In which I ask Michael Crowley if he remembers Canditate Obama's health care plan

by Stuart Zechman

At Swampland, Michael Crowley casually makes the case for the PPACA, and I respond in commentary, as reprinted below:

Michael Crowley,

You write:

"The ongoing publicity around those new measures--and the tangible changes in many Americans' lives-- might warm the public to Obamacare."

What many of us movement liberals particularly resent is the tiny population of beneficiaries being trotted out like public relations hostages by the Administration and this policy's (mostly partisan) supporters, with the message being "See? Vote for Democrats, or these poor, sick folks get it!"

Health care reform was never supposed to be about charity, about welfare, about all of us middle-class people putting aside our selfish concerns and donating to the unfortunate, worst-case scenario victims of the system that doesn't work for any of us (except the wealthiest).

Moving the goal-posts in Bush/Iraq fashion only serves to underscore the failure of this policy; we're not so completely stupid out here that we don't recognize a public relations strategy when we see it.

We also happen to have memories that are longer than mosquitoes' and the political press corps', Michael Crowley.

We remember when the President campaigned against the individual mandate he then advocated and signed into law, declaring:

OBAMA: "Let’s break down what she really means by a mandate. What’s meant by a mandate is that the government is forcing people to buy health insurance and so she’s suggesting a parent is not going to buy health insurance for themselves if they can afford it. Now, my belief is that most parents will choose to get health care for themselves and we make it affordable.

Here’s the concern. If you haven’t made it affordable, how are you going to enforce a mandate. I mean, if a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house. The reason they don’t buy a house is they don’t have the money. And so, our focus has been on reducing costs, making it available. I am confident if people have a chance to buy high-quality health care that is affordable, they will do so."

Do you, Michael Crowley? Does your profession remember? We do.

We also remember when the President campaigned on giving people a choice between the broken, expensive, denial-based system in which they're currently trapped, and a new, parallel system that didn't share the same incentives as the stock-price driven, for-profit private insurance cartels:

Specifically, the Obama plan will: (1) establish a new public insurance program, available to Americans who neither qualify for Medicaid or SCHIP nor have access to insurance through their employers, as well as to small businesses that want to offer insurance to their employees; (2) create a National Health Insurance Exchange to help Americans and businesses that want to purchase private health insurance directly...

We remember, because we were so enthused about the prospect of real change coming to compete with a health care system whose incentives are so at odds with consumers' interests. We were enthused because the Obama plan was so specific in its promised actions:

1. OBAMA’S PLAN TO COVER THE UNINSURED. Obama will make available a new national health plan which will give individuals the choice to buy affordable health coverage that is similar to the plan available to federal employees.The new public plan will be open to individuals without access to group coverage through their workplace or current public programs. It will also be available to people who are self-employed and small businesses that want to offer insurance to their employees.

The plan will have the following features:

-- Comprehensive benefits. The benefit package will be similar to that offered through the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), the program through which Members of Congress get their own health care. The new public plan will include coverage of all essential medical services...

-- Subsidies. Individuals and families who do not qualify for Medicaid or SCHIP but still need assistance will receive income-related federal subsidies to keep health insurance premiums affordable. They can use the subsidy to buy into the new public plan or purchase a private health care plan.

-- Easy enrollment. The new public plan will be simple to enroll in and provide ready access to coverage.

-- Portability and choice. Participants in the new public plan and the National Health Insurance Exchange (see below) will be able to move from job to job without changing or jeopardizing their health care coverage.

-- Quality and efficiency. Participating hospitals and providers that participate in the new public plan will be required to collect and report data to ensure that standards for health care quality, health information technology and administration are being met.

The whole idea was to construct for the benefit of everyone a new system designed to compete at a national level with the old, broken one, not to hand out medical welfare with one hand, and guaranteed profits with the other.

Do you remember, Michael Crowley? Has your profession forgotten? We haven't.

Remember the pre-campaign speeches against lobbyist access, secret deals and corrupting negotiations with powerful interests?

TOPIC: Ethics & Lobbying Reform, January 26, 2006

Lobbying Reform Summit, National Press Club Washington, DC

OBAMA: ...people shouldn't lump together those of us who have to raise funds to run campaigns but do so in a legal and ethical way with those who invite lobbyists in to write bad legislation. Those aren't equivalent, and we're not being partisan by pointing that out.

...when big oil companies are invited into the White House for secret energy meetings, it's no wonder they end up with billions...

When a Committee Chairman negotiates a Medicare bill at the same time he's negotiating for a job as the drug industry's lobbyist, it's hardly a surprise when that industry gets taxpayer-funded giveaways in the same bill that forbids seniors from bargaining for better drug prices.

In 2004, over $2.1 billion was spent lobbying Congress. That amounts to over $4.8 million per Member of Congress. $4.8 million per member so that oil companies can still run our energy policy and pharmaceutical companies can still raise our drug prices and special interests can still waste our tax dollars on pet projects.

See, one of the reasons why lobbyists...and their allies in Congress have been able to manipulate the system is because most of their backroom deals are done in secret. Just the other day, we heard that because of pressure from health care industry lobbyists, Republican negotiators met behind closed doors and changed a budget bill to provide a $22 billion giveaway to HMOs...

This is an outrage...

Do you remember, Michael Crowley? Can your profession contrast this kind of campaigning with the corrupt process that actually transpired? We can.

Based on these fabricated claims, Michael Crowley, most movement liberals had very little idea that the system overhaul proposed by Obama would turn into a Third Way think tank's dream legislation.

We remember this broken promise in particular:

Remarks of Senator Barack Obama: A Change We Can Believe In

Spartanburg, SC | November 03, 2007

...this is also a moment of great promise. It's a chance to turn the page by offering the American people a fundamentally different choice in 2008 - not just in the policies we offer, but in the kind of leadership we offer. It's a chance to come together and finally solve the challenges that were made worse by George Bush, but existed long before he took office - challenges like health care...

That's how I'll pass a universal health care bill that allows every American to get the same kind of health care that members of Congress get for themselves and cuts every family's premiums by up to $2500.

That is the change that's possible in this election. That is the moment I want to seize as President. And I ask you all to join me in this journey. Thank you."

Well, Michael Crowley?

Do you remember the President campaigning on an openly-negotiated, transparently-constructed, parallel health care system that lowers prices through national economies of scale, that allows every American to get the same benefits that Congress enjoys, and cuts every family's yearly premiums by $2500?

Do you remember a liberal health care policy being campaigned upon by this President, Michael Crowley?

The kind of system we movement liberals propose would do exactly those things, because we're not devoted to a political ideology that says we can't look to Germany or France, Canada or Japan --all the countries in the First World who do health care better and cheaper than we do-- for solutions. We're neither ideologically devoted to a "uniquely American solution," nor to guaranteeing private profits, unlike the President who appeared to us in office after the 2008 campaign was over.

The kind of system we got was the DLC's long-proposed "reforms", not liberal policy:

DLC | Key Document | August 1, 2000
The Hyde Park Declaration: A Statement of Principles and a Policy Agenda for the 21st Century

3. Promote Universal Access and Quality in Health Care

That more than 40 million Americans lack health insurance is one of our society's most glaring inequities. Lack of insurance jeopardizes the health of disadvantaged Americans and also imposes high costs on everyone else when the uninsured lack preventive care and get treatment from emergency rooms. Washington provides a tax subsidy for insurance for Americans who get coverage from their employers but offers nothing to workers who don't have job-based coverage.

Markets alone cannot assure universal access to health coverage. Government should enable all low-income families to buy health insurance. Individuals must take responsibility for insuring themselves and their families whether or not they qualify for public assistance.

Finally, to help promote higher quality in health care for all Americans, we need reliable information on the quality of health care delivered by health plans and providers; a "patient's bill of rights" that ensures access to medically necessary care; and a system in which private health plans compete on the basis of quality as well as cost.

Goals for 2010

# Reduce the number of uninsured Americans by two-thirds through tax credits, purchasing pools, and other means.

# Create a system of reliable "report cards" on the quality of care delivered by health plans and providers.

Public disappointment with the legislation currently being re-sold to us is not merely about the obviously false claims about what the new system would do, it's about what kind of new system we would have.

So, we remember, Michael Crowley, we remember the new system, the change that was held out to us, the promise of something fundamentally better than what we know is going to hell beneath our feet.

It's why we're offended when images of health care hostages are waved in our faces as a defense against the indefensible, indisputable fact that we were sold a counterfeit bill of goods in 2008. It's not that we didn't "get everything we wanted," it's that we got something we know won't work, and now we're being told that these unfortunate, sick people will die, if we try to hold those responsible accountable for their promises and claims. It's disgusting, it's cynical, and it certainly isn't change we can believe in --or that even works.

Does your profession remember? Is it capable of memories not provided for it by professional public relations campaigns?

Do you remember, Michael Crowley?

We do.

Imagine, if you will....

Imagine, if you will....

by Stuart Zechman

Imagine, if you will, that the only food that people have to eat comes
from McDonald's.

