You should read this: Triumph of the Trivial is an excellent post by Paul Krugman (no surprises there) which addresses the fact that the news media has failed to provide substantive coverage of important issues. Factacular is an important and also excellent post by Atrios responding to charges by the executive producer of CBS Evening News with Dan Rather that Krugman was inaccurate and unfair. Atrios shows that this response, far from refuting it, really proves Krugman's point.
My God's ex-Boyfriend on how Al Gore really invented the Internet (even though he didn't claim to). (Sorry, I couldn't resist, even though I have no idea who this person is and it's extremely unlikely to be any of my ex-boyrfriends. Yes, I know it's a lame joke.) Via Deborama.
For some light relief, it's time for you now to read Fafblog's convention coverage. Start here and scroll up to each successive post.
17:14 BST
I once was lost, but now I'm found
Bitter laughter at the announcement that the Florida 2002 voting records have disappeared in a computer crash. And then a funny thing happened:
When the loss was initially reported earlier this week, state officials had stressed that no votes were lost in the actual election. The record of the votes had been believed lost during the crashes in April and November of 2003, and county officials had said they did not have a backup system in place until December.
The lost records marked the latest in a series of embarrassing episodes involving Florida voting since the turmoil of the 2000 presidential race.
Despite the discovery of the disc, local activists expressed skepticism.
"There are now more questions than before," said Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, chairwoman of the Miami-Dade Election Reform Coalition. "I certainly want the disc, I certainly wish someone would test the original disc they are now claiming they found and determine when that disc was made, where it came from, whether it's been tampered with and if anyone's opened it."
A team from the state Division of Elections was sent to Miami earlier this week to work with local officials to see what happened and whether the information was retrievable. Kaplan said officials from the machine vendor, Election Systems & Software Inc., were also in the office, though he said it was Miami-Dade officials who found the disc.
This just happens too damned often. And how about this:
Republican Gov. Jeb Bush has tried for months to persuade Florida voters touchscreen voting machines are reliable. His own party apparently hasn't gotten the message.
The state GOP paid for a flier critical of the new technology and sent it to some south Florida voters where a primary election is scheduled next month.
"The new electronic voting machines do not have a paper ballot to verify your vote in case of a recount," the message states. "Make sure your vote counts. Order your absentee ballot today."
That's what Democrats and a coalition of civil rights groups have been saying in legal challenges, trying to force the state to provide a paper trail in case the touchscreen machines malfunction.
"It is insulting that the leadership's own party would believe that the system is broke," said Sharon Lettman Pacheco, spokeswoman for People for the American Way.
A lot of honest people on the right just do not get why the rest of us absolutely do not trust the current Republican leadership. But look at this stuff! And this is on the heels of Jeb Bush's new law forbidding paper trails. Now, what's that about?
Well, come on, folks, what does it look like it's about? When is it gonna be too much for you?
A few of them have figured out that cheating is a Bad Thing, but they assume it's only Democrats who do it. That's why they write books like If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat; Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends On It. They're never going to ask themselves why it was the Bush team, and not the Gore team, that refused a full state-wide recount in Florida. And they clearly still believe that it was only the Gore team that disputed late or otherwise improper military (absentee) ballots. (Hint: The Gore team did not want to accept those ballots in Republican-leaning districts because they had already accepted Republican disallowal of such ballots in Democratic-leaning districts.) To this day, you still hear the lie that the Gore team demanded one recount after another even though this lie was launched before any recounts had been completed.
I really should read my mail more often, 'cause this would have fit neatly into my previous post:
Cory Panshin suggested I have a look at your blog and contact you. Alexei Panshin and I have written a number of political and social songs together that I think might interest you and your readers. They have been recorded by my band Radio Free Earth, and mp3s and lyrics have been posted on our web site under the banner "Bad King George and Other Songs for Our Times". Let me know what you think: the link is
I've only listened to one so far (and found it instrumentally proficient), but considering the provenance I figured a lot of you might be interested. Free .mp3s, lyrics provided.
[Update: Yes, you would think I'd have been awake enough to mention that the letter was from Josh Wachtel, wouldn't you?] 00:18 BST
Drugs and music
I don't know what sort of drug you have to take to cause this, but they ain't Smart Drugs.
Many people inaccurately try to compare Ann Coulter with Michael Moore. This is wrong for a number of reasons, but this post at Best of the Blogs finds a closer (though still not right) comparison for the raving drunken barfly: Hunter S. Thompson. The difference being that Thompson had some idea what he was talking about to start with, and also, as the post says, HST is funny. Well, I suppose it's also worth mentioning that you eventually come down off of LSD. (And here - yes, I got one of those invitations from the WashPost, too, and I ignored it.)
Reefer Madness. Another reminder of Arthur Hlavaty's line about how drugs cause insanity in people who don't take them.
Katie Melua is too breathy and little-girlish on a lot of these tracks (some nice instrumental work backing it up, though), but you can listen to her latest album, Call off the Search, here. Some of it's actually pretty good, although most of it isn't really the sort of thing I lust to own a copy of. Via Ones and Zeros. 01:00 BST
Friday, 30 July 2004
Bring 'em home
I keep watching BBC2's coverage of the campaign and Kirsty Wark is driving me crazy. I think Gavin Esler is the other one who's making me nuts. I listen to their questions and they are all about exactly the same talking points the mainstream American media is leaning on. They've been over there too long and I sure hope they get someone who is uncorrupted over there for the RNC shindig.
[Disclosure: Kirsty once flew me up to Scotland to do a show on women's sexuality.] 23:11 BST
Media notes
Atrios notes that although Sandy Berger was completely exonerated, the media regards him as last weeks headline, apparently.
The Buzzflash convention blog has posted a whole bunch of reader responses about media coverage of the convention. They have lots of examples of the media spinning for the RNC.
Cartographic variations on presidential election maps. The examples are from 2000 but maps based on electoral votes and on population density give you a whole different picture from the one you get in traditional vote maps.
And the overnights so far are good: Kerry is definitely already showing a bounce, and even Luntz (who is famous for skewing his focus groups to the right) says some undecideds who were leaning toward Bush are now leaning toward Kerry.
As to the party itself, MyDD argues that Russ Feingold was right about how the campaign finance law would disadvantage Democrats in the race for corporate dollars and force the party to go back to their base. Thank you, Joe Trippi; thank you, Howard Dean. 18:58 BST
co.uk
Government spam: This is the real one: Copies of the booklet will be sent to all households in the UK throughout August.This is the parody, which, unfortunately, is a lot more sensible: In an effort to worry the public and convince them to vote for us again next year, and because George Bush asked us to, this website includes the common sense advice found in the Preparing for Emergencies booklet, and information on what the government is doing to protect the country as a whole. (Hint: we're praying really, really hard.) National editions of the booklet will be available here when we can be arsed to get translators to put them into your crazy moon languages..
And right after I wrote that, I checked my referrers and found a British site called Irritant which, interestingly, has the same item. But I want to refer you to this analysis of the Labour government that is painfully close to the bone.
Someone else I found in the referrers, also apparently posting from the UK, is Heraldblog. There I found this evaluation of Kerry's speech, but the author is apparently unaware that in fact a lot of people switched to C-SPAN because they really did want to hear what Kerry had to say. (And, as speeches go, there's not really much difference between "45 minutes" and "nearly an hour"; if it's a bad speech, 10 minutes is too much, and if it's a good speech, an hour can fly right by. The consensus I'm getting so far is that Kerry certainly made at least a triple - although I just heard Edwards saying it was out of the park - and he had plenty of applause lines. I didn't get bored.) 17:26 BST
Spin it
I found about five things wrong with Spinsanity's post called Moore's mendacity confirmed, starting with the title. (In the first sentence of the piece, Nyhan says Moore misconstrues the 9/11 report; it's a pretty big leap to "mendacity" from there.) Check it out and see how many you find. Meanwhile, Ben Fritz provides the obligatory attempt at balance by pretending that Paul Krugman was seriously ascribing to George Bush the qualities of his Arabian Candidate. Perhaps Fritz believes this, but if I were saying it, I'd say, "A really stupid, naive, and uninformed reader might actually think so."
There's nothing wrong with the economy, we tell you!WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A campaign worker for President Bush (news - web sites) said on Thursday American workers unhappy with low-quality jobs should find new ones -- or pop a Prozac to make themselves feel better.
