Digby takes note of another angle Karl & Friends are playing in order to suppress Democratic representation - by changing the way the census is counted. They have a number of irons in this fire, some of which we've discussed earlier, but I hadn't noticed this one before.
John Aravosis: But there's a larger question. If Bush is now telling the truth about who these people are, then pray tell, what the hell was Bush doing letting hundreds if not thousands of people "who have a history of blowing up trains, wedding and churches" run around free inside the US for the past 4 years? Or maybe this is just another lie. Via Eschaton.
Cather at DKos, My Republican Family Discusses Impeachment: This brings me to today's sermon: Talk with your families about this, folks. Ask your Republican uncle if an impeachment would be successful given the evidence available, or would more be needed. Ask your Ann Coulter quoting sister-in-law if she has heard any buzz about a possible impeachment. That's my favorite question, because she just heard some buzz. The more I find out on this issue, the more willing I have become to talk about it, and the one thing I have found that everyone in my family can assent to is that the Constitution is a sacred document to this country. Via Lawnorder.
From The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, It's good to be King George: As I was saying to a fellow peasant just the other day, it is ironic that this country should rebel against one King George only to bow down before another monarch of the same name more than 200 years later. Via Maru.
The Nation has a whole nifty pack of impeachment-related stuff up right now:
An editorial on Bush's High Crimes says: And given the palpable outrage among Republicans as well as Democrats at the President's contempt for basic constitutional law, is it impossible to imagine illegal wiretaps leading to the final undoing of the Bush presidency?
Jonathan Schell says in The Hidden State Steps Forward that: There is a name for a system of government that wages aggressive war, deceives its citizens, violates their rights, abuses power and breaks the law, rejects judicial and legislative checks on itself, claims power without limit, tortures prisoners and acts in secret. It is dictatorship.
Everyone is linking Wolcott's Headhunters for a reason: He makes a really good point about the lust for violence that erupts from the right-wingers when they talk about liberals.
I'm not done with Christmas, by the way, what with coming from an Armenian family and all. It's a long holiday season for me from Halloween to January 6th.
The UnCapitalist: The Dark Wraith awaits a time when the nation has leadership that does not defend its mismanagement by claiming a better President's results were a mirage. Via a link-rich post at NewsHog.
Whatever you can do: Jeanne D'Arc woke up Thursday and found her computer had died, and put up an RIP message for her weblog. But readers weren't happy with the idea of killing Body and Soul, and she's been talked into putting up a Tip Jar. You can't let this weblog die! Give her all the help you can.
Bill Scher says Filibusters Are Back In Style: Not that they ever took it off the table. They just treated it like a disgusting abhorrent tactic that should never be spoken aloud. But in the past several days, Dems have not only filibustered twice. They filibustered on behalf of the public. They filibustered not to obstruct, but to force Republicans to enact better legislation. And they filibustered successfully.
Another GOP lie that will never die - the one about Clinton and FISA.
My thanks to Julia (who hasn't quite got this send-a-link thing down) for a heads-up on two WaPo editorials this morning, one of which actually skates mighty close with the title White House Prevarications:
GIVEN ALL THE fuss about what government officials in Washington say off the record, it's surprising how little attention is paid to some of the things they say on the record.
They're talking about greehouse gas emissions, but trust me, guys, we do pay attention to all those on-the-record lies - it's just that you don't.
The other, Firing Offenses, notes the massive corruption Maryland's Republican governor has brought to the state:
FOR NEARLY a year, venomous partisan sniping in Maryland over the Ehrlich administration's personnel practices has partly obscured an underlying truth: It is illegal to fire mid- or low-level public employees solely because of their political beliefs. That tenet of constitutional law, affirmed by the Supreme Court and reflected in Maryland statute, is what's at issue in hearings of a special legislative committee that are finally underway in Annapolis, months after the controversy erupted. That, and the ruined careers of state employees who were fired or forced from their jobs after Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. took office nearly three years ago.
Ehrlich has been firing Democrats routinely, and Republicans perceived as disloyal. In the piece I had to search for because Julia didn't send a link to her own work, Julia says:
Are we clear? Has everyone got that? For nearly a year, the fact that Democrats have been saying that it is illegal to fire mid- or low-level political public employees solely because of their political beliefs has partly obscured the fact that it is illegal to fire mid- or low-level political public employees solely because of their political beliefs, because of course Mr. Ehrlich said that it was all a big coinkydink that the people he happened to have his fixers make up a "death list" and fire as soon as he got into office were Democrats and that Democrats were just bringing it up because they don't like him, so it was clearly a partisan cat fight and we lost sight of the blatantly illegal thing, especially since the Democrats were being all venomous about it.
Yes, that's right, it's venomous to say that breaking the law is breaking the law, just like it's venomous to call prevarications lies.
MB caught what slipped by the rest of us - Senator Frist finally managed to push his thimerosol get-out-of-liability-free legislation into law tucked into the Defense Appropriation Bill.
What makes it even more fragrant: this version gives blanket protection from lawsuits to pretty much any drug the Secretary of Health and Human Services wants to give it to.
I certainly had my problems with former Washington Post Ombudsman Michael Getler, but I'm used to the idea that the mainstream media was always (always) pretty status quo. However, his replacement, Deborah Howell, is deep in the right-wing, to the point that any minute I expect to see her writing things like "Democrat Party".
