Todd Purdum’s VF piece on Sarah Palin contains lovely little tidbits like this one:
By the time Election Day rolled around, the staff had been serially pummeled by unflattering press reports about the gaps in Palin’s knowledge, her stubborn resistance to direction, and the post-selection spending spree in which she ran up bills of $150,000 on clothes for herself and her family at high-end stores. The top McCain aides who had tried hard to work with Palin—Steve Schmidt, the chief strategist; Nicolle Wallace, the communications ace; and Tucker Eskew, her traveling counselor—were barely on speaking terms with her, and news organizations were reporting that anonymous McCain aides saw Palin as a “diva” and a “whack job.”
And this is even better:
More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of “narcissistic personality disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—“a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy”—and thought it fit her perfectly. When Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig’s condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God’s, and signed it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.”
And, happily, Purdum seems to have touched off yet another internal squabble inside the distressed and befuddled Republican Party. From Politico:
William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard and at times an informal adviser to Sen. John McCain, touched off the latest back-and-forth Tuesday morning with a post on his magazine’s blog criticizing the Todd Purdum-authored Palin story and pointing a finger at Steve Schmidt, McCain’s campaign manager.
Kristol cited a passage in Purdum’s piece in which “some top aides” were said to worry about the Alaska governor’s “mental state” and the prospect that the Alaska governor may be suffering from post-partum depression following the birth of her son Trig. “In fact, one aide who raised this possibility in the course of trashing Palin’s mental state to others in the McCain-Palin campaign was Steve Schmidt,” Kristol wrote.
Asked about the accusation, Schmidt fired back in an e-mail: “I’m sure John McCain would be president today if only Bill Kristol had been in charge of the campaign.”
“After all, his management of [former Vice President] Dan Quayle’s public image as his chief of staff is still something that takes your breath away,” Schmidt continued. “His attack on me is categorically false.”
Oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy. Are you as sick of this stuff as I am?
Conservatives are jumping up and down over a report by an EPA analyst expressing skepticism about climate change, which, they claim, was suppressed by agency brass because it didn’t conform to Obama administration orthodoxy on global warming.
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But it’s hard to blame EPA for not paying much attention to the study. And it’s more than a little ironic that DC Republicans have chosen its author as their new standard-bearer in the defense of pure science against politics. Because the author, EPA veteran Al Carlin, is an economist, not a climate scientist. EPA says no one at the agency solicited the report. And Carlin appears to have taken up the global warming topic largely as a hobby on his own time.
One of the really frustrating things about arguing with right-wing true believers is that they have a security blanket, and they cling to it. It’s the market. The magical market will fix everything. Capitalist fundamentalists are willing to ignore all manner of actual historical and economic evidence in order to assert that market forces are the best solution to every problem. This phenomenon is quite evident in the health care debate. Our system costs more, is less efficient, is more riddled with pointless bureaucracy, and covers far, far fewer people than the various systems employed by most other industrialized nations. Nevertheless, conservatives (American ones, anyway) cling to their security blanket. The market is always the answer - evidence be damned. Health care, their argument goes, is just another commodity, so the market will save the day. (In my view, a lap top computer is a commodity; access to health care should be a human right).
Paul Krugman’s recent post “Health care is not a bowl of cherries” is brief but makes an important point: the health care debate is bogus. There are many parties involved who are honestly trying to figure out how to improve the American health care system. Many on the right, however, are contributing nothing of value, and only making the process more difficult. Because they insist, with something that is quite close to religious zeal, that the market will always fix everything. Krugman responds, in particular, to people like Greg Mankiw and George Will. Here’s an excerpt from Will’s column, illustrating his childish attachment to market fundamentalism:
As market enthusiasts, conservatives should stop warning that the president’s reforms will result in health-care “rationing.” Every product, from a jelly doughnut to a jumbo jet, is rationed — by price or by politics. The conservative’s task is to explain why price is preferable. The answer is that prices produce a rational allocation of scarce resources.
Krugman’s response is spot-on (and I can identify with his palpable frustration):
Um, economists have known for 45 years — ever since Kenneth Arrow’s seminal paper — that the standard competitive market model just doesn’t work for health care: adverse selection and moral hazard are so central to the enterprise that nobody, nobody expects free-market principles to be enough. To act all wide-eyed and innocent about these problems at this late date is either remarkably ignorant or simply disingenuous.
I guess it doesn’t matter what economists know, or what evidence suggests. Conservatives will cling to their security blanket. It makes them feel good.
This time it comes from the tax-evading, prostitute-frequenting gasbag Dick Morris. Obama has already been accused of being Hitler, of hoping to institute Sharia law in America, of wanting to build concentration camps for children, of attempting to nationalize the whole American economy, and of generally being a terrorist’s best friend. Now, the revolting Morris tells us that Obama has effectively repealed the Declaration of Independence. I hesitated to post this video, as it is a particularly transparent and disgusting attempt to sell books. But it is also important to confront this sort of nonsense.
When it comes to health care, our right-wingers are just a lot more doctrinaire, less practical, and less humane than many right-wingers elsewhere. Case in point - in an attempt to show the superiority of America’s absurd and inefficient system, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) decided to diss Ontario. And he got an angry response from Conservative senator Hugh Segal of Kingston, Ontario.
In a blistering statement this week before the Canadian Senate, Mr. Segal took on the U.S. Republican Senate Leader who is leading the charge against government-funded health care in his country.
