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Shorter Palin: Real Winners Quit

post from Talking Points Memo on 03 July 2009 06:44:00 PM. © Talking Points Memo

Perhaps the best part of Palin's announcement today:Life is too short to compromise time and resources... it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: "Sit down and shut up", but that's[...]

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Fox Nation ignores resident Chris Wallace

post from Media Matters for America - Latest Items on 03 July 2009 06:42:19 PM. © Media Matters for America - Latest Items

On July 3, FoxNation.com features the headline "Obama Busted Stacking Town Hall ... What If Bush Had?" But the suggestion that Bush did not screen town hall audiences or questions was refuted by Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace, who said on the July 3 edition of Fox & Friends that "town hall meetings ... have always been something of an artifice, because I know in the Bush administration, George W. Bush, they had a lot of these town hall meetings, and they chose all the people there. So everybody has always tried to get a home-court advantage." Indeed, a March 12, 2005, Washington Post article on Bush's 2005 Social Security town hall events reported, "The carefully screened panelists [at a town hall in Memphis] spoke admiringly about Bush, his ideas, his 'bold' leadership on Social Security. If the presentations sound well rehearsed, it's because they often are. The guests at these 'Oprah'-style conversations trumpet the very points Bush wants to make."

In the wake of an October 13, 2005, "staged" public video conference Bush held with several soldiers in Iraq, an October 15, 2005, Washington Post article on that event called it "one of the stranger and most awkwardly staged publicity events of the Bush presidency." The article further reported:

Before they [Bush and the soldiers] spoke, Allison Barber, a mid-level Pentagon official, helped coach the troops on who would be asked what by Bush. Afterward, according to Reuters, she told reporters that "we knew that the president was going to ask about security, coalition and training" but not the specific questions.
This not a new technique for Bush; his White House has perfected the public relations strategy of holding scripted events featuring the president's supporters. During the first part of the year, Bush traveled the country to discuss his Social Security plan, while aides stacked the audience with Republicans and tutored participants in these town hall events on what to say.

From the March 12, 2005, Washington Post article titled "Social Security: On With the Show":

The few dissenting voices in the Cannon Center for the Performing Arts were quickly silenced or escorted out by security. One woman with a soft voice but firm opposition to Bush was asked to leave, even though her protests were barely audible beyond her section in the back corner of the auditorium. The carefully screened panelists spoke admiringly about Bush, his ideas, his "bold" leadership on Social Security.
If the presentations sound well rehearsed, it's because they often are. The guests at these "Oprah"-style conversations trumpet the very points Bush wants to make. Seniors on stage express confidence that Bush's plan to create private investment accounts would not eat into promised benefits, and the granddaughter of one spoke hopefully on Friday of a richer retirement if the president prevails.
These meticulously staged "conversations on Social Security," as they are called, replicate a strategy that Bush used to great effect on the campaign trail.
[...]
The White House follows a practiced formula for each of the meetings. First it picks a state in which generally it can pressure a lawmaker or two, and then it lines up panelists who will sing the praises of the president's plan. Finally, it loads the audience with Republicans and other supporters.
To help make its case, the White House recruits people such as Mark Darr, 31, an insurance agent from Benton, Ark., who joined the president on stage at a forum in Little Rock last month. In a subsequent interview, Darr said he believes he was chosen because he went to college with one son of Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee and provided insurance for another.
After the governor's office called, Darr said, he began receiving one call after another from the White House, quizzing him on his thoughts on Social Security and his family history, just as they did all the other candidates. "I'm sure they wanted to ... make sure they weren't going to embarrass the president," Darr said.

From FoxNation.com:

From the July 3 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends:

DAVE RIGGS (guest co-host): Well, it's good to see this, some in the press corps firing back. But is this unprecedented, though, in terms of the pre-packaged presidency that we're seeing now? You mentioned that all presidents do this, but this is something in itself. I mean, we haven't seen anything to this -- this much packaging before, have we?
WALLACE: Well, yeah, as far as the town hall meetings, yes. I mean, there have been -- those have always been something of an artifice, because I know in the Bush administration, George W. Bush, they had a lot of these town hall meetings, and they chose all the people there. So everybody has always tried to get a home-court advantage.

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Mitchell: Palin told allies she's "out of
politics, period"

post from Daily Kos on 03 July 2009 06:35:35 PM. © Daily Kos

Andrea Mitchell offers a different read on today's events than most have thus fair, saying sources close to Palin are claiming that she has told them that she is "out of politics, period" and that they are free to throw their support behind other 2012 candidates.

Who knows if Mitchell is right, but if she is, it would make a heckuva lot more sense than this being the opening of the 2012 campaign, as Bill Kristol suggested to Fox.

