Category Archives: Uncategorized

Recalling the People

August 4, 2008 – 3:02 pm
Though written constitutions may be violated in moments of passion or delusion, yet they furnish a text to which those who are watchful may again rally and recall the people. — Thomas Jefferson, letter to Joseph Priestley, 1802. (Jefferson, who was president at the time he wrote this, was referring to the unconstitutional Alien and Sedition Acts of the Adams administraton.)

In This Week’s Sift:

  • The Rule of Law Struggles to Re-assert Itself. A variety of just-below-the-radar developments in a wide range of Bush administration scandals.
  • Election notes. McCain goes hard negative. McCain 2000 vs. McCain 2008. A badly reported Obama quote touches off a media frenzy about his “arrogance”. The race card. And maybe McCain really isn’t against global warming after all.
  • Other short notes. The Knoxville shooting is terrorism. Al Gore is really Jor-El. Pakistan might not be on our side. The housing crisis has a ways to go. And more.
The Rule of Law Struggles to Re-assert Itself

This week saw a number of developments on the various fronts where the Bush administration has been flouting the rule of law. These days you need a good diagram to keep all the issues straight.

A number of scandals revolve around this point: Three kinds of people work for an administration

  • political operatives, who work for the president and/or his party.
  • political appointees like the cabinet and the U.S. attorneys. Awarding these jobs to political allies and people who share the president’s values is entirely legal, traditional, and even appropriate. Nonetheless, once in office these officials have well-defined and long-established duties to the United States that should supersede their loyalty to the president and his party.
  • career government employees. These folks are supposed to be non-partisan. They continue in office after the administration changes and their jobs are not supposed to be political spoils.You don’t want FBI agents or IRS auditors or TSA airport security people asking you who you voted for.

The essence of the Department of Justice scandals is that the administration ignored these distinctions. In the U.S. attorney scandal they tried to make political appointees act like political operatives, and fired ones who wouldn’t play ball. The Siegelman case is about prosecutors who would play ball, prosecuting a Democratic governor to get him off the political stage. The Goodling scandal is about treating career positions as political appointments.

Let’s start with Goodling. Last Monday the Department of Justice’s inspector general issued a report about Monica Goodling’s hiring practices while she was one of the top DoJ officials. Here’s the conclusion:

Our investigation found that Goodling improperly subjected candidates for certain career positions to the same politically based evaluation she used on candidates for political positions, in violation of federal law and Department policy.

When interviewing candidates, Goodling asked questions like “What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?” The problem: Career Justice employees don’t serve George W. Bush. They serve the United States of America. Or at least, they do under the rule of law.

dday on Hullabaloo culls through the inspector general’s report for the details. The sleaziest story was how Goodling apparently got rid of a Justice Department prosecutor because she was rumored to be a lesbian.

If we’re lucky, the worst that comes out of Goodling’s misdeeds is that the career employees at Justice will be skewed towards religious and political conservatives for years to come. But dday makes a more ominous speculation: If these people think of themselves as political appointees, whose real career path is in the conservative/Republican political establishment, then they will essentially be moles in any future Democratic administration.

[Y]ou are going to see all kinds of whistleblowers and martyrs coming out of the woodwork in an Obama Administration, telling lurid and probably false tales accusing them of exactly what the Bush Administration put into practice and more. And they will be held up on the right as shining examples of patriots who understand how the rule of law must be respected at all times.

Moving on to the next scandal, federal Judge John Bates (a Republican who worked with Kenneth Starr on the Whitewater investigation of Clinton, appointed a judge by President Bush) rejected the adminstration’s claims that former administration officials Harriet Miers and John Bolton should be exempt from congressional subpoena to testify about the firing of the U.S. attorneys. Marty Lederman analyzes the ruling here, and provides links to the text.

Karl Rove is offering the same excuse for his refusal to testify to the House Judiciary Committee about the Siegelman case. The committee voted to recommend that he be charged with contempt of Congress, putting him on the same path that Miers and Bolton went down. The Bush Justice Department — being a political operation and not a department of justice — refused prosecute the charge against Miers and Bolton, and presumably won’t prosecute Rove either. The congressional investigation into the Siegelman case was requested by bipartisan group of 44 former state attorneys general.

Now, administrations have claimed executive privilege before, but these cases take it to a whole new level. A proper claim would be on a question-by-question basis: If Congress asked Rove or Miers or Bolton about their conversations with the president, they might well claim that those conversations are privileged. But refusing to show up at all, before knowing exactly what the committee will ask — well, it’s stunning, and Judge Bates found it “entirely unsupported by existing case law.” And if Rove and the president were not involved in the Siegelman case (as Rove claims), then it’s hard to imagine how executive privilege legitmately comes into play at all.

So Miers and Bolton, and presumably Rove down the road, have a court order telling them to submit to a congressional subpoena. It used to be that in America you didn’t need to wonder what would happen next — they’d show up. But under the Bush Imperium, who knows?

Leaving the Politics Department Justice Department, you probably thought that Hurricane Katrina malfeasance stories were over by now. But no, there’s still one more: FEMA has warehoused a bunch of victim supplies ever since, and has now declared them to be government surplus — without ever asking anybody in Louisianna or Mississippi if they wanted the stuff.

And finally, Valtin on DailyKos argues that the timeline on torture goes back to December, 2001 — more than half a year earlier than previously thought. By July, 2002, (which is currently believed to be when the torture story starts) a number of presidential findings and other legal fig leaves were in place. But if the story starts sooner, Valtin claims, the war crimes charges are harder to dodge.

Election Notes
Trash Talk Replaces Straight Talk. During the last two weeks, during and after Obama’s successful foreign tour, the McCain campaign has gone full frontal negative, complete with some subtle but definite racial overtones. They threw around some false charges about Obama’s cancelled visit to a military hospital in Germany, blamed Obama for rising gas prices, said Obama would rather lose a war than lose an election, and then did some negative ads they claim are humorous: Celebrity and The One, which poke at the adoration Obama gets. (Seems like sour grapes to me. McCain would think it was great if he could draw huge, enthusiastic crowds. But he can’t, so it’s bad.)

It amazes me how many people can’t see the Obama-and-slutty-white-women theme in the visuals of the Celebrity ad. Or the racial odor to the whole he’s-not-one-of-us theme or the he-doesn’t-know-his-place theme in the other attacks. (David Gergen gets it. So does Bob Herbert.) (Here’s a parody of Celebrity. The official catalog of McCain ads is here. )

Other comments on the low road McCain is taking: the Washington Independent, Time’s Joe Klein, the Economist, Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, Salon’s Joe Conason, New York Magazine, and David Kiley of that well-known liberal bastion Business Week. Kiley writes:

What the McCain campaign doesn’t want people to know, according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was…wait for it…using wounded troops as campaign props. So, no matter which way Obama turned, McCain had an Obama bashing ad ready to launch.

Not the man he used to be. The word is starting to get out that if you liked McCain in 2000, you need to take a second look because he has changed.

You can tell that a meme is catching on when a bunch of independent commenters use the same words. Thursday I was reading David Ignatius’ WaPo column about how McCain should return to his “true voice” — that of his 1999 autobiography Faith of My Fathers. WaPo lets you leave comments, so I started mine “The McCain of 1999 is long gone.”

By coincidence, my comment appeared right after two others: “The John McCain you write about is long gone …” and “McCain is no longer that man …” Now, sometimes stuff like that happens because a bunch of dittoheads repeat the same Rush Limbaugh line. But since I am one of the people doing it this time, I know that I believed I thought of those words myself.

Here are some specifics: McCain 2000 had a conflicted opinion on abortion and expressed concern about the “illegal and dangerous operations” that women would suffer without Roe v. Wade. McCain 2008 is unequivocal: “Roe v. Wade is a flawed decision that must be overturned.” McCain 2000 criticized the proposed Bush tax cut by talking about the “lucky millionaire” who would get a much bigger break from Bush’s plan than McCain’s. McCain 2008 wants to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, and make more cuts that will benefit the wealthy. McCain 2000 denounced religious right leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as “agents of intolerance” and decried “the evil influence that they exercise over the Republican Party.” McCain 2008 gave the commencement address at Falwell’s Liberty University and sought the endorsement of an even nuttier agent of intolerance, John Hagee.

Fox News is making McCain look younger by sneaking in video from his 2000 campaign.

This kind of stuff never happens to Republicans. WaPo reporter Dana Milbank blogged a second-hand, unsourced Obama quote that made him sound puffed-up: “This is the moment . . . that the world is waiting for. … I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.” TV pundits picked this up and ran with it, echoing the Republican talking points that Obama is “arrogant” and “presumptuous”.

Except … it turns out the quote was way out of context, and the context turns it completely around. WaPo’s The Trail blog eventually got around to publishing the preface to the quote: “It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign — that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It’s about America. I have just become a symbol.”

The LA Times “On the Media” column comments: “It all would be quite funny if many people didn’t seem to be inhaling this multimedia stink bomb as if it were fragrant truth.”

Naturally, no apologies from anyone involved, and the narrative about Obama’s uppity nature rolls on. The lesson — which we should have learned in 2000 and 2004 — is that gaffes aren’t required. Once a narrative is in place, supporting evidence can be manufactured as needed.

Another tale of manufactured outrage begins (if you tell the story properly) here: On June 27, the McCain campaign released an attack ad that featured, among other images, Barack Obama’s face on a dollar bill. Obama then said this:

what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He’s risky.

And the McCain campaign responded: “Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck.”

But the McCain ad that started this exchange isn’t mentioned by anybody in the media, so Obama’s dollar-bill comment seems to come completely out of the blue. As a result a poll shows that 53% of the public buys the line that Obama is injecting race into the campaign.

Meanwhile, zenbowl on DailyKos shows some of the places where “the race card” has already been played.

Bob Cesca jumps on the Obama-isn’t-one-of-us theme:

The Republicans … set the tone of the debate. The corporate media accepts their terms, their rules and their frames as a given and the Democrats are expected to jump and dash and explain themselves based upon those givens, irrespective of how ludicrous they happen to be.

Prove to us that you’re one of us. Prove to us that you support the troops. Prove to us that you’re patriotic. Prove to us that you’re not an effete snob. Prove to us that you can talk to a gathering of bumpkins in a diner like a plainspoken Republican can. Prove to us that you’re not the enemy. Prove to us that you’re not presumptuous.

McCain, meanwhile, wears $500 Italian shoes, married an heiress who has $225,000 of credit card debt she’s too rich to pay attention to, and he’s never had a non-government job. But for some reason he never needs to prove that he’s one of us.

I’ve been ignoring the endless VP speculation on the blogs because it’s a waste of time. But I want to get my Republican prediction on record: Mitt Romney.

A Washington Post editorial makes the connection between Republicans’ vague, trumped-up charges of vote fraud and attempts to “scare new voters away from the polls”.

Global warming is supposed to be the signature issue that proves McCain is different from Bush. But it seems to depend on the audience. While talking to CNN’s conservative pundit Glenn Beck, McCain adviser Steve Forbes made McCain’s cap-and-trade system for regulating greenhouse gases sound like window dressing: “I don’t think those things are going to get very far as people start to examine the details of them.”

Short Notes: Not election

I’ve been wondering what to say about the shooting at the Unitarian Universalist church in Knoxville. (The most complete set of links is at the UUA web site.) I’m a UU myself, and have to confess that it’s unsettling to think of someone intentionally targeting members of my faith, even if it is just one lone bozo.

What I find missing from the general media coverage is the word terrorism. If this were a Sunni shooting up a Shia mosque in Baghdad, we’d all instantly recognize it as terrorism. When the Earth Liberation Front burns down a house, the New York Times calls it terrorism. But not here. White conservatives can’t be terrorists, it seems.

But the next time someone tries to tell me there haven’t been any terrorist attacks in America since 9-11, I’m going to mention Knoxville.

The pattern continues: Iraq casualties down, Afghanistan casualties up. In July, 13 coalition troops (all Americans) were killed in Iraq. (I almost wrote “only 13”. It’s easy to get into that mindset, and forget that you’re talking about people’s lives.) 30 killed in Afghanistan; it’s harder to tell from the way the web site is laid out, but at least 20 of them were Americans.

Sometimes a piece is just funny, even if you like the guy it’s making fun of. The Onion inserts Al Gore (or Gor-Al) into the Jor-El role of the Superman myth: Al Gore Places Infant Son in Rocket to Escape Dying Planet. It makes Gore look ridiculous, but the parallels really are striking.

If you’ve ever wondered how to get your letters to the editor published, author John K. Wilson explains how. He wrote this on the same day he got a letter published in the New York Times, so he must know what he’s talking about. (I’ve also gotten a bunch of letters published, and agree completely with what he’s saying, especially Rule 9: Make One Point.)

Remember how Pakistan was supposed to be on our side? Well, maybe not. The ISI — Pakistan’s version of the CIA — might have been behind the bombing of the Indian embassy in Afghanistan, which killed 54 people. If so, then they’re working with an ally of Al Qaeda.

In an interview in the current issue of Barron’s (no link without subscription), NYU economist Nouriel Roubini predicts bad loans from the housing bubble could eventually mount to $2 trillion. Bank write-offs so far are “only” $300 billion.

We are in the second inning of a severe, protracted recession, which started in the first quarter of this year and is going to last at least 18 months, through the middle of next year. A systemic banking crisis will go on for awhile, with hundreds of banks going belly up.

Insiders in the industry know that the debate about offshore drilling is largely moot, at least in the short term. Consider this paragraph from the most recent annual report of Transocean, the world’s largest offshore drilling company:

Our ultra-deepwater, deepwater and harsh-environment fleet is almost fully committed in 2008, with little availability in 2009 and 2010. We also have a large number of long-term, forward-start contracts, some of which provide fleet commitments beyond 2014. Similarly, few of our midwater rigs have availability in 2008, with a substantial portion of our midwater fleet contracted well into 2009. In addition, our jackup fleet is more than 80 percent committed in 2008. Our significant contract backlog gives us confidence that we will continue to see strong financial performance in the years ahead.

In other words, the bottleneck in the industry is a shortage of rigs, not places to drill. Releasing more land to offshore drilling would probably not increase the number of wells drilled between now and 2011.

Here’s a great graphic, illustrating that the U.S. isn’t as healthy as the other rich countries. Our death rate for children under 5 is about the same as Cuba’s and way below Sweden’s.

By weeklysift | Comments (0)

Changing the Current

July 28, 2008 – 3:15 pm
The Old Order Amish of Pennsylvania, who live a life poor in appliances but rich in community, had a depression rate about one-tenth that of their neighbors. … We don’t need to become Amish, but we do need to start building an economy that works for our current needs, rather than constantly readjusting our lives to serve the growth of the economy. — Bill McKibben, Deep Economy

In this Week’s Sift:

  • How Reasonable is Gore’s Challenge? It’s easy to find opinions about Al Gore’s speech challenging the U.S. to get all its electricity from renewable sources in ten years. But it’s much harder to pull together credible information about how ready renewable energy sources are to meet that challenge.
  • Media Bias: In Whose Favor? The networks cover Obama more than McCain, but they say more bad things about Obama while ignoring McCain’s mistakes. The “liberal media” may be the biggest myth the conservative media ever sold us.
  • Short Notes. The length of the Gore article has pushed this Sift up to my self-imposed length limit. Short Notes will be back next week.

How Reasonable is Gore’s Challenge?

Last week I promised an article about Al Gore’s challenge to produce 100% of our electricity from renewable sources in ten years.

Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down. Feeding Al Gore’s name into Google News gets you a wide range of opinion and analysis. Penn & Teller did an episode of their TV show “Bullshit” on Gore, global warming, and the idea of buying carbon credits. (My reaction: They ridicule some sources and give an uncritical platform to others for no apparent reason beyond what they seem to want to believe.) Real Clear Politics’ Jack Kelly is also a skeptic. And Mark Davis in the Dallas Morning News asks: “Who are we to assert that we know the planet’s ideal temperature?”

