Friday, January 27, 2006

We Write Letters

Oh yes. We do. This one went out to Bubba the Love Sponge. Yes, that's right: BTLS:

Hey Guys,

I heard you riffing tonight on Veteran support, and here's something you can pass along to your listeners. Check this out:

While it is quick with rhetorical support, the Bush administration has repeatedly refused to take the actions necessary to provide the troops the resources they need. The latest example comes from the Army Times, which reports that the Pentagon is currently working on a proposal to triple the costs of the military health insurance program (Tricare):
Increases would be substantial — as much as $1,200 more a year by 2009 — with no end in sight because the plan calls for annual rate hikes in 2010 and beyond that would match inflation.
Steve Strobridge, government relations director for the Military Officers Association of America, said it best:
In the middle of a war, with troops and families vastly overstressed, recruiting already in the toilet, and retention at risk, the Defense Department wants to pay for weapons by cutting manpower and trying to cut career military benefits by $1,000 a year or more? That’s just flat unconscionable.
More soldiers have been taken off the battlefield in Iraq by injuries and illnesses than by enemy fire. An increase in health care costs would be a great burden for these soldiers. Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer recently wrote to President Bush demanding that he disavow the program.
You can help. Already, more than 22,000 members of the Military Officers Association of America have written Congress opposing the initiative. Contact House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and tell them what you think about Bush’s proposed policy.
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Think this is bullshit? Don't believe me? Go check out the Army Times article, here. Bush should be lowering the costs of insurance for people that serve, not raising their premiums. Now, this may seem like a little thing, but sometimes it's the little things that make a big difference in people's lives, and for fuck's sake, people that serve have it tough enough already. I beg of you, please ask your listeners to call their Representatives and Senators and make sure this change does not go through. You guys pull a lot of weight, and together, we can stop this shit.

I'm a Liberal. A hard core fucking Liberal. And despite the spittle that comes out of the mouths of junkies like Rush Limbaugh, we Liberals believe in a strong military, a robust national security policy, and making sure our men and women in uniform are cared for properly. This is one issue that Libertarians, Liberals, and Conservatives can all agree on. We should band together and demand the Defense Dept. and the Bush administration quit cutting Veterans benefits and start fucking increasing them, NOW. Consider this: the most intelligent and physically able young people go the extra mile and volunteer to serve our nation, and when they get home, we treat them like shit. It's a fucking NATIONAL DISGRACE.

Again, I urge you guys to throw your weight around. Let's put some serious pressure on our elected officials in Washington and force some changes. I know you guys care, and you must know you have millions like me out here that care too.

Thursday, January 26, 2006

Jonah, Gore, James, and Todd

Just when I thought I'd read one of the best blog posts in quite a long time, (Peter Daou's incredible analysis over at Salon) James Wolcott hits one out of the park with this one. Here's a couple excerpts, this one from Gore Vidal:
"Originally, God wanted Jonah to give hell to Nineveh, whose people, God noted disdainfully, 'cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand,' so like the people of Baghdad who cannot fathom what democracy has to do with their destruction by the Cheney-Bush cabal. But the analogy becomes eerily precise when it comes to the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico at a time when a president is not only incompetent but plainly jinxed by whatever faith he cringes before. Witness the ongoing screw-up of prescription drugs. Who knows what other disasters are in store for us thanks to the curse he is under? As the sailors fed the original Jonah to a whale, thus lifting the storm that was about to drown them, perhaps we the people can persuade President Jonah to retire to his other Eden in Crawford, Texas, taking his jinx with him. We deserve a rest. Plainly, so does he. Look at Nixon's radiant features after his resignation!"
Shifting gears, here's another from Emmanuel Todd regarding America's response to Katrina:
"American industry has been bled dry and it's the industrial decline that above all explains the negligence of a nation confronted with a crisis situation: to manage a natural catastrophe, you don't need sophisticated financial techniques, call options that fall due on such and such a date, tax consultants, or lawyers specialized in funds extortion at a global level, but you do need materiel, engineers, and technicians, as well as a feeling of collective solidarity. A natural catastrophe on national territory confronts a country with its deepest identity, with its capacities for technical and social response. Now, if the American population can very well agree to consume together - the rate of household savings being virtually nil - in terms of material production, of long-term prevention and planning, it has proven itself to be disastrous. The storm has shown the limits of a virtual economy that identifies the world as a vast video game."
You know what to do, go...what, afraid of gaining some knowledge? Go I say...