Over at Eschaton, Holden reports on How the Post Spins Massive Corruption. Meanwhile, Atrios does his final convention post, in which he compares the media spin with the reality, and also compares the written speech that was handed out with the one Kerry actually gave. 15:57 BST
I think Josh Marshall gets it just about right here. The truth about "anti-Bush rage" is, as he says, that it was an anger born from powerlessness. It was anger at Bush, sure, but more than that it was anger at the lack of representation in the political discourse - from politicians or from members of the media - for a large chunk of the population who never particularly felt themselves to be "radicals" or "on the fringe" or, hell, even "angry."
I think this is true. During the '90s, something like two-thirds of the population disagreed with Congress and the media that Clinton deserved to be impeached or even further persecuted for his personal indiscretions. It didn't stop them, though.
Then there were all those people who wanted and expected a new healthcare program and didn't get it - with no help from the media, who made it all sound much too complicated. And then there were the two-thirds of the population in 2000 who wanted - and expected - the ballots in Florida to be counted, while the media, against all reason, took up the call for speed rather than accuracy. And then there were the two-thirds of the population who wanted to let the weapons inspectors complete their work in Iraq before the invasion - and yet, somehow, the media kept cheerleading the call to war.
This week the networks have been claiming they're skipping convention coverage because the public isn't sufficiently interested in it to draw good enough ratings for them. That, of course, is a lie; in fact, C-Span's ratings this week have been through the roof because people do want to see it and aren't prepared to just wait for the network shills to tell them Al Sharpton's speech was bad or that he attacked Bush (he didn't) - they want to see for themselves and make up their own minds. The real reason the networks aren't showing it is because they don't want you to know what Democrats really look like and what we have to say. But you knew that, right? 00:47 BST
Thursday, 29 July 2004
Trial Lawyers
We all know that when the RNC slams "trial lawyers" they really mean "lawyers who try to hold big corporations accountable." Just think how nice it would be for them if insurance companies never had to make payouts for all that malpractice insurance they keep collecting - and keep collecting at steepening rates despite the fact that many states have already capped jury awards for malpractice.
"Trail lawyers" are bad when they fight for ordinary people who have been the victims of corporate fraud or actual malpractice, but they're not so bad when they defend the corporate bandits, in which case the RNC thinks they can get away with pretending they are something else.
The Center for American Progress says this attack on Edwards ain't flyin', even with a lot of Republicans. Maybe that's because of things like this:
The dirty little secret of the White House's trial lawyer attacks is that a cadre of key Republican Senators started their careers as trial lawyers. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is a former trial lawyer. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) was a trial lawyer "in a state where juries have awarded numerous multimillion-dollar verdicts in plaintiffs' cases." And Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) said, "I have a number of trial lawyers that support me personally - they are friends of mine...I don't look at ATLA or trial lawyers as an enemy by any means."
Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is also a former trial lawyer and has publicly called for a cessation of the administration's slurs on the profession, and down in Florida:
The Gainsville, Florida Sun reports that the White House is trying to take its trial lawyer attacks to Florida, but may find some stiff resistance. While Gov. Jeb Bush has been outspoken in his criticism of the profession, promising ''to whack'' the trial lawyers, "even some Republicans say making trial lawyers the 'boogeymen' of this year's election may prove difficult." The leading GOP contender is former Bush Cabinet Secretary Mel Martinez, a successful trial lawyer who was president of the Academy of Florida Trial Lawyers. Similarly, the president of the state trial lawyers' association is a lifelong Republican, whose father once ran for governor.
Ordinary folk don't seem to be falling for this attack on Edwards, either, especially since the more Cheney & Friends push it, the more room is left for people to talk about Edwards' history as a defender of folks like them who have been egregiously harmed by corporate negligence. Most people don't look at those cases and wonder about the sins of the personal injury lawyer, they wonder why these corporations have to be privately sued when in truth their officers should do jail time for endangering the public. 13:57 BST
Paul Foot
Oh, damn.
I didn't even know he was gone until I saw it at Ken McLeod's page. From the Observer:
At first glance he appeared to be the respectable son of Sir Hugh Foot of Trematon Castle, Cornwall. But his patience told against him. From the early 1960s he was the journalist who would give the victims of injustice a hearing when no one else would listen. MPs, councillors, shop stewards, lawyers, ombudsmen, watchdogs and reporters may have decided that you were mad. Or dismissed you as an obsessive. Or - and this is the most common reason justified grievances aren't taken up - decided it would be too much time and trouble to champion your cause.
Foot was a shining exception, the best hope for thousands who had nowhere else to turn, their court of last appeal.
Paul Foot was a real journalist. We can't afford to lose them. 05:17 BST
Early morning stuff
Text of John Edwards' Speech. And, of course, you can see it here, along with the other big speeches of the evening. (RNC spin on Edwards: He sounded like a fast-talking lawyer.)
I've just found another interesting weblog I didn't know about before. It's got a bit of the transcript from the Michael Moore/Bill O'Reilly exchange. And I hadn't realized Aljazeera wasn't allowed to show their logo at the convention.
Mike is looking forward to reading a book. 04:29 BST
Wednesday, 28 July 2004
More stuff to check out
Atrios is sounding more like himself today. Check out his post about Scaife-funded smearing. Also Holden's post about Security by Clouseau, which made me laugh out loud.
We wait for John Dean's response: Fred LaRue, a high-ranking Nixon administration official who served a prison term for his role in Watergate and was among those rumored to be Deep Throat, has died. He was 75.
Here's the Zogby poll. I note with interest that Kerry appears to have regained his lead in Florida according to this one, but the Electoral Vote Predictor is showing Bush ahead there. Hm.
Feministing.com has a post on what's good at the convention for women.
Michael says: Iraq was the priority from the very start, as is made clear by the 1998 PNAC letter to President Clinton calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein; for PNAC, Afghanistan was and is a sideshow.
Someone passed me this link for what appears to be the Hitchhiker trailer, but I can't seem to get it to connect. 22:55 BST
And the fraudsters are, of course, Jeb Bush and his buddies. Paul Krugman:
It's election night, and early returns suggest trouble for the incumbent. Then, mysteriously, the vote count stops and observers from the challenger's campaign see employees of a voting-machine company, one wearing a badge that identifies him as a county official, typing instructions at computers with access to the vote-tabulating software.
When the count resumes, the incumbent pulls ahead. The challenger demands an investigation. But there are no ballots to recount, and election officials allied with the incumbent refuse to release data that could shed light on whether there was tampering with the electronic records.
This isn't a paranoid fantasy. It's a true account of a recent election in Riverside County, Calif., reported by Andrew Gumbel of the British newspaper The Independent. Mr. Gumbel's full-length report, printed in Los Angeles City Beat, makes hair-raising reading not just because it reinforces concerns about touch-screen voting, but also because it shows how easily officials can stonewall after a suspect election.
We already know about the little jimmy they tried this time:
This year, Florida again hired a private company - Accenture, which recently got a homeland security contract worth up to $10 billion - to prepare a felon list. Remembering 2000, journalists sought copies. State officials stonewalled, but a judge eventually ordered the list released.
The Miami Herald quickly discovered that 2,100 citizens who had been granted clemency, restoring their voting rights, were nonetheless on the banned-voter list. Then The Sarasota Herald-Tribune discovered that only 61 of more than 47,000 supposed felons were Hispanic. So the list would have wrongly disenfranchised many legitimate African-American voters, while wrongly enfranchising many Hispanic felons. It escaped nobody's attention that in Florida, Hispanic voters tend to support Republicans.
After first denying any systematic problem, state officials declared it an innocent mistake. They told Accenture to match a list of registered voters to a list of felons, flagging anyone whose name, date of birth and race was the same on both lists. They didn't realize, they said, that this would automatically miss felons who identified themselves as Hispanic because that category exists on voter rolls but not in state criminal records.
But employees of a company that prepared earlier felon lists say that they repeatedly warned state election officials about that very problem.
