I recently coined the term “Perma-Fuck” to describe what the media has done to Big Howard Dean. Several of you have expressed enthusiasm for the term, and have yourselves used it, for instance, to describe what is happening to real Americans at the hands of the Bush Administration.
The coinage will stand or fall on its own merit, and may morph in meaning several times before winding up in the Oxford Dictionary. But I plan to use the term in a quite limited way: to describe the status of a politician who has sustained irreversible damage by being classified or labelled in a certain way by the media. In my conception, Perma-fuck is something that is tattooed onto the body of a politician by the media.
Perma-fuck can be richly deserved — Slick Willie, Tricky Dick — or it can be totally unfair — Potatoe Quayle. Perma-fuck on the presidential level is somewhat bi-partisan in that it can on occasion happen to a Republican. However, observation reveals that Perma-fuck appears to be inevitable for apparent Democratic nominees: Tank-Head Dukakis; Slick Willie; Internet Inventor Al; Angry Howard.
In his column on The Nation’s website, John Nichols has neatly packaged the details of an enormously significant sidebar to the primary there:
“In all, 8,279 primary voters wrote in the names of Democratic challengers to Bush on their Republican ballots.
That’s a significant number. In the 2000 general election, Bush beat Democrat Al Gore in New Hampshire by just 7,212 votes. Had Gore won New Hampshire, he would have become president, regardless of how the disputed Florida recount was resolved.
Thanks to Buck for the link.
Here’s one theory: Taxes are a drag on the economy. They suck resources from the private sector that could be put to work helping to grow the economy. So when the economy starts to sag, the proper thing to do is cut taxes — particularly taxes on business and on the entrepreneur class. Any shortfalls in government revenue will be temporary because the resulting economic growth will raise government revenues as the economy (and hence the tax base) grows.
Of course Reagan tried this back in the early 1980s, and the results were not good. The federal deficit ballooned out of control and the economic stimulus was minimal. Indeed, the near–instant explosion of federal debt made Reagan raise taxes almost every year for the remainder of his time in office.
You might think that the demonstrated failure of the supply–side theory on such a grand scale would be enough to consign it to the dustbin of history, but you would be wrong.
Enter the current president and his team. Supply–side theorists one and all, they were ready to succeed where Reagan could not. As we know, Bush and his crew have slashed income taxes at the top and corporate taxes at all levels. Taxes on investment–derived income such as dividends were halved. In all, a near–perfect implementation of supply–side economics.
But it hasn’t worked, or at least it hasn’t worked the way proponents of supply–side theory claim it should. Yes, GPD is up (even though 2003 Q4 GDP slumped to 4%, that’s still a respectable number), but jobs and job growth are nowhere in sight. Bush’s tax cuts have ostensibly pumped billions upon billions of dollars into the economy, and all we’ve got to show for it is more pink slips.
So why hasn’t supply-side worked?
The biggest cuts (and the overall bulk of the cuts) in personal income taxes went to the top 1% of earners. Those people pocketed the extra cash: the money went into savings and non-productive investment (non-productive meaning investments that have no effect on economic output — treasury bills, for example). So only a tiny fraction of that part of the supply-side pump made it back into the economy.
The remainder of the personal income tax cuts got doled out in small packages to middle- and lower-income wage earners. Already strapped by the sagging economy, those people did what the supply-siders hoped they’d do: they spent the dough. The 8% GDP growth of Q4 in 2003 is testimony to the tax checks arriving in the hands of those people. The GDP slump in Q4 is testimony to the short-lived effect of that.
What about the corporate tax cuts? Businesses did what the top 1% did: They pocketed the savings. And why not? Industrial capacity utilization is still stuck at around 75%, so there’s no point in investing in new plants and equipment (which would create jobs). And with the economy not doing real well, the tax cuts sure make it easier to bolster the bottom line (thus helping those all-important stock prices).
Meanwhile, Bush has spent the last year pushing the dollar down in an effort to bolster sagging U.S. exports and bring the trade deficit under some control. But that’s not working out, either. Evidence suggests that U.S. exporters have taken advantage of the dollar’s fall to raise prices. Instead of boosting the volume of exports (which would begin to take up some of that excess industrial capacity and thus create jobs), exporters are cashing in on windfall profits while leaving American-made goods no more competitive overseas than they were before.
The end results are what we have today: GDP growth without job growth. Barring some serious policy changes, the outlook is not good. Over at the Whiskey Bar, Billmon is worried about deflation and notes the shaky international foundation of the dollar. In all, unlimited vistas of gloom on all sides — especially with Bush pushing to make the tax cuts permanent.
At this point, there really is only one way out of this mess and that’s bolstering demand. To a large extent, the American consumer carries the world economy on his back. If American consumer demand can be increased, it cannot help but drive all other sectors of the economy upward. The monstrous GDP spurt of 2003’s third quarter demonstrates that quite well. It also demonstrates that the supply-side remedy, at least as applied by Bush, was applied in the wrong place.
But Bush has made it very clear that, should he win a second term, he’ll be lavishing more and bigger tax breaks in the same two places where they haven’t worked. Clinging to supply-side theory to the bitter end, Bush and his crew may find themselves repeating the words of another American president:
“Died of a theory” was Jefferson Davis’s suggested epitaph for the Confederacy.
The media frenzy surrounding the build-up and tear-down of Big Howard Dean has been a huge boon to Sen. John Kerry. It has allowed him to come up unmolested on the outside, appearing to be a problem-free alternative to Big Howard. But, make no mistake, after the initial build-up focussing on his Vietnam war record and the fact that he got under Nixon’s skin, the tear-down of John Kerry will proceed in earnest.
Unfortunately for the Democrats, the Kerry tear-down is likely to take place largely after he has secured the nomination. He will then enter, and will never leave, the status known to political scientists, or at least to me, as “Perma-Fuck.” (See Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Dan Quayle, Howard Dean, and here, for an explanation.)
What are the likely outlines of the Kerry tear-down? Twenty years in the senate, and nothing to show for it: 351 bills introduced, nine passed; nine health-care bills introduced, none passed. This man says that he will be a better president than Bush because Bush failed to build a coalition to defeat Saddam. But if Kerry is not tough enough to bring in the senators from Indiana and New Mexico, how is he tough enough to bring in the prime minister of India or the president of old Mexico? If he can’t convince Sarbanes of Maryland, what makes him think he can convince Schroeder of Germany? Why should we believe that what failed in the United States Congress will succeed at the United Nations?
Jack Kennedy and John Edwards had an excuse for mediocre senate records: they were new. But Kerry is in his fourth term. He is burdened by a lengthy voting record that can and will be picked apart as liberal wuss, but he has no counterbalance of legislative accomplishment or impressive leadership position. He’s a Mondale or a Dole without the record and without the deep respect of his senate peers.
I tend to agree with this; I know Lead Balloons does. Read the whole thing at Black Commentator.
Dean was stripped of half his popular support in the space of two weeks in January while John Kerry — tied in the polls with Carol Moseley-Braun at seven percent just two months earlier — rose like a genie from a bottle to become the overnight presidential frontrunner.Both candidates were shocked and disoriented by the dizzying turns of fortune, and for good reason. Neither Dean nor Kerry had done anything on their own that could have so dramatically altered the race. Corporate America decided that Dean must be savaged, and its media sector made it happen.
…If a mildly progressive, Internet-driven, young white middle class-centered, movement-like campaign such as Dean’s — flush with money derived from unconventional sources, backed by significant sections of labor, reinforced by big name endorsements and surging with upward momentum — can be derailed in a matter of weeks at the whim of corporate media, then all of us are in deep trouble.
Posted by Jerome Doolittle at 07:02 PM
This morning I meant to send notification of a new item to a tiny list of other bloggers. Instead I sent it to my whole (rarely used) Bad Attitudes mailing list of some three hundred people. This was bad enough, but when irritated messages started coming back, things turned out to have been far worse.
Somehow I had managed to uncheck the Outlook Express box that hides the addresses of other recipients, thereby sending everybody's address to everybody else. This was unpardonably stupid, but I hope you’ll try to pardon me anyway.
Sorry again,
Jerry
The media coverage of Big Howard Dean’s Iowa rally speech has been the single most important factor in the damage to Dean’s prospects.
Now, Diane Sawyer of ABC News has closely examined charges that the news media grossly distorted the speech. Sawyer herself played the unfair snippet three times while interviewing Dean and his wife.
Sawyer chose not to play clips from the other cameras in the room, the ones that show the crowd constantly and wildly cheering all around Dean, and making clear that he is shouting not from anger, but so that even a few people near him could hear him.
What is Sawyer’s conclusion after reviewing clips from other cameras and talking to reporters who were there? Well, her article is entitled “The ‘Dean Scream’ — The Version of Reality You Didn’t See … or Hear on TV,” and she admits she and her network were flatly wrong in the way they played the speech. She also quotes representatives of every major news network admitting much the same.
Seen in proper context, including with the crowd noise Big Howard had to shout over not filtered out, the speech looks normal, even fun and good. As a matter of fact, the famous “Yeaaahh!” is literally not audible at all. If you have a connection that allows you to see video, check it out here.
I understand that Sawyer and these other TV biggies are desperately trying to save their souls for salvation — they don’t want their unfair coverage decisions to be responsible for damaging, probably fatally, the most promising and interesting American politician since Bobby Kennedy.
My answer: Diane, you better hope God’s guiding principle is mercy, not justice.
Thanks to Deanforamerica for the links.
We just released three teenagers from Gitmo. Because we are so proud of how we are conducting our war or terror, we would not give the teens’ exact ages. We limited ourselves to saying they are between 13 and 15 years old.
That means that when they arrived at Gitmo one year ago, they were between 12 and 14 years old.
Two points: 1) I feel so safe; and 2) I assume the No Child Left Behind administration provided schooling for the young lads.
Did you know that a Middle Easterner residing in South Africa has been picked up on federal charges of conspiring to send 200 American-made nuclear weapons detonators to Pakistan?
Probably not. It was easy to miss, just a three-paragraph item on page 12 of yesterday’s New York Times, tucked away as an after-thought at the bottom of a much longer story about an atom scientist in Pakistan.
One would presume that the suspect, Asher Karni, would be currently awaiting trial in one of John Ashcroft’s undisclosed holding pens while undergoing “intensive interrogation,” but one would presume wrongly.
