This business of speculating about what the President or Congress or the Democrats or Progressives must do to regain lost ground seems to be spinning wheels. There are a lot of reasons why Democrats lost the House in the midterms. Some of them have to do with the never-ending spin machine; others with disappointment at how some of the major policy sausage was made; still others with disillusionment and disconnection in general.

Howie Klein pointed me over to this article at The Nation by Danny Goldberg, chairman/CEO of Artemis Records and a board member of Rock the Vote. It struck home with me, and I think it will with you, too, no matter what your opinion of our current political dilemma is.

Key quotes:

Almost half of the public is either misinformed or subject to unanswered right wing narratives. If I believed that there was a chance of Sharia law being imposed in the United States I too would be gravely concerned. If I believed that most Europeans and Canadians had inferior health care to that of average Americans, I too would be against health care reform. If I believed that man-made global warning did not exist or that there were nothing we could do about it and that environmental efforts were responsible for unemployment I’d be against cap and trade.

[...]

Unless and until progressives change the mind sets of the tens of millions of people who believe right-wing mythology, who never read the New York Times or listen to NPR, who never watch any TV news other than Fox, future elections will have disappointing results for progressives regardless of who is in the White House.

To which my first reaction was...easier said than done. But Goldberg doesn't stop with that indictment. He very clearly articulates solutions, including this one:

Since Obama’s election, many pundits have quoted Franklin D. Roosevelt’s injunction of “make me do it” to labor leaders who came to The White House in the nineteen-thirties with an agenda. The way to “make” elected officials do things, is not simply to beat up on the administration but to change and mobilize public opinion.

Go read it. It's inspiring.

It's an amazing thing to see supposedly serious Republican pundits insist that the option of bombing Iran to stop its nuclear weapons program is not a partisan idea. No, it will only "help" President Obama's foreign policy platform of nonproliferation and multi-national engagement. That's what Eliott Abrams, former deputy national security advisor to GW Bush, would like us to believe, in this continuing series in The Atlantic on the dialogue that started with Jeffrey Goldberg's suggestion that Israel will bomb Iran, if the U.S. government doesn't get there first.

Jeffrey quotes Denis McDonough on the "serious threat to the global nonproliferation regime," but this is an understatement. If Iran acquires a nuclear weapon during his tenure, Obama would -- in his own eyes -- see the UN Security Council's resolutions made a mockery, the International Atomic Energy Agency transformed into a joke, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty come to an end. Multilateralism a la Obama would be finished, for Iran would have proved the "international community" to be toothless or non-existent. So if the president means what he has repeatedly said about world affairs, what is at stake is whether he leaves a legacy of disaster -- again, in his own eyes. In my eyes, he would be right in so concluding: the real issue in the Middle East today is whether we, the United States, will remain "top country" in the region or will allow Iran to claim some form of hegemony.

The political side of all this is equally plain. Obama will, by all accounts, suffer a tremendous setback in November and may well be defeated in 2012. Should Iran acquire the Bomb in the next two years -- the timetable Jeffrey suggests -- Republicans will have an even stronger case that Obama has weakened our national security. The Obama who had struck Iran and destroyed its nuclear program would be a far stronger candidate, and perhaps an unbeatable one. Now, from my perspective that is no reason to stop Iran's nuclear program, but I'm a Republican.

I want to quickly slide past the disingenuous "hey, Obama would be smart if he acted like a Republican" tone of the article - it's insultingly transparent, but hey, he's a Republican. The Atlantic already has a response to Abrams' idea that bombing Iran would boost Obama's re-election odds (not a hard argument to make). And certainly the QDR 2010 and the QDR independent panel's reports reflect the position that Dems also reinforce the US" super-cop" role. I want to comment on the amazing idea that, if Iran were to develop a nuclear bomb years from now, this reflects a failure of the non-proliferation regime and the United Nations, and would render the idea of multi-nationalism "toothless or non-existent." It perhaps goes to the Republican idea that international engagement is a waste of time, that if the United States does anything on the world stage, the rest of the world will follow.

Continue reading »

Paul Krugman discusses what he calls "the pundit delusion," in which pundits believe the day-to-day inside baseball (the stuff they love to endlessly recycle) is what determines the fate of the administration, when it really comes down to how well people are doing economically:

What should Mr. Obama have done? Some political analysts, like Charlie Cook, say that he made a mistake by pursuing health reform, that he should have focused on the economy. As far as I can tell, however, these analysts aren’t talking about pursuing different policies — they’re saying that he should have talked more about the subject. But what matters is actual economic results.

