangers of right-wing populism. At the same time, he continually undermines the moderate and secular forces in the region by acting high-handedly or allowing his clients to do so. As a result, Sunni fundamentalist parties, some with ties to violent cells, have emerged as key players in Iraq, Egypt and Palestine.

Democracy depends not just on elections but on a rule of law, on stable institutions, on basic economic security for the population, and on checks and balances that forestall a tyranny of the majority. Elections in the absence of this key societal context can produce authoritarian regimes and abuses as easily as they can produce genuine people power. Bush is on the whole unwilling to invest sufficiently in these key institutions and practices abroad. And by either creating or failing to deal with hated foreign occupations, he has sown the seeds for militant Islamist movements that gain popularity because of their nationalist credentials.

[…]

Bush has boxed himself into an impossible situation. He promoted elections that have produced results opposite of the ones he wanted. For all his constant rhetoric about his determination to hunt down and kill terrorists, in Palestine he has in effect helped install into power a group he calls “terrorists.” His confusion over whether this is democracy, which should be legitimate, or is an unacceptable outcome — and his unwillingness to address the underlying issues behind the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — suggest that a fatal paralysis will continue to afflict the region.

The man who is planning to run the mid-terms on his great success as a wartime president just facilitated the first elected Islamic terrorist government and delegitimized moderates throughout the region. That’s quite an achievement.

Here’s what the commentators were saying tonight on Lehrer. (Both of them looked like they were giong to shoot themselves right after the show was over.)

KHALIL JAHSHAN: I think the program that the president has been advocating has definitely suffered as a consequence of these elections. There is a big question mark right now on a program that was hastily put together post 9/11 without thinking of the consequences of this type of advocacy of democracy without tilling the ground, if you will, or tilling the soil to allow that type of democracy to grow and to be able to nurture it from a distance. These results, I think, made that criticism a lot more credible and more forceful today than yesterday.

[…]

MARTIN INDYK: Basically, look, I agree that recently we’ve heard the last few days some interesting statements from Olmert at the Herzliya Conference, some of the Hamas leaders during the election showing some hope that one could build on. But frankly this is deja vu in the sense that these results I think have set us back probably 20 if not 30 years.

We’re going to go back to again negotiating over charters and negotiating over removing the destruction of this party by the other party. And so there is — the chances of two parties who have conducted ten years of negotiations coming back to the table and restarting their negotiations from where things stopped right now are much dimmer. These chances are much dimmer and much slimmer than anticipated.

I’m sure all the warbloggers have been feverishly typing “bring it on!” all day. But this is actually very serious stuff and it is a direct result of a simpleminded American policy. It isn’t the first failure and it is going to be far from the last. You cannot successfully run the world on comic book slogans and third rate biblical homilies. When the Supreme Court installed a halfwit in the oval office we reaped the whirlwind.

Oh, and in case anyone’s thinking that this really wasn’t in the hands of Americans:

MARTIN INDYK: … And, by the way, one should say in this regard, that there was an opportunity to postpone the election. Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the PA wanted to do so. But this administration insisted that it go ahead.

When it comes to elections, there is nothing more sacred to a Republican than an arbitrary, meaningless deadline.

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Learning To Lose Well

by digby

I hope some of the comments I’m reading around the blogosphere aren’t reflections of of a knee jerk cynicism on the part of Democrats who have fallen in love with their assessment that they are superior to their elected leaders. This is a very dangerous state of mind.

John Kerry stepped up today. Apparently, that isn’t enough for some. He is still a “loser” in their eyes and is to be shunned. He didn’t do it soon enough. Or he didn’t do it right. Or he is nothing but a political opportunist. I’m beginning to think that some Democrats have gotten attached to their vision of Democrats as losers so they won’t be emotionally shattered anymore. That’s understandable. It’s painful to get beaten. But, the rank and file need to step up too and be willing to lose and not hate ourselves or our leaders for it. How we lose on issues like this makes the difference for the future.

Sustaining a filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee is a huge undertaking with the numbers we have. (Read Kos’ Reality Check on this.) It’s worth doing anyway because it’s important to stand up for principles. We can “lose well” by beginning to make a case to the American people that we believe in something other than splitting the difference. And we might just pull it off. Either way, we make the country (and the media) see that there are lines that we won’t cross.

But the way some people are acting, if we now lose this one it will be seen by the grassroots as just another example of Democratic fecklessness, even Kerry’s fecklessness, which is self-defeating and unfair. If we carp when our elected politicans take risks just as we carp when they don’t take risks, they have no motivation to listen to us at all.

Kerry and Kennedy stepped up today. They aren’t going down without a fight. This is worth doing and if we lose it, we should reward them and those who stood with them with our gratitude and support not another round of complaints about how they are a bunch of losers.

Go vote in this stupid CNN poll and give Kerry some props for doing something out of conviction. This isn’t a big winner for him and he didn’t have to do it. We need to let our politicans know we have their back when they take a stand.