If you want to read upbeat reviews of Gore’s speech, check out the Toledo Blade, the Hartford Courant (which also published this critical reader response), or the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

That’s the kind of stuff I was finding last week: people who agree or disagree, but nobody who was telling me anything to help me make up my mind. That’s why I punted to this week’s Sift, so that I could dig a little deeper.

Framing the message. In terms of political strategy, I think Gore has it exactly right. There are two main ways to push policy in a more environmentally sound direction. One is a “Repent, sinners!” approach that emphasizes the wasteful and extravagant nature of the American lifestyle. This case is easy to make — we use something like 1/4th of the world’s oil with less than 1/20th of the world’s population — but it’s not a very effective political message. Ronald Reagan once summed up conservation as being hot in the summer and cold in the winter. That’s not a campaign promise anybody can run on.

Gore, on the other hand, is saying that a new era is coming and the United States can lead the world into it. That’s an optimistic, patriotic message. It asks people to be willing to sacrifice to achieve a greater goal, but loses completely the dour, preachy implication that comfort is bad and suffering is good. The parallels with JFK and the space program help a lot. If the national debate gets framed as the environmentalists’ futuristic vision versus the desire of conservatives to keep the old oil economy going just a little bit longer, the environmentalists win.

Gore is also on the mark that ten years is the right time frame:

a political promise to do something 40 years from now is universally ignored because everyone knows that it’s meaningless. Ten years is about the maximum time that we as a nation can hold a steady aim and hit our target.

Ten years also is long enough to get us past a course that Gore criticizes as “incremental proposals made up of small policies designed to avoid offending special interests, alternating with occasional baby steps in the right direction.”

So yes, I’m totally on board with the shape of Gore’s proposal: A bold goal to be achieved in ten years.

Now, what goal should that be?

Other Plans. In 2003 Howard Dean proposed to generate 20% of America’s electricity from renewable sources by 2020. But he wasn’t trying to be radical, he just wanted to bring the U.S. up to the standard already being set by Denmark and Holland. (Two weeks ago I linked to this New Yorker article about an island in Denmark that already generates all its own power from wind.) It was a stop-falling-behind vision, not a lead-the-world vision. That it seemed bold at the time says something about the state of American politics.

Last December’s issue of Scientific American published a plan that its authors clearly considered bold. It called for massive solar arrays in the Southwest, storing excess daytime energy as compressed air in underground caverns for use at night, and a long-haul DC transmission network to get power from the Southwest to the rest of the country. (The power would be converted to AC before use; they’re not talking about rewiring the whole country. DC power travels better for reasons I don’t understand.) The authors estimate their plan would generate 69% of America’s electricity by 2050. They call for $420 billion in government subsidies during 2011-2020 to get things rolling, with the program paying for itself thereafter. By 2020 (about the time frame of Gore’s plan) they foresee the DC transmission backbone in place and 84 gigawatts of solar generating capacity, compared to the 3,000 GW they foresee by 2050.

Those numbers are purely solar, and mainly the gigantic array in the Southwest. So the total national renewable-energy capacity, including residential solar panels and wind turbines, would be higher.

If you have a more vigorous imagination, picture putting solar arrays in space, where cloudy days are never an issue. Then you beam the power down to receiving stations on Earth in microwaves that are also not blocked by clouds. The government could launch the first power arrays by 2016, and then hope for private industry to take over, producing 10% of our electrical needs by 2050. The president of the Space Power Association says, “The challenge is one of perception,” which is my nominee for Understatement of the Year. The paranoia potential is immense — “Death Rays From Space” and so forth. Political practicality aside, former NASA executive O. Glenn Smith promoted the idea this week in the New York Times. A detailed report from the Pentagon’s National Security Space Office is here.

Israel is a natural place to look for leadership in renewable energy. They have a concentrated population, a high-tech research infrastructure, a sun-soaked desert, and a national security interest in ending the Age of Oil as fast as possible. And sure enough, they are planning the world’s largest solar plant to be built in the Negev desert by 2012. It’s supposed to supply 500 megawatts of power, or about 5% of Israel’s needs. The director of Ben Gurion University’s Solar Center has predicted that Israel could go totally solar by 2036. I’m not sure whether or not those calculations include the power necessary to convert Israel to electric cars, which is also on the drawing board.

And what could you do if you had infinite amounts of money to play with and could build a city from scratch? The United Arab Emirates intend to find out. They’re planning a zero-carbon-emission city of 50,000 just outside of Abu Dhabi.

Maybe you’ve seen T. Boone Pickens’ recent TV commercials. The clearest explanation of Pickens’ plan is a five-minute video of Pickens in front of a white board; he does a great job, with a little extra help from patched-in graphics. The difference between Pickens and Gore is that Pickens worries only about the impact of imported oil on the U.S. economy, and apparently not at all about global warming or any other environmental issue. For Pickens, the problem is that $700 billion is leaving America each year, “the largest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind.” His solution: Instead of using our domestic natural gas to run power plants, use it to run vehicles, replacing gasoline from foreign oil. Then use wind power to replace the 22% of our electricity that currently comes from natural gas. Like Gore, he sees his plan as a ten-year vision. (Also like Gore, he invests in companies that are doing the stuff he says needs to be done. For some reason I can’t grasp, this supposedly makes Gore a hypocrite, but not Pickens.)

From a global environmental perspective rather than a national economic one, Pickens’ plan is kind of wacky — as explained by Grist’s Joseph Ramm. The craziest environmental thing we currently do is generate half our electricy from coal. Pickens’ plan leaves that intact, because coal is a domestic fuel. (Foreign = Bad; Dirty = OK.) As fossil fuels go, natural gas is our cleanest way to generate electricity. And an electricity-generating plant can burn natural gas at 60% efficiency, while a natural-gas-burning car operates at 15-20% efficiency. So Pickens has us do this massive turn-over of our infrastructure (cars that burn natural gas; stations that distribute it) and the result is that we wind up still burning fossil fuels in our cars and generating our electricity with coal. Ramm says: Build the wind farms, and use the electricity either to phase out coal or to fuel plug-in hybrid cars.

I did learn one important thing from Pickens’ video: The best place for wind farms is in the Great Plains, in a north-south strip that sits just to the east of the prime solar territory. Politically, this is huge. Local special interests could get middle-of-the-country senators from Arizona to North Dakota — mostly Republicans currently — to back an alternative energy plan.

That’s what currently happens with ethanol, which (along with other biofuels) gets a mixed review from National Geographic:

Biofuels as currently rendered in the U.S. are doing great things for some farmers and for agricultural giants like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, but little for the environment. Corn requires large doses of herbicide and nitrogen fertilizer and can cause more soil erosion than any other crop. And producing corn ethanol consumes just about as much fossil fuel as the ethanol itself replaces. Biodiesel from soybeans fares only slightly better.

But the same article claims ethanol from sugar cane (the way Brazil does it) has an 8-to-1 energy payoff, compared to 1.3-to-1 for corn ethanol. So biofuel is not a total chimera. And energy from bio-byproducts makes a lot of local sense. You’d never start raising cows just to get methane from their manure, but if you already have a dairy it’s an obvious win. Ditto for running vehicles on used cooking oil, as my local fried-chicken-delivery place does. Ditto for co-generation, where the waste heat of some industrial process is captured. What kind of national impact idiosyncratic projects like these can make is hard to estimate, but I’ll bet the current estimates are too low.

Summing Up. So what have I concluded from my week of alternative-energy web-browsing? I think the most important thing Gore (with independent help from Pickens) has done is move the Overton Window, the range of ideas that Serious People are willing to talk about. Getting up to 20% renewable power by 2020 seemed pie-in-the-sky when Dean proposed it in 2003. But Pickens is proposing that much power from wind alone, and nobody is laughing. If President Obama’s inaugural address contains a proposal for 50% renewable power by 2020 and 100% by 2050, it will sound reasonable. Building a political coalition behind it will be easier than most people think. There’s a culture clash to overcome, but a skillful president could get Pickens-style nationalists working with Gore-style environmentalists.

Second, there are some common elements in everybody’s plans. For example, an upgraded electricity transmission grid, with some kind of DC long-haul capability. We need it, and a lot of corporations stand to make money building it, so the politics should work. (I just bought stock in General Cable Corporation, which should profit from such a plan. Does that make me a hypocrite like Gore or a patriot like Pickens?)

Right now, if you’re somewhere with a prevailing wind, wind power works. Solar is at an earlier stage, but it works if you’re in a sunny place and can use the power immediately not too far away. (I noticed this week that those portable signs announcing road construction are solar-powered now.) The main economic problem with each is the up-front money; once you’ve got the wind turbine or the solar panel in place, you don’t have to pay for the wind or sun. But that’s the kind of financing problem governments have been solving since the Athenian tyrant Peisistratos subsidized olive tree planting in 500-something BC. (The trees wouldn’t be productive for 15 years. That’s why the olive branch became a sign of peace: there’s no point planting olive trees unless you think you can go 15 years without having your fields burned.) It’s mainly a question of political will, not technology.

But do I believe that Gore’s goal is feasible as stated? Not yet. Maybe a Kennedy-like man-on-the-Moon research project would yield some startling breakthrough like near-perfect-efficiency batteries or large-scale economically-viable superconductors. But things like that are hard to predict and can’t be counted on. And if we go to plug-in cars, that moves the goal posts for the electricity-generating problem.

But even though I don’t expect to see the result Gore called for, I’m glad he did it. That such an idea is out there and being talked about changes the political dynamic for the next proposal.

Media Bias: In Whose Favor?

All three network anchors decided to accompany Obama on his recent foreign tour, and the result was predictable: numerous statements-of-fact that the mainstream media is “in the tank” for Obama. (See a collage of Fox News repeating this talking point here.) A blog called the Tyndall Report got a lot of press when it appeared to make this point quantitative:

In the seven weeks since the primary season ended (04jun08-23jul08), John McCain has logged 67 minutes on the three broadcast networks’ weekday nightly newscasts, Barack Obama 166.

But (and this wasn’t mentioned by most of the folks who quoted Tyndall) that same Tyndall post doesn’t say the media is biased in Obama’s favor. Instead, it makes a case for obsession, not favoritism:

Obama gets more positive coverage, more negative coverage and more trivial coverage. Who else has stories filed about them on how he shakes hands with his wife?

Think about that three weeks of non-stop Jeremiah Wright coverage in the spring: Obama certainly dominated the news, but hardly because the media was trying to get him elected. The Center for Media and Public Affairs did the math and found that in fact it’s John McCain who gets the advantage from media bias:

when network news people ventured opinions in recent weeks, 28% of the statements were positive for Obama and 72% negative. Network reporting also tilted against McCain, but far less dramatically, with 43% of the statements positive and 57% negative

I think even that understates matters, because the most important measure of bias is whose talking points get repeated. And there I think McCain is the clear winner. I don’t have numbers, but you can probably verify this from your own experience: Compare how many times Obama is asked whether he was wrong about the Surge to the number of times McCain is asked whether he was wrong to want to invade Iraq in the first place. The link in the last sentence is the first time I’ve heard anyone ask McCain that question, while I’ve heard Obama confronted with the Surge countless times, starting at least back in January.

A second measure of media bias is what happens to candidate gaffes. Compare the coverage of Obama’s “bitter” remark to any of a number of more serious McCain gaffes — including the one where he describes the way Social Security has run since FDR set it up as “an absolute disgrace“. And McCain made a huge mistake during a recent interview with Katie Couric: He said the Surge caused the Anbar Awakening, when the proven chronology runs the other way. This isn’t a minor flub like when he says “Czechoslovakia” instead of “the Czech Republic”, it’s evidence that even on the issues that he builds his campaign around McCain doesn’t know what he’s talking about. So what did CBS News do with this major gaffe? They edited it out of the interview. Keith Olbermann’s people unearthed it from the unedited transcript on the CBS News web site.

McCain’s screw-ups, according to the mainstream media, just aren’t news. Obama’s are. The NYT’s Bob Herbert finally gets this point into his supposedly liberal newspaper. And one other Herbert point: Negative coverage of Obama is supposedly justified by the excuse that the voters don’t know him well enough yet. But how well do we know McCain? All we know is what he wants to tell us: “The mythical John McCain is an affable, straight-talking, moderately conservative war hero who is an expert on foreign policy.” Is that true? Does he have views on other issues? Does he tell the same views to every audience? Nobody wants to poke at that story too hard.

I’ll give two other people the last words. RKA on DailyKos:

But isn’t it kind of cynical that the media gives Obama’s trip a lot of coverage and simultaneously talks incessantly about how they are giving Obama too much coverage? If the media were truly in Obama’s tank, there would be no navel gazing about their own coverage decisions. They would just slant the coverage and get on with it. But they don’t. They offer themselves up as whipping boy to help John McCain turn lemons into lemonade.

Drew Westen:

But it’s easy to confuse biased reporting with accurate reporting about a candidate who inspires voters. Reporting on that inspiration, or simply showing crowd response, is no less “objective” than reporting on voters who aren’t convinced that he shares their values or is enough like them to vote for him … [P]eople connect with Barack Obama in a way they don’t with John McCain. He draws crowds that dwarf McCain’s, and he excites enthusiasm both at home and abroad that McCain simply can’t excite. And that’s the news.

By weeklysift | Comments (1)

Re-telling Bush’s Story

July 21, 2008 – 1:20 pm

We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that’s got to change. — Al Gore

In This Week’s Sift:

  • The Election’s Central Issue. Is George Bush a bad president who coincidentally happens to be conservative? Or are his administration’s failures the culmination of decades of conservative policies?
  • Gore’s Moon Shot. I’m still trying to figure out what I think about Al Gore’s call for 100% carbon-free electricity in ten years.
  • What Real Conservatives Want. The Texas Republican platform demonstrates how radical the party’s base is. Democrats should make McCain and all other Republicans say whether they agree with it or not.
  • Short Notes. What Michelle means to black professional women. Who’s still in high school: bloggers or mainstream media pundits? We’re #12! Snuggly the Security Bear explains FISA. And same-sex marriage is on its way to becoming no big deal in Massachusetts — just like I said it would.

The Election’s Central Issue

This election has many individual issues — the wars, health care, the economy, global warming, civil liberties, etc. — but behind them all lies one simple question: How will the American people tell the story of George W. Bush?

It’s not whether he has been a good president or a bad president. That’s been decided. Bush has one of the lowest approval ratings ever (23% at last count), and has been unpopular for a long time. His approval has been below 40% in Gallup’s survey (which is more favorable to Bush than most, currently 29%) since January, 2006. By comparison, at this point in his presidency Bill Clinton (already impeached-but-not-removed by then) had a Gallup approval number double Bush’s, 58% vs. 29%.

My personal suspicion is that these numbers underestimate Bush’s unpopularity. At 23%, you’re down to the people who feel like they have to defend you. I’ll bet a poll coupled with a polygraph would net a much lower number. As soon as Bush is off the stage those 23% will never invoke his name again, just as no Republican brings up Nixon today. (Gallup showed Nixon with 24% approval just before he left office. I wonder how many people would admit to belonging to that 24% a year or two later.)

The unresolved question, though, is: Why was Bush such a bad president? The Republicans can win this election if they can sell the story that Bush’s problems are personal, that he made some bad judgments another conservative Republican wouldn’t make. This is the line McCain pushes on Iraq: Bush listened to Rumsfeld and invaded without enough troops, then didn’t employ a good counter-insurgency strategy. But Rumsfeld has been fired, the strategy has been fixed, and we’re finally on track for the victory that we should have had in 2003. Bush bungled Katrina, but that was just bad management — and management is a non-partisan skill. On the economy, Bush just wasn’t conservative enough: He didn’t control Congress’ runaway spending. (The fact that Congress was controlled by Republicans during most of the Bush years is conveniently forgotten.)

