|
For The Trees
Who is our economy FOR, anyway? About the Authors: Dave Johnson John Emerson Richard Reich Thomas Leavitt
Recent Posts: BEST OF STF: Dave's: Articles not at STF: The ATLA Speech on building a progressive infrastructure Lowering the Bar The Attack on Trial Lawyers and Tort Law Who's Behind the Attack on Liberal Professors On the Right and their communications infrastructure: Why Republicans Win Win or Lose The "Conventional Wisdom" Machine Some History of the Conservative Movement HOW TO FIGHT BACK An Amplifier Of Our Own Don't Blame the Democrats How They Do It 1 2 3 4 Getting Rolled Other: You're Gonna Get Drafted Scalia and Self-Government Who is Our Economy For? Voting Machine Story Link Collection What's Wrong with this Picture? (Voting Machines) Like Meat in the Supermarket Get Active Thin Line 1 2 3 Fixing Social Security Seeing the Forest I, II, III "Incredibly Positive News" The Breadth of It The Republican Crony Club Moon Bush Ralph Nader is a Scab John's Best Of: Kerry Smear Page Bandar Bush 9/11 Commission Report Damages Bush -- if you read it Florida Goon Squad Intimidated the Supreme Court The Use and Abuse of George Orwell Zizka's Archives (John's previous identity) Zizka Sampler News Sources: AlterNet BuzzFlash Common Dreams Cursor Drudge Retort Information Clearing House Smirking Chimp TruthOut What REALLY Happened Links to Other Weblogs: |
 4/30/2004 War Is The Worst Thing I'm just back from the Santa Clara County Jefferson Jackson dinner. (Even though I live in San Mateo County... I go with my aunt who lives in the next county south...) This is a yearly Democratic Party event. One thing I want to comment on. I talked to a lot of people. Everyone has a theory about why we are in Iraq. Some talk about Bush being swayed by neo-cons who control what he hears. Some talk about oil. Others about religious agendas like trying to start the apocalypse because the Evangelicals want to ascend to Heaven as the rest of us perish in a total war. Etc. My comment is that WE DO NOT KNOW why we are in Iraq, and the reasons put forth by the Republicans are obviously bogus. They laid down a smokescreen, told a bunch of lies, whipped us up into a frenzy of fear and loathing, and got their war on. But no one accepts their reasons for war, and no one understands why we REALLY went to war. So we are left with rumors, conspiracy theories, people trying to piece together logic out of whispers of supposed information from possibly trusted sources... My point being that in a Democracy WE were supposed to decide after digesting all available information, with our government serving us by making that information available so we can be informed in our decision process, and the Congress was supposed to "declare war" only in response to the gravest of emergencies. But this time we were led to war, tricked into it, lied to, and manipulated by people who are masters of marketing but apparently void of basic humanity. But why? All we have to go on is rumor and speculation. WAR. WAR. My God, we started a WAR! WAR IS THE WORST THING IN THE WORLD and we are at war, and we started it. Yes WE. You and me, our country, we started a war, and now we are starting to see it grow. We are seeing images of soldiers urinating on prisoners with hoods over their heads. We are seeing images of children burned to death, arms missing, mosques exploding, bombs ending lives, coffins returning home... And worse, we did this while we were already occupied with Afghanistan, with finding the people who attacked us on 9/11, and eliminating their ability to attack us again. We took away from that effort to make this other war. And NO ONE can really tell us why. THIS is what we have become. (Yes, I know, a long night. It's late.) --- Posted at 4/30/2004 11:10:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post  
Spam Record I received 1306 spam messages today. A record, I think. If you ever send me mail and think I'm not answering, it may have gotten lost in the deluge. Update - 7 more in the 5 minutes since I posted that. Update - 359 more this morning. --- Posted at 4/30/2004 10:52:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Bev Harris on the spot Using the Patriot Act, the Bushies are going after Bev Harris. Another huge story that will be completely ignored by the corporate media. --- Posted at 4/30/2004 09:55:00 PM by richard Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Still more viewing pleasure Avedon finds a wonderful capture of Bill Maher putting the boot up Tweetie and Bush. Just a couple minutes. You will love this, I promise. --- Posted at 4/30/2004 06:43:00 PM by richard Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Bush Wasn't Flying the Plane I was just watching NBC Nightly News, and they clearly said that Bush landed the airplane on the aircraft carrier one year ago today. Bush did not land the plane. Bush never learned to land on a carrier, and has not been allowed to fly since he refused to take his flight physical after they instituted drug testing back when he was in the National Guard. He was a passenger. He had no need to wear the flight suit - it was all for show. --- Posted at 4/30/2004 05:38:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Mercenaries Awhile back Kos caught an enormous amount of flak because of a harsh remark he made about the four mercenaries who were killed outside Fallujah. Rather than backing down or pretending it didn't happen, he's stayed on the mercenary question. He's got a bunch of stuff up right now (April 29 and 30). Using mercenaries is the standard kind of corner-cutting contracting-out that Republicans like to do so much in everything. The mercenaries in Iraq are as well-armed as the troops, at least as well-trained, and much better-paid. They're not under military discipline, but the U.S. is ultimately responsible for everything they do. This is certainly an issue to follow. --- Posted at 4/30/2004 02:07:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Kalamazoo has its doubts about Bush-Cheney 9/11 testimony Sounds like the simple folk in Kalamazoo haven't learned how to regurgitate the received wisdom yet: "Still, we continue to be troubled by a number of conditions set by the White House before Bush and Cheney would testify. It was troubling that Bush and Cheney insisted on being questioned together. What did the White House fear about the two men being questioned separately? That they wouldn't get their stories straight separately? That Bush might go off the reservation and say something Cheney didn't want him to? We also are troubled by the fact that neither Bush nor Cheney were under oath when they answered questions. Granted, it is precedent-setting that a president and vice president would testify before a legislatively created body, but the refusal to answer questions under oath certainly must leave the public wondering. Finally, we are very troubled by the White House's demand that no recording, no official transcript, of the interview be made. Certainly we in the media live and die by the official record. Video, audiotapes, transcripts are what those who report the proceedings go on. Ditto for historians a generation from now. Even if today the testimony were classified and sealed from the public, someday an accurate record of what was said at Thursday's meeting would be invaluable for writers of history trying to understand this era. Why would the White House make such a demand?........ And their testimony, which we hope was totally truthful, may do much to help the commission, Congress and the White House reach some concrete conclusions about how to prevent another attack on American soil." (My emphasis). The Kalamazoo Gazette --- Posted at 4/30/2004 12:18:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Republican Pedophiles, etc. Over at my other site I sometimes try to beat the Republican creeps at their own game, for example on my Republican Sex Criminals page. I just received a link to an even better page which specializes in Republican Child Molesters -- 26 of them. I've always wanted to do a piece on my home state's indigenous brand of Republican sex criminals, adulterers, drug abusers, and scofflaws, but I've never gotten around to it. The list starts with the well-known Sen. Bob Packwood and includes Joe Lutz of the Moral Majority (serial adultery), Multnomah County Commissioner Gordon Shadburne (a homophobe who put his boyfriend on the country payroll), Drew Davis (drugs, porn, Jesus), Kelly Clark (legislator, stalker) and Wes Cooley (no known sex or drugs, but lied under oath too often even for the Republicans). We will now return to our regularly scheduled programming. --- Posted at 4/30/2004 09:46:00 AM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/29/2004 This is really depressing According to the White House, major combat operations in Iraq ended a year ago.* But this month has been the worst month so far. And now we're hiring Saddam's generals to do the fighting for us. *FOOTNOTE: Originally the White House simply reported that ALL combat operations had ended, but when that statement became embarrassing they doctored their website. --- Posted at 4/29/2004 07:45:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Accusing Nightline of TREASON! If you think for a MINUTE that the owners of the media are not far-far-far right wing, read this. Sinclair Broadcast Group owns a bunch of TV stations. They are ordering them not to show Nightline, because Nightline is paying tribute to the soliers who have died. Here's what they say about it: Sinclair to Preempt `Nightline' on ABC Stations, Cites Politics : "...the action appears to be motivated by a political agenda designed to undermine the efforts of the United States in Iraq."Is this extreme enough for you? Accusing Nightline of TREASON for showing the names of dead soldiers? --- Posted at 4/29/2004 05:28:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