That "repeatedly warned" thing turns up time and again in all of these stories, including the pre-2000 warnings about problems. Over and over. They know they are doing it. They were told.The Kerry campaign says it is working to ensure an honest election, but how? And how can anyone believe the election results if Bush wins? There's just no longer any reason to trust such an outcome, because it's just too clear that too many people have used too many means to fix the election for Bush again. There is only one thing that will give the world any reason to trust the election (and therefore believe in our ability to hold our leaders accountable):
Bill Scher did a pre-convention historical round-up before he started his embedded reporting from the con. Since then he's posted a number of items on events at the convention. And early this morning, also known as late last night, he posted his interview with Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), and a bunch of pictures and other stuff. He agrees that it was shameful that the networks didn't bother to cover Obama's keynote address. No kidding. I saw a quote somewhere last night in which conservative commentator David Brooks said, "They missed history."
Bill reminds me that Natasha is also conblogging, and she actually took the opportunity to interview reporters about why they were spending so much energy covering the bloggers. She also seems to have some of the better coverage of the blogger breakfast that others have referred to.
The American Prospect has a separate page for blogging the convention and the media coverage of the convention. Jeffrey Dubner: FOX NEWS, HANNITY AND COLMES, 9:34 P.M.: And Alan Colmes has officially called tonight's keynote speaker "Barack Osama." Something tells me it won't be recorded in the transcript, but it sure was there. Pure Freudian slip, but still...
You can read Barack Obama's prepared remarks here (link via Atrios), but to truly appreciate it I highly recommend you go to C-Span's pages and find the archived clip so you can see how he delivered it. He's really got that charisma thing. Wow.
I really enjoyed Why I Hate Saturn, and you already know how I feel about Boondocks, so I widened my eyes upon reading this at Uppity Negro: In other news, Birth of a Nation, by Aaron McGruder, Reginald Hudlin and Kyle Baker, will be available for purchase, right off the presses, at the NBM booth at Comic-Con International: San Diego.
Steve Soto managed to get a good post up on The Left Coaster for day one of the convention. Meanwhile, Mary reads Krugman on worries about the legitimacy of our elections, and soccerdad finds this worrying story: In brief, Pfizer one of the biggest drug companies in the world came up with the idea of using churches to promote the use of the Medicare prescription drug discount cards. The churches are trying to help out their members understand the confusing nature of the program. There may be reason for concern with this particular program.
Skippy has been writing letters again, and got mentioned on CNN as a result. Skippy is very proud.
"Doris Day With an Edge" - Julian Sanchez has a find:
A poster in my neighborhood for Nellie McKay's debut album was trumpeting a reviewer's claim that she was "rooted in the taut, witty tradition linking Cole Porter, Elvis Costello and Eminem." There's a taut, witty tradition (I puzzled) linking Cole Porter, Elvis Costello, and Eminem? I was so intrigued I decided I had to hear it... and that's just about right. Probably the most interesting, original sound I've heard this year; check her out.
I'm watching BBC2 and just saw Robert Reich saying exactly the same things I heard him say on Air America earlier, and now they're about to interview Al Franken. It's kind of surreal. 23:15 BST
Things to read
Eric Boehlert does duty watching the television coverage. No surprises, really, it's called Networks down: TV coverage of Boston, day one, slanted skeptically against the Democrats -- except for Fox, which couldn't bear to show most of the event. He's got a timeline showing the news programs repeating one RNC talking point after another.
Tom Tomorrow is more experienced at these things than most of the on-site bloggers, and has actually managed to get some words down: You can see down into the Fox skybox from where we are, and here's a fun bit of trivia for you: Bill O'Reilly does not stand up during the national anthem. He's another guy who ran into Michael Moore. And Bob Harris continues posting on the TT blog, and aside from reporting that at least one network is covering the convention (Aljazeera), he recommends this post at A Tiny Revolution.
Why does the Democratic platform no longer contain an endorsement of the death penalty? John Kerry.
What I want from my bloggers, I have to admit, is a combination heads-up on news and some analysis of what the media is doing with it. The trouble with having so many of my favorite bloggers at the DemoCon is that they're covering the actual convention rather than looking at what the media is doing with it. I don't mind having a few people giving eye-witness accounts, mind, but to a large extent I feel like I'm getting more information from C-Span than I am from their eye-witnessing. (This page appears to have the clips of the speeches, if you missed them. The Carter speech had people cheering and crying. There was a lot of standing ovation and cheering going on. Anyone who claims it's just anti-Bush is wrong - sounded to me like a lot of enthusiasm for Kerry.)
Atrios acknowledges the problem of being able to tell while in situ what the media is saying, and I heartily recommend reading the comments in that thread from viewers at home:
Well, I went to bed feeling good, woke up and soon felt crappy due to the coverage, which mainly was:
"Shove it."
Kerry wore a blue paper suit at NASA
Clinton spoke, will he overshadow Kerry?
The Kerry people have control and their limiting the Bush bashing.
As I got ready, I saw nothing of Carter. And the networks aren't even showing any coverage tonight.
And, all in all, I miss David Brinkley. It's not the same without him.
Kurt | Email | Homepage | 07.27.04 - 10:25 am | #
For those trying to parse the "Shove it" story, Teresa Heinz Kerry referred to "unAmerican traits"; a Scaife-rag "reporter" demanded to know what she meant by "unAmerican activities", THK objected that this wasn't what she said, he kept bugging her, and she told him he'd said something she didn't say and told him to shove it. I don't think this is up there with telling someone to go Cheney himself on the Senate floor.
Josh Marshall has been having some trouble adapting to the scene, but he does offer some spin-analysis:
Keep your eye out and you're bound to see this argument -- now floated by many conservative columnists -- that Kerry may win because voters need a breather -- a time-out, if you will -- from the turbocharged
a time-out, if you will -- from the turbocharged rush of history we've experienced over the last three years under George W. Bush. The president has simply accomplished so much, bent the world so mightily to his will, that Americans are craving a return to normalcy, as that campaign neologism once had it.
We thirst for mediocrity -- the road more travelled -- and Kerry quenches us.
But, really, how many times has the American electorate punished a president for accomplishing too much? Franklin Roosevelt? Harry Truman? Theodore Roosevelt? Where are the examples? [...] Rather than taking it on its merits, though, I have a different take on this argument. It's a rhetorical or logical reasoning halfway house on the way to a realization of how badly the president has screwed up what one might generously call his ambitious plans. As with Kubler-Ross's grinding five stages of grief, first we have denial. Then anger. And with this argument we have something akin to that tipping-point stage of 'bargaining' -- the sensible pundits' first tip-toe out onto a serious consideration of the impact of the president's term of office.
So Josh is still doing what he does, although it took him some time. In his previous post, he even managed an unscheduled mini-interview with Michael Moore that seems to have helped him crystallize some un-spin:
When it first occurred to me to write this post I was going to say that partisan Democrats have decided to give Kerry a free hand in appealing to independents and swing voters. But that doesn't get it quite right. That was the case in 1992 when the party's core voters, after twelve years out of the White House, were willing to give Bill Clinton all sorts of leeway with what most viewed as his DLC heterodoxies. But something different is at work here.
As Josh says, to most Democrats the trade-off between policies and broad appeal doesn't really exist. Our polices do have broad appeal, and Bush has been just one long attack on them.
But the problem is getting the message past the gatekeepers in the media. The swing-voters, the late-deciders, will know about that message only through the mass media, and the media has learned its lesson of four years ago when exposure to the Democratic convention gave Al Gore a significant bump in the polls that reversed his fortunes. You remember, don't you, that Al Gore came back from a 15% lag? The media hated the man who had been Clinton's VP for the fact that he had failed to repudiate Clinton sufficiently, and every time the public got a good look at Gore himself, the public liked him more. Gore also wiped the floor with Bush in the debates and the focus-groups all thought so, and the overnights for Gore after the first debate reflected that. So the media had to save the game by completely re-spinning the story - and it worked, bringing the eventual outcome close enough that although Gore still won, it wasn't good enough to keep the results far away from the hands of the utterly bent Supreme Court 5.
Jeralyn is another person whose regular blogging beat is being neglected while she's at the convention, but at least she's doing a little bit better at telling us what she's seeing, even if an awful lot of it is what we could have seen on C-Span anyway. (I have to admit I have been surprised at the number of people who do not realize that they can watch all of C-Span live from their website. And some don't even seem to realize that C-Span has been covering the convention.) And along with everything else, she has the big scoop from the blogosphere, which is the news that our very own Clark Kent is actually Duncan Black, the man in the blue tights with the big red A on his chest. A mild-mannered Senior Fellow for Media Matters for America, his real CV is hiding in plain sight right there.