This week's article could only have been written by someone who is completely in thrall to the right-wing machine. Observe:
Ann Scott Tyson, a respected military reporter just back from Iraq, wrote in a front-page story Nov. 4 that "newly released Pentagon demographic data show that the military is leaning heavily for recruits on economically depressed rural areas where youths' need for jobs may outweigh the risks of going to war."
The story said that more than 44 percent of military recruits come from rural areas, most from the South and West. "Many . . . are financially strapped, with nearly half coming from lower-middle-class to poor households, according to new Pentagon data based on Zip codes and census estimates of mean household income."
Now, you'd think this one fell into the category of "not even news" - after all, you don't expect your average middle-class or upper-class kid to look at their options and say, "You know, I think it would be best for me to go someplace where I'm likely to get paid peanuts and be maimed or killed rather than, say, go to college or take a job with high-earning potential."
But in winger-land, this kind of analysis sets all the alarm bells ringing, apparently.
In looking at the story, I talked to Curt Gilroy, who, as director of accession policy for the secretary of defense, has oversight of all active-duty recruiting; Tim Kane, a Heritage researcher; Betty Maxfield, demographer of the Army; Bruce Orvis, director of the Manpower and Training Program at the Rand Corp.'s Arroyo Center, and Robert Brandewei, director of the Defense Manpower Data Center in Monterey, Calif.
We have noted before that Ms. Howell thinks that right-wing "think tanks" that make up excuses are equivalent to mainstream think tanks (original usage) that do actual research - and that she regards the latter as "liberal". In this case, she is equating Heritage with the organization that did the research in question, National Priorities Project (NPP), "a liberal-leaning think tank that questions the war in Iraq." Note here that she apparently presumes that any group that questions the war is "liberal", having failed to absorb the fact that at this juncture many Republicans and right-leaning libertarians are also questioning the war. Come to think of it, anyone who isn't far-right does so.
Howell doesn't tell us, by the way, why she felt the need to research this particular story. Getler used to refer to letters from readers, but one gets the impression here that Howell just saw this article and felt she automatically needed to fact-check it. I'd like to know why, because the facts presented in the article are pretty uncontroversial. And I'd also like to know why Ms. Howell takes for granted that Heritage's own evaluation of NPP's methodology is more accurate than NPP's.
Maybe the real skinny behind this article is that Howell is looking for something else to talk about, since she surely must know that what her readers are really interested in is why she opened the can of worms she did by airing stupid White House sniping about Dan Froomkin on the Ombudsman's page in the first place.
Mahabarb: I did a Technorati search, and it seems Jazz is right - as of now the Right Blogosphere is ignoring the unfortunate post-election turmoil in Iraq. After whining at us that we ignored the glorious election, now they're ignoring the inglorious side-effects of an apparent religious Shiite victory. I noticed that, too - the right-wingers were playing up the election as usual, but letting slide the fact that maybe this election didn't quite accomplish anything much like a free democracy.
Steve Bates: I admit I am glad the PATRIOT Act extension was reduced from six months to one month, but I admit I'm surprised the change was initiated by Sensenbrenner. [...] What's up? Is there going to be another last-minute substitution at the end of the one-month extension, the way there was a blindsiding substitution of the current PATRIOT Act for the carefully crafted compromise version back in 2001? Is Sensenbrenner pushing the schedule... fine with me; get it done... or are we being set up again?
Bush v. Choice: It just keeps getting worse with this guy! How much more convincing do folks need that Alito is dangerous for women? Via The Daou Report.
Paul Bigioni on The real threat of fascism: Observing political and economic discourse in North America since the 1970s leads to an inescapable conclusion: the vast bulk of legislative activity favors the interests of large commercial enterprises. Big business is very well off, and successive Canadian and US governments, of whatever political stripe, have made this their primary objective for at least the last 25 years.
Media Matters has chosen the 2005 Misinformer of the Year, and that makes me think about Media Whores Online.
I'm not sure Tweety Matthews would have made Whore of the Year in the old MWO sweepstakes. Maybe Bob Woodward? Although I think I'd be pumping for Bill Keller - he may be an editor, but he sure did the job for Bush, and I don't think the reporters are even remotely responsible for the NYT's choice not to run the story on Bush's law-breaking until a year after the election. I invite you to make your own nominations in comments.
I ate too much and enjoyed every bite. Also, as usual, I made out like a bandit. I haven't been happy with the tree itself but yesterday we were out for a walk and saw some Sideshow-color Xmas balls and put them on up, and now it looks much better. (I like my tree to have lots of trashy decorations.)
President Bush has been summoning newspaper editors lately in an effort to prevent publication of stories he considers damaging to national security.
And they've gone, too. I couldn't help but notice something in this paragraph:
After Bush's meeting with the Times executives, first reported by Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, the president assailed the paper's piece on domestic spying, calling the leak of classified information "shameful." Some liberals, meanwhile, attacked the paper for holding the story for more than a year after earlier meetings with administration officials.
Thank you, Howie, for admitting that people who expect newspapers to deliver news in a timely fashion are liberals. You putz. (More from TalkLeft. And I see Jane Hamsher had the same reaction I did to that "liberal" business.)
