Digby tries to figure out swing voters: You can see why they need to hear more from him on where he stands. They've only had four years and he's done a relatively good job except for the jobs, gas prices, health care, social security, running up the deficit and Iraq. He just needs to lay out his agenda so they know what to expect.
GOPcon watch: Effete liberal academic Michael BTrubT finally recognizes the manly manliness of the manly RNC.
In The American Prospect, Battle of Little Big Vote by Tara McKelvey: Welcome to South Dakota, where Republicans tried to impose a poll tax to suppress the Indian vote.
I watched Thirteen Days last night, which means I spent the whole time thinking, "If that had been Bush, we'd all be dead." Anyway, it ends with a voice-over of John F. Kennedy saying this, which is probably way over Bush's head.
When Atrios and Digby bemoan the worthlessness of the press, Moe Blues thinks they understate the case, and delivers a little history lesson.
It's the same play, but move the theater and it's transformed. Slacktivist looks at the difference, and Hell House.
An editor is aghast when obvious lies show up in his newspaper. (via)
From TNR's RNC blog, Ryan Lizza on evolution in the anti-Bush rhetoric: I think I know what explains the shift. In the last four years, opponents of the president have gone from believing he is an idiot to believing he is a threat to civilization. Calling him "shrub," which was popular in 2000, no longer does the trick. Now, most Bush-haters think he's a ... well you know. (Jerome liked the slogans, anyway.) 01:38 BST
Monday, 30 August 2004
Mo' Blog
"And here I thought that 'GOP' stood for "Global Outsourcing Plan," says dataguy in a comment responding to this post by Any Sullivan. But Kevin Drum is back, and he has some sharp words for Dennis Hastert's suggestion that George Soros made his money from drugs. And he also says (so I don't have to say it again), For the record, I'd like to note that Hastert is not an overweight filmmaker or an anonymous blogger. He's the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the third highest ranking Republican official in the country. This is what the leadership of the Republican party has become.
Nathan Newman says the administration is at it again at the Department of Labor: Why should anyone take this administration seriously when they say they will take care of workers displaced by trade or outsourcing?
Oh, look, Patrick has a new photo at the top of page.
22:03 BST
On the blog
Lean Left keeps finding more stuff on Swiftvet Sleaze and also notes that Hesiod couldn't stand it anymore and has one last post he couldn't hold back.
Gail Online has a couple of amusing and timely photos on her page. And a couple of good links, of course.
Epicycle: So, Conservative leader Michael Howard has been banned from visiting the White House following criticism of Tony Blair and his policies on the Iraq war. Back in February, Howard gave a speech in the House Of Commons calling for Blair to resign, and this appears to have personally offended Bush's puppet master, Karl Rove - his message to Howard sounded like a sulky child: "You can forget about meeting the President, full stop. Don't bother coming, you are not meeting him". Given how long ago this actually happened, though, it seems likely that the news has now been deliberately leaked to coincide with the imminent Republican National Convention in New York, just one of a series of bizarre stories that have hit the media in the last few days. And a link to a really bad translation in an ad. 17:18 BST
I'm not one of these people who thinks every death caused by gun-shot is a reason to ban guns. I can't help but notice that some countries have far more liberal gun laws than the US does and yet do not have America's high murder rate. But there was a media event that made me notice this particular gun. I looked for a link but, unfortunately, I couldn't remember enough of the details to come up with good key words. (I don't know what it is, I've just never been good at that.) Or maybe it's not on the net, I don't know.
Anyway, a reporter was killed with one of these guns, and the media, which in those days actually used to really care when reporters got killed, went a bit nuts about it. It was a big story, and in that big story the weapon was referred to as "a cheap hand-gun". "Cheap hand-gun" was just starting to gain currency around that time as an epithet suggesting that it was too easy for criminals and teenagers to get their hands on not-very-good guns (that frequently exploded in the users hand) at low cost that should be banned because they had "no sporting purpose." Even the NRA supported this position back then.
It wasn't so much the death of the reporter that turned it into a bona fide media event, but rather the response by Charter Arms, who felt compelled to make a public statement defending what they said was not a "cheap hand-gun" at all, but in fact an expensive instrument. At that time it cost $80.00.
So I noticed the existence of the gun. Not a big deal in itself, but after a while I also noticed that this gun seemed to be involved in a few other significant events.
The gun cost Mark Chapman $197.00 when he used one to kill John Lennon in 1980 in front of the Dakota in New York.
I don't know what Mumia Abu Jamal paid for his.
I was told (by a reporter I've since lost contact with) that Arthur Bremer's .38 was also the same gun (although, again, I failed the Google test here). Since I regard the shooting of George Wallace as a significant event for American politics (I still believe it made the difference in Nixon's election), and John Lennon's death had a major impact on me, that stuck with me.
This time, Theresa's in a hurry to get to the counting. She began tallying absentee ballots on Friday in her own re-election race. Not to worry: the law requires the Supervisor of Elections in each county to certify poll-watchers to observe the count. But Theresa has a better idea. She refused to certify a single poll-watcher from opponents' organizations despite the legal requirement she do so by last week. She'll count her own votes herself, thank you very much!
And so far, she's doing quite well. Although 37,000 citizens have requested absentee ballots, she says she'd only received 22,000 when she began the count. Where are the others? Don't ask: though she posts the names of requesters, she won't release the list of those who have voted, an eyebrow-raising deviation from standard procedure.
And she has no intention of counting all the ballots received. She has reserved for herself the right to determine which ballots have acceptable signatures. Her opponent, Democrat Art Anderson, had asked Theresa to use certified hand-writing experts, instead of her hand-picked hacks, to check the signatures.
Unfortunately, while Federal law requires Theresa to allow a voter to correct a signature rejection when registering, the Feds don't require her to permit challenges to absentee ballot rejections.
I know what you're thinking. How could Madame Butterfly know how people are voting? Well, she's printed PARTY AFFILIATION on the OUTSIDE of each return envelope. That certainly makes it easier to figure out which ballot is valid, don't it?
And dear Reader, please take note of the implications of this story for the big vote in November. Millions have sought refuge in absentee ballots as a method to avoid the dangers of the digitizing of democracy. Florida and other states are reporting 400%-plus increases in absentee ballot requests due to fear of the new computer voting machinery. Some refuge. LePore is giving us an early taste of how the Bush Leaguers intend to care for your absentee ballot.
I nearly missed another article about Francis Fukuyama breaking with the other neocons on the war. What makes this one particularly fun for me is this:
In the clubby world of neoconservative intellectuals, many of whom are longtime friends and allies, Mr. Fukuyama's repudiation of the case for war, which appeared in The National Interest, was all the more startling because he presented it as an attack on a recent speech by his friend, the columnist Charles Krauthammer of The Washington Post.
Mr. Fukuyama faces stiff resistance. In an interview on Friday, Mr. Krauthammer says he is publishing a rebuttal in the next issue of The National Interest portraying Mr. Fukuyama's critique as "breathtakingly incoherent." [...] In an interview last week, Mr. Fukuyama said that he had harbored private doubts about the war at the time, although he kept quiet about them then. "I figured it was going to happen anyway, and there wasn't anything I could do about it," he said. "I believed it was a big roll of the dice, and I didn't believe it was a wise bet. But on the other hand, it was a roll of the dice, and for all I knew, it might have worked."
He added, "It turned out to be even worse than I anticipated."
But as he was listening to his friend Mr. Krauthammer deliver a recent speech on the theme of the United States as a unipolar power, Mr. Fukuyama said, he grew increasingly agitated.
Mr. Krauthammer's speech "is strangely disconnected from reality," Mr. Fukuyama said in his article.
"One gets the impression that the Iraq war," Mr. Fukuyama continued, "has been an unqualified success, with all of the assumptions and expectations on which the war had been based vindicated."
Arthur Silber: As I have previously said -- and the inevitable conclusion which most defenders of our foreign policy simply will not allow themselves even to consider: when you proceed from faulty premises, and when you take action based on a set of beliefs which contains massive contradictions, all you can or will accomplish is destruction.