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Heterosexually Yours

by digby

The General is passing the collection plate. He sits on the right hand of Republican Jesus, so helping him is the same as helping the Lord.

A General’s Prayer:

Lord, please bless the State Security Apparatus, that it might conduct it’s wiretaps to the best of its abilities. Provide Our Leader with the ability to look into our bedrooms, so that He might catch French politicians putting their little soldiers in ladies’ mouths and watch celebrities doing it. And Lord, let him share those videos with godly men like myself, who may then rail against these evils from our pulpits.

And bless our interrogators and their glowsticks and electrified nipple clamps of freedom. Provide them with the ability to induce pain as close as possible to that experienced during organ failure without quite equaling it.

And give us the ability to kill brown people more efficiently, so that our contractors may garner more fruit from their labor.

Praise Be.

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Filibuster!

by digby

John Kerry is calling for a filibuster of Alito. Flood your Senators’ offices with phone calls now.

Here are the phone numbers.

Might I make a special appeal for Califronia voters to make a forceful appeal to our Senator Dianne Feinstein. She is supposed to be a voice for women in the Senate and right now she is a voice for lukewarm water. Let her know that her constituents demand that she represent the people of California’s support for a women’s right to choose and a judiciary of fairminded jurists, not Federalist Society fascists.

(202) 224-3841—Washington
(415) 393-0707—San Francisco
(310) 914-7300—L.A.
(619) 231-9712—San Diego
(559) 485-7430—Fresno

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Men Of Principle

by digby

The Editors deconstruct the Deborah Howell story as only they can. An excerpt, regarding those who bemoan the new leftist barbarity:

When one is an Elder Statesman of the American media, and when one can’t be bothered to look into the particular details of some issue, it is never a bad idea to fall back on Ecclesiastes, and remind the readers – in a tone as wise and weary as you can muster – that the seasons change and the winds blow now this way, now that, turn turn turn, but there is nothing new under the Sun. As there was a time of saying Clinton was a coke-dealing Commie and a serial rapist, now comes the time of saying that George W. Bush shouldn’t run secret torture prisons. Men of Principle lament both of these equally, for they are just two sides of the same lamentable coin. Vanity of vanity, all of it. Can’t we just play nice?

Amen.

Political Fandango

by digby

I know that Atrios and others have already discussed this, but it’s such an obvious example of Tweety bullshit that I have to pile on.

Matthews yesterday claimed that an ad about GOP corruption implied incorrectly that DeLay was charged with bribery:

MATTHEWS: Dana, you’ve got to love it. This is America in action. Have you noticed in the Democrat ad, though, they do a close-up on Tom DeLay and they said “bribery”? Well, that’s not a charge against Tom DeLay. His charge is this thing about hard money, soft money. It’s a political little bit of a fandango. But nobody’s accused him yet of bribery. But that ad sure does.

The problem is that it clearly doesn’t. The ad shows a picture of DeLay when they say “money laundering” and a picture of Abramoff when they say “bribery.”

This is the kind of stuff Matthews does all the time. Just recently he had really bizarre hissy fit about Alito:

MATTHEWS: Well, I don’t know, I mean the Democrats, I’ve got a, I’m sitting here holding in my hands a pretty disgusting document. This is a, uh, put out for not for attribution, but it comes from the Democrats. They’re circulating it, I can say that. And in their complaint sheet against Judge Alito’s nomination, the first thing they nail about this Italian-American is he failed to win a mob conviction in a trial 20 years ago or — way back in ’88. In other words, they nail him on not putting, putting some mobst — Italian mobsters in jail, the Lucchese family. Why would they bring up this ethnically charged issue as the first item they raise against Judge Alito? This is either a bad, a very bad coincidence, or very bad politics. And either way, it’s going to hurt them. This document — not abortion rights, not civil rights, the fact he failed to nail some mobsters back in 1988. And this is at the top of their list of what they got against this guy. Amazingly bad politics.

He was so way out there on that one, that it didn’t even get traction among the Republicans. The document was about Alito being a lousy lawyer, which was clear when you read it —- unless you are Chris Matthews, of course, whose world is filled with people who love Bush for his sunny nobility and lying Democrats who slime fine public servants like the “moderate living” Tom Delay for crimes they didn’t commit. He is living in Bush’s bubble.

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Gentleman’s Agreement

by digby

Maureen Dowd is the Queen Bee of the Kewl Kidz. And she is one of those most responsible for the media’s current narrative of American Politics: Republicans are jocks, Democrats are nerds.

Here’s Dowd’s nasty and dangerous little sideswipe today:

“As the White House drives its truckload of lies around the country, it becomes ever clearer that Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Al Gore are just not the right people to respond to the administration’s national security scare-a-thon.”

And whoever does end up speaking for the Democrats will also fall short. In Maureen’s world, a Democrat is an object of derision, always. She may put down the Republicans, but she always reinforces the accepted narrative: Republican strong/Democrat weak. She has reduced the whole world into her stifled little junior high dating drama, and her influence is immense. She represents one of the most serious problems Democrats have.

