Jihadi Media
by digby
Over pictures of people who are handling rocket launchers and wearing ski masks with strange suits, the braindead Brit who is filling in for Cavuto today asked John Podhoretz if the New York Times should be charged with treason.
Charging a newspaper with treason seems like a stretch, but I could be wrong. I think the proper legal charge would be sedition. But implying that the New York Times staffers are jihadis seems a bit inflammatory to me.
The Pod was unpleasant.
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Just Don’t Count ‘Em
Steve Benen of the Carpetbagger Report is filling in for Kevin over at Political Animal and he has an interesting post up about the new movement to deny automatic citizenship to babies born in the United States. It’s one of those Lou Dobbs obsessions that’s gaining ground among the wingnuts.
His post reminded me of another Dobbsian boogeyman that I’ve been meaning to discuss which will have a very pernicious effect on politics if it is enacted: the anti-immigrant fanatics want to change the census to only include citizens. And they quite openly say it is because they want to change the make-up of the congress.
This is another one of those Karl Rove specials. It’s ostensibly about the scourge of illegal immigration, and plays perfectly into people’s cultural anxieties, but it’s really about structural political change.
Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s exceedingly interesting book Off Center talks (among other things) about how the Republicans have gone about creating a “backlash proof” system in which Republican seats are safe no matter how unpopular their beliefs or voting records are in the country at large. It’s a huge part of their long term strategy to change the political system in their favor. The book doesn’t mention this specifically, but it’s exactly the kind of thing that Karl and Tom would try to push to assure a long term majority.
This article in the Arizona Republic, shows that the estimate is that the seats lost would mostly be in Democratic states:
The U.S. Constitution should be changed so that only legal citizens can be counted when determining a state’s number of congressional districts, a Republican lawmaker argued Tuesday.
“This is about fundamental fairness and the American ideal . . . of one man or one woman, one vote,” said Rep. Candice Miller, R-Mich, testifying to a U.S. House subcommittee on federalism and the census.
The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires that, “Representatives of the (U.S.) House shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state . . . “
But Miller, backed by 29 House co-sponsors, is pushing a vote on an amendment that would change the word “persons” to “citizens,” excluding non-citizens as a factor in determining how many of the 435 U.S. House seats each state gets.
According to the 2000 census, there were more than 18 million non-citizens in the country, representing about 6.6 percentof the nation’s total population. They included as many as 8 million undocumented immigrants, along with guest workers, foreign students or others on temporary visas.
[…]
Recent studies, including one in May by the Congressional Research Office, show that had only citizens been counted in the most recent apportionment based on the 2000 Census, California – with more than 5.4 million non-citizens — would have six fewer U.S. House seats.
Texas, New York and Florida would each have one seat less.
Lower-immigration states like Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Wisconsin and Indiana would each have one more seat.
There could be a shift of 10 seats affecting 15 states if non-citizens are excluded in 2010, according to early projections by Polidata, a Lake Ridge, Va., firm that analyzes demographic information.
Arizona would not lose any of its seats. The state’s 462,239 non-citizen residents represent 9 percent of its total population – the seventh highest percentage in the nation. However, even if these individuals were not counted, Arizona’s population would still be high enough to still qualify for eight congressional seats in 2010.
But removing non-citizens from those calculations would have impact within the state. Arizona’s congressional district lines would have to be drawn much differently than they are now to equalize “citizen” representation.
For instance, based on their existing congressional districts, Rep. Rick Renzi, a Republican, is currently representing 620,000 “citizen” residents in his largely rural district, while Rep Ed Pastor, a Democrat, represents 480,000 citizen residents in his central-southwest Valley district. If non-citizens are no longer be counted , both Renzi’ and Pastor’s districts – as with all of Arizona’s congressional districts — would have to be redrawn so that they have more-comparable citizen numbers.
… an estimated 10 million legal permanent residents in the nation who are eligible to become citizens are Latino, and that 77 percent of these Latinos live in California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey or Arizona.