Now imagine that a strange phenomenon occurs, in which it is noticed (but, oddly, not widely reported) that Americans on the Canadian border seem to stream across into Canada to buy their Big Macs

It is discovered, and the information spreads through word of mouth on the internet, that a Big Mac in Grand Forks, North Dakota costs $7.40, but --incredibly-- McDonald's sells that same Big Mac in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada for $3.90.

Many people continue not to notice this strange situation. After all, most people get their information about McDonald's from the television commercials McDonald's airs, and they don't advertise their Canadian prices during Meet The Press, they advertise their "6 Dollar Menu!" specials. A huge population of Americans don't live near the Canadian border, and so remain unaware that they pay so much more than Canadians for the same sandwich. And, again, somehow these disturbing facts don't regularly make it into newspapers, magazines and television shows that depend on McDonald's for the advertising dollars for which they're starting to starve.

But, more and more, word spreads via new communications technologies that this is the case. Economic data that previously sat in dusty reports waiting for reporters to notice, and publishers to publish, is instantaneously available to anyone online. It is by this new channel that the shocking information starts to come out: the price that McDonald's charges for Big Macs in the United States is almost twice that of every other country that has McDonald's restaurants

The data shows that it's not just Canada. A Big Mac in Switzerland costs $4.41, in France it's $3.61, in Germany it's $3.58, in the UK it's $2.99, in Italy it's $2.68, in Spain it's $2.67, and --unbelievably-- in Japan it's only $2.58 for the same Big Mac.

What's different about these countries?

Lots of things, but one thing they also have in common is that their governments have special ministries set up to negotiate the price of a Big Mac with McDonald's every few years for the entire nation of tens and tens of millions of people.

The reason that the price of a Big Mac in Japan is so low is that their government has decided how much a Big Mac should cost, and told McDonald's that, if they don't like it, the Japanese government will fund a project to make their own McDonald's, complete with Golden Arches and Special Sauce, and that they're pretty confident they can make Big Macs, if they had to. Plus, they don't really respect McDonald's "worldwide patents" on Big Macs. They just don't care. So McDonald's takes the deal, otherwise they'll lose the money, and they know that the Japanese are not f*cking around.

So now it comes time in the United States to deal with the fact that McDonald's expenditures are taking up, like over 16% of the nation's wealth, because we're overpaying for Big Macs, and as the price stays low in other countries, McDonald's keeps raising the prices here to compensate and make more profits. Gradually, and then suddenly, it's getting ridiculous...and scary.  Nobody can continue to bankrupt themselves paying for Big Macs, and so something must be done. The Federal government's "Medi-Mac" program, which feeds people over 65, is going broke in ten years at a desperate pace.

What does the government of the United States do?

Well, they ask economists. The economists put up big, long, complex math equations with Greek letters in them up on white boards and Power Point presentations, and they explain what the symbols mean to government officials.

One of these symbols is for the price of Big Macs, one is for the number of people who need Big Macs, and one is for the number of Big Macs. Then they draw a graph of what that equation looks like, just like kids are forced to do in algebra class. The graph radically curves upwards, like the trajectory if you shot a balloon out of a cannon.

These economists come from different schools of economic theory, so some economists say "Set the price of Big Macs lower, then run the equation!" Unfortunately, the government officials say "We can't do that! That's off the table! You're fired. Somebody shut them up!"

Other economists, though, say "Set the number of people lower! Now run the equation.", and the officials say "Sure. Now the graph looks like a cannon shot of a balloon that's got a slow leak. Great!".

The problem is that the government officials are trying to make a new Federal program called "Fast Food Reform" that actually increases the amount of people who can buy Big Macs a little bit, because those poor folks are going to get a tax break at the end of the year for all of the Big Macs they buy.

So these officials go back to the economists, and say "We've got a problem here. How do we get that number of people who need Big Macs lower again, so the graph doesn't go back to exploding?" These helpful economists say "Well, why don't you tax some of the people who buy Big Macs now? Then the resulting decrease will offset the increase you're planning by a bit. That will keep the people who need Big Macs number more or less the same!"

Did you get that?

These economists can "bend the cost curve" on that graph of Big Mac spending, if they can offset the number of new Big Mac buyers with those who are taxed, and therefore can buy less. How much will the graph change? Not much, but enough so that that the government officials can say that it's "historic legislation".

Everybody in Washington goes home happy, job well done, live to fight another day. The economists, in particular, are pleased with their equations and graphs. Science! $700,000 in US Dept. of Health and Human Services research money! Science.

Meanwhile, back in Grand Forks, North Dakota, people hear grand statements about "bending the cost curve" and "historic" and "31 million people now able to buy Big Macs", and get increasingly irritated --and desperate. They still have to go to Winnipeg to buy low-cost Big Macs, and they don't understand why they can't just go to Walmart, and get them cheap there.

They also know that, in addition to having to go to Canada to get McDonald's food, they're also paying taxes to supply revenue for the government's "Medi-Mac" program, and they know that the Feds aren't paying Canadian prices for that, so they're getting soaked no matter what. They hate the political party in charge of Washington that did this to them. Their incumbent Senator from that party actually declines to run for office again. This scenario plays out similarly in many other states, just with different degrees of anger and disappointment. The price of a Big Mac in the United States begins to climb skyward to $8.00, $9.50, $15.90, $21.20, just like a cannon shooting a leaky hot-air balloon at the horizon.

Many middle class people who used to be able to afford a Big Mac start to starve.

That's the story of this Health Care Reform legislation, if it were about Big Macs instead of health care, and McDonald's instead of Pfizer.

I hope that you all enjoyed this little novella. 18 and over,
entertainment purposes only.

Babel

BABEL
by CMike

Since World War II scores of front rank politicians, business leaders, and economists have championed globalization. John Foster Dulles, Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz and Robert Rubin are some of the American cabinet secretaries who have promoted the transnational economic rights of capital. Bush 41 deserves a special mention for his role in advancing globalization. Perhaps the leading drum major for the march to globalization over the years has been banker and oil fortune heir David Rockefeller. Of course, all these folks have insisted that capitalism, local and global, is a great boon to mankind and is freeing from want hundreds of millions; billions of people.

That's one way to look at it. State of the World Forum President Jim Garrison has an alternative view. He is quoted in Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (pp. 199-200):

Taken cumulatively, the integration of the world as a whole, particularly in terms of economic globalization and the mythic qualities of "free market" capitalism, represents a veritable "empire" in its own right...

No nation on earth has been able to resist the compelling magnetism of globalization. Few have been able to escape the "structural adjustments" and "conditionalities" of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, or the arbitrations of the World Trade Organization, those international financial institutions that, however inadequate, still determine what economic globalization means, what the rules are, and who is rewarded for submission and punished for infractions.

Such is the power of globalization that within our lifetime we are likely to see the integration, even if unevenly, of all national economies in the world into a single global, free market system.

Perkins explains the World Bank makes loans to developing nations with the monies going directly to transnational corporations to carry out gargantuan infrastructure projects. The developing nations are thereby both integrated into the world economy and hopelessly buried in debt, thereafter to be subject to the edicts of the IMF.

The IMF then requires the governments of those debt ridden countries to adopt severe austerity policies including the suspension of social welfare expenditures and the selling off of their resources for pennies on the market value dollar. Of course, that could never happen here in the U. S. of A.. I mean centrist economists would be giving us a heads up about that for sure, right?

Knock, knock.
Who's there?
I'm from the IMF and I'm here to help.

IMF Finally Knocks on Uncle Sam's Door
David Hurst
June 30, 2008


Der Spiegel wrote that the IMF had "informed" Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke of plans that would have been unheard of in the past: a general examination of the US financial system. The IMF's board of directors has ruled that a so-called Financial Sector Assessment Program is to be carried out in the US.

[snip]

Der Spiegel reports that the IMF is threatening to seriously study the accounts of America, something President George Bush is determined to prevent at least while he is in the White House, informing the IMF that it can begin its investigation but cannot complete it until he leaves office.

[snip]

Under its by-laws, the IMF is charged with the supervision of the international monetary system. About two-thirds of IMF members - but never the US - have already endured this painful procedure...

We're becoming colonials once again, this time accepting of "taxation without representation."

Dr. Ravi Batra, who has predicted imminent economic calamity several times during the last twenty years, is in "I told you so" mode these days.

Business journalist Gretchen Morgenson has warned for years about the ethical conflicts of financial analysts associated with brokerage houses, the senselessness of some of those large compensation packages, and episodes of the break down of responsible corporate board governance from the pages of the New York Times.

In her recent article about the unfolding Fannie Mae; Freddie Mac crisis, Morgenson explains those two publicly traded, government-sponsored enterprises (GSE) have asset portfolios of $5 trillion and reminds the reader both were fined for accounting irregularities in recent years (Fannie to the tune of $400 million in 2004 and Freddie for the bargain sanction of $125 million in 2003). Morgenson cites a Bridgewater Associates estimate that losses from the eighteen month old economy wide "credit crisis" are growing and "might amount to $1.6 trillion when all is said and done."