I missed something [NOT POSTED BY DAVE] So what's up with Atrios? I missed something. He's talking about Nader voters as "greenshirts". Wonder what that is supposed to mean? We're going to be storming through the streets breaking the windows of Democrat-owned shops? Or what? And his passionate commitment to free expression on blogs didn't last very long. He's back linking to Kerry's campaign cash register already. I assume he made some statement about the undelinking of the Kerry campaign from his site. But I can't find it. He was right the first time -- the Kerry campaign's caving to the wingnuts' false outrage in l'affaire Kos was cowardly and contemptible. (Not untypical for Democrats. Ooops, better change my shirt before I say stuff like that!) --- Posted at 4/29/2004 02:48:00 PM by richard Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/28/2004 Again "Our military commanders will take whatever action is necessary to secure Fallujah on behalf of the Iraqi people," he [Bush] said. - Bush: Most of Fallujah returning to "normal'' "We had to destroy the village to save the village." - Unknown lieutenant during the Vietnam War --- Posted at 4/28/2004 03:07:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
"That's What They Do In Their Mosques" I just heard Rumsfield on CNN, holding up a picture of some people in a mosque with weapons, saying "That's what they do in their mosques." Is this as bad as calling it a "crusade?" Are we going after "those people" now? Shit is going to hit the fan. --- Posted at 4/28/2004 01:20:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/27/2004 Didn't They Use This Smear On Clinton? Yes, they did, and it worked. So they're dragging it out and using it on Kerry, too. $1000 HAIRCUT? KERRY FLIES IN HAIRDRESSER FOR TOUCH-UP BEFORE 'MEET THE PRESS': "On the Friday before his MEET THE PRESS appearance, Dem presidential hopeful John Kerry flew his Washington, DC hairdresser to Pittsburgh for a touch-up, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned. Cristophe stylist Isabelle Goetz, who handles Kerry's hair issues, made the trek to Pittsburgh, campaign sources reveal. 'Her entire schedule had to be rearranged,' a top source explains. A Kerry campaign spokesman refuses to clarify if Goetz flew by private jet on April 16 or on the official Kerry For President campaign plane. The total expense for the hair touch-up is estimated to be more than $1000, insiders tell DRUDGE."Expect another lie in an hour. It's what they do. They lie. They just lie. --- Posted at 4/27/2004 10:16:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Red-Baiting Clicking through the channels (I'm male) I landed on MSNBC for a few minutes where they were having a discussion about Senator Hillary Clinton bad-mouthing Bush "in the Arab press." Since these things usually come in orchestrated patterns, I checked, and sure enough the same story is running at Scaife's NewsMax, "Hillary Blasts Bush in Arab Press". They're implying she committed treason for saying bad things about Bush to Arabs. (Remember how they accused Clinton of "protesting against his government on foreign soil"?) This is the kind of Red-baiting that Republicans are known for, except it isn't Reds now, it's Arabs. "Sen. Clinton delivered the unprecedented attack in an interview with the London-based Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat on Monday, with newspapers from Tehran to Islamabad picking up her harsh words almost immediately."This "news report" concludes with "In comments that could only encourage the Iraqi insurgency, the top Democrat complained that "the United States was in trouble because it could not abandon Iraq, nor provide enough manpower to run the country, nor gather world allies willing to provide the necessary assistance for the gigantic task," according to Mehr's translation."OK, I'll go after some Trees for a minute, as long as we remember the Forest: They lie. They just lie. Never forget. Trees: 1) The interview was with a London-based news organization. 2) Arabs are not our enemies. Arab newspapers are not enemy organizations. (In fact, we're "helping" the Iraqis by "freeing" them, remember?) (No, don't look a the pre-9/11 plans to seize the Iraqi oil fields, look over THERE!) 3) Arabs are completely capable of reading American newspapers, and they even have the Internet in the Middle East, too. Newspapers "from Tehran to Islamabad" can even pick up stories from the Washington Times. And Islamabad might SOUND like an enemy if you're as ignorant as the Republicans clearly expect the consumers of their lies to be -- (Islam Bad) -- but it's actually on our side. And Iran has been helping against al-Queda as well. 4) It does not "encourage the Iraqi insurgency" to state the obvious. They have eyes. They can see the mess Bush has gotten us into. I know better, but I just can't stop myself... --- Posted at 4/27/2004 07:58:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
More viewing pleasure Here's another archived stream at C-SPAN you might enjoy watching. (If that direct link fails for you, go here and follow the first "WATCH" link.) It's a panel discussion (really a debate) from last weekend's Los Angeles Times Festival of Books: Panel: U.S. and Iraq One Year Later: Right to Get In? Wrong to Get Out? Watch 2 hrs. * Christopher Hitchens, "A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq" * Mark Danner, "The Massacre at El Mozote" * Michael Ignatieff, "The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror" * Robert Scheer, co-author, The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq" * Steve Wasserman, Los Angeles Times Book Review editor—ModeratorHitchens is looking much more prosperous (and sober even) since his Big Right Turn. But of course. Wasserman is as always somewhere between a weasel and a blowhard, but, except for some extremely long-winded (I did say it was Wasserman, right?) questions, is mercifully quiet. Hitchens makes you want to scream and throw things at the screen. Ignatieff always reminds me of the worst sort of self-promoting academic smart-fool, and he does not disappoint here. Danner is good on our side, but Scheer simply hands Hitchens his head on several occasions, especially during the last few minutes when he suckers both Hitchens and Ignatieff into some faux outrage and then raises the stakes to such a level that they are left literally breathless and staggered. It is one of the best moments I've seen on television in years. Watch the last ten minutes or so, or watch the whole thing if such discussions appeal to you. --- Posted at 4/27/2004 07:38:00 PM by richard Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
What America Knows III A letter to the editor in today's San Jose Mercury News show a lot of what is going on in this election, and in America today: "The Democrats and their sycophants in the media criticized George W. Bush for using pictures of 9/11 in his campaign ads. However, they seem to have no problem with using the issue of photographs of coffins of American soldiers in their attempt to damage the president politically for the war in Iraq. Look up hypocrite in the dictionary, and it will say, 'See Democrat, also Media.' "The news runs pictures of coffins coming back from Iraq -- that's news, no way around it. But to this Republican, those pictures make Bush look bad, and therefore news outlets showing such pictures must be biased against Bush. Let's go a bit deeper into what he is saying. I think this letter reflects the thinking of a typical "movement conservative." He's probably a Rush listener. Maybe he reads National Review, or visits Free Republic. To him, news is entirely about the political images that are projected to the public - entirely about whether the things told to the public help or hurt the right-wing movement. This Republican lives in a world engaged in an ideological war, so it is beyond comprehension that a news outlet would show something just because it is "news." The reality factor - the "news" - is not an issue, nor is it supposed to be, for him. Whether what is shown helps or hurts the movement is the only issue that matters. Everything is about helping move the cause forward. Anything that does not move the cause forward is an enemy. So look at what this means for traditional news outlets. An honest news outlet is going to report, on occasion, things that do not help the cause of the Republican Party. So to these committed conservatives, this means that regular news outlets are, by definition, "against" them! If an image is shown that hurts Bush, the outlet must be "liberal," or else they wouldn't show it. (This is why we are all so surprised when a "news" outlet like Fox discusses news that might be seen as unfavorable to Bush.) This writer KNOWS that the Republicans are lying when they say it is out of respect for the families of the soldiers that they refuse to let the media take photos and is complicit. To him it is clearly about images that harm Bush. He respects them for lying, because it furthers the movement. He understands the need to provide a cover story. He does not see it as lying and certainly there is no respect lost for those telling the cover story. He knows that it is part of the way things are done. THIS is what is going on now in America. The "conservatives" see themselves as part of a "movement" and understand their part. Listen to Rush, as they phone in and discuss the nuances of PR strategies. It is all about furthering the cause, defeating the enemy -- which, by the way, is you and me. Watch your back. --- Posted at 4/27/2004 03:19:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
