Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Falling Star

Arnold is beatable. From the LA Weekly:

Arnold Schwarzenegger could well be a one-term governor. Unbelievable as that seemed at the beginning of the year, which the action superstar entered as arguably the most popular governor in California history, it may end up that way.

[…]

A telling scene came last week at a strange little event at the Capitol. Billed as a “Thank You, Arnold” rally, heavily promoted with blast e-mails, robocalls and talk radio, it was a complete bust. A mere 100 supporters turned up to see the strange duo of Hollywood libertine Tom Arnold (the comedian who was Schwarzenegger’s sidekick in True Lies) and abstemious conservative 2003 gubernatorial candidate Tom McClintock.

Read the whole article for the litany of problems the Governator is facing as his “reform” agenda is resisted by pretty much everybody.

Unsurprisingly, I think that Warren Beatty understands the problem:

“This is an Arnold picture,” says Oscar-winner Beatty. “Superman walks in the room, and shit happens. That can be pretty spectacular. As long as all the characters follow the script. But this isn’t a movie.”

This is another example of the folly of voting for superficial politics. Schwarzenneger is alleged to be a pretty smart guy. I think it was Hollywood hype. He’s a hard worker who parlayed his body into a successful Hollywood career. (Many women have done the same before him, and none of them have been called geniuses for doing it.) If he really believed that he could do something like destroy California’s public employee pension plan purely by dint of his celebrity — a little fallacy that seems to common among big shot Republicans these days — then he’s stupid.

Hollywood is full of delusional people who think that they are geniuses. The worst offenders aren’t even stars like Arnold who can, at least, prove that they can make a movie profitable merely by their presence in it more often than not. The movie executives, who are the only organizational role models Arnold has ever had, are the real offenders.

Nikki Finke has this fascinating little window into the Hollywood boardroom:

Hypocrisy, thy name is EW’s parent company, Time Warner. Chairman and CEO Dick Parsons gave himself a perk that’s a monument to ego: a 5,000-square-foot, 21st-floor, marble-and-rare-wood dream suite (a supposed $25 mil to build out) inside the swankiest and priciest NYC office space, the new Time Warner Center. Parsons and the other heads of the Mammoth Media conglomerates feeding America its infotainment — Disney, Sony, Viacom, General Electric and News Corp. — may gag on celebrity greed, but they never stop indulging their own corporate gluttony.

Wanna hurl? Look at the latest shareholders-be-damned headlines this week about Viacom — owner of Paramount, CBS, MTV, VH1, and Infinity radio — disclosing that it gave its top three moguls a 58 percent pay increase even though the company’s stock price fell 18 percent in 2004. A Viacom spokesman noted that the bonuses for all executives were tied to operating income, not share price.

It’s not just the arrogance of rich, old Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone claiming he cuts costs at every corner while at the same time lining his own pockets at the expense of investors that’s so nauseating. It’s also the profligacy of a public company shameless enough to reimburse Les Moonves, who lives in Los Angeles but also has a New York apartment, $105,000 for the period he stayed in New York at his apartment instead of at a hotel, or Tom Freston, who is based in New York but also has a residence in Los Angeles, $43,100 for the time he spent staying at his L.A. home instead of a hotel.

Years ago, in another life, I used to receive Christmas baskets from Sumner Redstone. Instead of muffins or popcorn, however, he sent Omaha steaks. He was a cheapskate in every other way, but he did know his perks.

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Battlefield Biloxi

Mississippi is among the first states in the nation to make it lawful to allow religious documents to be posted on public property.

By signing the law today, Gov. Haley Barbour “thrills” the Christian conservative base of the Republican Party, which he’ll need if he plans to seek re-election or launch a presidential campaign, said Larry J. Sabato, director of the director of the Institute of Politics at the University of Virginia.

The law gives permission to those in authority of public buildings to post The Ten Commandments, excerpts of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and the motto, “In God We Trust.”