The Democrats need to tell a different story: The Bush presidency’s failures are the natural result of three big conservative ideas that go back to Ronald Reagan: Don’t tax the rich, don’t regulate business, and wave a big stick at the rest of the world. Replacing Bush changes nothing if we don’t reject those ideas.

The last 28 years — Clinton stalled the trend but didn’t reverse it — has been a more-than-fair test of this conservative philosophy, which we now see doesn’t work. If you cut rich people’s taxes, they get a lot richer, the government borrows a lot of money, and the benefits never trickle down. If you de-regulate corporations, you don’t get reasonably priced health care for all, you get Enron, MCI, and the mortgage crisis.* If you take a might-makes-right approach to other countries, they won’t cooperate. You’ll spend trillions sending troops all over the world, until you have no more troops to send.

Which of those failed conservative policies do McCain or the Republican Congressional candidates reject? Maybe they’re ready to stop denying global warming** — some of them, sort of, maybe. But McCain proposes more tax cuts targeted at the rich.*** He promises more wars. The center of his health care plan is a tax deduction plus a proposal to de-regulate health insurance companies, and he makes this vacuous promise, which is unsupported by any specifics whatever:

John McCain understands that those without prior group coverage and those with pre-existing conditions have the most difficulty on the individual market, and we need to make sure they get the high-quality coverage they need.

In other words, if you have a pre-existing condition, John McCain feels your pain. Kind of.

So here’s the story Democrats need to tell to the 77% of Americans who say the country is on the wrong track. It’s not on the wrong track because President Bush made some bizarre wrong turn. He just went eight years further down the road laid out by Ronald Reagan, and this is where it leads. John McCain and the Republicans running for Congress want to keep going further down that road. Obama and the Democrats don’t. If Democrats can convince the country to tell Bush’s story that way, they’ll have a landslide in November.

* I’m reminded of the commercials that John Houseman made in the Eighties for Smith Barney, which is now part of Citibank. “They make money the old-fashioned way,” he asserted forcefully. “They earn it.” The folks running Enron made money the really old-fashioned way — they stole it. That’s what big executives do when they know no one is watching them. Want more Enrons? Keep de-regulating.

** I haven’t read the entire 2004 Republican Platform, but I know it doesn’t contain the words warming or climate. The 2008 Platform of the Texas Republican Party says: “We oppose taxes levied and regulations imposed based on the alleged threat of global warming.” If McCain tries to put something about global warming into the national platform, there’s going to be a nasty fight. I’m betting he doesn’t.

*** On his web site the plan to eliminate the Alternate Minimum Tax is promoted as a tax cut for “middle class families” with no mention of the rich. But the AMT was originally targeted only at the rich. Now it hits some families in the upper half of the middle class, because Bush lowered the non-AMT tax rates and left the AMT alone. Even so, in 2010 90% of the AMT will be paid by households with incomes over $100,000. McCain also proposes a cut in the corporate tax rate. Millions of middle-class Americans own some small amount of corporate stock, but the overwhelming majority of the benefit from a corporate tax cut goes to the very wealthy. He’ll tell you it will trickle down, but it never does.

Gore’s Moon Shot

“Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years,” Al Gore said Thursday. (Here’s the text and video of Gore’s speech.) He compared this challenge to JFK’s pledge to put a man on the Moon, which seemed far-fetched at the time but actually came in ahead of schedule.

I’m looking for thoughtful commentary about how realistic Gore’s goal is, and I’m finding darn little of it. If you see something I should look at, either append a comment on the blog or email me. I’ll return to this story next week.

What Real Conservatives Want

In most states the Republican Party has to wear a mask of reasonability. But in Texas they get to let it all hang out. The 2008 Platform of the Texas Republican Party is worth a read. In fact, I’d recommend that Democrats distribute this platform nationwide and make it as well known as possible. Here are some highlights:

The embodiment of the Conservative Dream in America is Texas. … This platform is indeed the heart and soul of our Party.

We reaffirm our belief in … eliminating the Endangered Species Act. … We oppose taxes levied and regulations imposed based on the alleged threat of global warming. … we oppose subsidizing alternative fuel production

We believe the Minimum Wage Law should be repealed.

We support an immediate and orderly transition to a system of private pensions based on the concept of individual retirement accounts, and gradually phasing out the Social Security tax.

Life begins at the moment of fertilization and ends at the point of natural death. All innocent human life must be protected. … We are resolute regarding the reversal of Roe v. Wade. … We oppose sale and use of the dangerous “Morning After Pill.” … we urge Congress to withhold Supreme Court jurisdiction in cases involving abortion, religious freedom, and the Bill of Rights.

We believe [affirmative action] is simply racism disguised as a social virtue. … We demand abolition of bilingual education. … We have room for but one language here and that is the English language. … We urge immediate repeal of the Hate Crimes Law.

We further call on Congress to pass and the state legislatures to ratify a marriage amendment declaring that marriage in the United States shall consist of and be recognized only as the union of a natural man and a natural woman. Neither the United States nor any state shall recognize or grant to any unmarried person the legal rights or status of a spouse. … We urge the Legislature to rescind no–fault divorce laws. … We oppose … adoption by homosexuals.

We oppose any sex education other than abstinence until heterosexual marriage. … We urge Congress to repeal government-sponsored programs that deal with early childhood development. … We urge the Legislature, Governor, Commissioner of Education and State Board of Education to remind administrators and school boards that corporal punishment is effective and legal in Texas. … We support objective teaching and equal treatment of strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories, including Intelligent Design. … We pledge our influence … toward dispelling the myth of separation of church and state.

We believe the Legislature should enact legislation: allowing: Concealed Handgun License holders to carry concealed weapons on publicly owned institutions of learning

No extraordinary medical care, including organ transplants or body part replacement, should be performed on prisoners at taxpayer expense.

The Internal Revenue Service is unacceptable to U. S. taxpayers! We urge that the IRS be abolished and the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution be repealed. We further urge that the personal income tax, alternative minimum tax, inheritance (death) tax, gift tax, capital gains, corporate income tax, and payroll tax be eliminated. We recommend the implementation of a national retail sales tax

There is no substitute for Victory! We commend and support the Bush Administration’s current policy regarding our military operations fighting the War on Terror and confronting radical Islamist terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries around the world. … There should be no “time-table” applied to the withdrawal of our forces. … We oppose any plan to close Guantanamo

Our [Israel] policy is based on God’s biblical promise to bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel … We should not reward terrorism by allowing a Palestinian state carved out of historical Israel.

We demand Congress stop funding the IMF and any other international financing agencies. … We … urge our Texas Senators to unalterably oppose any agreement or treaty that seeks to establish an International Criminal Court (ICC) … We urge Congress to evict the United Nations from the United States and eliminate any further participation.

These statements are scattered throughout the document, but aren’t taken out of context in any way. The ellipses (…) are honest. I’m picking a few items from long lists, and grouping related items that may not be next to each other in the original. But the subjects and predicates really are intended to go together.

One reason Democrats lose is that we consistently allow Republicans to tell one story to their extremist base and another to the swing voters. Not just John McCain, but Republicans all over the country need to be asked about statements like the ones above. Do they repudiate the extremist Republican base, or do they support it?

Short Notes

Sophia Nelson writes a black professional woman’s perspective on Michelle Obama for the Washington Post. Obama’s treatment from the media comes as no surprise to Nelson, who presents a world in which stereotyping is the norm. If you’re noticed at all, then you’re seen as either a vixen or as angry. “This society can’t even see a woman like Michelle Obama.” To Nelson, Obama represents the have-it-all vision: “an accomplished black woman can be a loyal and supportive wife and a good mother and still fulfill her own dreams.” Nelson reports that 70% of black professional women are unmarried, and that they’re five times more likely than white women to be single at 40. From that point of view, Michelle really is a revolutionary.

Netroots Nation — the annual gathering of liberal bloggers that was called YearlyKos last summer — happened in Austin this week. (I wasn’t there.) The Washington Post coverage dripped with condescension. “If the Netroots can be compared to high school …” it said in the first paragraph, and continued the metaphor throughout the story. If you want to make your own judgments, the online video is here.

Media Matters turns that metaphor around while discussing the mainstream media’s attempt to create an issue around Obama’s “likability” or his ability to “connect with regular people” when polls consistently fail to find any such problem. The MSM pundits are like the middle-school in-crowd telling you who it’s OK to like. “Like cliquish teens, the D.C. pundit class is all too happy to make up a reason why you should dislike a candidate if a real reason fails to present itself.”

Frank Rich is one of the few mainstream journalists giving McCain’s statements any scrutiny at all:

In February Mr. McCain said he would balance the federal budget by the end of his first term even while extending the gargantuan Bush tax cuts. In April he said he’d accomplish this by the end of his second term. In July he’s again saying he’ll do it in his first term. Why not just say he’ll do it on Inauguration Day? It really doesn’t matter since he’s never supplied real numbers that would give this promise even a patina of credibility.

I just finished George Soros’ short new book The New Paradigm for Financial Markets. Basically, Soros has One Big Point he’s been trying to make ever since he wrote The Alchemy of Finance in 1987, and every few years he writes a book interpreting the current crisis in terms of that Point. The OBP: If you’re inside the system you’re modeling, and if your ideas are going to take off, then your model needs to account for its own effects.

The mortgage crisis really is a good example. The people who created the complicated packages of mortgages (that are blowing up now) were counting on two facts about the real estate market: (1) It was generally stable, and (2) each local market had its own cycle. So a package of geographically diversified mortgages should have been super-stable, stable even if the individual mortgages that made it up were a little shaky. It didn’t work because the mortgage packages themselves linked and destablized the local real estate markets. They created a flood of cheap financing that produced an unsustainable across-the-board boom, and made a path by which problems in one local market could propagate to the rest.

Why am I not reassured by this? The ultimate domino that could fall in the mortgage crisis — after the U.S. government eats the sins of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, who ate the sins of various mortgage lenders — is that foreigners might stop wanting to own dollars or buy our government bonds. The argument that this won’t happen is that just as the government considers Fannie and Freddie too big to fail, the foreign big-money types consider the U.S. too big to fail. They’ll keep loaning us money because the alternative is too dire.

We’re #12! A consortium of foundations has computed the “human development index” of the fifty states and the U.S. as a whole. The HDI was designed by the UN to boil a lot of development statistics down to one big number, as a general evaluation of the progress of developing countries. But what if you apply it to the developed countries? Turns out the U.S. is 12th in the world for 2005, the most recent year for which numbers are available. In 1990 we were second. But because we’re fat and uninsured, our life expectancy — one of the component numbers of the HDI — has slipped to 42nd in the world, behind places like Costa Rica. We also lead the other 30 richest nations in children-in-poverty and people-in-prison.

The BBC posts a state-by-state map of the HDI. It bears a striking resemblance to our political map: The Northeast and California are highly developed, the South poorly developed. It’s no wonder Colorado and Virginia are getting bluer, they have high HDIs compared to the neighboring states.

This week’s internet animation: Snuggly the Security Bear explains the FISA compromise. Scott Bateman animates and anotates Bill O’Reilly talking with Karl Rove about defying a congressional subpoena — it’s really no worse than turning down an invitation to appear on O’Reilly’s show.

Interesting piece in the NYT by Gail Collins about how uncontroversial same-sex marriage is becoming in Massachusetts. The state senate just approved a bill allowing out-of-state same-sex couples to be married in Massachusetts — by voice vote, without objection. Collins comments: “There is no greater force against bigotry than the moment when something becomes so routine that you stop noticing it.”

All of which leads up to my I-told-you-so moment. One of the first things I ever blogged about was the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s decision allowing same-sex marriage in November, 2003. The final paragraph of that essay was:

Personally, I expect the same-sex marriage issue to follow the same course as interracial marriage. After a few years of Chicken-Little panic, the vast majority of Americans will recognize that the sky has not fallen, and that the new rights of homosexuals have come at the expense of no one.

By weeklysift | Comments (0)

A Government of Men, Not Laws

July 14, 2008 – 1:56 pm
I think it might, in fact, be time for the United States to be held internationally to a tribunal. I never thought, in my lifetime, that I would say that, that we have become like Serbia, where an international tribunal has to come to force us to apply the rule of law. — Jonathan Turley, law professor at George Washington University

In This Week’s Sift:

  • FISA Wrap-Up. The good guys lost on this one. And when the key moment came, Obama wasn’t one of the good guys.
  • Another Shoe Drops. A few months ago the government had to bail out Bear Stearns. Now it’s bailing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Who’s next?
  • Stop Whining, Everybody. McCain’s top economic adviser thinks the American people are a bunch of whiners. But I thought it was us elitest liberals who were supposed to look down on ordinary folks.
  • Bad Day in a Bad Place. Nine American soldiers died in Afghanistan Sunday. And that’s not the worst of it.
  • Short Notes. A Chinese bullet train. The Times and Post cover something other than the news. The New Yorker has a controversial cover. Florida still can’t get elections right. Plus a bunch of other stuff.

FISA Wrap-Up

Thursday President Bush signed the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), which passed the Senate the previous day with Barack Obama voting for it. Some Obama supporters are willing to give him a pass on this, but I’m not. I’m still going to vote for him, but I’m not going to make any excuses for him on this issue.

Wikipedia has a good summary of what’s in the bill. Glenn Greenwald comments:

The most overlooked fact in the entire FISA debate — the aspect of it that renders incoherent the case in favor of the new FISA law or even those who dismiss its significance — is that virtually nobody knows what the spying program they’re immunizing entailed and towards what ends it was used — i.e., whether it was abused for improper purposes. Even those who acknowledge that the warrantless spying program was illegal like to assert that it was implemented for benign and proper counter-terrorism purposes (see Kevin Drum making that claim here) — but they have absolutely no idea whether that is true. None. Zero.

The lawsuits against the telecoms were just about the last chances to get an independent judgment about what happened, and they have now been shut down.

Obama makes his case here. He points to two good features of the bill. First:

The exclusivity provision makes it clear to any president or telecommunications company that no law supersedes the authority of the FISA court. In a dangerous world, government must have the authority to collect the intelligence we need to protect the American people. But in a free society, that authority cannot be unlimited. As I’ve said many times, an independent monitor must watch the watchers to prevent abuses and to protect the civil liberties of the American people. This compromise law assures that the FISA court has that responsibility.

The problem here is that the original FISA law already asserted exclusivity. The issue wasn’t the FISA law, it was President Bush’s belief that his constitutional powers as commander-in-chief can’t be limited by Congress. Bush still believes that, and a McCain administration will likely be populated with a lot of other people who believe it. emptywheel already identified what she called a “pre-emptive signing statement” in Attorney General Mukasey’s letter to Harry Reid back in February. Bush (or some future authoritarian president) just has to say that he’s going to interpret the law to be consistent with his powers under Article II of the Constitution, and exclusivity goes away.

Second, Obama is counting on the inspector general reports authorized by the bill to tell us what we need to know about past and current spying programs. I’m not optimistic about that, either.

emptywheel does a lessons-learned piece for the coalition of people who came together to fight this issue. Jane Hamsher sees this as one battle in a long war to regain democracy:

But I hope [the FISA vote] abolished once and for all the idea that our leaders are going to “lead” on this issue without encouragement to do so. Barack Obama and others will be great on this stuff when there is a reason for them to be great — when the public comes together in a meaningful way and provides the political climate where it becomes the wise thing to do. We’re not there yet. To make it happen, we need to reward those who were with us. We need to punish those who stood against us. We need to recruit and support primary challengers, and help those people with the tools they need to run winning races that don’t rely on being in the good graces of the political establishment.

Another Shoe Drops

This morning the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve announced a plan to keep the semi-public mortgage insurance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in business. This is the biggest government intervention in the financial markets since the Bear Stearns bailout in March, and is part of the same issue: the popping of the real estate bubble.