Mac Thomason on Bayou politics: Instead of intimidating black voters because of their race, goons poll-watchers in Bayou La Batre intimidated Asians because of their race! Alabama sure has come a long way! Some 50 Asian voters there had their right to cast ballots challenged on the grounds that they allegedly weren't American citizens. Plus they talk funny.
Dyke attacks Blair. I apologize. I'm constantly seeing this or similar headlines and I finally broke down. 01:10 BST
Sunday, 29 August 2004
Magwatch: The Washington Monthly
If you can't be bothered to read Bill Clinton's book, let me recommend Bill of Right, Matthew Cooper's review, which skips over the stuff the media rattled on about and gets to the meat.
Elayne Riggs says, The best thing so far about this must-read article by Josh Marshall, Laura Rozen and Paul Glastris is the way they take back the word "shadowy" right there, in the first sentence of the second paragraph, to point the finger at the people in power who actually are shadowy (as in, clandestine and secretive and back-channel and probably law-breaking) rather than the people whom the administration is trying to attack using that word (who are fairly above-board for the mots part). Looks like the real Reagan legacy is alive and well...
Just think, I might have overlooked this delightful piece of whimsy from the amazing Dr. Krauthammer if it hadn't been for Roger Ailes, who refers to him as "Charles Quackhammer", an apt re-naming given the silly hack's propensity for such very bad analysis of other people's psychology. This can't be helped, since he starts off, as always, with the proposition that Democrats are (a) cracked and (b) just as contemptuous of the American populace as the current Republican leadership so clearly is. Of course, since the lumber in Krauthammer's eye is now of sufficient size to build a nice four-poster bed and matching dresser out of, he doesn't acknowledge the comparison.
Historians will have a field day trying to fathom the depths of detestation that the Democrats are carrying into this campaign. Vanity is only part of it. What else is at play? First, and most obviously, revenge. Democrats have convinced themselves that Bush stole the last election. They cannot bear suffering not just a bad presidency but an illegitimate one.
What someone like Krauthammer cannot afford to see is that if Bush had turned out to be a good president, even his illegal appointment could have been overlooked. Unfortunately, the means by which he achieved power turned out to be emblematic of the kind of administration he would run.
Beginning with the contempt for the electorate that was evident when attempts to re-count were met with a campaign of dissembling in which we were told that everything we had always known was wrong - why, even counting the ballots is not only irrelevant to an election but a blatant corruption of democracy. Team Bush was complaining about "recounting and recounting" even when no recounts were as yet underway. They were also complaining about resort to the courts even though it was they who were using the courts to prevent the normal, legally-mandated recounts from taking place. So we start with a campaign of lies and illegality, and then it continues.
Everything you know is wrong. Counting ballots is undemocratic, war is good, neglect is security, and so on. The administration was warned about an imminent terrorist attack, and did nothing - and so 3,000 people were killed in a single morning on our home ground. The administration invaded Afghanistan and then walked away in the middle of it all to pursue a side agenda in Iraq - and didn't even properly equip our troops. And, having done so, they put pirates in charge of the rebuilding, thus guaranteeing that we would make enemies even of people who had personally been victims of Saddam. Not to mention emptying our treasury, violating every significant clause of our Constitution, alienating our allies, and launching the most divisive political campaign of our lifetimes.
No, none of that should have made us want to get rid of such a dishonest and irresponsible administration.
It's not as if Republicans in general don't show a snotty superiority toward the hoi palloi in other ways, either. What else did it mean when they demanded to know, "Where's the outrage?" over Bill Clinton's minor indiscretion? (And it was minor - so minor than when his Republican predecessors had affairs while in office, no one even bothered to report it.) Republicans, ever-contemptuous of the public's far more liberal beliefs and attitudes, are usually smart enough not to tip their hands, but having made the mistake of letting America know too many of the facts in their bizarre campaign against the Clintons, they found the country turning away from them in revulsion. So this time around they went back to their usual program of simply lying about their goals, their intentions. Bush lied about his "compassion" and his education program and his desire to safeguard Social Security and return "your money" to "you" and to improve the economy and to protect us from terrorism because if he told the truth he could not possibly get more than 29% of the vote. They know perfectly well they are playing the public for suckers - and they think we deserve it.
But look at how Krauthammer re-casts this:
Moreover, against all expectations, it turned out to be a consequential presidency. Bush was not the mild-mannered, Gerald Ford-like Republican he was expected to be -- transitional and minor. He turned out to be quite the revolutionary, most especially in his radical reordering of American foreign policy. A usurper is merely offensive; a consequential usurper is intolerable.
He says "consequential" as if it means something good. Yes, Bush has been "consequential" - the consequences of his administration have been disaster. There are certainly consequences to profound irresponsibility, astonishing wrong-headedness, massive destructiveness. Are we supposed to care about those consequences merely because they make a mark on history, and not because of the misery they entail? Being "consequential" doesn't necessarily mean you have the foresight of Winston Churchill or FDR - sometimes you are consequential because you do terrible things; it's not as if Hitler and Stalin have ever been regarded as "inconsequential". (Personally, I've always liked Ford's presidency, because he didn't do anything consequentially horrible.)
Why, even Republicans are starting to notice, and they're getting mad themselves. Jim Jeffords was an early signal, but even the military brass is chewing its collective liver over the damage Bush has done. No one in their right mind wants to see more of this, but Krauthammer thinks all of that anger is just some weird Democratic insanity.
A lot has been said about people who do long-distance psychology, and mostly it comes in the form of, "You can't psychoanalyze people from a distance. You have to interview them, you have to do tests." Actually, this is rubbish. If Krauthammer wasn't deep in the arms of his own psychosis, there's no reason he shouldn't be able to use his training to analyze people he sees in the public eye all the time. The reason you do tests and interviews with psych patients is because you don't have the opportunity to observe them in action, you can't see how they perform in their natural environment, so you have to take short-cuts. But in Bush's case the whole nation can actually watch him do his thing, and his thing is obviously way out of whack.
And Krauthammer has revealed an awful lot of himself as well. The advantage your shrink has is that, assuming you are a voluntary patient, you will probably reveal things you wouldn't tell your best friend, and we don't know for sure as outside observers how much of what Bush and Krauthammer say and do is delivered consciously and cynically, and how much is simply their own deluded thinking. Maybe Krauthammer doesn't believe a word he writes, and sits down to type these screeds thinking, "How can I make the perfectly sane statements of Democrats sound crazy?" But if that's not the case, then it doesn't take a highly-trained specialist and a battery of tests to see that his work represents a massive tower of projection and denial. If you give him credit for integrity, you have to conclude that he's nuts. If he's not nuts, he's committing deliberate libel against everyone who disagrees with his stated views. And either way, he doesn't deserve a column in one of the most influential newspapers in the country.
Of course, we have the same problem with Bush. Any attentive observer can see that Bush says things that are not true. Maybe he's knowingly lying (and on several occasions it's been obvious that he is), or maybe his thinking is so warped that he believes what he is saying (and sometimes this also seems to be the case), but clearly he cannot be trusted and his actions lead to disaster. Whatever he is, he is not a reliable defender of the US Constitution and the American Dream. Democrats and Republicans alike have been noticing this ever since the Selection, and more and more have realized it as time has gone by. The more people know, the less they trust him. This is proof that, while many Americans may still be ignorant, most of them are not so stupid after all. 13:26 BST
What the papers say
I have been totally annoyed all week by this Howard Kurtz thing in which he absolves the press of the blame for failing to subject Bush's arguments for invasion to any scrutiny. Look, the point was that Bush needed to make a case for war, and he didn't. The Iraq resolution's requirements were on the record, and he didn't meet them. What he did was illegal, and you chose not to mention it. Hell, yes, it would have made a difference. The members of this administration can get away with not doing their jobs because you don't either. This needs to stop.