Then there are our serious academics, centrists like Brad DeLong who remain unshaken in their belief that the road to recovery is but a few regulatory tweaks and maybe a health care program away. Centrist economists hold onto a few basic assumptions; that the equities market is fairly priced not just in a definitional sense but because prices are determined by the combined wisdom of hundreds of thousands of investors; that a brilliant employee can create great wealth for a company but might not, what, muster the energy to do so for a mere million or two dollars a year; that what ails the American economy is, in part, a mid thirty percent top income tax bracket that should be nearer to the forty percent level; and that our workers need more education and training (though it is not clear what it would be economically useful for them to learn). Understanding the big picture as they do, tenured centrist academics adjudge that the costs of globalization being borne by working class Americans are being compensated in full by the gains being made by the deserving workers in the developing world and by the international good will global trade creates.

DeLong warns against making sweeping changes to our economic system because such changes lead to unpredictable consequences likely to leave us worse off; better that any changes be made incrementally.

He is willing to "carry water" for the latest Treasury Secretary from Goldman Sachs and the current Fed Chairman because they are quite expert at their jobs. (Alan Greenspan also was seen as quite the expert while he was serving as Fed Chairman -- looking back, some of his mistakes are starting to glare.)

Secretary Paulson and Chairman Bernanke are crisis management specialists who plan in secret and speak without too much clarity. Paulson came up through the ranks at Goldman Sachs as an innovator and quick thinking trader of financial instruments. Bernanke is an academic who has made a study of the monetary causes of The '29 Crash and The Great Depression. They both know how to keep things going...one calendar quarter at a time; on recent occasions, one weekend at a time. They exude a confidence that says, if left to their own designs, they will keep most of the trains running.

Of course, there are more profound critics of the system than the pessimistic market watchers mentioned earlier in this piece. Their criticism is not about an inevitable boom-bust cycle. Rather, in a post-Keynesian world they are concerned about the status quo the capitalist class is trying create. Noam Chomsky, "economic hit man" John Perkins and Canadians Naomi Klein and Joel Bakan, a law professor and author of "The Corporation," are four commentators who make their own observations along these lines. (Batra is too much of a market watcher to fit in here.) They see modern day corporatism as relentlessly anti-democratic and anti-humanitarian.

Air America's anti-globalist Thom Hartmann supports tariffs based on wage differentials, strong unions, trial lawyers, and single payer health care. MSNBC's anti-globalist Pat Buchanan explicitly supports Ravi Batra's version of protectionism and the sometimes primary season presidential candidate has warmed up to labor unions over the years. Buchanan still opposes those trial lawyers and government paid health care.

Guess what it is

Guess what it is

Blogosphere not as radical as pundits think

Blogosphere not as radical as pundits think

by Gene Lyons

It's no exaggeration to say that the establishment media's initial response to the blogosphere was panic. The idea of mere citizens talking back to the press was unsettling to Washington media celebrities. Pundits who'd exhibited no qualms about the sordid imaginings of, say, American Spectator or The Wall Street Journal editorial page recoiled in horror at online mockery. It was laugh-out-loud funny to see a Washington Post reporter infamous for treating Kenneth Starr's backstairs leaks like holy writ make a show of pretending that the now-defunct Web site mediawhoresonline. com had accused her of prostitution. How the system had always worked was this: They dished it out, everybody else had to take it. Now that many print and broadcast outlets feature Web logs - blogs - of their own, it's no longer common to hear the word "blogger" pronounced with utter disdain. Even so, competition from the groundlings still provokes unease. The latest high-minded worrier is a University of Chicago law professor and sometime politico, Cass R. Sunstein.

A Justice Department official during the Carter and Reagan administrations, Sunstein has written a book called "Republic. com 2. 0," essentially arguing that the Internet's "echo chamber effect" is responsible for increased political polarization and declining civility. In an interview with salon. com, he said that social scientists find that when people talk only to those who agree with them, their views become more extreme.

"I don't like that Rush Limbaugh listeners call themselves ‘ditto heads,'" Sunstein said. "It's funny, but it's kind of horrible. FOX News is a self-identified conservative outlet. The more extreme elements on the left treat their fellow citizens as if they're idiots, or as if they're rich people who don't care about anybody." A former colleague and friend of Barack Obama, he yearns for greater recognition of the truism that "that neither conservatives nor liberals have a monopoly on wisdom." No sentient person thinks they do. We're all a mix of conflicting opinions. I've had runins with what I call the anti-gravity left during my own inglorious career. (I'm pro-hunting, for example, which drives sentimentalists nuts. ) Today, however, I'd argue that Sunstein suggests a false dichotomy of little relevance to the current situation.

Among the blogs I read, there's no equivalent of the authoritarian impulses, intellectual dishonesty and rote chanting of the GOP party line that characterizes Limbaugh and his imitators on the right. Partly, that's because most are written by educated individuals who take pride in winning arguments without cheating, and to whom party orthodoxy is anathema. In a saner climate, many wouldn't be called left-wing at all.

How liberal do you have to be to defend habeas corpus, Fourth Amendment privacy rights and the rule of law, as Glenn Greenwald does on his "Unclaimed Territory" blog at salon. com ? A former constitutional litigator, Greenwald brings rare clarity and passion to political issues with legal overtones.

Here are the political blogs I read every day.

Duncan Black's "Eschaton" blog combines the analytical skills of a Ph. D. economist with the irreverent wit of a Philadelphia wiseacre. If you'd been reading Eschaton (or Paul Krugman ), you'd have seen the housing bubble and the sub-prime lending crisis coming.

Josh Marshall's Ph. D. is in history, but his talkingpointsmemo blog specializes in gritty, detailed reporting. Marshall was on top of the Jack Abramoff influencepeddling scandal from the get-go. Link through talkingpointsmemo to Greg Sergeant's saucy "Horse's Mouth" media criticism blog.

Bob Somerby's Daily Howler provides salty press criticism you'll read nowhere else. "Radicalized" by the Washington media's 2000 "War on Gore" (his Harvard roommate, Al Gore ), Bob can't abide liberal fecklessness about the way RNC-invented "narratives" dominate mainstream political coverage, and he doesn't mind offending "weak, worthless" liberal pundits who look the other way.

Eric Alterman's "Altercations" blog is another place to find impassioned disputation between the host and a wide variety of antagonists on everything from Israel's Likud party to the New York Mets. A Ph. D. in history, Alterman also is the biggest Bruce Springsteen fan on the Internet. "Slacker Fridays," when the inimitable Charles Pierce's scathing missives appear, is a must. Media Matters columnists Eric Boehlert and Jamison Foser's dissections of the vices and follies of the "mainstream" media advance a point of view similar to The Daily Howler's somewhat more politely. Kevin Drum (washingtonmonthly. com ) and the inimitable Digby (digbysblog. blogspot. com ), a writer of such analytical brilliance and prodigious output she shames the rest of us idlers, are two bloggers I never miss. Read around for a while, follow the links to related sites and you'll soon find your own favorites list. A celebrated editor once told me that reading the letters submitted for publication to his magazine had persuaded him that, contrary to media careerists in metropolitan enclaves, political intelligence and wisdom are scattered randomly across the American landscape. Thanks to the Internet, they no longer have to ask anybody's permission to speak out.

This article originally appeared in The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, here.

Hillary's record withstands 'character' attacks

by Gene Lyons


Maybe somebody ought to give Iowa waitress Anita Esterday a political TV talk show. She couldn't be any worse than, say, MSNBC's Tucker Carlson. Recently, the boyish pundit has been suggesting that there's something deeply weird about female voters who support Sen. Hillary Clinton because they'd like a woman president, although it's entirely reasonable for "married white men" to despise her "because she gives off the feeling that she despises them." Got that ? Women: dangerously irrational. Men: terrified of women. If you think that's an isolated example, tune in "Hardball." Now that hyperthyroidic host Chris Matthews has finally exhausted the topic of Clinton's troublesome laugh, he's recently focused several programs on her peculiarly "Chinese" manner of clapping her hands.

It's not just MSNBC's testosterone brigade that's gone all Gong Show. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd actually favorably cited somebody scolding "Hillary's callousness in dumping Socks, the beloved White House cat and bestselling author, on Bill's former secretary, Betty Currie."

Try to believe it: Clinton's daughter grows up and leaves home, so a friend adopts her cat. To Dowd, this epitomizes the candidate's "opportunism... her secrecy, her ruthlessness."

What's wrong with these people ? It's common to compare Washington's self-infatuated media celebrities to high school kids. But even high school was never like this. Adolescents normally try to conceal their neuroses. These jokers mistake them for insights.

But let's get back to Esterday of Oelwein, Iowa. She served Clinton a sandwich during her shift at the Maid-Rite restaurant. At a later campaign stop, Clinton talked about meeting a waitress, a single mother working two jobs, exactly the kind of person her candidacy's all about.

Yeah, they all say that. So anyway, National Public Radio reporters descended upon the Maid-Rite, where Esterday, although she didn't blame Clinton personally, complained that Clinton's entourage hadn't left anybody a tip. NPR broadcast the story, a classic "gotcha." The great champion of hard-working women was too cheap to leave a tip. Good for a halfdozen "Hardball" episodes or Dowd columns, minimum.