Senator Mitch McConnell from Kentucky made the mistake of suggesting that the residents of Mr. Segal’s hometown of Kingston, Ont., are provided with health care that is inferior to what is available in the United States.
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“According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average lifespan in Kentucky is 75.2 years and according to Statistics Canada, that number is 80.4 years in Ontario, 78.3 years in Kingston,” [Segal] told the Canadian Senate after discounting Mr. McConnell’s numbers.
“Furthermore, according to a Fraser Institute study, in 2006, the U.S. spent $6,714 per capita versus $3,678 in Canada.”
Mr. Segal said in a telephone interview yesterday that the statistics indicate that Canadians are actually doing a better job at health care than their southern neighbours.
Mr. Segal is a Conservative, both with a small c and a capital one. He is not a “socialist.” But unlike conservatives in the United States, Canadian cons seem willing to confront access to health care as a serious issue, rather than an opportunity to express their mindless loyalty to the concept of private insurance and their reactionary hatred of anything that resembles single-payer health coverage. And, as Matthew Yglesias points out, the Conservative Party of Canada, in its statement of founding principles, includes the concept that “all Canadians should have reasonable access to quality health care regardless of their ability to pay.”
In Mark Sanford’s news conference this hour, he has admitted to an extramarital affair, apparently with a woman from Argentina.
Gotta love those revoltingly preachy conservatives, with their family values and such.
Anyway, that leaves us without a clear winner in the Sanford Pool. But many thanks to all of you who participated.
I guess we were all thinking too hard (so to speak).
And by the way - prepare yourself for nauseating amounts of attempts at humorous headlines, all of which will be variations on a “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” theme.
There have been a number of things about the Obama administration that have been somewhat disappointing thus far. But stories like this one show that there is reason to believe that Obama’s victory in November is resulting in some real, significant changes. In particular, it is important that we now have a president who seems interested in diplomacy as a path to progress in foreign relations. Unlike those of his predecessor, Obama’s first instincts aren’t to engage in sabre-rattling and pre-emtive war. And it is refreshing to have a president who doesn’t think that diplomacy and a desire for peace are signs of weakness. From TPM:
President Barack Obama has decided to return a U.S. ambassador to Syria after a four-year hiatus as talks between the two nations intensify, U.S. media reported Tuesday.
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By returning a senior U.S. envoy to Damascus, Obama is seeking to carve out a far larger role for the United States in the region as he works to rehabilitate U.S. relations with the Islamic world and the Arab Middle East, the newspaper said.
“It’s in our interests to have an ambassador in Syria,” a senior administration official told CNN.
It is clear by now that the Sanford story doesn’t add up. [See update below - Argentina? WTF?] If he was hiking, why didn’t he tell his wife? If he was working on a writing project, as his wife maintains, then why did his staff say he was hiking? Why didn’t he tell the lieutenant governor, his security detail, or other government officials that he was going to be away for a while, and that he would be out of touch? And what’s with the Atlanta airport thing?
The time has come, my gentle friends and readers, for wild speculation. So place your bets - let us know in the comments section which of the following is the most likely scenario. And feel free to add a write-in if I didn’t mention your favorite theory.
What is Sanford covering up?
1. An extramarital affair that produced a child
2. An embarrassing or otherwise inconvenient medical procedure
3. A visit to a mental institution
4. Something gay
5. Some sort of illegal business deal
6. Secretly giving testimony about something
7. A serious bender
8. Drug rehab
9. A visit to his secret, second family
10. WILD CARD: Conversion to Islam
UPDATE: He was apparently hiking the section of the trail just to the south of the Smokey Mountains. Actually, pretty far south.
This is a strange story. South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who has been quite visible in the national media in the past year or so, and was often mentioned as a possible candidate for President or V.P., appears to be missing and out of touch. His wife says she doesn’t know where he is, but that she’s not worried. State law enforcement and the governor’s office say they haven’t been able to reach him since Thursday. And at least one state legislator wants to know who is in charge of the state if no one knows the whereabouts of the governor.
Doughy-looking strawberry enthusiast and Missouri State Representative Cynthia Davis is apparently sick and tired of all of those poor, hungry kids in her state who are receiving - you guessed it - food. Food. Food for the hungry. Cynthia Davis is against food for the hungry.
(Here’s a shocker - she’s a Republican).
There are 100,000 more unemployed people in Missouri now than there were two years ago, and twenty per cent of children in the state live with hunger. Representative Davis, however, questions whether food assistance programs are necessary, since “hunger can be a positive motivator” and “if you work at McDonald’s, they will feed you for free during your break.”
Cynthia Davis, you preposterous buffoon, I HATE WHAT YOU JUST SAID.