I haven’t had time to study the details or figure out who has, but I will note this: Once again, private investors profit when things go well, but the taxpayers are left holding the bag when things go badly. If the subject is jobs moving overseas, the big-money types talk about “creative destruction” and the wisdom of the market. But when one of their own gets wounded they want the government to stop the game.

Last April, after the smoke of the Bear Stearns disaster had started to clear, Michael Lewitt of Hegemony Capital Management made this prescient remark about how the mortgage market was being cleaned up:

Does anybody really think it’s a good idea … for Fannie and Freddie to leverage their balance sheets further? All of these actions are going to have to be unwound at some point, which means that the day of reckoning is simply being delayed.

Delayed until today, when a new bailout is needed to push the day of reckoning off a little further. Long-term, it’s obvious what needs to happen: The U.S. government needs to decide exactly what is too big to be allowed to fail, insure it, collect fees sufficient to fund the insurance, and regulate the hell out of it, so that private companies don’t take advantage of their government insurance to stick the taxpayer with speculative losses. Lewitt again:

HCM often hears the argument that too much regulation will force business offshore and render the U.S. financial industry less competitive. Our response to that argument is that institutions and fiduciaries in the end will gravitate to the system with the strongest and wisest regulatory protections. Moreover, we should be pushing the most reckless practices out of our markets and into other markets. We should be creating global competition over best regulatory practices, not worst ones.

One more thing you might want to pay attention to: If your retirement plans involve owning some large chunk of stock in the company you work for, you need to think about what is happening to the employees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Stop Whining, Everybody

John McCain’s top economic advisor Phil Gramm thinks the recession is “mental” and that “we have sort of become a nation of whiners.” McCain is trying to distance himself from Gramm, but TPM has the video of how McCain has tied himself to Gramm when he needed to establish his economic heft. (When you see the video of Gramm’s statements — also in that TPM clip — it’s worse than just reading the text. His voice and expression are full of contempt.) On the weekend talk shows conservatives tried to defend Gramm’s point. George Will, for example, said “we are the crybabies of the western world.”

Now, here’s a thought experiment: Imagine if us pointy-headed liberal elitists were calling the American people whiners and crybabies. We’d never hear the end of it. But it’s conservatives doing it, so the media will forget in a day or two. Matthew Yglesias reminds us of other stuff that has blown over:

John McCain doesn’t know how to use a computer. John McCain doesn’t know when he last pumped gas or what it cost. John McCain owns seven homes and forgot to pay taxes on one of them for the past four years. But at least he’s not an elitist like Barack Obama.

Unless you read the conservative press regularly, it is easy to forget the extent to which they live in their own version of reality. Sunday’s Washington Times editorial page, for example, wanted to give a gentle correction to Gramm. But they couldn’t do it without first bowing at the altar of the Bush economic record. “After seven years of unprecedented strength,” they began, “the U.S. economy …” Not just strength, unprecedented strength, economic strength such as the United States has never seen before. The Moonie-owned newspaper continued:

It is a given that President Bush presided over one of the strongest economic periods in history, with staggering job creation of 2.6 million jobs, record minority home ownership and a market flush with investment.

“Given” is a well-chosen word here, because it is very hard to establish this point if anyone bothers to contest it. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities assembled statistics comparing the 2001-2007 expansion to the average period of economic expansion since World War II, and found that the Bush expansion is above average in only one area: corporate profits. If you weren’t a corporation, the Bush expansion was pretty anemic. And that “staggering” creation of 2.6 million jobs? Compared to 22.7 million under President Clinton, the only staggering thing is that the WT dared to bring the number up at all. And the Dow closed at 10588 the Friday before Bush’s inauguration in 2001; it was at 11101 last Friday — up a grand 4.8% or well below 1% a year. Flush with investment indeed.

Bad Day in a Bad Place

Nine American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan Sunday. Fifteen wounded. That’s bad enough as it stands, but how they were killed makes it worse. Usually when we lose a bunch of soldiers at the same time, it’s because some lucky shot took out a helicopter. Not this time. These nine died because the Afghan insurgents attacked a NATO base. That’s a level of tactical boldness that we haven’t been seeing from the insurgents in either Afghanistan or Iraq, and it sends a message about their confidence. Juan Cole comments: “the evidence is that the Afghan insurgents are getting better at fighting the US.”

Cole’s article is a “friendly critique” of Barack Obama’s plan to send more troops to Afghanistan:

Obama keeps talking about intensifying the search and destroy missions being carried out by US troops in the Pushtun areas of southern Afghanistan. As we should have learned from Vietnam, search and destroy missions only alienate the local population and drive it into the arms of the insurgency.

Another way we alienate the locals is that we keep killing civilians by accident, and then we compound the problem by claiming they were militants. This fools the American public, but the Afghans on the scene know better. A commission appointed by President Karzai concluded that’s what happened in a bombing in Nangarhar July 6.

The commission is headed by Senate deputy speaker, Burhanullah Shinwari whose constituency is in Nangarhar province. He told the BBC: ”Our investigation found out that 47 civilians (were killed) by the American bombing and nine others injured. There are 39 women and children” among those killed, he said. The eight other people who died were “between the ages of 14 and 18”.

Apparently this was a wedding party, not a terrorist encampment. We keep making this mistake, as Tom Engelhardt reminds us. Cole leaves Obama with this advice:

Stand up Karzai’s army and air force and give him some billions to bribe the tribal chiefs, and let him apply carrot and stick himself. We need to get out of there. “Al-Qaeda” was always Bin Laden’s hype. He wanted to get us on the ground there so that the Mujahideen could bleed us the way they did the Soviets. It is a trap.

Short Notes

Finally people are starting to say the obvious out loud: McCain’s promise to balance the budget by the end of his first term is a fantasy. The Washington Post goes through the numbers.

The New Yorker tells the story of a Danish island that decided to become energy independent.

I’m a little late with this one, but Salon’s Joseph Romm shines a light on the global-warming deniers in Congress.

Florida still hasn’t solved its vote-counting problems. In an election in West Palm Beach in June, 14% of the votes didn’t get tallied until somebody noticed that the totals couldn’t possibly be right. But it was a light turnout, so that was only 707 missing votes. Such a small number couldn’t make a difference in a state the size of Florida, could it?

No News Here. The New York Times dutifully reports the perpetual rumor that we’re about to start pulling troops out of Iraq. I agree with Atrios’ reaction: NA GA HA PEN. The official announcement of the rumored pullout is always about three months away, and it’s going to happen because everything’s turning out so well. It never happens. The only time Bush actually pulls troops out of Iraq is when the generals tell him there are no more troops. The Times analyzes:

Any troop reductions announced in the heat of the presidential election could blur the sharp differences between the candidates, Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, over how long to stay in Iraq. But the political benefit might go more to Mr. McCain than Mr. Obama. Mr. McCain is an avid supporter of the current strategy in Iraq. Any reduction would indicate that that strategy has worked and could defuse antiwar sentiment among voters.

Ditto for rumors about reductions. Anonymous administration sources start such rumors to defuse antiwar sentiment and help McCain. They’ll do it over and over again between now and November. And the Times will print the rumors because all those anonymous administration sources stop talking to you if you stop being a useful propaganda tool.

No News There. Just before 9-11 the media was consumed with a bunch of missing-pretty-girl stories. The biggest one was Chandra Levy, who had some kind of connection to Rep. Gary Condit. For a while 9-11 forced people to cover real news, but this week the Washington Post is back with a 12-part series on the Levy case. Armageddon wouldn’t get a 12-part series out of the Post, but this 7-year-old missing-person case does. JonBenet Ramsey — who has been dead nearly twice as long as she was alive — is also making headlines again this week. I guess that means that all the post-9-11 problems are solved now. Note to Bin Laden: If you want to get back into the papers, kidnap a pretty girl.

A lot of bloggers are upset by the New Yorker cover depicting every anti-Obama smear simultaneously — he’s a Muslim, Michelle’s a leftist revolutionary, and the flag is burning in the Oval Office fireplace under Bin Laden’s portrait. Maybe I’m being too sophisticated here, but I thought the joke was on the people spreading these wild tales, not on Obama.

Matthew Yglesias nails a point often ignored these days. McCain makes a big deal about how he criticized the Bush administration on Iraq way back when. But his differences with Bush have always been entirely tactical. He thought and still thinks that the invasion was a good idea. (If you agree, you should vote for him.) Matt also spotted this “I’d Rather Be Waterboarding” t-shirt for sale on a conservative site. Whatta sense of humor those guys have.

Speaking of waterboarding, Philippe Sands’ book Torture Team is out. This is the source of that Vanity Fair article “The Green Light” that I talked about in April.

Iran tested missiles Wednesday, and the price of oil went up. Has anybody noticed that Iran makes money when this happens? The ideal thing for Iran is to keep tensions high, but not so high that war breaks out. Ditto for Saudi Arabia and all the other Persian Gulf oil producers.

We spend our money on bullets, while the Chinese spend theirs on bullet trains. Who’s getting the better deal?

By weeklysift | Comments (0)

True Americans

July 7, 2008 – 1:15 pm
The ideal of a God-given liberty and God-given equality have been posited from the beginning of our experiment in democracy as a standard that we will never achieve but will always, at our best, aspire to. … So what we should not be at times when we’re disappointed with our country is anti-American. We should be true Americans, and we should go back to those ideals and revitalize them, and hold the nation accountable for what its founders dreamed to be possible. — Forrest Church, speaking at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly on 27 June 2008

In This Week’s Sift:

Nationalism vs. Patriotism. Should we love our country and try to improve it? Or just worship it no matter what it does?

Silly Season on the Campaign Trail. Did you hear the terrible thing Wesley Clark said? Probably not, because he didn’t say it.

Wars and Rumors of Wars. Will Bush attack Iran before he leaves office or not? Seymour Hersh paints a disturbing picture of an attempt to gin up an incident that will make the public accept another war. Also, the problem with the Surge suddenly becomes obvious.

Short Notes. Fat States of America. A 235 MPG car. Africa’s worst dictator isn’t who you think. Justice O’Connor goes gaming. And an archdruid coins a new term.

Nationalism vs. Patriotism

Everyone talks about patriotism near the Fourth of July. Obama did it better than most, but not even he put a name to the main threat to American patriotism: its rival, nationalism. Patriots love their country and want it to be as good as it can be. Nationalists make an idol of their country and demand that all kneel before it. The nationalist’s country is great and good by definition, not because it lives up to its ideals.

In recent years authentic patriotism has been losing out to nationalism. In order to fight back, patriots need to start doing two things: First, always call nationalism by its true name; don’t let the nationalists get away with calling themselves patriots. And second, we need to understand — and make the public understand — that nationalism is not just bad politics, it’s bad religion. A nation, even one with the power and accomplishments of America, can only be a false god.

This week’s clearest example of how nationalism has usurped the place of patriotism is the column Obama’s Real Patriotism Problem that National Review Online editor Jonah Goldberg wrote for Tuesday’s USA Today. Despite his superficial denial, the “patriotism” he promotes is pure and simple nationalism:

Definitions of patriotism proliferate, but in the American context patriotism must involve not only devotion to American texts (something that distinguishes our patriotism from European nationalism) but also an abiding belief in the inherent and enduring goodness of the American nation. We might need to change this or that policy or law, fix this or that problem, but at the end of the day the patriotic American believes that America is fundamentally good as it is.

No matter what our country does, it has “inherent and enduring goodness” and is “good as it is.”

Goldberg goes on to charge that Obama, like liberals throughout American history, can’t manage this kind of patriotism. He recalls a series of articles a liberal magazine published in 1922 in which “smug emissaries from East Coast cities chronicled the ‘backward’ attitudes of what today would be called fly-over country.” Someone even had the gall to suggest “that Dixie needed nothing less than an invasion of liberal ‘missionaries’ so that the ‘light of civilization’ might finally be glimpsed down there.”

Umm, Jonah, I don’t know how to break this to you, but that’s exactly what happened. The South in 1922? Jim Crow, remember? The liberal missionaries were the Freedom Riders and all the other civil rights activists of the fifties and sixties. If we follow Goldberg’s definition, though, the real patriots were the people who thought the Jim Crow South was “fundamentally good as it was” — not disloyal liberals like the Freedom Riders or Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King.

In May I was at the Newseum in Washington, the brand new journalism museum. They display a piece of the lunch counter from the Woolworth’s in Greensboro where civil rights sit-ins began, and show a filmed interview with one of the original Freedom Riders, whose name escapes me. He explained that they didn’t stage events for the press, but that if they expected trouble, they made sure reporters knew about it. “If you’re going to beat us up,” he said (or words to that effect; I’m pulling this quote out of memory) “don’t beat us up by the dark of night. Beat us up where everybody can see.”

Bunch of anti-American wimps, eh, Jonah? They just couldn’t see the goodness of America as it was.

I suppose Goldberg must find Frederick Douglass’ Fourth of July speech from 1852 to be extremely unpatriotic. Douglass pointedly refused to tell his white audience that America was good as it was:

The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.

Douglass had to contend with people who thought he should argue more calmly and reasonably against slavery, as today we have to contend with people who want us to do a cost/benefit analysis of torture. What, Douglass wondered, would such an argument be? Should he attempt to prove — to those not already convinced — that the slave is human? That humans have rights? Douglass refused:

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

Would that my country had more such people today. Because those are the words of a man truly loyal to the ideals that America represents, someone who wants his country to be as good as it can be. That’s the patriotism of a true American.

Silly Season on the Campaign Trail

I was happy to see the L.A. Times recognize how silly all the recent campaign controversies have been. As Paul Krugman notes:

Al Gore never claimed that he invented the Internet. Howard Dean didn’t scream. Hillary Clinton didn’t say she was staying in the race because Barack Obama might be assassinated. And Wesley Clark didn’t impugn John McCain’s military service. … Again and again we’ve had media firestorms over supposedly revealing incidents that never actually took place.

TPM put together everything you need to know about the Clark incident — the simple true statements Clark made, the way they were blown into something Clark never said, and the indignant way the media shot down those overblown statements of their own creation. It’s a good lesson in how political media works, and is pretty clear evidence that the media bias still tips towards McCain.

The other tempest in a teapot was Obama’s alleged flip-flop on Iraq. Obama said that in pulling troops out of Iraq he would “take facts on the ground into account.” If you had imagined that Obama’s plan was for our troops to throw down their weapons and run full speed for the Kuwaiti border, then this was a significant change. But anyone who has actually been listening to Obama, like TPM’s Josh Marshall or Tim Starks of Deutsche Welle’s Across the Pond blog, wasn’t all that shocked. Jed Lewison analyzes CNN’s attempt to manufacture an issue here.

Like a lot of people, I’m disappointed that Obama isn’t taking a strong stand against telecom immunity. And I’m even more disappointed that it looks like the FISA bill is going to pass. I expect to say more about this next week.

Wars and Rumors of Wars

Iran. The biggest question of 2008 isn’t the election, it’s whether Bush will attack Iran before he leaves office. Seymour Hersh says yes, as he has been saying for some while now. Mostly using his usual collection of anonymous sources, Hersh paints a picture of a bureaucratic wrestling match between Dick Cheney, who wants to attack, and the Pentagon, which doesn’t.

The most disturbing part of Hersh’s article is the allegation that covert ops are already in progress, aiming to exploit ethnic tensions among the Ahwazi Arabs (Iran is predominantly Persian, not Arab) and religious tensions among the Baluchis, who are Sunnis. (Iran is predominantly Shia). He quotes former CIA officer Robert Baer:

The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda. These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.

Hersh notes that 9-11 conspirator Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a Baluchi. Afghanistan in the eighties is where Al Qaeda came together.

While polls show the American public opposed to yet another war in the Middle East, an incident in January convinced the administration that the public might support — or even demand — a military reaction if it appeared that the Iranians had shot first. One of Hersh’s anonymous sources told him that

a few weeks later, a meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. “The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,” he said.