What Ashcroft did to the immigration court system is so egregious that even Posner objects: In one decision last month, Richard A. Posner, a prominent and relatively conservative federal appeals court judge in Chicago, concluded that "the adjudication of these cases at the administrative level has fallen below the minimum standards of legal justice." Ashcroft slashed the number of judges hearing the cases - by getting rid of all the more liberal judges. And you know what you get when you do that. Via TalkLeft.
The NYT is covering David Horowitz's program to dumb down universities by suppressing liberalism. Blondesense has a good answer to it all: What of German physics teachers who were required to inject the tenants of national socialism in their classrooms? And when they refused to teach only German ideas, college students ran professors off campuses and burned libraries. What of the Russian mathematicians who were required to teach Stalinist algorithms for the creation of the new Soviet Man? Their personal mail was opened and they were imprisoned for criticizing Stalin in it. It isn't wrong for secondary teachers like Aleskandr Solzhenitsyn or university professors like Albert Einstein to criticize their nation's leaders. An educated populace demands it.
Atrios posted even less than I did yesterday, but he did post a link and some quotes from Steve Chapman's Beyond the imperial presidency in the ChiTrib noting that Bush's theory of government seems to have nothing to do with whether big government is good or bad, or whether you should or shouldn't trust the government: But the theory boils down to a consistent and self-serving formula: What's good for George W. Bush is good for America, and anything that weakens his power weakens the nation. To call this an imperial presidency is unfair to emperors.
Senate Republicans late Wednesday blocked the authorization bill that guides the country's intelligence programs. It was the first time in 27 years that the bill had failed to pass before the end of the calendar year. [...] Democrats were informed last week that Republicans would clear the bill if three amendments, two by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and one by Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), would be stripped from the consent agreement.
But Democrats balked because Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), the chairman of the Senate intelligence panel, had agreed to the amendments. Roberts's staff did not return calls for comment yesterday.
Kerry's amendment would require the director of national intelligence to give the intelligence panels information on secret CIA prisons in several Eastern European democracies and in Asia.
Kennedy's amendments would require the White House to turn over copies of daily intelligence briefs that President Bush and former President Bill Clinton reviewed on Iraq.
Democrats have accused administration officials of exaggerating Iraq's weapons capabilities and terrorism ties to win public support for the war. No weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq.
One troubling memo concerns domestic wiretaps - a timely topic. In the memo, which he wrote as a lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department, Judge Alito argued that the attorney general should be immune from lawsuits when he illegally wiretaps Americans. Judge Alito argued for taking a step-by-step approach to establishing this principle, much as he argued for an incremental approach to reversing Roe v. Wade in another memo. [...] In a second memo released yesterday, Judge Alito made another bald proposal for grabbing power for the president. He said that when the president signed bills into law, he should make a "signing statement" about what the law means. By doing so, Judge Alito hoped the president could shift courts' focus away from "legislative intent" - a well-established part of interpreting the meaning of a statute - toward what he called "the President's intent."
Hentoff: In a few of the stories, those readers going beneath the headlines found harsh revelations of the shell game that McCain and Bush are playing. These discoveries add to the accelerating exposure of how George W. Bush-with the cooperation of the once principled John McCain and of other members of Congress-is engaging in the cruel and inhumane debasing of the values we are fighting for against homicidal terrorists. Via The Arizona Eclectic.
The Holiday Dump ... On Your Liberties: You can count on it. Every Friday, every holiday, news that would embarrass the Bush Administration if it weren't the Bush Administration gets dumped.
The one-page cartoon version of A Christmas Carol from an ancient Xmas edition of Ansible. (For the last couple years, I start getting hits on this link off Google at a rapid rate starting in late November.)
"It is required of every man," the Ghost returned, "that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow men, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world -- oh, woe is me! -- and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!" [...] "You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell me why?"
"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?"
Scrooge trembled more and more.
"Or would you know," pursued the Ghost, "the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it, since. It is a ponderous chain!" [...] "But you were always a good man of business, Jacob," faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.
"Business!" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"
Bob Novak says he had better sources than Bush on Iraq. And so did I. So did anyone who was paying attention. But we should let Bush, who knows less than anyone, decide who is an "enemy combatant"? Please.
You know, I still can't quite convince myself that I'm seeing this in a story about legislation passed by the US Congress:
But the measure awaiting President Bush's signature also would limit the access of detainees held at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to federal courts. And it would allow the military to use confessions elicited by torture when deciding whether a detainee is an enemy combatant.
And, of course, you can beat confessions out of pretty much anyone, you can get them to say anything - and, having done so, you can "prove" that no innocent person has been incarcerated and tortured. Don't you feel safe?
U.S. District Judge James Robertson criticized the government's detention of Abu Bakker Qassim and Adel Abdu Hakim, who have been jailed at Guantanamo for four years; they have been cleared for release because the government has determined they are not enemy combatants and are not a threat to the United States. But Robertson said his court has "no relief to offer" because the government has not found a country to accept the men and because he does not have authority to let them enter the United States.
And, of course, in the newspaper of the nation's capitol, crackpot right-wing mouthpiece Charles Krauthammer provides the latest defense of a presidential right to use the Constitution as toilet paper, calling the suggestion that such lawlessness should qualify as a high crime "nonsense".
Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. once argued that the nation's top law enforcement official deserves blanket protection from lawsuits when acting in the name of national security, even when those actions involve the illegal wiretapping of American citizens, documents released yesterday show.
And I can't quite believe someone like this has actually been nominated to the Supreme Court, either.
Factesque: No member of the flock followed up with the obvious: If the intelligence was so convincing that it was able to warrant starting a war and yet so flawed, doesn't that mistake then make the provisions set up in FISA even more important when we're talking about spying on American citizens? Isn't it possible for flawed and convincing evidence to be used against innocent Americans?
Meteor Blades at The Next Hurrah has a neat discussion of the virtues of the blogosphere (and why you should get into the Koufax Awards), and touches on a few issues I've been meaning to talk about myself, and maybe I'll get around to expanding on in the future.
Digby: Because the beltway press corps has conditioned itself to respond only to Republicans. They've trained themselves not take Democrats seriously, either the rank and file who inconvenience them with e-mails they do not want to read, or the leadership they simply disdain. Unpopularity obligates them to criticize Bush at least mildly, but the relief they feel when his numbers edge up a bit is palpable. They don't seem to know this about themselves. (Read this follow-up post, too.)
Mark Schmitt: I'm kicking myself because several weeks ago, various people sent me things encouraging me to comment on the possible inclusion of welfare reform in the budget reconciliation bill. And I got distracted and didn't do anything with it. And now here it is, almost passed into law, and I finally start looking at it. It's outrageous.
Kevin Drum: Of course, their argument is not that the president has the inherent power to authorize domestic surveillance anytime he wants, only that he has that power during wartime. And as near as I can tell, that's the elephant in the room that no one is really very anxious to discuss: What is "wartime"? Is George Bush really a "wartime president," as he's so fond of calling himself? Conservatives take it for granted that he is, while liberals tend to avoid the subject entirely for fear of being thought unserious about the War on Terror. But it's something that ought be brought up and discussed openly.
Thomas Nephew: We've thrown our reputation in the Muslim world into the wastebasket for the near future with Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and Guantanamo. With a little bad luck and plenty of 'hard work' from our leadership, we can do the same with our fellow Muslim citizens. Let's roll up our sleeves like Bush likes to do -- and keep that from happening.
It's the darkest day of the year, and we need bright lights and warmth and smiles. So happy Solstice, boys and girls.
One of the things I like about the WaPo website these days is that as soon as you've read something really stupid like William Kristol's offensive defense of the monarchy of King George, or Ralph Nader's stirring advocacy of one more way to make elections confusing and even more of a crapshoot, you can instantly find links from the same page to weblogs, some of which you've never even heard of before, that entertain you with a good pliers and acid job on this crap.
The Mahablog on weenies who are so scared of terrorism that they will give up everything in order to have George Bush to soothe their fears: Just call them cowards. That's what they are. I was in lower Manhattan on 9/11 and saw the worst that terrorism can do, and I am not crawling around under rocks screaming that we must compromise everything America stands for to keep us safe. And I've never considered myself especially brave; just put me in a dentist's chair, and I'll confess to anything. But as I wrote yesterday, righties are so terrified of the jihadist boogeymen they'll make excuses for anything Big Brother does, in the opinion - unjustified, I say - that Big Brother is keeping them safe. And they call themselves patriots. It's too pathetic.
Atrios has a pile of good links up which you should read: Katherine at Obsidian Wings: Look. We have a President here who is making a claim of unlimited power, for the duration of a war that may never end. Oh, he says it's limited by the country's laws, but they've got a crack legal team that reliably interprets the laws to say that the President gets to do whatever he wants. It amounts to the same thing. I am not exaggerating. I am really and truly not. Matt Stoller at MyDD: The problem is, there will not be good government, government by principle and character, until we look George W. Bush and the extreme right in the eye and say 'we cannot and will not do business with you'. This is not a partisan issue. You can do business with some Republicans, like John Sununu and Lincoln Chafee, and yes, John McCain. Even Tom Coburn will vote against pork, though he's crazy. [...] So it's not that he is a good man or a bad man, but that you cannot get anything done with him or his people in charge. You cannot do business with George W. Bush and his ilk, and talking him up undercuts the goal that all of us, including Senator Obama, seek. He is a figure to be demonized, because while it is not Bush alone it is Bush's fraud-riddled politics that are at the core of what is ruining what Senator Obama and all progressives want. Peter Daou at the Daou Report - I won't try to pick a quote but this is a description of the way the news cycles have worked to protect Bush. There's not much we can do about some of it, but if the Democrats would show a bit of agility and staying power, the cycle could be broken. (Matt's and Peter's pieces might make a nice little Christmas fax to your Dem reps so they have something to read over the holidays.)
Gay marriage starts today - civilization destroyed!
The legal partnership of Elton John to David Furnish is big news today, reminding me that I intended last week to write about the first such "marriage" here, between Matthew Roche and Christopher Cramp. They were given a special waiver of the waiting period because Roche, a cancer patient, was only expected to live a few more days.
I was touched by the decision to grant the waiver - which, it turned out, was just in time, as Roche died on December 7th.