Conservatives love to denigrate any alternative to our ineffective and ineficient health care coverage system. “We have the best health care system in the world,” they like to say. It has become a ubiquitous cry. Well, millions of Americans without coverage aren’t wild about our system, nor are millions more who pay outrageous premiums for lousy coverage, all to support a bloated insurance infrastructure. And, by the way, the World Health Organization isn’t so sure that USA is #1, either. In fact, their research says we’re number 37. Here’s the top 40, as of 2000:
1 France
2 Italy
3 San Marino
4 Andorra
5 Malta
6 Singapore
7 Spain
8 Oman
9 Austria
10 Japan
11 Norway
12 Portugal
13 Monaco
14 Greece
15 Iceland
16 Luxembourg
17 Netherlands
18 United Kingdom
19 Ireland
20 Switzerland
21 Belgium
22 Colombia
23 Sweden
24 Cyprus
25 Germany
26 Saudi Arabia
27 United Arab Emirates
28 Israel
29 Morocco
30 Canada
31 Finland
32 Australia
33 Chile
34 Denmark
35 Dominica
36 Costa Rica
37 United States of America 38 Slovenia
39 Cuba
40 Brunei
Matthew Yglesias points out that there is a wide array of healthcare systems out there, and that many of them work better than ours:
[Systems that work better than the U.S. system include] systems with Beveridge-style models (like the UK), systems with a single-payer insurance model (like Canada), and Bismark-style regulated-competition models (like Switzerland and the Netherlands)—all kinds of things work better than what we do. Another things liberals point out is that the Veterans’ Health Administration, which is an island of Beveridgism amidst America’s capitalist health fiasco, performs much better than the rest of the system.
It seems he’s at it once again (remember this time? And this one?) Pat Buchanan - who regularly appears in the big commerical media and is generally accepted as a mainstream (if idiosyncratic) pundit - appears to think that Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination is worse than segregation, slavery, etc. In other words, he likes the old-school racism better than affirmative action. Check it out:
Though the Obama media have been ballyhooing her brilliance — No. 1 in high school, No. 1 at Princeton, editor of Yale Law Review — her academic career appears to have been a fraud from beginning to end, a testament to Ivy League corruption.
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…Sotomayor got into Princeton, got her No. 1 ranking, was whisked into Yale Law School and made editor of the Yale Law Review — all because she was a Hispanic woman. And those two Ivy League institutions cheated more deserving students of what they had worked a lifetime to achieve, for reasons of race, gender or ethnicity.
This is bigotry pure and simple. To salve their consciences for past societal sins, the Ivy League is deep into discrimination again, this time with white males as victims rather than as beneficiaries.
One prefers the old bigotry. At least it was honest, and not, as Abraham Lincoln observed, adulterated “with the base alloy of hypocrisy” [bold added].
Lots of people have problems with affirmative action. I know. But this is beyond insane. The “old bigotry,” it seems to me, involved slavery, the slave trade and middle passage, segregation, beatings, lynchings, cross-burnings, and a host of other brutalities. The “bigotry” that Buchanan really hates, however, is that which helps people from traditionally oppressed groups get opportunities to go to college and such.
The Bush administration was marked by secrecy and a lack of respect for core principles of democratic governance. And so far, the Obama administration is on rather the same page:
The CIA argued yesterday that Bush-era documents detailing the videotaped interrogations of detainees should not be released, citing national security concerns, reports the Washington Post
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CIA director Leon Panetta argued in a statement that releasing the material “could be expected to result in exceptionally grave damage to the national security by informing our enemies of what we knew about them, and when, and in some instances, how we obtained the intelligence we possessed.”
Panetta wrote that the “disclosure of explicit details of specific interrogations” would give al-Qaeda “propaganda it could use to recruit and raise funds.” He called it “ready-made ammunition.”
An ACLU lawyer told the Post that Panetta is in effect arguing: “The greater the abuse, the more important it is that it should remain secret.”
Here’s the syrupy, misleading, childish vision of the Reagan legacy that right wingers love so dearly, expressed through the famous “morning in America” ads:
Here’s more evidence, from Paul Krugman this time, of just how far-reaching the negative effects of Reagan’s deregulating, mindlessly flag-waving, race-baiting, tree-hating, union-busting presidency have been. The emphasis here is on the deregulating part:
“This bill is the most important legislation for financial institutions in the last 50 years. It provides a long-term solution for troubled thrift institutions. … All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.” So declared Ronald Reagan in 1982, as he signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act.
He was, as it happened, wrong about solving the problems of the thrifts. On the contrary, the bill turned the modest-sized troubles of savings-and-loan institutions into an utter catastrophe. But he was right about the legislation’s significance. And as for that jackpot — well, it finally came more than 25 years later, in the form of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
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Attacks on Reaganomics usually focus on rising inequality and fiscal irresponsibility. Indeed, Reagan ushered in an era in which a small minority grew vastly rich, while working families saw only meager gains. He also broke with longstanding rules of fiscal prudence.
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The increase in public debt was, however, dwarfed by the rise in private debt, made possible by financial deregulation. The change in America’s financial rules was Reagan’s biggest legacy. And it’s the gift that keeps on taking.
If only someone had tried to warn us about this guy. Oh - right.
Ali Soufan, an FBI agent who participated in anti-terrorism activities and interrogations, is testifying today before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee. He claims that high-level intelligence was gained through legal techniques, not by the kinds of torture advocated by our former VP, the Dick of Darkness. In particular, Soufan says the high-priority interrogation of Abu Zubaydah disproves the repugnant case that the Dick of Darkness is currently trying to make:
Soufan said that when he used [legal Army Field Manual interrogation methods] on Zubaydah, they produced actionable intelligence in less than an hour.
As for torture, said Soufan: “This amateurish technique is harmful to our long-term interests. It plays into the enemies playbook” [bold added].
Matthew Yglesias offers an interesting post today (with a link to Michael Tomaskey) about the nature of partisan politics and sexual propriety. You wouldn’t think that sexual affairs would be judged by the party affiliation of their participants, would you? But you’d be wrong.