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

It's The Storyline, Not The Story

You Dummy. Peter Daou over at Salon wrote a great piece today about what we're up against. Here's a slice:
...And a single storyline delivered by a “neutral” reporter is a hundred times more dangerous than a storyline delivered by an avowed partisan. Rightwingers can attack the media for criticizing Bush, can slam the New York Times for being liberal, but when the Times and the Post and CNN and MSNBC echo the ‘Bush stands firm’ mantra, it adds one more brick to a powerful pro-Bush edifice.

These narratives are woven so deeply into the fabric of news coverage that they have become second nature and have permeated the public psyche and are regurgitated in polls. (The polls are then used to strengthen the narratives.) They are delivered as affirmative statements, interrogatives, hypotheticals; they are discussed as fact and accepted as conventional wisdom; they are twisted, turned, shaped, reshaped, and fed to the American public in millions of little soundbites, captions, articles, editorials, news stories, and opinion pieces. They are inserted into the national dialogue as contagious memes that imprint the idea of Bush=strong/Dems=weak. And they are false.

Peter was the man that ran Kerry's Internet efforts, so he's definitely in-the-know. It's a short piece that's well worth reading. You have to click through an ad, but go check it out.

I'd like to add an observation by opening up the lens. Josh Marshall has noted the rightward shift in American politics since the late '60's (albeit with a hiccup after Watergate):
..."Watergate ushered in a generation of Democratic politicians with little in the way of ideological commitment other than honesty. Not long after Watergate we got the Reagan revolution."

I'm not sure that's it precisely, though. Or perhaps the disagreement is one of cause and effect. A more economical answer, I think, is that the country was in the midst of a broad shift toward the right. The scandals surrounding Watergate upended the political dynamic in the country but not the ideological one. And as soon as those implicated in Watergate left the scene the broad pattern reasserted itself.

To catch an accurate view, that cogent point needs to be coupled with the unrelenting crusade by operatives on the Right to cow the media into operating under the precept that there truly is a "liberal bias" in the media. Thanks be to the Good Professor we know that's utter Bullshit. Digby adds some of the more recent right-wing boo-hooing, here. Bruce Miller had enough material to write a book about it.

To modern Republicans, Ronald Reagan is a God. He's their enduring God, the man that always gives their movement justification and force. He embodied this rightward shift, and to neuvo GOP types, he's the Gold Standard. After Ronnie slayed the Commie dragon, there was only one place for Conservatives to turn their hatred: inward.

Who else was there left to destroy except the Left? With Reagan came the advent of Rush Limbaugh, and he in turn spawned many mini-Limbaughs, most notably Sean Hannity. The other two modern day hyenas that come to mind are Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. These people have one purpose in life: bashing liberals and Democrats without end. After years of what Dr. Alterman has called working the refs, the mainstream media has now internalized the falacy that Democrats and liberals are lilly-livered, weak-kneed, whimps with no ideas and no agenda, and that's the platform from which they now operate. Troubling times in this new century, no?

Thursday, January 12, 2006

Joe Biden (D-MBNA): Utterly Useless

I'll have to confirm this, but I just heard Ed Henry on CNN say that Joe Biden and Dianne Feinstein see no need to filibuster the nomination of Judge Alito to the Supreme Court. They may believe that launching a filibuster makes for bad politics for Democrats. Fair enough, but what is an opposition party if it never opposes anything? Thinking about this stuff reminded me of a post Josh Marshall wrote a few weeks back which nails it. I feel it needs to be quoted at length:

For folks of my political persuasion, last year ended on a very bleak note. But things started going badly for the president from the beginning of 2005 and went down hill from there. Looking toward next year, a lot of stars seem to be in alignment for the Democrats. And history, scandal and the comeuppance of past mistakes and villainies all seem stacked against the president and his party.