While not disputing there are large undocumented populations in these states, Gonzalez said, “the reality is that these states also have hundreds of thousands of immigrants who are law-abiding citizens, have played by the rules and are preparing to become full participants in this nation.”
Kenneth Prewitt, director of the Census bureau from 1998-2000, warned Miller’s amendment would lead to less cooperation by immigrants who are already too often wary of census takers, and a less complete and less accurate census.
I think it’s pretty clear which party would benefit from this, don’t you? It’s true that a couple of upper midwest swing states might gain a seat or two, but for the most part it’s the big blue population centers that will suffer. And you can bet that the necessary gerrymandering that comes with such a scheme will be well planned to take care of Republicans in states in which immigrant communities suddenly “disappear” from the body politic.
These are the little landmines that Karl and company have set throughout our political structure that are going to have reverberations for decades. Right now the immigration debate is dividing the GOP more than the Republicans and Democrats. But who knows where things will be in a couple of years? Karl and company play the long game and bet that it’s always better to institutionalize their strict numerical advantage.
Short term they may be trying to play to the hispanic vote, but ultimately it’s all about solidifying their base to such an extent that they never have to do more than win a few showy races to maintain a majority. Big business doesn’t care one bit about whether legal and illegal immigrants are represented in the census. If it takes the heat off of the cheap labor debate, they would be perfectly happy to support it. And this feeds the angry white vote nicely.
This is how you keep a political machine well oiled and working even if you wind up spending quality time in a federal prison. The mob works this way too.
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Clutched Pearl Cluster
The Kippies have been announced and each one is more perfect than the rest. I do have one quibble, however. My personal favorite, Chris Matthews, didn’t win Best Wank for his repeated exhortation that a man, a real man, a manly man filled with masculinity, be sent in to save the day in New Orleans. Is there a bigger public wank in history than this?
Will the most powerful vice president in American history become the man who ramrods the rise of the new South and with it a legacy that could promote a draft for a Cheney presidency? The question is a big one. Is Cheney charging down South to serve as President Bush’s executioner or full-fledged viceroy?
[…]
“a tough guy…smart politician.. trying to figure out how to get his president out of a jam… smart guy, tough warrior..aware that now that he’s put his [huge] boots on the ground he has a stake in this. How big a foot is he going to land on this issue.”
Fo shizzle my nizzle
I’m sorry that Chris didn’t win a Kippie this year despite his many heroic paeans to Republican manly manness. But then Cary Grant never won an Oscar either. Sometimes life isn’t fair. (As with so many of the greats, maybe the problem is that he just makes it look so easy.)
Chris can take heart that he earned the Media Matters “misinformer of the year” so it’s not like his stand-out performance went unrewarded. And there’s always next year — all the commentators are telling us on a loop that Bush is poised for a comeback, and there is no greater chronicler of the rise of the codpiece than our man Chris.
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Truthiness
by digby
Jane appropriately excoriates the WaPo ombudsman, Deborah Howell, for her he said/she said prescription for even more confusing and useless reporting. I think this column may just be the perfect example of everything that’s wrong with modern journalism.
Howell comments on a report about military recruiting that stated that more recruits are coming from low income and rural families:
Numbers aren’t just facts. They can be interpreted in many ways, even if they come from the same or similar sources.
Ann Scott Tyson, a respected military reporter just back from Iraq, wrote in a front-page story Nov. 4 that “newly released Pentagon demographic data show that the military is leaning heavily for recruits on economically depressed rural areas where youths’ need for jobs may outweigh the risks of going to war.”
[…]
The story, which was largely based on Pentagon data, included some analysis done by the National Priorities Project (NPP), a liberal-leaning think tank that questions the war in Iraq. The NPP also used Pentagon, census and Zip code data. A different analysis, released by the conservative Heritage Foundation a few days later, was reported by other media outlets.