Except apparently it was false. A Clinton spokesman said that staffers had left a $ 100 tip on a $ 157 tab at the cash register. This will scarcely be credited by anybody who's worked in a restaurant, but it seems that the money never got to the waitresses. NPR's "gotcha" fell apart, as careful reporting would have established in the first place. Some stories are too good to check closely.

Contacted by The New York Times, Esterday was properly amazed.

"You people are really nuts," she said. "There's kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now - there's better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn't get a tip."

Amen to that. Indeed, it may be time to revise H. L. Mencken's immortal trope that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. True, scary numbers of people can't name their U. S. senators or locate Iran on a map. This leaves them vulnerable to shameless propaganda.

Today, it's the irresponsibility of Washington media celebrities that's most troubling. Consider Social Security, something that couldn't be more relevant to somebody like Anita Esterday. In 2005, Democrats defeated GOP schemes to privatize, i. e. hand over to the geniuses responsible for the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, the most successful social insurance program in American history.

So here came NBC's Tim Russert, doing his act at the recent Democratic presidential debate. Along with co-moderator Brian Williams, Russert's performance made it official: Among Beltway All-Stars, it's open season on Hillary Clinton. To the extent that rivals Barack Obama and John Edwards played along - and they did - they're fools.

There are many legitimate issues to debate - Clinton's vote for Joe Lieberman's saber-ratting Iran resolution, for example, or what many see as her excessively nuanced position on Iraq - without buying into these RNC-manufactured "character" issues. Grab the lead and it'll be your turn next, boys.

Regarding Social Security, the amiable Russert asked Clinton a question he said impinged on her "credibility." Supposedly, she'd told an AARP audience that she'd never raise taxes to augment the program and repeated herself to Russert in a New Hampshire debate, but was overheard telling an Iowa teacher that she'd consider it. "Why do you have one public position," Russert asked, "and one private position ?" Jamison Foser at mediamatters. org checked the transcripts. Guess what. Russert's accusatory query was factually false in every particular. Clinton's answers, public and private, have remained consistent: There is no Social Security "crisis." Any actuarial adjustments that may be needed should be considered only after "fiscal responsibility" has been restored. Then raising the tax limit of $ 97, 500 might be among them. She'd like a bipartisan commission. Several of the NBC stars' "character" attacks were similarly off target. Likely, they won't need Social Security. Likely you and Anita Esterday will. It's your democracy they're clowning with.

This article originally appeared in The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Politics, Sitcom-style

by Gene Lyons

(For some reason, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette chose not to publish Gene's column this week, so he passed it on to Moose & Squirrel to post. I'm reproducing it here as a back-up.)

It's rare that this column defends Robert Novak, so listen up. After his disgrace-ful conduct in the Plame affair, how the self-styled "Prince of Darkness" appears on TV without a bag over his head I cannot imagine. But Novak's getting heat from people pretending outrage at something he said on "Meet the Press" they'd rather not think about.

"Republicans are very pessimistic about 2008," Novak said. "When you talk to them off the record, they don't see how they can win this thing. And then they think for a minute, and only the Democratic Party...would say that, 'OK, this is the year either to have a woman or an African-American to break precedent, to do things the country has never done before.' And it gives the Republicans hope."

The normally excellent mediamatters.org website jumped all over host Tim Russert for not taking issue. But Novak merely stated the obvious. Any Democrat who doesn't realize that nominating Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama (or both) will start a political free-for-all of epic, near-psychotic proportions, must live in an imaginary United States not connected to the North American continent.

Winning that battle could be crucial to bringing the nation back to its democratic (with a small "d") senses. Deluding oneself that it'll be easy, however, is the surest way to fail. Pollsters know that many more people will claim to support minority candidates than actually do. Something Novak only implies is also true: the GOP holds losing cards on every major issue from Iraq to health care. Demonizing the Democratic nominee as unfit for office may provide their only chance of winning.

On cue, GOP sleaze merchant Floyd Brown and "Citizens United" have emerged from the shadows. He and embittered political consultant Dick Morris are collaborating on "Hillary: The Movie." ("Hillary: the DVD" is probably more like it.) David Bossie's involved too. A recent newspaper profile stressed that contrary to Democrats, Brown doesn't actually have horns, "is relaxed and quick to laugh, the deep, rich laugh of a full-grown kid."

Yeah, well, in 1992 Brown playfully transformed the 1977 suicide of a fine young woman into a lurid accusation against Bill Clinton because she'd once taken a law school class he taught. (Also a literature course I taught.) In the process, CBS News documented, Brown and Bossie harassed her family, peered into people's windows, invaded hospital rooms, and misrepresented their own motives and identity. Years later, Bossie got fired as a congressional aide for distributing doctored audiotapes smearing Hillary Clinton to reporters. They're a couple of real cutups.

Peddling lurid videos to yokels, however, isn't the worst of it. Citizen United's real triumph in 1992 was hand-feeding the bogus "Whitewater" scandal to the establish-ment press. The fool thing has a half-life like radioactive waste, even in the most exalted precincts. Elizabeth Kolbert's review of two new Hillary biographies in the New Yorker, for example, makes a big deal of her lost-and-found billing records. Kolbert is a fine reporter; I admire her book "Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change" enormously.

Yet she manages to re-tell the billing records story without mentioning how it ended: when found, Clinton's records vindicated everything she'd said about her legal work for the ill-starred Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan. Kenneth Starr's wet dreams about indicting her went for naught. Elsewhere, Kolbert praises her one-time New York Times colleague Jeff Gerth's Whitewater "diligence," then suggests that Hillary's unnaturally secretive because trying to interview her about personal topics "was like talking to someone through several layers of Plexiglas."

Gee, I can't imagine why. Here she was representing the same newspaper that kept an imaginary scandal on the front page for years using precisely the same methods - hiding the Treasury Department's 1995 Pillsbury Report clearing both Clintons of Whitewater misdeeds, for example - and Kolbert wanted to play girlfriends?

It's much the same with Jennifer Senior's "Sex in the City"-style review of the same books in the New York Times. Along with ludicrous asides about genteel Arkansas women and their "quaint ladies luncheons," Senior turns a dubious tale about Hillary's political ambitions completely inside out. (Yo, Jennifer, heard of Lucinda Williams? Now there's an Arkansas woman.)

So did Hillary contemplate running for Arkansas governor in 1990 out of "pent-up frustration...and injured pride" over her husband's alleged affair? No. Carl Bernstein's book makes clear the scheme was Bill Clinton's. They abandoned it after pollsters learned Arkansas voters would compare them unfavorably to George and Lurleen Wallace. (As they surely would have.)

Feigned incomprehension at the post-Lewinsky survival of the Clinton marriage will clearly be a major media theme in 2008. For Hillary to talk about it to anybody holding a notebook would be like Barrack Obama confiding his feelings about the word "nigger" to Citizens United.

Better be thought a cold fish than proven a fool.

July 18, 2007

Republicans have locked up the pundit vote
by Gene Lyons

Nobody knows who next year's presidential candidates will be.

This column has no particular favorite and will make no predictions. Even so, it's not necessary to be a prophet to know how Beltway pundits will handle the so-called character issue. The Republican nominee will be a virile, decisive straight-shooter who's 100 percent "authentic" and "comfortable in his own skin." The Democrat will be an indecisive phony, uncertain of his/her identity, but willing to strike any pose or pander to any constituency in a self-serving bid for power. That was the basic script for the media's astonishing "War on Gore" in 2000, the campaign of falsehood and vilification that helped elevate George W. Bush, an ex-preppie cheerleader and bicycling enthusiast dressed up in rugged "Texas Rancher" costumes, to the presidency over then-Vice President Al Gore.

If truth-telling matters, Bush must rank among the least "authentic" presidents in U. S. history. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell recently rebutted one of the president's pet fictions: that he's a "commander guy" who heeds professional soldiers in Iraq, unlike wishywashy Democrats who expect them to "take fighting directions from politicians 6,000 miles away in Washington, D. C."

In reality, Powell said on Meet the Press, "The president received advice from his military advisers last fall that said, 'Do not send more troops.' Gen. [John ] Abizaid went before the Congress, the commander of Central Command, and said he had consulted with all his division commanders in Iraq and... none of them wanted to send additional troops."

Instead, Bush ordered a surge called for by the same neo-conservative thinktank strategists and op-ed warriors who predicted an Iraqi cakewalk.

But I digress, and pointlessly. By now only cultists impervious to facts expect anything but clueless, arrogant bluster from this president.

In short, there's no evidence that the "Sabbath Gasbags," in Calvin Trillin's immortal phrase, have any more insight into the candidates' character than a trailerpark palm reader and somewhat less than my basset hound Fred, who could at least sniff their hands and figure out whose ears they'd been scratching.

Washington TV political chat appears increasingly disconnected from reality. Here's how the sages on Hardball, MSNBC's answer to junior high school, sum up the GOP hopefuls:

"What's appealing about Rudy Giuliani," thinks Newsweek's Howard Fineman, "is not the generous side. What's appealing about him is the tough cop side."

"Right," adds excitable host Chris Matthews. "You just wait until Daddy gets home."

Another time, Fineman opined that Rudy, a lifelong New Yorker, would have been a heck of a hunter - um, if he'd grown up in Alabama, I suppose.