The best way for Mr. Obama to have avoided an electoral setback this fall would have been enacting a stimulus that matched the scale of the economic crisis. Obviously, he didn’t do that. Maybe he couldn’t have passed an adequate-sized plan, but the fact is that he didn’t even try. True, senior economic officials reportedly downplayed the need for a really big effort, in effect overruling their staff; but it’s also clear that political advisers believed that a smaller package would get more friendly headlines, and that the administration would look better if it won its first big Congressional test.

In short, it looks as if the administration itself was taken in by the pundit delusion, focusing on how its policies would play in the news rather than on their actual impact on the economy.

Republicans, by the way, seem less susceptible to this delusion. Since Mr. Obama took office, they have engaged in relentless obstruction, obviously unworried about how their actions would look or be reported. And it’s working: by blocking Democratic efforts to alleviate the economy’s woes, the G.O.P. is helping its chances of a big victory in November.

Can Mr. Obama do anything in the time that remains? Midterm elections, where turnout is crucial, aren’t quite like presidential elections, where the economy is all. Mr. Obama’s best hope at this point is to close the “enthusiasm gap” by taking strong stands that motivate Democrats to come out and vote. But I don’t expect to see that happen.

What I expect, instead, if and when the midterms go badly, is that the usual suspects will say that it was because Mr. Obama was too liberal — when his real mistake was doing too little to create jobs.

Not even Washington, Lincoln and the Constitution could save him. Tea Party candidate Rick Barber went down in flames to challenger Martha Roby 61-39%.

At what point does the media admit they're hyping beating a dead horse? The tea party's over. It's time for Republicans to admit they are the tea party and the tea party is them, and move on.

Every time I hear hype about how the Tea Party is gaining strength, I remember that it's July and last year they were amusing to pundits for a couple of months.

They're not a force in this election cycle. Just full of fight. And lies.

Ken Sain

Another “secret” document from the British government has found its way into the press, this one revealing that the United States lied to Great Britain when it offered assurances it was not using napalm-like firebombs in the Iraq war.

But Mr Ingram admitted to the Labour MP Harry Cohen in a private letter obtained by The Independent that he had inadvertently misled Parliament because he had been misinformed by the US. “The US confirmed to my officials that they had not used MK77s in Iraq at any time and this was the basis of my response to you,” he told Mr Cohen. “I regret to say that I have since discovered that this is not the case and must now correct the position.”

Mr Ingram said 30 MK77 firebombs were used by the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in the invasion of Iraq between 31 March and 2 April 2003. They were used against military targets “away from civilian targets”, he said. This avoids breaching the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), which permits their use only against military targets.

Britain, which has no stockpiles of the weapons, ratified the convention, but the US did not.

A half-dozen Downing Street Memos have been released to the media and now this. Either someone in the British government is out to destroy the Bush administration, or they have no idea about security and are unable to protect state secrets in that country. You decide which you want to believe.
 

More Liars Than Liberals       Daily Howler

Chris Matthews might just as well have been reporting from Neptune. Last week, Matthews wondered why our Sunday shows never have “strong, articulate voices of the working person, the working family.” But let’s face it, Matthews was faking again; he knew the answer to his question. Our Sunday programs exit to serve those Millionaire Pundit Values—the foppish values of people like Matthews—and no liberal or working-class voice need apply. Indeed, Matthews has a Sunday show himself, and each week he assembles a Standard Panel—a group of foppish pundit script-readers among whom there will be no real liberals. Just as Bill Moyers explained (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 6/15/05), Matthews gathers four members of the press corps “establishment” (the press corps “elite”). and they proceed to show the world how clueless and scripted—how inbred—they are. Indeed, as we saw from the Chris Matthews Show just last week, there will normally be more liars than liberals when these foppish pundit groups meet. But before we get to one panelist’s lies, let’s take a fuller look at the views of our standard Sunday pundits. 
A half-dozen Downing Street Memos have been released to the media and now this. Either someone in the British government is out to destroy the Bush administration, or they have no idea about security and are unable to protect state secrets in that country. You decide which you want to believe.