In looking at the story, I talked to Curt Gilroy, who, as director of accession policy for the secretary of defense, has oversight of all active-duty recruiting; Tim Kane, a Heritage researcher; Betty Maxfield, demographer of the Army; Bruce Orvis, director of the Manpower and Training Program at the Rand Corp.’s Arroyo Center, and Robert Brandewei, director of the Defense Manpower Data Center in Monterey, Calif.
All said the story and NPP analysis lacked context because they did not report trends over the past several years and did not look at “nationally representative data” or the entire recruit population. A statement from Gilroy and Maxfield said that “incomes and socioeconomic status of recruits’ families closely mirror the U.S. population. These findings are contrary to those” in Tyson’s article.
[…]
My bottom line on polls and surveys, no matter what kind: Look for the widest context. Ask as many experts as possible what the numbers mean. Numbers can be right but not tell the full story, and that’s the case with the article on recruiting.
There are those who think with their heads and those who know with their hearts… But the gut’s where the truth comes from…I know some of you may not trust your gut yet. But with my help you will. The truthiness is that anyone can report the news to you, but I promise to feel the news at you.
Unfortunately for Howell, her “clarification” only leads to a muddy, unfathomable mess. After reading her further reporting, you have absolutely no idea what the truth is. She should have written her cute little opener to say “numbers are partisan and have an agenda. If you are a supporter of the administration you can believe the pentagon and Heritage analysts. If you are a liberal traitor, you can believe this crappy NPP think tank. It’s all about choice.”
Howell is promoting that absolute worst kind of he said/she said journalism in this piece. She does not recommend any kind of context in the reporting that might illuminate the Pentagon or Heritage agendas, such as the trouble the military has had with recruiting or the different sales pitches that the military uses in different areas. She does not seek out an academic statistician who might be able to look at all the statistics and sort them out in some way so that readers could come to a reasonable conclusion.
And for someone who so believes in telling all sides of a story, I think it might have been helpful if she told her readers what prompted her to write on this subject in the first place, don’t you? Was it, perhaps, a complaint from the pentagon which pointed out the conservative Heritage Foundation’s contradictory figures? (We know it wasn’t average readers, whom she and others at the Post consider nuisances.)
I do not know if the WaPo’s new ombudsman is political but she is remarkably willing to assume liberal bias in the Post’s reporting and recommend a “counterbalance” of right wing bullshit to even it out. In fact, this seems to be the Post’s answer to everything, lately.
As we have all written about ad nauseum in the blogs these last few years, this is what we hate about mainstream journalism these days. This idea that “numbers aren’t just facts.” Yes, they fucking well are. Numbers are numbers. They don’t have feelings, they aren’t obscure. They are what they are. They can be used in different ways, yes, but the job of journalists isn’t just to point out all the different interpretations and let the reader choose on the basis of which political party they belong to, it’s to reveal how they being used in different ways and why.
I already know that the Heritage Foundation and the pentagon have an agenda. I take Howell at her word that the NPP is a liberal think tank that is against the war. I don’t give a shit about any of that. What I would like to know is whether or not the military is recruiting more from lower income and rural areas and if so, why?
The editor of the paper defended the original piece by saying this:
Post National Editor Michael Abramowitz said, “Ann set out to tell the story of what kind of young people are joining today’s military. Obviously the armed services draw from a range of demographic, income and ethnic groups. The Pentagon’s own numbers indicate that that the military is drawing disproportionally from rural and southern communities, and from families with slightly lower incomes than the population in general.
“The numbers also show a close correlation between the unemployment rate and recruiting. These are the phenomena that Ann accurately described in her story. While we did note some trends, such as the growth in wealthier recruits, we probably could have done a better job highlighting some of the nuances in recruiting patterns and providing more context. But the overall thrust of the story still seems accurate and sound to us.”
That’s not good enough for Howell, whose further consultations with pentagon, Heritage and Rand analysts report a bunch of arcane gobblodygook that I defy Howell or anyone else to interpret.
But then, I guess that’s the point. In order to be fair one must go out of one’s way not to tell the truth. The facts, after all, are biased.