Neocon columnist Bill Kristol, who has been pushing for an attack on Iran about as long as Hersh has been predicting it, said on Fox News that Bush might attack Iran “if he thinks Obama is going to win.” Under that Bizarro-world logic, I guess, hawks should root for Obama and doves for McCain.

Commentary’s Max Boot thinks that Hersh’s article “is a combination of innuendo, hearsay, and opinionizing that detracts from the sum total of public knowledge” and that Hersh “is partly a victim of his anti-Bush worldview and partly a victim of his sources.” Of the alleged meeting in Cheney’s office he says, “That’s the kind of meeting which only takes place in the fevered imagination of Hersh and his leftist cohorts.” However, Boot brings no facts or sources (even anonymous ones) to the table, just his own intuition about how the administration works.

Afghanistan and Iraq. In hindsight, the real problem with the Surge has become obvious: You should never commit your last reserves until the decisive battle. If you’re about to win or about to lose, throw in everything. But otherwise, you need to keep the enemy guessing.

For the second straight month, coalition deaths in Afghanistan set a record, and were higher than coalition deaths in Iraq. 46 coalition troops died in Afghanistan in June, 31 in Iraq. (If you only care about American troop deaths, Iraq wins 29-28.) The Pentagon would like to send more troops to Afghanistan, but there aren’t any. “I don’t have troops I can reach for, brigades I can reach, to send into Afghanistan until I have a reduced requirement in Iraq,” says Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen. The Taliban knows this, and can escalate attacks without fear that we’ll escalate in response.

In Iraq, the insurgents and militias know we can’t maintain this troop level, so why not lay low and wait? That’s the real reason casualties and violence are down. We haven’t disarmed or defeated the insurgents, and the Malaki government hasn’t made peace with them. They’re just waiting.

Strangely, the administration has fallen into the trap that they so often warned about whenever a timetable for withdrawal was proposed: If the enemy knows you’re leaving, they can wait you out. Well, the Surge brigades are starting to leave now, and we don’t have any brigades to replace them. The Iraqis know this. Look for violence to ramp up again after the November elections, when the Surge is completely over and Iraq starts to become the next president’s problem.

Or maybe this isn’t so strange. Maybe the point of the Surge wasn’t to improve the situation in the long term, but just to kick the can down the road. For the rest of his life Bush will say, “We were winning when I left office.” The mess he leaves his successor will not be his fault, because nothing is ever his fault.

Short Notes

I spent last week at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly, where I kept a blog and wrote some articles for the UUA web site. You can find the links to them on my Free and Responsible Search blog.

538 still predicts a solid Obama win, but the margin has shrunk to a 309-229 electoral vote split, closer than the 339-199 projection two weeks ago. Real Clear Politics, which has always had a more conservative estimate of Obama’s lead, has a similar 304-234 projection. My prediction: The race will drift closer until the conventions, when the nation compares Obama’s acceptance speech to McCain’s. Then the margin will grow, and the debates won’t help McCain close it.

Slate’s Peter Maass argues that the worst dictator in Africa is somebody you’ve probably never heard of: Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea “whose life seems a parody of the dictator genre.” Maass explains why the American media hasn’t bothered to cover Obiang. Yes, he’s crushing the spirit of his nation, and yes, he’s stealing all the oil money and leaving his people in poverty. But hey, the oil is flowing, ExxonMobil is happy, the Bush administration considers Obiang “a good friend,” and the victims are almost all black. So what’s the big deal? Nothing to see here. Move along. Move along.

Speaking of oil, Andrew Leonard’s How The World Works column at Salon explains Why $140-a-barrel oil is no surprise

a tipping point has been reached. Enough people now believe that the era of cheap oil is over to ensure a significant, and ongoing, adjustment upward in the real price. Modern civilization as we know it is dependent on cheap oil, and cheap oil is becoming scarce. Voilà — time to panic. And a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy dynamic kicks in. The higher the price of oil goes without encouraging dramatic increases in production, the more worried the market gets.

One response is VW’s soon-to-be-marketed concept car, which gets 235 MPG.

On a deeper level, John Michael Greer at The Archdruid Report — how many of you have been reading that blog? — has given a name to something that really needed one: the Silent Running fallacy. Named after a classic sci-fi movie, the fallacy is “the mistaken belief that human industrial civilization can survive apart from nature. It’s this fallacy that leads countless well-intentioned people to argue that nature is an amenity, and should be preserved because, basically, it’s cute.” (Now we need a name for a similar fallacy on a smaller scale: that emotions are an amenity androids could function without.)

And just when we were getting used to the idea of Peak Oil, what about Peak Metal? A lot of industrial metals — gallium, indium, hafnium, and even (to a lesser extent) zinc — are being used up faster than we’re discovering new supplies.

CalorieLab released its annual fattest states rankings: Mississippi is the repeat champion, with 31.6% of its adult population classified as obese. West Virginia waddled past Alabama to claim second at 30.6%. Colorado is the slimmest state at 18.4%. In general, the Mountain West and New England are the least obese regions, the South the most. But it’s getting worse across the board — CalorieLab had to shift the color-coding standards on its map this year.

Ian Welsh on FireDogLake comments intelligently on the rankings and why Americans are so fat. Our farm policy “literally subsidizes crap food that makes people fat. … And if you’re missing essential nutrients in your diet, your body keeps wanting them and keeps telling you to eat more, in the vain hope you might eat something that isn’t crap.” (Those subsidies could also explain why the fattest states tend to be the poorest states.) He also blames unwalkable suburbs and recommends that physical education classes teach children how to exercise rather than just play team sports that involve a lot of standing around.

When I grew up back at the dawn of time — before SimCity, in other words — we thought games like Monopoly were educational because you had to figure out how much change to give somebody who buys Baltic with a $500 bill. Well, games currently on the drawing board are supposed take things to yet another level. Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is involved in a game project called Our Courts, which is scheduled to appear late next year. She describes it as “online, interactive civic education project for seventh- and eighth-graders.” (It’s necessary because the No Child Left Behind Act, according to Reagan appointee O’Connor, has “effectively squeezed out civics education” in the schools. Guaranteeing an uninformed populace for decades to come — just one of the many accomplishments of George W. Bush.)

Microsoft and AMD sponsor the Imagine Cup, an annual student competition to create computer games. Each year (2008 is the sixth) the games revolve around a theme from the UN’s Millennium Goals. This year the theme is “Imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment.”

I noticed this stuff when Mike Musgrove wrote about it in his @play column in the Washington Post. But a more consistent source of information is the Games For Change blog.

While we’re talking about play, a great internet toy is Policy Map. It combines U.S. maps with all sorts of data sets so you can see things like how income is distributed around the country, or between neighborhoods of your city, or which neighborhoods have a lot of car thefts. A bunch of the data sets come from the 2000 census, so the unemployment figures are way out of date. But the crime stats come from 2006 FBI reports, and the ethnic distribution of the country probably hasn’t changed that much since 2000. The basic interface resembles GoogleMaps, so you can zoom in or out at will. It’s hours and hours of wonkish fun.

I frequently highlight statistics showing how poorly the economy is doing. The American magazine presents the other side: How well the American economy is doing over the long term. One criticism: Most of the article’s graphs display averages. Meaningful economic graphs display medians. Unlike medians, averages hide the gap between rich and poor, as well as the gap between the very rich and everyone else.

For example, if Bill Gates (net worth $58 billion ) walks into a bar in a poor neighborhood, the bar’s average customer becomes a billionaire — hiding the fact that all the other customers (besides the guy who mugs Gates) are still poor.

Suppose Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen (net worth $16 billion) invites Gates to join him in the owner’s box at a Seattle Seahawks game, and fills the rest of Qwest Field’s seats with 66,998 homeless bums. Then the average fan is a millionaire, but the median fan is a homeless bum.

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Compromising Positions

June 23, 2008 – 1:01 pm
Reformers who are always compromising have not yet grasped the idea that truth is the only safe ground to stand on. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

In This Week’s Sift:

Remind Me Why We Elected Democrats. Congressional Democrats agreed to two compromises with the Bush administration: They wrote another blank check for Iraq and gave Bush everything he wanted with regard to FISA. And in exchange they got … well, they must have gotten something.

Don’t Get Sick in Mississippi. Mississippi’s “moral refusal” law protects healthcare workers whose consciences keep them from saving your life. Creationism is back in Lousiana. And South Carolina offers Christian license plates.

Remember Iraq? Americans made up their minds about Iraq in 2007, and now they just don’t want to hear about it.

Short Notes. The usual collection of torture, racism, pollution, and dictators. Plus a detailed Republican plan for our economic future. Enjoy.

Next Week: You’ll have to sift for yourself. I’ll be blogging on the web site of the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly from Fort Lauderdale. I’ll post a link on my Free and Responsible Search blog. In the meantime, check out my latest column for UU World.

Remind Me Why We Elected Democrats

Two important bills got passed in the House this week. One provides $162 billion to keep fighting the war in Iraq, among other things. It’s yet another blank check, containing nothing that might cramp the style of our Warmaker in Chief. The other revises FISA to make legal a lot of the domestic spying and wiretapping that the administration was doing illegally — and by-the-way to make sure that the lawsuits against the telecom companies will be thrown out of court.

Described by the Democratic House leadership as “compromises,” both bills were backed by the White House and passed with almost unanimous Republican support, while Democrats were split. Republicans voted for the FISA bill 188-1, Democrats against 128-105. Republicans voted for the Iraq funding bill 188-4, Democrats against 151-80. Both votes fit the definition of “bipartisanship” offered by Glenn Greenwald in January:

On virtually every major controversial issue — particularly, though not only, ones involving national security and terrorism — the Republicans (including their vaunted mythical moderates and mavericks) vote in almost complete lockstep in favor of the President, the Democratic caucus splits, and the Republicans then get their way on every issue thanks to “bipartisan” support. That’s what “bipartisanship” in Washington means.

Sounding more like an innocent bystander than Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi said of the Iraq funding bill: “Let us hope this is the last time another dollar will be spent without constraint, without conditions.”

Time magazine buys the “compromise” spin on the FISA deal and asserts that it “has drawn attacks from both sides.” But the only attacks they mention come from the Left. By contrast the Right seems pretty happy. The New York Times quotes Republican Senator Kit Bond: “I think the White House got a better deal than even they had hoped to get.”

What did the Democrats get? According to Time:

In negotiations with Pelosi’s office, the telecoms offered a compromise: Let a judge decide if the letters they received from the Administration asking for their help show that the government was really after terrorist suspects and not innocent Americans.

But if the letters say “We want you to spy on ordinary Americans for us” — then we’ll really throw the book at them, I guess. Republican House Whip Roy Blunt says bluntly: “The lawsuits will be dismissed.” I’m sure the plaintiffs will appreciate what a compromise that is from the administration’s original position, which was that the lawsuits should be dismissed.

The problem with this I-had-a-note-from-my-president reasoning was summed up inadvertently by Kit Bond:

I’m not here to say that the government is always right, but when the government tells you to do something, I’m sure you would all agree that I think you all recognize that is something you need to do.

So, if that’s our operating principle, what should happen if Bush tells Blackwater to assassinate someone? (A terrorist, naturally. Or at least someone that the government says — in the letter that Blackwater will use to get court proceedings dropped — it suspected to be a terrorist. I mean, it was a suspected terrorist they were really after. Those other people were just in the line of fire.) Digby calls this what it is: the Nuremberg Defense. It’s OK that the telecoms broke the law, because they were only following orders.

So let me disagree with Senator Bond: When the government tells you to do something against the law, you say no. That’s what it means to live under the rule of law.

The Senate hasn’t voted on the FISA bill yet, but Barack Obama is not covering himself with glory. He says he’ll try to strip telecom immunity out of the bill — a symbolic effort likely to fail — but generally supports the “compromise.” He hasn’t endeared himself to the bloggers who have been fighting this issue from the beginning: Emptywheel, Glenn Greenwald, and others.

So, in short, it’s a complete, across-the-board Democratic cave-in. To an unpopular lame-duck president. Why? Time explains:

Pelosi wanted the issue off the table for the political campaign this fall. Despite anti-GOP sentiment in the country and record low popularity for President George W. Bush, Democrats still trail on national security and that could hurt them in Congress.

You may remember that this is exactly the reason the Democrats gave for passing the original Iraq War resolution in 2002: They were getting national security off the table, so that they could focus the fall campaign on issues where they felt stronger, like health care and the economy. In 2002 it worked so well that Democrats lost the Senate and didn’t get it back until they found some backbone in 2006.

In The Political Brain, Drew Westen offers this contrary advice:

The question of when to avoid certain issues because “the poll numbers look bad” has an unambiguous answer: never.

Getting an issue “off the table” just cedes it permanently to your opponents. They make their case and you change the subject — the voters are not going to be impressed. And by doing something against the fundamental principles of your party, you look untrustworthy. Because voters respond to candidates emotionally, and not by going down an issues checklist, the way to look strong is not to agree to positions that your opponents define as “strong,” but to defend your own principles forcefully.

Worst of all: What if your principles turn out to be right? Then, after the policies you capitulate to bring disaster, you can’t capitalize because you’re implicated. (Ask Kerry or Clinton about their 2002 Iraq votes.) Atrios makes this prediction:

Democrats will regret embracing the expansion of executive power because a President Obama will find his administration undone by an “abuse of power” scandal. All of those powers which were necessary to prevent the instant destruction of the country will instantly become impeachable offenses. If you can’t imagine how such a pivot can take place then you haven’t been paying attention.

Don’t Get Sick in Mississippi

If you don’t live in a state dominated by the Religious Right, you probably don’t realize just how bad things have gotten.

Wednesday, Dogemperor on DailyKos explained Mississippi’s “moral refusal” law paragraph-by-paragraph. The upshot: If the care you need violates the conscience of a healthcare worker — doctor, nurse, pharmacist, ambulance driver, anybody — that worker doesn’t have help you, not even by directing you to some other professional whose conscience is less picky. The worker cannot be punished or reprimanded in any way, even if you die from lack of treatment. Even an insurance company can refuse to cover a claim by asserting an issue of conscience. (Insurance companies have consciences?)

The purpose of all this is to make it as difficult as possible to get an abortion in Mississippi, even if it’s necessary to save your life. (And secondarily, to allow pharmacies not to fill prescriptions for birth-control pills.) But the provisions are general enough that you have to wonder about unintended consequences. What if I join one of those sects that objects to any medical intervention, and then I buy a Mississippi-based health insurance company and start refusing all claims on moral grounds? That’s a business model that really works.

In other theocratic news: Christians in South Carolina will soon be able to get a special “I Believe” license plate, complete with a crucifix and stained-glass window. Three ministers, a rabbi, and a Hindu organization are suing.

Students will soon be learning creationism in science classes in Louisiana’s public schools, if Governor (and rumored McCain VP) Bobby Jindal signs a new law, as expected. The Louisiana Science Education Act is part of the new “academic freedom” push creationists are making in the wake of the Dover decision against teaching intelligent design. The bill authorizes teachers to introduce “supplemental textbooks” that encourage “critical thinking” about “evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.” The anti-evolution Discovery Institute, which drafts models of laws like this, wants its own anti-evolution textbook, Explore Evolution, to be just such a supplement.

Morbo on the Carpetbagger Report considers moving this “academic freedom” argument from science to history classes: “Should we allow ‘criticism’ of the history of the Holocaust in the classroom? After all, some cranks write books saying it never happened. Shouldn’t our children hear both sides?” I think Morbo could pick an ever better set of cranks: the ones who claim Jesus never existed. How about helping our children learn “critical thinking” by “teaching the controversy” over that issue?

Remember Iraq?