I read it in the IHT but couldn't find their version online, so I googled it and found it on Yahoo News - Richard Reeves on the real issue: Whether you agree or disagree with the words pouring from the podium over Americans who see reflections of themselves in George W. Bush, the real issue of this election will not be mentioned. The core issue is this: Our president is incompetent. He is not a good president. Reeves gives ten reasons why.
There's a good letter in Saturday's Washington Post that usefully explains that social spending helps the economy. It's one of those things that conservatives don't want you to know.
Meanwhile, in the Observer, David Aaronovitch visits a red state and finds it not quite what he expected, and back at home Will Hutton decides political correctness is actually okay. 02:43 BST
Brian Hunter at CommonPrejudice discusses the way someone appears to be trying to hype the public and the police into believing that "anarchists" are planning violence in New York. Steve Gilliard reacts strongly.
Where is John Edwards? And how much does media have to do with the impact of advertising?
The People's Republic of Seabrook: Perhaps it's just that George W. Bush recognizes that he couldn't carry John Kerry's jock when it comes to debating the issues that are important to this country today. Of course, if you can frighten people into thinking that the absolute WORST thing that they can do is change horses in the middle of the race, why would you have to worry about debating issues? And this David Horsey cartoon.
This is a couple of months old, but read I Am Going To Burn from Harper's anyway.
MPs plan to impeach Blair over Iraq war record: MPs are planning to impeach Tony Blair for "high crimes and misdemeanours" in taking Britain to war against Iraq, reviving an ancient practice last used against Lord Palmerston more than 150 years ago. A bunch of Celts, mostly. And Boris, of course.
Buzzflash has an .mp3 (here) of the video of former Texas Lt. Governor Barnes confessing on video that he fixed National Guard posts to get the sons of rich people out of the Vietnam draft - and says he's really sorry. (Is there streaming video somewhere?)
The Poor Man discovers that Bush has flip-flopped free speech for "independent" groups. And also joins the chorus of those who have suggestions for Kerry about answering Bush.
Moving Ideas has an update on the progress of the Class Action Bill - which, of course, exists to limit your ability to bring class action suits.
David Sirota says: AP says a recent Bush executive order is "in keeping with Bush's goal of having the government defer as much as possible to local interests." While that may be the White House's rhetoric, it is not its record, and then provides some examples from that record. He also examines the
New York-bashing by the Republicans.
Skippy says the DA who lied about Kerry as one of the Swift Boat Liars has been busted for lying - but for something else.
Bruce Schneier has a bunch of op-ed articles appearing this week that address some of our favorite recurring themes (which, come to think of it, is usually the case with Bruce).
A terrorist alert that instills a vague feeling of dread or panic, without giving people anything to do in response, is ineffective. Even worse, it echoes the very tactics of the terrorists. There are two basic ways to terrorize people. The first is to do something spectacularly horrible, like flying airplanes into skyscrapers and killing thousands of people. The second is to keep people living in fear. Decades ago, that was one of the IRA's major aims. Inadvertently, the DHS is achieving the same thing.
We have, of course, visited the point before, and this is where we look at the landscape and say, "Well, if what the terrorists are up to - and it is - is to try to terrorize Americans, then thanks to the Bush administration, the terrorists really have won."
Which brings me back to another point. Three years ago when people in Europe pointed out that terrorism wasn't really a surprise - and that going to extremes was not necessarily the way to handle it - the response from the newly-aware was to demand, "Why have you put up with it?" Like, why they didn't just go and, I dunno, declare a war on terrorism and attack the countries that "supported" the terrorists, I guess.
Well, one reason is that a major country that was supporting the terrorists was the United States, and it actually would have been mighty difficult to just, you know, invade America and, hey, maybe have some, uh, regime change. I don't actually think it was crazy for European countries to pass on that idea.
But the real answer is that Europeans didn't just "put up with it" - they treated terrorists like the criminals they were and didn't allow them to completely disrupt their way of living. They did not suddenly get behind an excited drive to gut their treasuries and impoverish their countries and their people by setting off half-cocked on some stupid permanent state of war that would wipe out the very civil liberties and trust in law that made their nations worth living in to begin with.
So, yes, it is no longer Al Qaeda that is terrorizing the United States, it's the Bush administration. And, thanks to them, the authoritarians in certain other countries (e.g. the UK) have jumped at the chance to shred civil liberties and issue ID cards and other creepy stuff they've wanted to do all along. Thanks a lot, you "freedom-loving" monkeys!
Imagine a list of suspected terrorists so dangerous that we can't ever let them fly, yet so innocent that we can't arrest them - even under the draconian provisions of the Patriot Act.
Really! If these people are terrorists, why don't they just arrest them? What is the no-fly list for? It seems pretty obvious that it's not there to catch terrorists, but to make life difficult for the rest of us. Bruce provides details on just what a mistake this is.
If you fly out of Logan Airport and don't want to take off your shoes for the security screeners and get your bags opened up, pay attention. The US government is testing its "Trusted Traveler" program, and Logan is the fourth test airport. Currently, only American Airlines frequent fliers are eligible, but if all goes well the program will be opened up to more people and more airports.
Participants provide their name, address, phone number, and birth date, a set of fingerprints, and a retinal scan. That information is matched against law enforcement and intelligence databases. If the applicant is not on any terrorist watch list and is otherwise an upstanding citizen, he gets a card that allows him access to a special security lane. The lane doesn't bypass the metal detector or X-ray machine for carry-on bags, but it bypasses more intensive secondary screening unless there's an alarm of some kind.
Unfortunately, this program won't make us more secure. Some terrorists will be able to get Trusted Traveler cards, and they'll know in advance that they'll be subjected to less stringent security. [...] Moreover, there's no need for the program. Frequent fliers and first-class travelers already have access to special lanes that bypass long lines at security checkpoints, and the computers never seem to flag them for special screening. And even the long lines aren't very long. I've flown out of Logan repeatedly, and I've never had to wait more than 10 minutes at security. The people who could use the card don't need one, and infrequent travelers are unlikely to take the trouble or pay the fee to get one.
And in Olympic Security in The Sydney Morning Herald, he points out that you can install lots and lots of high-tech security that intrudes overwhelmingly on our privacy, but none of it is likely to stop anyone who is determined to create a disaster.
So, basically, you kiss your civil liberties good-bye, you take on whole new levels of hassles when you go anywhere, and you get nothing for it except - that's right - a false sense of security. [Note: Bruce provided both the links to the articles as they appear on the websites in question and also the permanent links on his own site. I decided to use both in case anyone ever wants to use those articles for document reference, but Bruce's own links are friendlier.) 18:40 BST
Despite virtually universal media insistence that the presidential popular vote remains too close to call, Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry has held significant leads in the crucial electoral vote total since late May - briefly interrupted by the mid-June media circus over Ronald Reagan's death, but firmly re-established since early July (after Fahrenheit 9/11 began screening and Kerry selected Edwards as his running mate).
The latest state polls, as of Aug. 24, put Kerry ahead of Bush by 108 electoral votes (with Colorado's nine votes tied). Currently, Kerry leads in former Bush states Florida, Tennessee, Missouri, Nevada and New Hampshire. (And at one time or another during the past five weeks, Kerry has also led in former Bush states Arkansas, Ohio, Arizona and West Virginia.)
Why is Kerry leading handily in electoral votes while the popular vote remains close? Because there has been a major shift in about 15 states, with seven former "battlegrounds" moving to Kerry and eight former Bush states becoming freshly competitive. Although many pollsters and pundits have been focusing much of their attention on Oregon, Washington, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, New Hampshire and New Mexico, those states have moved firmly toward Kerry. At the same time, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina and even South Carolina are now in play.
Yesterday, however, The Los Angeles Times released another poll that gives Bush the edge; Paul Glastris, sitting in for Kevin Drum at Political Animal, says:
I don't know quite what to make of the new LA Times poll that seems to show a perceptible move towards Bush since last month on an array of fronts. Alas Ruy Teixeira is on the road, so we may have to wait for his always-interesting analysis.