51% of the people, all of the time People joke that the Bush Administration has been using Lincoln's quip as their game plan, but the joke isn't very funny any more. It's starting to look as if the Bush strategists are planning to win re-election by targeting two groups only: the fanatics of the Republican core constituency, and the people who aren't really paying attention. A majority of Americans still believe that Saddam had MWD, actively supported al Qaeda, and was probably involved in 9/11. No evidence for any of this has surfaced. The attacks on Kerry's supposed "anti-defense" votes don't hold water either -- Rumsfeld and Cheney held similiar views at various times in the past. As Republicans say about everything else but defense, "You can't solve a problem by throwing money at it", and some weapons systems just aren't needed. (The one person people really should be looking at in this regard is Rumsfeld, who sent an undermanned and underequipped army to Iraq). The flap about Kerry's service records is even worse. The best you can say about Bush's military performance is that he served stateside and got permission to leave the service early with an honorable discharge. (This is the absolute minimum standard of acceptable military service). The worst you can say about Kerry is that he was a decorated combat veteran who got permission to leave the service early with an honorable discharge. Kerry comes out far ahead by all non-pacifist standards, and people have asked why the Bush people are even raising the issue. The answer is that they are targetting people who aren't really paying attention -- airhead centrist whim voters who vote on the basis of buzz. "Well, there were questions about Bush's military service, and there were questions about Kerry's service too, so basically it's a wash". That sounds shrewd and maybe even wise, right? Nobody's going to fool this guy! He doesn't even have to read the articles to figure out what's going on! I blame the drug culture. During the Sixties a lot of people came to believe that they could get the real truth by intuiting vibes and reading auras, and that nit-picky left-brain attention to fact and detail is useless, if not harmful. Some of those people are still around today, and they seem to have had kids. The present Bush campaign can only succeed if it gets active collaboration from the media. The most routine professional, fact-based coverage of the Bush campaign would blow it completely out of the water. But for whatever reason, even some non-partisan journalists have accepted a definition of "neutrality" which (like the worst forms of affirmative action that the Republicans rail against) requires equality of outcome. If, on a particular issue, the Bush people lie and the Kerry people tell the truth, the media will not tell us about it. (What they actually do is really worse than simply fake neutrality, of course -- most what we see about the election in the media is paid advertising for which ultimately do not take any responsibility at all.) The possibility that Bush might be reelected to an irresponsible lame-duck term without the support of any well-informed voters at all is terrifyng. To me that sounds like a carte blanche to run wild and trash the place worse than he has already. As always, I end up making a plea to people who never come to my site: the libertarians and the semi-mythical rational conservatives and moderate Republicans. None of them really have any reason to support Bush (key words: Patriot Act, little government, fiscal responsibility, and "sliming John McCain"). But it's possible that many of them will do so anyway, saying "At least he's not a Democrat!" Even the ones who don't vote for Bush will probably just slink down to the polling place and take advantage of the secret ballot. I'm really hoping that a few of the big names will stand up in the last few weeks of the campaign and announce publicly that they're voting for Kerry. If they don't, the consequences could be appalling. (No, I don't think that the Democrats will be able to pull it off on their own.) --- Posted at 4/27/2004 07:16:00 AM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/26/2004 Campaigns, blogs, marketing and reality Watch this at C-SPAN. If the link doesn't work for you, go to C-SPAN.org and search down the "LATEST VIDEO" list for "TechnologyPolitics Summit on Politics & the Internet (04/26/2004)". The first presentation concerns progressive talk radio, but more interesting is a terrific talk by David Weinberger (a Dean Campaign Internet advisor). This starts about 57 minutes into the clip and runs for about 45 minutes. --- Posted at 4/26/2004 11:53:00 AM by richard Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Magic Spells From the story referenced below, something on a completely different topic. Can anyone tell me what the difference is between this: ..."years before, Wallace was just about dead at the bottom of a swimming pool and that the only thing that brought him back to life was the power of people praying for him to live." and the belief that you can cast a magic spell? --- Posted at 4/26/2004 10:52:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
What Americans Know II My earlier post was obliterated by Blogger after being up for a few days. The post started with the news that most Americans STILL think Iraq was behind 9/11. Among other things I said it's crucial for us to listen to Limbaugh in order to understand what Republicans are thinking and what so many Americans think is reality. Today a Washington Post story covers this territory. Some people get their information from the TV networks or the paper. Stein starts with the Drudge Report Web site, where he scans the headlines and clicks on one that says, "Rallying Cry For Dems: Vote Bush Out of Rove's Office." "This is the kind of stuff that pisses me off," he says. "They don't give Bush the respect he deserves. Not only because he's president, but because he's a helluva good man." Next he goes to a Web site called WorldNetDaily.com. He clicks on an article that says, "Poll: Bush's Approval Sinking," but dismisses it as untrustworthy when he sees the poll was done by CBS. "Of course I have a suspicion of CBS," he says. "Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw -- they don't have any credibility with me." Next he goes through a site called FreeRepublic.com, which calls itself "the premier conservative news forum," and then moves on to a site called sftt.org. "Soldiers for the Truth," he says, scrolling through another list of articles and watching a video of what the site says is a U.S. Apache helicopter targeting and obliterating three Iraqis. "Another guy moving right there," one voice on the video says, all business. "Good. Fire. Hit him," another voice says. "It's amazing, the military, the men and women who are serving us," Stein says. "You think about the sacrifices, the idea of spending Christmas in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in West Africa, in these hellholes. In the civilian world, they get some injury, carpal tunnel syndrome, and they want to go sue their employers, and these guys . . . I'm so proud of them. I'm so glad they're on our side." Next he goes to Military.com, where there's a photograph of an American soldier holding a wild-haired Saddam Hussein on the ground moments after his capture. "Look at the contrast," Stein says. "There's the American soldier coming to liberate the country, and there's the tyrant who ran the rape rooms and the children's prisons. That inspires me." Next he goes to AmericanRhetoric.com, where he has listened to an "awesome" speech by Bush, an "amazing" speech by Reagan, and a "great" speech by Martin Luther King Jr. from a time before "things got so distorted," and then he goes to townhall.com, which calls itself a "conservative news and information" site, where he begins hopscotching from Pat Buchanan to Robert D. Novak to Ann Coulter. This is how Stein gets his information, along with watching Fox News and skimming the local paper, to which he once canceled his subscription because he was so offended by an opinion column about Bush that began, "The Boy Emperor picked up the morning paper and, stunned, dropped his Juicy Juice box with the little straw attached." He recognizes that the information he seeks out reinforces his beliefs rather than challenges them, but "I feel I'm more informed than most people," he says. "Most people don't read all of this."There's so much more in this article. Read it. Start listening to Limbaugh. Start in small, 5-minute doses. Don't break your radio. Work up to a full half hour. It is CRUCIAL to understand what Americans are being told. You will not BELIEVE what they're telling people! But this is the core of Republican thought. What you hear here is repeated in various forms and dilutions on the mainstream news. It sets the agenda. People BELIEVE that cutting taxes or the rich increases government revenue! People BELIEVE that Christians are persecuted in America. People BELIEVE that "the government" is some separate entity that takes money from regular working people and just keeps it for "themselves." They are told that Republicans are "people like us" and Democrats drive "limousines" and "drink wine and eat French cheeses" and that they hate Christians. Over and over they are told these things. And they are told, over and over again, not to listen to mainstream media, not to trust anything "Liberals" say, not to trust their facts, not to believe anything they hear except from the far right. And it works. Republicans understand how people get their information, and they take advantage of it. They spread little (untrue) stories about ridiculous lawsuits on music radio stations, they send out (untrue) chain e-mail stories about Kerry insulting people, they call talk shows with (untrue) stories about Kerry pushing his way to the front of lines in drug stores saying, "Do you know who I am?" They plant (untrue) stories about people (meaning Jews) persecuting Christians. Fox News reports Iraq stories under the banner "War on Terrorism" as if Iraq had anything to do with Terrorism... --- Posted at 4/26/2004 10:44:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/25/2004 Jinxed Looks like I'm saving the data from the hard drive. It just came up again, and I'm copying everything to a new drive, hoping it lasts long enough. Meanwhile something has screwed up the Seeing the Forest site, starting with the deletion of part of the What America Knows post, and leaving everything after that in bold. I'm leaving it alone in case Blogger fixes it... --- Posted at 4/25/2004 07:44:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Hard Drive Help I've got a 30gb Quantum Fireball in my Mac G4 that suddenly won't spin up. The Drive Setup doesn't see it. Does anyone have any suggestions? Am I going to have to spend a huge amount to get the data recovered? Thanks in advance for any help. Update - It does spin up, but the Mac won't see it. So maybe it's some kind of failure in the circuitry of the drive. --- Posted at 4/25/2004 04:54:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/23/2004 What Americans Know You probably have seen this poll reported on other blogs. I don't tend to post things I have also seen elsewhere, but this one really, really needs repeating. "A new poll shows that 57 percent of Americans continue to believe that Saddam Hussein gave 'substantial support' to al-Qaida terrorists before the war with Iraq, despite a lack of evidence of that relationship. In addition, 45 percent of Americans have the impression that 'clear evidence' was found that Iraq worked closely with Osama bin Laden's network, and a majority believe that before the war Iraq either had weapons of mass destruction (38 percent) or a major program for developing them (22 percent). [. . .] among those who say most experts agree that Iraq had banned weapons, 72 percent plan to vote for Bush."To understand Bush's support, you have to unde Well, I don't know where the rest of this post went. It was up for a few days, and then this happened to it. Thanks, Blogger. --- Posted at 4/23/2004 04:32:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
