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Talking Ids

The Atlantic features a fascinating article this month about talk radio in which the author goes behind the scenes of a popular radio show here in LA. He examines the entire ethos of the business while focusing on one right wing talk show host named John Zeigler.

A couple of things about the business itself stuck out at me. Evidently, they really do make the case that it isn’t right wing politics that make them successful; it’s the “stimulating” nature of their format:

KFI management’s explanation of “stimulating” is apposite, if a bit slippery. Following is an excerpted transcript of a May 25 Q & A with Ms. Robin Bertolucci, the station’s intelligent, highly successful, and sort of hypnotically intimidating Program Director. (The haphazard start is because the interviewing skills behind the Q parts are marginal; the excerpt gets more interesting as it goes along.)
Q: Is there some compact way to describe KFI’s programming philosophy?
A: “What we call ourselves is ‘More Stimulating Talk Radio.'”
Q: Pretty much got that part already.
A: “That is the slogan that we try to express every minute on the air. Of being stimulating. Being informative, being entertaining, being energetic, being dynamic … The way we do it is a marriage of information and stimulating entertainment.”
Q: What exactly is it that makes information entertaining?
A: “It’s attitudinal, it’s emotional.”
Q: Can you explain this attitudinal component?
A: “I think ‘stimulating’ really sums it up. It’s what we really try to do.”
Q: [strangled frustration noises]
A: “Look, our station logo is in orange and black, and white—it’s a stark, aggressive look. I think that typifies it. The attitude. A little in-your-face. We’re not … stodgy.”

Ok, she’s a bozo, but probably less of a bozo than she sounds. The article doesn’t go there, but I strongly suspect that when you have an 800 pound elephant like Rush as your drive time cash cow, you’d better stimulate in a very particular way, if you know what I mean. She just can’t say that. This is particularly true in a business that is monopolized by a very few companies:

Radio has become a more lucrative business than most people know. Throughout most of the past decade, the industry’s revenues have increased by more than 10 percent a year. The average cash-flow margin for major radio companies is 40 percent, compared with more like 15 percent for large TV networks; and the mean price paid for a radio station has gone from eight to more than thirteen times cash flow. Some of this extreme profitability, and thus the structure of the industry, is due to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which allows radio companies to acquire up to eight stations in a given market and to control as much as 35 percent of a market’s total ad revenues. The emergence of huge, dominant radio conglomerates like Clear Channel and Infinity is a direct consequence of the ’96 Act (which the FCC, aided by the very conservative D.C. Court of Appeals, has lately tried to make even more permissive). And these radio conglomerates enjoy not just substantial economies of scale but almost unprecedented degrees of business integration.

Example: Clear Channel Communications Inc. now owns KFI AM-640, plus two other AM stations and five FMs in the Los Angeles market. It also owns Premiere Radio Networks. It also owns the Airwatch subscription news/traffic service. And it designs and manufactures Prophet, KFI’s operating system, which is state-of-the-art and much too expensive for most independent stations. All told, Clear Channel currently owns some 1,200 radio stations nationwide.

The article goes on to discuss just how specious the ratings system really is and how much it depends on guesswork to determine who is listening and in what numbers:

An abiding question: Who exactly listens to political talk radio? Arbitron Inc. and some of its satellites can help measure how many are listening for how long and when, and they provide some rough age data and demographic specs. A lot of the rest is guesswork, and Program Directors don’t like to talk about it.

These big companies control as much as 35% of a market’s total ad revenue and they set the prices for these ads based mostly on “guess work.” Deregulation is credited with creating these big companies and enabling the economies of scale that are bringing them such huge profits. And the political view that dominates almost all talk radio station in the nation is Republican, the party that supports deregulation. A coincidence I’m sure.

The article looks closely at this guy John Ziegler who may or may not be typical of right wing radio hosts. His self righteous sense of victimization sounds so typical, however, that I think he may be fairly indicative of what makes people like this get up in the morning. He’s certainly a misfit. His main beef (although there are endless beefs) is that political correctness has cost him a decent life. He said something that people called racist and he thinks it was unfair. He said some things that people called sexist he feels put upon. The author of the piece is inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt but I see the problem entirely differently.

He used the word “ni**er”. Speaking of “the Arab world” he says, “We’re not perfect, we suck a lot of the time, but we are better as a people, as a culture, and as a society than they are, and we need to recognize that, so that we can possibly even begin to deal with the evil that we are facing.” And he goes absolutely nuts when people say that he is racist for saying these things.