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Southern Fried
Atrios links to Novakula’s column today in which he discusses Trent Lott’s agnizing over whether to seek another term. I think we’ve all wondered if Katrina would have an impact on the GOP in Mississippi and Alabama and this may be the test. (New Orleans’ African American disapora is very likely to result in a stronger Louisiana GOP) I suspect he thinks it’s time to cash out. They’ll never be a better opportunity.
Atrios also highlights Novak’s last line which I also think is the most interesting aspect of the piece:
When George W. stood aside while Trent Lott was tossed out, I wrote on Dec. 23, 2002, that the secret liberal theme behind his defenestration was that “the GOP’s Southern base, the bedrock of its national election victories, is an illegitimate legacy from racist Dixiecrats.
Now, three years later, that bedrock may be eroding.
I don’t know why he thinks it was secret. That view is right out in the open and it happens to be true. Both the Republicans and Democrats have been talking about the southern strategy for decades. (Perhaps Novak thinks the mass defections from Democrat to Republican in the south directly on the heels of the voting rights act of 1964 was a coincidence?)
In any case, that’s not what’s interesting. It’s that he thinks the “bedrock” of the southern GOP base may be eroding. Personally, I doubt it, at least in any significant sense. However, many of the structural problems conservative writer Christopher Caldwell predicted in his famous contrarian article “the Southern Captivity of the GOP” from 1998 could be coming to fruition.
9/11 obscured them but the problems remain. Here are some excerpts from that article:
The party’s 1994 majority came thanks to a gain of nineteen seats in the South. In 1996 Republicans picked up another six seats in the Old Confederacy. But that only makes their repudiation in the rest of the country the more dramatic. The party has been all but obliterated in its historical bastion of New England, where it now holds just four of twenty-three congressional seats. The Democrats, in fact, dominate virtually the entire Northeast. The Republicans lost seats in 1996 all over the upper Midwest — Michigan, Wisconsin (two seats), Iowa, and Ohio (two seats). Fatally, they lost seats in all the states on the West Coast. Their justifiable optimism about the South aside, in 1996 it became clear that the Democratic Party was acquiring regional strongholds of equal or greater strength.
[…]
The Republican Party is increasingly a party of the South and the mountains. The southernness of its congressional leaders — Speaker Newt Gingrich, of Georgia; House Majority Leader Dick Armey and House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, of Texas; Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, of Mississippi; Senate Majority Whip Don Nickles, of Oklahoma — only heightens the identification. There is a big problem with having a southern, as opposed to a midwestern or a California, base. Southern interests diverge from those of the rest of the country, and the southern presence in the Republican Party has passed a “tipping point,” at which it began to alienate voters from other regions.
As southern control over the Republican agenda grows, the party alienates even conservative voters in other regions. The prevalence of right-to-work laws in southern states may be depriving Republicans of the socially conservative midwestern trade unionists whom they managed to split in the Reagan years, and sending Reagan Democrats back to their ancestral party in the process. Anti-government sentiment makes little sense in New England, where government, as even those who hate it will concede, is neither remote nor unresponsive.
[…]
Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, … and insists that libertarians and moralists can still cohabit. And since Norquist is a key — if not the key — adviser to Newt Gingrich, his interpretation can be taken as a semi-official Republican understanding of what’s left of Ronald Reagan’s electorate. “The Reagan coalition is the Leave Us Alone coalition,” Norquist says. “Tax activists want their paychecks left alone. Pro-family people want their kids left alone. Ralph Reed’s constituents are not interested in running other people’s lives. They don’t care what odd people do in San Francisco on Saturday afternoon.”