“Fundamentalist Christians can be a majority of those who turn up in caucus primaries. This would be very useful in seeking the Republican nomination for president,” Sabato said.

There is only one way to deal with this. Scientologists, fully recognized as a religion by the US government, should insist on displaying their sacred documents as well. If the government of Mississippi isn’t establishing Christianity as the state religion with this act, then it will be open to displays of all religions that Americans practice, right?

I honestly think this may be a better tack to take than constantly fighting purely on the principle that no religious displays should be allowed. People evidently need to have someone draw them a picture of the problems that ensue when the government starts taking sides in religious issues. (They could read European history, but that would take time away from “Desperate Housewives”.) The hard core fundamentalists would not care because they actively seek to wipe out any religious expression but their own. However, there are many people who don’t see the harm in displaying The Ten Commandments in a courthouse. It is those people who need to be shown what happens when the government allows one religion to have official standing over another. Things get ugly. Apparently we need a demonstration of that before people will understand it.

We have been very fortunate in this country to have religions of all kinds flourishing without interference. The establishment clause, it should be remembered, was supported by evangelicals at the time because they were the most likely to be oppressed if freedom of religion was not made explicit in the new constitution. Without the establishment clause, and American government’s overall hands-off attitude, the Mormon and Pentacostal churches would never have become world religions.

I don’t know if the following is true (got it on these here internets) but I think it’s a fair illustration of the lesson:

THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD GO I –

“On seeing several criminals being led to the scaffold in the 16th century, English Protestant martyr John Bradford remarked, ‘There but for the grace of God, goes John Bradford.’ His words, without his name, are still very common ones today for expressing one’s blessings compared to the fate of another. Bradford was later burned at the stake as a heretic.” From the “Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins” by Robert Hendrickson, Facts on File, New York, 1997.

Update: Matt Yglesias has more on the difficulties awaiting the new Republican “religious” party/
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Harry Started It

David Brooks says that if it weren’t for Roe vs Wade we wouldn’t be having all this nastiness in our political discourse. And the fight over the judiciary — my gawd — nobody would even think of it:

Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Roe vs. Wade decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter -viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since, and now threatens to destroy the Senate as we know it.

Religious conservatives became alienated from their own government, feeling that their democratic rights had been usurped by robed elitists. Liberals lost touch with working-class Americans because they never had to have a conversation about values with those voters; they could just rely on the courts to impose their views. The parties polarized as they each became dominated by absolutist activists.

I think he’s right. In fact, all those right wingers who agitated for the impeachment (and worse) of Earl Warren in the 1960’s were not actually upset about Brown vs board of education or Griswald vs Connecticut or any of the other decisions that we thought had set the wingnuts aflame during the era. It was because they were anticipating that the Supreme Court was going to find a right to abortion in 1973.

Here’s how The Eagle Forum so cleverly covers their tracks:

The Warren Court (1953-1969) fueled the Culture War into an inferno and then placed the federal judiciary squarely in the white-hot center of the conflagration. “Impeach Earl Warren” signs exploded like rockets across the nation as Americans began to realize what was happening. But the courts and the Constitution have remained at the center of our culture conflict, and much of the Warren Court’s legacy remains in tact.

Clearly, they refuse to admit that until Roe vs Wade in 1973 the right had no issues with the courts. Indeed, everyone got along just great. They bore no ill will for the court that found “separate but equal” to be unconstitutional. Oh no, it wasn’t until poor Harry Blackmun found that a woman had a right to the privacy of her own body that the right decided that the “robed elitists” had usurped their democratic rights. All that impeachment talk before then was just good clean fun.

Thus, the culture war is all about abortion and not, as some have erroneously assumed, a half century of struggle over fundamental issues of social justice, tolerance, individual rights and modernity in general. This whole thing is a simple disagreement between upstanding conservatives saving cute little babies from black robed elitists and lazy liberals refusing to admit that equal rights under the law is a matter for legislative negotiation with Rick Santorum.