What wingnuts like him don’t understand about this is that when they openly embrace the party of Strom Thurmond and Phyllis Schlaffley and Jesse Helms, they carry their extra baggage and they need to choose their words more carefully than others. The context in which he said those things could show that he wasn’t a racist but when you are a card carrying right winger don’t be surprised if people jump to conclusions.

They certainly have no trouble applying this standard to members of the party of alleged traitors like Michael Moore when they do not carefully choose their words on the subjects of terrorism and war. For some reason conservatives believe that the scourge of “political correctness” only goes one way when it is clear that they are enforcing speech codes just as rigid as anything seen on an ivy league campus. Instead, when they are called on their insensitive and racist remarks they immediately retreat into a whining mass of self pity (while they sit in the corner sputtering that liberals must disavow Ward Churchill’s every utterance.) As Thomas Frank so convincingly proved in “What’s The Matter With Kansas” this sense of grievance is simply what makes guys like him tick. In fact, there seems to be an abiding sense of grievance in parts of the American character that has manifested itself successfully in the right wing talk format.

I urge you to read this whole article if you can. It’s a fascinating look into a world that is as unglamorous as you can get and still be called media. (Well, except for blogging.) Talk radio is more than entertainment. Way more. It’s the conservative id.

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High School Confidential

Hudson over at Daily Kos has posted a provocative piece about a Republican tactic he calls “fencing.” He accurately describes this process of ritual humiliation that’s become a standard part of the Republican playbook over the last few years, the purpose of which is to “fence off” voters from feeling comfortable identifying with the Democrats and candidates who are widely seen as socially marginalized objects of derision — effeminate geeks. I suspect this tactic works particularly well with certain sub-sets of white males whose identity is wrapped up in machismo and high school jock style social hierarchies —- and the women who buy into those simple heuristic methods of determining leadership capability.(Old Mudcat pretty much came right out and said it. “It’s a macho thing.”)

Clearly, this tactic has been used to great effect in the last two presidential elections and I think it plays particularly well into the existing stereotypes of the two parties with respect to national security. Of course, one of the reasons this works so well is that it is partially designed to appeal to the media’s puerile sense of bitchy good fun, as well. It would not be nearly as effective if the MSM could resist the immature temptation to side with those they perceive as “real guys” and help them deride Democrats as weirdos and sissies.

Bob Sommerby has meticulously detailed the media’s heinous treatment of Al Gore in 2000. Here’s just one example:

RNC PRESS RELEASE:

Washington (June 14)—As Al Gore kicks off his presidential campaign on the front porch of his family’s hobby farm near Carthage, Tennessee, Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson will lead credentialed reporters on a tour of the real Gore homestead—the 8th floor hotel rooms that used to be the Gore suite of the former Ritz Carlton on Washington’s Embassy Row…

Nicholson will arrive at the hotel (now known as the Westin Fairfax and previously called the Ritz Carlton) in a mule-drawn carriage at 10:30, and will then hold a news conference at the hotel’s “Terrace Room” before giving reporters a tour of the former Gore suite.

Here’s how Time magazine dealt with the charming little stunt:

Meet Al-oise

Al Gore’s childhood is the stuff of classics. Specifically, the children’s classic Eloise, by Kay Thompson. Both Al and Eloise lived in a hotel, both were born in the late ’40s, both had busy parents, both have had to wage wars on boredom. And this month, the Eloise licensing campaign heats up with dolls, furniture and collectibles.

I won’t bore you with all the reasons that was such a nasty little piece of work but it doesn’t take a genius to see that the mention of Gore with dolls, boredom, rich parents and a spoiled little girl was no accident. Suffice to say that the press corps snorted in derisive delight and never looked back.

However, this ritual humiliation goes all the way back to Dukakis, at least, with the tank picture. Clinton was a little more difficult to paint with this stuff because he was a known womanizer and they weren’t able to turn him into a sexless geek or a cartoon pansy, even with the allegedly ballbusting wife. In the end they were reduced to calling him a pervert for liking blow jobs which didn’t work all that well, for obvious reasons. Kerry, however, was the subject of constant derision along this line. As Hudson points out:

In the Bush-Kerry campaign, “fencing” mostly took the form of playground insults and other humiliations:

Kerry looks French. Kerry spends a fortune on haircuts. Kerry is vain and pompous. Kerry has funny hair. Kerry’s voice is funny. Kerry reminds people of Lerch on The Munsters. Kerry wears Lycra–fluorescent-striped Lycra. Kerry rides a fancy European bike. Kerry looks fruity when he windsurfs. Kerry wears expensive suits, ties, sunglasses, shoes and belts. Kerry asks for French mustard when he orders a hot dog…

They didn’t exactly make a secret of it.