A moment so pregnant with possibility has inevitably turned to speculation about how the Dems could blow it -- which is a possibility well worth considering. And that leads to all the questions of which issues should the Democrats pursue, which will position them better, should they have more new ideas -- those and a thousand other questions that, together, all amount to paralysis and a morbid self-indulgence and introspection.

I say let's forget about all of that. Far better to concentrate on two things.

First, attack!

Saying that amounts to a lightning rod in itself, hoisted up for battering from all sorts of scolds. But it's nothing to be ashamed of. The point of a political opposition is to oppose -- if there are no grounds for opposition, then there is no reason for such an opposition to exist. Better to join the president's party or go out of existence. And certainly, for those who share the perspective of this site, there is plenty to oppose. To say 'attack!' simply means to maintain the initiative in the debates of the day -- always. And when it's lost to get it back as soon as possible.

Second, you can't be an opposition without knowing what you oppose and what you're for.

Bad writing is usually imprecise writing -- and its badness usually stems from the bad writer not having taken the time to think through just what he or she means to say. The cobwebs and vagaries of their minds are revealed in bad prose.

Bad politics usually stems from people not having a clear idea of what they're trying to achieve, where they're trying to go. Once you know where you're trying to lead the country, strategy and tactics and optics and gutting the other side all tend to fall into place. If not perfectly, then a whole lot easier. Where do we want to take the country? Forget the rest and think about that. That's the guiding star.

He emphasized his own thoughts on opposition above, and I couldn't agree more. Veering back to the Alito issue, I also agree with Matt Yglesias here:
To be clear about the nature of my defeatism, I don't like it any more than you. I'm not of the school of thought that says the issues at stake here are trivial or that substantially rolling back the Roe and Casey precedents will generate an electoral windfall for Democrats. Confirming Alito will be a bad thing, and almost certainly an unmitigated bad thing. But I think it's wrong to blame liberal interest groups, Democratic senators, progressive bloggers, or anyone else's insufficient savvy or zeal for the problem. The Republicans won a majority, the Republicans are bad people, and so they're going to do something bad. It's their fault, and the only remedy is better performance on Election Day.
He's right, we need to win at the polls. Period. So why, you ask, are you picking on poor Joe Biden in the subject of your post? Seeing as he's a Democrat running for president? For one, he voted for the egregious legislation known as the Bankruptcy Bill. He's a Senator from Delaware, where, because that state has the most lax rules for credit card companies in the country, he apparently felt he needed to appease his corporate donors. How bad is that bill? Mr. Drum, take it:

Bottom line: you don't need to understand all the intricacies of bankruptcy law to know what to think of this bill. Through their actions, its sponsors have made it abundantly plain that abuse of the system isn't their real aim: protection of major campaign contributors is. The poor get shafted, the very real crisis of medical bankruptcy is ignored, the rich are allowed loopholes that let them off the hook, and credit card companies can continue on their merry way knowing they won't have to pay the price for their own folly.

Welcome to America.

If you want the gory details about the bill itself, go read the whole post. Moving along, we have this blatant clowning by Biden at the Alito confirmation hearings:


How dignified, Joe. Maybe he is the personification of the Centrist Democrat: Complete Jackass. I'm not a huge fan of late hits in football, but in this case I'm calling pigpile on Joe: (from James Wolcott in regard to Condi Rice's confirmation hearings. Who, let us recall, had an oil tanker named after her):
...Fineman went on to scoff at John Kerry's vote against Condi's confirmation as an empty gesture, but I have more respect for Kerry's gesture, futile though it may be, than I do Joe Biden's windmill arm action and posturing. He makes a big show of saying that he has little faith in Rice being anything other than Bush's translator and message-machine--that he hoped she would be a firm advocate for the State Department rather than simply a loyalist, but that his instincts told him this was unlikely--and then voted for her anyway!

Biden is like a slugger who never quite gets good wood on the ball, no innuendo intended. He gets into the batter's box, scuffs up the dirt with his cleats, gets settled, takes practice strokes, and--here comes the pitch--lets rip with a mighty swing...and pops up. Again and again, he goes through his Rocky Calavito rituals, and each time he hits an infield fly.