And speaking of Media Matters, they have a lot of the convention spin on their website at the moment, such as this item on Chris Matthews' obsession with the Evil Conniving Ambitions of Hillary Clinton, not to mention Novak's characterization of Democratic convention delegates as "flesh-eating".
Meanwhile, I was just listening to Air America Radio's Unfiltered, where Lizz and Rachel interviewed Rep. Barney Frank and asked him whether he planned to run for Kerry's Senate seat if Kerry wins the presidency - and they got a scoop. Frank said that if Kerry wins and the Democrats don't take back the House, he will do so, but if the Democrats do take back the House, he'll stay there. 17:06 BST
Remarks of Al Gore
I love this country deeply, and even though I always look to the future with optimism and hope, I do think it's worth pausing for just a moment as we begin this year's convention, to take note of two very important lessons from four years ago.
The first lesson is this: Take it from me, every vote counts. In our democracy, every vote has power. And never forget that power is yours. Don't let anyone take it away from you or talk you into throwing it away.
And let's make sure that this time every vote is counted. Let's make sure that the Supreme Court does not pick the next president, and that this president is not the one who picks the next Supreme Court.
The second lesson from 2000 is this: What happens in a presidential election matters. A lot. The outcome profoundly affects the lives of all 293 million Americans, and people in the rest of the world, too. The choice of who is president affects your life and your family's future.
And never has that been more true than in 2004, because let's face it our country faces deep challenges. These challenges we now confront are not Democratic or Republican challenges; they are American challenges that we all must overcome together as one people, as one nation.
And it is in that spirit, that I sincerely ask those watching at home tonight who supported President Bush four years ago: did you really get what you expected from the candidate you voted for? Is our country more united today? Or more divided? Has the promise of compassionate conservatism been fulfilled? Or do those words now ring hollow?
For that matter, are the economic policies really conservative at all? For example, did you expect the largest deficits in history, year after year? One right after another? And the loss of more than a million jobs?
By the way, I know about the bad economy. I was the first one laid off. And while it's true that new jobs are being created, they're just not as good as the jobs people have lost. And incidentally, that's been true for me too. Unfortunately, this is no joke for millions of Americans. And the real solutions require us to transcend partisanship. So that's one reason why, even though we meet here as Democrats, we believe this is a time to reach beyond our party lines to Republicans as well.
And I also ask tonight for the consideration and the help of those who supported a third party candidate in 2000. I urge you to ask yourselves this question: Do you still believe that there was no difference between the candidates?
The NYT has the rest of the evening's speeches linked here. 04:41 BST
More stuff that's not about Boston
Gene Lyons actually read Clinton's book before reviewing it. Whenever Lyons returns to that subject, you learn even more interesting things you didn't know.
I got this off a quotepage at Michael Moore's site:
Mario Cuomo after watching Fahrenheit 9/11 3 times: "I was convinced that it should be viewed and reflected upon by as many Americans as possible... especially young people who, in a few years, might be part of our military forces. I'm committed personally to the proposition, as more than just a lawyer, that everybody should see this film." (Chicago Sun-Times, 6/17)
But this isn't about praising the movie. This is about a convention speech that has been called "electrifying" - Mario Cuomo's keynote speech to the 1984 Democratic convention:
It's an old story. It's as old as our history. The difference between Democrats and Republicans has always been measured in courage and confidence. The Republicans believe that the wagon train will not make it to the frontier unless some of the old, some of the young, some of the weak are left behind by the side of the trail. The strong, the strong they tell us will inherit the land.
We Democrats believe in something else. We democrats believe that we can make it all the way with the whole family intact. And, we have more than once. Ever since Franklin Roosevelt lifted himself from his wheelchair to lift this nation from its knees -- wagon train after wagon train -- to new frontiers of education, housing, peace; the whole family aboard, constantly reaching out to extend and enlarge that family; lifting them up into the wagon on the way; blacks and Hispanics, and people of every ethnic group, and native Americans -- all those struggling to build their families and claim some small share of America.
For nearly 50 years we carried them all to new levels of comfort, and security, and dignity, even affluence. And remember this, some of us in this room today are here only because this nation had that kind of confidence. And it would be wrong to forget that.
So, here we are at this convention to remind ourselves where we come from and to claim the future for ourselves and for our children. Today our great Democratic Party, which has saved this nation from depression, from fascism, from racism, from corruption, is called upon to do it again -- this time to save the nation from confusion and division, from the threat of eventual fiscal disaster, and most of all from the fear of a nuclear holocaust. [...] We Democrats must unite so that the entire nation can unite because surely the Republicans won't bring this country together. Their policies divide the nation - into the lucky and the left-out, into the royalty and the rabble. The Republicans are willing to treat that division as victory. They would cut this nation in half, into those temporarily better off and those worse off than before, and they would call that division recovery.
The convention blogging I've seen so far has been mostly boring travel stuff. As someone who has read numerous sf convention reports, and written a few, I really hope this is gonna be better than that. Meanwhile:
Read an excerpt from Joe Trippi's The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Being a political junkie at heart, by the late 1990s I began daydreaming about a campaign that would be run the way these revolutionary companies were being run - not from the top down, with a $200 million TV ad budget and a detached board of directors, but from below: A campaign run by the people. (Thanks to Randolph Fritz.)
Some liberals didn't like F9/11. I think this kind of attitude is a waste of time, even though I, too, am a snob. I'm looking at a media landscape in which the entire mainstream spent a few vital years deleting any news or analysis that might have been unflattering to Bush and his policies, and I think it's a good thing that Moore managed to get people to look at some of that stuff that was edited out. Yes, some of his conclusions are not the same as mine, but the story needed to be presented and the questions needed to be asked. Moore asked them. The rest of the media mostly didn't. You get no prizes from me for hammering the guy who finally did.
Wrong-wing Fox nut Bill O'Reilly decided to start a boycott of the Evil French, and declared himself effective on the basis of data from something called The Paris Business Review. In fact, there is - or was, at least - no Paris Business Review, so someone had to invent it.
Bushes Against Bush, via Scaramouche. And I think I've linked an item about Books for Soldiers before, but I was pleased to see that an ISP has been sending subscribers an announcement about it, which is much more interesting than anything my ISPs ever send me. 14:21 BST
If I weren't already convinced that the present U.S. government would be less perfidious if Al Capone, Sonny Barger and Meyer Lansky were in charge of the three branches, I'd be a bit more outraged, shocked, etc. by the evidence laid out by Michael Meacher. Not only is the evidence for high-level Pakistani involvement in the events of 9/11 categorically more convincing than the thin gruel supplied by con-men and phantoms that's been flogged by the cabal as evidence for Iraqi involvement, but the cabal is actively attempting to and thus far succeeding in suppressing the former.
And from an earlier post, here's a quote from an article that talks about Europe but might just as well explain why American corporatists can't belong to a party of real family values:
In a world where the distribution of wealth is steadily moving upward, workers who think advances in science, technology and commerce should allow them to have somewhat easier and more satisfying lives are told instead that it means less break time to chat with their mates and less leisure time with their families.
It's interesting, isn't it? I mean, for years everyone talked about the leisure that scientific advances would buy for workers, and yet now it is taken for granted that the only benefits should go to the corporations and their owners and executives, and none of it should go to the rest of us. How did that happen? 12:28 BST
And, via Buzzflash, Are You the Media? The article was written in anticipation of the FCC's Monterey hearing on the 21st, but it's a good piece about what has happened to radio. 02:15 BST
Sunday, 25 July 2004
I bet you can guess who won the World Stupidty Award
Our favorite Suburban Guerilla has a good rant on the discovery that the tendrils of the monster have reached, well, everywhere:
I simply can't stress this enough: If you think the FDA is trying to protect you, you're wrong. This administration exists only to further the power of corporations.
In the Pennsylvania ruling, issued Tuesday, the appeals court threw out a lawsuit filed by Barbara E. Horn, who said her husband had died because of defects in the design and manufacture of his heart pump. The Bush administration argued that federal law barred such claims because the device had been produced according to federal specifications. In its briefs, the administration conceded that "the views stated here differ from the views that the government advanced in 1997," in the United States Supreme Court.