It seems that cheating on your cancer-stricken wife has career-ending implications if you’re a Democrat (John Edwards), but not if you’re a Republican (Newt Gingrich). Getting busted for enjoying the services of a hooker? If you’re a Republican (David Vitter), you keep your job; if you’re Democrat (Eliot Spitzer), you’re expected to resign.
Fascinating. It is especially curious since, as Yglesias points out, “only one of the two parties…puts a very high premium on the idea that state regulation of individual sexual behavior should be the main role of government.” And that same party is the one that most loudly trumpets the importance of protecting “the sanctity of marriage,” too. Fascinating.
But there’s more to this than just sex, it seems to me. For instance, if you opposed the Vietnam War, and took steps to prevent yourself from going, and you’re a Democrat, you’re loudly and repeatedly labeled a draft dodger (Bill Clinton). But if you’re a Republican, and you were in favor of the Vietnam War, and took steps to prevent yourself from going (Bush, Cheney, et al), you’re fine.
That’s totally backwards, isn’t it?
If you were opposed to the war, and you made sure you didn’t go, (whatever one thinks of that position), at least it is morally defensible and consistent. You didn’t want to fight in an unjust war, and you didn’t want others to have to, either. If you were in favor of the war, and you made sure you didn’t go, it seems to me that you’re a coward and a hypocrite. You thought the war was great, but there was no way you were going to fight it - you’d let others, especially those who didn’t have connections, fight it for you. But I suppose it isn’t exactly news that the likes of Dick Cheney are cowardly and hypocritical.
So if you’re a Democrat, and you have an affair, or you refuse to fight in combat, watch out. If you’re a Republican - well, it’s complicated.
It has become apparent that lawlessness and secrecy were the order of the day during the GWB administration. But this story, via Glen Greenwald, does not reflect well on the Obama DOJ, either. The story revolves around Binyam Mohamed, who was tortured and held in Guantanamo for six years, and America’s attempt to keep evidence from coming to light in Britain. Greenwald:
In February, Obama’s DOJ demanded dismissal of Mohamed’s lawsuit against the company which helped “render” him to be tortured on the ground that national security would be harmed if the lawsuit continued. Then, after a British High Court ruled that there was credible evidence that Mohamed was subjected to brutal torture and was entitled to obtain evidence in the possession of the British government which detailed the CIA’s treatment of Mohamed, and after a formal police inquiry began into allegations that British agents collaborated in his torture, the British government cited threats from the U.S. government that it would no longer engage in intelligence-sharing with Britain — i.e., it would no longer pass on information about terrorist threats aimed at British citizens — if the British court disclosed the facts of Mohamed’s torture.
As a result of the American threats, the British High Court ruled that it would keep crucial evidence of Mohamed’s torture under wraps. And, according to Greenwald, the new administration appears to be helping to cover up the crimes of the old one:
In the aftermath of that ruling, there was some dispute about whether the Obama administration had really issued this threat to Britain or whether it was merely a residual threat from the Bush administration. But in the wake of a recent motion by Mohamed’s lawyer to the British court for re-consideration of its ruling, in response to which the British government submitted the written threats from the Obama administration, there can now be no doubt not only that Obama made these threats to Britain, but did so in a remarkably extreme and heavy-handed manner.
The wild paranoid fantasies of the right continue. Republican Representative Pete Sessions of Texas apparently thinks Barack Obama is a really, really evil guy. Obama, Sessions says, hopes to wreak havoc on our country in order to carry out his power-hungry agenda.
At the beginning of April, a Fox News poll asked respondents whether they believed that President Obama “wants the financial crisis to continue so government can take over more businesses and grow the federal government.” Only 23 percent said that they thought Obama wanted it to continue, but that minority view was recently endorsed by a top-ranking Republican official. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), the chairman of the NRCC, told the New York Times that he believes President Obama aims to “‘diminish employment and diminish stock prices‘ as part of a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy to consolidate power.”
Sessions further argues that Obama’s platform is “intended to inflict damage and hardship on the free enterprise system, if not to kill it.”
Here is another Bachmann treat for all of you who, like me, can’t quite get enough of the lunatic representative from Minnesota. Governor Tim Pawlenty is featured in this video, too, but he doesn’t provide quite the entertainment that Michele does. My favorite part of this piece is most definitely Bachmann’s Nazi salute about 35 seconds into the video (right after she uses the word “evil”). She also says that the government is “impovering [sic], enslaving, and fitting the next generation in shackles and chains,” which is good stuff, but you can’t beat a good Nazi salute.
From former W speechwriter Jay Nordlinger at NRO comes one of the strangest and most pathetic-sounding statements of partisanship and power-worship I can ever remember reading:
In my experience — and I’m just generalizing here — the better the person, the more positive he is about George W. Bush. Certainly the less snarky and narrow. Most of the people I admire most, admire the 43rd president.
I am proud to be one of the worst people Nordlinger has never met.
And I find it preposterous that anyone - except maybe W’s mother - would suggest that one’s character is linked to one’s appreciation for our 43rd president. In many ways, Bush vividly represents what is worst about America. Coddled by privilege, he was handed everything he ever got in life. He spent much of his life underachieving and wasting the privileges he had been handed. A self-professed patriot, he used his connections to hide when duty called during Vietnam, allowing others to fight a war that he supported. And eventually, because of his name, and because of the many advantages that he didn’t earn, he rose to the highest office in America. Once in office, he enacted policies that would help protect the privileges of the few and reward his friends in coprorate America, in both cases at the expense of the health of the nation. He also started a war under false pretenses, ordered the United States to engage in torture, held prisoners (many of whom insiders now say were innocent) indefinitely without charge, ordered illegal wiretapping, governed in an excessively partisan way, and alienated our allies.