(I was amused by the distinction between civil partnership and marriage described in the article: "The procedure is an exclusively civil one in Britain, with the partners signing certain documents, whereas a marriage becomes binding when partners exchange spoken words in a civil or religious ceremony." The only words I recall exchanging when we got married were an agreement not to be married to anyone else while we were married to each other, and then we signed our names.)
NYT - Sunnis Reject Early Iraq Election Results, Calling for Inquiry : Sunni Arab leaders angrily rejected early election results on Tuesday, saying the vote had been fixed in favor of Iranian-backed religious Shiites and calling for an investigation into possible fraud. Secular politicians also denounced the results and demanded an inquiry. So, American-style democracy, then.
In a week when the Grey Lady has been exposed as covering-up for the administration's egregious violation of the very substance of Constitutional law, the public editor decides to talk about...book reviews.
WaPo - Spy Court Judge Quits In Protest: A federal judge has resigned from the court that oversees government surveillance in intelligence cases in protest of President Bush's secret authorization of a domestic spying program, according to two sources. Great, but if people who have doubts about the legality of the program all resign, who does that leave?
4 GOP Senators Hold Firm Against Patriot Act Renewal: There was just one problem. Well, four problems, actually. Four of the 46 senators using the delaying tactic to thwart the USA Patriot Act renewal are members of Frist's party. It is a pesky, irritating fact for Republicans who are eager to portray the impasse as Democratic obstructionism, and a ready-made rejoinder for Democrats expecting campaign attacks on the issue in 2006 and 2008.
Democrats Seek All of Alito's Writings: The documents "will be important in evaluating Judge Alito's nomination," the eight Judiciary Committee Democrats said in a letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales. Just imagine what a treasure chest it's likely to be!
Revolt of the Professionals - David Ignatius says: The civil liberties debate is indeed a welcome sign that we are returning to normality. I assume that by "we", he means the press, having finally noticed what has been obvious to at least half the country for a long, long time.
Editorial: The belated and limited awakening we are seeing in Congress is the consequence of many Americans realizing that the administration has gone too far.
The Christmas He Dreamed for All of Us - The all-American Christmas has been non-sectarian throughout our lifetimes: Christmas belongs to all of us. The religious content of those holidays was fine for Christian believers, but the composer of "God Bless America" preferred to celebrate a common national identity, complete with common holidays that had nonsectarian meanings.
LAT - Officials Fault Case Bush Cited: But some current and former high-ranking U.S. counter-terrorism officials say that the still-classified details of the case undermine the president's rationale for the recently disclosed domestic spying program.
Republicans Welcome Democratic Resistance on Security Matters - They think it makes them look stronger. But this is just another sign that Democrats must start talking about how Bush is not doing anything to improve national security, and that it started long before 9/11 and has not changed.
Or maybe they are missing headlines. The newspapers and broadcast media themselves are leaving an awful lot out, so it takes some close reading and extra research to figure it out. As people who read weblogs, we already know this - it's why we're here. But between the lines, we learn.
When members of the paid media try to address this question, they fail. They never quite understand the difference between the right-wing blogosphere and the liberal blogosphere. They say things like:
By repeating conservative criticisms about the allegedly elitist, sycophantic, biased MSM, liberal bloggers have played straight into conservative hands. These bloggers have begun unwittingly doing conservatives' dirty work.
What they're attacking is the MSM's Progressive-era ethos of public-minded disinterestedness. By embracing the idea of objectivity, newspapers took a radical turn from the raw partisanship that guided them in the nineteenth century.
No, we're not. The so-called "objectivity" we are seeing today is very different from what we saw 30 years ago, for the simple reason that when you refuse to acknowledge that one side is telling the truth while the other is lying, that's not objective. Objectively, Bush lied and Gore didn't, but you'd never have known that from the mainstream media's coverage of the 2000 campaign. Objectively, there is no more important thing to do in an election than make sure everyone can vote and then count all the ballots, but you wouldn't have known that, either.
And that's just half the problem. Franklin Foer is claiming that the press gave an equal shake to "both sides of the issues", but Bob Somerby quite rightly disagrees:
In our view, the mainstream press misbehaved grievously in its coverage of Campaign 2000. Its coverage of Bush's tax cuts was part of the problem. But does Foer really think that this passage describes the press corps' general approach? According to Foer, the press corps felt "obliged to give a hearing to both sides of a debate," leading to soft treatment of Bush's misstatements. Granted, Bush routinely got soft treatment. But was this same treatment extended to Gore? On Neptune, perhaps. Not on Earth.
For one example, consider the way the mainstream press corps handled the issue of Social Security. In May 2000, Bush formally proposed his "private accounts" - making arguments that would be left for dead five years later, when Bush was president. But did the mainstream press corps feel "obliged to give a hearing to both sides" of this debate? To the contrary. As we have discussed in detail, mainstream pundits heaped praise on Bush's "bold leadership" in proposing these accounts - and savaged Gore for daring to oppose such a far-seeing plan.
Bush was out-and-out lying about his proposals, even denied the actual wording of his policy proposals on his own website during the debates, hinting that Gore was lying. But the mainstream media echoed the RNC suggestion that Gore's facts "didn't add up" while declining to point out that Bush was the guy who was subtracting two from two and getting five.