That doesn't stop him from speculating that the Swift Boat Liar ads have done some damage, but it looks to me like the spin cycle moved to another phase yesterday and we'll have to see how that works out. Or, as Bill Scher says at Liberal Oasis:
Consider the following:
1. Snapshot Of A Fluid Situation
The poll ran from Saturday to Tuesday. Kerry's counteroffensive began two days prior to the start of the poll, and its still going.
In turn, the results don't reflect some the counteroffensive's recent successes: the resignation of a top Bush lawyer, the spreading news of John O'Neill's Cambodia lie or Max Cleland's (almost) hand-delivered letter.
2. Bush's Numbers Still Bad
Bush's approval rating in the poll was 52%, an insignificant increase of 1 pt from July. (And much higher than most polls.)
Furthermore, a majority disapproves of Bush's handling of the economy (51%), and Iraq (50%). A plurality (49%) says Iraq was not "worth going to war over."
Most damning, on the question, "do you think the country is better off because of...Bush's policies...or do you think the country...needs to move in a new direction," Bush loses big (43%-54%).
3. The Swift Boat Phase Will End, But Bush's Bad Record Won't
Perhaps less than the specifics of the Swift Boat Liars charges, some people were negatively influenced simply by witnessing Kerry on the defensive.
Not the posture an unsure voter wants to see a candidate in.
But that's fixable, by going on the offensive more often.
Bush's record is not fixable. It's a losing record, and he's stuck with it.
Now we're hearing that Bush is going to announce some cool new policy initiatives at the convention. Gosh, I wonder what he can do to top the trip to Mars and the war on steroids.
Oh, wait, I know! Tax cuts!
Seriously, we can only hope he doesn't claim he's going to do something we approve of, because we already know how that goes. 12:38 BST
On the Interweb thing
Mark Thatcher 'planned to relocate to Texas': MARK Thatcher was arrested by a crack South African police unit in connection with an African coup attempt because he was planning to quit his luxury Cape Town home and relocate to the United States next week, a senior detective said yesterday.
You know they're making it up about "anarchists" and even - one can hardly credit it - Weathermen planning to cause violence in NYC, right? Somebody is planning something, it sounds like, but it sure am ain't the dam' Weather Underground. Watch out for fake "protesters" out there, folks.
His daughter once said that she thought the invasion of Iraq was one of the things that took the fight out of her father at the end - the worry that we were getting into another Vietnam.
And, as John Nichols wrote in his Nation weblog after Cash's death last year, "Though he was not known as an expressly political artist, Cash waded into the controversies of his times with a passion. Like the US troops in Vietnam who idolized him, he questioned the wisdom of that war. And in the mid-1960s, at the height of his success, he released an album that challenged his country's treatment of Native Americans."
But it was his songs which really marked him as a man of the people. He took sides in his songs, and he preferred the side of those imprisoned by the law--and by poverty and hard luck.
Yet, this Tuesday the GOP and the American Gas Association, a network of 154 utility multinationals, are shamelessly trying to appropriate the singer-songwriter's legacy by hosting an exclusive "celebration" of Cash for the Republican delegation from Tennessee inside the elite corridors of Sotheby's auction house.
In response, an ad-hoc group of activists have created a website to honor Cash's memory ([link]) and to express what is safe to say would be Cash's outrage over the Bush Administration's malign neglect of the poor in this country. Do you think Cash would be supporting the President's economic policies? How about the Iraq war? If you think the answer is "no," then come join other Johnny Cash defenders at 4:00pm (dressed in black if you'd like) on Tuesday, August 31st, at Sotheby's at 1334 York Avenue in Manhattan.
(I'm not sure where I first saw this story, but here's one post that has a few of the links in it.) 02:21 BST
Story time
I've been meaning to pass on this little tale Sandi Toksvig told on her LBC radio show a few weeks back (as quoted to me by Rob):
George W. Bush, Donald Trump, the Pope, and a small boy are onboard an airplane when the engines fail. The plane is going to crash, and there are only three parachutes.
Grabbing one and strapping it on, Donald Trump announces: "I'm really rich, so of course I have to live."
So saying, he leaps out of the plane.
Then George Bush says, "I'm the leaderer of the free world, so of naturatily I have to live." Whereupon, he leaps out of the plane.
The Pope then turns to the boy and says: "I'm an old man and I've lived a full life, so you should take the remaining parachute."
"Oh, don't worry," says the boy, "there's still a parachute for each of us. George Bush just jumped out with my rucksack."
I have to admit that when I heard this joke, I actually spent a beat wondering what I would have had to have in my knapsack that would have been valuable enough for me to stop him - but then, I'm going to Hell.
Listening to an American radio station again after all this time is pretty surreal. I still haven't forgotten how annoying the ads can be, but after a break of nearly 20 years, it does seem to be a bit of an alien language. Of course, the fact that I'm only hearing one station's ads means it's difficult to get context, but you usually work the patterns out after a while.
Still, even knowing how disastrous American medicine has become didn't prepare me for hearing an ad for a cold medicine advertised in terms of it having the lowest co-pay of any preparation of its type.
That's the kind of thing that makes you wonder how many of your associations are too far out of context. Am I the only person who hears "Super-8 Hotels" and immediately visualizes something extra seedy? Or are Super-8 hotels in fact an especially seedy chain in the first place that everyone makes jokes about anyway? Did anyone else hear the ad for the Phaser with stuff like, "has even been made illegal in some states!" and, "guaranteed or your speeding ticket is paid!" and think at first that it must be a gag rather than a real paid spot?
I find the ads for loans especially jarring - they seem to be offering so much and demanding so little that it's hard to imagine they aren't loan sharks. And then there are the baldness cures, the diets, the dating services - this stuff I think of as being stuck in the print ads in a comic book, right by the Charles Atlas and X-Ray Specs stuff. I'm sure this isn't the kind of advertising I remember coming out of my dashboard back in the old days.
But this week they started running an advert for....yes, a vanity publisher! 14:03 BST
All the news in bits
From Cursor: Revisiting a WABC report on NYPD's 24-hours-a-day surveillance, with one supervisor and six cops assigned to each of "56 primary anarchists," WSWS warns of "the danger of violent confrontations sparked by agents provocateurs" at the GOP convention.
For those of you who can't get up early enough to hear the Morning Sedition version of the Swift Boat ad, Bill Scher has been kind enough to post it at LiberalOasis, where he also discusses the impact of the original ad and Kerry's recent smackdown of Bush.
Bill Frist and Hillary Clinton have a joint article on healthcare in The Washington Post. Now, ask yourself, what could it possibly say?
From race to religion: the next deterrent law?A lively openDemocracy exchange between philosopher Julian Baggini and journalist Nick Cohen exposed deep disagreements over the British government's proposal to introduce a law banning religious hate-speech. Now, lawyer Geoffrey Bindman adjudicates the argument. Via Also not found in nature.
An old soul... tells you where you can take the No Child's Behind Left survey, and also has some questions about funding of PEN.
And I don't know what it means, either, but Tsuredzuregusa seems to be a newish weblog which, among other things, has a post about female bloggers that lists a few you may not know about yet and could check out. There's also a poster that does the numbers. And she'd like comments. 00:54 BST
TalkLeft posts a letter from a Long Beach cop reporting that a woman with marijuana plants in her yard was left alone because she had proper documentation of her status as a registered medical marijuana user.
A change in the laws in Virginia has allowed an innocent man to go free: ARTHUR LEE WHITFIELD has been locked up for 23 years for two rapes committed in 1981. [...] This week he was freed, the state having concluded based on DNA evidence that he is innocent.
David Neiwert discovers another shadowy group, AWOL Guardsmen for the Truth: Editor's note: Someone slipped this under the Orcinus newsroom door the other day, if ya know what I mean. Sounds kinda hinky, but hey. If this kind of fact-gathering is good enough for Matt Drudge, it's good enough for me.