That Brooks, he’s a keen social observer and historical analyst. He figured this out, I’m sure, over a Bud light and a plate of popcorn shrimp down at Coco’s.

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Ball Gag

So Howard “I couldn’t even beat a stiff like Bill Jones” Kaloogian has another one of his fun little smear jobs up on his “Moving America Back To The Dark Ages” site. (He is, for those who don’t know, one of the guys who instigated the California Recall.)

Here’s the transcript of the “ad”:

Wife: Honey, were you watching C-SPAN today? Did you hear how disloyal Senator Voinovich was to Republicans and President Bush? Voinovich stood with the Democrats and refused to vote for John Bolton, the man President Bush has chosen to fight for the United States at the UN

Husband: No, I was streaming it on the Internet at the office, but from what I could tell, Senator Voinovich played hookey from the hearings?

Wife: Yeah that’s right. He’s missed most of the Bolton confirmation hearings, but then shows up at the last minute and stabs the President and Republicans right in the back.

Husband: That’s ridiculous – the United Nations needs reform, we need someone who will stand up for the United States and fight the UN’s corruption and anti-Americanism.

Wife: Shame on Senator Voinovich. After the Democrats smeared Condoleeza Rice for Secretary of State and Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General, how could Voinovich side with the Democrats in smearing John Bolton?

Husband: It seems like Senator Voinovich has become a traitor to the Republican Party.

Wife: Enough’s enough. I’m logging on to Move America Forward dot com to register my protest with Senator Voinovich’s office.

Husband: What was that site? Move America Forward dot com ?

Wife: Yep, Move America Forward dot com

It must be awfully uncomfortable being told that either you become a submissive slave to the right wing or you are a traitor. Welcome to our world Senator Voinovich.

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Unlawful Combatants

The word that Moussaoui may be pleading guilty today reminds me that we haven’t heard anything about the alleged dirty bomber, Jose Padilla, for a while. His name will be remembered in history as the the Supreme court ruling that held that the government could keep someone imprisioned with no due process indefinitely simply by moving him or her from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. As it happens, The Talking Dog did a lengthy and interesting interview with Padilla’s lawyer just this week:

Talking Dog: Do you think that, by and large, the American people actually care about this case, and care about what happens in it?

Donna Newman: I’m afraid the answer is no. Most people think that at least they’re taking a terrorist off the street- they’re making ME safer. But they’re not, of course. This makes us less secure– not more secure. What’s that famous statement…

Talking Dog: Ben Franklin’s quip that “they who would trade their precious liberty for a little temporary security
deserve neither”?

Donna Newman: Exactly. What we have here is a decision not made by the people– but by their government. In this country, the Congress makes the laws, and the President executes them. The President MUST follow the laws of Congress. Congress passed a law [18 U.S.C. § 4001(a) (2000) (the “Non-Detention Act”)] expressly prohibiting the President from detaining citizens on U.S. soil without CONGRESSIONAL authorization to do so, and the President had, and has, no such authorization. The President didn’t ask Congress to pass a law to give him such authorization. And even if he did, such a law would probably be unconstitutional. Not because anyone condones terrorism, or anything like that. But there are reasons we do things. In Germany– and I hate to use that as an example, but it’s true– in Germany people turned their backs on the first few infringements and it just kept going. For another thing, we need to protect our soldiers over in Iraq and elsewhere fighting for us. That’s why we’re strong. It’s our laws and that we follow them that make us strong. Without them, how are we different from other countries? I believe in our Constitution. YOu just can’t take someone on the street, lock them up, and say that the rules don’t apply to them. You just can’t.

Well, apparently you can. My favorite part of this is that she had filed the original writ of habeas corpus in New York because that’s where she thought her client was. She did not know for sure, of course, because she wasn’t allowed to see him and the government wouldn’t tell her. And then the court decided that because she had filed in the wrong jurisdiction they could not deal with the merits of the case. Needless to say this opens up a whole lotta possibilities for the government in future cases like this one.