Reed Hundt takes Maureen on today in a scathing post over at TPM. But here’s the nut:

In its way, this sorry tale resembles that of many other erstwhile liberals in the mainstream media who, when invited to the never-ending Washington cocktail party, have chosen to smile obligingly at the contemptible remarks made about progressives rather than to express repugnance for the viciousness. Ms Dowd is famously shy in person, they say, but in writing she’s laughing it up at the bar with the rest of the crowd. The original movie version was Gentlemen’s Agreement, starring Gregory Peck.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with that movie, here’s the pertinent passage from the NY Times review:

This film stars Gregory Peck as recently widowed journalist Phil Green. With a growing son (Dean Stockwell) to support, Green is receptive to the invitation of magazine publisher John Minify (Albert Dekker) to write a series of hard-hitting articles on the scourge of anti-Semitism. In order to glean his information first hand, Green decides to pose as a Jew. As the weeks go by, Green experiences all manner of prejudice, the most insidious being the subtle, “gentleman’s agreement” form of bigotry wherein anti-Jewish sentiments are merely taken for granted. Green’s pose takes a toll on his budding romance with Minify’s niece Kathy (Dorothy McGuire), who comes to realize by her own example that even those who insist that they harbor no anti-Semitic feelings are also capable of prejudic

This is why we out in the hinterland are alarmed by people like Deborah Howell and Chris Matthews. These are people who are not open partisans. Yet by “gentlemean’s agreement” they take for granted certain negative assumptions about Democrats and pump them out into the body politic. It has been so internalized that they seem to not even know they are doing it. In a world where toxic liberal-eliminationist rhetoric is openly celebrated as “mainstream” and where liberals are commonly derided as cowardly and denounced as treasonous, this is very disturbing indeed.

I’m sure that most of Washington laughed uproariously when Grover Norquist made this crude characterization of Democrats as animals last January:

Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they’ve been fixed, then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful. They don’t go around peeing on the furniture and such.

And I’m sure that the same people whose sides were splitting over that hilarious bon mot were nodding their heads in agreement when Lindsay Graham admonished the Democrats to behave with decorum toward Samuel Alito and then fell over with the vapors when readers of the Washington Post rebelled against an ombudsman who refused to acknowledge a biased assumption. Not only are we democrats cowardly and tresonaous, we have no sense of humor, either. That’s the curency of the nation’s capital.

Many of us out here in the country are seeing a capital that operates in dozens of ways on a Gentleman’s Agreement that Democrats are bad. Our values are wrong, our leaders are dishonest, our philosophy is weak, our policies are ridiculous and our beliefs are immoral. The conventional wisdom is crystalizing into prejudice.

Here’s Howard Kurtz talking about Rush Limbaugh (via the Daily Howler):

KURTZ: Has Tom Daschle lost a couple of screws?

Did the normally mild-mannered senator accuse Rush Limbaugh of inciting violence?

He came pretty darn close. There were cameras there. You can watch the replay.

We can understand that Daschle is down, just having lost his majority leader’s job and absorbed plenty of blame for this month’s Democratic debacle.

What we can’t understand is how the South Dakotan can suggest that a mainstream conservative with a huge radio following is somehow whipping up wackos to threaten Daschle and his family.

Has the senator listened to Rush lately? Sure, he aggressively pokes fun at Democrats and lionizes Republicans, but mainly about policy. He’s so mainstream that those right-wingers Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert had him on their Election Night coverage.

Here is the commentary Daschle was referring to:

Limbaugh: You seek political advantage with the nation at war. There is no greater testament to the depths to which the Democratic Party and liberalism have fallen. You now position yourself, Senator Daschle, to exploit future terrorist attacks for political gain. You are worse, sir, than the ambulance-chasing tort lawyers that make up your chief contributors. You, sir, are a disgrace. You are a disgrace to patriotism, you are a disgrace to this country, you are a disgrace to the Senate, and you ought to be a disgrace to the Democratic Party but sadly you’re probably a hero among some of them today…

Way to demoralize the troops, Senator! What more do you want to do to destroy this country than what you’ve already tried? [pounding table] It is unconscionable what this man has done! This stuff gets broadcast around the world, Senator. What do you want your nickname to be? Hanoi Tom? Tokyo Tom? You name it, you can have it apparently. You sit there and pontificate on the fact that we’re not winning the war on terrorism when you and your party have done nothing but try to sabotage it, which you are continuing to do. This little speech of yours yesterday, and this appearance of yours on television last night, let’s call it what it is. It’s nothing more than an attempt to sabotage the war on terrorism for your own personal and your party’s political gain. This is cheap. And it’s beneath even you. And that’s pretty low.

In case anyone failed to notice, Daschle lost his next election. And nobody connected the dots, least of all Howard Kurtz or Maureen Dowd, who bask in the glow of establishment approbation for mainstreaming the idea that Democrats are crazy, ineffectual and treasonous.

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