Atrios continues his excellent coverage of the Swift Boat Liars at Eschaton, with a bit of Newsnight transcript and a lot of other things. Oh, and this item from The Daily Show, which is apparently the only news show to get right to the point. Nobody said you couldn't be funny and right at the same time - like somebody said once, "The more you know, the more jokes you get." 15:37 BST
At Seeing the Forest
John Emerson notes that, "The Bush team has very deftly redefined the debate over his discredited Swift Boat Liars as a debate about soft money and 527s," and that the villain of the piece is supposed to be George Soros, because he is a rich guy who donates money to liberal groups. For some reason, we're supposed to find this more sinister than Richard Mellon Scaife's deliberate dissemination of lies. Especially since, you know, Soros is a Jew!
Meanwhile, Dave Johnson reminds you of the important thing to remember about everything they say:
O'Neill in Cambodia. This is the guy who has been saying that Kerry is a liar for saying he was in Cambodia and that if Kerry WAS there he should have been courtmarshalled.
So, of course, now they found a tape of O'Neill, from before all of this Kerry smear stuff, saying he was in Cambodia.
But I'm not passing this along to refute the Swift Boat liars. I'm passing this along to remind you of the bigger picture: THEY JUST LIE!
And by "they" he doesn't just mean the Smear Boat Liars. He means all of them. 13:39 BST
Bits and pieces
Charles Kuffner takes a closer look at Texas polling figures and, while it's still very solidly red, it's not quite as solidly red as it used to be. Maybe.
Skimble has a first-person report on yet another dangerous terrorist who we are lucky enough to have been protected from.
Media groupthink by Robert C. Koehler: Still, this is unprecedented. The war's enthusiasts are losing heart. In May, the Times publicly pulled down its "mission accomplished" banner, owning up to the fact that it had been suckered by Ahmad Chalabi and other Iraqi expatriates with a self-serving war agenda. And Watergate icon Bob Woodward agonized last week, on page 1 of the Post, "I think I was part of the groupthink."
Josh Marshall finds the word: The current debate about these two men's military service has put the spotlight on physical courage. But that really is a side issue in this campaign, if we're talking substance. The real issue isn't physical bravery but moral cowardice. President Bush is an examplar of that quality in spades. And it cuts directly to his failures as president. Forget about thirty years ago, just think about the last three years.
A lot of the musicians I know pay attention to politics, read the papers, and so on. Alice Cooper explains why musicians like him support Bush: Because we're morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal. (via)
And: By their silence more soldiers died: We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped away their memories of us. - VVAW's John F. Kerry
Behind the sheer political expediency of the Swift Boat veterans campaign lies the genuine and long-simmering rage of a small group of men who have never accepted the unspoken truce of 1975--the foundation of which is nobody's wrong if everybody's right. We all agree that both those who served and those who protested, even those who sought refuge from the draft in Canada, acted honorably and in accordance with the dictates of their consciences.
Men like John O'Neil and Admiral Roy Hoffman and their 47 Ronin not only want to discredit John Kerry and the hundreds of other veterans who served and later turned against an immoral and unwinnable war, they also want to re-write history to "prove" that they were right and all those who opposed the Viet Nam disaster were wrong.
Do we have to go over this again? The war was wrong - it was a stupid idea in every dimension. We shouldn't have been there. We couldn't win. And our government used a stupid rotation policy in the field and then treated our troops like dirt once they returned. Don't try to hang this on the protesters; we've heard the lies about how protesters supposedly "spit at soldiers" who came back from 'Nam, but it never happened. It was the same people who supported the war who chose to turn their backs on our vets when they came home.
This White House is even worse, sending them into the field without sufficient food or protection and stripping them of their benefits even as they do so. They still haven't ditched the lousy rotation policy and now they even charge them plane fare. The open contempt with which this administration treats all past and present members of the military is reason enough to throw the bums out.
John Kerry's voice, once upon a time, was an important one in ending a war that we'd already lost. Whether he'll be a hero again this time we can't yet know, but what we do know is that if today's soldiers are to have a hero, it won't be George Bush. 15:59 BST
Nader back on Virginia ballot: The attorney general's office said today the State Board of Elections must accept petitions submitted by Ralph Nader's presidential campaign. [...] Kilgore is a Republican, and head of the Bush-Cheney re-election team in Virginia.
When pictures like this were appearing in the newspapers, how did the Republican Party (and the Dixiecrats who switched over to the GOP around this time) support the Panthers' right to bear arms? 23:12 BST
Ads and liars
Atrios is still doing some important stuff about Bush's bizarre response to the Swift Boat Liars in which he condemns all independent political advertising. Of course, it's not so bizarre if you pay attention to the fact that the only independent organizations that are purveying outright lies of this nature are the ones that support Bush.
But it's also not so bizarre if you remember that Bush and his buddies don't need independent groups as long as they can continue to manipulate the media into being pretty much their own private advertising firm - but one which is not controlled by campaign finance law.
Randi Rhodes has been pointing out today that the Swift Boat Liars had a mere $200K ad-buy - something that got them into very few markets over a short period of time. But the free, extended advertising the news shows have given them is worth millions. Take away the right of independent groups to advertise and all the networks need to do is treat the Swifties as "authors" of their disgusting book and just keep interviewing them on the air - and independent groups are in no position to respond.
Meanwhile, the Bushistas get to keep pretending that there is no distinction between the libelous claims of the SBV's and the non-libelous advertising done by MoveOn.org. 21:47 BST
In the neighborhood
We gave a party the other night, and I had wondered what would happen when two of my friends and colleagues who hadn't been on good terms for a while ran into each other here. One of them was spurred by the occasion to write a long post integrating a remarkable amount of history and some infuriating current events into her recall of that event.
John McCrory noticed an interesting thing in an NYT article - it says that George Bush "declared war on Iraq." Does anyone remember that?
At Altercation, Eric dispenses with the straw-man version of point about chickenhawks again before going on to the mysterious fact that Republicans are having to support a candidate that they don't like or agree with. Charles Pierce then contributes his own commentary on why the Swift Boat Liars still seem to be in the news despite being thoroughly debunked and discredited. (I will add, however, that Fortunate Son had far more going for it than the Swifties - and the content of that book has never been debunked.)
From The Washington Post, U.S. Uses Secret Evidence In Secrecy Fight With ACLU: The Justice Department is using secret evidence in its ongoing legal battles over secrecy with the American Civil Liberties Union, submitting material to two federal judges that cannot be seen by the public or even the plaintiffs, according to documents released yesterday.
I wasn't going to mention this, but seeing as how I misunderstood what GOTV was linking because Alice forgot to put in the link (since fixed), I suppose I ought to clarify: The Washington Post is having a contest.
It's not that I object to being nominated or anything like that, it's more that I don't really care. It's from their marketing department anyway, so you just decide for yourself if you want anything to do with it. And if you do, I'm not going to tell you who to nominate, either. Use your judgment. 18:08 BST
Atrios tells you Who cares: Not the liberal media, that's for sure. A bunch of people are about to take a serious hit to their paychecks, and it's apparently more important to focus on the number of ounces of blood that dripped from Senator Kerry's leg when the shrapnel, which is still making its home there, came to pay him a visit. He also asks for More Like This: A newspaper editor takes the time to fact-check an op-ed published in the paper. Better it was done beforehand, but at least it was done.
Here's an action alert to save PBS: Let PBS know that you're watching its slide from the principles of journalistic integrity that are meant to guide its programming and tell the network that it'll lose you as a supporter if this new conservative slant isn't reversed.
Chris Bowers at MyDD says Free Media Is Far More Influential Than Paid Media, saying the impact of the Swift Boat Liars ad owes its reach to the broadcast media who have provided it all the free attention. He suggests that ads that go to Bush's "personal drama" might get the same kind of free legs.
The Slacktivist is disturbed that Bush has (he claims) been reading the same thin devotional book for three years, and recommends progressing to some meatier stuff.
At Pacific Views Natasha has two posts on the fabulousness of the modern media, and it's not just WorldNetDaily that has flakey ideas. And, of course, Michelle Malkin is taking advantage of the worst of them.