An e-mail I received: TEXAS TRUTH TOO GOOD NOT TO PASS ON While suturing a cut on the hand of a 75-year old Texas rancher (whose hand was caught in a gate while working cattle), the doctor and the old man struck up a conversation about George W. Bush being in the White House. The old Texan said, "Well, ya know, Bush is a 'post turtle'." Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him what a 'post turtle' was. The old rancher said, "When you're driving down a country road an you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a post turtle." The old man saw a puzzled look on the doctor's face, so he continued to explain, "You know he didn't get there by himself, he doesn't belong there, he doesn't know what to do while he's up there, and you just want to help the dumb bastard get down!"Bush the Post Turtle. --- Posted at 4/23/2004 04:13:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Bush had his chance to win it. Get him out of there before he screws up again. Diana Moon, has pointed out that Bush and his surrogates are 100% sure to blame the Democrats for his Iraq disaster. (Tinker Bell died because we didn't believe hard enough). The title above is my first try at what I think we should be saying. For 32 years now Democrats have been running away from the McGovern Curse, which the DLC has interpreted to mean "No Democrat ever can oppose any war anywhere". That has to change. Democrats have to suck up their guts and go on the attack. It'll be a rough sell. Bush's rabid core constituency is 30% of the electorate, Bush's team has close to a billion dollars to blow, the media are shallow, spineless, and venal, and many "centrists" are just airheads. It will be like the Alamo or Thermopylae -- the few and the proud, defending human civilization against the ravening Republican horde. (Take that, Samuel Huntington! Take that, Victor Davis Hansen!) As I've been saying for a couple of years, this election will be decided by the rational conservatives and the intelligent centrists (if there are any). If they stick with Bush, we are doomed. There are plenty of signs that they're starting to shift, but I'm not counting on it. George W. Bush may be allowed to run the world off a cliff just because certain people couldn't force themselves to vote for the party of unions, affirmative action, and (gasp!) gay marriage. (The horror! The horror!) --- Posted at 4/23/2004 04:08:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Why Chalabi? Digby has one very good answer. --- Posted at 4/23/2004 03:09:00 PM by richard Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
A Hero I don't know anything about this guy, except that after 9/11 he gave up a $3.6 million NFL football contract and enlisted in the army. He was "an exceptional student with a 3.84 grade point average through college and graduated summa cum laude with a degree in marketing" who died yesterday in Afghanistan. This was just announced and there isn't much news yet about what happened. I don't know if he was a rabid right-winger, or a Democrat, and it doesn't matter. (I guess it does matter because if he was a Democrat the Republicans are going to start smearing him now.) --- Posted at 4/23/2004 08:23:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Osama Bin Laden Captured!! Not really. There's a spam email going around saying so, though. If you clink on the link in the email, you get a nice computer parasite. (Story here). Investigators are hot on Osama's trail, though. My sources tell me is that the latest tip is that Osama has apparently figured out that if you want to disappear from view, the Texas Air National Guard is the best place to go. --- Posted at 4/23/2004 06:26:00 AM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/22/2004 Buy Books, Help Pay For STF Bandwidth   
  
   
Click on the book cover, buy the book, support Seeing the Forest!--- Posted at 4/22/2004 10:59:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/21/2004 Voting Machines Story Maryland Group Sues to Upgrade E-Voting Machines: "A Maryland voters' group said on Wednesday it planned to force the state to add printers to electronic voting machines to ensure they can be double-checked after a disputed election, such as the 2000 presidential vote. " --- Posted at 4/21/2004 07:56:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
The CPA Institution Josh doesn't often crack me up, but this is funny. --- Posted at 4/21/2004 02:41:00 PM by richard Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/20/2004 Stealing an Election Bruce Schneier offers a back-of-the-envelope estimate of what we're up against. In 2002, all the Congressional candidates together raised over $500M. As a result, one can conservatively conclude that affecting the balance of power in the House of Representatives is worth at least $100M to the party who would otherwise be losing. So when designing the security behind the software, one must assume an attacker with a $100M budget. Conclusion: The risks to electronic voting machine software are even greater than first appears. --- Posted at 4/20/2004 07:02:00 PM by richard Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Brush off the Polack Jokes Apparently Poland is thinking of leaving Iraq and joining Old Europe. What's the correct term for those guys, anyway -- "piroshki-eating Holocaust monkeys"? Our club has become even more exclusive. Update: This is a developing story, with different people saying different things, and there's a change of government coming up soon too. Link --- Posted at 4/20/2004 12:26:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Chimpeach Chimpeach --- Posted at 4/20/2004 10:27:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/19/2004 They Know Sunday Meanwhile, back in the real world, the administration is expected to nominate John Negroponte to be our first ambassador to postwar Iraq, to take up residence in what will be the world's largest embassy after June 30.Monday: In a blow to President Bush and his coalition partners in Iraq, Honduras followed Spain on Monday in announcing it will pull its troops out of the country.The Hondurans know. --- Posted at 4/19/2004 10:13:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
What OTHER Election-Manipulation Deals? Woodward's book reveals that Bush made a deal with Saudi Arabia to reduce oil prices as an election-manipulation tactic. So the question is, WHO ELSE? What OTHER countries, corporations, etc. have Republicans made deals with to manipulate our elections? And in exchange for what? When the Republicans started accusing Kerry of making deals with foreign governments, we should have known... --- Posted at 4/19/2004 10:48:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Bandar Bush is in the driver's seat The two stories below are so flagrant that I have trouble believing them myself. I find it unbelievable that there has been so little media outcry, and that Bush supporters still are able to believe anything that the man says. These guys are tough when confronting France, but are meek and obedient with the Saudis. Colin Powell was not told about our Iraq War plans until Bandar had approved them. Bandar wasn't easily pleased, but ultimately we got his approval for what we wanted to do. More recently, when OPEC (led by the Saudis) decided to cut production and raise oil prices, Bandar kept Bush on a string for awhile before he agreed to increase Saudi production in time for the elections. I don't know what his quid pro quo was, but we can be sure that he got it. (If you just tuned in, the 9/11 attackers and sponsors were mostly Saudis, and there was quite possibly no Iraqi involvement at all. We've spent several years now scouring the earth for little specks of evidence that Saddam had something to do with 9/11, while ignoring warehouses of evidence that high-level Saudis were implicated.) BANDAR BUSH TELLS US WHAT WE NEED TO DO IN IRAQ "And so Bandar, who's skeptical because he knows in the first Gulf War we didn't get Saddam out, so he says to Cheney and Rumsfeld, ‘So Saddam this time is gonna be out, period?’ And Cheney - who has said nothing - says the following: ‘Prince Bandar, once we start, Saddam is toast.’" After Bandar left, according to Woodward, Cheney said, “I wanted him to know that this is for real. We're really doing it." But this wasn’t enough for Prince Bandar, who Woodward says wanted confirmation from the president. “Then, two days later, Bandar is called to meet with the president and the president says, ‘Their message is my message,’” says Woodward." Excerpt Transcript BANDAR PROMISES TO KEEP OIL PRICES DOWN "Bush, who campaigned in 2000 on a pledge to persuade the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to keep oil supply plentiful, has been under fire in this election year after Saudi Arabia, the cartel's largest producer, led a push to cut OPEC output by 1 million barrels per day from April..... Adel Al-Jubeir, foreign affairs adviser to the Saudi crown prince, told reporters in a telephone conference call that global oil inventories were at a reasonable level and blamed oil market speculators for driving up the crude price. Joe Barnes of the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Texas said Riyadh was more than willing to help Washington balance energy prices by raising stocks in an emergency, like after the Sept. 11 attacks. Right now, "the Saudis do not believe current oil prices are an emergency," he told Reuters.' UPDATE: A more recent story: "Woodward, discussing his new book, Plan of Attack, on the Bush Administration's preparations for the Iraq war, told CBS television that Prince Bandar pledged the Saudis would try to fine-tune oil prices to prime the US economy for the election - a move they understood would favour Mr Bush's re-election. Questioned about his claim at a time when oil prices are nearing a 13-year high, Woodward, a senior editor at The Washington Post, said: 'They're high. And they could go down very quickly. That's the Saudi pledge. Certainly over the summer or as we get closer to the election they could increase production several million barrels a day and the price would drop significantly.'" Update Story I Story II Guardian Bandar Bush --- Posted at 4/19/2004 08:05:00 AM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/18/2004 Democrats and Liberals Below I've argued that if you want to be part of the mainstream establishment you cannot be a dove. This is just part of a more general rejection of "liberalism". Steve Teles, a Brandeis political science professor, has said that the only thing all conservatives have in common is a hatred of "liberals". Many reasonably moderate voters would never vote for a Democrat because they think the Democratic Party is liberal. If you ask them what they mean by "liberals", however, they'll often point to pot-smoking bisexual tree-hugging pacifist ecoterrorist vegans. But these people are not Democrats: they're Greens, if anything. In other words, the people who killed Gore by voting for Nader also hurt Gore by causing moderates to vote for Bush. Everyone knows that life isn't fair, but this particular lose-lose proposition is an especially nasty one. The Democrats have been bullied into driving away their fringe constituency, while the Republicans have succeeded in keeping theirs on board. And the Republican fringe is plenty nasty: neo-Confederates, Armageddon Christians, "nuke'em all" warmongers, and anti-tax anarchists. In 2000 Nader got 2.7% of the vote and Buchanan and Browne combined got 0.79% of the vote. You know that there are a lot more racists and libertarians than that out there. That's only 3.5% of the vote altogether, but suppose the proportions were switched (.79% Green votes, 2.7% Buchanan and Libertarian votes). Gore would have got almost 2% more votes, Bush would have got almost 2% fewer, and Gore (who already had a .5% advantage in the popular vote) would have defeated Bush solidly, 50.3% to 46%. The Electoral College and the Supreme Court couldn't erase that margin. The Democrats have to stop running away from their fringe voters. --- Posted at 4/18/2004 08:48:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
House of Bush, House of Saud The New York Times just ran a stupid review of Craig Unger's book House of Bush, House of Saud. I strongly recommend Unger's book, but Tepperman's Times review is worth reading too, just for a glimpse at the way the establishment group mind works. Unger points out that the Bushes have long-established ties to the Saudis and that the Saudis have donated over a billion dollars to Bush-sponsored causes. He speculates that this may have caused the Bushes to be friendlier to the Saudis than they should have been. There's nothing really extreme about this conclusion. But Tepperman frames the book as a "conspiracy theory" in order to dismiss Unger's main points. He actually concedes many of Unger's facts (though one fact which he does not mention is that the 9/11 attack was manned, funded, and organized by Saudis.) He concludes his review by explaining that we are slaves of the Saudis and have little choice other than to do pretty much whatever they want us to do. Tepperman is the senior editor of the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs, which makes his mediocre dishonesty (and his hopelessness about our relationship with the Saudis) seem a bit more more alarming. More on the Bush-Saudi connection. --- Posted at 4/18/2004 07:11:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Would we have been better off leaving Saddam in power? My irascible friend Diana Moon (no link, scroll to "Sunday Morning") has asked the question: "Do you think that we would have been better off leaving Saddam in power?" This is not actually an outrageous question. What it amounts to asking is whether George Bush the First was right to leave Saddam ("a force for stability") in power after the First Iraq War. But the very fact that it can be asked at all speaks very poorly of the younger Bush's Second Iraq War. Coming up with something better than Saddam Hussein shouldn't have been that hard. From the American point of view, we have confirmed (at a very high cost) that Iraq never had any WMD. As for the terrorist threat, it has certainly become worse: more Islamic militants have been created, whereas nothing at all has been done to reduce terrorism (and resources have even been diverted from the real war on terror.) The war has severely stressed most of America's diplomatic relationships and has also been costly both economically and in terms of casualties. Are the Iraqis themselves better off? At this point no one in the world has any idea who will be governing Iraq in a year's time. (As far as that goes, no one in the world knows who will be governing Iraq two months from now). But the most likely possibilities are a militant Shiite theocracy, a long civil war, and an extended American occupation. None of these are necessarily better than Saddam's rule. We're frequently told that we've liberated the Iraqi women, but that's just because you always have to talk about the ill-treatment of women when you talk about Islam. Iraqi women, per se, were better off under Saddam than they are now under the mullahs, just as they were better off in Afghanistan under Communism than they have been since the Communists were overthrown. (No, this doesn't justify either Saddam or Communism, but the secular governments were much better about educating women and letting them work). And democracy now looks like the longest of long shots, with a real risk of getting an anti-American, anti-Israeli democracy. This is not the war we were sold, and we will not be able to make a success of it without a long, costly, and probably brutal occupation. Hawks assure us that we have no other choice, but most of what they told us last time turned out not to be true. Bush's war has been a complete failure unless its whole purpose was to get the U.S. involved in a longer and wider war. --- Posted at 4/18/2004 05:59:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Not A Political Statement Now KPIG's playing Reggae Accident: This is not a political statement Nor is it a farce In the land of the great bald bird The rasta man is sparse He does not like our urban jungle Or our capitalistic nightmare He does not believe in auto insurance Mon I don't believe that is fair It was a reggae accident Four rastas in a rambler A reggae accident They came from out of nowhere A reggae accident They were smoking some spliff cigars A reggae accident They totaled out my car I lost the case that sealed my fate Last week in municipal court The judge ruled for rasta restitution Of a most peculiar sort Now there's four stoned faces at my dinner table And my wife wonders how come She does not mind the extra mouths to feed As much as she minds those after dinner drums We sing was a reggae accident Four rastas eating pasta A reggae accident Pass the parmesan please A reggae accident How does a rasta spell relief A reggae accident No problem mon, pass the spliff Oh reggae down... Now the sun shines on the isle of Jamaica As it's done since time began No problem says the rasta mon When I asked to join his band You see I sold my house I quit my job I left that narrow-minded wife And I moved to the island of Jamaica ya Just to live that rasta lifeAnother KPIG favorite is Warren Zevon's Lawyers, Guns and Money, which is now the Bush theme song (along with "If I Only Had A Brain"). Send lawyers, guns and money Dad, get me out of thisand With the thoughts you'd be thinkin' You could be another Lincoln If you only had a brainFor a Sunday afternoon. --- Posted at 4/18/2004 04:57:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Why there was no moderate anti-war movement Matt Yglesias (April 17 and 18, "Were Anti-War Arguments Wrong", no permalinks) has recently published a piece admitting that he was wrong when he initially supported the Iraq war. He distinguishes his own confession of error from the expected flood of weaselly fake mea culpas, of which David Brooks' supremely weaselly piece is presumably only the first. ("I was wrong but I was right anyway": Matt's paraphrase). Matt, who is anti-dove, then asks why mainstream anti-war voices were so few before the war. His own answer and those of his commenters miss the point, however. Since the end of the Vietnam War, or 1980 at the latest, not being a dove has been one of the criteria for being part of the mainstream at all. Before the decision on Iraq War II had been definitively made, there was in fact a great deal of mainstream anti-war opinion (look here and here.) But when crunch time came, those opponents all folded -- because if they had not done so, they would have become pariahs. (As Scott Ritter and, more recently, Richard Clarke have seen). This consensus also probably accounts for a great deal of the media's writing-to-a-script, as repeatedly exposed by Bob Somerby. Up-and-coming young journalists learn what kinds of things they must say in order to continue to be up-and-coming. Nothing has changed. The policy-makers and opinion-leaders who were wrong are still in place. No one either in the media or in government has lost his job or suffered a demotion because of his mistakes. So you should plan to see the same old opinion-leaders, in endless parade, passing the buck and covering their butts at a dollar a word. But don't even hope to hear from the ones who were right all along. --- Posted at 4/18/2004 11:49:00 AM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