For his part, Reed, formerly the executive director of the Christian Coalition and now a Georgia-based political and public-affairs consultant, thinks the two wings get along as well as ever. Looking at the Republican field for President in 2000, he says, “Traditional supply-siders like Steve Forbes are enthusiastically embracing the social dogma of the party. Lamar Alexander is moving to the right, guys like John Ashcroft are picking up steam, John Kasich is talking about faith in God. I see a holistic message developing.” To an extent Reed is right: this is not 1963 or 1964, when the Rockefeller wing and the Goldwater wing fought an intraparty civil war. Yet there is something more troubling going on. Every Republican candidate now has to “make his bones,” to prove his good faith by declaring his unequivocal willingness to alienate the “elites” of the country. Describing the Christian right to a reporter last fall, the former Washington congressman Randy Tate, who is now the executive director of the Christian Coalition, said, “They don’t just want to be given crumbs off the table and taken for granted.” Far from proving Republican tolerance, the rapprochement Reed points to is merely the sound of the Republicans’ cosmopolitan wing crying “Uncle.”
This southern takeover is part of a natural, if paradoxical, transformation. It parallels the way the Goldwater debacle of 1964 destabilized the Democratic Party — by sending alienated northern Republican progressives into the Democrats’ ranks. These progressives joined with northern urbanites to forge a party that was more to their liking, though it was too liberal for the Democratic Party’s stalwart southern conservatives — and, eventually, too liberal for the nation as a whole. In like fashion, Democratic excesses since the seventies may have destabilized the Republican Party by chasing those southerners into the fold, transforming the Republican Party into a machine that is steadily becoming too conservative for the country.
There has always been tension between the Republicans’ constituent wings. What long masked it was the Cold War. The Reaganite party was never a two-part but always a three-part coalition, of social conservatives, economic conservatives, and foreign-policy hawks. The hawks’ group was minuscule, but it happened that their passion (anti-communism) was shared by Christians and capitalists alike.
[…]
When the Republicans can no longer promise tax cuts, they’re left with only the most abrasive aspects of the Reagan message, kept under wraps throughout the 1980s: the southern morals business. If the Republicans didn’t believe in shrinking government, they didn’t believe in the freedom that it was supposed to promote — which made it much harder to argue that their moral agenda was being advanced in the name of live and let live. And what did they have besides the moral agenda?
The Republicans are too conservative: their deference to their southern base is persuading much of the country that their vision is a sour and crabbed one. But they’re too liberal, too, as their all-out retreat from shrinking the government indicates. At the same time, the Republicans have passed none of the reforms that ingratiated the party with the “radical middle.” The Republicans’ biggest problem is not their ideology but their lack of one. Stigmatized as rightists, behaving like leftists, and ultimately standing for nothing, they’re in the worst of all possible worlds.
There is messaging “gold” in that article now that it is crystal clear that the Republicans are not the party of small government and it lies here:
If the Republicans didn’t believe in shrinking government, they didn’t believe in the freedom that it was supposed to promote — which made it much harder to argue that their moral agenda was being advanced in the name of live and let live.
How can Norquist’s “leave us alone” coalition exist in a party that supports the government spying on its citizens and supports intrusion into a family’s most difficult medical decisions? How can a “leave us alone” coalition support a president who acts like a king? How can decent people who believe in moral values continue to work hard and support a party that is corrupt to its core?
They can’t.
Caldwell concluded with this:
Their party is now directionless, with only two skills to recommend it: first, identifying and prosecuting the excesses of its opponents; second, rigging the campaign-finance system to protect its incumbency long after it has ceased having any ideas that would justify incumbency. The Republican Party is an obsolescent one. It may continue to rule, disguised as a majority by electoral legerdemain. But it will be a long time before the party is again able to rule from a place in Americans’ hearts.
They gave up trying to rule from a place in America’s heart some time ago and are now ruling from some place in America’s gut. Fear (or the fun “horror movie” version of it anyway) is what they use to keep the disparate threads of Norquist’s coalition together. I think, however, Bush’s misdhandling of Iraq and Katrina — not to mention the ridiculous overplaying of the terrorist threat — may have dampened their prospects for a repeat of their successful communist fearmongering of the past.