This court has made some doozy decisions and this one will be right up there with the worst of them. Gawd help us if we have another terrorist attack.

Of course, this shouldn’t be surprising considering that the government was sending around requests in Iraq for a torture “wish list.”

Army intelligence officials in Iraq developed and circulated “wish lists” of harsh interrogation techniques they hoped to use on detainees in August 2003, including tactics such as low-voltage electrocution, blows with phone books and using dogs and snakes — suggestions that some soldiers believed spawned abuse and illegal interrogations.

[…]

In both incidents, a previously disclosed Aug. 14, 2003, e-mail from the joint task force headquarters in Baghdad to top U.S. human-intelligence gatherers in Iraq is cited as a potential catalyst.

Capt. William Ponce wrote that “the gloves are coming off” because casualties were mounting and officers needed better intelligence to fight the insurgency. Ponce solicited “wish lists” from interrogators and gave them three days to respond. That message was forwarded throughout the theater, including to officials at Abu Ghraib, where notorious abuse followed.

At the 4th Infantry Division’s detention facility in Tikrit, the e-mail caused top intelligence officials to develop a list including open-hand strikes, closed-fist strikes, using claustrophobic techniques and a number of “coercive” techniques such as striking with phone books, low-voltage electrocution and inducing muscle fatigue. The list was sent back to Baghdad on Aug. 17.

Interrogators used the perception of newfound latitude to interview an unidentified detainee on Sept. 23, 2003. According to the detainee’s statement, he was made to lie across folding chairs while an interrogator beat the soles of his feet with a police baton. He said he was later hit in the back and the buttocks with the baton while in a painful stress position.

This is what we do when we are the ones who invade the country allegedly to liberate the people. Imagine what this nation will do if another catastrophic terrorist attack happens. The Padilla case precedent will undoubtedly be used to justify holding large numbers of people in secret detention in unknown jusrisdictions indefinitely. Since they won’t have access to a lawyer or advocate of any kind, God only knows what will be done to them.

Correction: Original habeas corpus filed in NY. Corrected in the post.
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Speaking of Superstition

Evidently people believe that the water stain on this overpass looks like the Virgin Mary:

Personally, I think it looks like this:

or maybe this:

That water stain brings all kinds of things to mind that are worthy of reverence.

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The Pope Show

My cable has been out for several days so until this morning I hadn’t had the pleasure of watching “The Pope Show” on CNN for a while. In fact, I thought that it might be on hiatus since the old pope was dead and the new one had been named. Not so. The show has been renewed. Now it’s “The New Pope Show.” (They were going to call it “God’s Rottweiler” but it didn’t focus group well among dog lovers.) Episode one was today. He led a mass and had a photo op. He also plays the piano. Wadda guy.

I am not surprised that Catholics like Andrew Sullivan are worried and depressed or that conservatives would be excited and thrilled to see a re-affirmation of their authoritarianism and bigotry. These are the good old days for reactionaries, after all. But liberals needn’t fear. CNN’s Jennifer Eccleston just said that this new pope is “sending a message, saying ‘hey, guys, I’m not as conservative as you think!'”

Like, he is so totally not, like, super conservative, even! Kewl.

John Powers wrote a wonderful piece this week in the LA Weekly about death, declinism the conservative capture of the media. I urge you to read the whole thing, but I think this captures what so enraptures the conservatives and their media handmaidens — simplicity and infallibility. That’s what people like about this papal orgy and that’s why they voted for Dubya.

As often happens these days, the pope’s death and funeral took on a ghastly reactionary tinge. The right tried to hijack everything from John Paul II’s most conservative ideas — you didn’t exactly hear Fox News analysts talking up his criticisms of capitalism or the Iraq war — to his aura of unassailable rectitude. President Bush was especially eager to wrap himself in the papal robes. Whereas Bill Clinton said that John Paul II had been right about some things and wrong about others, Dubya said he couldn’t think of a case where the pontiff had been wrong. That seems reasonable to me. After all, if one infallible leader can’t spot another, who the hell can?

