Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Good morning.

I’m Julia, and Digby’s asked me to put some stuff up here for a few days.

I thought I’d introduce myself by giving you a little background on our local New York Republican mess, since it’s been in the national papers quite abit lately, and there’s nothing quite so… operatic… in its sheer byzantine silliness as our local New York Republican mess.

from the Times: Republican federal corruption OG Al D’Amato sticks his oar in on behalf of the Democrat

Alfonse M. D’Amato, the former senator, sharply criticized a leading Republican candidate for governor, William F. Weld, saying last night that Mr. Weld was under the “cloud” of a federal investigation for once running a “sham college.”

Mr. D’Amato, a Republican, also chastised Mr. Weld for resigning as governor of Massachusetts in 1997, before his second term was over, and then seeking to lead New York “without any real experience here.”

…

Mr. D’Amato also said that Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor, had done an “excellent” job in office.

This is remarkably interesting for what it says about the current state of New York Republican politics.

a brief digression about Mr. Pataki, Mr. D’Amato and local politics, recent and not-so-recent, here in New York

Mr. D’Amato was, for many years, the autocrat of the New York Republican party, and he pretty much invented our departing Republican governor (mostly to piss Rudy Giuliani off – New York Republicans don’t much like Mr. Giuliani, but Mr. D’Amato likes him less than most. Mr. Giuliani is also a bit of a crook, but not part of this group). Unfortunately for the former Senator, Mr. Pataki isn’t doing all that well, and the rest of his current political stable is – shall we say – not quite ready for prime time.

Mr. Pataki (like NYC Mayor Mr. Bloomberg) cut a sweetheart deal with a politically well-placed union to get their endorsement in his re-election campaign. This hurt him badly with the national Republicans he’s desperately courting for a federal appointment (he’s pretty much played out here in New York).*

In this, parenthetically, he differs from Mr. Bloomberg, a billionaire who is in it for the good the Republican party can do his media empire through judicious deregulation. There are those cynical souls who think that his single-minded focus on the good of media company stockholders might have had something to do with the universal press support he got at election time for his less-than-universally-appreciated performance in office, but I digress.

Back to the strike: Like Mr. Bloomberg, Mr. Pataki saw an opportunity to get himself back in the good graces of fiscal hawks by cracking down on the transit union. With his usual deft political touch, he saw this opportunity after Bloomberg, badly bloodied in the court of public opinion, caved, declared victory and went home.

Part of Mr. Bloomberg’s cave-in was a deal to give the transit workers a refund of pension contributions they had made prior to an earlier contract which lowered the percentage of their pension contributions. This is particularly humiliating for Mr. Bloomberg, since the givebacks will more than cover any Taylor Law fines (two days’ pay for every day out on strike-public employees are barred by law from striking in New York) that were levied against unionmembers during the course of the strike, but of course Mr. Bloomberg doesn’t much care how much of the MTA’s money he spends to make his little problems go away (you’d want to keep in mind that Mr. Bloomberg might only control four out of the nine MTA board, but Mr. Pataki needs Republican friends with money very badly right now).

This left the field wide-open for Mr. Pataki, who is currently playing to the balcony by attempting to retroactively derail the contract agreement. Says the MTA board (which kept him apprised of the negotiations) never told him about the giveback (they say they did). Now he wants to unilaterally change the MTA’s agreement with the union to remove the givebacks, which would most likely send the union back out on strike, as well as (and here’s the beauty part) removing the “bargaining in good faith” component of the MTA’s negotiations that trigger the Taylor Law.

Honestly, it’s better than All My Children. You just have to find someplace other than the Times to read about most of it. I recommend Newsday.

end of brief digression about Mr. Pataki and local politics, recent and not-so-recent, here in New York

Back to Mr. D’Amato and Mr. Weld: it seems that the former Senator is still a bit testy about the former Governor leading the Justice Department investigation of the former Senator’s brother for misusing the former Senator’s office for private profit which ended in the conviction of the former Senator’s brother (later overturned on appeal). This is one of the factors that led to the former Senator’s defeat by Mr. Schumer, thus ending a staggering series of ethics violations and endless televised bootless trips to the fishing hole on Whitewater.

Amusingly, Mr. Weld’s experience in Tennessee is controversial specifically because it involved, er, for-profit education, working-class students getting screwed and backdoor union-busting.