"Bring It On" This NY Times story includes this line: "Yet the killing will almost certainly have political consequences..." But actions that inflame the entire Arab world have other, more immediate consequences if you are a family with someone serving in Iraq: Report: 11 U.S. Troops, Dozens of Iraqis Killed. --- Posted at 4/18/2004 08:26:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/17/2004 1952 VINCENT BLACK LIGHTNING I'm listening to KPIG (online) and I nominate the following that they just played for Best Lyrics: 1952 VINCENT BLACK LIGHTNING by Richard Thompson (Hear it here.)Sigh. KPIG and Santa Cruz and Lighthouse Point and Steamer's Alley (it's a surfing thing)... Update -My potty-mouth wife says, "Romanticizing a bad way of life - A bank robber on a fucking motorcycle." I MET her in Santa Cruz! Other KPIG Best Evers: The Road Goes On Forever By Robert Earl Keen Illegal Smile by John PrineOh says Red Molly to James "That's a fine motorbike. A girl could feel special on any such like" Says James to Red Molly "My hat's off to you It's a Vincent Black Lightning, 1952. And I've seen you at the corners and cafes it seems Red hair and black leather, my favourite colour scheme" And he pulled her on behind and down to Boxhill they did ride Oh says James to Red Molly "Here's a ring for your right hand But I'll tell you in earnest I'm a dangerous man. For I've fought with the law since I was seventeen, I robbed many a man to get my Vincent machine. Now I'm 21 years, I might make 22 And I don't mind dying, but for the love of you. And if fate should break my stride Then I'll give you my Vincent to ride" "Come down, come down, Red Molly" called Sergeant McRae "For they've taken young James Adie for armed robbery. Shotgun blast hit his chest, left nothing inside. Oh come down, Red Molly to his dying bedside" When she came to the hospital, there wasn't much left He was running out of road, he was running out of breath But he smiled to see her cry He said "I'll give you my Vincent to ride" Says James "In my opinion, there's nothing in this world Beats a 52 Vincent and a red headed girl. Now Nortons and Indians and Greeves won't do, Ah, they don't have a soul like a Vincent 52" Oh he reached for her hand and he slipped her the keys Said "I've got no further use for these. I see angels on Ariels in leather and chrome, Swooping down from heaven to carry me home" And he gave her one last kiss and died And he gave her his Vincent to ride. --- Posted at 4/17/2004 01:27:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Another Fact On The Ground Sharon, thanking us for reversing decades of US policy and completely backing the policies of the Likud party while obtaining no concessions at all from Israel, has now had Hamas leader Rantisi assassinated. So this will be another "fact on the ground" for us to deal with. You might remember last month's Israeli assassination of Yassin -- the guy in the wheelchair. That assassination directly triggered the recent events in Iraq, leading to the deaths of 82 American soldiers, and hundreds of Iraqis. THIS assassination is very likely to lead to a further increase in violence in Iraq, and across the Middle East. We have a President who allows -- encourages -- these actions by Israel which lead DIRECTLY to increased violence in Iraq and the deaths of ever more American soldiers. It looks more and more like this President WANTS all-out war in the Middle East. --- Posted at 4/17/2004 12:26:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/16/2004 Powerful! The DNC has gotten it right. Go watch this powerful ad!!! DNC Video: Mistakes Were Made. Excellent. --- Posted at 4/16/2004 11:02:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Digby Hullabaloo: "There is a great big political battle going on with a bunch of guys who take no prisoners. We are not dealing with our daddy's Republican Party. They are not going to disappear and they are not going to allow us to enact a progressive agenda unimpeded. We'd best take that into account because simply reforming the Democratic Party into a fighting progressive voice for change ain't gonna get it done. We need every last person for this battle from all those awful DLC'rs and Democrats in the House and Senate to John Edwards to audacious faux Dem Wes Clark to Howard Dean. We don't have to sign any loyalty oaths but we do have to be serious and mature and understand how terribly difficult and how high the stakes are in trying to govern with the sort of opposition that puts a criminal like Tom DeLay into a leadership position. They will fight with everything they have."Digby! Digby! Digby! --- Posted at 4/16/2004 10:25:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Intellectual Crisis of the Left Over at Blogging of the President Matt Stoller is writing about "the intellectual crisis of the left." He summarizes posts on the subject by Peter Levine and Mark Schmitt of the Decemberist. I piped in with the following, and repeat the comment here: Levine writes (as paraphrased by you) that "Creating a network of left-wing institutions to play hardball politics with the right as the radicals have done (such as Air America to balance Rush Limbaugh), doesn't make sense, and can only lead to a further fraying of our civic culture."I'd like to take issue with that view of what Progressive organizations would do, if only we could get them funded. I'm much closer to Schmitt's view. Let's step back a minute and think about what the Right's huge advocacy infostructure is and how it affects our politics. First, take a look at Jerry Landray's Media Transparency article about the huge machine backing up Bush's campaign efforts, and the recent NCRP study it discusses. (And some of my own research starting here.) Here's how I see it: This huge infrastructure of the Right -- "the Wurlitzer" -- has spent decades softening up the public, spreading right-wing memes through the population, creating "conventional wisdom" that we need "tort reform," "tax relief," "school choice," and that "Social Security is going broke" and many more such themes. So after hearing this, over and over, the public is ready to support politicians offering solutions to these "problems." So what these organizations do is lay the groundwork for the Republican Party to come in and harvest votes. It hardly matters who their candidate is, the election script is already written, they just repeat it, and they have this huge chorus backing them up nationwide. So come election time, the public has already been prepped. Progressives and Moderates have very few real advocacy organizations in place -- especially not those that promote general Progressive principals out to the general public. As a result, the public is not prepped for Progressive issues. Our politicians have to educate the public about problems and issues from scratch, alone, and must do it during each election cycle. And not just alone, as in a voice in the wilderness against the huge right-wing chorus, but also they do not get the kind of marketing advice and assistance that organizations like the Heritage Foundation offer. Mark Schmitt nails this when he writes, "Having worked on a presidential campaign in 2000, I came to the conclusion that the hardest thing to do within a campaign, even an idea-driven campaign, is to develop new ideas, because the field operation, the message-of-the-day, the press, dealing with the candidate's time, etc., consume everyone's energy. The best a campaign can do is to pick up on and promote ideas already developed, and so I see campaigns as the moment where we measure the availability of new ideas in the larger world, and the success of other groups and people in developing the kind of visions and policy blueprints that candidates can use. If the candidates fail to do so, it is at least in part an indication of the failure of the think tanks or other institutions that are supposed to do the job.But I don't think the problem is that our "think tanks or other institutions" are failing to do the job, I think the problem is that WE are failing to understand that this is the job of these think tanks and other institutions and not the politicians and parties. So it's really WE who are to blame for not creating and funding them. We often complain that the "Democratic Party" is not "finding its voice" and is not explaining issues well, etc. We complain that Kerry is not voicing the issues effectively. But look at the other side. Do you think Bush is this amazing master of communications. NO! He just repeats what the right-wing machine feeds him. The Republican Party is little more than the candidate wing of this huge apparatus. So we shouldn't be blaming the Democratic Party, this is not their job. The job of politicians is to reflect the will of the public. The job of a network of advocacy organizations is to set up that background of public understanding for them. Politicians on the Right have such an easy job! The public has been hearing decades of "what's wrong with" public schools, lawsuits, etc. AND hearing "experts" talk about how to solve those problems, so the politicians of the Right just come in and pick up on that. THAT is the role of the Right's network of advocacy institutions. The progressive Center for American Progress is one small, small beginning towards doing something about this. But they are just one organization, and their focus is current legislative issues -- sort of trying to beat back the tide. The Right has over 500 such organizations in place. They have literally thousand of well-funded operatives. Our side needs people to step