Here’s a well-done, if depressing, article on how the concentration of Democratic campaigns in the hands of a few firms is hurting them in elections. I can think of a few good object lessons (the article has a lot of blind quotes and so tends to avoid mention of specific campaigns): 2002 candidates like Jeanne Shaheen and Erskine Bowles and Chellie Pingree got beaten in part because of the bland, prefab feel of their campaigns – especially the August-to-November unblinking drone of social security and prescription drug commercials. On the other hand, the most successful campaigns of 2002, the pleasant surprises, were Tim Johnson and Mary Landrieu, who each found a very specific, very local issue on which to draw contrasts between themselves and Team Bush (drought relief for Johnson, sugar for Landrieu). And I don’t think anyone doubts that Paul Wellstone, had he lived, might have won not in spite of his opposition to an
Iraq war but because of the principled contrast it created. Will the D’s learn their lesson in time for 2004?
By the way, Seth culls all the blogs and has some sharp commentary and interesting insights into the sausage making and strategic workings of party politics. He is a good place to start when you’re pressed for time and you want to get a snapshot of the inside political dope of the day.
It is hard to explain just how thoroughly Rupert Murdoch and his cadre of greedy sharks have ruined my baseball team, the Dodgers. They have systematically destroyed the tradition that survived everything from Branch Rickey’s noble decision to sign Jackie Robinson and end the color line in baseball, to the move out to LA to recreate themselves from the Brooklyn Bums to the classiest team in the national league (or at least a perennial contender.)
They destroyed the best farm system in baseball, hired (then mercifully fired) Texas Republican psych case Kevin Malone who Enroned the team for the forseeable future with contracts for old and/or worthless banged up pitchers worth many, many tens of millions and stripped the club of virtually all ties to its century long legacy. (Not to mention treating the best manager in baseball, Mike Scioscia, so badly that he left the organization he’d been born to manage to take our crosstown rivals to the world series instead.)
Now that NewsCorp achieved its goal of keeping Disney out of the sports media market in Southern California, they are selling the team (which they only bought for the purposes of gaining the media rights in the first place.) I’m surprised they haven’t fired Vin Scully as a cost-cutting measure.
This week, to add insult to injury, that fishwrap piece of shit the NY Post had to print another speculative “outing” piece in it’s heinous gossip pages that has resulted in the embarrassment and resignation of one of the greatest baseball players in history from the only organization he ever worked for.
VERO BEACH, Fla. — Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax, whose brilliance on the mound captivated fans in the 1960s and defined the Dodgers’ greatest era in Los Angeles, has severed ties with the club in protest of another News Corp. subsidiary.
Koufax, a very private man who established a standard for pitching excellence in four of the most dominant seasons in the game’s history from 1963-66, recently informed the Dodgers he would no longer attend spring training here at Dodgertown, visit Dodger Stadium or participate in activities while they are owned by the media conglomerate, because of a report in the New York Post that apparently intimated that he is homosexual. The Post is owned by News Corp.
Through friend Derrick Hall, a Dodger senior vice president, Koufax declined comment Thursday night, but officials familiar with the situation said the legendary left-hander, and Vero Beach resident, broke off ties after 48 years in response to a two-sentence gossip item published in the Post on Dec. 19. The Post reported that a “Hall of Fame baseball hero” had “cooperated with a best-selling biography only because the author promised to keep it secret that he is gay. The author kept her word, but big mouths at the publishing house can’t keep from flapping.” Koufax, who was not specifically named by the paper, is the subject of Jane Leavy’s acclaimed biography, “Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy,” published last September.
News Corp. is undertaking steps to sell the Dodgers, but the timetable doesn’t help team officials saddened by what they perceive as the Post’s unfair treatment of Koufax.
Expressing his feelings to the Dodgers through Hall shortly after learning of the report, Koufax said “it does not make sense for me to promote any” of the companies controlled by News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, adding he would “feel foolish to be associated with or promote one entity if it helps another.” Hall said Koufax stressed, “I have no problems with the Dodgers or their current or previous management. It’s more so about [News Corp.].”
Whatever his sexuality, he isn’t a whore. And I imagine his sissy, hall-of fame fast ball could still knock Rupert on his ass from 90 feet away.
Reading this interesting post on SullyWatch, I was stuck by an irony concerning the “cheese eating surrender blah,blah,blah” mantra. They wrote:
So, while it’s fair to say that the French military hierarchy was outsmarted, the “surrender-monkey” theme is completely inappropriate. But then, I guess it takes a lot more thought to yell “Followers of an obsolete military doctrine!” than “Pussies!”