Karni is not a Pakistani or a Moroccan or an American-born Yemeni from Buffalo. He is an Israeli citizen, and he is free on bail at a rabbi’s home in Silver Spring, Maryland. Not to worry, though. The judge ordered him to wear a monitoring device.
For a few more details on the case, very few, see this old Reuters story out of Denver. Karni was arrested there on New Year’s day. Surely you remember all the media hullaballoo about it at the time? Me neither.
Maureen Dowd’s column today carries the headline, “Dump Cheney Now!” Actually, though, her column says no such thing.
Dowd does say that the vice president is deluded and a trash talker and an exuder of infallibility and a sufferer from a form of chutzpah so inflamed that it has not yet entered the lexicon.
But none of these warrants removal from the White House — certainly not in the moral universe inhabited by Republicans. For that, the vice president would have had to lie about oral sex.
For a more acute and thorough consideration of Cheney’s political future, see “Will Dubya Dump Dick?” by Jim Lobe of Inter Press Service.
Here's a small excerpt — but by all means read Lobe’s entire story, which is fascinating and convincing.
Reports were already surfacing two months ago that a discreet “dump Cheney” movement had been launched by intimate associates of Bush's father (former president George H. W. Bush), his national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and former secretary of state James Baker, who now has a White House appointment as Bush Jr’s personal envoy to persuade official creditors to reduce substantially Iraq's $110 billion foreign debt.In addition to their perception that Cheney’s presence would harm Bush’s re-election chances, Scowcroft and Baker, who battled frequently with the vice president when he was defense secretary in the first Bush administration, have privately expressed great concern over Cheney’s unparalleled influence over the younger Bush and the damage that has done to U.S. relations with longtime allies, particularly in Europe and the Arab world.
This is not the first time that the elder Bush has used Scowcroft as a mouthpiece to warn his harebrained son of looming disaster. Nor will Bush the Younger be any more likely to listen now than he was before. His “Creepy Death Wish” is too compelling for that.
More and more it becomes clear that the central pschodynamic of George W. Bush’s presidency is the envy and hatred he feels for his father, and the contempt which the father so plainly feels for his slacker son.
There have been many questions about what kind of man Gen. Wesley Clark is. The most persistent question about Clark’s fitness for the presidency centers on the charge that he was relieved of his command as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe because of issues of “character and integrity.” This charge has been made against Clark by former Secretary of Defense William Cohen and Hugh Shelton, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Neither man has been willing to elaborate on Gen. Clark’s failings. There may be legitimate character questions about Gen. Clark. But this isn’t one of them.
The fact that Shelton and Cohen have refused to specify the nature of these supposed character issues made the charges suspicious from the start. What really happened? The real story, as one might expect, is simply that Shelton and Cohen grew miffed when Clark would not do precisely as instructed.
Why couldn’t Cohen bring Clark to heel in just the way I have seen Cohen heeling his two tiny white Scotties on Pennsylvania Avenue — that is, erect and like a lord, cream-white cashmere scarf blooming subtly from the neck of his impecably tailored double-breasted navy blue wool overcoat, the two tooled leather oxblood leashes, one in each hand, wrapped smartly several times around his butter-soft and gleaming black calfskin gloves, held firmly like reins, well away from the body, and kept grandly taut as by a charioteer seeking to control an edgy stallion? (A real commander, that one.)
What were the particulars of Clark’s supposed insubordination? It turns out that Clark’s real violation was simply to consult people other than Shelton and Cohen. Namely, people at the White House, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and, worst of all, British Prime Minister Tony Blair. As if Clark were not at the time the Supreme ALLIED Commander of NATO forces in Europe.
Indeed, there is a tale of character and integrity in the story of Clark's removal from office — but not the one Shelton and Cohen imagine, and have retailed so successfully to the credulous press.
When the air war in Kosovo ended, Clark’s two-year hitch as Supreme Allied Commander had four months left to run. But by decades-long custom and practice, it would be renewed for another year, possibly two.
As reported by Time, here’s what happened next:
Only a month after the Kosovo war, Clark learned that the Pentagon would be relieving him of his NATO post in early 2000, three months before his European tour was to end. According to Samuel Berger, Clinton’s National Security Adviser, the Pentagon had told Clinton that the military career of Air Force General Joseph Ralston was winding up.
Ralston was then serving as Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Clinton felt he owed him. Ralston, after all, had lost his bid to become the chairman in 1997, when a controversy erupted over an extramarital affair.
Clinton approved Ralston as a replacement for Clark, Berger says, thinking it would happen only when Clark’s term ended, not three months early. “We approved a succession, not an execution,” Berger recalls.
Literally minutes after Clinton approved the new appointment without understanding that it meant Clark’s immediate removal, Shelton and Cohen contacted reporters with the news. Thus, when Clark soon after got word of the dagger in his back and called the White House for an explanation, the matter was public and a fait accompli that Clinton could not fix without looking like a fool, even if he had wanted to.
Shelton and Cohen are right — the story of Clark’s removal from command does tell us a lot about character and integrity.
Bush, like many sport wannabes, has always seemed to be bothered by fat folks. They are weak willed and pathetic. Way back when, Business Week reported that Bush would often tease Larry Lindsey about being fat.
Now comes the news that the Bush administration opposes a WHO effort to fight the now global epidemic of obesity. Turns out that Bush likes the food industry more than he dislikes the notion of fatties.
One of the gems of the story: “The Administration questions the scientific basis for “the linking of fruit and vegetable consumption to decreased risk of obesity and diabetes.”
David Kay now confirms that Saddam disarmed while Bill Clinton and the Democrats were containing Iraq during the 1990s.
As I have argued many times (here, here, and here), one of the best ways for the Democrats to attack Shifty George on Iraq is to point out that the lack of WMDs in Iraq shows that the patient, tough, Democratic policy of containment succeeded in disarming Saddam while boosting America’s status around the world and preventing Iraq from becoming a threat to the United States. In contrast to the patient, tough, and successful Democratic policy, the reckless, impatient policies of Shifty George are costing us more than a boy a day while decreasing America’s homeland security and shredding American global prestige, all so that Bush can garner headlines, upstage his father, and film political ads on aircraft carriers.
Bottom line: Bush is too impatient, too immature, and simply not tough enough to protect the United States the way the Democrats did during the 1990s.
It is with both interest and dismay that we watch the president and his Republican henchmen in Congress do their best to sabotage the efforts of the 9-11 Commission. Dismay because it is (or should be) abundantly clear to anyone with three or more functioning brain cells that figuring out what, exactly, led to the disaster is the only possible hope of preventing another one.
Bush fought the formation of the Commission or any sort of investigation from the very beginning. After public pressure from the families of the victims of the disaster made it politically untenable for Bush to resist any longer, he acceded to the creation of the Commission — provided it had a very short working time and a strict deadline.
He and his administration then stonewalled the Commission, blocking or simply failing to respond to requests for information. When it became clear in November of last year that that, too, was becoming a political problem, Bush “compromised” by allowing certain commission members to read redacted portions of some of the requested documents (and they could not have copies of those documents).
Now the Commission’s deadline is approaching, and its members have made it clear that they need more time — due primarily to Bush’s stonewalling last year. And Bush’s Republican henchmen in Congress are riding to the rescue of their dear leader by opposing any legislation to grant the extension.
What this tells us in no uncertain terms is that the security of the United States is nothing more than a meaningless talking point for Bush and the Republicans. No one can claim to want to protect America from terrorists while at the same time blocking a full and complete investigation into one of the most devastating terrorist attacks in history.
And so we watch with interest. It may well be that Bush and his cronies are painting themselves into a political corner. Short-sheeting the 9-11 Commission certainly adds fuel to the “wacky” conspiracy theories that Bush and his administration have some culpability for the disaster.
At the very least, it smacks of coverup. And if the media were to simply report the facts of Bush and the 9-11 investigation, it would force Bush to explain to the public why it is so important that the true story behind the disaster of September 11, 2001 never see the light of day.
“In an experiment performed by Professor Anderson of Utah State University, she and her colleagues covered a chicken with a product called Glo Germ, which is invisible in daylight but visible when exposed to ultraviolet light. The chicken was given to a home cook, who was asked to prepare it. By the time the chicken was done, Professor Anderson said, the light revealed chicken juices everywhere — on the counter, in the sink, on cabinet handles, even on the sippy cup of the cook’s 2-year-old child.
“Chuck Gerba, a professor of environmental microbiology at the University of Arizona who has studied bacteria in home kitchens, said that he found that people who had the cleanest-looking kitchens were often the dirtiest. Because ‘clean’ people wipe up so much, they often end up spreading bacteria all over the place. The cleanest kitchens, he said, were in the homes of bachelors, who never wiped up and just put their dirty dishes in the sink.”
It must be true. It was in the New York Times.
The government is giving us all a chance to sign up for John Ashcroft's Listserv. You go first.
On Tuesday, according to Reuters, Vice President Dick Cheney met with the Pope and presented him with a crystal dove. The Pope told him to stick it in an undisclosed location. Or should have, anyway.
After good but not killer wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, the road ahead for Sen. John Kerry looks like this: four to six weeks of media fawning (look for frequent play of the early shots of him yachting with JFK and Jackie), then the ritual media tear-down will begin, and will last for the rest of Kerry’s political career, just as it did with Clinton and Gore — a static state technically referred to by political scientists as “Perma-Fuck.”
The good news for Kerry is that because the media was unexpectedly required to squeeze in an entire unscheduled build up/tear-down cycle (for Big Howard Dean), the Kerry build-up cycle has yet to take place, meaning that the Kerry tear-down probably can’t get under way in earnest much before the March 2 mega-state primaries, giving Kerry time to dispatch Dean.
The bad news? First, if the news media accelerates the Kerry build-up phase to make up for lost time, it is conceivable that the Kerry tear-down could get underway before March 2. In that case, Big Howard at the last minute may be able to pick up hundreds of delegates in the big states. Given Dean’s substantial residual strength in both Iowa and New Hampshire, this possibility can’t be discounted.