I think that Caldwell’s thesis is proven by the fact that Bush won so narrowly in 2004 and that they were unable to gain any Senate seats outside of deep red territory. They couldn’t win any house seats outside of the rigged Texas gerrymander. Bush’s popular vote margin came from turnout in the deep south, not because of any gains elsewhere. I ask you, if a Republican incumbent couldn’t win big in that election, when we were just three years from a major terrorist attack and deeply engaged in wars in two countries, then what will it take?
They’ve got the south for the time being. The question for them is if they can legitimately win anywhere else. If Novak is right and they are starting to lose their grip a little bit there then they’ve reached their high water mark.
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Jeanne D’Arc needs a new computer.
I can’t imagine a blogosphere without Body and Soul, can you?
It’s common wisdom that this administration has, from the outset, and right up to the present, made a habit of accusing others of what it is guilty of. I’ve always thought of that as just an effective technique — put your opposition on the defense, so that, at best, no one notices what you’re doing, and, at worst, people excuse your crimes because the other side supposedly does it too.
But when self-described Christians are choosing to replicate the history of their faith in reverse, casting themselves in the villains’ place, while somehow still claiming the innocence of holy victims, it looks more like pathology than political spin. They remind me of Alex in A Clockwork Orange, aroused by Christian iconography, fantasizing himself as a Roman soldier. Then throw in something too twisted for Alex –fantasizing himself, simultaneously, as a martyr.
Sick. Just sick, these Clockwork Christians.
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Guest Post
Bush’s Head
by Poputonian
James Wolcott’s recent reference to Digby’s blog as “a Paul Revere gallop through the pitched night of the Bush years” reminds me of this passage from Paul Revere’s Ride, a 1994 book by the great historian David Hackett Fischer. The passage seems relevant to the recent discussion (triggered by the Kos article in WM) about the role blogs play in political discourse. Fischer sees Revere in relationship to the overall Revolutionary movement and debunks the myth that he was a “just a messenger.” He describes Revere as an important cog *in a liberal movement* that was “open and pluralist” and made up of “an alliance of many overlapping groups.” Revere was a silversmith by day, but away from his trade he was doing much more for the rebel cause, and it was more than a poetic midnight ride. This has a feel to it, like maybe this is what bloggers did before computers, in a day when everything was closer, within physical reach, and people did their politics face to face.
Paul Revere’s Role in the Revolutionary Movement
The structure of Boston’s revolutionary movement, and Paul Revere’s place within it, were very different from recent secondary accounts. Many historians have suggested that this movement was a tightly organized, hierarchical organization, controlled by Samuel Adams and a few other dominant figures. These same interpretations commonly represent Revere as a minor figure who served his social superiors mainly as a messenger.
A very different pattern emerges from the following comparison of seven groups: the Masonic lodge that met at the Green Dragon Tavern; the Loyal Nine, which was the nucleus of the Sons of Liberty; the North Caucus that met at the Salutation Tavern; the Long Room Club in Dassett Alley; the Boston Committee of Correspondence; the men who are known to have participated in the Boston Tea Party; and Whig leaders on a Tory Enemies List.
A total of 255 men were in one or more of these seven groups. Nobody appeared on all seven lists, or even as many as six. Two men, and only two, were in five groups; they were Joseph Warren and Paul Revere, who were unique in the breadth of their associations.
Other multiple memberships were as follows. Five men (2.0%) appeared in four groups each: Samuel Adams, Nathaniel Barber, Henry Bass, Thomas Chase, and Benjamin Church. Seven men (2.7%) turned up on three lists (James Condy, Moses Grant, Joseph Greenleaf, William Molineux, Edward Proctor, Thomas Urann, and Thomas Young).
Twenty-seven individuals (10.6%) were on two lists (John Adams, Nathaniel Appleton, John Avery, Samuel Barrett, Richard Boynton, John Bradford, Ezekiel Cheever, Adam Collson, Samuel Cooper, Thomas Crafts, Caleb Davis, William Dennie, Joseph Eayrs, William Greenleaf, John Hancock, James Otis, Elias Parkman, Samuel Peck, William Powell, John Pulling, Josiah Quincy, Abiel Ruddock, Elisha Story, James Swan, Henry Welles, Oliver Wendell, and John Winthrop). The great majority, 211 of 255 (82.7%), appeared only on a single list. Altogether, 94.1% were in only one or two groups.