Frank Rich has put his finger on an important point: The public and the media have increasingly tuned out of the argument about whether we’re succeeding or failing in Iraq, and tuned out of any news about Iraq at all. The American public decided in 2007 that the war was a mistake, and they only want to know when it will be over. The latest suicide bombing, the latest offensive, the latest claim that we’re winning or that we can’t win — not many people want to hear it. But in case you’re still interested, here are some recent articles:

The giant oil companies are about to sign a new agreement with the Iraqi government. They have had no role in Iraq since Saddam threw them out four decades ago. From their point of view, mission accomplished.

Violence is down, but the militias are still well armed and capable of renewing their fight at any time. Agreement on Iraq’s political future still seems far off.

Salon’s Tom Engelhardt looks at the colossal bases we’re building in Iraq, the ones the Bush administration wants to hang onto permanently. Since the permanence of our occupation is not something we like to talk about, the bases have largely gone uncovered by the media. Engelhardt finds this remarkable: “Imagine if just about no one knew that the pyramids had been built. Ditto the Great Wall of China. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The Coliseum. The Eiffel Tower. The Statue of Liberty. Or any other architectural wonder of the world you’d care to mention.”

One reason that Iraqis are uncomfortable with a long-term American presence is that our Christian soldiers won’t stop prosyletizing.

And if Iraq has passed off the front pages, what about Afghanistan? Since the start of that war, 531 American troops have died in Afghanistan. 56 of those deaths have come in the first half of 2008. That’s about the same pace as 2007, our worst year so far, when 117 died.

Short Notes

A Senate report verifies the claims of the Vanity Fair article I told you about in April. The push for torture came from the top levels of the Bush administration and had to overcome resistance from the military. The idea that the administration just responded to the needs of interrogators in the field is the usual propaganda: Blame the guys at the bottom.

Another new report: Physicians for Human Rights examined 11 ex-detainees who claimed to have been tortured. The physical evidence PHR found supported the claims. Broken Laws, Broken Lives summarizes their findings. The preface is written by retired Major General Antonio Taguba, who is famous for overseeing the Army’s internal investigation of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib. He writes: “there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

The poll-reading geeks at 538 see a trend toward Obama. Their current electoral map predicts a 339-199 Obama victory. They calculate the odds of an Obama victory at 75%.

Meanwhile, Brave New Films documents more McCain doubletalk in video. In These Times covers the same ground in print.

23/6 presents both the latest anti-McCain MoveOn ad and a humorous parody of it.

In Sunday’s New York Times, Donovan Hohn tags along on a mission to clean up Gore Point, Alaska. Gore Point is uninhabited and almost inaccessible, but when Hohn’s team arrives, the beach is full of plastic crap. Think about that. Apparently the ocean currents have “convergence zones” where floating trash collects. Somewhere north of Hawaii, there’s growing accumulation of floating trash that’s currently about the size of Texas.

The Saudis are promising to increase oil production. This will be an interesting test of the Peak Oil theory, because there’s been a lot of speculation that the giant Saudi oil fields are closer to exhaustion than the Saudis let on.

Thomas Friedman characterizes the Bush-McCain push for more drilling in America as: “Get more addicted to oil.” Cartoonist Ann Telnaes makes the same point visually.

Jezebel is keeping a racism watch on the presidential campaign. If you haven’t seen the Obama/CuriousGeorge monkey or the “If Obama is President … will we still call it The White House” button — well, here they are.

dday on Hullabaloo calls attention to Rush Limbaugh’s spin of the Midwestern floods. Rush contrasts the midwestern response to “all the stuff that happened in New Orleans.” It’s an interesting look at how race prejudice creates its own evidence.

Thanks to all the people who have asked about my hometown Quincy, Illinois. Other than a narrow strip along the riverfront, the town sits on a bluff over the Mississippi, so my parents are high and dry. In response to Limbaugh I’ll say this: Anybody who is a veteran of these midwestern river floods sees an immediate difference between them and post-Katrina New Orleans. When the water rises in Illinois, you retreat a few hundred yards to higher ground. You may lose your property, but you don’t get encircled and cut off from food and drinkable water.

President Mugabe of Zimbabwe is holding onto power the old-fashioned way, by using violence to intimidate his opponent into withdrawing from a run-off election. “We will not ask people to sacrifice their lives by voting,” said an opposition party spokesman. The run-off became necessary when Mugabe’s election commission refused to admit that he had lost the first election.

Conservative columnist Robert Novak calls attention to the “Roadmap for America’s Future” laid out by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. If you want to know the real meaning of those vague phrases entitlement reform and tax reform, it’s all spelled out here in the kind of detail McCain and the other Republicans don’t dare to go into.

  • Social Security is made “permanently solvent” through “a more realistic measure of growth in Social Security’s initial benefits and an eventual modernization of the retirement age.” Translation: lower benefits beginning later. (There’s a subtle class issue in “modernizing” the retirement age. Working beyond age 65 is easier for pencil-pushers and keyboarders than for bricklayers.)
  • Medicare is turned into a private insurance system, with government contributing “up to $9,500” annually to your personal medical savings account after you turn 65 (or whatever the “modernized” retirement age turns out to be). Medicare spending becomes predictable because all subsequent medical inflation is your problem, not the government’s. And what you do if $9,500 isn’t enough to buy coverage for your pre-existing conditions is a mystery.
  • A “simplified” tax system eliminates taxes on the non-working wealthy and on corporations: Interest, capital gains, dividends, and inheritances are untaxed. The alternate minimum tax (whose original purpose was to make sure the very wealthy didn’t use loopholes to avoid taxes entirely) goes away. A national sales tax replaces the corporate income tax.

Novak’s prediction: “After what is expected to be another bad GOP defeat in the 2008 congressional elections, Ryan [and like-minded youngsters] McCarthy and Cantor could constitute the party’s new House leadership.” He’s looking forward to it.

By weeklysift | Comments (1)

Habeas Corpus Isn’t a Corpse

June 16, 2008 – 2:21 pm
If you don’t include torturing helpless prisoners in your definition of evil, your definition of evil is meaningless. — Tony Lagouranis, Fear Up Harsh


In This Week’s Sift:

Hocus Pocus: The Court Makes Habeas Corpus Reappear. Justice Scalia says Americans will die for this. Newt Gingrich thinks it could cost us a city. What evil invention are they talking about? Habeas corpus, the foundation of human rights.

The Negative Campaign. John McCain is behind in the polls and doesn’t have a popular issue to run on. So he’s going to have to make Barack Obama even less popular.

Short Notes. Obama comes to the town where I grew up, while McCain visits the town where I live now. The SOFA negotiations become uncomfortable. Governor Jindal, exorcist. Impeachment or hanging? And the surprising downside of loaning large sums of money to people in jail.

Hocus Pocus: The Court Makes Habeas Corpus Reappear

I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating: Just about all of your rights as an American are founded on habeas corpus. The Latin is intimidating, but the idea is simple. If a government official arrests you, you can get a hearing before a neutral judge. The judge determines whether or not the government has a legal basis to hold you, and if not, you go free.

Most of your other rights concern what reasons the government can or can’t use at that hearing. Your freedom of religion means that “He’s a Muslim” is not a good enough reason to imprison you. Your freedom of speech means that “She called the president an ignorant jerk” is also not a viable reason. But if the hearing is never held — if the government just arrests you and doesn’t have to explain itself to anybody — then even though your other rights may stay on the books, you have no way to claim them.

Worse, if any class of people is denied habeas corpus rights, that creates a hole in the system into which anyone else might fall. Say, for example, that non-citizens aren’t allowed a hearing. “No problem,” you say, “I’m an American citizen.” But if the government says you’re not a citizen, then who’s going to hear you claim that you are?

Cutting corners on habeas corpus is especially dangerous when combined with the Bush administration’s unitary executive theory, by which they interpret Article II of the Constitution to mean that all officials in the executive branch of government are “emanations of the president’s will” (in David Rifkin’s evocative phrase). So if somebody in the Pentagon accuses you of being an enemy combatant, and a military commission assesses the evidence against you, your accuser and your judges are all emanations of the president’s will. If the president doesn’t like you, you’re pretty much screwed.

This week the Supreme Court decided this is a bad situation, and is not consistent with the American tradition of constitutional law. That’s the good news. The bad news: They decided it by one vote, 5-4. The four in the minority — Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito — are healthy, relatively young, and likely to stay on the court for many years. The next two or three retirements are going to come from the five. Senator McCain has mentioned Roberts and Alito as models for his court appointments, so this ruling could easily be reversed if McCain is elected.

As for what the new ruling says in detail, I haven’t finished reading it yet. Glenn Greenwald (I keep forgetting he’s a lawyer) summarizes it. So does Salon’s James Ross. The Volokh Conspiracy extracts key quotes. So does emptywheel.

From the responses of conservatives, you might think that the Court had ordered the immediate release of everyone at Guantanamo, rather than just offer them a fair hearing. (Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick: “The court merely said that the petitioners are entitled to some reasonable approximation of a habeas corpus proceeding, and that the jumped-up pretrial hearings known as Combatant Status Review Tribunals just don’t substitute.”) Bush said, “It was a deeply divided court. And I strongly agree with those who dissented.” Presumably he meant Justice Scalia, who wrote that the decision “will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” On Face the Nation Sunday Newt Gingrich raised the ante: “This court decision is a disaster which could cost us a city.” McCain said it was “one of worst decisions in the history of this country.” (By contrast, Obama supported the ruling, calling it “an important step toward re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law.”)

Conservative commentators went even further. National Review’s Andy McCarthy passes on a “practical response” suggested to him by “an old government friend.”

Let’s free all Gitmo detainees…on a vast, deserted, open and contested Afghan battlefield. C-130 gunship circling overhead for security. Give them all a two minute running head start.

Glenn Greenwald reports on a radio debate he had with conservative Jed Babbin:

The question I put to him again and again was one that he simply couldn’t answer: how and why would any American object to the mere requirement that our Government prove that someone is guilty before we imprison them indefinitely or execute them?

And the bottom line is that many of them aren’t guilty. That’s the conclusion the McClatchy Newspapers came to in its Guantanamo: Beyond the Law series.

From the moment that Guantanamo opened in early 2002, former Secretary of the Army Thomas White said, it was obvious that at least a third of the population didn’t belong there.

Of the 66 detainees whom McClatchy interviewed, the evidence indicates that 34 of them, about 52 percent, had connections with militant groups or activities. At least 23 of those 34, however, were Taliban foot soldiers, conscripts, low-level volunteers or adventure-seekers who knew nothing about global terrorism.

Only seven of the 66 were in positions to have had any ties to al Qaida’s leadership, and it isn’t clear that any of them knew any terrorists of consequence.

This conclusion would not surprise anybody who has read Fear Up Harsh, the account of an American interrogator in Iraq. (It sounds familiar because I put it on the Summer Reading List last week.) The book describes in detail a system focused entirely on sweeping up anyone who might know something, and not at all concerned with clearing the innocent.

It didn’t occur to me at the time, but the patrol that discovered the IED had no reason to believe these two farmers had anything to do with it. But they were nearby, and so they were worth arresting. Then they were handed to someone like me, who really wanted to believe that the infantry had a good reason to pick them up.

So he moved them on to the next prison up the ladder. And so on.

The Negative Campaign: It’s Starting

Securing the Democratic nomination gave Obama a bounce in the polls, and a small but definite lead over McCain. The 538 blog is currently predicting a 300-238 electoral college victory for Obama. 538 has a complicated technique for assessing the probabilities state-by-state, and they now give Obama a 62% chance of becoming the next president. That agrees with the Intrade market, where shares of Obama are trading at 62.

Pundits of all stripes are starting to agree on the general shape of the campaign: With an unpopular Republican president, an unpopular war, unemployment and gas prices rising, and an amazing 80% of the public agreeing that the country is on the wrong track, the only way for McCain to win is to tear Obama down. Ideally, as in all negative campaigns, the candidate himself will keep his hands clean. But the mudslinging is already starting.

A lot of it will revolve around race. In America today, you can’t just campaign on the theme “Don’t vote for the black guy.” But you can raise racial fears and resentments indirectly, then provide a smokescreen argument for directing that fear and resentment at a candidate. This path was blazed by the 1988 Willie Horton ad, which never came out and said “Dukakis will let big black studs rape your womenfolk” but certainly raised that idea in viewers’ minds. The 2006 “Harold, Call Me” ad against black Senate candidate Harold Ford again put forward an interracial sex theme — deniably, of course. The beneficiary, now Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, was able to have it both ways. He could denounce the ad while claiming to be unable to stop the national Republican Party from running it. (Meanwhile, his own anti-Ford ad had African tom-toms sounding in the background.) Expect something similar from McCain.

Fox News is already trying — sometimes with unintentionally comical ineptitude — to connect Obama with anything dark and scary. The fist-bump greeting that Obama and his wife exchanged before his victory speech in St. Paul was characterized by Fox as a possible “terrorist fist-jab“. Fox labeled Michele Obama as “Obama’s Baby Mama” — a slang expression for mothers of illegitimate children, more-or-less equivalent to calling the Obama daughters bastards. As with Willie Horton, the “baby mama” phrase triggers images beyond its literal meaning, connecting Obama with ghetto gangsters who father more children than they can keep track of.

Floyd Brown, the producer of the original Willie Horton ad, is raising money for an “independent” anti-Obama advertising campaign. His first ad pushed the idea that Obama was soft on gang violence, and his most recent one promotes the frequently debunked Obama-is-a-Muslim charge. Expect more. His group, the National Campaign Fund, maintains the exposeobama.com web site.

The worst stuff, naturally, is in emails of no determinable source that people forward to their friends. Maybe you’ve gotten some.

Obama is showing early signs of responding more quickly and effectively than John Kerry did to the Swift Boat ads in 2004. His campaign recently put up a Fight the Smears web site to collect simple evidence debunking negative rumors. For example, in response to the charge that Obama won’t say the Pledge of Allegiance, they have a tape of Obama leading the Senate in saying the Pledge on June 21, 2007.

At a fund-raiser in Pennsylvania Friday, Obama promised not to be a patsy. “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” he said. This line has been widely interpreted as a reference to the scene in The Untouchables where Sean Connery explains “the Chicago way” to Kevin Costner.

Maybe the best way to fight back is with ridicule, like this video in which people explain why they’re voting Republican.

Short Notes

Saturday Obama was in my home town (Quincy, Illinois), which is bracing for the same flood waters that have swept through Cedar Rapids. He filled a few sandbags and called for his supporters to come out and volunteer to build up the levee. This is the right way for him to exploit the age issue. Obama wielding a shovel displays vigor in a way that McCain can’t match. The call for volunteers is a clear contrast with President Bush, who won’t ask average Americans for any sacrifice beyond going shopping. And anything about floods and levees is going to remind Americans of New Orleans, where the Bush administration failed in its pledge to protect American cities.

I saw McCain here in Nashua Thursday. He said pretty much the same things he said here in December, but I think I’m starting to understand him better now. I wrote up my observations on DailyKos and on my own Open Source Journalism blog. And if you happened to see this piece on CNN, the questioner was absolutely as boring and single-minded as they made him out to be.

Today is the first day for same-sex marriages in California. State officials think they might be busy.

The Bush administration’s attempts to negotiate a status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) with the Iraqi government has run into problems. The administration has been very secretive about what it is proposing, but leaks from the Iraqi side indicate that the administration wants a large number of permanent bases in Iraq and free rein for American forces to do whatever they deem necessary, without Iraqi approval. Prime Minister al-Maliki says this would “violate Iraqi sovereignty.” Smintheus on Daily Kos has a pretty good summary of what is publicly known.

Glenn Greenwald recalls when it was almost treason to accuse the administration of wanting permanent bases in Iraq:

What’s striking is how those who pointed out that this was the administration’s plan were totally demonized in our establishment political discourse — Americans who said that long-term bases were the real U.S. intention in Iraq were scorned as anti-American, far Leftist hysterics, while Iraqis and other Middle Eastern Muslims who said this were mocked as primitive, Arab Street paranoids.

