Out-Foxed

Fox News didn't get a question during the Obama 100 Day press conference? Whaaaa!! Boo hoo!!!

Perhaps that's because they're a faux news organization. The kind of faux news organization that doesn't carry presidential pressers. The kind of faux news organization that sponsors teabagging parties and then lies about the turnout. The kind of faux news organization that eggs on the crazies toward secession and armed revolution (the former being perhaps an idea I could warm to).

But most infuriatingly, the kind of faux news organization that purposely misrepresents facts to hype up their increasingly crazy audience... a really bad habit for a "news" organization:

During the April 24 edition of Fox News' Special Report, White House correspondent Wendell Goler cropped a comment by President Obama and took it out of context -- effectively reversing the statement's meaning -- to falsely suggest that Obama supports creating a health care system "like the European countries." Goler claimed that Obama "doesn't want to do it halfway" on health care, and then aired a clip from a March 26 online town hall event of Obama saying, "If you're going to fix it, why not do a universal health care system like the European countries?" Following the clip, Goler reported: "His critics worry universal health care would mean government-run health care." In fact, Obama actually said, "Now, the question is, if you're going to fix it, why not do a universal health care system like the European countries?" [emphasis added] In doing so, Obama was paraphrasing the town hall question he had been asked -- "Why can we not have a universal health care system, like many European countries, where people are treated based on needs rather than financial resources?" -- before explaining why he opposed such a system.

I was kind of tickled to see Obama dis them, though... he's a guy after my own heart, that one.

Specter Defects

Specter's defection to the Democratic party isn't totally surprising to me, although I think it says less about the greatness of the Democrats than it does about the current suckiness of the Republicans. As long as the GOP wants to rule from the far right of their party they will continue to alienate the majority of Americans. As long as they think putting people like Palin at the front of their leadership -- someone who is generally unqualified but fits the rigid social/religious requirements of the wingers -- they are doomed. As long as the Republican party continues to represent a dictatorial do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do standard, they are doomed. As long as they focus on catering to the whims of the (diminishing) southern white population, they are doomed. And as long as they cling to failed or outdated ideologies and chant them like a mantra while ignoring contraindicating facts, they are doomed.

Not that I mind any of this since the modern GOP has become anathema to me.

I do feel a certain regret, however, since a strong GOP challenge would keep the Dems on their toes. A weak opposition party challenge is historically proven to result in a self-indulgent ruling party. I also feel a little concerned by the hysterical tone and tenor of those wingers who feel threatened by the loss of power within their party... the bizarre fixation on guns (the need to amass them, flex them, paranoid rantings about how Obama is going to take them, bbb), the need to participate in exaggerated "Socialist!" rhetoric, the whole idea that Obama is a Manchurian candidate (or God forbid, the anti-Christ). The nutso-ness of some of these people is getting a little scary to me. With Faux News egging them on by scapegoating groups like ACORN (a relatively powerless acronym if ever there was one) and urging "revolution" (picture Glenn Beck with tears streaming down his cheeks, crying over the death of his country while simultaneously insisting that his followers "surround them"), I am worried about what the more unstable of this group might do.

Regardless, to this iteration of the Republican party (now in its death throes), I say: Good riddance.

Cousin Matthew (1958 - 2009)

And Death Shall Have No Dominion

by Dylan Thomas

And death shall have no dominion.

Dead mean naked they shall be one

With the man in the wind and the west moon;

When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,

They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.

Under the windings of the sea

They lying long shall not die windily;

Twisting on racks when sinews give way,

Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;

Faith in their hands shall snap in two,

And the unicorn evils run them through;

Split all ends up they shan't crack;

And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.

No more may gulls cry at their ears

Or waves break loud on the seashores;

Where blew a flower may a flower no more

Lift its head to the blows of the rain;

Though they be mad and dead as nails,

Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;

Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,

And death shall have no dominion.

Goodbye, Matthew... it won't be the same here without you.