Does this slobbering nonsense make you think, in any way, of a group which felt "obliged to give a hearing to both sides of a debate" - so obliged that they were willing to cover up for a candidate's outright lying? As we've described in endless detail (links below), Bush's presentation was endlessly praised; Gore's presentation was trashed to the core. During Campaign 2000, the mainstream press covered up for lying when it was done by Candidate Bush. But to this day, gentle fellows like Foer pretend that they never have heard this.
Somerby doesn't even go over here (although it can be found all over the rest of his site) the fact that the press went well beyond this and spent quite a bit of time attacking Gore for "misstatements" it actually made up. Maureen Dowd covered a Gore event and declared him "boring" because he talked about issues, but did not mention how he electrified crowds. Was that "objective"? Howard Fineman obsessed on Gore's wardrobe, and other members of the press even invented and carried a fantasy about how Naomi Wolf supposedly told Gore to wear "earth tones" - few people understand that there is not a single shred of evidence that she ever did so. (Fineman, in fact, seemed to think it was really heroic when Bush changed his clothes, but somehow pathological if Gore wore a different suit.) The press itself lied about Gore claiming to have "invented the Internet", "discovered Love Canal", and apparently fantasizing that he was inspirational to the lead character in Love Story.
These charges were a double-whammy, because if he had made such claims, they would have been largely true - but he didn't, and by suggesting that to say so would have been false, the press was preventing him from discussing these things at all. The press did not tell you that it was Al Gore's work in Congress that made the modern Internet possible, that exposed Love Canal and similar sites. And the press did not tell you that the author of Love Story said outright that the lead character of his novel was partially based on Al Gore.
Bringing us up to date, we now have "even-handed" stories about the New York transit strike that gloss over the real causes of the strike and instead concentrate only on the inconvenience the strike represents to commuters and shoppers in the city. And we have startling revelations about administration perfidy (or insanity) hidden in buried paragraphs (just as we did in 2001 when we had to wait until the 43rd graf to find out that, contrary to the headline, Al Gore had received the most votes in Florida). Without numerous bloggers highlighting individual sections of lengthy stories - each of which deserves a headline of its own - we'd hardly be aware of the depths of the big stories the corporate media are underplaying.
Is the press being "objective" and "even-handed"? Are they hell. They called for impeachment of a president who, like most other presidents, had an affair while in office. But when the entire White House is engaged in trying to overturn our Constitution, "the I-word" is unmentionable. They had no trouble screaming about lies when it was about something trivial done by a Democrat, but lies from this White House can't even be so named. They doubted every word in defense of the Clintons in Whitewater, even though the record showed then as now that they'd done nothing wrong, but they refuse to admit that Bush has crossed a line when he is destroying everything that made America great.
And why? Because the far right might accuse them of being liberal, and gosh, we can't have that.
Bill Scher reminds us that without checks and balances, we don't have the moral authority to fight terrorism. It's not just a civil liberties argument, it's a national security argument.
Nice catch at Suburban Guerrilla, where Susie finds a right-winger in a right-wing rag saying: President Bush presents a clear and present danger to the rule of law. He cannot be trusted to conduct the war against global terrorism with a decent respect for civil liberties and checks against executive abuses. Congress should swiftly enact a code that would require Mr. Bush to obtain legislative consent for every counterterrorism measure that would materially impair individual freedoms. Yep, that's Bruce Fein of the Federalist Society, writing in The Washington Times. Think of it! (Also: Slouching Toward Kristallnacht.)
I've taken drugs to kill the pain and my brain is in space, so this'll be brief.
The good news is a defeat for "Intelligent design" in Dover, Pa: Dover Area School Board members violated the Constitution when they ordered that its biology curriculum must include the notion that life on Earth was produced by an unidentified intelligent cause, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III said. Several members repeatedly lied to cover their motives even while professing religious beliefs, he said.
Bellaciao: From all the information we have gathered on his activity, it seems clear that he holds two major political beliefs: 1. He believes he is above the law. 2. He sometimes believes he IS the law. (Via The Smirking Chimp.)
Atrios has more good discussion on the Madness of King George as discussed by almost everyone outside the White House (and the Borg). Start here and move upward.
Matt Bai seems to be saying that there is a "New World Economy" (18 December) in which employees can no longer depend on their employers. And, for some reason, this means we should not want something we can depend on, like Social Security.
But Bai has not described a new economy at all - he has described something much like the conditions that made Social Security necessary in the first place.
Nor does Bai explain why the most efficient and portable form of insurance in the world is unnecessary to these insecure times.
Asserting that we need modern remedies for modern times must sound very nice over the fourth or fifth beer, but before Mr. Bai tells us that we must reinvent the wheel, perhaps he ought to explain what was wrong with the round one, and why a square one would do the job better.
Looks like Jess has gone all serious on me with The Iraq question: A while back I contacted two bloggers, two military veterans, one from the left side of the political spectrum, one from the right, one was a marine lawyer, one jumped out of airplanes in the army, these two men agreed to answer some of my questions.
The New York Times has finally weighed in on The Business of Voting on their editorial page: The counting of votes is a public trust. So is the reporting on how it is done. Dan Mitchell, like Diebold, has never acted as if he understood this. Via The Brad Blog.