Of course, Fineman's the same guy who once praised Bush's kinglike bearing: "He's a boomer product of the '60s," the pundit gushed, "but doesn't mind ermine robes."

Fineman actually wrote that under his Newsweek byline.

That's how it goes on Hardball night after night. Mention a prominent Republican and the courtier-pundits swoon like 12-year-old girls at a boy band show. Matthews goes into virtual meltdown over former Sen. Fred Thompson, another "daddy" figure. Frequent guest Mark Halperin, Time's version of Fineman, praises his "magnetism." On TV, he wrote, Thompson plays "a straight-talking, tough-minded, wise Southerner - basically a version of what his supporters say is his true political self."

Now here's a guy who's been a Washington lobbyist and Hollywood actor most of his adult life; campaigned across Tennessee in what turned out to be a rented red pickup driven by an aide; and sports a very un-first ladylike trophy wife younger than his kids. (There's a funny picture on-line of neo-con guru Paul Wolfowitz peering at lovely Jeri's low-cut cocktail dress.) So what's Thompson to the Hardball gang ? Fineman: "A tough guy" with "a strong record on cultural issues as a cultural conservative from the South."

Look, an American presidential election is essentially a long-running reality TV show. So there's definitely something in what they're saying. Hardball has very low ratings outside of D. C., but it and programs like it are where the Beltway group narrative gets worked out, the basic story line that pundits use to sell themselves as experts without studying tedious issues like health care or foreign policy. The brilliant blogger "Digby" asks a penetrating question: "Why do so many male Washington courtiers have giggling mancrushes on... Republican politicians?" Personally, I blame "heterosexual panic." Half the insulting e-mails and all the anonymous phone calls this column generates deal in sexual insult. Whether it's fear of terrorism, uneasiness at the prospect of a woman president or cultural change generally, the GOP base responds like trained seals to tough-guy poses. It follows that Democrats must play the foil: John Edwards a foppish girlyman, Hillary Clinton an unnatural woman, Barack Obama a racially confused Oreo - well, you get the picture. Yes, it's pathetic. And no, it has nothing to do with reality or the nation's problems, but it's nevertheless something Democrats can't afford to ignore.

Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.

[Source.]

As seen on TV

Put Bush's 'puppy dog' terror theory to sleep - Richard Clarke.

Stupid NYT tricks

Public Remains Split on Response to Warming

Ninety percent of Democrats, 80 percent of independents and 60 percent of Republicans said immediate action was required to curb the warming of the atmosphere and deal with its effects on the global climate. Nineteen percent said it was not necessary to act now, and 1 percent said no steps were needed.

Right, so even when a large majority of Republicans join with the overwhelming majority of Democrats and Independents on an issue, the public is "split".

How come the public is never "split" when it's, say, support for the death penalty, or anything else that sounds good in a right-wing frame?

Yeah, yeah, I do know why.

Jack Velenti Dies

And though your music lingers on
All of us are glad you're gone.

If I could live my life half as worthlessly as you,
I'm convinced that I'd wind up burning, too.

Unconnected

Someday I will figure out why I can never get my laptop to communicate with my brother's network. Oh, sure, I can get into web-based stuff like e-mail, and Blogger and all that, but I really need to use my laptop to update The SIdeshow. Grrr....

Tap tap tap

Is this thing on?

Test test test
test test test.

Train jumps tracks

Gene Lyons

Only weeks ago, GOP campaign officials were breathing smoke and fire. According to Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds, R-N. Y., the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, hapless Democrats had no idea what they were up against. Relentlessly negative TV commercials funded by the party's $ 50 million war chest were about to bury Democratic candidates under an avalanche of charges dug up by so-called opposition research - unpaid student loans, late tax payments, embarrassing lawsuits, etc. "We haven't even begun to unload this freight train," Reynolds boasted to The New York Times. Asked why the party that currently controls the White House and both houses of Congress wasn't stressing positive themes in its TV ads, he burst out laughing. "If they moved things to the extent that negative ads move things," he said, "there would be more of them." A few days later, Reynolds himself got run over by an off-schedule freight train in the form of the nastiest Washington sex scandal in decades. It's doubtful he's laughing now. Reynolds, see, is the guy who says he and Rep. John Boehner, ROhio, warned House Speaker Dennis Hastert last spring about Rep. Mark Foley's "overly friendly" e-mails to 16-yearold congressional pages.

The speaker recalls no such meeting.

Reynolds was alerted to the situation by his own chief of staff, one Kirk Fordham, who'd previously been Foley's chief of staff. Fordham, in turn, insists that he quit working for the very horny congressman after warning Hastert's staff "sometime in 2002 or 2003" about Foley's salacious e-mails to high school boys. Fordham says that Jeff Trandahl, the recently resigned clerk of the House, told him about a drunken late-night visit by Foley to the pages' dormitory.

Hastert's chief of staff, with whom the Illinois lawmaker shares a Washington townhouse, claims the meeting with Fordham never happened. Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported that Arizona Republican Rep. Jim Kolbe "personally confronted" Foley about sexually explicit e-mails as long ago as 2000.

GOP staffers have reportedly been warning Republican (but not Democratic ) pages to be leery of Foley since 2001.

Despite hearing, seeing and speaking no evil, Hastert has bravely accepted "full responsibility" - in Washington, the phrase is universally understood as a formulaic incantation signifying its exact opposite and magically absolving blame - and promised a vigorous investigation. The speaker also went on Rush Limbaugh's program to blame Democrats, with no evidence whatsoever, for leaking Foley's incriminating e-mails to the press. Apparently false, but so what if they had ?

But back to Reynolds. After warning Hastert (or not ) about the Florida congressman's unseemly interest in adolescent lads, what did the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee do next ? Did he notify the police or the FBI ? Did he even contact the feckless sleuths on the House Ethics Committee ? Reynolds did none of those things. Instead, according to conservative columnist Bob Novak, he talked Foley out of retiring from Congress.

Then Reynolds accepted a $ 100, 000 contribution from Foley to the NRCC. Can you say "hush money" ? I knew you could.

Representing Palm Beach, Fla., one of the nation's wealthiest congressional districts - GOP propagandists Limbaugh and Ann Coulter own homes nearby - Foley had raised millions more in campaign contributions than he needed and donated it to the party. He was a GOP cash cow, plain and simple.

Back home in Buffalo, Reynolds' Democratic opponent has been running TV ads saying he "knew of the problem months ago, but he failed to act aggressively to protect the kids.... Reynolds not only failed to act, he actually urged the Florida congressman to run for office again, possibly putting more kids at risk."

According to a poll in the Buffalo News, Reynolds now trails Democrat Jack Davis by 15 points, 48 to 33 percent.

What makes this scandal a political godsend for Democrats, writes Glenn Greenwald on his "Unclaimed Territory" weblog, is that it's "like the Cliffs' Notes version of... how the Bush movement operates." Unlike, say, Republican hocuspocus on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, the ongoing catastrophe in Iraq, budgetary flim-flams and extreme negligence after Hurricane Katrina, it's about something simple and direct that everybody gets in his gut. It's all there: the elevation of money and power over all competing values, the transparent lies and evasions, grotesque attempts to blame the victims - the infamous Drudge Report and others claimed the pages led poor Foley on - and ludicrous demands that prominent Democrats take lie detector tests to prove they didn't blow the whistle. Some Republicans claim a homosexual conspiracy because several who tried to stop Foley's predatory behavior are openly gay. "There has been a virtual carousel... of one pathetic, desperate attempt after the next to deflect blame and demonize those who are pointing out the wrongdoing," Greenwald writes. "This is what [Republicans ] always do, on every issue. The difference here is that everyone can see it, and so nothing is working."

[Via Moose & Squirrel]

Times revealed little that Bush hadn't told us
Gene Lyons

The key thing about the infamous New York Times scoop that's drawn the theatrical wrath of the Bush administration is the last thing you'll hear from the newspaper's embattled editors: how little real news it contained. Nobody who's paying attention could be surprised that U. S. agents monitor international money transfers. George W. Bush has been patting himself on the back about it for years. The June 28 edition of MSNBC's "Countdown" led with several video clips of Bush touting U. S. plans for cutting al-Qa'ida's cash flow. On Sept. 24, 2001, while the rubble of the World Trade Center was still smoking, Bush announced the "Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Center at the Department of the Treasury to identify and investigate the financial infrastructure of the international terrorist networks." A veritable barrage of White House press releases has chronicled the government's work with NATO and international agencies like the Financial Action Task Force to combat money laundering and terrorism. The subject of the Times report, SWIFT - the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, a Belgian consortium that coordinates commerce among 7, 800 banks - has been discussed in congressional hearings and U. N. reports since 2002.

SWIFT is no secret. It publishes a slick magazine, hosts a lavish yearly trade exposition and features its cooperation with the Financial Action Task Force on its corporate Web site. Indeed, in 2004, Stuart Levey, who heads the Treasury Department's anti-terrorism efforts, told Congress that al-Qa'ida had quit using international banks and taken to dispatching couriers carrying suitcases filled with cash. Numerous reports have documented that fact.