up to the plate and start funding these kinds of organizations as well. So I think that yes, we DO need a network of left-wing institutions. But what I think they should be doing is putting out books, articles, op-ed pieces, and people to talk on the radio and TV, all advocating a return of progressive values of community, democracy, sharing, nurturance, tolerance, etc. I see this as an effort to restore civility, not to further fray our civic culture. I think that leaving the Right's institutions in charge of the megaphone is what is very, very dangerous to our civic culture. But, as I said, my vision of this is that the organizations are conducting the research into how to better our society, and doing the research on the nest ways to put the word out there, advocating progressive values of community, etc. (Some time ago I wrote something similar in Don't Blame the Democrats.) --- Posted at 4/16/2004 07:20:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Facts On The Ground -- So Deal With It I'm watching the press conference with Bush and Blair. They are talking about the decision to back Sharon's plan, and screw the Palestinians. In the press conference they are saying something along the lines of, "Well, this is the way it is NOW, and you can either look back and say, 'You shouldn't have done that' or you can look at what is happening now and get involved in the reality of today.' " This is another example of leaders presenting us with "facts on the ground." Bush and Sharon are just going ahead and doing what they want, and getting the situation the way they want it, regardless of what the public wants or the participants want. They just go ahead and do what they want and tell us to deal with it. Since the Palestinians don't like they solution THEY propose, they are going around them, saying that they are blocking peace so they are going to go ahead and impose this WITHOUT Palestinian participation or negotiation. This is the new style of our government -- no listening to public opinion, no votes, no legislation, just presenting us with "facts on the ground" and telling us this is the way it is now so deal with it. This is the corporate style of management. "The decision has been made." Present us with "facts on the ground" and call it "bold leadership." The format of press conference itself exemplifies this style: there will be 3 questions and no more, and forget this nonsense about leaders being accountable to the public. The decision has been made. They have learned from the WMD situation. They made up a justification for invading Iraq -- WMDs -- and now it is causing them trouble. So forget the justifications from now on, they are just going to go ahead and make declarations and we'd best just "shut up shut up shut up" and recognize that, as Bush said in his press conference. "The decision has been made and it is not going to change." Remember what Chalabi said about tricking the US into invading Iraq: "When asked if he feels any unease or discomfort at the fact that some Americans feel the United States was suckered into a war under the false pretenses of disarming Saddam of weapons of mass destruction, Chalabi replies, 'No. ... We are in Baghdad now.'"The decision has been made, and they are in Baghdad now. --- Posted at 4/16/2004 09:30:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/15/2004 The Apprentice: Guest Starring George W. Bush The Apprentice: Guest Starring George W. Bush --- Posted at 4/15/2004 06:42:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Tax RELIEF??!! Headline at the Kerry campaign site: "John Kerry has proposed three times more tax relief for middle-class families than George W. Bush "Tax RELIEF???!!! What's next, "Tort Reform?" You would think that SOMEONE in the Kerry campaign would be aware of Lakoff and others' work on FRAMING, since every weblog I read and most politically aware thinking people I am in contact with is. How can a national political campaign in the year 2004 make such a framing mistake? If Kerry gives in to the Right's use of language, and acknowledges their framing of this issue, why not just endorse Bush, since the "need for" tax cuts is the central message of Bush's campaign? How can Kerry now argue that the deficits are bad? And then there's Kerry's statement on Bush's sudden, surprise reversal yesterday of decades of US progress on Mid-East peace, enraging the entire Arab world: That Bush's move was good politics was evidenced by Democratic rival John F. Kerry's quick move not to let Bush outflank him among pro-Israel voters. "I think that could be a positive step," the Massachusetts senator said, approving of the Bush-Sharon action regarding both refugees and Israel's borders.I'm still going to vote for Kerry. But... I'm not going to ask if it's him or his old-style Washington Democrat campaign staff... He hired them. I'll put the Kerry donation button back up when I feel better about him. --- Posted at 4/15/2004 09:40:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/14/2004 Did Ashcroft Intimidate the 9/11 Commission? Slate has a couple of good articles up about Bush's speech and Ashcroft's testimony. What this usually means is that we can expect to see a couple of crappy articles soon for balance, to protect Slate against the charge that they've gone all liberal and shit. (But I suppose I should be grateful and not complain so much.) Molly Ivins summed up Bush's Texas character in three words: pious, macho, and anti-intellectual. Saletan describes a man detached from reality and perhaps borderline mentally-ill. Partly in response to his article, I ended up fearing that Bush might win the election even after all the rational conservatives (Richard Clarke, George Will) have jumped ship, leaving us with a lame-duck President who owes nothing at all to anyone who has a brain. After all, he "means what he says", and the voters seem to like that. Kaplan's piece asks why Ashcroft was treated so gently by the 9/11 commission, which allowed him to blame various Clinton-administration people and did not confront him about his own inaction. Ashcroft, who put a low priority on counterterrorism and denied requests for more funding, is really the most vulnerable member of the Bush administration, but the commission didn't even touch him. Kaplan speculates about various plausible reasons for this, but leaves out the possibility that the commission had been intimidated. Ashcroft will almost certainly remain Attorney General for the next nine months, and might well serve for four years after that. He's an utterly ruthless true believer who controls police powers (many of them as-yet unused) which are unprecedented in American history. Perhaps the members of the commission all decided that they didn't dare make an enemy of a man like that. Those are two pretty chilling possibilities. Bush's support is steadily eroding, but we can expect a savage counterattack, and Bush has gotten out of the last two or three weeks a lot better off than he deserved to. Trust, Don't Verify (Saletan in Slate) Ashcroft Gets a Free Pass (Kaplan in Slate) --- Posted at 4/14/2004 10:10:00 AM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
The Right Declares Absolute War On 9/11 Questions New York Post Editorial: NATIONAL DISGRACE: "The national 9/11 commission has been hijacked by political shills -- men and women eager to subordinate truth to partisan advantage; who hold a transitory victory on Election Day more dear than American victory in the war on terror. Tawdry ambition has eclipsed sacred duty; all Americans are diminished, but none more than the families of the 9/11 victims -- who expect better from the commission, and certainly deserve it. Unless it is the thousands of young Americans now under arms in Iraq and elsewhere; their bravery and devotion to duty is inspirational. How shameful that the commission attack dogs hold their sacrifices so cheaply. And John F. Kerry, who presumes to the presidency, acquiesces. What a disgrace. "There's more. It is incredibly divisive and intending to inflame Bush supporters to a hateful frenzy. Watch your backs. --- Posted at 4/14/2004 07:12:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/13/2004 At The Kerry Blog Over at the John Kerry for President Blog: "Tonight, the President had the opportunity to tell the American people what steps he was going to take to stabilize the situation in Iraq. Unfortunately, he offered no specific plan whatsoever. Rather, the President made it clear that he intends to stubbornly cling to the same policy that has led to a greater risk to American troops and a steadily higher cost to the American taxpayer." --- Posted at 4/13/2004 08:10:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
