Monday Stuff

post from The Liberal Doomsayer on 05 May 2008 11:16:00 PM. © The Liberal Doomsayer

Maybe there's more to "Senator Honor And Virtue" and his "secret" life than I hinted at in the earlier post; "The Onion" has more...

McCain Declines Secret Service, Dares Assassins To Try Something

...and I liked this "Obama in 30 Seconds" ad sponsored by MoveOn; you can go to the site and view the rest (and if any Dems in Indiana and North Carolina are reading this, you know what you must do tomorrow).

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http://liberaldoomsayer.blogspot.com/2008/05/monday-stuff.html

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It's Hard to Fail When You Have No Standards

post from Open Left - Front Page on 05 May 2008 11:12:24 PM. © Open Left - Front Page

Today Glenn Greenwald indirectly brought up a point I've been looking to make, as he rips on the[...]

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http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/OpenLeft-FrontPage/~3/284361408/showDiary.do

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Krugman Says Obama Ad Misrepresents His Comments

post from TalkLeft on 05 May 2008 11:12:00 PM. © TalkLeft

Ouch.

Paul Krugman says an Obama ad attacking Hillary on gas tax relief misrepresents what he said.

I did not say that the Clinton proposal would increase oil industry profits. If the ad implies that I did, it should be retracted.

....I was very clear when I wrote about the Clinton proposal that while I didn’t think it was good policy, it was not the same as McCain’s, and relatively harmless. If the Obama people are suggesting otherwise, they’re being deliberately dishonest.

Krugman's original column is here. It attacks only McCain's plan which is not the same as Hillary's.

More...

Krugman adds:

Krugman adds: "Just to be clear: I don’t regard this as a major issue. It’s a one-time thing, not a matter of principle…Health care reform, on the other hand, could happen, and is very much a long-term issue — so poisoning the well by in effect running against universality, as Obama has, is a much more serious breach."

As I wrote earlier today, meet the new boss, he's the same as the ones he's trying to replace.

Will Obama pull the ad?

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http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TalkleftThePoliticsOfCrime/~3/284332362/82231

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A New Purple State (If Still a Reddish One)

post from MyDD on 05 May 2008 11:06:45 PM. © MyDD

Today Markos brings us some surprising and potentially exciting news: Texas may be on the map in 2008. In Texas, John McCain leads Hillary Clinton by six percentage points and Barack Obama by five. The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey found[...]

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http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/mydd/~3/284332594/25259

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Fox Military Propagandist Promotes Terrorist
Murder

post from Daily Kos on 05 May 2008 11:05:14 PM. © Daily Kos

‎Does support of terrorists make one a terrorist? Presumably that depends on whether you take Mister Bush’s squint-eyed November 6, 2001, prescription – "You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror" – in a blindly nationalistic fashion or in a moral one. Terrorism isn’t an ideology. It’s a technique. Much as sophists and thugs - such as the late Jeane Kirkpatrick - like to twist the definition to fit who is carrying out a policy, terrorism can't be one thing for them and something else for us.

Yet one of the most pre-eminent of the Pentagon’s chosen propaganda team of ex-military-cum-television-analysts, retired Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney, not only supports but promotes terrorism against Iran. He's still spewing on Fox News despite having been exposed by David Barstow’s revelations three weeks ago.

This isn’t new territory for McInerney. He’s argued for attacks on Iran for as long as Bill Kristol and other neoconservatives have done. As a member of the Iran Policy Committee, McInerney has long argued that the State Department should take the Mujahideen-e Khalq off its terrorist watch list. The group originated as leftwing opposition to the Shah of Iran in 1963 and was involved in various operations, including the taking of U.S. Embassy hostages in 1979 and the bloody suppression of the Shiite revolt in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Although MEK killed Americans as well as Iranians in the past, it has since adopted a public veneer of being a backer of freedom and democracy as soon as the Iranian mullahs are overturned, the idea being to install one of its founders as Iran’s president.

Although thousands of MEK fighters based in Iraq were disarmed in 2003 when the U.S. military arrived, the organization has since been implicated in attacks in Iran, including assassinations and bombings in public places. Given Mister Bush’s ordering of clandestine activities in Iran and long-standing White House support for various armed groups along Iran’s borders as – belatedly – reported in the Los Angeles Times three weeks ago, such activity can hardly be surprising to anyone who has followed U.S.-Iranian relations even cursorily.

But, just as Max Boot and Robert Kaplan and Stephen Peter Rosen and others argue quite openly for American empire, now we have a well-connected ex-general openly calling for terrorist attacks – excuse me, responses – in Iran. With a Fox News reader cheering him on.