Now, let's look at part of the statement Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid gave today (via Kos):

I have not forgotten that Judge Alito was only nominated after the radical right wing of the President's party forced Harriet Miers to withdraw. The right wing insisted that Justice O'Connor be replaced with a sure vote for their extreme agenda. Four days of hearings have shown that Judge Alito is no Sandra Day O'Connor.

Senate Democrats will meet next week to discuss the nomination.

If we're to take CNN's word, there really isn't any point in Democrats meeting next week to discuss anything at all, is there? Given the arguments I've heard, I'm still on the fence as to whether filibustering Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court is good politics or not. But based on the reporting and Harry Reid's statement, Democrats either need to get on message, or shut their mouths. There's just no way to build a strong opposition caucus when the Senate Minority Leader says we'll decide next week, and then two prominent committee members basically say "we won't oppose". If Democrats can learn anything from Republicans, it's that you never open your mouth until you know what the shot is. No talking out of school, no leaking about where might you stand, and no public statements until there's a consensus. Playing the media is simple, but what seems most difficult to achieve is Democratic solidarity. It's pretty straightforward: either act like a coalition or give up the ghost. This from Josh really bears worth repeating:
Bad politics usually stems from people not having a clear idea of what they're trying to achieve, where they're trying to go. Once you know where you're trying to lead the country, strategy and tactics and optics and gutting the other side all tend to fall into place.
A clear idea thrives on a clear message. Here we go: stick together, present a unified front, or keep losing elections. Over and over again.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Legislatin's Hard Work

Legislating from the Oval Office that is.

When will we as a nation get around to having a discussion about whether Executive Orders are consitutional or not? This whole dust-up about the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretaps is based on the president issuing an Executive Order.

It's one thing to issue a proclamation and an Executive Order stating that we as a nation recognize Punxsatawny Phil's sage advice about when winter will end, and quite another issuing an order to have telecom companies participate in data mining activities that monitor billions of phone calls and e-mails on American soil.

When the president can authorize the creation and funding of a whole new program of spying without any real congressional oversight, we've entered the weird new land of democracy-on-the-fly. I guess we shouldn't be shocked that under a preseident like George W. Bush, it's make up the rules along the way.

Some Executive Orders may be benign and/or under the perview of the executive branch, but others are just flat-out unconstitutional. A Congress with any balls would curtail this made-up power.

Update: corrected the first sentence. Ooops.

Update II: I wrote the good folks over at the American Prospect to comment on this post. We'll see if they get back to me. Hope so...

Saturday, January 07, 2006

Texan Propaganda

It's never a surprise to me that the worst prevaricators and snake-oil chiselers come from Texas. Their state constitution has a provision that would allow them to secede from the Union and form their own country anytime they want. They should do so immediately. The remaining 49 United States would be far better off.

What amazes me is how easily our nation has come to tolerate the lies, doublespeak, projectionism, and outright horseshit that comes out of the mouths of politicians from Texas. The creepy part is that it's the type of soft propaganda that cruises under the radar. Here we have the perfect example of this kind of language from Tom DeLay (R-TX) upon stepping down from his majority post in the House:
We have cut taxes, we have shrunk government, we have redesigned government, we have protected American families.
The first part is absolutely true, the Republicans have cut taxes: for the rich. The next three points are demostrably false, and simply untrue. He's either completely delusional, or he knows they're not true and he's lying. The facts are that government has grown larger under this Republican majority, and last year 4 million more Americans fell into poverty (of course, that may fit with Tom's definition of "protecting American famalies"). This is classic Texas bullshit; taking credit for things that simply have not happened. Here's a bit more:
In the 21 years I have been in Congress, I have always acted in an ethical manner, within the rules of the house and the laws of our land. Time once again, will bear out that truth.
That's why he was cited by the ethics committee three times for violations of House rules, he's under indictment in Texas for money laundering, and he's expected to face more felony charges as his sidekick lobbyist Jack Abramoff sings to the Justice Department. Just how stupid does he think we all are? It's almost insane how this passes by the news media and goes almost unnoticed. I guess if he lied about getting a blowjob, that might warrant some excitement. You folks down in Sugar Land sure must be proud...