The second bit of potentially bad news for Kerry from the delay of his build-up cycle is that this pushes the start and the truly vicious first months of the Kerry tear-down cycle into the general election period, right during the crucial April-May-June time that the nominee will really be first introduced to the American public. Imagine if Bill Clinton in 1992 had to do his Sixty Minutes appearance with Hillary in May or June instead of in January.
(The reverse is also true: if Big Howard threads the needle to the nomination, he, like Bill Clinton before him, will have had many months to adjust to his new life status as Perma-Fucked, and will be a stronger candidate for it.)
UPDATE: Nice article explaining that the battle between Kerry and Big Howard Dean is far from over. For instance, take last night's New Hampshire results: only Kerry and Dean exceeded the 15 percent threshhold to receive delegates, meaning the two will split all the contested New Hampshire delegates. Based on the votes received by each candidate, the contested delegates will be allocated on a 39/26 (i.e. 3/2) split, meaning that Dean last night won 40 percent of the contested New Hampshire delegates. Nothing to sniff at.
Big Howard Dean’s post-Iowa speech has been criticized as not being “presidential,” and indeed Dean has conceded the point.
So, let’s talk about unpresidential behavior. Prematurely prancing around on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier is unpresidential.
There are a number of differences between these two unpresidential performances, not the least of which is that an exhausted and stunned Big Howard had only a few minutes after an unexpected defeat to figure out what to do, whereas Mission Accomplished was the best and most carefully considered work of a tanned and rested Potomac brain trust.
Ms. D’Arc over at Body and Soul scores again:
[E]very major candidate for the presidency stretching back to Dwight Eisenhower made his military records public.George Bush has not.
The Washington Post is reporting that somebody up in New Hampshire is engaging in some rough tactics:
Campaign aides distributed documents alleging that voters had received harassing phone calls, phony e-mails and faxes that purported to be from the Dean campaign, but contained bigoted or offensive language.
I don’t have a clue where this stuff is coming from. However, Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina has already demonstrated an admirable ability to slime his opponents while personally appearing sunny and above the fray. Edwards is the one who supplied attack memos to his caucus-goers in Iowa instructing them how to isolate, undermine and outmaneuver Big Howard Dean’s supporters during the caucus. The good senator disavowed the tactic just as soon as he learned of it, which unfortunately was not until the ink was dry on his suprisingly strong Iowa showing.
At any rate, I certainly hope that whoever is using the current repellent tactics in New Hampshire wins the nomination. (In a related vein, my main disappointment with Big Howard Dean has been his regrettable sense of fair play.)
“We’re misusing our influence,” he said in a staccato voice that had lost none of its rapid-fire engagement. “It’s just wrong what we're doing [in Iraq]. It’s morally wrong, it’s politically wrong, it’s economically wrong.”
Howard Dean? John Kerry? Or more likely Dennis Kucinich?
Actually the quote is from the principal surviving architect of the tragedy we caused in Vietnam, Robert S. McNamara. The former secretary of defense was speaking in an interview with Doug Saunders, a columnist for the Globe and Mail in Canada.
Why do we so often have to rely on the Canadian or British press to find out what the hell is going on in our own country? Didn’t any American reporters think to ask McNamara these questions?
Could it be that McNamara gave those same answers to the many American reporters who have been interviewing him in regard to Errol Morris’s new documentary, The Fog of War? Did those reporters imagine it wasn’t newsworthy? Were their editors and publishers afraid it might seem unpatriotic to suggest that Donald Rumsfeld is headed down the same road that doomed Robert Strange McNamara to an old age of disgrace?
Here’s more from the Saunders interview:
He pointed to Washington’s failure to appreciate the complexities of Iraqi culture, and therefore to anticipate the extended guerrilla war it is now engaged in — a chief mistake of Vietnam. Without the full involvement of other major nations, he said, such mistakes will always be made.“And if we can’t persuade other nations with comparable values and comparable interests of the merit of our course, we should reconsider the course, and very likely change it. And if we’d followed that rule, we wouldn’t have been in Vietnam, because there wasn’t one single major ally, not France or Britain or Germany or Japan, that agreed with our course or stood beside us there. And we wouldn’t be in Iraq."
By all means read the whole column — which comes to us thanks to Judy, Bad Attitudes’ Canadian embed.
Real, thoughtful conservatives like Tacitus are increasingly ready to sacrifice Shifty George because of his zany imperial plans and spendthrift ways.
UPDATE: Along the same lines, Sen. John McCain spreads some love Bush’s way.
Buck sent a link to this Washington Post story in a comment on Moe Blues’s thoughts on the deficit yesterday. The Post does a good job of bringing the balance of trade question down to earth. Excerpt:
The U.S. economy now borrows $1.5 billion a day from foreign investors, said Sung Won Sohn, chief economist of Wells Fargo & Co., and that level could reach $3 billion a day in the near future.Currency traders fretting over that dependency have been selling dollars fast and buying euros furiously. The fear is that foreigners will tire of financing America’s appetites. Foreign investors will dump U.S. assets, especially stocks and bonds, sending financial markets plummeting. Interest rates will shoot up to entice them back. Heavily indebted Americans will not be able to keep up with rising interest payments. Inflation, bankruptcies and economic malaise will follow.
A slow, orderly decline in the dollar’s worth may avoid a financial panic, but it also gives international investors time to shop for other places to put their money. That could actually put more pressure on interest rates than a sharp, steep drop, as investors demand a premium for holding dollar-denominated assets, Korjut Erturk of the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, wrote recently.
But a rout on currency markets could be disastrous to the international economy’s psyche. In the November issue of Fortune, Berkshire Hathaway chief executive Warren E. Buffett confessed that he had bet against the dollar for the first time in his life by purchasing foreign currencies.
Orcinus does a very nice job rounding up and analyzing the known facts about Shifty George’s failure to discharge his National Guard obligations, concluding that he certainly was AWOL, and arguably qualified as a deserter.
Big Howard addressing supporters:
“We raised $40 million from ordinary people like you … We don’t owe anybody anything.”
Slightly adapted from what George W. Bush said in his State of the Union speech about superjocks on steroids:
To help children make right choices, they need good examples. Politics plays such an important role in our society, but, unfortunately, some professional politicians are not setting much of an example. The use of performance-enhancing inherited wealth and family connections in politics is dangerous, and it sends the wrong message — that there are shortcuts to high office, and that winning is more important than character. So tonight I call on major donors, voters, talk show hosts, journalists and their bosses to take the lead, to send the right signal, to get tough, and to get rid of primogeniture in politics now.
Buck, a frequent poster here, has been doing some good work on the Cybergate scandal, wherein Republican senate staffers electronically stole and used Democratic strategy memos. This may have violated bar ethics rules, which would be a problem for any attorneys involved, and may have criminal implications as well.
Fellow bloggers: since the mainstream press isn’t birddogging this one the way it should, it is up to us to keep the matter alive. Think of how bloggers resuscitated and kept alive Trent Lott’s comments at Strom Thurmond’s birthday party.
As of noon today, you owe $24,000. That’s your share of the current national debt. For a family of four, that comes to almost $100,000. The amount you owe rises every day, and it is rising at an accelerating rate.
Despite the president’s pipe dreams, should his budget be passed with no additional spending by Congress, the deficit will actually get much larger instead of being cut in half in the next five years. If history is any guide, the Republican Congress will tack on mountains of pork-barrel spending, thus making the situation even worse.
Make the tax cuts permanent and toss in “reform” of the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) and we’re looking at $500 billion worth of deficit. And that’s without the partial privatization of Social Security that Bush wants to push through (at an estimated cost starting at $1 trillion and going up from there).
At some point, the chickens will come home to roost. The government can issue bonds for eternity, but as government debt grows it begins to squeeze the credit markets. Interest rates rise. And when they do, the Federal debt begins to rise even more dramatically. So, too, does the proportion of tax revenues that go simply toward interest payments.
When that happens — and it will happen if steps are not taken very soon — we will face some difficult or perhaps impossible choices. Bush will spend his entire campaign proclaiming that Democrats are going to raise your taxes, and he’s absolutely correct. But for the average citizen, the tax increases of the Democrats will amount to mere pocket change compared to the confiscatory tax hikes that lie ahead on the road the president would have this country travel.
Howard Fineman of Newsweek on why it is proper for Big Howard Dean to be on his knees begging media big-wigs like Fineman for his life: Dean failed to laugh at Fineman’s jokes:
I said: “Well, governor, I guess you have the gay hunter vote locked up.” (It was a fresh joke at the time.) His response was an icy stare. Maybe it wasn’t that funny. But he couldn’t fake tolerance for sophomoric humor – and isn’t that required in politics?
While the media fixate on whether they have succeeded in turning Big Howard into a political corpse because he shouted at a rally, and before they turn in earnest to their ritual build-up, then tear-down, of Sen. John Kerry, a story regular Americans who try to follow politics might be interested in is going uncovered: Bush’s popularity with key segments of the electorate continues its 11-month slide. Every month he becomes more vulnerable.
Moving the ball forward on the important story of the senate Republican staffers who stole confidential Democratic memos, if any of the staffers or members of congress who reviewed these documents are licensed attorneys — a pretty good bet, given that they work for the Judiciary Committee — they may have violated the ethics rules and may be subject to sanction or disbarment.
Here’s the lay of the land:
Rule 8.4 of the American Bar Association’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct states that:
It is professional misconduct for a lawyer to: …engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation…
Does this definition of “misconduct” include reviewing and using documents that a lawyer knows to be privileged or confidential? The answer is a clear yes. Let’s assume that one or more of the persons involved are members of the D.C. Bar, which again seems a safe bet. District of Columbia Bar Opinion No. 318 states that:
A lawyer who reviews and uses material that he knows is privileged may be engaging in a dishonest act in violation of Rule 8.4(c).
The ABA’s Formal Opinion 94-382 comes to a similar conclusion:
A lawyer who receives on an unauthorized basis materials of an adverse party that she knows to be privileged or confidential should … refrain from reviewing such materials…; she should notify her adversary’s lawyer that she has such materials and should … refrain from using the materials…
Turning again to the legal ethics authority in D.C.:
In our view, a failure [to return a confidential document unread or seek guidance from the document’s owner before reading the document] would be a dishonest act, in violation of Rule 8.4(c). A document received by a lawyer under these circumstances [where the receiving lawyer knew the documents were confidential] comes to the lawyer with “notice” that it does not belong to him. In that sense, it is little different than a wallet found on the street: the finder knows that it does not belong to him, and should he appropriate to himself the wallet’s contents, the finder engages in the tort of conversion.