The Times' article concerned not operational details, but worry among some officials that the U. S. might be casting its net too wide, although it concluded that the government was doing nothing illegal. So did same-day stories in the Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal. In short, the information was of marginal interest to anybody but specialists in international finance.

So how dumb would a terrorist have to be not to know that U. S. spies monitor international money transfers? Maybe dumb enough to fall for the White House's demagogic attack on The New York Times (but not, oddly, The Wall Street Journal or the LA Times) as a left-wing newspaper so consumed with hatred for Bush that it would risk catastrophe to embarrass him.

The New York Times arrogant? Goodness, yes. Condescending, too. During the decade the newspaper devoted to its farcical coverage of the Whitewater hoax, feeding out of Kenneth Starr's soft little hand like a Shetland pony, I experienced that condescension firsthand. Even confronted with dispositive documentary evidence that its Whitewater stories were bunk, its basic response never varied: We're The New York Times and you're not.

But left wing? Well, the Times, along with The Washington Post, led the 2000 "war on Gore" that basically gave Bush the presidency. Then-columnist and now executive editor Bill Keller actually quoted his 3-year-old daughter's opinion that the Democratic nominee was a stiff.

After 9/11, the Times, along with the rest of the newspaper consortium, buried its finding that had all the legal votes in Florida been counted in 2000, Al Gore would have been president.

Lest we forget, it was reporter Judith Miller's series of leaked, single-source "exclusives" touting Saddam Hussein's imaginary nuclear weapons accompanied by TV appearances by Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney carefully coordinated with Times publication dates that helped stampede the nation to war. Columnist Keller thought invading Iraq was a terrific idea.

Now the Times has its reward. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll thinks he knows why.

"Many members of the president's base consider ‘New York' to be a nifty code word for ‘Jewish,'" he writes. "It is very nice for the president to be able to campaign against the Jews without (a) actually saying the word ‘Jew' and (b) without irritating the Israelis."

Actually, that's wishful thinking. Anti-Semitism, as such, is old hat among True Believers on the extreme right. For years, the idea's been percolating through the right's well-organized propaganda apparatus that Democrats aren't loyal Americans.

Regarding Ann Coulter's ludicrous book, "Slander," I once wrote that "the ‘liberal' sins [she ] caricatures - atheism, cosmopolitanism, sexual license, moral relativism, communism, disloyalty and treason - are basically identical to the crimes of the Jews as Hitler saw them." Michael Savage, Michael Reagan, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh and others peddle the same sterilized American update of an ancient slur. Limbaugh recently called 80 percent of Times subscribers "jihadists." Now the Bush White House, desperate to prevail in 2006 congressional elections, has taken up the cry. Reasonable people never want to believe that extremists believe their own rhetoric. But quit kidding yourselves. This is mass psychosis. The next terrorist strike, should it happen, will be blamed on the enemy within: treasonous "liberals" who dissent from the glorious reign of George W. Bush. Unless confronted, it's through such strategems that democracies fail and constitutional republics become dictatorships.

[This article originally appeared in the Arkanasas Democrat-Gazette. Thanks to Moose & Squirrel.]

From A Distance

Since Fasthosts is still down, I've been having a bit of a P.F. Sloan festival on YouTube.

Most people have heard P.F. Sloan's music but don't know it. For example, the first ten seconds of "California Dreamin'" (listen but don't watch that video) is him playing guitar.

A few people may be familiar with "Let Me Be" as recorded by the Turtles. (That video is a hoot - remember what sweet little boys they were before they became Flo & Eddie?)

And just about everyone has heard Barry McGuire's rendition of "Eve of Destruction". The record company told Sloan that if he played that song for anyone, they'd suspend his royalties, and when they heard McGuire singing it, they did.

(The original versions of both of those are gentler.)

When the Patrick McGoohan show (that preceded The Prisoner), Danger Man, was shown in the US, it was given a new title and theme song - the latter being "Secret Agent Man", another from P.F. Sloan, sung by Johnny Rivers.

But you can hear the man himself singing his "From A Distance", a song I've always been fond of.

I couldn't find any of the surf music, which is surprising since he did so much stuff for Jan & Dean. (But I did find something I would have posted if it had been available when Jan Berry died in 2004, a live performance from later in their career of "New Girl In School", which is not a P.F. Sloan song.)

Cracked me up when I read an interview with Sloan in Songwriter magazine by someone who had never heard of him until Jimmy Webb wrote a song called, "P.F. Sloan" - he'd assumed the title name was of a fictional character meant to represent the trials of songwriters, and had been shocked to learn that it was actually a real person.

Some of the other stuff he did is a little embarrassing and I think I'll skip mentioning it, although I'm afraid you've heard that, too.

Technical difficulties

Yes, The Sideshow appears to be down. I can't get the site for my provider, either, so I don't know what's going on. Let's hope things will be back together shortly.

Staying the course is politics, not planning
by Gene Lyons

Instead of running for majority leader if Democrats take control of the House in 2006, maybe U. S. Rep. John P. Murtha ought to run for president. He may be 74, but the man knows how to handle himself in a fight, a skill too many genteel Democrats appear to have forgotten. Here's the story: After escaping indictment last week, the new Republican ethical gold standard, White House apparatchik Karl Rove hustled to New Hampshire for a GOP fund-raiser. There he engaged in the kind of cheap smear for which he's justly infamous. Of Democrats like Murtha who voted to confront Iraq but have become war critics, Rove said: "Too many Democrats - it strikes me they are ready to give the green light to go to war, but when it gets tough and when it gets difficult, they fall back on that party's old pattern of cutting and running. They may be with you at the first shots, but they are not going to be there for the last tough battles." Let's pass over the fact that when George W. Bush presented the Iraq resolution, he vowed that it wasn't a declaration of war. Most people knew better. When Tim Russert played the videotape of Rove for Murtha on "Meet the Press," the crusty old former Marine reacted angrily.

"He's in New Hampshire," Murtha said. "He's making a political speech. He's sitting in his air-conditioned office with his big, fat backside, saying, ‘Stay the course.' That's not a plan. I mean, this guy - I don't know what his military experience is, but that's a political statement."

For the record, Rove's military experience, like Vice President Dick Cheney's and that of virtually all the neo-conservative architects of this ill-conceived utopian fantasy, is absolutely zero.

Murtha knows about war. A native of the coal-mining and steel-making region of western Pennsylvania, he volunteered to fight in Korea and Vietnam, where he won two Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star with Combat "V" and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. I'm confident that even at 74, he could kick Rove's pasty posterior with one leg - assuming he could outrun the little creep.

As history, this cut-and-run business is nonsense. It wasn't Democrats who made peace in Korea. It was President Dwight Eisenhower. Democrats didn't dispatch Henry Kissinger to whisper to China in 1972 that the U. S. could live with a communist Vietnam. President Richard Nixon did. He began the long, bloody retreat that ended with the North Vietnamese taking Saigon under President Gerald Ford.

Maybe the oddest thing about the legacy of Vietnam is that the worst thing that could happen, from a rightwing perspective, did happen. The U. S. lost the war. Communists conquered much of Southeast Asia. And the effect on national security ? Well, we got lots of good Vietnamese restaurants out of it. Otherwise, none.

The communists soon fell to fighting among themselves, with Vietnam invading Cambodia, China attacking Vietnam, and the Chinese and Soviet Russians entangled in a blood feud. Next, Russia invaded Afghanistan. Domestic fallout from that bloody fiasco helped cause the collapse of the U. S. S. R. and the demise of communism almost everywhere - also because nobody but a few crackpot professors in the West believed in it anymore.

Exactly why so many like Rove, Bush and Cheney, who avoided Vietnam, subsequently metamorphosed into countryclub Napoleons is mysterious. Personal psychodrama appears to be involved.

It's past time to get real, Murtha says. Invading Iraq was an unnecessary folly.

"We didn't have a threat to our national security. That's been proven," Murtha told Russert. "Second, we [sent ] inadequate forces to get it under control in a transition to peace.... [T ] he third thing was no exit strategy.

"It's no longer a military war," Murtha said. "We have won the military war against [the ] enemy. We toppled Saddam Hussein. The military's done everything that they can do. And so it's time for us to redeploy.... Only Iraqis can settle this."

Murtha didn't say so, but there's no chance of an Iraqi democracy friendly to the U. S. That's a delusion. Bush's photo-op visit merely underscored the point. Three years after "Mission accomplished," and the mighty conqueror flies into the fortified "Green Zone" unannounced and can't trust Iraq's prime minister enough to give him, oh, an hour's notice ? That's not how Alexander the Great did it. Meanwhile, Murtha says, the U. S. is spending $ 8 billion a month while American soldiers are being killed and maimed, physically and psychologically, mainly to provide political cover for Bush. Intimidated by Rove ? Not hardly. "You can't sit there in the air-conditioned office," Murtha said, "and tell these troops - they're carrying 70 pounds on their back inside these armored vessels and hit with improvised explosive devices every day, seeing their friends blown up, their buddies blown up - and he says, ‘stay the course.' Yeah, it's easy to say that from Washington, D. C."