I've been kinda busy this weekend, but I've been checking in briefly here and there to see what's going on, and Atrios has been pretty hot. His posts on the culpability of liberal hawks on the issue of the war should be read and digested thoroughly. Like he says, this is still going on. He's also absolutely right that it is outrageous for the media, the Republicans, and members of the Democratic leadership to pretend that there is any equivalence between the Swift-Boat Liars and MoveOn.org.
Josh Marshall examines two Kerry campaign ads that respond to the Swift Boat Liar's smears (with links to the ads so you can see them for yourself).
At The Left Coaster, there is a sighting of "the foil fedora" in GI, Robot, where bringing troops home is read in the worst possible paranoid light.
I'm too lazy to go through my pages looking for old posts about jobs, unions, and other means to create a culture of shared interest in rebuilding Iraq for Iraqis (that would have forestalled the building of a community of interest in just getting rid of Americans), but Steve Clemons visited that same subject recently and you may find therein a few other insights, besides.
At Long Story, Short Pier, an inspired journey into The Virgin Ben's Reading List for an understanding of where the gentlemen went.
Last night before I went to bed I was happy to see that Atrios said the Bush campaign had been busted over the Swift Boat Liars - they can claim all they want to that the campaign has nothing to do with them, but it's clear that they do. Boy, are they busted. And here's more debunking by David Corn at The Nation. (Note to Josh Marshall: The word you are looking for is "coward".)
Monkey Media Report returns to the subject of our favorite endorsement of a presidential candidate. Here's a quote I liked:
It's reasonable to expect that anything working to ratchet down the medieval "Christian vs. Muslim" rhetoric will also serve to ratchet down the number of Al Qaeda recruits, which (it's again reasonable to expect) will keep the USA safer. Therefore, it couldn't be more obvious that another Bush term is high on Osama's list of priorities. Our aggressive neocon White House crew - who, remember, preemptively invaded a country without making any serious post-war plans - have just handed Islamist terrorists yet another failed state in which to set up shop. Why on earth would terrorists now prefer Kerry when Cheney and his pals have been so good to them?
As some of you may be aware, a flash storm in the West Country town of Boscastle has devastated a town that has stood for hundreds of years without any such disaster ever affecting it before. (This page has an aerial photograph. And here is a photopage.)
That was Monday, but what I didn't know until it was mentioned to me last night is that Boscastle is the home of the country's only Museum of Witchcraft, and it's also rather a mess right now. Although only one internal wall has fallen, the contents are pretty much what you'd expect and restoration prospects are unknown. There are photographs on their front page with updates.
And while I was looking for a link for the original story, I found that someone else had already said all this on her blog, and so, of course, had Feorag, which I should have known already. (Sorry, it's been a busy week.) 20:30 BST
So much for free speech
After John McCain called on Bush to condemn the Swift Vote Liar ad, the White House looked for a way to change the subject. Atrios quotedScott McClellan:
We've called on Senator Kerry to join us and call for an end to all of this unregulated soft money activity.
Elizabeth Dole just told us once again that this is Bush's position. Can some reporter please get to the bottom of this? Does Bush want them to be illegal? Has he embraced a new campaign finance law position?
Now, all this sounds pretty sperm-of-the-moment, like something they'll just say until the issue goes away, until you read this morning's Washington Post and find Thomas Edsall reporting this:
The Federal Election Commission yesterday adopted new regulations that will make it significantly more difficult for independent political groups to continue to raise and spend millions of dollars in contributions after the 2004 election.
The new rules become effective Jan. 1 and will not limit this year's explosion of spending by nonparty groups such as America Coming Together and the Media Fund, which are closely aligned with the Democrats, and Progress for America on the Republican side. [...] If these rules had been in effect for the current election cycle, they probably would have crippled such groups as ACT and the Media Fund, both of which got off the ground with multimillion-dollar donations from wealthy liberals determined to defeat Bush.
We've talked about this before, kiddies. Those ads are pretty much all there is for Democrats and liberals, because the broadcast media is owned by Republicans and leans increasingly to the right, PBS is increasingly becoming right-wing, and while there are right-wing cable networks like Fox and now it's imitator CNN, there are no equivalent liberal networks to speak of. Air America is making inroads on AM radio but still has nothing like the saturation of right-wing talk radio. A president can control the news cycle to a certain extent, but if the press is out to get you (which they seem remarkably more prone to when the president is a Democrat), that just gives them more excuses to promote the RNC's spin against that president.
In other words, most of these rules are being tweaked, it seems, to try to keep the advantage with those in power and out of the hands of the rest of us. 16:43 BST
The meeting had all the hallmarks of an ordinary Congressional hearing. There was Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, discussing the problems faced by ordinary citizens mistakenly placed on terrorist watch lists. Then, to the astonishment of the crowd attending a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday, Mr. Kennedy offered himself up as Exhibit A.
Between March 1 and April 6, airline agents tried to block Mr. Kennedy from boarding airplanes on five occasions because his name resembled an alias used by a suspected terrorist who had been barred from flying on airlines in the United States, his aides and government officials said.
Instead of acknowledging the craggy-faced, silver-haired septuagenarian as the Congressional leader whose face has flashed across the nation's television sets for decades, the airline agents acted as if they had stumbled across a fanatic who might blow up an American airplane. Mr. Kennedy said they refused to give him his ticket.
"He said, 'We can't give it to you'," Mr. Kennedy said, describing an encounter with an airline agent to the rapt audience. " 'You can't buy a ticket to go on the airline to Boston.' I said, 'Well, why not?' He said, 'We can't tell you.' "
"Tried to get on a plane back to Washington," Mr. Kennedy continued. "'You can't get on the plane.' I went up to the desk and said, 'I've been getting on this plane, you know, for 42 years. Why can't I get on the plane?'"
The hearing room erupted in laughter. [...] In Mr. Kennedy's case, airline supervisors ultimately overruled the ticket agents in each instance and allowed him to board the plane. But it took several weeks for the Department of Homeland Security to clear the matter up altogether, the senator's aides said.
That's for one of the best known men in the US Senate - and he could go directly to Tom Ridge.
Meanwhile, I'll be interested to learn all about the terrorist named Edward Kennedy for whom the Senator was "mistaken", if he in fact actually exists. We've already noted previous cases of this nature with lesser-known victims who were not mistaken for anyone else, but in fact had been placed on the no-fly list because they had engaged in such terrorist activities as organizing peace campaigns or having once worked for Ralph Nader. It's the sort of thing that makes you wonder if any of this is actually happening by accident. 15:35 BST
In case you haven't met him, Bruce designs and codes software for the Space Telescope Science Institute. The STSI manages Hubble for NASA. Yet he advocates a full return to paper ballots:
Let's hear it for paper trails. No...wait...let's hear it for paper ballots. I'm serious. A couple years ago a good friend of mine who is a lawyer and I were discussing all the various ways our respective trades can fail the people they are supposed to be helping. He observed at one point in the discussion that we were both good examples of how the closer you are to a system, the more afraid you are of it. I earn my living designing and coding software. I have earned my living doing this for two decades now. Listen to me: there should never be software anywhere in the path between the person who casts a vote and the people who tally all the votes. Anywhere. Anywhere. Did you get that? Anywhere. [Emphasis in the original.]
In comments, Bryan writes:
I can write the software in an afternoon that will record choices made by touchscreen, add them to a database, and print out a ballot. That part is easy, because the task is simply a matter of assembling bits I have already written over the years.
The problem is protecting that system from tampering. The same system that makes it easy to create the code, also makes it easy to mess with the code. Look at the history of the Windows operating system and Internet attacks.
If the concern is helping the disabled vote, write a program that prints out a ballot for them, but count the ballot, not the invisible database in the computer.
And Scorpio (of Eccentricity) seconds Bruce's evaluation. You all know this is what I have been saying all along: Use the machines to print the ballots, not to count them.