The Big Fat Lie

Not that Fox News discriminates between big lies and little lies, but this time they've really cooked up a whopper: that via torture we were able to prevent a second 9/11 in LA. Except, of course, we didn't. The Library Tower plot fizzled in February 2002 and KSM was captured in March 2003. Any news outlet, politician, blog, or pundit who insists on repeating the lie is either a fool or playing their audience for one.

First of all, the background: No, Karl Rove, Marc Thiessen, and Fox News are not telling the truth when they claim that U.S. torture techniques prevented a 'west coast 9/11.'

Rove et al. claim that after CIA waterboarding, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gave authorities information used to foil a plot to hijack an airplane with a shoe bomb and fly it into the tallest building in Los Angeles, the Library Tower (now known as the U.S. Bank Building).

In other words, Rove and his crew say torture saved America from another 9/11.

As Timothy Noah and Daily Kos TV have documented, however, the Rove timetable just doesn't add up. While KSM was arrested in March 2003, the plot was stopped in February 2002 -- more than a year earlier. Rove's tale could not possibly be true.

If there had ever been information obtained via torture that had produced actionable intelligence and resulted in anything good you can bet your sweet ass the Bush admin / CIA would have found a way to leak it. If the best they can come up with now is a dupe, then you know they've got nuttin'. Another footnote to the epic fail that was Bush / Cheney.

p.s. In the deepest, darkest trenches of my heart, though, I do think someone ought to get tortured for causing me to have to remove my shoes everytime I go through security at an airport.

Memories

Remember when Cheney said Reagan proved deficits didn't matter?

The Great Descent

What an insightful comment by E.D. Kain (h/t Sullivan):

A larger point is that Fox News is simply not conservative. The fact of the matter is, I find NPR and even News Hour more conservative than Fox - but in a different sense, I suppose, than the standard boiler plate conservatism that has so infested American politics. What I mean to say is that the conservatism of Fox News tends to be wrapped up in loud, divisive, trashy television that is cheap and ugly and reactionary and essentially all things distasteful that conservatives should look at with scorn and antipathy. The measured, reserved, thoughtful and culturally sensible tone of NPR is far more conservative. I’d rather my kids listen to it than watch Glenn Beck. I’d rather they listen to Fresh Air than Rush Limbaugh. Why have conservatives let go of the high culture war? Why have they conceded defeat there - in the arts, in literature, in music - trading it instead for trash television and cheap rhetoric?

I tend to paint all conservatives with the colors of Fox News these days but that's probably unfair of me -- I forget that they're not all regurgitating Fox's daily absurdities. When I read comments like that of Kain, I remember why I used to be non-partisan.

When Fox first came out I thought it was merely a conservative news source. Then it seemed like they became drunk on the level of access they had to Republicans in power and started carrying water for them. Then there was the abundance of weirdly shiny-lipped blond women in short skirts. Over the past year or so, however, and definitely since November, they've gone completely off the rails. Clearly this is a ratings strategy, this latest drive to reach out to every disenfranchised white person they can rope in with crazy talk of fascism, revolts, armed revolutions, tyranny, etc. They sure do seem larger than life with Glenn Beck crying over the "death" of his country on TV but what they've become is the Jerry Springer of cable news.

At its inception, Jerry Springer was just another talk show competing with Oprah, Sally Jesse Rafael, Maury Povich, etc. It covered serious topics and hosted mainstream guests. Wanting to break from the pack, the Springer show decided to get a little more tarty with sensational topics like adultery and homosexuality. Eventually they went all-out trashy and now it isn't a show until someone takes their top off and blames their mother for stealing their lesbian lover.

Harrrr... Pirates!

Happy to see that the remaining grinning pirate is being tried as an adult.

The way the international shipping companies have handled piracy over the past decade is a disgrace. By treating it as a mere business transaction they have actually created a thriving pirate industry. Small bands of armed pirates zoom up to a cargo ship and are allowed -- allowed!! -- to hold the crew hostage until a payment is delivered. The insurance actuaries actually calculate this hostage "fee" into their policy price, which shipper's accountants have actually determined to be cheaper than providing security detail for their vessels. The whole thing is just batshit crazy.