Yesterday Bad Attitudes was blitzed with 312 comment spams. I cried for help to Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Electrolite, who has been having similar problems. One of the results of his generous advice is that the commenting page is now set up a little differently.
Before there were four buttons at the bottom: Cancel, Post, Preview, and Forget Personal Information. Now the Post option no longer appears, forcing you to Preview what you’ve written.
Once you do this, your options at the bottom of the Preview page are Preview and Post. If you’re happy with what you’ve written, go ahead and post. If not, tinker with it some more. If you change your mind and decide not to post at all, hit the “previous page” button until it takes you to the original comment page. Then hit Cancel.
The point of all this is that spammers are subhuman, not superhuman. For their mass attacks they use software rather than their subhuman fingers. And in theory the spam software shouldn’t be able to post a comment if it doesn’t find a Post button. We’ll see. No spam this morning, anyway.
If this is an inconvenience, I’m sorry. But it should be pretty simple and hey, you ought to be previewing your comments anyway. Neatness counts.
Rep. Dick Gephardt is a good man. As the author of the congressional resolution that enabled Shifty George to start his war in Iraq, he also was profoundly wrong on the most important public question of the day. Now, over 500 deaths, 2,200 casualties, and 0,000.00 weapons of mass destruction later, Gephardt is still Bush’s biggest Democratic ally on the war.
Why, then, are Gephardt’s staffers flocking en masse to the campaign of Wesley Clark, who along with Howard Dean is the only major Democratic candidate with a consistent anti-Iraq war message?
Paragraph 12 in a typical story about Big Howard:
Throughout the day, Dean conceded the Iowa speech was overheated but said the anger issue is greatly overblown. Indeed, Dean has rarely lost his temper on the campaign trail.
There is always a hook in every bit of bait that Bush and Rove throw out to the suckers.
Here’s the hook in their immigration proposal, as explained by University of Texas economist James K. Galbraith:
“The proposal promises minor conveniences to the estimated 8 million undocumented workers in this country. But at what price?
“The new class of migrants would have to leave when their permits are up, unless renewed. They would have to leave if fired from their jobs. In a word, employers would judge who stays in the country and who is kicked out. Forget labor rights. Forget unions. Also forget family, home, neighborhood, things like that. Anyone wanting to protect those things will stay out of sight.
“Worse, workers coming into the program would in practice be giving up their path to political rights. They would, for the most part, never become citizens. They would never get to vote. No one will represent their interests. No one will speak for their schools, their clinics, their wages. No one will stand in their defense when they are abused on the job, hurt, sacked, blacklisted, and sent home.
“Bush made clear that this program is not just for workers presently in the country, as the press has mostly been reporting. It is not just for those who may soon arrive. No, it is far broader than that. Here's the president's speech: "If an American employer is offering a job that American citizens are not willing to take, we ought to welcome into our country a person who will fill that job."
“This program will permit any employer to admit any worker. From any country. At any time. The only requirement is that it be for a job Americans are not willing to take. But it is easy to create such jobs: Cut wages. Terminate the unions. Lengthen the hours. Speed up the lines. Chicken farmers have known this for years. Bush's plan is a blank check for every bad boss this country has.
“There is no reason why principal recruitment of new workers would be from Mexico. It might be, very massively, from China. Or perhaps from India, with its large English-speaking population. Temp agencies would go out on recruiting missions. Some of this competition may displace Mexican and Central American nationals presently working illegally in the United States (and hoping to stay). That would only drive them even further underground.
“And for those who take up the program, register as temporary workers, and then see their permits expire? Bush is at pains to say that he expects this group to go home. But who will make them? Will the government organize a mass campaign of roundups and deportations? Or will the workers just quietly disappear back into the sub-underground of the truly illegal?
“And for those who do go home, who will replace them? Another cohort of strangers? This is a program to create a rotating underclass of foreign workers, who never assimilate to American ways or adopt American values. It's hard to imagine anything worse for our social life — more productive of petty crime — or for that matter, riskier for our national security.
“For millions of citizen workers, what would happen? The answer is clear: Bad bosses drive out the good. Good bosses will turn bad under pressure. The terms of our jobs would get worse and worse. Who would want a citizen worker? A bracero will be so much cheaper, more loyal, and under control. And who among us, in our right mind, would want to look for work? Unless, of course, we needed to eat. Or pay the mortgage. I am not exaggerating: This is a threat to us all.”
There’s much more on other Bush/Rove scams in the article, which Moe Blues spotted for us. Read it in Salon.
As Buck points out in the comments to the Our Next President, Part Duh post, the presently mini-scandal about Republicans hacking into the computers of Congressional Democrats may finally be gaining some traction.
As usual, Robert Novak (dubbed “Novakula” by some) was the recipient of leaked materials, and as usual he says he’ll never reveal his source. This has all the makings of a scandal every bit as damaging as Watergate for the Republicans in Congress. Indeed, the questions that now need to be asked include what did Frist know and when did he know it.
But don’t count on it. The investigation will be swept under the rug, there to reside with the Plame investigation. The media may make a quiet squeaking noise about this, but pursuing it is not good for business. So you’ll hear little or nothing there.
Indeed, everything you need to know about how this will be handled is evidenced by the fact that Senator Orrin Hatch suspended one of his staffers over this back in November. That revelation was greeted with silence by the press. And so it will be with this continuation of the investigation. Unless Trent Lott, Bill Frist, or Tom DeLay get frog-marched down the Capitol steps, the media has much more important things to cover — like Michael Jackson, Kobe Bryant, Scott Peterson, and whether or not Martha will bake swan-shaped meringue cookies for the jury.
So what if George Bush finally wins the presidential election this year? We may well face a tyranny in America that up until now was associated more closely with the former Soviet Union. Bush will easily become the most powerful president in the history of the United States, and he will use that power to advance the agenda of his cronies no matter the consequences for the country.
Should Bush win, he will have a Congress wherein both houses are firmly in the control of his party, and a judiciary soon to be crammed full of like-minded ideologues. Despite Bush’s plaintive bleating about judges thwarting the will of the people, it will be Bush and the GOP running roughshod over the people’s will and their good estate.
Consider the events of the present as harbingers of this Bush future. The Omnibus Spending Bill was today passed by the Senate despite Tom Daschle’s vow to block the bill (the Democrats were screwed in a cloture vote). The bill should make it through the House with minimal fuss and thus become the law of the land.
Contained within the bill is a measure that rewrites a significant portion of America’s labor law, namely the rules governing overtime pay. The bill allows companies to redefine the status of workers so that they no longer qualify for overtime. An estimated 8 million wage earners will no longer be eligible for overtime pay, even though they can still be required to work more than 40 hours per week.
The Omnibus Bill provides a stark and startling lesson for Bush’s second term. The rewrite of the overtime rules was explicitly rejected by resolutions passed by both the House and the Senate. Both houses of Congress passed versions of the Omnibus Bill with the overtime rules provision ripped out. Yet, because Bush insisted that the labor law be rewritten to favor employers even more, the overtime rules provision was put back into the bill by the Republican conference committee. Never mind that the elected representatives of the people overwhelmingly rejected this provision. King George demanded it, and so shall it be.
It boggles the mind to think of what will be coming our way in a Bush second term. No longer facing re-election, political considerations can be tossed to the winds. It will be a free-for-all. The tax cuts will become permanent, that much is assured. But the real question will soon be all too apparent:
What voice in their own government do American citizens have?
We watched the State of the Union last night and you know what? We loved it!
Our reactions are below, mine first because I am the Head Blogger.
The president seemed clean and freshly barbered for the State of the Union address. Unlike Reagan, he does not use Grecian Formula. Mr. Bush is still at an age where a touch of gray suggests wisdom, not senility.
The president’s jewelry was simple and understated. He wore only a wedding band and a lapel flag. The flag was an American one. Mr. Bush is frank to admit that he is an American, born right here in Connecticut.
As is traditional the flag had thirteen stripes, seven of them red and six white. Its upper left quadrant was a blue field bearing fifty white stars, one for each state. (Iraq is not yet a state.)
The president’s clothing fitted well, with his choice of colors keying off his lapel pin. The president’s shirt was white. His suit was blue. His tie, knotted in a medium Windsor, was red.
The president’s eyebrow was beige-colored, mixed with gray. It had been divided into two pieces, one over each eye. The bare patch in the middle is starting to grow back and needs attention.
…the president making it clear that he has gone out of his way to meet with the servants:
“I have had the honor of meeting our servicemen and women at many posts, from the deck of a carrier in the Pacific, to a mess hall in Baghdad.”
“In the Pacific” was the touch I admired. Without actually lying, Bush’s speechwriters managed to suggest that he had been present at the Battle of Midway rather than a staged photo op within sight of San Diego.
Below is one of the hundreds of other photo ops Bush has missed since accomplishing his mission in the Pacific. It was the funeral of Captain Eric Paliwoda, a 1997 West Point graduate.
A few thoughts on the State of the Union… Bush had two ways to go. One was to articulate a clear view of the future, without being overtly political. More of a soaring, visionary approach. He rejected this and instead made it a very political speech, making sure he criticized each of his potential opponents. Now there’s nothing wrong with taking advantage of a huge audience to formally launch your campaign.
So what does the speech tell us about what we can expect in the next year and another potential term?
He intends to take away traditional Democratic initiatives in education and health care. He doesn’t have imperial ambitions, but made sure we all know that he’s a tough guy, so he doesn't need a permission slip to invade another country. The main role of Government is to protect us from terrorists, and in most other areas the private sector is better. So make the tax cuts permanent to starve Government. Try to switch Medicare to a private system. Empower people to opt out of the Social Security system.
Unless you want to use Government to impose national educational standards on the states and ram vouchers down the states’ throats. Or use Government to change the constitution so gays can’t marry. Or use the Government to rein in the lawyers, who ruin everything.
So more of the same. Buy off the swing voters to peel off Democratic voters. Signal to the conservatives that you will help them all you can. Show you are one tough hombre to make us feel good about ourselves. But don’t let anyone add up the cost of all you want to do. Keep it simple, sounding good. “Government bad, private sector good!” And above all, make sure none of the bills come due until you are safely retired. Not a very courageous approach, but crafted to play very well in an election year.