Mother Jones: In 2008, BP touted it's new tech to measure oil flow. This may be why it stopped working

the glttering eye: Making excuses

cab drollery: Balance

The Reaction: Belgium on the brink: Parliamentary elections could lead to a split

World-O-Crap: Physician, Heal Thyself

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: Beck promotes book of Nazi sympathizer...Make it stop, please...The siege of Helen...Just shoot me...MoDo misunderstands irony, writing...LA Times employs a full-time wingnut...MSM ignores blogger's work...Cold water on their meme...Lie and Spin

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John Amato and I frequently Monday morning quarterback the news shows and the pundits invited on to represent the "left" side of the conversation. Most of the time, I'll admit, we're puzzled by how that particular person is considered on the left (Joke Line, I'm looking at you). John has done some media training and I'm just dipping my toes into the media appearances (you can hear my segment discussing the Sunday shows on The Nicole Sandler Show live every Monday at www.radioornot.com or check out the podcasts) because we both feel so passionately that we need strong, unapologetic liberal voices out there to pierce through the right wing noise.

So I'm thrilled that we're seeing high visibility liberals like Arianna Huffington and Markos Moulitsas on This Week on a semi-regular basis. For years, it wouldn't have happened.

But after watching this clip, the substance of which Heather discussed on Sunday, I want to speak to a fatal flaw in appearances like Arianna's and Markos's.

As I expected, both of them did their homework and were armed with facts to support their side. That's what we do: we present facts and hope that the other side will observe the rules of debate. But look who they were debating. Do you honestly think that Liz Cheney is going to argue fairly? Of course not. She lies right in the faces of Markos and Arianna (and more importantly, the viewer who may not have those facts in hand) when she says it's absolutely not true that Halliburton was fined millions of dollars for defrauding the federal government. Note how Arianna laughingly says she can't wait for Politifact (a supposedly non-partisan fact-check organization through the St Petersburg Times) for their verdict on her factual accuracy. As of this writing, more than 36 hours from the broadcast, and Politifact has remained suspiciously silent on Liz Cheney, but only too happy to go after Markos for a slip of the tongue that he immediately acknowledged afterward.

So clearly, having the grasp of the facts and/or counting on the anchor/fact check organization to expect truthfulness from their guests doesn't work. Nor does expecting Liz Cheney and George Will to be fair, and not dismissive, as they trot out the strawman that liberals even blame the demise of the Gore marriage on Bush, something Liz Cheney thinks she read on Daily Kos. All snide insinuations to dismiss, belittle and render non-credible everything else they say.

Well, liberals, let me tell you right now: It's time to put away those Marquess of Queensbury rules. Stop smiling as they lie to your face. But don't get caught in some distraction (the last vestige of a Republican scoundrel: focus on some picayune aspect and steer the conversation away from anything of substance for which they have no defense). Keep hold of your head, your calm and your facts and cut them off at the knees, rhetorically speaking.

There's no reason, for example, why Liz "Spawn of Satan" Cheney should have any credibility to appear on these shows. She is a veteran of an administration widely considered the worst in modern history and of the department that pushed a foreign policy that has failed us, at the cost of thousands of American deaths, tens of thousands of devastating injuries and one trillion dollars of American taxpayer money. Her latest gig is at the head of a think tank formed with another neo-conservative (Bill "I'm always wrong" Kristol) to push a failed foreign policy that has been soundly rejected by the American people and to throw as much crap at our current president to see what sticks. That's it: she is on TV to push for more destruction. Why the hell aren't we impeaching her credibility by pointing out this FACTUAL information?

C'mon, Markos and Arianna, she's done nothing to earn your (or the audience's) respect. She feels no compunction about belittling you on air. Stop being polite. Be honest. And make that torture-apologist, war-mongering shrew and her partisan-motivated propaganda talking points radioactive on these shows.

The Right Is Wrong and Small As Well

With every national poll (83% opposed) condemning government interference in the Terry Shiavo matter you would think by the immense media presence of supporting talking heads that the reverse was actually true. In fact, no case in recent memory (possibly Elian Gonzales) has demonstrated the enormousimbalance between the vocal pundits of the lunatic fringe right wing and their actual lack of support bymainstream Americans.

All week long, pundit after pundit from the Right, followed politician after politician from the Right, by inundating the national media with twisted rationale and downright lies and smears of the innocent people just doing the civic jobs in a fully functioning Democracy. From one court loss to the next, the panicking pubescent pundits of the Right leaped from one cable news show to the next. An uninformed observer might believe by viewing these manic media performances that this group represented a gigantic swath of the voting populace in America. But when the dark star dust settled, there was simply no one home. In fact, no poll number in the recent history of Red State/Blue State divisive battles has reached as high as the 80% region. Clearly, the American people have spoken.