This evidence strongly indicates that the revolutionary movement in Boston was more open and pluralist than scholars have believed. It was not a unitary organization, but a loose alliance of many overlapping groups. That structure gave Paul Revere and Joseph Warren a special importance, which came from the multiplicity and range of their alliances.
None of this is meant to deny the preeminence of other men in different roles. Samuel Adams was especially important in managing the Town Meeting, and the machinery of local government, and was much in the public eye. Otis was among its most impassioned orators. John Adams was the penman of the Revolution. John Hancock was its “milch cow,” as a Tory described him. But Revere and Warren moved in more circles than any others. This gave them their special roles as the linchpins of the revolutionary movement — its communicators, coordinators, and organizers of collective effort in the cause of freedom.
Another list (too long to be included here) survives of 355 Sons of Liberty who met at the Liberty Tree in Dorchester in 1769. Once again, Paul Revere appears on it. There were at least two other Masonic lodges in Boston at various periods before and during the Revolution; Paul Revere is known to have belonged to at least one of them. In addition to the North Caucus, there was also a South Caucus and a Middle Caucus. Paul Revere may or may not have belonged to them as well; some men joined more than one. No definitive lists of members have been found. But it is known that Revere was a member of a committee of five appointed “to wait on the South End caucus and the Caucus in the middle part of town,” and that he met with them (Goss, Revere, II, 639). Several Boston taverns were also centers of Whig activity. Revere had connections with at least two of them-Cromwell’s Head, and the Bunch of Grapes. The printing office of Benjamin Edes was another favorite rendezvous. In the most graphic description of a gathering there by John Adams, once again Paul Revere was recorded as being present.
In sum, the more we learn about the range and variety of political associations in Boston, the more open, complex and pluralist the revolutionary movement appears, and the more important (and significant) Paul Revere’s role becomes. He was not the dominant or controlling figure. Nobody was in that position. The openness and diversity of the movement were the source of his importance. Appendix D, page 301, Paul Revere’s Ride, by David Hackett Fischer, New York, 1994.
People will use blogs as they wish, but their important role in directing the actions and messages of a political movement is becoming more and more undeniable. The liberal blogs that I read *usually make their assertions* in an open and pluralist way, not in a top down hierarchical fashion; independent and distributed, yet coordinated and overlapping. This is quite the opposite of our *conservative* adversaries. [I changed rightwing to conservative because the real conservatives hate to be painted with the Bush brush. Tough shit.]
Fischer’s description of Revere as a ‘linchpin, communicator, coordinator, and organizer of collective effort’ seems also seems apropos (heh). It’s pure teamwork, where each role is small, even miniscule, but in the aggregate can lead to an essential outcome, which in today’s political environment is the shedding of authoritative conservatism in favor of an open pluralism.
And wouldn’t you give just about anything to sit in a place called, Bunch of Grapes? Or how about The Green Dragon Tavern or Cromwell’s Head? With luck, maybe someday there will be an establishment called Bush’s Head.
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Radioactive Muslims
Glenn Greenwald sees through the new “leak” about the government being forced (gosh darn it to heck) to monitor Muslims for nukes. Similar to how the convenient color coded terrorist warnings leading up to the election last year were designed to keep the president’s poll numbers from falling, this one is designed to muddy the waters of the NSA spying scandal. After all, if Muslims are suspected of building nuclear devices right in our backyards (God Save Us ALL!) why in the hell are we worried about a little harmless phone tapping?