Watching the president’s State of the Union (SOTU) address, I was struck by several things. But what was perhaps most pervasive throughout the speech was the gross misleading that was spread over it like peanut butter on a cracker. Of course there were a few outright lies, but the overall package was intended to mislead the uninformed.
For example, Bush cited the fact that two-thirds of Al-Qaeda’s top leadership is in custody as though this were a recent development (in fact, that number has held steady since the autumn of 2002), and implied that the captures were attributable to the success of the Patriot Act (in fact, none of the captures occurred on American soil or had anything whatever to do with the Patriot Act).
He painted an amazingly rosy picture of Afghanistan, pointing out that country’s new constitution. Back here on planet Earth, Afghanistan is spinning apart as the Taliban has regained control of big chunks of the southwest part of the country and the warloads have carved up the rest. The Afghani constitution carries as much weight as a parking ticket.
He stated that Iraq “had only Saddam’s law” at this time last year, but today it functions under new laws. Indeed, the “new law” is that of Sharia Islamic law. Passed in secret by the governing council, the new “domestic law” of Iraq strips women of their rights, making a mockery of the democratic concept we supposedly are bringing to the country.
Stepping up to the plate to defend his rationale of a year ago, Bush said “[T]he Kay Report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities…” Of course, even Kay himself stated in several interviews that what he found doesn’t really add up to anything.
All of these statements are misleading, and apparently intended to mislead. Like an advertisement for Sea Monkeys, nothing here is an outright lie; yet the statements are so far from the truth that their overall impact is the same as a lie.
Where the outright lies came out was the part of the SOTU that touched on domestic matters. Bush started out with a demonstrable falsehood when he said “Jobs are on the rise.” Here on planet Earth, Bush has actually presided over a net loss of 3 million jobs.
He called for increasing the size of Pell Grants. This is a welcome change from the previous three years where Pell Grants were cut every year.
And, of course, he called for making his tax cuts permanent and said he could cut the deficit in half in five years. Unfortunately, given the current tax structure and Bush’s new spending proposals (like the Medicare drug benefit), it is not physically possible for Bush to cut the deficit at all, especially since he proposed no spending cuts. Here on planet Earth, the vast majority of credentialed economists see ballooning deficits from here to eternity.
This is emphasized even more strongly by the new tax cuts he wants. Bush called for a new tax credit for lower-income households to allow them to buy health insurance. That will have to be one hell of a credit, since even reasonable coverage with a very high deductible costs about $6,000 per year. And owners of sole-proprietorships and limited partnerships will be able to deduct 100% of their health-insurance premiums.
Interestingly, Bush did not mention his grand new initiative to go back to the moon and to land men on Mars. Perhaps word reached him from planet Earth that Americans are more interested in solving real and immediate problems.
Due to a crazy arctic jetstream, the weather in New England last week was the coldest it’s been in 50 years.
Now comes word that electric power companies in Connecticut may have taken advantage of the spike in natural gas prices to sell their natural gas into the spot market instead of using it to produce electricity.
Because they were selling their gas instead of using it to keep the state warm and well-lit, the companies asked consumers to conserve power, and even had the chutzpah to warn that they might impose rolling blackouts if folks didn’t conserve enough. They literally may have been willing to freeze a few old Yankee ladies in the dark instead of passing up some quick profits. Electric dereg at work.
Character is the reason I support Big Howard Dean for the Democratic nomination. He is totally trustworthy. You can count on him. He says what he means. All the legislators he worked with in Vermont from both parties confirm it: you can trust Dean. That’s why I call him Big Howard.
After eight years of Slick Willie and three of Shifty George — eleven long years of knowing the president is a liar — a sense of bigness and trustworthiness is what I want. I get the sense that Big Howard will stand and fight, whether it benefits him or not. This instinct was confirmed after last night’s disappointment in Iowa, when Dean was big enough and tough enough to come roaring back.
Character is the reason I have doubts about John Kerry. He has been a U.S. senator for nearly twenty years, and he has not put the opportunity to good use. To me, that calls into question Kerry’s character and fitness to lead.
He has essentially no major legislative accomplishments to his name. Nor is he particularly well-respected by his fellow senators. Compare him to the late, great Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, whose legislative achievements were real despite the fact that he was viewed by many of his colleagues as an extremist.
More important to the point, Wellstone was liked and respected by most senators, including a large number of conservative wingnuts. So there’s little excuse for the fact that Kerry’s own senate colleagues consider him something of a lightweight. Also, because Kerry is by far the best-informed man running for president, there is no question he knew what he was doing when he voted for the Iraq war, yet he did it anyway.
Kerry once earned my respect by running a fairly high-toned campaign during a hotly contested re-election race against Gov. William Weld in the 1990s, but in recent months when Kerry was looking into the maw of oblivion in his presidential race, he did not do so well. He flinched badly, and joined Gephardt and the national media in attacking Howard Dean on irrelevancies such as Dean’s fundamentally sensible Confederate flag statement.
Kerry’s rise has been fueled by the media’s talk of his supposed electability. This is based in large part on his Vietnam record and the media’s lack of one, and I understand the point. But can a man who sounds like William F. Buckley, Jr. really win?
Wesley Clark presents character questions as well. Is it really that difficult to figure out which political party you belong to before the age of 56? While all of the candidates have borrowed liberally from Dean’s rhetoric even while they eagerly assisted the media in savaging him, Clark is the candidate who has most internalized Dean’s anti-war and anti-Bush message.
My worry is that Clark the Chameleon picked this stuff up not because he profoundly cares about it or believes it, but simply because Dean was red hot when Clark jumped in three months ago. It's ironic that Clark — the candidate with the perhaps most questionable moral and political center of gravity — has risen by imitating Dean, the only candidate who clearly has an absolutely Plymouth Rock-like set of principles.
Meanwhile, John Edwards in terms of his character remains the biggest mystery of all. Character points for giving up his senate seat to run. Points for being the only candidate in the race with the discipline to keep the focus on his own message, and off his opponents. Big, big character points for passing out samples of Breck shampoo during his announcement tour after a wicked but right-on pundit dubbed him “The Breck Girl.” But still, hard to get ahold of what makes him tick. Slippery, elusive — potentially the greatest one of all.
All the groin-kicking of Big Howard by Lieberman, Kerry, Gephardt, and most of all, the national media certainly has paid off. Even ABC News and The New York Times admit that their tear-down of Big Howard over the past three months has been unfair — and this from people who still can’t admit what they did to Bill Clinton was wrong. Here’s what the political director of ABC News said about the recent Dean coverage: “he is so overly scrutinized to be beyond fair.” And The Times: “His words and record have been vetted by rivals and the news media far more intently than those of any other candidate.”
The blood-letting has paid off in two ways, one of which in the end could benefit Dean: if Big Howard can secure the nomination, Rove will be able to come up with no new dirt to throw at Dean in the general. That’s a valuable contribution. Second, and so obvious as not to bear further comment, it has paid off for Kerry and Edwards, who denied Big Howard the Iowa win that once seemed plausible and would have put Big Howard in a prohibitive position going into New Hampshire.
Xymphora flags a fascinating essay by F. William Engdahl in the English edition of the Swiss magazine Zeit-Fragen.
These excerpts only hint at Mr. Engdahl’s whole argument, which is closely reasoned and compelling. By all means read the full article.
… Just as Britain in decline after 1870 resorted to increasingly desperate imperial wars in South Africa and elsewhere, so the United States is using its military might to try to advance what it no longer can by economic means. Here the dollar is the Achilles heel.In 1975 OPEC officially agreed to sell its oil only for dollars. A secret U.S. military agreement to arm Saudi Arabia was the quid pro quo. Until November 2000, no OPEC country dared violate the dollar price rule. So long as the dollar was the strongest currency, there was little reason to as well.
But November was when French and other Euroland members finally convinced Saddam Hussein to defy the United States by selling Iraq’s oil-for-food not in dollars, ‘the enemy currency’ as Iraq named it, but only in euros. The euros were on deposit in a special UN account of the leading French bank, BNP Paribas. Radio Liberty of the U.S. State Department ran a short wire on the news and the story was quickly hushed.
… Iraq was not about ordinary chemical or even nuclear weapons of mass destruction. The ‘weapon of mass destruction’ was the threat that others would follow Iraq and shift to euros out of dollars, creating mass destruction of the United States’ hegemonic economic role in the world.
Deep conspiracies involving Bretton Woods and Nixon’s abandonment of the gold standard and the denomination of oil in euros are as far beyond me as astrophysics. But international finance isn’t beyond George Soros at all, and he’s sinking millions of his own dollars into the effort to remove Bush’s people from the White House.
That much, I do know.
If ever the media needed dissecting, 2004 is the year. Happily, there are a growing number of sources you can turn to for some in-depth looks at how the media is serving (or not serving) the public.
Of course, there is Bob Somerby’s incomparable Daily Howler. The Daily Howler is invaluable for pointing out how the “popular” media (pundits, columnists, political commentators, comedians, etc.) create and perpetuate a whole range of spin-points, “memes,” and misperceptions.
And the esteemed Columbia Journalism Review has joined the fray with its own Campaign Desk. Campaign Desk concentrates on print media, primarily newspapers and wire services. If you’re interesting in a look at how what gets printed stacks up against the “standards” of journalism, bookmark Campaign Desk.
If we don’t hold the media to standards, how can we ever answer the question, “Is our media reporting?”
What wretches first spawned spam? I half-remembered something about a pair of Ur-spammers back in the misty dawn of the internet. Immigration lawyers, weren’t they?
Google confirmed it.
The mother and father of all spammers were indeed the husband-and-wife team of Martha S. Siegel and Laurence A. Canter, Tucson lawyers, and the tenth anniversary of their loathsome get is almost upon us. We all owe the boutique firm of Canter & Siegel a great debt, but unfortunately it is one we cannot repay without risking jail time.
It was on April 12 of 1994, according to K.K. Campbell, that “Canter unleashed the first mega-spam against Usenet. (He’d done local, mini-spams before; he was now going international.)