At that time, the government said that F.D.A. approval of a medical device set the minimum standard, and that states could provide "additional protection to consumers." Now the Bush administration argues that the agency's approval of a device "sets a ceiling as well as a floor."
The administration said its position, holding that individual consumers have no right to sue, actually benefited consumers.
They masquerade as libertarians, but that's all just rhetoric to fool the unwary. What it's really about is making sure that those in power never have to conform to the letter of their own contracts, never have to keep their promises, never have to answer to charges of fraud. Susan's article concludes like this:
I talked to someone in federal enforcement the other day. He told me Washington now routinely intervenes in any cases involving corporate interests; even his email is monitored.
It's depressing. We are, without a doubt, living under a fascist regime that seized power through a coup, yet no one seems to notice.
I was talking to a friend yesterday about this. "It's as if people won't believe it unless they call a press conference and announce, 'We are a fascist regime who took over through a coup,'" I said. "And until they make that announcement, no one will."
They're scary people, no matter what the subject is.
For example, the Butler Report, which right-wingers keep quoting to try to smear Joe Wilson, but leave out this little item:
American investigators have dismissed the suggestion that Iraq was seeking uranium from the west African state of Niger in a quest for nuclear weapons, because it was based on forged documents. It was also inherently implausible, they added, since Iraq had 550 tons of "yellowcake" - uranium which has undergone the first stage of processing. But the Butler committee accepted the Government's contention that it had separate intelligence, which has never been disclosed, to support the claim.
I've been wondering about this for a while - we know Saddam had the stuff, and the evidence that he tried to have some purchased in Niger is pretty thin to begin with. Why do we never hear this little detail?
Christopher Brauchli in The Boulder Daily Camera on astonishingly bad judicial appointments, Two more feathers in Bush's cap: It was just an unlucky selection. President Bush had more than 1 million lawyers from whom to choose and thanks to bad staff work he made a couple of really unfortunate choices. He probably doesn't even realize it, but those with concerns about the quality of people who are appointed to the federal bench cannot help but notice. Alas, poor George, he just can't get a break. (Via The Smirking Chimp.)
In A Parallel Universe, a new Harry & Louise political ad is discussed on The Colmes & Hannity Show; Bill Frist's spin can't fly, and Hannity can hardly get a word in edgewise: COLMES: Come on, Senator. You can stop that inside the beltway talk here on Colmes & Hannity. The fact of the matter is that Bush stopped the best chance to ensure tax relief for real Americans. Imagine. (via)
You can hardly turn around without hitting another third rail in American politics these days. The Left Coaster has a favorite: Israel.
Kevin Drum issues a challenge: Given the theory of supply and demand and the steep rise in CEO salaries compared to everyone else's, explain why the supply of CEOs has decreased, why the demand for CEOs has increased, and that curve is steeper than for "any other commodity on the planet." 12:36 BST
In Mother Jones, Gail Sheehy asks, Who's in Charge Here?What the 9-11 Commission Report does not explain is why, on the morning of September 11, 2001, President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and other top officials were essentially missing in action. (Via The Smirking Chimp.)
Career profile of the incompetent Condi Rice, Blindsided or blind? by John Prados: Highly qualified but strangely inattentive, Condoleezza Rice has missed the signs of the Soviet collapse, the importance of terrorism before 9/11, and more.
Jeralyn at TalkLeft recommends the ACLU's analysis of the 9/11 report, which points out that some of the new security recommendations are just more civil liberties violations that, truly, we don't need.
I love the way Arthur does this: Lost Philip K. Dick story found A typical paranoid excess of his later days, this tale imagines his singer/goddess/obsession being dragged from a Las Vegas stage for dedicating a song to someone who made a movie the gummint didn't like.
A remarkably short Slacker Friday post, in which Charles Pierce says:
So, it was the acronyms who did it.
CIA, FBI, NSC, but not the NSA, God knows. DOT. DoD. The acronyms did it. Fire all the acronyms.
I don't know at what point my head exploded. Maybe it was when Tom Kean was complimenting Bill O'Reilly on the latter's analytical abilities, or when Condi Rice was waxing all serious with Sean Hannity. Maybe it was earlier, when Lee Hamilton suggested that nobody was reading enough Tom Clancy. (After yesterday, and given the dive he took 20 years ago on Iran-Contra, Hamilton is now the Greg Louganis of the national security state.) I mean, Christ's sweet name, a failure of imagination? Not on the part of Gary Hart or Warren Rudman or Al Gore, or Coleen Rowley, or the people in Phoenix, or poor, dead John O'Neill. Their imaginations didn't fail. In fact, the single most preposterous part of yesterday's report was its tsk-tsking of how the recommendations of previous commissions were ignored. Who ignored them?
Nobody.
It was the acronyms.
Everybody's guilty so nobody is.
Read the rest of that letter, and read Stupid on how nobody's talking about Sudan. Actually, I'm not talking about Sudan, either. The reason I'm not talking about Sudan is that every time someone mentions Sudan I go, "Oh, God," and then I think about Afghanistan and Iraq and think how Bush and Wolfowitz and the gang have pretty much made The Most Powerful Nation in the World helpless to do anything anywhere because we are stuck in, y'know, this qWagmire and sucked our troops dry to the point where we are now re-drafting people in their 60s who have already been honorably discharged. We have no moral authority and we have no troops to send anywhere else and oh god oh god oh god. So I don't talk about it.
As you recall, campaign finance legislation puts caps on how much coverage campaigns can buy, but as I've said before, the networks are free to choose how they will cover the campaign themselves. How is that working out? The Kerry campaign's share of network news coverage has been on a steady slide since the Massachusetts senator all but clinched his party nomination after the March 2 "Super Tuesday" primaries. According to a survey of media election coverage during the first half of 2004, President George W. Bush's share of the nightly newscasts has risen steadily through the year, while Senator John Kerry's image and words faded from network screens. (That link is from an earlier post.)
Another link I found further down in the letters is from The Big Picture, which discusses more changes in radio as listeners leave in disgust and advertising revenue goes with them. 12:03 BST
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Pentagon on Friday released newly discovered payroll records from President Bush's 1972 service in the Alabama National Guard, though the records shed no new light on the future president's activities during that summer.
A Pentagon official said the earlier contention that the records were destroyed was an "inadvertent oversight."
Like records released earlier by the White House, these computerized payroll records show no indication Bush drilled with the Alabama unit during July, August and September of 1972. Pay records covering all of 1972, released previously, also indicated no guard service for Bush during those three months.
Buzzflash interviews Mark Crispin Miller about his new book: I wrote Cruel and Unusual to make the case that Bush & Co. is fundamentally un-American -- an order wholly alien to the spirit of our founding documents. Certainly the regime represents some dark old strains in U.S. history: nativism, white supremacism, theocratic tyranny. But as far as our mainstream political traditions are concerned, Bush & Co. have simply junked them. They've hijacked the U.S. ship of state, and have it on a suicidal course.
Krugman looks at Bush's insurance plan in Medical Class Warfare: First, it offers a tax credit for low- and middle-income families who don't have health coverage through employers. That credit helps them purchase health insurance. The credit would be $3,000 for a family of four with an income of $25,000; for an income of $40,000, it would fall to $1,714. Last year the average premium for families of four covered by employers was more than $9,000.
Bob Somerby speculates on the origins of what he suggests is a quote out of context: As we have noted, that "slam dunk" meeting is almost surely the most cited anecdote from Woodward's book. As typically presented, it shows an alert president challenging the quality of the intelligence, then being (falsely) reassured by a dopy CIA chief. But the story, while pleasing, makes little sense as presented (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 4/28/04). Main problem: Why was this meeting even being held? As Woodward shows, Bush and Cheney had been pushing WMD since August 2002; but the "slam dunk" meeting occurred four months later, on December 21, 2002. Why was Bush getting briefed at this late date? Woodward simply doesn't say. And he fails to say what happened next. If Bush expressed doubts on the WMD, what sort of follow-up occurred? This seems like an obvious question-and Woodward fails to address it.