Karl Rove telegraphs a punch: “the GOP convention will portray Kerry as “an object of humor and calculated derision.” Meanwhile, Senator Trent Lott throws a haymaker at a ‘French-speaking socialist’

The convention, of course, famously featured those cute little band-aids. Dirty trickster Morton Blackwell took the heat before the press for it, but clearly it was planned at a much higher level. Perversely, this playground bully humor actually plays better if some “grownups” wag their fingers and show their disapproval. Mudcat’s macho guys just roar off in their fast cars spraying gravel in everybody’s faces while their sycophants cheer wildly on the sidelines. They actually gain currency when people tut-tut their nasty little jokes.

While talk radio is a purely macho power game, I think it’s interesting that in the mainstream media so many of the right wing pundits and their allegedly objective colleagues characterize a slightly different version of high school power structure — the snotty Heathers. Tucker Carlson, Robert Novak and chief dominatrix Ann Coulter personify the nasty tone and rigid hierarchy of the “popular girls.” Perhaps it is because guys like Tucker and Rich Lowry and Jonah Goldberg simply cannot credibly be seen as macho so this is the best they can do. (Coulter is in a class by herself.)But regardless of whether they are the macho jocks in the fast cars or the mean girl Queen Bees, they all smoothly work together to inflict the same adolescent ritual humiliation.

All of this is to say that there has long been a campaign to emasculate Democrats. (I suspect that there is a corollary in the defeminization of Democratic women as well.) This is powerful stuff and we’d best admit that it is going on so that we can formulate a response that actually works. Right now, we either try to out-manly them or we laugh it off, neither of which are working. (The worst advice that Paul Begala ever took was when Tucker Carlson told him to laugh when these kind of insults are hurled. He often sounds like a nervous hyena they come so fast and furiously and it has the effect of making him appear slightly unhinged.)

I think this tactic plays into many people’s anxiety about changing social and gender roles in our fast moving society. A lot of folks out there are genuinely freaked out by the rapid pace of change and because of it are very susceptible to rigid stereotypes. They just feel more comfortable on the side of the fence where the macho high school boys and the girls who love them are. It’s very hard to even get them to peek over and see what’s on the other side.

And all people refuse vote for someone whom they think of as weak. It goes to the very essence of what leadership is. Half the country is obviously able to see past this little high school game and evaluate the strength of a candidates on the basis of something other than image and macho rhetoric. The other half is clearly in thrall to the manufactured Hollywood image of manly leadership.

I’m not entirely sure what to do about this, but I think dealing with it is far more important than any single stand we take on foreign policy. The people who Peter Beinart thinks to reach are not going to be impressed with historical references to faceless “fighting liberals” of the 50’s. This aversion to voting for Democrats on the basis of national security is much more primal than that and it needs to be dealt with in the same way.

Any ideas?

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Wajda Expect?

Here is the problem when you put a person known as a war criminal back into a war zone in a position of responsibility. When stuff likethis happens it looks really, really, bad.

BAGHDAD, Iraq – U.S. troops who mistakenly killed an Italian intelligence agent last week on the road to Baghdad’s airport were part of extra security provided by the U.S. Army to protect U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte, a U.S. official said Thursday.

Italian intelligence agent Nicola Calipari was killed March 4 when U.S. troops opened fire on a car carrying him and Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who had just been freed from insurgents.

“The mobile patrol was there to enhance security because Ambassador Negroponte was expected through,” U.S. Embassy spokesman Robert Callahan said, confirming reports in Italian media. The newspaper La Repubblica reported Wednesday that the checkpoint had been “set up to protect the passage of Ambassador Negroponte.”

It was not known if Negroponte, who was nominated last month by President Bush to be the new director of national intelligence, had already passed through the checkpoint.

When you have a guy with a reputation for enabling death squads involved in something like this you tend not to get the benefit of the doubt. Not that we care, apparently. Still, it’s just a tad embarrassing for the United States of Spreading Democracy to have to even try to explain to the world why once again John Negroponte is right smack in the middle of another hugely controversial shooting of innocent people. I know democracy is untidy and all, but this is ridiculous.

If this is true it defies belief that the government hasn’t known that this was the case since the first day. I wonder why they forgot to mention it?