The French in WWII were the followers of an obsolete military doctrine.
In many respects the defense policy initiatives undertaken by the Bush administration in the wake of 11 September do not closely correspond to the threat. For instance, the administration has resurrected a traditional Realist paradigm despite the post-modern (non-state) character of the new terrorism. Also prominent among the administration’s policy responses has been an acceleration of the anti-ballistic missile defense program, sterner rhetoric regarding Iraq and North Korea, and a military modernization program focusing largely on traditional military structures and platforms.
The Bush Doctrine is an obsolete military doctrine before it has even been tried. But then, in a rapidly changing world, stale policy papers written by wild-eyed idealistic zealots aren’t usually adopted word for word by great powers.
Charles Pierce in a (great, as always) letter to Altercation says:
Wait, now. This Michael Savage knucklehead to whom MSNBC shamefully truckles on a weekly basis now is the same Michael Weiner whose association of aluminum with Alzheimer’s Disease once had people tossing out their cookware (bad), and briefly threatened to cause the demise of canned beer (good), and is altogether the cause of no little hilarity every time real AD researchers get together? This is the same guy? This is the new voice of the patriotic Right? A patent medicine salesman? The Whitley Strieber of AD research? What’s next? Art Bell, Biochemist? When did this start making sense?
Taking a page from Poppy’s successful “they’re ripping the babies from the incubators” PR effort in Gulf War I, President Rove created a group called the Committee For An Independent Iraq. It’s run by a bunch of PNAC neocons and gullible front men (like Bob Kerrey) to “sell” the war, particularly to the Europeans, which explains why a US lobbyist helped draft Eastern Europeans’ Iraq statement
From the W. Post:While the Iraq committee is an independent entity, committee officers said they expect to work closely with the administration. They already have met with Hadley and Bush political adviser Karl Rove. Committee officers and a White House spokesman said Rice, Hadley and Cheney will soon meet with the group.
This article from November 2, 2002 in the Asia Times lays out the history and connections of the “Committee.”
It’s always the same names and the same faces. And unsurprisingly, the much vaunted Eastern European statement of support, the document for which Chirac has been excoriated for taking the “New Europeans” to task over, turns out to be another Neocon/Rove sell job.
FYI: The following are the three primary documents that explain the Bush policy of “pre-emptive war and American military empire. You will notice that the threat of global terrorism remains an incidental issue (made useful as a opportunistic public relations tool after 9/11) that presented no reevaluation of the overall geopolitical strategy and engenders no fundamental shift in priorities.
Quite a few Americans are probably aware of this, but it’s the first time I’ve seen any mainstream news program tackle this vital story about the real reasons and the tactics being used by the administration to take this country into war. I very much doubt that the majority of this country, both Republican and Democrat, know they signed on to American Empire when George W. Bush assumed the office.
I hope hard working Americans enjoy working 7 day weeks (while the terrible French and Germans are drinking their white wine and eating their brie-n-cheese at the beach) because global military dominance is expensive and nobody’s signing on to help.
While the world awaits war in Iraq, little attention has been paid to President Bush’s military budget proposal for next year—less still to a line item that would have attracted enormous notice in more placid times. This is the Missile Defense program, the successor to what, in Ronald Reagan’s day, was called the Strategic Defense Initiative or “Star Wars.” The program’s budget, which was released to no fanfare on Feb. 3, is startling for a couple of reasons.
[…]
…to go with the big boost, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has asked Congress to exempt Missile Defense from the law that requires all weapons systems to undergo operational tests before being deployed in the field. Carl Levin, the Senate Armed Services Committee’s ranking Democrat (and the only lawmaker raising a fuss about this move), noted that the purpose of this law is “to prevent the production and fielding of a weapon system that doesn’t work right.” Yet Rumsfeld, justifying the bypass, said, “We need to get something out there,” in case, say, North Korea attacks us with ballistic missiles soon.
[…]
Finally, if Bush is worried about rogue states and terrorists blowing up Americans, as he has even more reason to be, he should do more to stave off attacks that might take place tomorrow. Last November, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees offered Bush a free ride on this road. It passed an amendment that allowed him to take $814 million out of Missile Defense, transfer it to the Department of Homeland Security, and spend it there in whatever ways he saw fit. Bush turned the offer down.
It vas not in ze plan. Nothing must interfere with ze plan.
Katerina VandenHeuvel said tonight that Rumsfeld should resign. Frankly, I’m not sure he shouldn’t be committed. This is so freakishly muddleheaded that somebody, somewhere has got to get him out of there.