There’s more. But I think I’ve made my point. There are many things I admire about America. But Bush represents those things I like least about my country - the arrogance and entitlement of privilege, phony and hypocritcal patriotism, greed, militarism, and a willingness to sacrifice freedom and decency in the name of “security.”
Minnesota Representative and national embarrassment Michele Bachmann is at it again. This time, she’s pointing out that there seems to be an eerie correlation between swine flu outbreaks and - you guessed it - Democrats!
The fact that she was wrong, and the previous outbreak she referred to actually started during Ford’s term, not Carter’s, is sort of beside the point, isn’t it?
There was an episode of the Simpsons some years back, which contained a scene intended to lampoon Fox News. As the Fox reporter spoke, one of the stories in the news crawl at the bottom of the screen read “Do Democrats Cause Cancer?” At the time, I thought that was really funny.
From the “It Turns out that People are Even Dumber than We Thought” Department here at IHWYJS comes an intriguing new story: apparently conservatives don’t know that Stephen Colbert is joking. A study at the Ohio State University suggests that conservative viewers are more likely to assume that Colbert “only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said” while liberals recognize Colbert’s satire and do not assume that he holds the political opinions he offers on his show.
I am going to resist the temptation to write all of the things that are now swirling around in my head. But I urge you to draw as many conclusions as you like from the Ohio State study. Go nuts.
(UPDATE: OK - I realize now that conservatives who participated in this study must have been engaging in their own form of performance art, right? They were “in character” when they responded to the study, weren’t they? So it was all just another level of satire - the whole thing is a meta-joke, right? Because people can’t be that stupid, can they? I mean it has to be a gag - like that whole elaborate joke about how Sarah Palin was going to be the V.P. nominee for the Republicans. That was hilarious, and for a little while, I actually thought it was real. In retrospect, I now realize it was a little far-fetched, but they had me for a minute there. Ooops. Looks like those funny right-wingers got us again).
Despite Arlen Specter’s defection, it is not quite the time to declare the death of the Republican party (remember Jim Jeffords?) But Paul Krugman sums up my feelings on the matter pretty well:
What strikes me, however, is the extent to which this is a self-inflicted wound. If [Republican Senate challenger] Pat Toomey of the Club for Growth weren’t so diligent about enforcing supply-side purity; if Republicans hadn’t made Rush Limbaugh the effective head of the party; Specter might still be GOP, and the Obama agenda much more limited.
Instead, though, we have a party that seems to be in a death spiral: the smaller it gets, the more it’s dominated by the hard right, which makes it even smaller. In the long run, this is not good for American democracy– we really do need two major parties in competition. But I’ll settle for getting that back after we get universal health care and cap-and-trade [bold added].
Brian Kilmeade of Fox News says that John McCain “should not be allowed to talk on torture” because “he was tortured.” This means, in Kilmeade’s logic, that his views are “skewed,” and Kilmeade rhetorically asks “whaddya think - he’s going to be pro-torture after he’s been through it?”
I suppose that by Kilmeade’s logic, unemployed workers should not talk about the economy, rape victims should not express an opinion about sexual assault, and for god’s sake Holocaust victims should stop giving us their damn thoughts on the Nazis! Their views are skewed!
Five members of Congress were arrested in Washington today for protesting genocide and crimes against humanity in Darfur. From the Boston Globe:
After a brief series of speeches in front of the Sudanese embassy, [the five] members of Congress stood quietly and refused to move to the other side of yellow police tape — a deliberate act they knew would get them arrested. After giving the small group of demonstrators three chances to move, police approached the lawmakers and activists and bound their wrists loosely behind their backs with plastic restraints.
The group included James McGovern of Massachusetts, John Lewis of Georgia, Donna Edwards of Maryland, Lynn Woolsey of California, and Keith Ellison of Minnesota.
“I don’t want to be here in 2012, calling on the Sudanese government to stop the killing,” McGovern said. “We need to care. We need to act. Every life is of equal value.”
You’d think that there would be no way to find a fill-in host for Rush Limbaugh who would say things as offensive or ridiculous as Rush, right? Wouldn’t you? Well, you’d be wrong!
Mark Davis, filling in for the King of All Media Drug Addicts recently discussed the prevalence of white people at the asinine “tea parties.” He then posed the question “why aren’t black people more attracted by liberty?”
Long-time Republican Pennsylvania Senator, magic-bullet theory guy, and Howdy Doody lookalike Arlen Specter may be in electoral trouble. It seems right-wing challenger Pat Toomey is ahead of Specter by 21 points in the latest Rasmussen primary poll.
This could be good news for the Democrats. Specter, as a relatively moderate Republican, has had crossover appeal in the somewhat divided but nonetheless blue-ish Keystone State. (In Presidential elections, for example, PA voted for Clinton twice, Gore, Kerry, and Obama, and has a Democratic governor and junior senator). The arch-conservative Toomey, on the other hand, seems poised to do well in Pennsylvania’s closed Republican primary, but should have much less appeal with independents and Democrats in a general statewide election.