It’s a shame. He sounds like Al’s kinda guy.

*This has been a real boon to New York politics watchers who needed a good laugh, as the national party gifted us with Mrs. Pirro’s short-lived Republican challenge to Hillary, which was the greatest thing since State Senator Espada and we all appreciated it

MSM Kudos

by digby

Multiple props to Janet Hook and Mary Curtius of the LA Times for getting the lead of this excellent story 100% correct.

See, it can be done:

The corruption investigation surrounding lobbyist Jack Abramoff shows the significant political risk that Republican leaders took when they adopted what had once seemed a brilliant strategy for dominating Washington: turning the K Street lobbying corridor into a cog of the GOP political machine.

Abramoff thrived in the political climate fostered by GOP leaders, including Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), who have methodically tried to tighten the links between the party in Congress and business lobbyists, through what has become known as the “K Street Project.”

GOP leaders, seeking to harness the financial and political support of K Street, urged lobbyists to support their conservative agenda, give heavily to Republican politicians and hire Republicans for top trade association jobs. Abramoff obliged on every front, and his tentacles of influence reached deep into the upper echelons of Congress and the Bush administration.

Now, in the wake of a plea agreement in which Abramoff will cooperate in an influence-peddling investigation that might target a number of lawmakers, some Republicans are saying that the party will need to take action to avoid being tarnished.

“This is going to be a huge black eye for our party,” said Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.), a senior member close to House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.). “Denny’s going to have to be very tough and really speak out against people who are indicted. He’s going to have to do it quickly and decisively and frequently.”

Hastert moved Tuesday to inoculate himself from the scandal by announcing that he would give to charity about $60,000 he received from Abramoff and his clients. He is the latest of several lawmakers who have returned or redirected money they received from Abramoff-related sources.

That’s the story folks. If Democratic staffers would keep their yaps shut about how scared they are of “innocent people getting swept up” and if the party would come out swinging, the truth might get out. This needs reinforcement.

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Democrats Are Wimps, Republicans Are Crooks

by digby

Those two memes are the fundamental negative images people have held of the two parties for the last quarter century. The Abramoff scandal offers the Democrats an opportunity to change their negative meme and reinforce the GOP’s by swinging hard against this corrupt political machine.

Unfortubately it seems they are going to change it by turning it into “Democrats are wimps AND crooks, Republicans are just crooks.”

While Mr. Abramoff is most closely linked to Republicans, even Democrats, many of whom also benefited from his largesse, acted skittish.

“We’re talking about people who have longstanding careers in Congress who took contributions from somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who knew Jack Abramoff,” said a Democratic Congressional aide who insisted on anonymity so as not to drag his boss into the scandal. “Now they’re panicked. The hope is that this investigation will root out the wrongdoing without innocent people getting hit with the ricochet.”

Mr. Abramoff’s plea bargain is scary to Washington’s power brokers precisely because he was so entangled with so many of them.

His ties to Grover G. Norquist, a leading conservative strategist and president of Americans for Tax Reform, and Ralph Reed, the former director of the Christian Coalition who is now a candidate for lieutenant governor in Georgia, date from his college days.

He once worked as a lobbyist alongside David H. Safavian, who was the head of the White House procurement office until just before his arrest last fall in the Abramoff investigation. And Mr. Abramoff’s former personal assistant once worked for Karl Rove, President Bush’s chief political strategist.

At the White House, administration officials have been reluctant to comment on the case, referring questions to the Justice Department and declining to defend Mr. Safavian. But on Tuesday morning, the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, denounced Mr. Abramoff’s actions.

We have Abramoff intimately connected with two of the most powerful movement conservatives in Washington and directly with the White house and Karl Rove. This is the kind of thing that used to set the cable gasbags afire with speculation in the Clinton White House. Victoria Toensing’s head would be spinning like a top while she screeched about dirty money the rule of law. And Dan Burton and Orrin Hatch would be liberally quoted in the NY Times saying that there was a need for immediate congressional investigations to determine the length and breadth of Democratic corruption and if leads directly to the president, well, so be it.