I couldn't have been more proud that it was an American crew that refused to go along with the scheme, and I couldn't have been more proud of the way the Navy handled the confrontation. They used restraint, rescued their hostage, and left two very strong messages. First one for the pirates: Don't fuck with American ships. Second one for the rest of the world: This is how you do it.

Of course I couldn't end the post without saying that the media -- and especially the right wing talking heads -- behaved atrociously during the whole episode and have proven once again that they're worthy of my mocking disgust.

:-)

Free Markets

Ah yes, the mythologically self-correcting free market at work:

April 21 (Bloomberg) -- Citigroup Inc.’s board will likely survive a shareholder vote at today’s annual meeting, even after overseeing $28 billion in losses and a 77 percent stock decline last year.

Groovy.

I'd love to know which market principle this follows, where nobody is ever punished or even held accountable for failure?

Tortured Logic

Bush said on multiple occasions that "This government does not torture people." Aside from the fact that we found out that he intentionally lied to us (again), I am irritated that I'm now forced to listen to endless hours of torture justification on cable news. My thoughts haven't quite gelled yet, but here they are:

• I'd support it if I thought it did more good than harm.... but I don't think the evidence has proven that to be true. And even though I don't support a program of torture, I couldn't say I'd rule it out in a ticking time bomb scenario. I am pretty certain, however, that a true ticking time bomb scenario is somewhere in statistical fantasy land while the probability of a torture program being abused (with negative results) is pretty high. To summarize: I am very comfortable supporting a no-torture policy with an exception for Jack Bauer to shoot out someone's knee cap if there's a nuclear bomb scheduled to go off in LA in 20 minutes.
  

• If you waterboard someone 183 times without getting a big reveal and you think, "maybe we'll get something if we waterboard him 184 times," then you are an idiot.

• I can't figure out why the Right is so schizophrenic on this topic. A few years ago when Abu Ghraib was in the news, the wingnut talking heads went on and on and on about how it was a) an isolated incident carried out by a few bad apples, b) more like fraternity hazing than torture, c) another symptom of Bush Derangement Syndrome because clearly St. Bush said We Do Not Torture. Now that the truth is out, they're unconcerned about being lied to and unconcerned about torture being used and instead are mad because... the truth is out. The twisting logic is really disturbing.
  

• Are we really worried that now that al Qaeda knows our torture techniques they'll be able to "survive" our torture techniques? Can you really train someone to withstand 11 days of sleep deprivation without going mad? Can you really train someone to withstand having his testicles crushed? If the assumption by Joe Scarborough and Dick Cheney is that the enemy will be trained to "outlast" torture because they know it will eventually cease, does that mean we must plan to torture indefinitely (or to death) to be effective? The logic isn't working for me here.

• Speaking of sleep deprivation, that is some wicked shit. Please stop acting like it isn't "real" torture.

• What happened to moral high ground? I thought it was the all-important moral high ground that allowed us to invade Iraq, a sovereign nation, in part because Saddam... um... tortured people he considered to be a threat to his government (one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, blah blah blah). So would conservatives now have us concede the moral high ground? Or are we saying to everyone, "watch the mouth speak about America's moral high ground while the hand behind the back executes our torture policy?" Or are we saying torture is the new moral high ground?

• Most studies indicate that torture isn't overall effective. It's used because it seems like it should work, it's used because people are lazy, it's used because people are desperate. None of which makes it good policy. The people who support it are the same people who wanted to go to war in Iraq because they thought that would make them safer, despite the fact that if they educated themselves on the kind of pesky details you won't find on Faux news, they'd find that wasn't true, either.