Rewriting history by Eric Boehlert in Salon: Ever eager to prove it's fair and balanced, the Fox News Channel brags that it broke the Bush DUI story in 2000. Warning: You've entered the spin zone. Via The Hamster. 23:48 BST
Around the web
THE SYSTEM WAS BLINKING RED (PDF). Atrios is right about this: I know we're all supposed to believe that the report is easy on the Bush administration. But, you know, it really isn't. It doesn't come out and say "Bush and Condi really screwed the pooch." But, if you read this chapter, one really comes away thinking "Bush and Condi really screwed the pooch."
Michael Bérubé: But we all know why Ralph wouldn't run in the primary: the whole premise is that the system itself is broken, so there's no point even attempting to play within it. Well, as every savvy progressive and her brother has already pointed out, it's a shame the New Right didn't take that holy attitude toward the GOP, isn't it. Instead, they worked within it and took it over- like good radicals, working from the roots up. (Tom Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? contains a fine account of how the Kansas GOP of Bob Dole and Nancy Kassebaum became the Kansas GOP of Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts and creationism in just over a decade.)
The Daily Show learns that the Counter-Clinton Library won't tell you who Clinton really murdered. 18:55 BST
Things that were in my mail
(Aside from the people who sent me that link in the update to the post below, that is.)
Sandy Berger. What does it mean? Well, not much. What it really boils down to is that Berger forgot that he was no longer part of the administration and couldn't just stick things in his pocket, so he did what he probably used to do when he was legally entitled to, because that's how he always did it before. He destroyed no documents. He took some copies of documents that he was no longer allowed to walk out with. No big deal. Except that The Republican Noise Machine is saying this proves Clinton is to blame for 9/11 and that Berger was hiding the evidence. Well, no, he wasn't - he removed not a single original document. And it's Bush who failed to prevent 9/11.
Randolph Fritz tips me to a review of Fahrenheit 9/11 in Aljazeera. A lot of it is fairly lame and poorly-written (I don't even understand what that first bit about the title is supposed to mean), but it did make me think of this: One consistent theme in both Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 is the continual fear Americans are encouraged to feel - of each other, and of the world.
Ro Nagy was looking at the international ratings for F9/11 (here) and noticed that The Land of the Free actually restricts more people from seeing the film: Certification: Argentina:13 / Australia:M / Canada:14A (Ontario) / Canada:G (Quebec) / Ireland:15 / Netherlands:12 / Switzerland:12 (canton of Geneva) / Switzerland:12 (canton of Vaud) / UK:15 / USA:R 02:28 BST
Thursday, 22 July 2004
Bloody Washington Post
The WP used to have a link on their home page for the image of their paper front page, and I always found that useful because only by seeing that can you know what they actually chose to give the most prominence to. I can't find it now, but you know how blind I am. Did they stop doing that?
The reason I ask is that the current top headline on their website in extra-big type is:
Bush Receives 9/11 Findings
What an active guy! He received the findings, and that's the news! Blimey!
I dunno, maybe it's just that they think they need to record everything Bush does so he can't say later that he never saw it. But we already know he isn't going to read it.
Admittedly, the title of the article when you click on the link is something else - 9/11 Panel Calls for a National Intelligence Chief - but I still don't know what I would have seen on the paper that was on my doorstep when I got up this morning.
In any case, I'm not very happy with that headline, either. This is hardly the most vital finding of the report, and anyway (whether Kerry endorsed that "finding" or not), I'm not entirely sure why we need yet another intelligence chief when, after all, coordinating all the security is what Condoleeza Rice was supposed to be there for in the first place. (OK, I know that's not her real job for this administration, but it's what the National Security Advisor exists to do.)
The commission's final report, released after a 20-month investigation, recommends the creation of a national intelligence director and a national counterterrorism center. But while it faults institutional failures, it stops short of blaming Bush or former president Bill Clinton for failing to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.
I love that - should it even be a question whether Bill Clinton failed to prevent the September 11 attacks? No, of course not, because he did not fail to prevent them. He prevented the "Millennium attacks", which was his job, because he was president at the time. When the attacks failed to happen on his watch because he stopped them, it became Bush's job to make sure those same plans did not come to fruition on his watch - and he didn't do it. And he didn't do it because no one in his administration seemed to think it was their job.
The most important failure was one of imagination," the report says, according to news services. "We do not believe leaders understood the gravity of the threat."
Yes, that was quite a failure of imagination, after the Clinton administration had told them the threat was serious, and the administration's own intelligence people had told them the threat was dire and immediate. In the circumstances, how could they have imagined that there was a grave threat?
What they were supposed to have imagined was that they were supposed to do their job. Imagine that!
But The Washington Post, apparently, does not want you to think about that, either. That's why they waited until the middle of the article to get to this point:
The report is a broad indictment of the government's efforts to combat al Qaeda before the Sept. 11 attacks. The document identifies as many as 10 opportunities to potentially unravel the plot.
Hm, the article doesn't tell us who missed those opportunities, though. I wonder who that could have been.
And then we have to click for the next page of the online version to see this remarkable quote from the former governor:
"Had we had any inkling, whatsoever, that terrorists were about to attack our country, we would have moved heaven and Earth to protect America," Bush said. "And I'm confident President Clinton would have done the same thing. Any president would have."
"But instead," Bush did not continue, "we sat on our hands and did nothing, unlike President Clinton, who really did stop planned attacks for the turn of the century."
CBS has decided to shoot the moon. First they refused to air MoveOn.org's Superbowl ad. Then they ran the wingnut anti-Clinton ad during Clinton's 60 Minutes interview. Then they caved on the Reagan miniseries. And NOW, they've decided that they will not air Ron Reagan's primetime speech at the Democratic Convention. CBS, Censorship Broadcasting Service!
CBS News will not cover Ron Reagan's prime-time speech at the Democratic National Convention live and in its entirety because it won't have enough words.
Yeah, right.
[Update: Margaret Young was the first to send me that link, and then Steven desJardins, Dominic Thomas (of Epicycle), and of course the ever-helpful Owen Boswarva (of Also Not Found in Nature); it seems they've just moved it down to the bottom of the list where I didn't catch it. Steve says: The top two headlines on my copy of this morning's Washington Post are "Kerry Has Strong Advantage Among Latino Voters" and "War Funds Dwindling, GAO Warns". Also above the fold are "D.C. Gap In Wealth Growing" and "9/11 Commission Offers Critiques On Many Fronts". Having seen the image, I see the 9/11 Commission story is pretty close to the fold, though.] 16:38 BST
Religion
Matthew Yglesias and Ayelish McGarvey argue in The American Prospect about whether Kerry has a religion problem.
Fred Clark at Slacktivist explains why some people think the Bible allows them to ignore the rest of Leviticus while still clinging tenaciously to one single line - "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination." And why they're wrong.
Since I'm not usually hesitant to condemn Nicholas Kristof for his general refusal to recognize that the showy piety of the Christian right does not define Christianity, I suppose I should have acknowledged that he at least wrote an article admitting that the whole Left Behind sort of religion is just another sort of jihad. (via) 15:11 BST
Walter Cronkite reckons Edwards' experience has to be better than Cheney's, Rumsfeld's, etc. (I mean, he isn't the guy who made such a mess of Iraq.) (via)
LiberalOasis points out that on the Berger story, we're getting conspiracy theories that make Michael Moore seem utterly sober and restrained by comparison.
Republican mask slips; Democrats react: Democrats on Wednesday denounced a Republican lawmaker quoted in a newspaper as saying the GOP would fare poorly in this year's elections if it failed to "suppress the Detroit vote." (via)
There's been a little dust-up in the left-blogosphere over what amounts to the place of progressives in the Democratic Party. Jeanne weaves her tune through themes by Brad DeLong and Max Sawicky.
America's Vichy Left vs. Michael Moore: In fact, the main cause for the demise of the American Left is much more sinister than that. The American Left is responsible for destroying the American Left. I don't mean that metaphorically. I mean quite literally that anytime the Left starts to get somewhere, you can be sure that a vigilante mob of other Leftists will rise to the occasion to crush it, to make sure they stay as marginalized and ineffective as always. (via)
World Net Daily says this guy is "America's favorite humorist." Now you know.