McInerney starts one minute into the video linked here.

Question: If we do have evidence, and apparently we do, according to officials, that Iran is killing U.S. troops in Iraq or supporting that, why haven't we struck by now?

McInerney: It beats me, Greg. I don't know why we haven't. They have killed hundreds of Americans with their explosively formed projectiles [EFPs], and that's why I think we have to take action. And here's what I would suggest to you. No. 1, we take the National Council for Resistance in Iran off the terrorist list that the Clinton Administration put them on, as well as the Mujahideen-e Khalq that are at Camp Ashraf in Iraq. Then I would start a tit-for-tat strategy. For every EFP that goes off that kills Americans, two go off in Iran. No questions asked, people don't know have to know how it was done. It's covert action. They become the most unlucky country in the world. And then I would start moving U.S. carrier battle groups into the region, as well as some of our stealth aircraft, just to make sure they understand, don't try to kick off a major insurrection come October and September, October to impact our elections. They are deliberately ratcheting up and we’ve got to counterattack.

As McInerney pointed out, this isn’t the first time he has made this proposal. He did it in a March 30, 2007, column, too. And while he suggests that the tactic won’t endanger civilians, this is a detestable lie. IEDs, whether equipped with EFPs or not, kill civilians in Iraq all the time. Deploying McInerney’s monstrous terrorist proposal would mean murdering Iranians - men, women, children - who happen to get "unlucky."

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http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/284331803/04028

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Bernanke, the genius

post from AMERICAblog: A great nation deserves the truth on 05 May 2008 11:03:00 PM. © AMERICAblog: A great nation deserves the truth

No, you don't say?

"High rates of delinquency and foreclosure can have substantial spillover effects on the housing market, the financial markets, and the broader economy," Bernanke said in remarks prepared for delivery to the Columbia University School of Business in New York.

Naturally none of this prevents him from a strict whatever-Wall-Street-wants policy of cushy bailouts and rate cuts. What next? Is Bernanke going to boldly state that interest rate cuts to banks don't transfer to individuals or that when the dollar goes down, gas prices go up with each rate cut?

Where the heck were Bernanke and Greenspan, the Fed, and the Republicans when this fragile system was being built up? They're all supposed to be so smart, so how did they honestly think that real estate would always increase? Have they never studied bubble economies before? How did we get stuck with such an incompetent bunch?

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C&Ls Late Nite Music Club with Lightnin Hopkins

post from Crooks and Liars on 05 May 2008 11:00:33 PM. © Crooks and Liars

About 15 years before he passed away in 1982, I got to spend some time with Texas blues original Lightnin’ Hopkins. He was playing dates in the Village and I was seeing him a lot and I asked him if he would come out and play my school, Stony Brook, which he did. He had [...]

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http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/05/05/cls-late-nite-music-club-with-lightnin-h
opkins/

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Monday Late Nite: Something Borrowed, Something
Acid-Washed

post from Firedoglake on 05 May 2008 11:00:21 PM. © Firedoglake

America's First Party Girl, Jenna Bush, is tying the knot on Saturday. No word on what country we'll invade as a wedding gift.[...]

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http://firedoglake.com/2008/05/05/monday-late-nite-something-borrowed-something-a
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AP-Ipsos National Poll: Hillary Ahead by 7

A new AP-Ipsos national poll has just been released. Hillary has some serious momentum happening.

Clinton (47%) Overtakes Obama (40%) Nationally On Eve of Indiana And North Carolina Primaries ; Poll Shows Clinton Campaign Picking Up Steam With Democrats Nationally

47% say that if the 2008 Democratic presidential primary or caucus was being held in their state today, they would choose Clinton, while 40% would vote for Barack Obama.

These results are in contrast to a poll conducted by Ipsos from April 23rd to April 27th and released last week which showed that Obama had a forty-six percent to forty-three percent lead over Clinton on this same question.

Hillary's greatest support is coming from women with high school education or less and low income voters. The margin of error is 3.1%.

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http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TalkleftThePoliticsOfCrime/~3/284332364/5708

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Some Truly Bad Twenty-Year-Old Wanking

(Huge network issues earlier, so I'm just getting to this now...)

Robin Toner of the New York Times managed to do something pretty unbelievable ? and repugnant ? yesterday in this Political Memo column, which included the following (digging for some really old dirt in an effort to impugn the Democrats in general and Barack Obama in particular)?

WASHINGTON ? Sometimes, as Senator Barack Obama seemed to argue earlier this year, a flag pin is just a flag pin.