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Of The Party,By The Party, For The Party

The next time a wingnut (or anybody) scolds you for being hyperbolic when you call the Republicans undemocratic authoritarians send them here. This report outlines the jackboot tactics of these legislators as they pretty much shut down any form of debate in the congress and govern by one party rule. Their hypocrisy, as always, is astonishing.

For those of you who don’t remember the early 90’s, there was an incessant whine and beating of breasts about the unfairness of the Democratic leadership and how they were elitists whose terms had to be limited in order to bring back the founders’ dream of a citizen legislator who put the people before themselves and the good of all before their party. I think people finally voted them into power in 1994 just to make them shut their mewling gobs as much as anything. And waddaya know? Once in power they are far, far worse than anything the Democrats ever dreamed of. What are the odds?

I realize that the concept of hypocrisy had been retired so there is no point in pursuing this line of thinking. But when you come across the occasional wingnut who says “the Democrats were worse” it would be handy to have read this report in detail so you can slap the supercilious smirk off his face.

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Time To Step Up

Ezra has been trying to find a way to accomodate the DLC in this polarized political world, and I appreciate his efforts to think it through. Today, however, he lost all patience with them. And he points out something that is very important. The DLC is always pushing the leadership to defy the shibboleths and toss aside interest groups to prove that they are the not captive of tired old fashioned thinking. Well, the DLC needs to take a page out of its own blueprint and defy the corporate establishment on the bankruptcy bill. It is the most heinous piece of legislation to come out of the republican congress so far and it is a potent symbol of the worst kind of special interest manipulation in that it blatantly hurts middle americans while protecting the interests of the rich and big business. They need to step up and do a little Sistah-Soljah on their ass.

I’m all for the big tent, but there is no excuse for the DLC not to understand how fundamental this kind of corporate racketeering is to average Americans. It goes against everything Democrats believe in. At some point you’ve got to pick a side. This is one. Social Security is another. These aren’t abstractions about the global economy or deregulation. This is about real, red blooded American people who are going to be hurt at the expense of greedy corporations and radical ideology. That is where the line must be drawn. The DLC could do a lot for its credibility with the rank and file if it would acknowledge this and make an effort to distinguish itself from horrors like this bankruptcy legislation. There is no good reason for them not to.

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The Vig

Atrios helpfully links to a freeper thread (so I don’t have to) in which they just discover that the bankruptcy bill is an abomination. My favorite quote is, “Conservatism must mean something more than simply doing what pleases big business.” There’s some serious cognitive dissonence going on over there.

Here’s the nurse now with a quick Kool-aid injection:

The administration supports the passage of bankruptcy reform because ultimately this will lead to more accessibility to credit for more Americans, particularly lower-income workers,” said Trent D. Duffy, a deputy White House spokesman. “The fact that the Senate was able to set aside those issues and move toward passage shows it’s another bipartisan accomplishment.

I won’t go into why the Senate “Useful Idiot” Club felt they had to enable Dear Leader to once again claim a bipartisan victory. I hope that they will hear from their contituents loud and clear, however. From the reaction in the blogosphere, anyway, there is some serious bipartisan shock and disgust at this bill.

I had thought that this bill was a bit of kabuki to placate the credit card companies. I never bought that the abortion amendment was really enough to keep the bill from passing the house if Tom Delay wanted it to pass. My reasoning was that nobody wanted to shut down the gravy train of consumer spending that was propping up this economy. And I figured that even if they felt they had to pass the bankruptcy provisions this time that they would use the opportunity to set a cap on these interest rates in order to keep the party going for a while. But, as with every other piece of domestic legislation, there isn’t even a single thought given anymore to the health of the economy as a whole. It’s just ad hoc pay-offs dependent on how much a particular special interest has slipped into the pockets of certain senators.

I certainly hope that anyone running against a Republican in ’06 (or incumbent Dem who voted with the pigs yesterday) makes hay out of this, and not just the bankruptcy bill itself, but the way that they enabled the credit card companies to continue charging usury rates of 30-40-50% interest while preventing people from declaring bankruptcy when they get caught in that increasing spiral. Everyday Americans know about credit card bills. Many people are finding out the hard way that if they are late with one bill all their credit card interest rates can very unexpectedly rise to a ridiculous level and compound a reasonable amount of debt into an unaffordable one. Or they are finding that their credit score drops when they take on a certain level of debt for a large purchase or an unexpected emergency like medical bills, thus triggering another huge rise in their interest rates across the board. Average, hard working folks I know in real life have been complaining about suddenly finding that their minimum payment has doubled from one month to the next because of completely unforseen circumstances. That the credit card companies are making record profits at the time they are whining about bankruptcy proves that this is just pure, unadulterated greed. It’s a racket and these pigs in congress just put their personal USDA stamp of approval on it. It is an outrage.