Yet, right out of the box, the Democrat quoted in this article is an anonymous staffer discussing how afraid the Democrats are that a couple of them might be caught up in the scandal. Nancy Pelosi and others did speak out yesterday and they aren’t given any prime space in this article. But the truth is that the Democrats do seem skittish and it’s just plain stupid. There should be great joy and energy in Democratic circles at the idea of crippling the GOP machine — Delay, Norquist and Rove are all in trouble and that is unalloyed good news. It won’t destroy the machine entirely, but those three are extremely valuable cogs that are not easily replaced. And there is also the potential to expose these scam artists and strong arm thugs for what they are — thus proving that we aren’t actually wimps. Instead we are reinforcing that impression — and allowing the Republicans to frame this as some sort of abstract “Washington” problem. The press, needless to say, is going where the action is. Since we are motionless, they are focusing on the GOP response.

Why we are skittish about this I do not know. There is no serious downside for us. The scandal is just the latest in a series of Republican screw ups and it’s a doozy.

I just heard Newt Gingrich talking on Fox about how the Republicans need to take up the mantle of reform and vow to clean up the corruption in Washington. He said this without irony because he’s quite serious. He mentioned that the Democrats were investigated ten years ago for illegal foreign campaign contributions. He didn’t mention that there was never any there there. But it sounds good, doesn’t it? And the Republicans may just be able to finesse this because Democrats are so skittish about a couple of their brethren being caught up in the sweep that they are pulling their punches.

Republicans beat a decorated war hero with a fey draft dodger during wartime because they skillfully exploited the public’s long held anxieties about Democratic bona fides on national security. If Democrats can’t can’t run on the corollary “Republicans are crooks” meme in the midst of the biggest government abuse and corruption scandal since Watergate, then we really are useless. We saw this coming for months. And yet we are caught flat footed and the GOP is going to run as the party of reform. Dear gawd.

Update: Sam Rosenfeld has much more on this here. Highly recommended.
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Jack’s Loyal Friend

by digby

Tom: You were around the old timers — and meeting up on how the family should be organized. How they based them on the old Roman legions and called them regimes — the capos and the soldiers. And it worked.

Abramoff:Yeah, it worked. Those were the great old days you know. And one was like the Roman Empire. The Family was like the Roman Empire.

Tom: It was once. Jackie — when a plot against the Emperor failed — the planners were always given a chance to let their families keep their fortunes.

Abramoff: Yea — but only the rich guys Tom. The little guys — they got knocked off and all their estates went to the Emperors. Unless they went home and uh, killed themselves — then nothing happened. And their families — their families were taken care of Tom.

Tom: That was a good break — nice funeral.

Abramoff: Yeah — they went home — and sat in a hot bath — opened up their veins — and bled to death. And sometimes had a little party before they did it.

Tom: Don’t worry about anything Jackie Five Angels.

Abramoff: Thanks Tom — thanks.

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Socially Close

by digby

Jane makes a vital catch.

What in gawd’s name is Alice Fisher doing anywhere near a political case? She should recuse herself immediately. Full stop.

The probe is being overseen by Noel Hillman, a hard-charging career prosecutor who heads the Public Integrity Section and who has a long track record of nailing politicians of all stripes. But politics almost certainly will creep into the equation. Hillman’s new boss will soon be Alice Fisher, who is widely respected but also a loyal Republican socially close to DeLay’s defense team.

Now, ask yourself if an investigation was being held into powerful Democrats under a Democratic administration if there would be shrieking harpies flying all over the airwaves today demanding a special prosecutor.

Yeah, I know. Whatever.

update: More from Jane on Alice.

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Bipartisan BS

by digby

The media is working hard to make this into a bi-partisan scandal but that is simple bullshit. Ed Henry on CNN, for instance, couldn’t stop talking about Byron Dorgan being implicated in this scandal. I don’t know if Dorgan’s going to be swept up, but let’s just say that if he is he probably deserves it because he would be the stupidest man in the world. He’s the top Democrat on the Indian Affairs Committee and even Steno Sue writes:

Dorgan has asked some of the toughest questions in the committee hearings probing the $82 million Abramoff and Michael Scanlon charged their tribal clients.

I suppose some people would think this is a normal thing for a man on the take to do, but I would suggest that it’s unlikely. Here’s a good rundown on the Dorgan connection (and the media’s predictably bad reporting on it) from Media Matters.

Fasten your seatbelts. The press is surely under tremendous pressure from the Republicans to report this as a bi-partisan scandal and they are already buckling under. But that doesn’t change the fact that this is a GOP operation from the get — and they know it.