I noticed last night's Blitzer poll and got a chuckle out of it, but Mark Evanier got the joke. He also used it as a jumping-off point for talking about paperless voting:
The only semi-logical argument I've ever heard against them is that, supposedly, receipts might make it easy for people to sell their vote, in that they could then prove to the person paying them that they'd voted as ordered. The problem with that argument is that absentee ballots make vote-selling even easier and no one is against them.
Nothing annoyed me more about the 2000 election than all the Bush partisans trying to pretend that the irregularities in that election were a minor detail and telling Democrats to "get over it." It was like some of them were afraid that any expressed concern about more accurate voting would further taint their boy's "victory." I have never been convinced that a different guy would have wound up in the White House if every voter who was qualified to vote and wanted to vote had done so and been tallied as per their intent. But I was sure disappointed that I never heard a prominent Republican say that they were uncomfortable with the way their guy got in.
As Mark knows, I disagree that a different guy wouldn't be in the White House if Katherine Harris hadn't thrown thousands of probable Gore voters off of the rolls, and if the people who did vote had all had their votes properly counted. And I think the Republicans know that, too, which is why prominent Republicans did not say they were uncomfortable with the way their guy got in. Prominent Republicans know that deception is the only way most of them can ever get in.
But I also think Mark dismisses worries about vote receipts too easily - vote-selling would not be a new thing. (I do vote by absentee ballot for obvious reasons - yes, I am still a US citizen - but I find remote voting very worrying. I can easily envision a time, especially with the way things are going, when your employer stands over you while you vote online or fill out your mail-in ballot.)
The real argument against receipts is that we wouldn't need to talk about receipts at all if we had real paper ballots. Why shouldn't we have them? Why should there be no actual ballots to count and recount?
Let's think for a minute about what receipts are about: The machine is counting your "real" vote, which is a substanceless electronic pulse that is completely opaque to the ordinary voter. Your receipt may or may not actually contain information about what that pulse says to the counting mechanism. Therefore, the only way your receipt is ever going to be of value is if there is an acknowledged counting error and the paper receipts must be counted. (It should go without saying that said receipts would have to remain on the premises after you vote, because calling people back for their receipts would be a big hassle, as well as making your vote vulnerable to third-party interference.)
The problem in Florida in 2000 was that the ballots were unclear and the machines weren't up to reading them. That problem would easily be solved by using a touch-screen to fill out your voting details and having the machine print out a standardized ballot that is easy for counting machines to read. The machine that prints your ballot could still be able to count votes, if you like, and that would make a nice comparison number for ballots that were counted by the separate machine that counts the ballots.
But it's like this: Your paper receipt is meaningless unless it is actually counted. Your piece of paper.
In my ideal world, we would have the voting machines and the counting machines both independently tally the votes, and we would still require that all ballots be counted by hand. It'd make it a lot harder to jimmy the vote. Accepting the idea of "receipts" just puts the opportunity for cheating where it still has no oversight. I'm, y'know, against that. 16:41 BST
On the blog
I know I'm going to typo or misspell your name so I look for the easy-to-find spot on your page (or even each individual post) where your name is spelled out in proper up-and-down casing and I can just copy it and be sure to get it right. So then I find you have your name nowhere on your page, or you have it only in all-caps, or only lower-cased, or you are Max Blumenthal. Never mind, it's still a great blog, with good reads on Bush's Cuba Distortion, and the plans of theocrats to pray outside both conventions, and a bunch of other stuff. At least Salon has his name spelled and cased properly for his article on The other regime change, which answers the musical question, Did the Bush administration allow a network of right-wing Republicans to foment a violent coup in Haiti?
Billmon tries to figure out why Ralph Nader has gone over to the enemy.
Josh Marshall says the Sandy Berger story hitting the news now is the result of "a malicious leak intended to distract attention from the release of the 9/11 commission report."
I was revolted by two things in Tony Blair's speech yesterday about making war on the '60s - the content and the weird, repeated slogan in the background ("Safe communities") in Bushian style. I agree with this: Mark Oaten, the Liberal Democrats' home affairs spokesman, said Mr Blair was wrong to target the thinking of the 1960s: "I would have thought the culture of the Eighties may have more to do with it."
At Daily Kos, a sudden opportunity in Congress has opened up with the surprise announcement that: Jim Greenwood, a moderate Republican in Pennsylvania's 8th Congressional district, just announced he will not seek reelection this year, instead removing his name from the ballot. The Democrat, Virginia "Ginny" Schrader, is an attorney who has just $7,000 in the bank as of June 30th. Greenwood's district voted for Gore in 2000 by a decent amount, and the GOP is now scrambling for a replacement. This is a chance to pick up a seat, so y'all get behind Ginny any way you can.
Wonkette: Arnold Schwarzenegger has said he won't apologize for calling California lawmakers "girlie men," even though some have criticized the remark as "sexist and homophobic." We're sort of with the Gov on this one. He shouldn't apologize because "girlie men" is sexist or homophobic, he should apologize because it's lame..
TBogg has the dirt, found at The Corner, of all places: Bill Timmons lied about Ronstadt:
Mr. Goldberg --
My wife & I were at the Linda Ronstadt performance in question, at the Aladdin in Las Vegas, and quite frankly, Aladdin President Bill Timmins' account of what happened is complete crap. There was mixed booing and cheering at Ronstadt's pro-Michael Moore comment, and that was about the extent of the "bedlam" that supposedly broke out. I saw no posters being torn down or cocktails being thrown in the air, and if people stomped out of the theatre unhappy, it was because 1) that was the last song Ronstadt performed; it was her encore; and 2) she mainly sang her standards repertoire, with the Nelson Riddle orchestrations, and a large part of the crowd wanted to hear more of her rock-'n'-roll stuff; she got the biggest round of applause for doing a lackadaisical run-through of her version of "Blue Bayou."
Frankly, my suspicion is that Timmins is way overdramatizing what happened, in order to justify giving Ronstadt the boot. It simply wasn't that big a deal.
Administration suddenly cares: Unfortunately, unless we see progress in some of these areas, if we see Iran stop supporting the terrorists who have tried to undermine the hopes and dreams of the Palestinians... I guess the administration has been really supportive of Palestinian hopes and dreams all this time. Coulda fooled me.
Moose & Squirrel found the text of Stephen King's acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation's award last year. It's actually worth reading, no matter what you think of King's books. (I think King is a better writer than most people give him credit for, but I don't like being scared.) 14:42 BST
There was a sighting of actual sunlight, so I went out for a long walk and I overdid it. I am so tired. I thought I would be recovered by now but I can barely type. Go read Bad Attitudes and Corrente. I'd tell you why but I'm just too tired. 20:25 BST
It's your world
"War remains the decisive human failure." A cloud over civilisation - J.K. Galbraith with a first-person account of the how the military-industrial complex works. And what it means: Mass slaughter has become the ultimate civilised achievement. (via)
I keep meaning to remind you: The bad news is that they did it, but the good news is that they got caught. But keep your eye on the ball - the last time I looked, the names that were illegally purged from the 2000 voting rolls still haven't been restored, and there were a lot more of them. (PS. I don't think they'll have much trouble attacking Elton John.)
Jobs: Even more startlingly, of the 509,000 in new total nonagricultural employment from February to June , 495,000 or an astonishing 97% of the cumulative increase were part-time jobs-- showing why the average work week has been dropping so dramatically.Rejoinder to Nader: So just as the Liberty Party candidate of 1844 tipped the election to a rightwing racist who would launch an imperial war, so too did Nader's candidacy in 2000 tip the election to Dubya and the war in Iraq.GOP Pisses Away Its Political Future. (All this assumes that the ballots are counted, of course.)
I gotta admit, I'm worried. (I'll tell ya right now, if Kerry's plane just happens to fall out of the sky, or if he ends up dead for any other reason, I don't think I'll be able to suspend judgment.) 01:52 BST
Sunday, 18 July 2004
Notes
Patrick found time to write a catch-up post, and also added a couple of things to the Sidelights bar, including this post from Better Angels debunking Rick "Man-on-Dog" Santorum's claim that Denmark's family life has suffered because it allows legal gay unions.
At Pharyngula: He explained that basically there is no problem, as evolution could have been the method employed, and added that only a fool would deny evolution given the evidence. Although he didn't state it exactly like this, his view seemed to be that truth (evolution) cannot contradict truth (Islam). So there is no conflict with Evolution and Islam. Simple as that. Naturally, this is a weblog that gets e-mail from creationists.