We are seeing the outlines of a potent broadside against the Republicans in 2006 if we are only bold enough to take it. Social Security privatization and this bankruptcy bill are full throated attacks on the middle and working class in this country. They are asking working Americans to take on more and more risk in order to enrich and protect big business. They want to cut your taxes by a couple of bucks and then force you to put thousands more into the hands of their friends on wall street and the big banks.

You can tell that the White House is aware of this by their typically orwellian formulation of the bill:

ultimately this will lead to more accessibility to credit for more Americans, particularly lower-income workers.

Has there ever been an administration with more gall? Low income workers already have access to loan sharks. The vig is the same, either way. Maybe next year they’ll pass legislation allowing the credit card companies to break your legs if you are unable to pay. It works for Tony Soprano, why not the Republican Mob?

I dearly hope that the Democrats are planning to nationalize these midterms and go after this administration with a fiery populist message.The time is ripe and this hits people right where they live. Even if we do not gain any seats, it’s imperative that we begin to make the argument that the Republicans own the government and that they are using their power corruptly. When the shit comes down, and it will, we must have very carefully laid out the case that this abdication of all common sense and concern for average Americans defines this corrupt Republican establishment.

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Tears Of A Klein

It turns out that Joe Klein is even thicker that I took him for. Josh Marshall put out a call to find cases where Klein explained his bizarre theory that social security would have to be privatized because we have moved from an industrial age to an information age.

Google has oodles of cites and none of them make any damned sense whatsoever. Here are a couple you might enjoy:

Joe Klein

Oh, it changed dramatically. Welfare, the Welfare Reform Programme, which I was opposed to, I was wrong, it has been a tremendous success and I’ll tell you why. Because Clinton had a coherent governing philosophy, which Tony Blair shares to a certain extent, which is that in the Information Age, you don’t deliver public services the same way you did in the Industrial Age. You don’t rule out huge bureaucracies, what you do is give targeted cash payments. He gave targeted cash payments to the working poor, so that if you were a mother on welfare, after, you know, after eight years of Clinton, you got $5,000 more a year, you kept your health benefit and your children got health benefits. That was no small thing. If you were middle class or below, you got college tuition tax credits, 10 million Americans take advantage of this. This is a social programme on a scale that dwarfs the GI Bill of Rights, which everybody speaks of as one of the great American social triumphs.

Charles Wheeler: Doesn’t dwarf the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson does it?

Joe Klein: The Great Society was an utter failure because it helped to contribute to social irresponsibility at the very bottom.

Oh my, I’ll bet that started a clatter of teaspoons in Georgtown, didn’t it? What a ballsy, no-nonsense, manly statement, and him a tried and true liberal, don’t you know. (And after he wrote that nasty book about Clinton and the black women, too.)

Yet, for some reason I still don’t quite understand why exactly in the information age you don’t deliver public services the same way you did in the industrial age. If he’s talking about automatic deposit and e-filing your taxes, then I guess he’s right. But I still don’t see what these targeted cash payments or tuition tax credits have to do with the information age or why they are so superior and don’t contribute to the social irresponsibility among the darkies … er … I mean “those at the very bottom.” (And is it even slightly believable that it dwarfs the GI Bill? is he talking about unadjusted 1953 dollars?)

Here he takes another stab at it:

Clinton did come to the presidency with a coherent, long term political philosophy and purpose. To a very great extent–a surprising extent–he lived up to it. I know because I was there and I was one of those who was involved in the formulating of this new philosophy, which has been called The Third Way. There was a general understanding that the Democratic Party had gone off the deep end and needed to come back. Clinton once told me that when he was hoping to be Mario Cuomo’s vice president, the job of the next president is going to be to move us from the Industrial Age to the Information Age.

Government was, and very much still remains, the last of our major institutions that stuck in the Industrial Age, where the paradigm is top-down, centralized command and control, assembly line, standardization, and one size fits all.

In the Information Age, Clinton knew that the paradigm was the computer, that the government had to be more decentralized, that bureaucracies had to become more flexible, and that our social safety net had to reflect that–the fact that people had more information and have to have more choices about where they get their health care, where their money for their retirement is held, and so on.

The government has to be more like a computer. Bureaucracies have to be more flexible and our social safety net has to reflect that because people have more information so they have to have more choices about where they get their health care and where they put their retirement money. Huh?