[Originally from The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette]

Bush's fabled intuition may be just that
Gene Lyons

Tell me again about President Bush's fabled intuition, his born leader's gift for choosing the right course of action by natural instinct. Oh, and, yes, the peerless political genius of Karl Rove. Because if you didn't know any better, it would appear that the administration's grandest schemes have gone badly awry, confronting the White House with a political crisis seemingly beyond its control. For the longest time, Bush was the GOP and the GOP was Bush. Although I've always seen the cult of personality surrounding Bush as a rationalization of his manifest shortcomings of character and intellect, there was no denying its power. Now that illusion appears to be fading. Both the ongoing catastrophe in Iraq and the incomprehensible political blunder of trying to hand over management of U. S. ports to a company headquartered in the United Arab Emirates have brought about the unthinkable: open dissent from prominent Republicans and discontent among the Republican base. The scary part is that Bush's second term has an almost unimaginable three years to run longer than the entire presidency of John F. Kennedy.

Because of the way things are going, we may be about to find the authoritarian rock-bottom; that is, how many Americans will profess unthinking loyalty to any president calling himself "Christian" and "conservative," and retaining the support of right-wing radio hosts.

Roughly one-third is my guess. According the latest CBS News poll, Bush's approval rate stands at 34 percent, down eight points from January.

Only three few months ago, Republican pundits excoriated Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean for expressing doubts that the Iraq war could be "won" in any traditional sense, and calling for the immediate withdrawal of National Guard troops and the phased pullout of all U. S. forces within two years. "Howard the Coward, " one called him. They derided a highly decorated Marine veteran, Rep. Jack Martha, D-Pa., after he referred to continued U. S. occupation of Iraq as " a flawed policy wrapped in an illusion" and called for a tactical retreat. White House spokesman Scott McClellan accused Murtha of wanting "to surrender to the terrorists."

Now the destruction of the Askariyah Shrine in Samarra, a site almost as holy to Shia Muslims as St. Peter's Basilica is to Roman Catholics, seems to have set the nation on a seemingly irreversible path to open civil war - something Dean and other opponents of invading Iraq, with its seething sectarian and tribal rivalries, warned against years ago. Atrocity follows sickening atrocity, which U. S. and British troops appear powerless to prevent.

So what will right-wing character assassins now say about William F. Buckley? Writing in the National Review, the magazine he founded, one of contemporary conservatism's elder statesmen has seen enough.

"One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed," Buckley concludes. "Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans. The great human reserves that call for civil life haven't proved strong enough. No doubt they are latently there, but they have not been able to contend against the ice men who move about in the shadows with bombs and grenades and pistols."

Will GOP apparatchiks question Buckley's patriotism ? Call him a traitor?

"The administration has, now, to cope with failure," he adds. "Mr. Bush has a very difficult internal problem here because to make the kind of concession that is strategically appropriate requires a mitigation of policies he has several times affirmed in high-flown pronouncements. His challenge is to persuade himself that he can submit to a historical reality."

Translation: Bush must eat crow for the country's sake. Alas, reality has never been his strong suit. He prefers aircraft carrier photo ops. Assuming that anybody in the White House has enough courage to brave one of Bush's famous temper tantrums, however, here's how this column, aware of his penchant for seeing himself as his generation's Winston Churchill, has long suggested putting it to him: Mr. President, Iraq isn't Normandy, it's Dunkirk, a tactical retreat from an over-exposed and unsustainable position. In the "war on terror" it's not D-Day 1944, it's more like 1940. On the other hand, how can anybody reason with a politician who committed the spectacular folly of the Dubai Ports World deal ? Persons eager to save Bush from the consequences of his heedless bullying characterize opposition to handing over control of U. S. harbors to a stateowned company run by a hereditary Arab monarchy as "quasi-racist scaremongering," " global ethnic profiling" and worse. What rubbish. If there's a racial component to the dispute, Bush's fear-mongering created it. Furthermore, there are perfectly legitimate political objections to handing over operating control of U. S. ports to a state-run company anywhere in the world, much less a Middle Eastern monarchy with a demonstrable history of allowing itself to be manipulated by extremists. If he's lucky, Bush's fellow Republicans will find some pretext to save him from the trap he's created.

Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.

Courtesy of Moose & Squirrel.

Vice president shoots himself in the foot
Gene Lyons
Feb 22, 2006

My first inclination upon hearing the news was to give Deadeye Dick Cheney’s hunting accident a pass. It’s not as if there aren’t more important things to think about. Unless a plausible case could be made that the vice president harbored a grudge of some kind against the Texas lawyer he’d mistaken for a quail, everything sounded fairly straightforward. As a one-time hunter, I could readily imagine Cheney’s horror, shame and fear at seeing Harry Whittington go down. Full disclosure: After accidentally blowing a 12-gauge hole in the ground on a long-ago rabbit hunting expedition, I was subjected to years of good-natured teasing by my partners. Even so, the message was clear: Keep the safety on and your finger off the trigger or find some other damn fools to hunt with. Assuming ole Deadeye doesn’t give up the dubious sport of killing pen-raised game birds (a bit like hunting in a hen house ), he may have trouble finding companions, because the more information emerged, the less straightforward things looked. Indeed, the incident grew curiouser and curiouser, until the ultimate “Alice in Wonderland” headline eventually appeared (on the CNN Web site ), “Shooting victim apologizes to vice president.”

And most of it was nobody’s fault but Cheney’s.

Look, everybody hates the press at times like these, or pretends to anyway. But any time a name-brand celebrity—actor, athlete, singer, politician, essentially anybody who shows up regularly on TV—either gets caught doing something stupid with his clothes off or shoots somebody, for heaven’s sake, there’s going to be a media circus. Wasn’t the vice president paying attention during “The Adventures of Big Bill, Little Bill and That Woman, Miss Lewinsky” ?

By those standards, Deadeye got off pretty easy, given the incoherence of his actions. To see how, let’s go back to the beginning. “Peppered pretty good” was how Katharine Armstrong, the ranch owner Cheney delegated to leak the story to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, described Whittington’s wounds some 18 hours after the fact. At that point, the man was still in the ICU.

In bird-hunting parlance, “peppered” means sprinkled with spent shot falling from overhead—an uncomfortable, but not life-threatening, sensation. A person shot in the face with a load of No. 7 birdshot, however, might easily have died.

Without doubting Cheney’s sincere concern for his victim, there must have been long minutes, maybe hours, after the 78-year-old man went down when the vice president must have been equally worried about himself. Even in South Texas, with what GOP spinner Mary Matalin called its “culture of rural enforcement” during her remarkable appearance on “Meet the Press,” gunshot deaths can’t simply be waved off like parking tickets.

As a grown man, much less as vice president of the United States, Cheney must have understood that if Whittington did die, he could have found himself under investigation for reckless endangerment or negligent homicide—whatever they call it in Texas—with all the witnesses, not only those approved by Armstrong and him, questioned under oath.

Cheney’s first action after getting back to the house, according to Armstrong, was to mix himself a cocktail. What on earth for ? Every homicide cop I’ve ever known would wonder if the purpose wasn’t to mask evidence of alcohol already in the shooter’s system.

Next, the sheriff’s deputy who showed up at the ranch in response to the ambulance call got turned away by the Secret Service, Matalin later alibied, on “national security” grounds. That’s preposterous.

Wouldn’t Cheney want to clear things up ASAP ? Would you or I be given 14 hours to compose ourselves before talking to authorities after shooting somebody in the face ? As an Armstrong Ranch guest in Kenedy County, Texas, population 441, maybe so, but almost nowhere else in the U. S., which is more to the point.

Because Cheney’s not you or me. He’s the vice president of the United States, a shrewd, calculating man and a Washington insider for almost 40 years. Badly shaken or not, he knew exactly how his evasiveness would look. And he decided to risk it anyway. Why ? Even before Cheney finally appeared on Republican State TV, a. k. a. FOX News, to express remorse and take the blame after four days of allowing surrogates to hint that Whittington’s uncanny resemblance to a bobwhite quail made him somehow to blame, GOP robo-pundits made an elaborate pretense of not understanding what the hubbub was all about—not who first reported the story or even when. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer went so far as to argue that Cheney “did the manly thing. He decided, ‘I’ll take the heat, but I’m going to give my host and my friend, who just got shot, a half a day of reprieve.’” Time subsequently reported that the initial draft of the vice president’s press statement neglected to mention exactly which manly man in the hunting party actually pulled the trigger.

Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.

(Via Moose & Squirrel.)

Digby:

We are not the radicals. To force women who wish to terminate their pregnancies - for whatever reason - to use coathangers - that's radical. And unspeakably cruel. To refuse to recognize, both legally and publicly, a couple in love - that's radical. And narrow-mindedly cruel. To base foreign policy on the president's "gut" and an obviously untenable unilateralism - that's radical. And stupid. To get a team of unscrupulous lawyers trained in the black arts of sophistry (ahem!) but ignorant of American history to gut the Constitution and argue that a president is just an ominipotent monarch under a different name - that's radical. And utterly un-American.