INDIA: An elite force of police officers with large moustaches is being assembled to tackle criminals. It is hoped they will turn the tables on thieves and others who use large moustaches to intimidate victims. 'These men will patrol sensitive pockets using psychological tactics against criminals and keeping them at bay,' said a police spokesman in the central state of Madhya Pradesh. The scheme will be launched in other areas and officers will be given an allowance to keep their moustaches in trim.
Why don't they just wear black capes and a bat on their chests? 17:03 BST
Tell everyone!
I love John Sayles. He's got a movie opening in September that I gotta see, too: Silver City. Read the blurb, watch the trailer, see what I mean. And mark it in your calendar - 17 September is when it opens, and if you wanna keep that flick alive, you gotta make sure it has a good opening weekend.
Oh, yeah, click here to see the ACLU dinner, where you can learn about why a series on knitting got someone fired from NPR, and John Sayles talks about Silver City, and Seymour Hersh talks about torture and criminality, and Greg Proops does some stand-up, too. Starts with my girl Nadine "Always Dressed for Dinner" Strossen, and it's all good. 13:19 BST
I was just watching this election/terrorism report from The Daily Show and the thought that kept going through my mind is that usually, terrorists kill Democrats. Just a reminder.
Maybe we can pick up some seats. Still, I don't trust anything that talks about Bush's 2000 coat-tails. Bush had no coat-tails in 2000 - he lost the election. 21:04 BST
Absolutely stupid
I was reading a comment at News Hounds when I saw a link posted for a rabid opposition site called Liberals Suck Bigtime. "This should be fun," I thought. Given the title, I really didn't expect to see this in the top post:
Traditional American values under massive attack
Increasing in severity and occurance traditional American values are under a relentless attack from the ultra liberal media, socialist countries ,conspiracy theorists, radical activists,land grabbing local governments..ect. ect. Will we be "America"ten years from now? It does'nt look too promising. What can we do? What are some other things that have done or are doing harm to our country?
For a site that has "suck" in its title and sports a presidential portrait with what appears to be a girl (not a woman) with her head between Bill Clinton's legs (are these the same people who think a president - like Bush or even Reagan's corpse - should "always" be shown the respect of the office?), a plaintive cry about the destruction of "traditional" values seems a bit off the track. (Not to mention the violation of the traditional value of at least an attempt to show willing on the punctuation front. Or even a spell-check. Is this another victim of home-schooling?)
More importantly, real American values really are under attack, but not by liberals - rather by Rolls Royce Republicans who think you should be so grateful to work for them that you daren't even ask for remuneration for your time and sweat. Robyn Blumner sees it, and discusses Kerry's choice of John Edwards as his running-mate in the context of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas:
'Today, under George W. Bush, there are two Americas, not one,' Edwards declared in campaign stops over the winter. 'One America that does the work, another America that reaps the reward. One America that pays taxes, another America that gets the tax breaks. One America that will do anything to leave its children a better life, another America that never has to do a thing because its children are already set for life.' [...] 'The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ, but they walk corporate,' Frank writes. 'Values may 'matter most' to voters, but they always take a back seat to the needs of money once the elections are won.
'Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital-gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation.'
The DLC has a lot to answer for in letting all this happen, of course, but it's certainly not economic liberalism that's to blame. Economic liberalism is, in fact, the substance of the American Dream, the very thing that the cheap-labor conservatives are trying to destroy (and not without some significant success).
Thomas Frank himself has provided an article (adapted from the book's conclusion) for TomDispatch, entitled Red-State America Against Itself (via) that illuminates this point a bit more fully:
This is due partially, I think, to the Democratic Party's more-or-less official response to its waning fortunes. The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the organization that produced such figures as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Terry McAuliffe, has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues. The larger interests that the DLC wants desperately to court are corporations, capable of generating campaign contributions far outweighing anything raised by organized labor. The way to collect the votes and -- more important -- the money of these coveted constituencies, "New Democrats" think, is to stand rock-solid on, say, the pro-choice position while making endless concessions on economic issues, on welfare, NAFTA, Social Security, labor law, privatization, deregulation, and the rest of it. Such Democrats explicitly rule out what they deride as "class warfare" and take great pains to emphasize their friendliness to business interests. Like the conservatives, they take economic issues off the table. As for the working-class voters who were until recently the party's very backbone, the DLC figures they will have nowhere else to go; Democrats will always be marginally better on economic issues than Republicans. Besides, what politician in this success-worshiping country really wants to be the voice of poor people? Where's the soft money in that?
This is, in drastic miniature, the criminally stupid strategy that has dominated Democratic thinking off and on ever since the "New Politics" days of the early seventies.
Bear in mind that liberals have never, ever dominated any part of Congress, regardless of which party had a majority. But in the 1960s it became clear that opposing racism was no longer a particularly liberal value - it was mainstream. And civil rights legislation was able to pass not just because some Democrats were behind it, but because a lot of Republicans were, too.
(Anyone who thinks the Democratic Party didn't have plenty of legislators who opposed the civil rights movement has a lot to learn about history. Most of those career racists were leaving the party as a result of the Democratic leadership's recognition that racism was not a winning issue, and became Republicans - Strom Thurmond being the most obvious example. But it should tell you just how far right both parties have moved that the most liberal voting record in the current Senate is held by Robert Byrd, whose early career, though he has since repudiated it (which is why he is still a Democrat), included his membership in the KKK. For most of his career, however, it was still safe to call Byrd a conservative, because that's what he was. He only seems liberal by comparison with his colleagues - on both sides of the aisle.)
Economic issues are the ones that make the real difference in a nation's values. A fair and prosperous nation isn't harmed by a few oddballs and different drummers whose private lifestyles are out of the mainstream. America always had plenty of material space for beatniks and queers (even if no one wanted to hear about it). And even when the largest generation in history hit its teenage years and managed to make a whole lot of noise with its boisterous, colorful, and frequently obnoxious demands, that didn't hurt America's prosperity or even make that drastic a change in the fundamental culture of America; we still believed in our nation's promise and expected true reverence for the Constitutional ideal.
But, despite what you may see on your TV screens, in real-life, corporate-suited America, there is suddenly much less room for eccentricity, for oddballs, for people who march to that different drum or who want to pioneer off to a new frontier. The economy of the mainstream is so tight that the marginal economy is drying up, and with it those spaces that our artists and thinkers - and kids who just hadn't found their niche yet - used to inhabit. More and more, things are about either big money or no money. American upward-mobility is becoming a thing of the past, and is actually more easily found in places like Germany and France. Think about that: France and Germany are the nations of The American Dream?
Look again at that quote from our "traditional" author, and see what he thinks is part of the "liberal" attack on traditional values:
the ultra liberal media, socialist countries ,conspiracy theorists, radical activists,land grabbing local governments..ect. ect.
And after you strip away the name-calling, what is the only actual issue in that list? Land-grabbing local governments.
Land-grabbing local governments? Who on earth does he think the land-grabbing is motivated by and done on behalf of? It's not gay activists and hippies, I promise you. None of this grabbed land is being used to set up abortion clinics.
And if this is the sort of thing you really object to, why on earth would you support someone who made his own personal fortune by scheming to condemn private property and confiscate it to build a baseball stadium at taxpayers' expense to line his own pockets? Remember, this is the only business venture at which George W. Bush did not fail, it's how he made his own money.
If this is what "conservatives" are mad about, it's certainly a fine example of Frank's thesis. They see a few high-profile "liberals" emerge from their (rented) limos and in their resentment they give their allegiance to people who own six expensive cars and will stiff them for the meagre wages they earned by the sweat of their brows (not to mention stealing their land). They don't even notice that the money they routinely pay into their own retirement accounts - yes, that's what Social Security really is - is the money that George Bush has stolen to pay for this insane war that has made us a whole lot less safe than we were on September 12th of 2001.
It's too bad people don't know the real secret of those limousines our liberal-minded media stars turn up to concerts and openings in: They are rented by the corporation. The stars usually assume - not unjustifiably - that all this glam is part of the promotional budget they are paying for (with more than 90% of the money they make for the company); they later find out that in fact the costs are being docked from their royalties (which was only about 7% of what they'd earned for the company to start with).