Update (2:53PM): The plot thickens -- Palin's spokeswoman seems to suggest Mitchell's sources are wrong, saying "this is a fighting move."

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Palin About to Hit the Iceberg

post from Firedoglake on 03 July 2009 06:30:22 PM. © Firedoglake

Bill Kristol is kidding himself if he thinks this is a "shrewd move" on Palin's part. That press conference and everything about this make Mark Sanford look like a master of public relations. Nobody springs a "surprise resignation" as a way to[...]

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Creating Killers: Ten Years Later

post from TPMCafe on 03 July 2009 06:28:00 PM. © TPMCafe

I'll never forget the moment, ten years ago this weekend, when I first heard the news. I was winding down after a long week of work, my thoughts drifting to Independence Day holiday festivities, when my cell phone rang with word that a young white man driving a blue Ford Taurus shot up a crowd of Orthodox Jews as they were leaving Sabbath services. Six people lay seriously injured on the sidewalk outside Congregation Adas Yeshurun, not far from my Chicago apartment.

After years of researching white nationalist groups, my instincts told me that this wasn't some random shooting. Minutes later, I received a call alerting me to another shooting just north in Evanston. Those blasts left Ricky Byrdsong, an African-American family man and basketball coach, lying dead in front of his children.

As I raced back across town through rush hour traffic in the sweltering summer heat, I got another call that more shots were fired in another suburb. Thankfully, this time the perpetrator missed the young Asian-American couple. The identity of the shooter was still a mystery, and he was still at large.

By this time, my colleague and I had enough information that we were able to identify the killer. All evidence pointed to Benjamin "August" Smith of the white nationalist group, the World Church of the Creator. We had been close tracking Smith's rapid rise in white nationalist netherworld.

The next day, Smith made his way downstate to Springfield, where he fired at two black men, missing them both. A few hours later in Decatur, Smith shot and wounded African-American pastor Stephen Anderson. Near midnight he seriously wounded an Asian-American college student in Urbana.

On Sunday, July 4, exactly one year after Smith first distributed racist literature around Bloomington, Indiana, he fired into a crowd entering the Korean United Methodist Church, killing Won Joon Yoon, a University of Indiana graduate student.

As law enforcement officers were trying to stop Smith, I was spending two sleepless days trying to help figure out Smith's next move and working with the American Jewish Committee to prepare a report on Smith and the white nationalist group to which he belonged.

That report opened with the chilling quote from Smith, "To want to live in a world where blacks have power over whites, where Jews are in control, I think that's a sickness and I'd like to eradicate that sickness. In some ways it's inevitable - racial holy war."

The Smith murders came after the brutal dragging death of James Byrd Jr. by Texas Klansmen, and was followed a month later by an Aryan Nations member shooting up a Jewish day care center in Los Angeles. Suddenly, everyone was talking about the 1999 "summer of hate."

Almost as quickly as it happened, interest in the cause of these shootings faded into the distance. Over the last decade, there have been many more acts of violence committed by white nationalists, most going almost unnoticed to the general public. The Benjamin Smith killings probably didn't make the cut in Leonard Zeskind's book, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream, not because it wasn't an important event, but because chronicling all the killings would take volumes.

Now it appears that we're in the midst of another long, hot summer. Scott Roeder, the Kansas Freeman, walked into a Wichita church and gunned down Dr. George Tiller. James von Brunn, the Maryland Holocaust denier, killed Stephen T. Johns, a black security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Museum. A trio of Washington State minutemen activists were recently arrested for the execution-style killing of Raul Flores and his 9-year-old daughter to fund their nativist activities on the Arizona border.

The tie that binds all of these murders together (and distinguishes them from random acts of brutality), is that all of the perpetrators were entrenched in the white nationalist movement for years before they decided to strike. They don't hate blindly, because of misplaced rage or unemployment anxiety, they hate with a vision. Killers like these aren't born, they're made. Blood and Politics delves deep into the social movement that provided the ideological ammunition for these shooters.

Like Zeskind, Rinku Sen's post The White Supremacist in Us" aptly reminds us of the dangers of dismissing these folks as "backwoods" or that it's just the actions of a "lone crazy white man" (or women, for that matter).

Sen also wisely lifts up the danger of dismissing racism as "isolated madness" or "isolated extremism." Zeskind's book vividly reminds us that the problem of white nationalism is not isolated, that over the past three decades it's moved from the margins to the mainstream. As Blood and Politics points out, white nationalism poses a threat to both public safety and public policy.

It's also not "extremism." Throughout Blood and Politics, Zeskind studiously avoids the term. In this context, "extremism" has no inherent meaning, conveying relationships to some continuously moving and not always middle-of-the-road version of the "center."