I can’t find anywhere where Klein actually explains why we need to have all these choices about our safety net or why having more information compels it. Indeed, as Josh Marshall pointed out earlier, it is counterintuitive. In a world in which people are asked to take many more chances in their careers, where pensions really are a relic of the past, where health care can be yanked from beneath you in a moments notice, it seems to me that government guarantees of basic security are more important than ever.

Klein’s DLC catechism has all the markings of someone who jumped on a sexy trend when he was younger and hasn’t realized the fashion has changed. There is no there, there. He’s like one of those e-venture capitalists of the late 90’s spewing fast talking bullshit about “new organizational paradigms where knowledge is defined in terms of potential for action as distinguished from information and its more intimate link with performance.” In other words, gibberish.

It was fashionable for one brief period to think that turning government into a collection of kewl, outsourced, totally, like, stand alone pods of individualized data collection and service modules, but most people sobered up sometime in early 2000. It was always crap.

Clinton did what he could to survive, reframe the Democratic image and move the country forward while under monumental pressure from the opposition. I do not blame him for doing what he did. But I have never understood that this discredited e-commerce comic book version of government was his vision. If it was, I imagine his enthusiasm has cooled by this time. Crashing stock markets and huge crony capitalist boondoggles generally make intelligent people think twice about utopian capitalist wet dreams. Klein doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo.

And, by the way, who knew that Joe Klein was personally involved in formulating the “third way?” Funny, I thought he was just a bad journalist and a worse novelist. I had no idea he was such an open Democratic partisan. Frankly, I think he would have been more helpful to the cause if he’d simply shut his gossiping, moralizing, judgmental trap during the administration.

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Do What You Can

Democrats.com has a nice form to e-mail your Senators to filibuster the bankruptcy bill. They are scheduled to vote tomorrow. This is a seriously egregious bill that no Democrat (Joe Biden) should back under any circumstances, but it looks like it will pass this time unless somebody filibusters.

The most amazing thing about this is that while they are drastically reducing the ability of people to get a fresh start and seize more of their assets, they are also going to allow the credit card companies to charge usury rates to these very same people. It’s like something out of Dickens.

Click here if you have a few minutes, or make a call if you have more than a few minutes and make your wishes known.

Update: Julia at Sisyphus Shrugged pointed me to No More Mr Nice Blog’s interesting insight into Charles “Let ‘Em Eat Pancakes” Grassley’s view toward Christian charity:

Grassley now:

A national group of Christian lawyers is appealing to church leaders to join them in lobbying against the bankruptcy reform bill introduced by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Ia.

The lawyers say the legislation runs contrary to the forgiveness of debt and charity required by the Bible….

In response, Grassley said Congress could not be bound by biblical mandates because “the Constitution does not provide for a theocracy.”

“I can’t listen to Christian lawyers because I would be imposing the Bible on a diverse population,” Grassley said.

–Des Moines Register, 3/4/05

*****

Grassley then:

SEN. CHARLES GRASSLEY: … It’s odd that one of those — there has been some condemnation of him because of his religious beliefs. It’s a sad commentary that John Ashcroft’s Christian religious beliefs can’t be considered an asset in the same vein that Joseph Lieberman’s religious faith was considered an asset during the last election.

–discussing the pending confirmation of John Ashcroft, PBS NewsHour, 1/18/01

On Friday, June 19, 1998, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Religious Liberty and Charitable Donation Protection Act, S.1244. The new law will protect tithing and charitable giving under the federal bankruptcy code.

Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa introduced the legislation last year….

In addition to protecting from federal bankruptcy courts the donations made to a church through tithing or to a tax-exempt charity through an established pattern of giving, the Religious Liberty and Charitable Donation Protection Act also restores the right of debtors to tithe and give charitably after declaring bankruptcy under Chapter 13….

–Grassley press release

On June 12, 1995, the Senate initiated debate on the CDA [Communications Decency Act]…

The entire Senate debate, spearheaded by Senator Exon and Republicans Dan Coats and Charles Grassley, was informed by the sensibilities of the religious right. The Senators read letters from the Christian Coalition and from Bruce Taylor [of the National Law Center for Children and Families] into the record….

–“The Religious Right and Internet Censorship” by Jonathan Wallace

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Read This

Garance Franke-Ruta has a wonderful, must read piece up about the ways in which the left and right blogosphere work. When it comes to scalp hunting, the right is (as always) professional and funded. And once again the usual suspects are present:

Scratch the surface and the same names turn up in each scandal, revealing the events of mid-February to have been part of an ongoing and coordinated proxy war by Republican political operatives on the so-called liberal media, conducted through the vast, unmonitored loophole of the Internet.