Conveniently, I decided to check Pacific Views first tonight and found out Mary is about to be on Majority Report on Air America. While I wait, I find a huge raft of links to all sorts of stuff, like those neat orbital aurora event pictures. 00:20 BST
Thursday, 19 August 2004
Chain links
Sometimes I just start by following one link I found in the referrers and then wandering from there to another page and another following links on each page. During my little adventure this afternoon, I found:
More Bushisms: "As you know, we don't have relationships with Iran," Bush said. "I mean, that's -- ever since the late '70s, we have no contacts with them, and we've totally sanctioned them. In other words, there's no sanctions -- you can't -- we're out of sanctions."
Good stuff at Rox Populi, and check out this analysis of how your tax dollars are being used to make sure our military only gets their news from Fox.
This is a map of the home locations of those Americans who have died in Iraq. 17:04 BST
The UK's biggest hypocrite
I suspect that someone in the Labour Party must have outed David Blunkett in an effort to get rid of him, but I always feel there is justice when a public prig is hoist on his own petard. If you're going to be telling the rest of us to be chaste, you'd bloody well better be chaste yourself.
Anyway, there's a rather good article in the Edinburgh Evening News:
HOW refreshing to see someone take a stand and decide not to tell the whole world about the new love of their life. Despite no shortage of offers, Home Secretary David Blunkett has taken the principled decision that, for once, privacy should come first.
After his relationship with a married woman was revealed, he told reporters: "After my divorce, I decided not to talk again about my subsequent private life. I have stuck to that principle over the years . . . and defended all politicians' right to a degree of privacy."
Can this really be the same David Blunkett who wants compulsory ID cards, government access to our phone and computer records, and our cars electronically tagged?
His principled stance may come as a surprise to the campaign group Privacy International, which was formed to resist the growing interference by governments and big companies in our lives.
Just last month, in its annual "Big Brother" awards to recognise the worst offenders, Privacy International announced it had renamed one category the David Blunkett Lifetime Menace award, in recognition of the number of times he has been nominated.
So, why doesn't he think the rest of us deserve any privacy? 16:36 BST
Choose life
From David Eliot at Abolish the Death Penalty: Ryan Matthews became the 115th person to be released from death row due to actual innocence this week. He is from Louisiana. Interestingly, while researching his case for a press release, I found that he is the THIRD African American juvenile to be wrongly convicted and sentenced to death. Think about that. Of the 115 people we now know to be innocent, three of them were put on trial when they were 16 or 17 years old by Louisiana prosecutors. And all three were black. You think they've got a problem down there?
David also has some remarks on the so-called "closure" that victims' families are supposed to get from seeing the culprit executed.
Carrie at The Lonely Abolitionist has a story on the cost of a single death penalty prosecution: The State has spent approximately $1.5 million on Mateo's death sentence.
Carrie also reports on re-evaluation of possible sentences in Texas: This fall, the legislature will consider altering the criminal justice system in Texas to give juries the option of life without possibility of parole along with the option of death in capital cases. Right now, juries can choose death or life with possibility of parole in 40 years. Most people who support the death penalty say they would prefer life without parole if it were an option - which may have made a significant difference in this case, where the jury received instructions that misled them into believing that parole was available when it was not. 15:41 BST
Webcrawl
Jeralyn at TalkLeft on an angry man: Michael McAllister walks out of prison in Virginia Wednesday after serving 18 years for an attempted rape that the detective and prosecutor in his case later said he probably didn't commit.
MadKane will be part of the NY blogger bunch for the GOPcon (or maybe we should just call it ConCon), and has written a song for the occasion.
Ken MacLeod and People talking politics in a bar: It's recently struck me that the moderate, liberal, democratic and humane response to the build-up to the Iraq war should have been to argue for the West to arm Iraq. It's not merely the case that invading Iraq was a distraction from fighting Al-Qaeda: it was objectively fighting on the same side as Al-Qaeda. If you're serious about fighting Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, the last thing you'd want to do, on the face of it, is overthrow - or even weaken - one of the few regimes in the region that was capable of and interested in crushing them within its borders. But that's what the US and UK did. The conclusion must be that they have other priorities that come higher than fighting Al-Qaeda.
Bush's Brain, the movie based on James C. Moore and Wayne Slater's book Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential, won't really surprise most political junkies, but nevertheless fills in a lot of interesting detail, and gives you a larger sense of Rove's pattern of dishonesty in aid of winning.
I hadn't realized that pattern went all the way back to his college days, when he ran for the head of the College Republicans. That appears to be his first use of the tactics he used in 2000 to make sure the apparent winner never got to take office.
So even fellow Republicans aren't necessarily crazy about Rove and his nasty habits, and several of them turn up as talking heads in this film.
The movie goes to theaters on the 27th, but the DVD is on sale now from their website - makes a great gift!
And while I'm on the subject,
Nick Confessore suggests at Tapped that maybe Rove's game plan isn't working out so well this time around. Why, it's almost like people have started to notice.... 17:23 BST
Your political world
Well, here's a surprise: When Sequoia Voting Systems demonstrated its new paper-trail electronic voting system for state Senate staffers in California last week, the company representative got a surprise when the paper trail failed to record votes that testers cast on the machine. Oh, wait, that's not a surprise; I've been harping on this all year.
Travis at Rainstorm has a round-up of recent articles on the polls that point to a possible Kerry Landslide.
The legendary Philip Agre says we need to answer two simple questions: What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It? When Agre writes one of these long, thoughtful articles, you just have to read them; this is high-level truth-speaking.
Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple:
Q: What is conservatism?
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.
Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.
These ideas are not new. Indeed they were common sense until recently. Nowadays, though, most of the people who call themselves "conservatives" have little notion of what conservatism even is. They have been deceived by one of the great public relations campaigns of human history. Only by analyzing this deception will it become possible to revive democracy in the United States. [...] Conservatism promotes (and so does liberalism, misguidedly) the idea that liberalism is about activist government where conservatism is not. This is absurd. It is unrelated to the history of conservative government. Conservatism promotes activist government that acts in the interests of the aristocracy. This has been true for thousands of years. What is distinctive about liberalism is not that it promotes activist government but that it promotes government that acts in the interests of the majority. Democratic government, however, is not simply majoritarian. It is, rather, one institutional expression of a democratic type of culture that is still very much in the process of being invented.
Conservative social orders have often described themselves as civilized, and so one reads in the Wall Street Journal that "the enemies of civilization hate bow ties". But what conservatism calls civilization is little but the domination of an aristocracy. Every aspect of social life is subordinated to this goal. That is not civilization.
The reality is quite the opposite. To impose its order on society, conservatism must destroy civilization. In particular conservatism must destroy conscience, democracy, reason, and language.
Liberalism is a movement of conscience. Liberals speak endlessly of conscience. Yet conservative rhetors have taken to acting as if they owned the language of conscience. They even routinely assert that liberals disparage conscience. The magnitude of the falsehood here is so great that decent people have been set back on their heels. [...] Another example of conservative twisting of the language of conscience is the argument, in the context of the attacks of 9/11 and the war in Iraq, that holding our side to things like the Geneva Convention implies an equivalence between ourselves and our enemies. This is a logical fallacy. The fallacy is something like: they kill so they are bad, but we are good so it is okay for us to kill. The argument that everything we do is okay so long as it is not as bad as the most extreme evil in the world is a rejection of nearly all of civilization. It is precisely the destruction of conscience.
Or take the notion of "political correctness". It is true that movements of conscience have piled demands onto people faster than the culture can absorb them. That is an unfortunate side-effect of social progress. Conservatism, however, twists language to make the inconvenience of conscience sound like a kind of oppression. The campaign against political correctness is thus a search-and-destroy campaign against all vestiges of conscience in society. The flamboyant nastiness of rhetors such as Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter represents the destruction of conscience as a type of liberation. They are like cultists, continually egging on their audiences to destroy their own minds by punching through one layer after another of their consciences.