Sen keenly reminds us of the legacy of racism and the many "unconscious biases" that exist just below the surface of American life. Zeskind's book highlights how white nationalism does not act in a vacuum. The movement often attempts to tap into those wellsprings of bigotry to gain wider acceptance and support.

There are those who contend that the white nationalist vision is created out of the fears of economic distress. Declining wages and bleak working-class prospects, they say, create a cycle of violence and scapegoating. Amongst many of my progressive friends, the economic argument is almost a reflexive response.

Zeskind tackles this issue head on in Blood and Politics. His analysis of the voting patterns for David Duke and various racially charged ballot measures help remind us that there is little correlation with individual economic circumstance among white voters. The data shows that foremost it is the issue of race the drives white voters to support bigoted ballot measures and candidates. Zeskind's book also reminds us how over the past several decades horrific acts of racist violence committed by white nationalists happen in good economic times and bad economic times. White nationalism is a phenomenon that operates independently of individual economic conditions.

It's hard to argue that any of these horrific acts was motivated by economic downturn. If it were economic circumstances that lead to acts of racist violence or an increase in white nationalism, then the spate of high profile murders in 1999 should serve as a good point of comparison to the current situation.

In 1999, unemployment was at a low 4.3%. The Dow soared to achieve its first close above 11,000. Yet we still experienced the summer of hate and an increase in white nationalist activity around the country.

A closer look at the specific example of Benjamin Smith also weakens the individual economic circumstance argument. He was clearly not driven by economic anxiety. He was solidly middle class, well educated, and his prospects were good. Yet, he still felt compelled to kick off his version of a racial holy war.

As Sen points out, we must move past "the unspoken assumption that since we criminalized such hatred through civil rights laws, there's nothing else we can do as a country." We can and should be working across the color line to address issues of race, gender and inequality. But more is needed, including the creation of a movement-wide impulse to tackle head on racism, anti-Semitism, and bigotry for what they are -- racism, anti-Semitism, and bigotry.

Moreover, we need a firmly-held vision of ourselves as a multiracial nation, a clearly articulated alternative to the fantasies of white nationalism. Such an impulse needs to address both the structural and institutional bigotry and the threat of white nationalism, in good times and in bad, before more killers are created. After all, it's what we do between the shootings that really matters.

###

Devin Burghart is the associate director of the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights (www.irehr.org). He now lives in Seattle.

Sponsored Topics: Race-Ethnic-Religious Relations - Race and Racism - Leonard Zeskind - Supremacy and Separatism - United States

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"The News is a Joke" -- it may be Truer than you
think

post from Docudharma - Front Page on 03 July 2009 06:27:49 PM. © Docudharma - Front Page

Breaking Non-News Announcement!!! -- Listen up consumers! Court JestersIn societies where freedom of speech was not recognized as a right, the court jester -- precisely because anything he said was by definition "a jest" and "the uttering of a[...]

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From Crazy to Shrewd In One Hour

post from Talking Points Memo on 03 July 2009 06:22:00 PM. © Talking Points Memo

At 4:06 ET, when news first broke that Sarah Palin was resigning the governorship, Fox News got Palin's Svengali, Bill Kristol, on phone who said he was "real surprised" by the decision. "[Y]ou know when I first heard it I thought that's a little crazy,[...]

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Go Crazy, Folks

We've rounded up the Top 10 Sarah Palin videos we've posted on the site since her selection as McCain's veep last year. These are the most-viewed clips of her stumbles and bumbles and of the coverage surrounding here -- in all their viral loveliness. [...]

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Banker accepting souls as collateral

post from AMERICAblog News| A great nation deserves the truth on 03 July 2009 06:18:00 PM. © AMERICAblog News| A great nation deserves the truth

He might be out of luck trying to find a soul on Wall Street but fortunately he's doing micro-loans in Latvia. (Wall Street gladly takes handouts from average Americans to maintain their posh lifestyle, so clearly they are as soulless as they are selfish.) I'd love to hear the rate of faults later this year though micro-loans tend to have very high success rates. High interest rates tend to sound more like loan sharking than micro-loans but even a loan shark would probably ask for some other collateral. A new market is born.

Clients have to sign a contract, with the words "Agreement" in bold letters at the top. The client agrees to the collateral, "that is, my immortal soul".

Mirosiichenko said his company would not employ debt collectors to get its money back if people refused to repay, and promised no physical violence.

Signatories only have to give their first name and do not show any documents.

"If they don't give it back, what can you do? They won't have a soul, that's all," he told Reuters in a basement office, with one desk, a computer and three chairs.