I had heard that the church has trouble recruiting priests these days so it would seem that every single priest in the country has appeared on CNN these last three weeks. Every day it’s someone new with more warm words for the old pope and even warmer ones for the new pope with Wolf and Darryn and the rest genuflecting and squealing like a bunch of 7th graders at an N Sync concert. One of the priests just said that Ratzinger’s election was the work of the Holy Spirit (rather than the result of keen political maneuvering.) This is America, after all, where only most superstitious interpretation of anything is deemed credible. And just now Kyra Phillips showed us how to get to the new pope’s fan club, which is totally awesome. Miles says that we are going to a papal photo-op in a couple of minutes and I’m so excited.

I would really like to hear anyone say with a straight face that the American news media are hostile to religion. To one who is not religious, it’s become an oppressive and suffocating ubiquitous topic that feels an awful lot like proselytising. Whatever. The new supah-star, meaty-cheesy Pope Benedict is saying “hey guys, I’m not so ultra-conservative!” But he is indubitably infallible, so that’s good.

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Flame On High

I’ve been having some major Adelphia cable problems so posting is sporadic and I apologize. It’s been a rough couple of days for me anyway. Seeing Ann Coulter feted on the cover of Time magazine as a mainstream political figure instead of the deranged, murderous extremist she actually is was quite a shock. And then a friend sent me the links to the Free Republic thread discussing the death of Marla Ruzicka, which made me so nauseous that I had to shut down for a while.

It has become clear to me that we are frogs being slowly boiled to death. And the media are enjoying the hot tub party so much that they are helping to turn up the heat.

Ann Coulter is not, as Howie Kurtz asserts today, the equivalent of Michael Moore. Michael Moore is is not advocating the murder of conservatives. He just isn’t. For instance, he doesn’t say that Eric Rudolph should be killed so that other conservatives will learn that they can be killed too. He doesn’t say that he wishes that Tim McVeigh had blown up the Washington Times Bldg. He doesn’t say that conservatives routinely commit the capital offense of treason. He certainly doesn’t put up pictures of the fucking snoopy dance because one of his political opponents was killed. He doesn’t, in other words, issue calls for violence and repression against his political enemies. That is what Ann Coulter does, in the most coarse, vulgar, reprehensible way possible.

Moore says conservatives are liars and they are corrupt and they are wrong. But he is not saying that they should die. There is a distinction. And it’s a distinction that Time magazine and Howard Kurtz apparently cannot see.

I have long felt that it was important not to minimize the impact of this sick shit. For years my friends and others in the online communities would say that it was a waste of time to worry about Rush because there are real issues to worry about. Likewise Coulter. Everytime I write something about her there is always someone chastizing me for wasting their time. Yet, here she is, being given the impramatur of a mainstream publication of record in a whitwash of epic proportions. Slowly, slowly the water is heating up.

It’s kind of funny that I and others spent last week arguing whether Democrats ought to be encouraging Hollywood to stop selling sex, (which even David Brooks agrees doesn’t seem to correlate to any real negative change in the way kids behave.) But, here we have a real problem, a real coarsening of the discourse which has resulted in our politics becoming so polarized and rhetorically violent that it’s as if we live on two different planets.

While Ann Coulter makes the cover of Time for writing that liberals have a “preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason,” her followers actually side with Iraqi insurgents against an American charity worker. At freeperland and elsewhere they laughed and clapped and enjoyed the fruits of the enemy’s labor. This is because if you listen to Ann and Rush and Sean and Savage and all the rest of these people you know that there is no greater enemy on the planet than the American liberal. That’s what Ann Coulter and her ilk are selling and that is what Time magazine celebrated with their cover girl this week.