Here's the latest post at Wampum for making your Koufax Award nominations. (And no, I don't generally campaign for these things, but yes, I like being nominated.)
Jane Smiley gives us Bush's Ten-Step Program for destroying America: Or, to put it another way, the Bush administration apparently wishes for and is working toward a chaotic Iraq, a corrupt American election structure with openly corrupt influence-peddlers like Delay and Abramoff in charge of policy, a world in which people suffer and die from weather-related catastrophes, a two-tiered economic structure in the US (with most people in the lower tier), and the isolation of the US as a rogue state from the other nations of the world.
Viggo Mortensen: "I'm not anti-Bush; I'm anti-Bush behavior," Mortensen told Progressive magazine. "In other words, I'm against cheating, greed, cruelty, racism, imperialism, religious fundamentalism, treason, and the seemingly limitless capacity for hypocrisy shown by Bush and his administration."
And speaking of Viggo, he's posted an excerpt from Kristof about Bill O'Reilly's war on Christmas, and also linked to Gary Kamiya's Blood and betrayal in which he reviews a book and asks if at long last we are able to hear Robert Fisk.
GOP-style democracy: Iraqi Parties Complain of Vote Irregularities: As the United States portrayed Thursday's Iraqi elections as a resounding success, political parties here Saturday complained of violations ranging from dead men voting to murder in the streets. (via)
Purposely misquoting FISA to defend the Bush Administration: This is a real case study in how total falsehoods are disseminated by a single right-wing blogger who is then linked to and approvingly cited by large, highly partisan bloggers, which then cause the outright falsehoods to be bestowed with credibility and take on the status of a conventionally accepted talking point in defense of the Administration.
How is it that a rich, spoiled, pampered frat boy with an affected Texas accent, who never worked a day in his life and used family connections to avoid service in Vietnam, became the heir to Andy Jackson? If that's not parody, I don't know what is.
Although we might yet go the way of the Romans. Historians tell us that as Rome fell, the Romans themselves scarcely noticed it was happening. Even as the barbarians were literally at the gates, individual Romans went ahead with their personal business with no concern that their way of life was about to end. They didn’t see it coming. And they didn’t see it because the end of Rome was unthinkable. Today the true believers in American exceptionalism cling to the idea that the virtues of our American republic are so unassailable as to justify any depravity done in America’s name. The notion that America could be in the wrong, much less fall from grace as The Land of the Free, is unthinkable.
Beware of what is unthinkable. Just because something is outside your imagination doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
Digby with a history lesson that reminds us: People say the Democrats are spineless, but they are nothing to the invertebrate GOP congress who have willingly abdicated their constitutional duty to enhance the power of the president and the Republican Machine. No pride, no integrity, no standards.
You know something? When Bush attacks legislators for wanting to take a second look at the Patriot Act and says stuff about how "delaying tactics" in the Senate could benefit terrorists who "want to attack America again and kill the innocent and inflict even greater damage than they did on September 11th," I always want to shake him and scream, "You moron! They don't need to do anything to inflict greater damage on us! You're doing that for them!" And more important people than me are beginning to suspect it.
Media in Iraq: The fallacy of psy-ops: WASHINGTON Some top Pentagon officials say they are justified in planting positive stories in the Iraqi media about U.S actions in order to present a more positive image. Whether the policy is ethically correct misses the larger point. Pushing PR or propaganda simply doesn't work. That depends on what the aim is. It undoubtedly fails to convince the Iraqis to disbelieve what they can see with their own eyes, but this stuff isn't meant for them - it's meant for us.
It's like all problems, if you ignore it it goes away: Well, the utter abandonment of the people of New Orleans continues apace. [...] These are our friends, our colleagues, our treasured national history that are being kissed off without the problem of how to help them even being considered on the most base level. As a nation, is that our character? We'll let this happen? We'll let some drunk jackass with no life skills surrounded by jackals and petulant royalty completely blow this off? I wish, after the last five years, I was surprised. (Me, I'm glad that after the last five years I can still be shocked by things like this.)
I don't know what it was, 'cause he wasn't pretty and he wasn't noted for any important things outside of his professional life as an actor, but John Spencer had something special, and I know I speak for many in saying that he will be missed, even though he was "just an actor".
This might make a good present for you last-minute shoppers.
So, Bush admitted breaking the law, but of course he is less concerned with protecting Americans than he is in protecting his own power, so he pretended to be justified and complained instead about the information getting to the public:
Revealing classified information is illegal. It alerts our enemies.
By "our enemies", he was of course referring to the American people; our enemies in Al Qaeda already assume that they are under surveillance. Atrios notes that the right-wing blogosphere has been chorusing loudly on this one, and boy is he right. Protein Wisdom, for example:
The Democratic spin doctors, spurred on by their disingenuous Congressional taskmasters , are all over the tube this morning trying to gin up additional outrage over this NSA domestic "spy story"-even as the President stands firm and defends the practice. Forcefully. [...] If it turns out-like I believe it will (and I've heard now from several people familiar with intelligence)-that what the President was doing (and will continue to do) was not only legal, but from a practical standpoint, critical to monitoring domestic terror cells and stopping terrorist attacks here and abroad, I believe that any pro-defense American with the power to do so should insist that these intelligence leaks be investigated.