Conservatism continually twists the language of conscience into its opposite. It has no choice: conservatism is unjust, and cannot survive except by pretending to be the opposite of what it is. [...] Many of these messages have become institutions. Whole organizations exist to provide a pipeline of "facts" that underwrite the message of "liberal media bias". These "facts" fall into numerous categories and exemplify a wide range of fallacies. Some are just factually untrue, e.g., claims that the New York Times has failed to cover an event that it actually covered in detail. Other claimed examples of bias are non sequiturs, e.g., quotations from liberal columns that appear on the opinion pages, or quotations from liberals in news articles that also provided balancing quotes from conservatives. Others are illogical, e.g., media that report news events that represent bad news for the president. The methods of identifying "bias" are thus highly elastic. In practice, everything in the media on political topics that diverges from conservative public relations messages is contended to be an example of "liberal bias". The goal, clearly, is to purge the media of everything except conservatism.
The word "inaccurate" has become something of a technical term in the political use of public relations. It means "differs from our message". [...] Conservative strategists construct their messages in a variety of more or less stereotyped ways. One of the most important patterns of conservative message-making is projection. Projection is a psychological notion; it roughly means attacking someone by falsely claiming that they are attacking you. Conservative strategists engage in projection constantly. An commonplace example would be taking something from someone by claiming that they are in fact taking it from you. Or, having heard a careful and detailed refutation of something he has said, the projector might snap, "you should not dismiss what I have said so quickly!". It is a false claim -- what he said was not dismissed -- that is an example of itself -- he is dismissing what his opponent has said.
Projection was an important part of the Florida election controversy, for example when Republicans tried to get illegal ballots counted and prevent legal ballots from being counted, while claiming that Democrats were trying to steal the election. [...] A simple example of turning language into a weapon might be the word "predictable", which has become a synonym for "liberal". There is no rational argument in this usage. Every such use of "predictable" can be refuted simply by substituting the word "consistent". It is simply invective.
More importantly, conservative rhetors have been systematically mapping the language that has historically been used to describe the aristocracy and the traditional authorities that serve it, and have twisted those words into terms for liberals. This tactic has the dual advantage of both attacking the aristocracies' opponents and depriving them of the words that they have used to attack aristocracy.
A simple example is the term "race-baiting". In the Nexis database, uses of "race-baiting" undergo a sudden switch in the early 1990's. Before then, "race-baiting" referred to racists. Afterward, it referred in twisted way to people who oppose racism. What happened is simple: conservative rhetors, tired of the political advantage that liberals had been getting from their use of that word, took it away from them. [...] A recent example is the word "hate". The civil rights movement had used the word "hate" to refer to terrorism and stereotyping against black people, and during the 1990's some in the press had identified as "Clinton-haters" people who had made vast numbers of bizarre claims that the Clintons had participated in murder and drug-dealing. Beginning around 2003, conservative rhetors took control of this word as well by labeling a variety of perfectly ordinary types of democratic opposition to George Bush as "hate". In addition, they have constructed a large number of messages of the form "liberals hate X" (e.g., X=America) and established within their media apparatus a sophistical pipeline of "facts" to support each one. This is also an example of the systematic breaking of associations.
The word "partisan" entered into its current political circulation in the early 1990's when some liberals identified people like Newt Gingrich as "partisan" for doing things like the memo on language that I mentioned earlier. To the conservative way of politics, there is nothing either true or false about the liberal claim. It is simply that liberals had taken control of some rhetorical territory: the word "partisan". Conservative rhetors then set about taking control of the word themselves. They did this in a way that has become mechanical. They first claimed, falsely, that liberals were identifying as "partisan" any views other than their own. They thus inflated the word while projecting this inflation onto the liberals and disconnecting the word from the particular facts that the liberals had associated with it. Next, they started using the word "partisan" in the inflated, dishonest way that they had ascribed to their opponents. This is, very importantly, a way of attacking people simply for having a different opinion. In twisting language this way, conservatives tell themselves that they are simply turning liberal unfairness back against the liberals. This too is projection. [...] It is often claimed in the media that snooty elitists on the coasts refer to states in the middle of the country as "flyover country". Yet I, who have lived in liberal areas of the coasts for most of my life, have never once heard this usage. In fact, as far as I can tell, the Nexis database does not contain a single example of anyone using the phrase "flyover country" to disparage the non-coastal areas of the United States. Instead, it contains hundreds of examples of people disparaging residents of the coasts by claiming that they use the phrase to describe the interior. The phrase is a special favorite of newspapers in Minneapolis and Denver. This is projection. Likewise, I have never heard the phrase "political correctness" used except to disparage the people who supposedly use it. [...] Conservative remapping of the language of aristocracy and democracy has been incredibly thorough. Consider, for example, the terms "entitlement" and "dependency". The term "entitlement" originally referred to aristocrats. Aristocrats had titles, and they thought that they were thereby entitled to various things, particularly the deference of the common people. Everyone else, by contrast, was dependent on the aristocrats. This is conservatism. Yet in the 1990's, conservative rhetors decided that the people who actually claim entitlement are people on welfare. They furthermore created an empirically false association between welfare and dependency. But, as I have mentioned, welfare is precisely a way of eliminating dependency on the aristocracy and the cultural authorities that serve it. I do not recall anyone ever noting this inversion of meaning.
Just for the record, I've had an article on just this subject percolating at the back of my mind for the last few weeks. I'm not sure when, exactly, I first heard the word "entitlement" used in association with welfare and Social Security, but I do remember being startled by the usage. Throughout my life, I had heard the word used only to refer to those who appeared to believe they were better than the rest of us, usually wealthy people who were said to have "a sense of entitlement". This was always derogatory, and clearly indicated people who expected, but clearly were not entitled to, more than the rest of us. George W. Bush is precisely the sort of person to whom this word would traditionally have been applied.
It is aggravating to see it applied instead not merely to welfare but even to SS, a program to which recipients are entitled for the simple reason that they have paid for it throughout their working lives. As the example of Enron has showed us, the sense that the deals you have made by paying for them do not "entitle" you to anything has extended even to your privately agreed pensions. Increasingly, this is even true of obedience by your employer to labor laws (including payment of your hourly wage for the hours you've actually worked at their behest), to the obligations of your medical insurer to approve medical treatment in a timely fashion, and an ever-widening array of things you would not have agreed or contributed to had you known that your return would not be provided when it came time to collect.
Conversely, conservatives appear to believe that they are still entitled to your work, even if they do not recompense you, and that they are still entitled to your money, even if they don't give you anything for it. Much in the same way that they insist they are entitled to your respect and deference even when they have fallen well short of earning them from you.
I've only pulled some quotes out of the first half of this article, but for goodness sake read the rest.
Ordinarily it's David Neiwert who writes the long pieces about hate, but this time it's Gary Farber. On the other hand....
About once a week I say to someone that I miss MWO. David Neiwert feels the same way, and tries to fill in after some classic media whoring by Anne Kornblut of The Boston Globe about the Swift Boat Liars. 01:12 BST
Tuesday, 17 August 2004
At Altercation
Eric Alterman has decided that a subscription-only article in The Nation by Todd Gitlin and John Passacantando should be read by all of us, so he has posted No Bush, No Chicago '68 at Altercation. I have to admit, I'm worried about another Chicago, too. Some people say it's different because that was a Democratic convention and this is the RNC, but I don't think so; the perception will be that the same people are the "trouble-makers".
Eric also recommends this E.J. Dionne article purporting to advise Kerry to fight back with simple language, but I actually don't think Dionne's version makes it that simple, either. Kerry gave a fairly short and simple (20-word) answer to the question of whether he was against the way Bush had run the war, and the Bushistas cut up both the question and the answer so that Kerry appeared to be answering the question, "Are you an anti-war candidate?" with "Yes, I am."
Eric's new "Think Again" column is called The Narrative vs. The Truth, about, "the media's misplaying of the military strength argument, of course, to the benefit of conservative Republicans."
I thought I'd already linked the Safety Second ad from its source, but Eric has the link to the NYT page. It charts the far better ways the cost of the Iraq war could have been spent to protect America. (And now I can't find the source link.)
Go read the letter from Brian Thomas to find out what Ursula LeGuin said when he asked her, "Do you want George Bush out of the White House?"
Eric also made some nice points in Monday's post about the poisonous nature of the attacks on ACT and Soros, and on the market value of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. 22:30 BST