I’m not going to argue with my fellow Democrats any more about how Janet Jackson’s nipple and Desperate Housewives’ double ententres are coarsening American media culture. This is not because American media culture isn’t being coarsened. But T&A is clearly not the problem. It’s the sick, depraved fucks who are selling liberal death fantasies to the public and being aided by idiots in the mainstream press who are so in the (ever heating) tank that they have lost all sense of perspective.

The recently annointed GOP saint, Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was the one who coined the phrase “defining deviancy down” and I think he’s been validated. When a deranged, flamthrowing fascist like Ann Coulter is called “amusing” and “entertaining”, deviancy has definitely been redefined.

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Swallowing Their Pride

Tom Delay’s supporters are awfully upset about having things forced down their throats and would like Tom to ram something down the Democrats’ throats instead:

Josh, You have to tell the whole story of anything or you are not credible. I never take anything democrats say because in the last 10 years the Minority is trying to force everything down our throats. You speak in such disrespect about Delay, the bug man, that I have suggested to many senators by email, that Delay should quit and start running or the presidency. He is just what we need. With his style we could ram down your throats.

Lotta forcing and ramming going on there. Of course,the big man himself likes to turn a colorful phrase in this regard only he prefers “stuffing” over “ramming.” Here’s a classic :

Americans “have been tolerant of homosexuality for years, but now it’s being stuffed down their throats and they don’t like it.” DeLay said.

Tom DeLay’s vivid rhetoric (like that of his biggest fan) apparently just burst out despite his best efforts to contain it. That’ll happen.

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Doing Our Part

I have written in the past that I would love to watch the Sunday gasbag shows with some of America’s incisive social critics of the past. I can only imagine what Mark Twain or HL Mencken would say at the spectacle of Tim Russert and five pompadoured members of the clergy disgorging scripture with all the unctuous insincerity of a South Carolina push poller. You know it would be wicked.

This article by Richard Byrne in The American Prospect discusses Sinclair Lewis, one of the greats, and specifically notes just how relevant Elmer Gantry is today. (Considering the Big Tent Revival Senator Frist and the Dogbeater Dobson are putting on the Sunday, it’s almost eerie.)

It has been almost 80 years since novelist Sinclair Lewis set his most iconic ?ctional creation, a hell-raiser turned hell?re preacher named Elmer Gantry, loose on an unsuspecting America. For a clergyman in his 70s, Gantry has proven to be remarkably hale and hearty. Op-ed writers and columnists lean continually on Lewis’ parson to represent a uniquely American type: the fundamentalist hypocrite serving up corn pone and brimstone to promulgate a strict public morality.

The type was on its way to the margins in Lewis’ day; the 1920s were when modernity won, if not in fact in the great heartland, at least in the larger self-image of a nation gorging itself on jazz, burlesque, motorcars, and bathtub gin. But the type — the living, breathing Gantry, as it were — is now back with a vengeance.

And social critics of our day must not be afraid to expose rank hypocrisy wherever we can. In our party’s quest to clean up popular culture I’ve decided that my personal mission is to take on the country music business.

Country Music star Gretchen Wilson:

Well I’m an eight ball shooting double fisted drinking son of a gun
I wear My jeans a little tight
Just to watch the little boys come undone
Im here for the beer and the ball busting band
Gonna get a little crazy just because I can

You know im here for the party
And I aint leavin til they throw me out
Gonna have a little fun
gonna get me some

I may not be a ten but the boys say I clean up good
And if I gave em half a chance for some rowdy romance you know they would

I’ve been waiting all week just to have a good time
So bring on them cowboys and their pick up lines

Dont want no purple hooter shooter just some jack on the rocks
Dont mind me if i start that trashy talk

You know im here for the party
And I aint leavin til they throw me out
Gonna have a little fun
gonna get me some

Mothers all over the heartland must be beside themselves over this kind of cultural pollution. How can they explain it to their kids? (What does “get me some” mean, mommie?)

James Wolcott notices another shocking example of daytime radio sexual innuendo.

Where will it end?

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