“Canter spammed almost 6,000 groups in less than 90 minutes … The post was a C&S; ad for the U.S. ‘Green Card lottery’ — a chance for non-Americans to enter a very low-odds US-work-permit raffle. C&S; offered to fill in forms for a mere $95 per person, or $145 a couple (not mentioning it’s free to enter).”
You or I, struck dumb by the horrors we had unleashed, would be doing penance under an assumed name in a Himalayan monastery by now. But you and I are not Counselor Canter.
Counselor Canter has his own website instead, and on it is a page full of links to articles about his past glories. Read all about it — and do keep in touch.
See Brad DeLong’s posting on Bush’s recess appointment of Charles Pickering to the federal appeals bench. Particularly notice the update at the end. It makes an obvious point, but one that escaped me till Professor DeLong pointed it out.
I had been under the mistaken impression (a mistake I’m about to correct) that Brad DeLong’s website was already on my blogroll. It should be on everybody’s. A Berkeley economics professor who was in the Clinton administration, he has created a wonderfully intelligent and informative blog.
In the new Washington Monthly, Carnegie Mellon Professor Richard Florida has written a wonderfully interesting essay called “Creative Class War.”
It has as many intelligent and new (at least to me) ideas about America packed into it as anything I’ve read in years. A few samples:
…Millions of new jobs in the wireless networking field, for instance, could be created if unused broadcast spectrum, currently controlled by TV networks and the military, could be freed up. When’s the last time you heard a presidential candidate talk about that?…Even Bush’s tax policy shows the same old-economy preference. His dividend tax cut was supported by mainstream, blue-chip companies, which stood to gain, but opposed by high-tech executives, whose company stocks seldom pay dividends…
…Clinton, in his rhetoric and policies, wanted to bring the gifts of the creative class — high technology, a tolerant culture — to the hinterlands. Bush aimed to bring the values and economic priorities of the hinterlands to that ultimate creative center, Washington, D.C…
…We have many brilliant young people, but not nearly enough to fill all the crucial slots. Last year, for instance, a vast, critical artificial intelligence project at MIT had to be jettisoned because the university couldn’t find enough graduate students who weren’t foreigners and who could thus clear new security regulations.
Well, that’s enough. Go read it.
We are paying a heavy price for the growing political disempowerment of the most creative and most economically promising sectors of our society. We are backing away from our future, making bridges not to the 21st century but to the 19th.
We hear more and more these days about the Republican Party's “Southern Strategy.” The central theme of this is that the bulk of Bush's “red states” lie in the South, and hence he will play to win there. Indeed, some Republican strategists contend that Bush should simply write off parts of the country and not even bother to campaign in those areas. Specifically, the West coast and the Northeast are the areas mentioned most often, with various other areas thrown in depending on who is doing the strategizing.
Now we begin to hear some Democrats advocating a similar write-off campaign for whoever the nominee is. Forget most of the South, they say, because Bush has it locked up. These strategists suggest concentrating effort in the industrial states (Pennsylvania, Ohio, etc.), the Northeast and the West coast to garner enough electoral votes to win.
The write-off strategists of both parties are wrong. First, such a strategy exposes the candidate to the risk of having just one state fail him and thus cost him the election. Bush, for example, could easily lose Florida because of his Medicare follies and his environmental record. Without Florida, the South-only strategy becomes weak. Similarly, the Democratic candidate could easily lose Pennsylvania, thus making the Industrial strategy vulnerable.
But perhaps the worst thing about these strategies is the increasing polarization of the country they will produce. Dividing the nation along North-South lines did not work out so well the last time. And we’re coming to a place where the nation will have to pull together in the face of an economic crisis that could make the Great Depression seem like good times.
A presidential candidate may well win with these strategies, but it will be a Pyrrhic victory.
A new study confirms what I’ve been saying: Big Howard is being tested by an overwhelming media/Washington insider attack. The assault is having its intended effect, which is to bring down Big Howard’s poll numbers, and push up those of the Washington retreads who are running against Big Howard.
The terrific news is how Big Howard is handling it. He’s not whining. He’s not yelling about how unfair it all is. He’s battling back. That fighting spirit is why Big Howard would make the best nominee, and why he still is in the best position to score an incredible out-of-nowhere nomination victory over his originally better-known and better-financed rivals.
Compare and contrast the bitter, self-pitying squeals and bleats that have been coming for months from Sen. John Kerry and Sen. Joe Lieberman as they let their own front-runner status slip away. Howard Dean was cheating. Howard Dean was not a U.S. Senator. Howard Dean was angry. Al Gore didn’t call me on the phone. Blah, blah, blah.
It just gets better and better. Today’s story in the Times about Karl Rove’s ludicrous “healthy marriage” proposal is headlined, “Bush’s Push for Marriage Falls Short for Conservatives.”
Rove, that is, underpandered.
But he overpandered, too:
The conservative Christians’ insistence on an amendment to prohibit same-sex marriage may put President Bush in a political bind as he starts his re-election campaign, caught between wooing potential swing voters and turning out his core evangelical supporters. Some conservative strategists warn that pushing to amend the Constitution to prohibit same-sex unions could turn off some potential Republican voters like suburban women, who might find excessive talk about the perils of same-sex marriage as intolerant, mean-spirited or weirdly obsessive.
Jeez, you think?
I’d love to know Rove’s private opinion of his party’s famous “base.” As a young reporter I once did a series for my Virginia paper on George Lincoln Rockwell (below), the founder of the American Nazi Party. Apart from the Nazi thing and the being crazy thing, Rockwell was a pleasant enough man — educated and intelligent.
During one of my interviews a Nazi stepped in briefly to ask his führer a question. The man seemed unusually moronic even for that crowd, and when he was gone I sort of rolled my eyes at Rockwell.
“Hey,” he said, “in this business you take what you can get.”
The New York Times reports that the Bush/Rove administration is planning to spend $1.5 billion to”help couple develop interpersonal skills that sustain ‘healthy marriages.’”
Ronald T. Haskins, a Republican who has previously worked on Capitol Hill and at the White House under Mr. Bush, said, “A lot of conservatives are very pleased with the healthy marriage initiative.”The proposal is the type of relatively inexpensive but politically potent initiative that appeals to White House officials at a time when they are squeezed by growing federal budget deficits.
It also plays to Mr. Bush’s desire to be viewed as a “compassionate conservative,” an image he sought to cultivate in his 2000 campaign. This year, administration officials said, Mr. Bush will probably visit programs trying to raise marriage rates in poor neighborhoods.
“The president loves to do that sort of thing in the inner city with black churches, and he’s very good at it,” a White House aide said.
My first thought was of a wealthy Washington woman who told me back in the early 1960s that she planned to give her colored cook a tubal ligation for Christmas. She made the offer and to her astonishment the cook quit.
My second thought was that this was just another one of Rove’s reveries, a cheap, base-pandering political ploy which would die after the election for lack of funding if Congress didn’t kill it first.
My third thought was more charitable. Wasn’t it possible, given the GOP’s recent history of horny hypocrisy, that this was an anguished cry for help from the born-again leader of the family values crowd? And who better than me to respond? I have logged 48 years of mostly healthy marriage, although I was down for a couple of weeks with stomach flu over Christmas.
Here is my advice, Karl. Pass it on.
To insure inaction at least until November, your tutee will of course name a commission to study the matter. And who better to sit on such a commission but Republican notables with frequent experience of marriage?
And these men and women should hold the rest of humanity to the very highest of standards, formed as a result of their own extensive investigations into adultery and divorce — the twin scourges of healthy marriage among the lower orders.
Here then is a suggested list of field-tested, sin-seasoned members to serve on the President’s Special Advisory Commission on Healthy Marriage:
Chairman: Neil Bush … Co-Chaplains: Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker … Public affairs: Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura Schlessinger.
Members-at-large: former U.S. Representatives Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, Dan Burton, Bob Livingston, Bob Barr, Bob Dornan, Bob Bauman and Helen Chenoweth.
Members emeriti: Warren Gameliel Harding, Ronald Reagan and Strom Thurmond.
Feel free to call me for further suggestions, Karl. Do you mind if I call you Karl? You can call me Turd Blossom if you like.
The political power of the religious right has been evident since Ronald Reagan flapped his hand on the Bible. And other than scattered voices that have been quickly shouted down, there really has been no countervailing power.
Until now. Meet the Religious Left. At last a group that openly opposes the subversion of religion for political and economic gain.
With adequate support from like-minded people, maybe they can finally do something about all those moneychangers who have been crowding the temples of late.
In the matter of Paul O’Neill, the Rude Pundit has said what I wanted to say, only in language somewhat more vigorous than I permit myself.
I suspect the best is yet to come. Presumably the former Secretary of the Treasury has an attic stacked with documents of great interest regarding his government service, in anticipation of the vile and cowardly revenge that Rove is surely plotting.
Make sure to check out Josh Marshall’s latest posting on the off camera part of Bush's recent interview with Diane Sawyer.
It speaks for itself. Sure everything that the administration told us about Iraq has turned out to be wrong. The thrust of Bush’s argument seems to be that Hussein would have wanted to get weapons to threaten us if he could have. So we had to drop a couple of hundred billion or so and take him out. I’m convinced.
…it seems like the numbers went the wrong way again last week.
But not to worry: “Experts” say that good times are right around the corner.
The last time we heard stuff like this, the president shared his name with a vacuum cleaner brand.
If a Democrat wins the election, will we even have a government?
It may well be that if a Democrat wins and stasis is maintained in both houses of Congress, we will have four years of a non-functional federal government. The current Republican majorities will effectively block everything the new president seeks to do.
While Bush, for example, has had 99% of his judicial nominees approved, the nominees of the Democratic president will not even get hearings, much less confirmations. No administration-sponsored legislation will make it out of committee. In sum, the new president will be powerless to effect any changes to the roadmap to disaster laid out by Bush, Lott, and DeLay. It would not be at all surprising to find that should the new president need to use the military, the Republican Congress would block his efforts simply to make their partisan point.
At the same time, the Republican-controlled Congress will pass an endless stream of terrible legislation that the new president will have no choice but to veto. Of course, every bad bill will be cloaked in fair-seeming terms so that the new president can be painted as “obstructionist” during his term, and “do-nothing” during the next election cycle.