I wrote a piece a few months back about Abramoff and his two college Republican lieutenants Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist called Nixon’s Babies in which I discussed just how important Abramoff is to the “movement.” And I highly recommend reading Nina Easton’s Gang of Five: Leaders at the Center of the Conservative Ascendacy Anybody who looks at Jack Abramoff and sees anything but a hard core GOP influence peddler who was paid very well to finance the GOP machine is either a shill or a fool.

I just saw CNN’s Henry again say that this was a bi-partisan scandal and that Democrats were going to find it very hard to make the “culture of corruption” charge. This was not “he said/she said” — he was editorializing in his piece and his opinion is either uninformed, myopic or biased. This piece was followed by another from William Schneider in which he helpfully points out that while the public indicates that it thinks Democrats are less corrupt than Republicans that’s only because the public understands that it’s because the Republicans are in power and have more opportunity.

Bullshit. The reason people think this is because every few years we find out that Republicans leaders have no respect for the law. It’s like clockwork. If they aren’t selling themselves outright to big business on the floor of the congress they are claiming the constitution allows them to break any law they choose. Just in the past couple of weeks we’ve had news reports about legal trouble for corrupt Republicans George W. Bush, Ken Lay, Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Duke Cunningham, Ralph Reed and Jack Abramoff. Lot of dots there. Is it too much trouble for the media to connect them?

This characterization of the scandal as being “bi-partisan” is typical bad mainstream journalism, particularly the emphasis they are placing on the very small handful of Democrats who’ve even been mentioned (much less included in any legal procedings.) Not only are they creating some equity and illegality where none exists, by doing it they are missing the real story, as usual.

This isn’t a story about power corrupting or about a few bad apples. This is about a corrupt political machine — a system of money laundering and public corruption on behalf of one political party. It’s about a party that has used every tool at its disposal to legally and illegally enrich itself and enhance its power. It’s right there. It’s unravelling before our eyes.

And all Dana Bash and Ed Hanry can say is that Jack Abramoff lent his skybox to Democrats and Republicans alike. Which he did. He lent it 1% of the time to Democrats and 99% of the time to Republicans. That makes all of them equally corrupt.

Update: Crooks and Liars has some great Tweety spin footage. Seems it’s not partisan because Abramoff is Satan.

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Press The Meacham

by digby

Media Matters caught Jon Meacham calling Howard Dean insane on Russert yesterday. I think that’s especially rich considering Meacham is the guy who penned this crazy shit:

The uniqueness—one could say oddity, or implausibility—of the story of Jesus’ resurrection argues that the tradition is more likely historical than theological.

He’s also the guy who told Imus (scroll down) that Joe Wilson went on his trip to Niger after we had invaded Iraq to “discover if those 16 words were true.” He really knows his stuff.

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Pratfalls

by digby

Watching Hardball, I just saw Bush’s full face in his appearance yesterday. He looks like shit. It’s not just the scratch on his forehead, which I realize could be the result of some extreme brush clearing over the week-end. There’s something wrong with his lip too and his eyes are all puffy.

I will say it again. It is not normal for a healthy 59 year old man to injure his face as often as this guy does. It just isn’t.

Here’s today (the picture doesn’t do justice to how bad he rally looks):

Here are a couple of pictures from previous pratfalls in the first term:

The first one was the pretzel incident. The second was a fall from his bike in May of 2004. There was another incident just last July when he fell off after crashing into a security officer in Scotland.

I continue to think this is very odd, even for a daredevil brush clearing cycler like Junior.

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Contextualizing

by digby

Jane discusses this article in today’s NY Times about how blogging is affecting journalism and she makes this important point:

They do not spend the hours and days sifting through raw data now available to average people on the internet. I cannot emphasize this strongly enough. That is not what they do. If you want to know some obscure detail about something Judith Miller did or said in June of 2003 you call emptywheel. If you need to know about journalists named in the subpoenas sent to the White House in January 2003 you email Jeralyn. If you expect that kind of depth of knowledge about details from the people whose job it is to dig up new dirt in this case, they don’t have it. They don’t have the time.

In this light bloggers serve the function of analysts. Or re-analyzers, more aptly, who attempt to contextualize as they sort through available data and look for patterns, inconsistencies and greater truths. For my money if I was trying to marry a blog with a newsroom that’s where I’d start — I’m constantly amazed that with all the access to information now available the big news bureaus don’t have a deeper pool of researchers to be the adjunct memories of people who spend their time in the development of external news sources.