Because it is not quaint to reveal our secrets simply because you don't believe that we are truly at war. And that is what is happening here-that Dems and progressives believe the ends justify the means. And until the rest of us stand up and go on the offensive-until we stop taking the kind of reactive posture that forces us to defend each and every necessary action (the precise rhetorical position anti-war progressives want us in)-we will continue to watch our safety erode, and our politicians go weak.
Laura Rozen quite rightly calls it a phony argument, for what I assume are obvious reasons - funny how trivial they find exposing security secrets when it's Rove and Cheney doing it, eh? The conservoborg just can't understand the difference between giving away national secrets and exposing wrong-doing on the part of our leaders.
Well, get this straight: This isn't about spying on Al Qaeda, it's about illegally spying on American citizens and, not incidentally, making war on our Constitution. Bush isn't king and he isn't a god and if he acts like he thinks he is then he really, really needs to be kicked out fast.
Josh Marshall has been keeping on eye on this one and reminds us that this violation was unnecessary to national security, even in the most practical sense. This wasn't about needing to be able to spy on citizens, it was about being able to do so illegally. There was nothing actually stopping them from doing it legally. This was a crime against the Constitution, pure and simple.
If knowing about this crime makes our enemies stronger, it's only because they now know how weak our democracy really is, thanks to George W. Bush. But then, every time Bush says we had "bad intelligence" he tells the world we are weak. Being stuck in Iraq years after saying we were just going there to overthrow Saddam (done) and see if he had any WMD (he didn't) tells them that, too, of course. Oh, and by the way, where's Osama?
Since real terrorists already suspect that they are being snooped on, and no doubt act accordingly, we are left with Atrios' analysis:
There was absolutely no reason to not follow FISA unless they didn't want anyone to know who they were snooping on.
Remarkably, PW quotes a Democratic strategist as agreeing that there is something significant about the timing of the release of this scoop now (as opposed, I suppose, to next week or last week). They are happy to ignore that great big elephant in the room of what was going on "over a year" ago when they had the story but chose not to publish it. Now that was a piece of timing.
We live in a world where blatant political operatives are nominated to oversee our elections: President Bush nominated two controversial lawyers to the Federal Election Commission yesterday: Hans von Spakovsky who helped Georgia win approval of a disputed voter-identification law, and Robert D. Lenhard, who was part of a legal team that challenged the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. Ted Kennedy has written a letter expressing concern. Everyone should be screaming about this.
And speaking of elections (or election fraud), what can possibly explain the fact that after decades of fighting tooth and nail to avoid giving DC the vote, Republicans are suddenly enamored of the idea? Boy, they must really be confident....
More reasons to hate the DLC: Al From, president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, and pollster Mark Penn wrote a strategy memo to DLC supporters last week warning party leaders not to use Bush's problems as an invitation to call for an immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, or generally to steer a more liberal course that could alienate the middle-of-the-road voters the party needs. Oh, god, please put a stake in it.
Kudos to E.J. Dionne for pointing out that Republicans' "new" ideas have failed - and that they're old and tired, besides. He should have pointed out that they were actually old and tired 30 years ago when they were supposedly "new"; the whole point of liberal policies was that they were an antidote to the same failed idea that you could make a country stronger by giving the rich what they want. Having a strong middle class is still the new idea, and you do it by keeping the rich from getting too rich.
Bruce Fein looks like he's criticizing Alito's dishonesty, and I guess he is, but he's criticizing it as bad strategy rather than as lack of integrity, and says Alito should come clean about being a right-wing fruitcake because America is more conservative today than it was when we rejected Robert Bork, and we would just love him if we only knew that he wants to get rid of voting rights, reproductive freedom, accountability for both government and business, and the Bill of Rights in general. Yes, please, please get lots of news coverage of Alito being up-front about his far-right views.
Torture's Long Shadow, a little history lesson from Russia: This is a new debate for Americans, but there is no need for you to reinvent the wheel. Most nations can provide you with volumes on the subject. Indeed, with the exception of the Black Death, torture is the oldest scourge on our planet (hence there are so many conventions against it). Every Russian czar after Peter the Great solemnly abolished torture upon being enthroned, and every time his successor had to abolish it all over again. These czars were hardly bleeding-heart liberals, but long experience in the use of these "interrogation" practices in Russia had taught them that once condoned, torture will destroy their security apparatus. They understood that torture is the professional disease of any investigative machinery.
"I have tried to break down the walls of secrecy in Washington. But today the walls are thicker than ever. More and more of our policymakers hide behind those walls. Only the press can stand as a true bulwark against an executive branch with a monopoly on foreign policy information. It has all the authority it needs in the First Amendment."
TalkLeft: You had to know it was too good to be true. Don't praise John McCain's torture amendment too soon. The Levin-Graham Amendment passed along with it, and it amounts to a license to use coercive techniques, particularly on detainees at Guantanamo. What's wrong with Carl Levin, anyway? (Also: Federal Judge Calls DEA's View of Hemp 'Asinine'.)
Bob Novak says 
It's the darkest day of the year, and we need bright lights and warmth and smiles. So happy Solstice, boys and girls.