The Administration’s purported efforts to find radiological activity in Muslim mosques is now supposed to be thrown onto the pile along with its lawless NSA eavesdropping program, so that the whole confusing controversy is aggregated into nothing more than the same tired, irrational terrorist-defending fetish of trying to impede George Bush in his valiant crusade to protect us from The Terrorists. And sure enough, like puppets on cue, the most blindly loyal of the Bush defenders are spitting out exactly this scary tale.
And with the images now darkly dancing around in our heads of Muslims hiding in their mosques in Los Angeles and Queens and Georgia suburbs and maybe in your own backyard, standing over a toxic brew of radiology and TNT ready to zap us all with their mushroom clouds, all of this annoying chatter about FISA and the Fourth Amendment and the NSA is supposed to meekly fade away, drowned to death by nightmares of our children with their hair on fire and glowing in the dark and George Bush trying to save them.
He asks if they will get away with it again. I dunno. At some point you have to wonder if the citizens of the US will tire of playing this little fantasy of being a nation under seige (while they shop til they drop) and want to switch the channel to little “Morning in America.”
I heard a stranger in a line at the book store say the other day that he was tired of hearing the president talk about “protecting us” like he’s some kind of super hero. It’s possible that they’ve gone to the well with this one too many times. We’ll see.
Update: I see that I was unclear. (Eggnog?) This looks like it was leaked because it is the kind of thing that some people will find reasonable. (I doubt that it’s any more effective than making grandma take off her slippers at the airport, but whatever.) The point is that the administration likely leaked this themselves for the purpose of obscuring the seriousness of the NSA spy scandal.
If this is true, it is another case of the administration leaking classified information for political purposes. How surprising.
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Little Red Data Miner
It turns out the Little Red Book Story was a hoax. Thank Goodness. But lest anyone think that this means anything, check this out:
The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system’s main arteries, they said.
As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.
[…]
“There was a lot of discussion about the switches” in conversations with the court, a Justice Department official said, referring to the gateways through which much of the communications traffic flows. “You’re talking about access to such a vast amount of communications, and the question was, How do you minimize something that’s on a switch that’s carrying such large volumes of traffic? The court was very, very concerned about that.”
Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.’s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda.
What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.
That’s what we all thought. TIA Redux. Which means they have likely been sifting through millions of Americans’ communications, with the acquiescence of your friendly neighborhood phone and internet provider, looking for keywords, patterns … well, we don’t know, now do we, because it’s all done with no oversight. They could be looking for signs of illicit blow jobs, which is, as we all know, a major threat to the republic.
I would not expect that this mining is quite as sophisticated as we might like. After all, we are surveilling Quakers and PETA because they are terrorist threats so I wouldn’t look for the NSA to have some mind boggling, science fiction level capabilities to sort out the person who is discussing current events from the terrorist trying to kill us all.
Oh well. If you don’t want to be a suspect, just don’t use your phone or computer. Or the US mail. Or an airplane. Or a library. And if you do use those things, just don’t say anything that a computer might interpret to be a threat. Is that so hard? Use your heads, people. This is what we have to do to preserve our freedom.
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Meme of Fours
by digby
Kevin passes the torch of this new meme to me thinking that it will reveal something interesting about me. I doubt that it will, but here goes:
Four jobs you’ve had in your life: pizza cook, Alaska pipeline worker, medical transcriber, VP of business affairs.
Four movies you could watch over and over: The Godfather, Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally, Dr Strangelove.
Four places you’ve lived: Fairbanks Alaska; Ankara Turkey; Bangkok Thailand; Bay St Louis, Mississippi.
Four TV shows you love to watch: The Daily Show, The Family Guy, Deadwood, Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Four places you’ve been on vacation: Mykonos, Greece; Chitna Alaska; Pismo Beach California, Avignon, France
Four websites you visit daily: Atrios, Firedoglake, The Sideshow, Alicublog (and gawd knows how many hundreds of others …)
Four of your favorite foods: sourdough bread, salami, soft cheese, chocolate (and Zocor)
Four places you’d rather be: Amsterdam, Kauai, San Francisco, Lake Como
Peter Daou, the ball is in your court.
Update:
Here it is.
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