In his piece in the National Review titled “The Case for the ‘Torture Memos’,” Lowry tries to argue that the torture memos are something of which our nation can be proud. I am not kidding.
The debate over the just-released Justice Department memorandums on interrogation techniques ended as soon as they were dubbed the “torture memos.” Forevermore, they will be remembered as the legal lowlights of a “dark and painful chapter in our history,” as Pres. Barack Obama put it.
Rightly considered, the memos should be a source of pride. They represent a nation of laws struggling to defend itself against a savage, lawless enemy while adhering to its legal commitments and norms. Most societies throughout human history wouldn’t have bothered [bold added].
With all due respect, Rich, the “while adhering to its legal commitments and norms” part is just plain wrong. The Bush administration was doing the opposite - the administration was trying to create legal language that would allow the administration not to adhere to legal commitments and norms. And this was a pattern. In the name of the war on terror, the administration rejected (even mocked) the Geneva Conventions, pretended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act didn’t exist, violated the fourth amendment, and threw habeas corpus out the window. Adhering to the law is not the same thing as creating language that allows you not to adhere to the law. Its the opposite.
The release of the torture memos is not an occasion to pat ourselves on the back, Rich. Rather, it’s the opposite.
Over at The American Prospect, Paul Waldman surveys the landscape of paranoid rhetoric coming from the right as of late. Since Obama’s inauguration, we have been treated to quite a mixed bag of insanity, including:
-Obama is a communist
-Obama is a fascist
-Obama is planning to build concentration camps
-Obama wants to send our children to re-education camps
-Obama is so bad that Texas might just secede from the union
-Obama is planning to take your guns away (an old favorite!)
-Obama is making plans for the one-world currency
-Obama is planning to declare martial law
And so forth. That such things might emanate from the tin-foil-hat set is understandable; there are always fringe elements (across the political spectrum) who embrace wild conspiracy theories and engage in paranoid rants. But the lunacy and fear mongering that has bubbled up in recent weeks and months has come, for example, from members of congress, a governor, and well-known figures at major media outlets. Disturbing.
Noted TV jackass and supporter of discredited economic theories Larry Kudlow recently took objection to what he saw as a “Boyz N the Hood handshake” between President Obama and Hugo Chavez:
Click here for TPM’s links to the four torture memos released by the Justice Department. The first of the Office of Legal Counsel memos is from 2002, the others from 2005.
One of the memos describes waterboarding in horrifying detail, then claims that it qualifies as “a controlled acute episode,” rather than torture, as “the waterboard could not be said to inflict severe suffering.” Bent Sorensen, on the other hand, who is a former member of the U.N. Committee Against Torture, says the following:
It’s a clear-cut case: Waterboarding can without any reservation be labelled as torture. It fulfils all of the four central criteria that according to the United Nations Convention against Torture (UNCAT) defines an act of torture.
First, when water is forced into your lungs in this fashion, in addition to the pain you are likely to experience an immediate and extreme fear of death. You may even suffer a heart attack from the stress or damage to the lungs and brain from inhalation of water and oxygen deprivation. In other words there is no doubt that waterboarding causes severe physical and/or mental suffering – one central element in the UNCAT’s definition of torture.
In addition, the CIA’s waterboarding clearly fulfils the three additional definition criteria stated in the Convention for a deed to be labelled torture, since it is 1) done intentionally, 2) for a specific purpose and 3) by a representative of a state – in this case the US.
The old adage says that we’re not born bigots - prejudice has to be learned. Well, what better place to learn than in school? Apparently, the good folks at Aksjomat Publishing House are trying to help Polish students learn mathematics and bigotry at simultaneously (a good time saver, no?) The following math problem appears in The Mathematical Miniatures for Primary Schools, published by Aksjomat:
On board a sinking ship there are fifteen Christians and fifteen Turks. In order to save the ship from going to the bottom, half of the crew needs to be thrown overboard. One of the Christians proposes that the whole crew form a circle and every ninth person jump overboard. How should the Christians place themselves so that only the Turks are drowned?
Nice.
One of the authors tried to defend the Turk-drowning math question:
We did not try to exhort anyone to hate. What mattered to us was the mathematical model – the historical context was irrelevant. In order to solve the problem one needs to be acquainted with principles Maths, not the ways of murdering Turks.
In the interest of serious journalism, Fox News is hosting a “virtual tea party” on tax day. I am not kidding. They are not merely “covering” what they call the “tea party movement;” Fox News is essentially promoting it. The Fox newsbot in the clip below actually says “can’t get to a tea party? Fox nation hosts a virtual tea party - you can check it out on [the Fox News website].”
If, during the Bush years, a liberal organization had organized a movement with historically revolutionary overtones, like this one, and it was being “hosted” online by a network, the right would be screaming “treason.”
Watch this and gag:
I can’t wait for the virtual John Birch Society meetings, virtual NRA outings, and other such virtually journalistic services that Fox News will undoubtedly be providing sometime soon.
James Dobson, whose record is now 0-1 in Culture Wars
Focus on the Family Founder, bible-thumping culture warrior, dangerously repressed busybody, sexist homophobe, and all-around cretin James Dobson has come close to conceding defeat in the culture war. Bill Clinton and the internet, it seems, have combined with other generalized forces of evil to defeat Dobson and his righteous band of warriors. Unfortunately, he isn’t quite giving up. In any event, this is rather fun to read:
“The battles that we fought in the Eighties now, we were victorious in many of those conflicts with the culture, trying to defend righteousness, trying to defend the unborn child, trying to preserve the dignity of the family and the definition of marriage. We fought all those battles and really it was a holding action. […]
[W]e made a lot of progress through the Eighties but then we turned into the Nineties and the internet came along and a new president came along and all of that went away and now we are absolutely awash in evil. And we are right now in the most discouraging period of that long conflict. Humanly speaking, we can say that we have lost all those battles, but God is in control and we are not going to give up now, right?