[…]

But success bred change. Along has come a new group of bloggers who aren’t mere “citizens” at all. On the left side, some of these became deeply enmeshed with political parties, “527s,” and campaign advocacy groups — and are now a new generation of no-holds-barred partisans and major party fund-raisers, the liberal equivalent of George W. Bush’s “Rangers” and “Pioneers.”

On the right, a number of these bloggers were already political operatives or worked at long-standing movement institutions before taking up residence online. They are, at best, the intellectual heirs of L. Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center and Reed Irvine, who founded the ultraconservative, media-hounding nonprofit organization Accuracy In Media (AIM) in 1969 as part of the first generation of post–Barry Goldwater right-wing institutions. At worst, they’re the protégés of conservative fund-raiser Richard Viguerie and dirty-tricks master Morton Blackwell, who has tutored conservative activists since 1965, most recently mocking John Kerry at the Republican national convention by distributing Band-Aids with purple hearts on them.

Which brings us back to Jordan. He was brought down not by outraged citizen-bloggers but by a mix of GOP operatives and military conservatives. Easongate.com, the blog that served as the clearinghouse for the attack on CNN, was helped along by Virginia-based Republican operative Mike Krempasky. From May 1999 through August 2003, Krempasky worked for Blackwell as the graduate development director of the Leadership Institute, an Arlington, Virginia–based school for conservative leaders founded by Blackwell in 1979. The institute is the organization that had provided “Gannon” with his sole media credential before he became a White House correspondent. It also now operates “Internet Activist Schools” designed to teach conservatives how to engage in “guerilla Internet activism.”

Indeed, Krempasky could be found teaching this Internet activism course one recent February weekend to about 30 young conservatives at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington. “He advocated that people write from their experience — and not necessarily as conservatives,” a Democratic consultant who attended the seminar incognito told me. For example, Krempasky told “a conservative firefighter” that he should write about firefighting because that would be of interest to readers. Using that angle, he could build an audience. And if push ever came to shove, he could respond to an online dogfight from the unassailable position of being a firefighter — and not as just another conservative ideologue. Krempasky then offered to help all the attendees set up their own blogs. “We’re definitely in serious trouble,” said the Democratic attendee.

The tactics Krempasky promotes are directly descended from those advocated by the late Reed Irvine of AIM, whose major funder was, for the past two decades, Richard Mellon Scaife. “Many bloggers and blog readers might not even know who Reed Irvine was, nor understand the debt we owe him as conservatives,” Krempasky wrote upon Irvine’s passing last year. “But that debt is tremendous.” In the late ’80s, Irvine had started the campaign to “Can Dan” Rather, coining the phrase “Rather Biased.” Last fall, Krempasky was operating the main anti-Rather site, Rathergate.com, and using Irvine’s slogan as a rallying cry to organize a vast letter-writing and e-mailing campaign “to contact CBS and express themselves,” as he put it in an interview with Bobby Eberle of GOPUSA, an activist Web site founded by Texas Republicans and now owned by Bruce Eberle (no relation), the proprietor of a conservative direct-mail firm. “Conservatives have operated through alternative media for 40 years, direct mail being the first one,” Krempasky told me, sitting in the food court of the Ronald Reagan International Building as the CPAC wound down. “As far as the Internet goes, conservatives have largely been ahead of the left.”

Also part of the Easongate.com team was La Shawn Barber, who writes a biweekly column for — again, the name pops up — GOPUSA and has written for AIM about “the Bush-bashing media.” Working alongside Krempasky and Barber was another site, RedState.org, “a Republican community weblog” registered with the Federal Election Commission as a 527. Krempasky helped found that site along with Senate staffer Ben Domenech, the chief speechwriter for Bush ally and Texas Senator John Cornyn; and former U.S. Army officer Josh Trevino, a conservative blogger who used to write under the name “Tacitus.” The goal of RedState.org? “[T]o unite … voices from government, politics, activism, civil society, and journalism” in service of the “construction of a Republican majority.”

Just read the whole thing. And then come back and we’ll get Zephyr Teachout on the horn and get on that blogging ethics thing right away. I feel very confident that the right is going to be very happy to sign on. And then we can all sing Kumbaya and play Yahtzee.