• Now that the truth is out, let's just stop doing it and move on. Those who are obsessed with prosecution must get over themselves. We've got too much going on right now to stop and sort out who did what and under what motive in the Bush regime. We were misguided, we did something we shouldn't have, now we're not. End of story.
  

• Cheney cherry picking his Faux News interview with Hannity was just about as pathetic as Cheney cherry picking his torture stories. (I've always wondered -- why did that administration have so little faith in their policies that they'd only talk to people who had already proven their support for them?) The fact is that the Bush administration selectively leaked anything they thought might garner them the support of the villagers and/or discredit their critics long ago. I am highly skeptical that we averted a bunch of terrorist activity through torture but by all means, release the memos he's requesting. My recollection is that terrorist threats usually seem really HUGE when they're first reported and then quickly fizzle out as more information is obtained. Remember that Londoner who was gunned down by police in the subway a few years back? For days the news coverage raged on about how the killing was totally justified because the brown guy was a terrorist. Politicians were patting each other on the back. Questions were raised but the story was way too fun and compelling -- We killed a terrorist!!! And then details started to emerge. And then the truth was revealed -- it had just been some unlucky schmuck on the subway after all.

BTW, Cheney's recent grumblings remind me of a man who knows history will judge him harshly. No doubt he will go to the grave believing he did the right thing -- it's that way with all of history's great villains. The would-be president who could never have gotten elected as such, who instead snuck in through the back door as Bush's "mentor" veep, has a world view that's as dubious as it is dangerous. I for one am thrilled to see him fading away.

Short Memories

Zoh my gawd, please for the love of all that's holy can we just shut up about how Obama shaking the hand of an enemy will cause the downfall of America as we know it. It won't. It is a media created Faux-trage. Trust me.


No matter what the ratings driven talking heads on cable tell you, US foreign policy under Bush was an anomalous freak show -- not the norm. Are our memories so short that his disastrous eight year reign has somehow become our gold standard?

Tea Party Til You Puke

An incoherent, irresponsible load of crap sponsored non-freaking-stop by Faux News. While I found the build up somewhat amusing, the most entertaining aspect was the pathetic national turnout... "thousands"!! Well, that and the continued bizarre fixation on ACORN (that a ginormously powerful media corporation like Rupert Murdock's continues to scapegoat ACORN -- a mostly irrelevant group of poor people who, to summarize, knock on doors for a living -- really freaks me out).

If the turnout had matched even one week's worth of the newly unemployed (~650K) I might have been impressed. If they'd come anywhere close to the number of New Yorkers alone who participated in the 2003 national anti-war protests (~500K), I might have been impressed. But an aggregate number of maybe a hundred thousand (who knows, really, after Neil Cavuto got caught inflating numbers by 300% on the air) is supposed to make us think there's a revolution pending? I don't think so.

After all the hours of hype and news coverage leading up to it, I feel kind of sad for the organizers.

But what the hell... it's America, and protests -- no matter how silly (Code Pink, anyone?) -- are just another part of who we are.

Current And Former Defense Officials

First the slander regarding the defense budget (a 4% year over year increase is apparently the new "gutted"), now the slander of the man who owns it. It's rather predictable that "current and former defense officials" who have something to gain -- or more accurately, lose -- in the reallocation of resources are now slandering Defense Secretary Gates.

The changes in the budget represent a shift that's long overdue. High tech military toys are important but we've been over prioritizing them. The military power that wins the kind of wars we actually fight is far more conventional than what we fantasized about during the cold war.

Bush Sr. and Clinton (under the recommendation of Rumsfeld) went entirely in the wrong direction when they reallocated funds in order to make the military more about technology and less about boots on the ground. This latest move represents a vital correction.

Goodbye, Texas

I know, I know... it's not me, it's you. You're just not at a place in your life where you feel like you can commit. I understand -- you have issues. And the truth is, Texas, if you're not happy with me, I could never be happy with you. That whole "preserve the Union" thing Lincoln pushed us into is a quaint, outdated notion. Go... be free.

Do your thing.

I wish you all the best.