But it can never be that simple for anyone with direct experience of the 1988 presidential campaign. That year, the Republicans used the symbols of nationhood (notably, whether schoolchildren should be required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance) to bludgeon the Democrats, challenge their patriotism and utterly redefine their nominee, Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts.

The memory of that campaign ? reinforced, for many, by the attacks on Senator John Kerry?s Vietnam war record in the 2004 election ? haunts Democrats of a certain generation.

And I just love the way that Toner treats all of this as anything but absolutely scurrilous, by the way (which surely would have occurred if a Dem had done this to a Repug).

The 1988 campaign was, in many ways, the crucible that helped create Bill Clinton?s centrist philosophy and his fierce commitment to attack and counterattack, which drove the politics of the 1990s.

You?have?got?to?be?FREAKING?KIDDING?ME!

I might as well point out right now that Toner somehow manages to write about all of these truly putrid moments in our political history with NO MENTION WHATSOEVER of the two most notorious practitioners who fouled our climate the most during that time, and that would be Newton Leroy Gingrich and Lee Atwater (pictured).

(At least Dorothy Wickenden of The New Yorker managed to write a column that had already contained much of what Toner already said, thus trying to emphasize this Obama/Dukakis narrative in a much more subtle way, and even properly documenting Atwater?s role and his own contrition over the forces he had unleashed as he lay dying from a brain tumor.)

But just remember that, as far as Toner and our corporate media is concerned, attacks on someone?s patriotism through flag lapel pins and questioning their war record, to say nothing of trivialities on the issues list such as reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools, all fit into a nice, neat little niche...

Twenty years ago, the nation was in an era of comparative peace and prosperity; a sense of crisis did not hang over the election. Today, with the war in Iraq in its sixth year and the economy stumbling, more than 8 in 10 Americans say the country is on the wrong track. A new generation of voters have entered the electorate, who may not be as susceptible to values issues.

In such a climate, it would presumably be far more difficult than in 1988 to keep the campaign focused on symbolic, values-related issues, or matters of personality.

See, as far as our corporate media is concerned, the ENDLESS fixation with a certain black preacher, a candidate?s bowling score or basketball prowess as well or the aforementioned attacks on one?s patriotism are all ?values issues.? Not ridiculous, mindless nonsense that fills up our dialogue like cotton candy, slowly dissipating as we realize that we?ve been hoodwinked out of a legitimate discussion of issues AGAIN. Not a total abdication of any sense of journalistic ethics or responsibility.

No, these are all ?symbolic, values-related issues,? or ?matters of personality? (and yes, I know this scam isn't new, but it deserves to be called out for what it truly is).

(And the Times no doubt wonders why its circulation is declining along with just about every other newspaper in the country?)

And believe it or not, Toner?s column actually gets better (well, worse really)?

Even with so many big issues at stake this time around, the race between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton has often been focused on questions of values, background and character ? witness the recent fixation on Mr. Obama?s ties to the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., or the continued unfounded rumors that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.

Oh, but even though ?unfounded,? you?re going to repeat them anyway, aren?t you, Toner (as opposed to ignoring them for the freeper agit-prop that they are)? Nice job.

And still more ?fun? awaits?

Attacks on a presidential candidate?s patriotism are hard for many politicians to take seriously. ?Unless you?re talking about the Manchurian candidate, the idea that someone who put their heart and soul into running for president didn?t care deeply for their country is kind of ridiculous,? said Drew Westen, a psychologist and political consultant.

But again, that doesn?t stop you guys from repeating it anyway (and nice job to parrot Mann Coulter?s talking points, Drew ? Westen is one of these guys who keeps telling Democrats to ?dumb down? their campaigns and talk to voters like they?re stupid (here)?actually, all it takes is someone with a minimum of speaking talent and an ability to interact with voters and a rapid response against Repug slime, and with all due respect to Al Gore and John Kerry, they really didn?t have any of that, though they would have been wonderful presidents ? sigh ? and somehow I don?t think we?ll be hearing Westen dispensing any advice to Obama on this).

And though I?m not a big fan of the DLC, I thought this quote from Bruce Reed in Toner's hit piece, the group?s president, spoke volumes?

?Republicans have been trying to put us in the same box for 40 years now,? Mr. Reed said. ?We win elections when we don?t let them.?

And our media has been trying to do the same thing for at least half that amount of time (and the same thing happens when we don?t let them either).

Read The Full Article:
http://liberaldoomsayer.blogspot.com/2008/05/some-truly-bad-twenty-year-old-wanki
ng.html

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