Meanwhile, of course, the media will be busy printing every specious story that comes along. The media lynching of Clinton will seem like a day at the beach compared to what awaits the next Democratic president.
So what are people of good will to do? How can we save our country from the impending train wreck that is Bush’s legacy and the manufactured disaster awaiting the next Democratic president?
The answer would seem to be working beyond the election to maintain and expand the grassroots organizations that have taken root in the last year. Tip O’Neill famously said that all politics is local. In this day and age, the true power of politics is in the face-to-face, one-on-one of grassroots efforts. Messages spewing from the media have much less impact than well-chosen words from a friend or neighbor.
George Orwell would be unsurprised to find that a free speech zone in George Bush’s America is one set up by federal agents to silence free speech.
I’ve talked about this before in connection with South Carolina dissenter Brett Bursey, who continues to maintain, in the face of evidence forcibly presented to him by agents of the White House, that the entire United States is a free speech zone.
Now a thorough piece by James Bovard in the San Francisco Chronicle makes it clear that the Bursey case is far from an aberration. It is Bush administration policy, enforced country-wide by the Justice Department and the Secret Service and local police acting for them.
The policy is a kindly and a merciful one, which aims only at protecting antiBush demonstrators from harm. Would I lie to you? Then listen to Secret Service agent Brian Marr:
“These individuals may be so involved with trying to shout their support or nonsupport that inadvertently they may walk out into the motorcade route and be injured. And that is really the reason why we set these places up, so we can make sure that they have the right of free speech, but, two, we want to be sure that they are able to go home at the end of the evening and not be injured in any way.”
The Bushies must be frustrated. Wall Street types are hyping the economy. The missing piece is job creation. Then come the latest jobs reports. The Times reports that “Most forecasters had said they thought December would be a breakthrough month for job creation, given the strengthening economy. But instead of the 150,000 new jobs they had expected, there were a minuscule 1,000.”
If jobs creation doesn’t pick up soon, the Bushies will have to argue that, while there are 2 million less jobs now than when they took office, it could be worse without their excellent policies. “It Could Be Worse” probably isn’t Rove’s first choice for a economic slogan.
Rove’s problem may be that there are structural problems in the economy. For owners of capital, times are good with low interest rates and rising stock prices. For consumers without substantial financial assets, times aren’t so good. The Washington Post reports that consumer debt in the US has topped $2 trillion for the first time. And this doesn’t include mortgage debt.
The Post states: “It’s a huge problem,” warns Howard S. Dvorkin, president and founder of Consolidated Credit Counseling Services Inc., a nonprofit debt-management organization. “You cannot be the wealthiest country in the world and have all your countrymen be up to their neck in debt.”
Banks have been encouraging consumer to overspend. “In the old days, the best customer was someone who could pay off their loan,” said Manning, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y. “Today the best client of the banking industry is someone who will never pay off their loan, because then the client is more likely to incur fees.”
What the Bushies really hope is that interest don’t start to rise. At some point consumers, the foundation of our economy, will have to try the rein in spending and pay off their debts. The Bushies better hope rates don’t go up too soon.
I failed to catch that black and tan Democratic cattle call out in Iowa over the weekend, but such considerations do not slow the true pundit. So here goes…
“Do you have a senior member of your cabinet that was black or brown?” the Reverend Al Sharpton demanded of Dr. Howard Dean, former governor of 98%-white Vermont, who quipped back quick as a wink, “I tried, Al, believe me I tried. But both of them had jobs already.”
All right, that last part wasn’t really in the news, but in an unrelated development Joe Lieberman really did get on Dean’s case about something or other because I saw that part with my own eyes on a Daily Show rerun just now and although I don’t recall the substance of Lieberman’s attack, which in any event maundered off into confusion very much as this sentence itself is doing, I do recall reading somewhere or other that the late Chancellor of the Exchequer Dennis Healy once gave this description of being similarly nibbled upon by one of his political rivals:
“Being attacked by Sir Geoffrey Howe in debate,” Healy joshed in a jugular vein, ”is like being savaged by a dead sheep.”
(Self-congratulatory note: I wrote the second paragraph last night. This morning I find that the Associated Press has kindly filled in the blanks for me —
Contending that recruiting minorities for high-level posts in state government is difficult in a state that is nearly 98 percent white, one black leader who met regularly with Dean praised his efforts as governor. He recalled turning down Dean’s requests to serve in the administration.“He asked if I had an interest or if I knew of anyone who had an interest,” said Vaughn Carney, a lawyer and executive with a financial services company. “I myself was constrained by other commitments. I wasn’t aware of anyone who would be qualified or would be available.”
In her column in The Nation this week, Patricia J. Williams does what she does so often and so well — twists the lens a little so that a pattern pops out and you say, Well, sure, of course. I knew that. But you had really never quite seen it just that way before:
…I am hardly a military strategist, but let me offer my ongoing concern that our leaders are dealing with Iraq in very much the way domestic police forces have too frequently mishandled crime in American inner cities, where wrongheaded tactics like careless profiling have repeatedly fueled community resentment and even riots in areas that had once begged for police presence. The missteps have generally involved a terrible dualism: overreaction to so much as a false twitch of a hand with a wallet in it, yet underreaction to large, complex problems like crack houses and drug lords.I can’t help thinking about what happened in 1985, when the police decided to pre-emptively act against the MOVE house in Philadelphia. John Africa and his followers were foul and lawless, to be sure, but instead of traditional means, the police chief and the mayor came up with the bright idea of firebombing the building, killing all the occupants, including five children. That they also accidentally ignited the adjacent row houses and ended up burning down the entire neighborhood was an unfortunate bit of collateral damage. A similar thing happened when the ATF and the FBI surrounded David Koresh’s compound in Waco, Texas. Rather than wait them out — which might have taken months — they decided to push the siege to an end that resulted in that other notorious inferno…
Michael Cushing has tipped me off that Bad Attitudes is a nominee for the Koufax Award, sponsored by Wampum to select that undeservedly obscure blog which in 2003 most effectively overcame the handicap of lefthandedness.
I had not heard of Wampum, but a blog devoted to “Progressive Politics, Indian Issues, and Autism” can’t be all bad. And so, in a pathetic spasm of gratitude, I’ve just put it on my blogroll.
Take a look also at The Rude Pundit, “proudly lowering the level of political discourse.” I’ve just added him to the Bad Attitudes blogroll, too. The guy is really rotten.
I was lucky last year to be joined by a crack team of graduate and undergraduate interns representing every Ivy League school but one, as well as all the top schools of international affairs, from Johns Hopkins to the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. Their charge was to develop a comprehensive list of all the areas in the United States of America that have been rendered safer by the Bush Administration’s foreign policy and war on terrorism.
I thank them all for their work. Here’s the list:
I may be light on posting the next few days. I’ve been asked to help out on a project in Burlington. I look forward to giving you my reflections from within the glowing center of the Big Howard reactor core when — and if — I emerge without my fingers burned off.
Wish me luck. I hope my protective gear holds up against the extreme temperatutes known to exist at the center of the galaxy.
Meanwhile, I know my esteemed, and just plain steamed, colleagues — MoeB, Double-T, and Jerry — will keep the heat on here.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report released Friday showed the “jobless recovery” continues unabated. Perhaps more disturbing is the 309,000 people who have simply dropped out of the labor force — unemployed too long, they have given up looking for work.
Reading the fine print of the BLS report, we can see who is taking on the chin: retail jobs, manufacturing jobs, and financial services (specifically mortgage refinancing). But most interesting was this:
“Professional and business services added 45,000 jobs in December. Over the year, employment increases in this industry have totaled 252,000. The majority of this gain occurred in temporary help services, which added 166,000 jobs in 2003, including 30,000 in December.”
What this tells us is that more and more people who used to have good-paying, middle-class jobs have become temporary workers. For example, someone who had a full-time job as an accountant is now working for Kelly Services at one-tenth the income.
This does not bode well for America’s long-term health. It signals that the middle class is being hollowed out, and since that is the portion of the population responsible for most consumer spending, an economy based on consumer spending (such as ours) could be in deep trouble.
At the same time, we note some other disturbing trends. First, average household credit-card debt is now at about $19,000. Consumers are almost at the very limit of their ability to spend, and simply paying off the interest on those cards is taking a serious bite out of disposable income — the same disposable income that fuels consumer spending.
Second, personal bankruptcies and credit-card defaults hit all-time highs last year, and are forecast to increase this year. Mortgage foreclosures are also at an all-time high, and also forecast to increase.
Third, home refinancing fell sharply toward the end of last year, signaling that most homeowners have run out of home equity on which to borrow more. Home equity loans fueled an awful lot of consumer spending over the last three years as interest rates sank to historic lows.
Fourth, the rapid decline in the dollar versus other currencies is making U.S. debt less attractive for foreign buyers of that debt. At the moment, a handful of Asian countries are propping up the dollar as best they can in an effort to maintain their own export-based economies. They cannot continue this effort forever.
All this casts some grave doubts on the future of the economy. We may find ourselves in a situation where nothing short of massive government spending on economic stimulus programs can save the economy. However, with the federal deficit at record levels and the dollar sliding to new lows, it may not be possible for the government to intervene as it has no remaining revenue sources or credit sources.
Is it any wonder why the International Monetary Fund called America’s deficit and trade imbalance a threat to global economic stability?
Ron Suskind, who won a Pulitzer Prize when he worked for the Wall Street Journal, seems to have become the go-to guy for those who leave the Bush White House feeling deceived and disillusioned.
First there was Suskind’s Esquire piece a year ago in which John DiIulio, the departed head of Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, told the reporter:
There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis… Every modern presidency moves on the fly, but on social policy and related issues, the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking: discussions by fairly senior people who meant Medicaid but were talking Medicare; near-instant shifts from discussing any actual policy pros and cons to discussing political communications, media strategy, et cetera.”