That's why I'm blogging. It's not to advance a "leftwing agenda." Unless preventing Social Security from being gutted by rightwing maniacs is considered a leftwing agenda. Unless demanding that the US president behave like the president of the United States is supposed to behave towards the victims of a devastating hurricane is a leftwing agenda. Unless insisting that the nation's schools teach science and not cynical lies is a leftwing agenda.

I see everyone is taking the old Political Compass test again.

OK, now here's me, at:
Economic Left/Right: -7.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.64

So how did you score?

The Sideshow is down?

Well, I just stopped being able to find it. And I don't know why, yet, either.

Update: It's back now. I don't know what happened, but at least it didn't last long.

Eyeball news

Okay, I haven't set up a re-direct for The Sideshow yet, but I will as soon as I've properly wrapped my mind around the idea. The whole site is mostly duplicated at its new home now but archives aren't deleted, so your old permalinks to individual posts will still be good.

So do me a favor and change your blogroll links and your favorites ASAP to:

http://sideshow.me.uk

And then you can watch some movies:

Fiore: The Depressed Democrat's Guide to Recovery (Via An Age Like This)

Video: George W. Bush: MISTAKEN

Propagate this link!

I'm now http://sideshow.me.uk. (The www. prefix will work too, but why bother?)

Fact vs. Fantasy in the election

We have two strains of thought: One is that every single indicator of who would win and was winning the presidential election was wrong because of a stealth campaign by Bush that was largely invisible and occurred almost entirely below the radar, to the extent that nothing was indicating a Bush win (except for some cooked polls that have been picked apart to the point of destruction). The other is that the vote itself was cooked.

The first strain is clearly conspiracy theory: that the Republicans somehow, deliberately, managed to hide their campaign and their support completely from experienced watchers who were looking for them, yet somehow their supporters showed up to overwhelm Kerry supporters at the last minute, and nobody saw them.

The facts clearly support the second strain of thought - that the vote was cooked - but the media has chosen to believe that despite any evidence on the ground, a lot of mysterious Bush voters happened to be there when no one was looking. And lied to the exit polls. And did this only in places that were using electronic voting machines owned by a highly-partisan Bush-supporter who had publicly vowed to do whatever he could to bring home the election for Bush.

To believe the "Bush won" conspiracy theory, you have to believe that not only Zogby was wrong, but that both Democrats and Republicans completely altered their behavior and switched their voting patterns, and that Republicans did this in such a way that nobody noticed it even while it was happening.

Democrats vote late in the day. It's always been true, and everyone knows it. When exit polls early in the day say the Democrat is winning by a wide margin, you can take it to the bank that it's not going to get any better for the Republican as people start coming home from work. And that's exactly how it looked on the ground on election day - there was no late surge of Republicans to outnumber the Democrats. And yet, at the last minute, somehow, the polls suddenly started showing Bush coming even and then breaking ahead at a time when there was no sign of these Bush voters suddenly showing up at the polls. How did that happen?

Some folks at Berkeley have done a statistical analysis for us, with all sorts of charts and tables and graphs with color lines and everything, The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in
Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections. That's a .pdf (via Bartcop), but here's the finding for those who don't want to be bothered:

Electronic voting raised President Bush's advantage from the tiny edge he held in 2000 to a clearer margin of victory in 2004. The impact of e-voting was not uniform, however. Its impact was proportional to the Democratic support in the county, i.e., it was especially large in Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade. The evidence for this is the statistical significance of terms in our model that gauge the average impact of e-voting across Florida's 67 counties and statistical interaction effects that gauge its larger-than-average effect in counties where Vice President Gore did the best in 2000 and slightly negative effect in the counties where Mr. Bush did the best in 2000. The state-wide impact of these disparities due to electronic voting amount to 130,000 votes if we assume a "ghost vote" mechanism and twice that - 260,000 votes - if we assume that a vote misattributed to one candidate should have been counted for the other.

Well, now, that's mighty suspicious, isn't it? The suggestion of the machines flipping Kerry votes for Bush is about as subtle as a brick, here, folks.

Need more? How about Was it hacked? in The Orlando Weekly:

How do we know the fix was in? Keefer says the total number of respondents at 9 p.m. was well over 13,000 and at 1:36 a.m. it had risen less than 3 percent - to 13,531 total respondents. Given the small increase in respondents, this 5 percent swing to Bush is mathematically impossible. In Florida, at 8:40 p.m., exit polls showed a near dead heat but the final exit poll update at 1:01 a.m. gave Bush a 4 percent lead. This swing was mathematically impossible, because there were only 16 more respondents in the final tally than in the earlier one.

No, really, you think it was a fair election? Just how big a brick do you need to get hit in the head with?

The New York Times needs a brick the size of Ohio, apparently, and even that may not work. You have to work to ferret out the facts in Matt Bai's Who Lost Ohio? because Bai apparently believes it's good enough to say that, well, since Kerry lost, the Republicans must have done a better job than anyone noticed at the time. But here we have people actually going out and looking at the supposedly conservative boondocks counties that made an 11th-hour swing for Bush, right at the moment they are supposedly making the swing, and there's no one there - except a few straggling Kerry voters. It's not just that no one saw the Bush campaign, but there weren't many signs of Bush voters at the polls at the time when this surge of same was supposed to be suddenly swamping what had until then been a commanding Kerry lead.

No, I'm sorry. All of the facts say that people voted for Kerry. Only the machines disagree. The only real question at this point is why Keith Olbermann seems to be the only person in Big Media who thinks that theories about the magical/invisible Bush surge aren't good enough to counteract the facts.

Around the web

More from Oliver Willis' Brand Democrat project

Kevin Drum has a short round-up of some of our favorite examples of moral values by the returned Republican-controlled Congress. Buying Sailor George a yacht was a particularly popular choice. (Atrios liked that one, too.) Not that we think he can pilot a boat any better than he can ride a horse....

At Salon, Joe Conason says a document has been declassified that proves Richard Clarke was telling the truth and Bill Frist was slandering him.

Democrats.com blog is keeping track of the stolen election stories.

Summer Cosmetic Must-Haves!

Election stories

Then: Election Worker Refuses to Lie for Voting Software Company:

Marion County Clerk Doris Anne Sadler revealed Tuesday that the company installed illegal software before last November's election.

1st Tuesday: First hand reports by other Ohio volunteers:

5. There were numerous reports of voters trying to select Kerry and Bush was selected on the screen instead. The voters would try repeatedly to get Kerry to come up. Voters were only allowed three "pushes." They were told they could request a different machine, but of course by the time they were on the phone with the Election Protection project workers, it must have been too late.

6. There were also reports of voters getting to the review screen and seeing "No Selection." For president. This was often at the same polling places where machines were breaking down. Voters could not get their vote for Kerry for president to register.

9. Another GOP challenger asked a voter for a Green Card in order to get a provisional ballot. The voter called in to find out what a Green Card is. Of course, this was a trick. Voters must be citizens.

10. Machines at some polls had to be re-set after every voter. This took so long that people started to leave. This Election Protection project lawyer and her colleagues sent food out to the voters. They sent food out to voters at different precincts at least three times during the day to encourage them to stay in line.

Now: David Rees says Chin Up. (via)

Enlightenment strikes again

So....What Happened To The Truth? : The Crushed Optimism of a Young Republican

I am, and have always been, a registered Republican. I grew up in a Republican family in a Republican area, and went to church every Sunday with other southern white Republicans. I went to a private Lutheran College in NC. Growing up, we had Boy Scouts, and bake sales, and school plays with lots of other white Republican families. We didn't hang around white kids because we were racist, that's just all there were.
[...]
You know, there really is more to the Bible than "striking down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who seek to destroy and poison my brothers."(Ezekiel 25:17) I read that part, too, and it even showed up in a movie! But let us remember that in that verse, God is the one doing the striking, not a man. Look, George W. Bush is not the Holy Sheriff. George Bush is Barney Fife, and I wish he would put his bullet back in his shirt pocket and go back to his fake-ass Dude Ranch in Crawford. Religion is important to people all over the world, but we should all know by now that it makes very poor public policy. Religion and Government DO NOT MIX! Church-Run Day Care Programs are great, but never forget that 9/11 was a Faith-Based Initiative, too.
[...]
What has brought this to a head for me is our last election, which, despite the dismissals by Diebold and others, really does look like it was stolen. "But your side won!" I hear you say. Yes, we won, but there is no honor in winning this way. I'm pretty sure I could whip anybody in chess if my friends snuck in and took my opponent's queen and bishops away, but even though I had the trophy and cash prize, I don't think I'd feel very good about it. You're not a bad-ass street fighter if your friend kicks the wheelchair out from under the Vietnam Vet you're fighting so you can kick him in the teeth while he's down.

This is no wild "conspiracy theory", by the way. I've done a great deal of research - it's on my site and many others. It really does look like the 2004 election was stolen. By us.

I saw this four years ago, after the selection - a number of Republicans and libertarians I know were saying they were never going to vote Republican again after what happened in Florida and Bush v Gore. They've been dribbling away ever since, after the appointment of Ashcroft, or finding out that Bush ignored the warnings before 9/11, or the Patriot Act and the war and so on. So, welcome to a new cycle.