He is actually saying that we should spend massive billions to put up a primitive missile shield that has never worked in the past and we shouldn’t test it further because “we have to get something out there” in case North Korea attacks. Oooookay.
He thinks that Kim Jong Il and others are really, really stupid (like his boss) and they will stop building ballistic missiles if we put up a useless multi-billion dollar erector set in Alaska and just tell everybody that it can blast every offending missile from the sky kinda like in Star Wars. North Koreans are so dumb they can’t even read the Washington Post so they’ll never know that missile defense doesn’t work and that even if it did, it couldn’t possibly stop more than one or two missiles.
So, they’ll send a whole bunch! And soon. Just in case the technology might get better later on.
Of course, if Kim Jong Il isn’t as stupid as Rumsfeld’s boss (actually it’s hardly even possible) so he will likely assume that if they do happen to blast 20 or 30 million Americans away, they’ll be blown into the stone age by our ICBM’s. So, seeing as they cannot possibly be stupid enough to risk that, they will probably not send any missiles our way in the first place.
Kinda neat. I think they should call it Mutually Assured Destruction. (And they should call the untestable missile defense system they are building “Welfare For Rich Republican Contributors”)
Meanwhile, Osama’s probably been making deals with Pakistan and the former Soviet states for spent uranium and other goodies, but we don’t have time for that kind of thing. Micronesia might be planning to unleash a Doomsday machine any day now. We’d better pretend to get prepared by pretending we have a super-duper laser beam bomb annihilator thingy. That’ll stop ’em in their tracks.
The most dangerous result of the years long ascension of the radical wing of the Republican Party is that they have been so successful at turning the Democratic Party into poster children for Battered Liberal Syndrome. (Witness the stomach churning spectacle of Zell Miller rhetorically sharing a big slurpy soul kiss with President Smirk today.) And in doing this they have become so filled with satisfaction and assurance of the rightness of their strategy that they are now convinced that they can dominate the world by using the same tactics of aggression and intimidation.
The problem is that the rest of the world is not the Democratic Party, so cowed by the endless rhetorical violence against them that they will do anything to avoid angering the unpredictable GOP beast. The rest of the world fights back when they are threatened by a bunch of flaccid bullies because they have dealt intimately with some fearsome monsters that would make schoolyard imitators like Junior and the Retreads reach for a Maxi-Depends.
One of the few Democrats who has been mercilessly treated as a punching bag yet remained intellectually honest and fiercely combative against these nasty tactics is Rep. Barney Frank. In this interview he tells it like it is:
Rep. Frank said he does not believe the administration any longer believes Saddam Hussein is a threat or that its tax-cut program focused on eliminating dividend taxes will stimulate the American economy.
“They have broader ideological goals,” he said.
“Those goals are to democratize the Middle East and end the era of social spending on popular government programs,” he said.
Saddam Hussein is actually quite limited in his power, as opposed to some place like North Korea, which has at least some nuclear weapons, Rep. Frank said.
“Saddam Hussein is almost kind of like Gulliver. He’s tied down. Except he’s the Lilliputian and we’re the giants,” he said. “Yes, he would like to do bad things but he’s in no position to do them.”
“The right wing believes that the invasion of Iraq is an opportunity to democratize the Arab world, he said. It believes imperialism is good if the imperialist is good,” he said.
Junior “gits to decide” who’s been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.
If President Bush has his way, some veterans soon will pay more for health care, meatpackers will have to fork over more for government inspections, and visitors could encounter recreation fees at more national parks and forests.
It is all part of a White House plan to increase revenue by billions of dollars next fiscal year through new and higher user fees. Such charges — generated by services the government provides and the businesses it regulates — would pull in $176.3 billion under Bush’s 2004 budget, an increase of $5.9 billion from this year’s estimated receipts.
“Not over my dead body will they raise your taxes,” Bush told the wildly applauding crowd.
Mirriam Webster:
Main Entry: tax
Function: noun
Usage: often attributive
Date: 14th century
a : a charge usually of money imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes
b : a sum levied on members of an organization to defray expenses
Of course, he did mangle the language, as usual, and say “not over my dead body,” so he can slide out of it on a technicality. Republicans love technicalities. Like “winning” presidential elections with 5-4 votes on the Supreme Court after having lost the popular vote. So, I won’t be holding my breath for him to follow through. Still, it would be nice if a Democrat or two mentioned it, don’t you think? Just to see the Republicans spin like a top?