Clearly the right blogosphere is more professional and more sophisticated than the left. They have fully incorporated it into their noise machine and added it to their bag of dirty tricks. We, on the other hand, are becoming adept internet detectives and clearing houses for citizen action. They are top down, we are grassroots. They are party apparatchiks, we are a vibrant political constituency in our own right. I’ll put my money on us for the long term. Like their Leninist mentors, their edifice will fall of its own weight.

But in the meantime, I wonder how much more of these phony blogs are out there? Maybe this is a job for DKOS-CSI.

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Seinfeld Reruns

I missed Press The Meat yesterday because it was interrupted for the LA marathon, so I didn’t have the dubious pleasure of seeing Joe Klein make my point about the DLC being an anachronism — or have the real pleasure of seeing Paul Krugman agree with me. Not that Klein is necessarily DLC but he represents the ossified views that took hold in the 90’s. When he starts using tech boom jargon, you know that he’s still lost in a haze of Monica’s thong and Pets.com.

MR. JOE KLEIN: Well, it’s kind of amazing and somewhat amusing to see the Republicans so much on the defensive on this issue right now. It’s an unusual circumstance. I agree with Paul in that private accounts have nothing to do with solvency and solvency is the issue. I disagree with Paul because I think private accounts a terrific policy and that in the information age, you’re going to need different kinds of structures in the entitlement area than you had in the industrial age. But it is very hard to do that kind of change under these political circumstances where you have the parties at such loggerheads.

I’d love to know what the logic is for his statement that we should have private accounts because we are in the information age as opposed to the industrial age. What, because we can get our account statements by e-mail? That is nothing but warmed over techno-babble you would have heard at Comdex circa 1997. He’s badly in need of an upgrade.

I wrote below about the DLC, but Klein shows that many in the elite media are probably suffering from the same problem. Obviously, Paul Krugman sees the real issue:

MR. KRUGMAN: I think it’s just wildly up in the air. I mean, you know, there’s enormous turmoil on the Democratic side trying to figure out–there’s a lot of unity but there’s a lot of turmoil about what the party stands for. And I just don’t know. I mean, I can’t–I dread the prospect of a Clinton run just because I think that would be–it would be an attempt to recreate the politics of the ’90s when you had Bill Clinton, who was a president who managed to sort of triangulate. And I think we ought to have an election that’s really about what what kind of country we’re going to be and we won’t have that if it’s Hillary Clinton running.

…

MR. KLEIN: Paul, I have a question for you: What was it about the peace and prosperity of the eight years of the Clinton administration that you didn’t like?

MR. KRUGMAN: No, I liked the way the country ran.

MR. KLEIN: I think that he had a real governing philosophy. It wasn’t triangulation. It was moving us from the industrial age to the information age, and that’s where the Democratic Party is going to have to move…

MR. KRUGMAN: There’s a radical right…

MR. KLEIN: …if it wants to have any role in American politics.

MR. KRUGMAN: There’s a radical right challenge to America as we know it that’s under way, and I think the Democrats–I mean, maybe Hillary Clinton can do this. I’m actually not opposed to her, right? But they need to make clear that they are going to turn back that tide, not blur it.

MR. KLEIN: The answer to a radical right challenge isn’t a reactionary left response.

No the answer is to keep making the same mistakes over and over again, apparently.

This is the essence of the argument within the Democratic Party right now. We either acknowledge the nature of the opposition and gather our courage to fight it with an affirmative defense of our beliefs and a willingness to take the fight to the Republicans or we continue with a constant tweaking of issues and small bore accomodation in the hopes that we can eke out a tiny win election to election, the latter of which I would find a dubious proposition what with the questionable “wins” we keep seeing in states run by Republicans.

Here’s the problem. The other side is waging a battle for total political dominance. They are willing to do anything to achieve it from cheating at elections to government propaganda to spending billions on a travelling political spectacle to entertain the folks. We will not defeat them with pocket protector arguments about the information age (although if anyone were qualified to make such an argument it would be Paul Krugman, the quintessential economist geek.) I suspect the fact that Krugman sees the big picture while Klein is still floating on a cloud of Seinfeldian nostalgia speaks more to the fact that Krugman famously does not hob knob with the in crowd while Klein famously lives for it.

As Ari Berman points out in his article in The Nation, the DLC and the allegedly liberal media are one big circle jerk.

Update: Josh Marshall is also curious about Klein’s bizarre statement that private accounts are required for this new information age. He’s scouting for some evidence that Klein wasn’t just blowing smoke because he didn’t have a clue about the subject. I’m pretty sure he won’t find it.

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