The problem is, the lunatic fringe on the right couldn't care less.

emailed by Mark G

Checks and Balances and the "F-Word"

via SeeingtheForest

Is there enough going on to make you nervous yet? The Vice President of the United States was the keynote speaker at a conference where other speakers called for "a new McCarthyism" to bring "terror" to intellectuals, saying "let's oppress them [liberals]," and "the entire Harvard faculty" are "traitors." A Congressman said, "America's Operation Iraqi Freedom is still producing shock and awe, this time among the blame-America-first crowd," ? Then he said, "We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and facilities to make them inside Iraq."

Meanwhile, right-wing commentators talk about killing American journalists, their premier blogs talk about former president Carter as being on the side of the enemy and leftists have "seamlessly taken up the cause of Islamic fascism". I have provided only afew examples.

When you hear threatening talk like this,in thecompany of the country's leadership, you know that whatever comesnext isn't going to be pleasant. Things do not appear to be heading in agood direction at all. If you have been following this in the blogs, youknow that more and more people are becomming concerned that the Right'srhetoric is growing ever more violent and totalitarian. Serious peoplehave started referring tothe"f-word." (See alsohere,here,here,here and manyother places.)

Oliver Williswrites,

You cannot deal with that sort of ideology in any sort ofaccomodationist manner. Liberals need to understand this, from Democraticsenators in Washington who still ? still ? refuse to vote theirconscience out of some sense of loyalty to a long-dead notion of civilityin Washington, to progressive pundits who actually believe that theirright-wing counterparts in the nation's media are actually there for agive-and-take rather than a chance to paint everyone to the left of JoeLieberman as a terrorist sympathizer. . I have provided only a few examples.

When you hear threatening talk like this, in the company of the country's leadership, you know that whatever comes next isn't going to be pleasant. Things do not appear to be heading in a good direction at all. If you have been following this in the blogs, you know that more and more people are becomming concerned that the Right's rhetoric is growing ever more violent and totalitarian. Serious people have started referring to the "f-word." (See also here, here, here, here and many other places.) read on

Many right-wing pundits like Byron York have been defending Arizona's new immigration law by saying that there is a great deal of case law that deals with 'reasonable suspicion,' so what's all the fuss?

Anonymous Liberal writes a nice piece that strips their arguments to the bone.

Ramesh Ponnuru makes a similar point, arguing that critics "ignore the fact that the 'reasonable suspicion' standard already exists in case law and is not the invention of the Arizona statute." He writes that "[s]peeding and being Hispanic wouldn't be enough to do it."

This is true, but it ignores some important realities. I completely agree that a judge would interpret "reasonable suspicion" in this context very narrowly. A situation like the one described by York, where the circumstances strongly point toward human smuggling, is just about the only situation I can imagine that would survive judicial scrutiny. Certainly looking Mexican or speaking Spanish would not be enough.

The problem with this logic, however, is that it's hard to see how these decisions will be subjected to judicial review. The reason there is extensive case law interpreting what "reasonable suspicion" means is because defense attorneys routinely move to suppress any evidence procured by way of an illegal stop or frisk, at which point the police must articulate the basis of their reasonable suspicion. If they can't do so to the judge's satisfaction, the evidence is suppressed and the charges are often dismissed. Police quickly learn to follow the rules if they want their charges to stick.

In the immigration context, however, there is no evidence to suppress. Defense attorneys will not have an obvious mechanism for contesting the reasonability of the request for documentation. I can see an occasional civil rights complaint filed by the ACLU or a similar group, but I don't see what circumstances would lead to any kind of routine judicial review of these decisions. The police will largely be on the honor system.

And that's why this law is so problematic. It a recipe for police abuse, for unchecked racial profiling. And even if the police generally do a good job of controlling themselves, the mere spectre of such abuse will only drive the undocumented community farther underground. There will be no cooperation with the police. No reporting of crimes. More fleeing the scene of accidents. More children not getting medical care because their parents are afraid to take them to the hospital. It's just really bad policy.

it's tough to win when there's no evidence to suppress, I confess. (Bad rhyme) A judge is almost always going to side with a police officer except when there's insurmountable evidence to support your claim. In these situations that's never going to happen.

Have you ever been to court on a traffic ticket after you dispute it? You might be completely right and did stop at that red light or signaled before you made that right hand turn, but as long as the officer shows up to court---you're guilty as charged.