Personally, I hope he does give up, and I prefer evil. If “evil” means resisting Dobson’s call for biblically-mandated gender roles, if evil means promoting marriage equality, if evil means believing that “tolerance” and “diversity” represent something more than “buzzwords” - then count me evil.
The CIA is decommissioning the secret overseas prisons where top al Qaida suspects were subjected to interrogation methods, including simulated drowning, that Attorney General Eric Holder, allied governments, the Red Cross and numerous other experts consider torture, the agency said Thursday.
In an e-mail to the agency’s work force outlining current interrogation and detention policies, CIA Director Leon Panetta also announced that agreements with the private security firms guarding the so-called black sites will be “promptly terminated,” and contractors no longer will be used to conduct interrogations.
The bad news:
Panetta, however, said that CIA officers who were involved in interrogations using “enhanced” methods authorized by the Justice Department during the Bush administration “should not be investigated, let alone punished” [bold added].
The message: We’re going to curb our most abhorrent behaviors, but we’re going to give the Bush administration a pass on its illegal actions.
Translation of the message: The law does not apply to the powerful.
…discuss global climate change in good faith, it seems. His attempt to portray concerned scientists and environmentally-conscious citizens as deluded alarmists (”Dark Green Doomsayers”) is being met, however, with significant opposition. And some of that opposition is coming from his own colleagues at WaPo. TPM Muckrakerreports that there have been “three separate efforts, from three separate sections of the paper, to push back against the bow-tied columnist’s well-chronicleddeceptions on global warming. ” For example, this piece, by Andrew Freedman, examines Will’s attempt to engage in global warming denial by cherry-picking data. And in the video below, WaPo columnist Eugene Robinson accuses Will of making a climate change report sound as if it said “the exact opposite of what it actually said” and of crossing a journalistic line.
I discussed the International Committee of the Red Cross report, which contains very serious details of possible torture of alleged terrorism suspects in U.S. custody in this previous post. The report is now available online - click here to read it in pdf format.
The report refers to fourteen particular detainees, and its allegations of their “ill treatment” are sobering. Here’s an excerpt:
The general term “ill treatment” has been used throughout the following section [of the report], however, it should in no way be understood as minimising the severity of the conditions and treatment to which the detainees were subjected. Indeed, as outlined [in a following section of the report], and as concluded by this report, the ICRC clearly considers that the allegations of the fourteen include descriptions of treatment and interrogation techniques - singly or in combination - that amounted to torture and/or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina continues believe that it is more important to engage in ideological posturing than to help the citizens of his state. Rejecting stimulus money, which is intended to help South Carolina’s economy and educational system, has become a kind of crusade for the governor. He’d rather look like a true believer in the eyes of Grover Norquist types, apparently, than use federal funds to improve the lives of real people in his state.
He recently told an unemployed South Carolinian that rather than take stimulus money, he’d say some prayers for the unemployed. He also wants to reject stimulus money dedicated for educational purposes, even if it costs 4,000 S.C. teachers their jobs. For Governor Sanford, it doesn’t matter if your school is falling apart, or if your class sizes are getting out of control; what matters is that he makes a point about his dedication to his morally and economically bankrupt principles.
Sanford goes as far as to say that accepting federal aid for his state’s school system would be “fiscal child abuse” because it results from deficit spending and therefore isn’t sustainable. So if you are a teacher in South Carolina, and you find yourself unemployed, or if you are a student in a crumbling school, things may be pretty grim for you. But you can rest assured that your governor sleeps well at night, knowing that he is sticking to his belief that the magical market and small government will solve all of our problems. The fact that is isn’t true doesn’t seem to matter to Sanford at all.
It’s more or less official now - as long as they don’t have illicit sex, presidents can do more or less whatever they like. From Charlotte Dennett :
Those of you following the George W. Bush prosecution trail will be interested to know that Patrick Leahy’s “truth commission” is a no-go. I was in a meeting with Leahy and four other Vermonters on Monday when he broke the news to us.
We had asked for the meeting to learn why he supported a truth commission over the appointment of a special prosecutor.
Halfway through the allotted 30 minute meeting (with him taking up much of the time explaining why he was not generally opposed to prosecution, since he had been a DA for eight years and had the highest conviction rate in Vermont), he told us that his truth commission had failed to get the broad support it needed in Congress, and since he couldn’t get one Republican to come behind the plan, “it’s not going to happen.”
It was a sobering exchange. The meeting had begun with our expressing serious concerns about ongoing dangers to our democracy, with the trend going to executive power while damaging our Constitution.
(The United States is a “nation of laws,” right? My ass).
Michele Bachmann may be a complete lunatic. She may just be dumber than a bag of hammers. One thing is for sure - she’s ready to lead the revolution! Check it out:
Hannity and Bachmann - that’s quite a tag team.