There was a guy who did this kind of journalism long before technology made it possible for many of us to carry on the tradition. At their best, bloggers are the heirs to IF Stone, whose methods wwere described by his friend Victor Navasky this way:

His method: To scour and devour public documents, bury himself in The Congressional Record, study obscure Congressional committee hearings, debates and reports, all the time prospecting for news nuggets (which would appear as boxed paragraphs in his paper), contradictions in the official line, examples of bureaucratic and political mendacity, documentation of incursions on civil rights and liberties. He lived in the public domain. It was his habitat of necessity, because use of government sources to document his findings was also a stratagem. Who would have believed this cantankerous-if-whimsical Marxist without all the documentation?

Sound familiar? And while we scruffy bloggers are (mostly) not marxists, we are greeted with great skepticism because we are unregulated, uncredentialed, and in some cases psuedonymous, so we also must go to great lengths to document our findings. Luckily, the technology that gives us such amazing instant access to reams of information also gives us the ability to link directly to our source material — as Arianna once described it “showing our work.” And over time we gain credibility with our readers the same way that newspapers do.

What Jane says about contextualizing is absolutely correct. If you followed the Whitewater scandal (or attempted to) you came to realize that the journalists who were writing about it were so caught up in day to day reporting that somewhere along the line they lost sight of both the big picture and the details. It became a daily exercize in futility trying to sort out what exactly was going on. Until Gene Lyons’ articles in Harpers (that led to his book “Fools for Scandal”) and then a couple of jury trials, I honestly couldn’t figure out what was going on. And I read three or four papers a day at the time. It was a story in desperate need of context, research and command of detail, mostly because it was a story being dribbled out a daily basis by political operatives and Arkansas opportunists to journalists who, in the midst of daily reporting, couldn’t see the larger story. (I have no idea where their editors were.)

I didn’t know how that worked in those days, thinking that journalists would see through spin and report it if it was clearly partisan. But I was wrong. They did fall for that story and turned it into an unintelligible, meaningless scandal that harrassed the president from almost his first day in office.

Today, certain bloggers would keep meticulous track of details, speculation and obvious spin and would report and discuss them in real time. Others would bring the whole story into historical perspective. Still others would try to tie all the disparate threads together to show larger patterns and trends. And many would speculate about the meaning of the scandal and the political ramifications. The scandal might happen anyway, but at least there would also be informed, engaged readers and easy access to those who have taken the time to analyze and contextualize the story as it unfolds. The alternative is to continue to allow the powerful triumverate of official sources, professional PR flacks and political operatives to lead the press (and, therefore, the country) around by the nose as they have so often in the last 15 years.

I’m not suggesting that blogging is a replacement for mainstream journalism. The daily papers, news broadcasts and news weeklies are indispensible. But more and more, people are recognizing mainstream journalism’s vulnerability to conventional wisdom, establishment pressure and partisan spin. And the longstanding reliance on he said/she said “objectivity” is simply no longer adequate in the modern world of sophisticated public relations. Blogs fill in some of the gaps.

I’m a little surprised that so many reporters are fighting them so hard instead of doing the smart thing, which is co-opt them. Good bloggers can be a reporter’s best friends if he learns how to use them.

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Up Down By 15 Points!

by digby

Steve Benan points out that Elaine Chao needs to find a standard of success other than the Dow Jones to tout this fabulous Republican economy:

[W]hile it was the 0.6% decline for the year that generated headlines, most seem to have overlooked the fact that on the day Bush was sworn into office in January 2001, the Dow Jones stood at 10,732.46. As of now, it’s at 10,717.50.

In other words, after five years of Bush’s presidency, the stock market has a cumulative gain of negative 15 points.

Under Reagan, the Dow went up 148%. Under Clinton, it grew 187%. After five years, Bush isn’t quite breaking even.

This reminds me of an article I read in the LA Times over the week-end. In the relativistic fashion we’ve come to love in the Bush era, that inconvenient fact has made many people simply decide that the Dow is no longer relevant:

As for the Dow, many believe the 109-year-old index of 30 large, blue-chip companies hasn’t been an accurate barometer of the economy or the broader stock market for the past two years.

Yes, and we’re actually winning in Iraq and global warming is a hoax — which you’d never know just by looking at the facts. Clearly, the facts are biased.

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