This week the Washington Post has a series (called The Bubble) about the housing mess. Here’s a clip from Sunday’s installment:

The young woman who walked into Pinnacle’s Vienna office in 2004 said her boyfriend wanted to buy a house near Annapolis. He hoped to get a special kind of loan for which he didn’t have to report his income, assets or employment. Mortgage broker Connelly handed the woman a pile of paperwork.

On the day of the settlement, she arrived alone. Her boyfriend was on a business trip, she said, but she had his power of attorney. Informed that for this kind of loan he would have to sign in person, she broke into tears: Her boyfriend actually had been serving a jail term.

Not a problem. Almost anyone could borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars for a house in those wild days. Connelly agreed to send the paperwork to the courthouse where the boyfriend had a hearing.

Who could possibly have foreseen that something might go wrong with such a sound business model?

Congressman Dennis Kucinich filed 35 articles of impeachment against President Bush this week. Read them all here. I think Bush should be glad that he’s president of the United States and not Pakistan, where opposition leader Nawaz Sharif is calling for President Musharaf to be hanged. On the other hand, Kucinich should appreciate that he’s not in Zimbabwe, where President Mugabe has brought treason charges against the second-in-command of the party that had the audacity to run against him. “We are prepared to fight for our country and to go to war for it,” Mugabe said.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is sometimes mentioned as a McCain VP. So isn’t it handy that he has experience as an exorcist? I can see it now: Vice President Jindal is presiding over the Senate when some crazy-assed thing Senator Inhofe says about global warming makes Harry Reid’s head spin. As soon as Reid’s eyes come around to the front again, there’s Jindal with the Holy Scripture in his hand. “Out, demon, out!” he commands.

Pollster.com graphs the changing party identification of people in Wisconsin: Democrats rising, Independents and Republicans sinking. This may not be a swing state any more.

A few weeks ago I linked to a video that compressed the Democratic presidential race so far into seven minutes. Well, now that the race is complete, it takes eight minutes.

By weeklysift | Comments (4)

Looking Towards November

June 9, 2008 – 3:02 pm
Democracy without honest information creates the illusion of popular consent, while enhancing the power of the state and the privileged interests protected by it. — Bill Moyers, speaking Saturday to the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis

In This Week’s Sift:

Two Eventful Weeks. Since my last Sift, the primaries ended and Barack Obama became the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party. Where the race is now, the best links for keeping track of it, and best guesses about what the Clinton supporters will do.

They Lied. Not so long ago, saying “Bush lied” marked you as a resident of the Far Left. Now the Senate Intelligence Committee has come very close to saying it, with the support of two of its Republican members.

The Media Helped Them Lie. Scott McClellan says the media was “too deferential to the White House” when the Iraq War was being sold. ABC’s Charles Gibson protests, but the facts don’t back him up.

Political Summer Reading. A few books that aren’t exactly beach reading, but are worth a look if you have some time this summer.

I’m running over my voluntary 3,000-word limit this week, so I’ll do without a Short Notes section. In the meantime, check out the most recent “Unearthed News” feature by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Brendan DeMelle on Huffington Post. Short Notes will be back next week.

Two Eventful Weeks

I’m going to assume that you do not live in a cave, and so you already know the basics of what happened in politics these last two weeks. It started a week ago Saturday when the Democrats came up with a compromise to resolve the Florida-and-Michigan issue. Not everybody liked it. The final primaries were held on Tuesday, and superdelegates finally started declaring themselves in large numbers. By Tuesday night, Obama had the support of a majority of delegates to the Democratic Convention in August, so he declared victory in a very good speech in the same arena in Minnesota where the Republican Convention will be held. Clinton gave a speech that night that did not include a concession, for which she was roundly criticized.

McCain also spoke that day, lamely enough that the contrast with Obama scared Republicans. The snarkiest response to his speech came not from some upstart liberal blog, but from the Economist, which noticed a resemblance to Batman’s arch-villain the Joker in McCain’s “terrifying death rictus grin-and-snicker after every joke line. I don’t know whether Americans are ready to vote for Mr McCain, but I am prepared to pay him one million dollars not to release deadly Smilex gas over the New Year’s Eve crowd at midnight.”

Wednesday a conference call with her supporters in Congress convinced Clinton that the campaign was over and it was time to endorse Obama. On Saturday she that did just that. It was an emotional scene, and she handled it marvelously. I had grown increasingly suspicious of Clinton as the campaign wore on, so I watched closely for some hint that would undercut the main message; I didn’t see one. She put her full effort into the speech and did her best to convince her supporters to get behind Obama.

Where Are We Now? According to the polls, McCain and Obama are more-or-less tied, with perhaps a slight advantage to Obama in both the popular vote and the electoral college. The conventional wisdom is a little more definite in predicting an Obama win.

The best place to watch the numbers is the 538 blog. (538 is the total number of electoral votes, with 270 making a majority.) 538 is to polling what Bill James is to baseball statistics. During the primaries, 538 (also known as the blogger Poblano) was uncanny at cutting through the pre-election fog — figuring out who would actually vote, how the undecideds would break, and so on. 538 doesn’t conduct polls, it just reanalyzes everybody else’s data and tosses in everything else that seems relevant: a state’s demographic profile, results from similar demographics in other states, how Bush and Kerry did in 2004, fund-raising numbers, and so on. It works.

538’s current if-the-election-were-held-today guess is a 273-265 electoral college win for Obama.

The best place to watch the conventional wisdom is through the predictive markets. These resemble stock markets, but the shares correspond to candidates. A share of Obama will pay $100 if Obama wins, and people bid to determine what that share is worth today. Right now, Obama is trading at $61.80 compared to $35.90 for McCain. Originally, the wisdom-of-crowds folks believed that predictive markets might have uncanny prognosticating ability, but so far they seem to react to events more than predict them. (Last November-December, for example, shares of Huckabee went up more or less in tandem with his Iowa poll numbers.) It is a good way to quantify what people are expecting at the moment, though. Follow them through Slate’s continuing “Why Vote When You Can Bet?” feature.

What’s Obama’s Advantage? If the polls are nearly even, you might wonder why the conventional wisdom is favoring Obama. I can’t speak for all the conventionally wise, but here’s why I expect him to win: I think the final days of the divisive primary campaign were a low point for Obama. The country is leaning towards the Democrats at all other levels, and as November approaches I expect the presidential level to align with that trend. In other words, there’s a big pool of voters who support Democrats generally and Democratic positions on the major issues, but who right now are either undecided or leaning towards McCain. I think Obama will eventually get most of their votes.

In particular, I expect Obama to eventually win over two types of voters: moderates who mistakenly think that McCain is a moderate, and some Clinton fans who are supporting McCain out of spite.

Finally, McCain is pushing the same experience theme that failed Clinton in January. Experience works as an issue only until the public can see the candidates side-by-side. At that point, the experience difference has to be visible in their performance — McCain needs to look like he knows what he’s talking about while Obama doesn’t. If the experience advantage is invisible — and I think it will be — the issue goes away. That’s what happened in Kennedy vs. Nixon.

Moderates. Most politicians have a boom-bust cycle with the media. Obama, for example, got a lot of good coverage when he was emerging in December-January, and then March was 24/7 Jeremiah Wright. Through last summer and fall, Clinton benefited from the media message that she was inevitable. But immediately after Iowa pundits focused entirely on her failures, and then in the spring they exaggerated her chances of winning after Obama had built an insurmountable lead. Build-up-tear-down is the normal pattern.

For some reason, McCain has no cycle. Since he emerged on the national scene in 1999, he has received relentlessly positive coverage. As a result, people tend to believe that McCain agrees with them, even when he doesn’t. Many pro-choice voters, for example, somehow have gotten the impression that McCain is pro-choice, when he actually takes a fairly extreme pro-life position. That’s typical. McCain is a doctrinaire conservative. He’s even more hawkish than Bush. He thinks the magic of the marketplace will solve our healthcare problems. He supports the Bush tax cuts and wants to focus new tax cuts on corporations, while balancing the budget through “entitlement reform” — cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits.

Now, I understand that some people will never catch on. But more and more voters will start paying attention as the election gets closer, and many will be shocked by what they find.

Clintonites. There’s a lot of anger among Clinton supporters right now, especially older women who see Obama as all the undeserving young men who ever got promoted over them. Until Saturday, Clinton did her best to fan that anger. The whole point of all the Florida-and-Michigan stuff was to create a narrative of injustice and paint Obama’s victory as illegitimate. (If you buy this narrative, try to imagine it with the names switched: What if Obama tried to count a primary that he had won because Clinton’s name wasn’t on the ballot, and where many voters had stayed home because the Democratic Party had told them their primary was meaningless? Which way does the injustice go then?)

Lots of people have written about this group lately: Michelle Goldberg at The New Republic, Carol Lundergan at TPM Cafe, and Jane Hamsher at the Huffington Post, just to name a few. The BloggingHeads discussion between Jane Hamsher and Brink Lindsey is pretty insightful: Jane separates the Clinton-loyal women into two groups: politically active feminists and previously apolitical women who identify with Hillary personally. The first group will come home to the Democrats, she says, but the second may not. For them, it’s not about abortion or the Supreme Court or the economy or the war; it’s about Hillary. No Hillary, no vote.

That matches what I see on the blogs. As the campaign wore on, Democratic blogs became more and more segregated into pro-Obama blogs (like DailyKos) and pro-Clinton blogs (like MyDD). Neither completely eliminated its minority supporting the other candidate, but life was difficult for them. Already on Wednesday, though, peace started breaking out. The harsh feelings on either side are not entirely gone, but people who care about politics and progressive values realize what’s at stake in this election. They aren’t going to dwell on their disappointments or let personal animosity screw things up.

On the blogs specifically set up to support Clinton’s candidacy, though, it’s a different story. The outstanding example here is HillaryIs44 (a reference to the 44th president, the next one). These bloggers feel wronged by Obama and the Democratic Party, and they’re out to take down anybody involved in denying Hillary the nomination, including Obama-supporting superdelegates like John Kerry. Clinton’s concession speech made no difference to them, and many hang on to the fantasy that some Obama scandal will still break out and cause the superdelegates to change their minds. The key acronym here is PUMA (Party Unity My Ass).

These are the people McCain was pandering to at the beginning of his Tuesday speech, when he congratulated Clinton at length and said, “Pundits and party elders have declared that Senator Obama will be my opponent.” He was implicitly pushing the message that Obama stole the nomination from the rightful victor, Hillary Clinton.

Nobody knows exactly how many HillaryIs44-type people there are, or if McCain can really keep their support. The measure to watch is not the tone of HillaryIs44 (which will never change), but its traffic level. Will this community of resentment hold together, or will its members defect one-by-one as November approaches?

Will Clinton Be VP? No. Forget all the arguments for and against, it comes down to this: Clinton said McCain would be a better commander-in-chief than Obama. If she’s on the ticket, Republicans will run that video 24/7.

They Lied.

More people have changed their minds about George W. Bush than about any president in American history. Over the last seven years, his approval rating has done a falcon-dive from its historic high in the 90s after 9-11 to a Nixon-like 25% today. In the course of that long re-assessment, two events stand out: his administration’s bumbling response to Hurricane Katrina, and its failure to find WMDs in Iraq. We didn’t save New Orleans, and we didn’t save the hypothetical cities that Bin Laden was going to destroy with Saddam’s weapons.

No matter how messy, bloody, and expensive the Iraq War turned out to be, Americans would still support it if we thought it had prevented al Qaida from blowing up Atlanta or unleashing an anthrax plague on Chicago. That was the war President Bush sold us. If it had just turned out to cost more than he led us to believe, we’d have forgiven him.

But there were no WMDs. American cities faced no danger from Saddam. And if Bin Laden still has plans to destroy them, our troops in Iraq do not stand in his way.

Katrina was just incompetence, but Iraq has long carried an odor of deception. Did Bush and his people just get it wrong? Were they themselves fooled by incompetent intelligence services? Or did they lie to us?

The new report of the Senate Intelligence Committee adds weight to the case that they lied. The Senate report examines the public statements of Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Powell during the lead-up to the war, and compares them to the intelligence reports the administration was receiving. Conclusion: In regard to WMDs, evidence supporting their position existed, but they ignored contrary evidence and dissenting interpretations in the intelligence community. In regard to the relationship between Saddam and Bin Laden, they just made stuff up. The intelligence community had debunked the Saddam/Osama relationship, but the administration pushed it anyway. All of the committee’s Democrats and two Republicans — Chuck Hagel and Olympia Snowe — approved the report.

The Media Helped Them Lie.

Almost simultaneously, Scott McCellan’s new book What Happened was describing the Iraq deception from the inside, using the word propaganda to describe what the administration did.

In addition to the obvious conflict with the administration, McClellan’s book touched off a discussion about the role of the press. A lot of the mainstream journalists — NBC’s David Gregory, for example — took offense at McClellan’s charge that the press was “too deferential to the White House.”

NBC’s Today morning show coincidentally had the three major network anchors on — Katie Couric, Brian Williams, and Charles Gibson — and asked them about it. Couric described the pressure the networks were under — how the administration threatened to freeze CBS out of war coverage if they didn’t change their tone. But Gibson claimed the right questions were asked and “there was a lot of skepticism” about Colin Powell’s speech.

Unfortunately for Gibson, we have Google and YouTube now and can check his memory. Glenn Greenwald did the research, and discovered that in fact Gibson displayed precious little skepticism after Powell’s speech.

“It is not our job to debate [the administration],” Gibson told the Today audience, “It is our job to ask the questions.” Glenn goes on to nail this as the Stenographic Model of Journalism:

Real reporting is about uncovering facts that the political elite try to conceal, not ones they willingly broadcast. It’s about investigating and exposing — not mindlessly amplifying — the falsehoods and deceit of government claims. But our modern “journalists” (with some noble exceptions) don’t do that not only because they can’t do it, but also because they don’t think it’s their job.

His post contains many links worth following, to discussions of how Phil Donahue’s show got canceled despite its ratings, the firing of Ashleigh Banfield, and CNN correspondent Jessica Yellin’s assertion that “the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president’s high approval ratings.”

Political Summer Reading List

Imagine that you’re a what-the-hell kind of guy who loves foreign languages and cultures. You’ve been bopping through life with no discernible plan when in June, 2001 you get this amazingly brilliant idea: If you join the Army, they’ll pay you to learn Arabic. Fast forward a couple of years, and life is not turning out exactly the way you planned. You’re an interrogator at Abu Ghraib.

That’s what happened to Tony Lagouranis. He begins his memoir Fear Up Harsh with one of the great opening lines: “I should never be mistaken for a hero.” And then he goes on to tell a fascinating story of corruption and slippery slopes. It has a moral:

Once introduced into war, torture will inevitably spread, because ticking bombs are everywhere. Each and every prisoner, without exception, has the potential to be the one that provides the information that will save American lives. So if you accept the logic that we have to perform torture to prevent deaths, each and every prisoner is deserving of torture. … We should be very concerned about this steady progression and where it will lead, because the essence of torture — tyrannical control over the will of another — is everything that a free and democratic society is supposed to stand against. We should be very skeptical of the idea that our use of torture overseas will never come home.

Martha Nussbaum is a philosopher whose new book Liberty of Conscience explores the boundary between philosophy, American history, and constitutional law with regard to the issue of religious freedom and the relationship between church and state. If that description sounds dense, academic, and unreadable, I’ve done her an injustice. Her book has a very simple point: Defenders of religious liberty screw up when they present separation-of-church-and-state as an end in itself. Separation is better understood as a means to this end: Every American should come to the public square as an equal, without hierarchies created by ranking one religion over another. Mixing church with state inevitably implies that some beliefs make you more (or less) American, and therefore they entitle you to a higher (or lower) level of respect from your government.