If you can’t bear to listen to Sean Hannity interview Michele Bachmann, well, I don’t blame you. So here are some of Michele’s highlights:
To the barricades! -
At this point the American people - it’s like Thomas Jefferson said, a revolution every now and then is a good thing. We are at the point, Sean, of revolution. And by that, what I mean, an orderly revolution — where the people of this country wake up get up and make a decision that this is not going to happen on their watch…we can’t let the Democrats achieve their ends any longer.
This bit is really dramatic -
Economics works equally in any country. Where freedom is tried, the people rejoice. But where tyranny is enforced upon the people, as Barack Obama is doing, the people suffer and mourn.
Obama is elected, and the people suffer and mourn. Spectacular.
Here’s some more paranoid rambling -
Right now I’m a member of Congress. And I believe that my job here is to be a foreign correspondent, reporting from enemy lines. And people need to understand, this isn’t a game. this isn’t just a political talk show that’s happening right now. This is our very freedom, and we have 230 years, a continuous link of freedom that every generation has ceded to the next generation. This may be the time when that link breaks. And I’m going to do everything I can, I know you are, to make sure that we keep that link secure. We cannot allow that link to break, because as Reagan said, America is the last great hope of mankind. where do we go–
Still, as I mentioned back in October, Marx appears to be making a bit of a comeback. Marx and Engels began the Communist Manifesto with the claim that “A specter is haunting Europe - the specter of Communism.” The powers that be, they claimed, had entered into a “holy alliance to exorcise this specter.” Well, it isn’t 1848 anymore. And the establishment isn’t exactly trembling over the possibility of communist uprisings. But Marx’s analysis of capitalism won’t go away. Because it shouldn’t. It haunts us still.
And as more time passes, eventually the real words and ideas of Marx and Engels will be further liberated from the horrors of the phony Marxism of monsters like Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. We might then be able to take seriously the critiques of capitalism that Marx produced, without having to entertain an irrelevant debate about Stalinism (which was a murderous disaster that had nothing to do with what Marx actually wrote).
John Cassidy’s 1997 New Yorker essay “The Return of Karl Marx” was quite prescient and is well worth a read. The abstract is here. And Christopher Hitchens has a piece in the April issue of The Atlantic that mentions and develops themes introduced in Cassidy’s essay. Hitch:
As I write this, every newspaper informs me of frantic efforts by merchants to unload onto the consumer, at almost any price, the vast surplus of unsold commodities that have accumulated since the credit crisis began to take hold. The phrase crisis of over-production, which I learned so many long winters ago in “agitational” meetings, recurs to my mind. On other pages, I learn that the pride of American capitalism has seized up and begun to rust, and that automobiles may cease even to be made in Detroit as a consequence of insane speculation in worthless paper “derivatives.” Did I not once read somewhere about the bitter struggle between finance capital and industrial capital? The lines of jobless and hungry begin to lengthen, and what more potent image of those lines do we possess than that of the “reserve army” of the unemployed—capital’s finest weapon in beating down the minimum wage and increasing the hours of the working week? A disturbance in a remote corner of the world market leads to chaos and panic at the very center of the system (and these symptoms are given a multiplier effect when the pangs begin at the center itself), and John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, doughty champions of capitalism at The Economist, admit straightforwardly in their book on the advantages of globalization that Marx, “as a prophet of the ‘universal interdependence of nations,’ as he called globalization … can still seem startlingly relevant … His description of globalization remains as sharp today as it was 150 years ago.”
I think it is safe to say that if we want to get some perspective on our current economic situation, Marx has a little more to offer than, say, CNBC. But I think we’re stuck with CNBC for now; because, as Marx himself put it, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.” Damn.
So much for the ol’ “World-Wide Web.” In keeping with a long-standing tradition of censorship, the government of the People’s Republic of China has blocked access to youtube.
Google said Tuesday that its YouTube video-sharing Web site had been blocked in China.
Google said it did not know why the site had been blocked, but a report by the official Xinhua news agency of China on Tuesday said that supporters of the Dalai Lama had fabricated a video that appeared to show Chinese police officers brutally beating Tibetans after riots last year in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.
…
“The instant speculation is that YouTube is being blocked because the Tibetan government in exile released a particular video,” said Xiao Qiang, adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and editor of China Digital Times, a news Web site that chronicles political and economic changes in China.
Mr. Xiao said that the blocking of YouTube fit with what appeared to be an effort by China to step up its censorship of the Internet in recent months. Mr. Xiao said he was not surprised that YouTube was a target. It also hosts videos about the Tiananmen Square protests and many other subjects that Chinese authorities find objectionable.
On the bright side, Chinese President and Communist Party General Secretary Hu Jintao has apparently not blocked access to Brylcreem.
Rush isn’t happy with the questions the press asked Obama last night. In particular, he is troubled by a question that made reference to a recent report that claims that one in fifty American children will experience homelessness. Limbaugh calls this statistic “bogus.” His evidence? A different report? Some government statistics, maybe? Nah. He counters the report and the statistic with this: “would somebody tell me the last time you saw a kid sleeping under a bridge?”
Limbaugh creates his own tailor-made reality for his listeners. He appears to feel perfectly entitled to declare things to be true or not true just by his own proclamation, without evidence or context. And his listeners appear quite comfortable in Rush’s reality (they call themselves “Ditto Heads,” after all; so I guess we can’t expect a lot of ciritical pushback from his audience). And this man, sadly, is taken very seriously by many people in this country.
(And by the way - what are you doing under those bridges anyway, Rush? Shopping, maybe?)