Now Suskind has written a book due out soon which is based on material from fired former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill. An economic Tory, O'Neill was the only intellectually interesting member of the Bush cabinet. He portrays a George W. Bush very similar to DiIulio’s — a man as disengaged, ignorant and incurious as Ronald Reagan, although lacking the excuses of age and incipient Alzheimer’s. But when it comes to demanding total subservience, Bush is no Ron; he’s all Nancy:
Loyalty is perhaps the most prized quality in the White House. In the book, O’Neill suggests a very dark understanding of what happens to those who don’t show it. “These people are nasty and they have a long memory,” he tells Suskind.But he also believes that by speaking out even in the face of inevitable White House wrath, he can demonstrate loyalty to something he prizes: the truth. “Loyalty to a person and whatever they say or do, that’s the opposite of real loyalty, which is loyalty based on inquiry, and telling someone what you really think and feel — your best estimation of the truth instead of what they want to hear.”
That goal is worth the price of retribution, O’Neill says. Plus, as he told Suskind, “I’m an old guy, and I’m rich. And there’s nothing they can do to hurt me.”
Reading between the lines of this article yields an unmistakable message: Shifty George is shitting bricks at the prospect of facing Big Howard.
Why do I say this? I’m from the poor-cousin branch of the same ridiculous Social Register WASP tribe as Big Howard and Shifty George. And I can tell you that Shifty George is amazed, confused, and intimidated that someone from an equally fancy background actually went to medical school and became a regular family doctor, instead of into the buttered, easy slip-on family business (politics for the Bushes, Wall Street for the Deans). Another closely related matter is that Shifty George the Brewmaster/Cheerleader remembers just how tough some of those wrestlers were.
These are not pleasant days for Shifty George, and he can’t wait for them to be over. Not a real good space for the kind of man who travels with his own pillow.
He’ll almost certainly crumble under the pressure at some point, and when he does, odds are he’ll crumble completely and quickly. I hope it happens right in the middle of one of the very few debates Shifty will be forced to endure.
Some of you will think it bad manners for a person like me, officially entered in the Big Book of Modern Nations as an “Indian citizen,” to come here and criticize the U.S. government. Speaking for myself, I’m no flag-waver, no patriot, and am fully aware that venality, brutality, and hypocrisy are imprinted on the leaden soul of every state. But when a country ceases to be merely a country and becomes an empire, then the scale of operations changes dramatically. So may I clarify that tonight I speak as a subject of the American Empire? I speak as a slave who presumes to criticize her king.
The photography is by Sari Goodfriend of West Cornwall, Connecticut. More of her work is at sarigoodfriend.com. The words are from a speech in New York City’s Riverside Church given by the wonderful Indian writer and thinker, Arundhati Roy.
She finishes by saying, “I hate to disagree with your president. Yours is by no means a great nation. But you could be a great people.”
With the entry below, “Space Cowboy,” Moe Blues joins Bad Attitudes as our fourth blogger. I thank him and welcome him aboard.
More administrative stuff: while the blog was down, I did a little desk-cleaning. Most of the material I’ll be putting up over the weekend will be old, but it’s news if you haven’t seen it yet.
For instance the Arundhati Roy speech I’m about to blog. She gave it in May, but it slipped past me until this week.
William Rivers Pitt puts together in one package, convenient for sending to everybody you can think of, that increasingly obvious truth about 9/11 — Bush Knew. Even Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post knows he knew.
Please read. Please spread.
So President Bush wants America to go back to the Moon and establish a base there. Then it’s on to Mars. Why? Is it to advance the frontiers of knowledge? To further science? To foster the human spirit of exploration?
According to the Washington Post, it is none of those things.
“Bush and his advisors view the new plans for human space travel as a way to unify the country behind a gigantic common purpose…”
Cynics might say that the whole thing is nothing more or less than a political ploy. And the cynics would be right. Who in the White House hit on this great idea? None other than Karl Rove, the president’s political advisor.
Some think the question is how will we pay for this, but the real question is how will this play with the public. Beyond a few Star Trek TNG fans and a few hold-over romantics (and the aerospace industry), it seems unlikely that the public imagination will be ignited by this. Indeed, it seems more likely to ignite public ire that tens of billions more tax dollars will be wasted shooting the remake of Neil Armstrong’s landing when the country faces such dire fiscal problems.
Porn spammers invaded Bad Attitudes on Sunday, screwing up the blog so badly that it has taken till now to straighten things out. I sent notice of this to all of you whose email addresses I have. Other visitors may have wondered why the blog had gone inactive, and why the comment links no longer worked.
Starting tomorrow (Saturday) we’ll be back in the saddle again. The main residue from the pond scum who did this is a thousand or so porn links posing as comments, most of them, fortunately, sprinkled around on outdated posts. For anyone who has trouble locating porn on the net, these should prove helpful.
No doubt I should spend days crawling through the site and deleting these deposits one by one. No doubt I should do a lot of things, but there you go. See you tomorrow.
There is a strong, defeatist school of thought among Democrats holding that Shifty George is unassailable on Iraq and terrorism. This is only natural, since most people have never stood up to a bully before. If they had, they’d know what Big Howard Dean instinctively knows: most times when you stand up to a bully like Shifty George, he runs away.
James Traub, an incorrigible nincompoop who writes for the New York Times Magazine, has:
…a nightmare in which Dean wins the nomination, conditions in Iraq improve modestly and in the course of a debate, President Bush says: '“Go to Iraq and see the mass graves. Have you been, Governor Dean?” In this nightmare, Bush has been, and Dean hasn’t. '“Saddam killed 300,000 people. He gassed many of these people. You mean I should have thought there were no chemical weapons in the hands of a guy who impeded our inspectors for 12 years and gassed his own people and the Iranians?'” [Michael O'Hanlon, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution,] glumly says that he has resigned himself to the thought that '“the Democratic base is probably going to lose the Democrats the election in 2004.”
Strong and wrong beats weak and right — that’s the bugbear the Democrats have to contend with.
Traub thinks this is a “strong” message that Big Howard won’t be able to fight? Stop snivelling, Jim Traub: a bully’s message is not strong, it’s weak. And it’s easy to outline a two-part comeback that can send Shifty George running back to mommy:
“First, Mr. President, by all means, let’s talk about graves. Let’s talk about the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of graves that have been dug across America for the brave boys and girls who fought and died for our country in Iraq. And, let’s talk about the fact that you have never attended one of those funerals, not even one! You even ended the tradition of arrival ceremonies for caskets when our dead boys arrived on American soil.
Why? Because you were worried that pictures of these heroes arriving home would go out over the TV and remind Americans of the ongoing failure of your Iraq policies and harm your poll numbers. I promise that as president, if I need to order men and women into combat, I will restore the tradition of having the president attend some funerals personally, and I also promise that any family that wants a high administration official at the funeral of their loved one can have it.
“Now, let’s talk about the mass graves in Iraq. You are absolutely correct, Mr. President, that Saddam Hussein used weapons of mass destruction against his own people. You’ve said it many times. The rest of the story, which you never, ever say, is that these terrible acts by Saddam Hussein occurred more than ten years ago, during the last Republican administration. Then the Democrats and Bill Clinton came to power, and opened an era of aggressively containing Saddam Hussein, and disarming him. The Iraq strategy of Bill Clinton and the Democrats worked. And yes, the United Nations was part of the Democrats’ strategy to contain and disarm Iraq during the 1990s. The United Nations inspections, which you laugh at, worked. The proof is that we have failed to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
“What you need to admit now, Mr. President, is that you were wrong when you said we needed to go into Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction. Let’s be clear: in March of 2003, the United Nations weapons inspectors who said that Iraq did not pose an imminent threat to the United States were right. Dozens of members of Congress agreed that Iraq was not a threat to the U.S., and voted against the war. And that is why virtually all the many, many freedom-loving democracies in the world — the Dutch, the Norwegians, the Canadians, on and on the list goes — refused to follow your lead into Iraq. Let me say this: if we can’t get Canada, our best friend in all the world, a terrific, free country and a great friend, to go in somewhere with us, we better go back and doublecheck things.
“You can say what you want about Bill Clinton. But you can’t deny that his strong Democratic administration, working with the United Nations and all the freedom-loving allies that you have abandoned, made sure that Iraq was not a threat to the United States during the 1990s before you even took office.
“Now you have wasted two years of our military effort on a war against a country Bill Clinton, along with our allies and and the U.N., already disarmed, and all that time, and effort, and manpower could have been going toward stopping the real threat — Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.”
Now, come on, Jim Traub. Was that really so hard?
A New Year’s resolution from John D. Rockefeller, for Bush and his whole warhog crew:
“George Harvey once asked him to what one thing more than another he attributed the success of the Standard Oil Company. After pondering a while, Rockefeller replied, ‘To the fact that we never deceived ourselves.’”
(This piece of advice may also help Bush to understand why Harken Oil had a business trajectory so different from that of Standard Oil. It probably won’t, though. Help, that is.)
Kos says the Democrat can win without the South.
I agree; no other plan makes sense for 2004. This doesn’t mean that Big Howard should give up talking to the concerns of rural Southern whites, just that he shouldn’t spend a dime on the South in the general. Time enough for that in 2008.
And to those who claim that writing off the South places in jeopardy the five Democratic southern senate seats at stake, the answer is, not even Gen. Clark is going to win Louisiana, much less generate coattails there, so who cares if we get beat there by only 15 points instead of 20?
I always have thought of Helen Thomas, the old codger formerly of UPI who is by seniority allowed to ask the first question at presidential press conferences, as a brain-dead dingbat has-been.
Helen, how wrong I was. (Thanks to Kicking Ass for the link.)
The struggle for the Democratic nomination has degenerated into swell-headed senators throwing hissy fits because they got passed on the outside by an ex-governor of Vermont. Kerry, I used to have some respect for. At least with Lieberman, I never did.
It’s one thing to explain why you would be the better nominee. It’s quite another to viciously attack your own party's frontrunner as totally unqualified for the job, essentially on the dubious ground that he did not serve in the U.S. Senate. (For the record, Big Howard would be the 29th president, out of 44, not to have been a senator, and an ex-senator hasn’t occupied the Oval Office for 30 years.) And neither of these nationally prominent senators has shown signs of ever once questioning why his own campaign has lost steam while an unknown phenomenon has jetted ahead, with unprecedented fundraising and grass-roots support. Mirrors, anyone?
Also, can’t Kerry and Lieberman step back and realize that the Democrat with the best chance to stop Big Howard Dean is Wesley Clark, who is also the only major Democrat who has mostly avoided vicious Kerry/Lieberman-like attacks on Big Howard?
At least we only have to listen to these whiners for one more month.