Nussbaum retells the history of religious freedom and oppression in America — including the shameful parts — from Roger Williams leaving the Massachusetts Bay Colony to present controversies about displaying the Ten Commandments, reciting “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, and same-sex marriage. Her ultimate conclusions resemble down-the-line ACLUism. But her arguments are founded on values that really are common to the vast majority of Americans, rather than values that we merely wish were common.

Have you ever noticed how the war party is full of people who dodged military service? The anti-gay party has an inordinate number of closeted gays? The family values party has a hard time finding candidates who can hold their first marriage together long enough to raise a child? (And do any of them have a daughter as pride-worthy as Chelsea Clinton?)

Glenn Greenwald thinks that’s not just a series of unfortunate coincidences. In Great American Hypocrites, he makes the case that the true core value of the conservative movement is hypocrisy. And in a brilliant move, he takes his history-of-conservative-hypocrisy all the way back to the icon: John Wayne. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard somebody say that the Republicans are the John Wayne party. Well, Glenn agrees: Wayne ducked military service during World War II, when other actors of his era (Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable — even Jane Fonda’s dad Henry, for God’s sake) enlisted. He philandered. He was married three times. He got hooked on prescription drugs. And all the while he strutted around like the epitome of male virtue. Yep, he’s the model for the Republican party.

Like most of Glenn’s stuff, this book repeats itself and could have been a lot shorter. But it’s a fun rant, and will provide plenty of ammunition for arguments with conservative friends and relatives.

Every few months the blogosphere lights up with reports of some inspirational talk given by Bill Moyers. Well, now you can read them all in a book, Moyers on Democracy. Except for the talk he gave at the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis Saturday. That one you’ll just have to watch on YouTube. You can also watch the hilarious way Moyers turns the tables on an ambush interviewer sent by Bill O’Reilly. It takes nine minutes to play out, but it’s worth it.

I haven’t finished Drew Westen’s The Political Brain yet, but I’ve seen enough to recommend it. His main point is that Democrats approach a campaign like a high school debate, while Republicans approach it like marketing. That’s why Republicans win even when the Democrats’ positions are more popular. He discusses how emotions and imagery influence political decision-making, and dissects political advertisements to explain why they do or don’t work.

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No Sift This Week

May 30, 2008 – 6:23 am

The Weekly Sift will return on June 9.

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Political Soap Opera

May 26, 2008 – 2:18 pm
Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. — George Orwell


In This Week’s Sift:

The Clintons, Season 17. Why is so much political coverage focused on a candidate who no longer has a chance to win?

The Scariest Thing I Read This Week. Radar’s article about a program called Main Core is all based on anonymous sources. But it’s a pretty frightening story all the same.

McCain Watch. Nobody is paying attention, but the media actually is starting to scrutinize John McCain.

Short Notes. Playing fetch in Iraq, Joe vs. Joe, Sistani’s new fatwa, and a bold way to handle the border patrol.

The Clintons, Season 17

Politics and government are actually not very popular in America, so it’s not unusual for our political coverage to be taken over by some other art form. That happened this week, as the media focused its attention not on the future governance of the United States, but on the ongoing soap opera of The Clintons. Will the sexist media force Hillary out of the race? Will she destroy the Democratic Party? Will we finally discover that Barack is the secret love child of Bill Clinton and Tina Turner? Stay tuned.

Let’s get political reality out of the way as fast as possible: Obama now has the majority of the elected delegates. The superdelegates continue to trend towards him. In spite of the claims of the Clinton campaign, the polls show no statistically significant difference between how Obama and Clinton compete against McCain. There is no credible scenario where Clinton gets the nomination, or credible argument that she should get it, and even the incredible scenarios leave the Democratic Party so shattered that McCain wins.

Enough of that. It’s boring. On to the juicy stuff.

Did She Really Say That? No, not really. She did bring up Bobby Kennedy’s assassination while answering a question about why she was staying in the race, but the people who think she was hinting that someone might shoot Obama are being unfair. (Keith Olbermann, who I ordinarily admire a lot, kind of wigged out on this one.) The first time I saw the video, I interpreted it the same way she eventually explained it: the RFK assassination is something lots of people remember from a primary campaign that stretched into June. Bringing it up was misguided for a bunch of other reasons — 1968 is not a campaign today’s Democrats should be imitating — but I didn’t hear any invitation to violence. (An invitation to violence looks like this.) The most complete telling of the story is here.

As past readers of this blog should know, I’m down on this whole somebody-said-a-bad-thing style of politics. I didn’t like it when the media was going crazy about Obama’s “bitter” comment, and I don’t like it now. Obama is being gracious and writing the whole thing off to the stress of a long campaign causing words to come out wrong. Let’s leave it at that.

What’s She Doing? I wish I could figure it out. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a candidate continuing to run long after any real chance at the nomination is gone. Mike Huckabee did it, and nobody holds it against him.

But Clinton is doing something Huckabee didn’t: working hard to raise resentment against her party’s near-certain nominee. Her Florida-and-Michigan rhetoric tries to make Obama’s victory seem illegitimate. The why-are-they-trying-to-force-me-out stuff is salting the wounds of her supporters. Just before making the RFK comparison she complained “People have been trying to push me out of this ever since Iowa.” Why? “I don’t know. I don’t know. I find it curious. Because it’s unprecedented in history.” In reality, Obama’s been handling her with kid gloves, but she’s doing her best to sound like a victim.

Hillary Clinton is on a very destructive path. I can’t figure out where it’s going or what she hopes to gain from it.

Mulitiple frames. From the beginning of Hillary’s campaign, many older women — who experienced overt discrimination that younger women have trouble imagining — have framed this campaign as The Only Chance In Our Lifetime To Elect a Woman President. Some of them seem to have a hard time imagining that other people frame the campaign differently, so they can only attribute Clinton’s loss to sexism. Any other explanation is just an excuse.

By contrast, thirty-somethings, male and female alike, find the Clinton-is-all-women notion puzzling. To them, Clinton’s gender is an important part of her biography, but not the all-encompassing theme of 2008.

A lot of Democrats of all ages have framed this campaign around the war: Clinton voted to authorize it and has never really admitted that vote was a mistake, or explained how she will avoid similar mistakes in the future. When the war was popular, she positioned herself so that its possible success wouldn’t ruin her candidacy. Now that it’s unpopular, she talks forcefully about ending it. In 2006 the late Molly Ivins wrote: “Sen. Clinton is apparently incapable of taking a clear stand on the war in Iraq, and that alone is enough to disqualify her.” Is that an excuse for sexism?

For liberal activists, 2008 is the culmination of the Dean revolution of 2004. The Clinton-era move-to-the-right tactics that killed us in 2002 and 2004 are finally being rejected. Hillary made the mistake of picking the wrong side: She’s the establishment candidate in a revolutionary year. Should we ignore that because she’s a woman?

Is She the Last Hope? Marie Cocco writes: “The record suggests that if Clinton is not the nominee, no woman will seriously contend for the White House for another generation.” Of course, after Colin Powell ruined his future by being the mouthpiece for the Bush administration’s lies to the UN, the prospects for a black president looked pretty dim too. Who saw Obama coming in 2003?

Let’s back up and take a wider view of how sexism works at this level. Lots of people, male and female, are talented enough to make a serious run for president. What most of them lack are a jumping-off point and a story. Sexism has made it harder for women to get either one.

Credible presidential candidates are almost always either governors or senators or vice presidents. You need that jumping-off point. (Congressmen like Dennis Kucinich or Tom Tancredo just prove the rule. How far did they get?) So as long as there weren’t many female governors or senators, the chances for a female president were slim. But that’s changing. The Center for American Women and Politics lists eight current female governors, including two — Janet Napolitano of Arizona and Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas — who are widely mentioned as Obama VP possibilities. There are 16 female senators. Not half, but not zero either. Then there’s Nancy Pelosi. The more women who stand at jumping-off points, the more likely that one will be in the right place when opportunity beckons.

But that’s not the complete accounting of sexism in presidential politics. A candidate also needs to be the protagonist of a story of leadership, and men have a bunch of such stories to choose from. John McCain can run as a war hero, because war-hero-becomes-political-leader is a story as old as Caesar. When Obama runs as a charismatic young Turk, people say, “Oh, yeah — JFK. I know this story.”

Right now neither of those stories works for women. (I think that’s a big piece of the feminist resentment of Obama.) Only two leadership stories do: The Deserving Ladder-Climber, who pays all her dues, fulfills all the prerequisites, does all the homework, and is ready. And the Heir, who carries on the political legacy of her father or husband. (Think Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, Evita Peron.) Hillary Clinton’s story is a combination of the two: She paid her dues in her husband’s administration.

Both stories have disadvantages. By the time a Deserving Ladder-Climber makes it to a jumping-off point, she might be too old to go further, like Diane Feinstein (but not Sebelius or Napolitano) today. And since legacy-producing leaders are rare, plausible Heirs are always going to be rare too.

The main reason I think we’ll see a female president much sooner than a generation is because more leadership stories are going to open up for women. The manufactured Jessica Lynch story took off because the country is ready to see a woman as a war hero. A genuine female war hero may yet come out of Iraq or Afghanistan and start moving up. I’d love to see a 40-something woman try the Charismatic Young Turk story — that might be ready to start working too. As we see more female CEOs, the Non-Political Business Wizard story — Ross Perot, Lee Iaccoca — might open up as well.

We’ll really know that women have made it in American politics when we see a uniquely female leadership story, one that builds on traditionally feminine archetypes. That might take a generation. But some other story will work first.

The Scariest Thing I Read This Week

Like digby and emptywheel, I don’t know what to do with articles like this one from Radar magazine. It’s frightening. It sounds plausible. But it’s totally based on anonymous sources, so maybe it’s just one reporter’s paranoid fantasy. Should we be scared or not? Beats me.

Here’s the main idea: Deep inside some part of the Homeland Security Department, probably FEMA, is a plan to deal with the ultimate emergency — something that unleashes chaos on the land and threatens the continuity of government. The plan descends from those Cold War plans to keep the country going after nuclear attack, and it contains the option of martial law.

Scary, but not too scary yet. Just about everybody who’s thought much about the possibility of apocalyptic disaster assumes there’s a plan like that somewhere. But it gets scarier if this plan is not just a wad of paper in a filing cabinet in some underground bunker, but is instead an active program interconnected with all the Bush administration’s illegal spying programs. That’s the thesis of this article: All the illegal wiretapping and data mining is feeding a database called Main Core, which has records on eight million suspicious Americans, and which will be used to figure out who the government needs to round up and detain at the outset of the national emergency.

It is, of course, appropriate for any government to plan for the worst. But when COG [continuity of government] plans are shrouded in extreme secrecy, effectively unregulated by Congress or the courts, and married to an overreaching surveillance state—as seems to be the case with Main Core—even sober observers must weigh whether the protections put in place by the federal government are becoming more dangerous to America than any outside threat.

Like any good conspiracy theories, this one pulls a lot of threads together. No one has ever explained the real issues behind the dramatic Ashcroft hospital-room scene. Why has the Department of Homeland Security expanded its capacity for large-scale temporary detention? Administration testimony about warrantless wiretapping has always carefully bracketed “this program” without commenting on what other secret programs might be doing. DHS is a likely home for such a program, because it lacks the Congressional oversight and legal restrictions of the CIA, FBI, NSA, or other intelligence agencies. FEMA’s feeble performance against natural disasters might be the result of its re-orientation towards political emergencies. And why did the Military Commissions Act of 2006 expand the domestic role of the military?

The right answer to these questions is not to jump to conclusions, but for Congress to soberly investigate. Of course, that would mean avoiding the executive privilege roadblock that has allowed the administration to prevent any serious oversight so far. That’s not going to happen until Congress either threatens impeachment or starts putting people in jail under its power of inherent contempt. And so far it isn’t ready to go there.

McCain Watch

Fasincating piece in the NYT a week ago Sunday: The McCain Doctrines by Matt Bai. Bai compares the military-policy views of four Vietnam-veteran senators — McCain, Kerry, Hagel, and Webb — and makes an insightful point: By spending 1967-1973 as a POW, McCain missed the common experience of the war that the others were having.

During those years, McCain did not share the disillusioning and morally jarring experiences of soldiers like Kerry, Webb and Hagel, who found themselves unable to recognize their enemy in the confusion of the jungle; he never underwent the conversion that caused Kerry, for one, to toss away some of his war decorations during a protest at the Capitol. Whatever anger McCain felt remained focused on his captors, not on his own superiors back in Washington.

McCain compensated for this hole in his experience by studying the Vietnam War after-the-fact at the National War College. There he was taught that we arrived at the right anti-insurgent strategy in Vietnam too late, and that Congress pulled the plug on an effort that was starting to work. That’s the lesson he’s applying to Iraq.

It briefly looked as if McCain had taken an in-between position on Telecom Amnesty: Give the telecom companies retroactive immunity only after Congress had held rigorous hearings to figure out what they did. Alas, it was an illusion. The McCain campaign has issued a correction: McCain completely supports the Bush administration policy of no-strings amnesty for the telecoms who helped the government illegally spy on their customers.

Slate’s Robert Gordon explains why McCain is wrong on health care. When the federal government started allowing interstate banking, all the card companies moved their credit card operations to South Dakota, which gives consumers the fewest rights. McCain’s proposal for interstate health insurance would have the same result.

The Washington Post determines that the saving McCain expects to make by limiting earmarks just doesn’t add up.

Short Notes

In Iraq, Ayatollah Sistani is turning against us. That’s pretty important.

Public Eye magazine discusses the emerging links between the religious right and anti-immigrant groups. The article traces the fault lines in a political coalition that wants to include both working-class whites (who feel threatened by the growth of the American Latino population) and the Catholic Church (which represents most of that population and depends on it for future growth).

Phillip Carter’s Intel Dump blog pointed me in the direction of one of his favorite soldier blogs: Kaboom: A Soldier’s War Journal and this story about an American platoon in Iraq adopting a stray dog. Small things can be very touching sometimes, like a game of fetch just before dawn in a place that seems abnormal in every other way.

RFK Jr. and Brandon Demelle remind us of all the important stuff that happened this week that the major media never got around to covering. Think of it as a Short Notes inside Short Notes.

A pair of Joes — Lieberman and Biden — went back and forth on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal this week.

Lieberman charges that the Democratic Party has abandoned the strong foreign policy that it stood for under Truman and Kennedy, that after Vietnam it slid into believing “the Cold War was mostly America’s fault” — a position that was reversed under Clinton and now has been reversed back. After 9/11 “I felt strongly that Democrats should embrace the basic framework the president had advanced for the war on terror as our own, because it was our own. But that was not the choice most Democratic leaders made.”

Biden points out that there is not a single part of the world where the Lieberman-Bush-McCain foreign policy is working. “On George Bush’s watch, Iran, not freedom, has been on the march.” He describes 9/11 as a historic opportunity “to unite Americans and the world in common cause” — an opportunity that the administration blew through policies that “divided Americans from each other and from the world.” He concludes: “The Bush-McCain saber rattling is the most self-defeating policy imaginable. It achieves nothing. But it forces Iranians who despise the regime to rally behind their leaders.”

I’m sure you’re in suspense about which case I find more convincing. Do I favor torture, the surrender of our civil liberties, and pre-emptive war based on false intelligence? Or should we try to represent the democratic values of the world and deserve the good-guy mantle that Bush wants to claim through rhetoric alone? Hmmm. Let me think.

Glenn Greenwald follows the money as the telecoms try to get Congress to let them off the hook for breaking the law. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the groups whose lawsuits will be dropped if telecom immunity passes, reports: “AT&T’s spending for three months on lobbying alone is significantly more than the entire EFF budget for a whole year.”

Now even the Pentagon is admitting that contractors in Iraq were mismanaged.

In case you missed any part of it, SlateV has a seven-minute summary of everything that’s happened in the race for the Democratic nomination.

I don’t think I’d have the guts to handle a border-patrol checkpoint like this.

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