The Press Conference II It seems to me that after this performance tonite REAL Republicans must be REALLY pissed off at the Scaife-funded "movement conservatives" who have taken over their party, and packaged up Bush as a Product to be Marketed, and got us into this incredible mess in Iraq, and put the country into massive, massive debt. So are they going to continue to take focus-group-tested instructions from Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, or are they going to take their party back from the Tom Delay/Pat Robertson/Newt Gingrich corporate-fascism crowd? I mean, looking back from here, compared to this crowd even Nixon seems like a reasonable, fairly-honest, moderate leader who was at least somewhat concerned about the greater good of his country when it came down to it. --- Posted at 4/13/2004 08:02:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Ashcroft Sets Looniness Record Today Attorney General John Ashcroft made two of the looniest statements that any public official has ever been guilty of. Yeah, I know that that's saying something. I don't mean blaming the Clinton administration for 9/11. We knew that the shifty-eyed, guilt-wracked Puritan with the shameful secret would do that. The looniness is in the way he did it. "The commission cited a May 10 Justice Department document setting priorities for 2001. The top priorities cited were reducing gun violence and combating drug trafficking. There was no mention of counter-terrorism.....[Ashcroft] said the May 10 memorandum was based on goals developed by the previous administration." In other words, almost five months after he had been selected by Bush, Ashcroft hadn't changed anything whatsoever. He was still working for Bill Clinton! Looniness the Second: later in his testimony Ashcroft said "Our agents were isolated by government-imposed walls [and] handcuffed by government-imposed restrictions...." I hate to tell you, John, but you aren't an outsider any more. You are the government! The Department of Justice is not an innovative private entrepreneur being crushed by the load of government regulation, or a hardworking family man being harassed by the IRS. The Department of Justice is a branch of government! You have to come up with some new cliches! The man is afraid of calico cats. He's threatened by neoclassical marble sculptures of bare-breasted women. He has assigned trained investigators to surf for porn on the internet. He spent over a hundred thousand dollars prosecuting Tommy Chong for bongs. He spent tens of thousands of dollars finding whores in New Orleans when you practically have to fight them off, and when most guys can score for less than two hundred. Boobs and loonies usually live out their lives in obscurity and are forgotten a few years after they die, but Ashcroft has earned himself a reputation which will last as long as the rivers flow and the grass is green. Too goddamn bad we didn't promise that to the Indians. Story --- Posted at 4/13/2004 06:50:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
The Press Conference I'm watching the press conference. I'm having so many reactions... I keep wanting to write about specific things Bush is saying... The admission that he has a list to call on, his focus-group-tested statement that oceans used to protect us (he's never heard of ICBMs, or the British burning Washington DC?), his clear lie about WMDs combined with his statements that the Iraq war is really about changing the Middle-East, his bumbling, rambling manner, his inability to admit ANY kind of mistake... AND some of the reporters were asking actual questions - not tough but certainly more than they ever have. But I'm going to See the Forest, not the trees, and say that I think I am watching history. I think there has never been a Presidential performance like this before, and I am including Reagan's rambling answer in the Mondale debates, when his Alzheimer's disease was beginning to have its effect. I can not imagine that a reasonable adult could watch this performance without thinking that it would be best if the Republicans choose someone else as their candidate this year. Best for the country, best for the Republican Party, best for the world. It was ON HIS WATCH! RUN SOMEONE ELSE! --- Posted at 4/13/2004 06:29:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
What Did He DO? Everyone is asking, "What did the President DO after seeing the Aug., 6 memo?" Thanks to Kos, here is the transcript of Bush the next day. This is on the White House's own server, by the way. Remarks by the President to the Pool. (That's press pool...) --- Posted at 4/13/2004 04:42:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Abraham Lincoln: Stalin or Osama? Recently a regrettable controversy erupted when Blogger Y was accused of having compared Blogger J to Hitler. Below our neo-Confederate friends show us how we can make our points vividly without using the Hitler comparison. At issue is an attempt to erect the first statue of Lincoln anywhere in the solid Republican South. This led to a split in the Virginia Republican Party, many of whom think of Lincoln as a hated Northern Liberal. Opposition was led by U.S. Rep. Virgil Goode (R., VA.) and Virginia Legislature Delegate Richard Black (R., Loudon), with some help from The Washington Times. Comments from the first three pages of a 3600-signature petition: "Absolutely Not ! I'll accept a statue of Ape Lingum in Richmond when Karl Marx and Vlad Lenin are placed in Washington, D.C. along with a statue of Bin Laden in New York City..... Why not put up a statue of Osama bin Laden at Ground Zero?.... The only way that I would support a statue of Lincoln in Richmond would be to have him depicted in CHAINS in a kneeling position!.... Put up a Lincoln statue in Richmond ONLY after you put up a John Wilkes Booth statue at Ford's theatre.... A statue of Lincoln the war criminal doesn't deserve to be anywhere in the state of Virginia, much less in Richmond....." There's more on this from Mac Diva here. Mac now writes at Macaronies and Silver Rights. --- Posted at 4/13/2004 03:07:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Al Franken I hope you're all listening to Al Franken's show every day. It is just so FUNNY! --- Posted at 4/13/2004 10:10:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/12/2004 The Other Side of the Story: John Kerry and Martin Van Buren Some may think that the 9/11 investigation is about George W. Bush and maybe Bill Clinton, but if you spend enough time on the internet you'll find out that it's really about LBJ, FDR, Woodrow Wilson, and every other goddamn no good Democratic President that there ever was or will be. My friend Al at Brad DeLong has strengthened the Republicans' case, pointing out that the Democrat Martin Van Buren's performance in the 1837-1838 Caroline incident and Aroostook War on the Maine-New Brunswick border was disgraceful and cowardly. Kerry should firmly dissociate himself from Van Buren's costly do-nothing policy in the Aroostook Valley, and explain that as a New Democrat he has renounced the failed policies of the past. Unless he does so, he cannot expect the American People to elect him to the highest office in the land. --- Posted at 4/12/2004 05:34:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Back Off The Bin Ladens On the Randi Rhodes Radio Show, she just suggested going to Google and looking up the phrase "Back Off The Bin Ladens". And always keep in mind that the President's Daily Briefing, warning of an al-Queda attack on the US, was presented to Bush the day before he started the longest vacation any President has taken. --- Posted at 4/12/2004 12:54:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/11/2004 Instructions skippy has instructions for a President who said he needs things spelled out VERRRRRRY clearly. --- Posted at 4/11/2004 07:00:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/09/2004 Cronies Arianna writes about the Republican Palace in Iraq. I call it the Republican Crony Club. --- Posted at 4/09/2004 07:40:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Have A Nice Weekend RADIO AUSTRALIA: "North Korea says nuclear stand-off 'at brink of war'" --- Posted at 4/09/2004 03:19:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Rice's testimony supports Clarke In her testimony before the 9/11 Commission, Condoleezza Rice spoke repeatedly about "structural and legal impediments", "structiral problems", "structural inability", etc., etc. The basic idea is that the failure to respond to warnings about terrorism was because of problems in the bureaucracy, and that the Bush administration was working on these problems when 9/11 hit. Richard Clarke knew all about structural problems. When Clinton's National Security Adviser Sandy Berger "convened the Principals [Cabinet-level officials] in crisis mode", he was taking steps to get all of the top people in the Clinton Administration to work at overcoming the structural problems of the system. In the Clinton Administration the top people worked to overcome the structural problems. In the Bush administration, they didn't. The bureaucrats were the same in both cases. The problem wasn't structure, but leadership. The ones responsible are Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Cheney, Bush -- and above all, Rice. --- Posted at 4/09/2004 09:00:00 AM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
We need more partisanship Mild-mannered Kevin Drum (now writing for the insanely-moderate Washington Monthly) has linked to a wonkish yet fluffy article which bemoans America's increasing partisanship and suggests some nice bipartisan reasons for it. (One of the reasons was people becoming more partisan in a heavily partisan environment just to fit in). The viciousness that has won the Republicans a lot of elections during the last decade or so is not mentioned, of course, nor is the stolen 2000 Presidential election. Here's my slightly-edited comment, which was a response to a poster named Carl: Carl is right. The article didn't mention people becoming LESS partisan (perhaps by making remarks about "pandering to the core constituency") in order to be accepted. I mean the various counter-intuitive, DLC Democrats -- for example, the leadership of the Democratic Party. While I have been harsh in the past about the wimpiness of the Democratic leaders, I now grudgingly admit that to a degree it is a reasonable response to a situation in which you are not the majority party and you have to work with the majority to get anything done, combined with the fact that a considerable proportion of the Dems are personally half-Republican and will cave in a showdown. But Democratic leadership should be thinking a lot harder of ways to take back the majority, rather than resigning themselves to minority status. Their main leadership strategy that I've seen is to wait for the Republicans to move even further right so that the Dems can pick up "moderate" Republicans of the McCain type (thus moving further right themselves.) I am also convinced that Peretz and a number of other significant voices in the party (i.e., his stable of punks) are much more intent on destroying the left wing of the party than they are in putting the Democrats in power. The partisanship seen on the left is mostly anger at the 2000 election and the generally vicious trend of the Republicans, especially over the last decade. In other words, Democratic partisanship is a belated response to vicious Republican partisanship (a response which is replacing the DLC "submissive wetting" strategy). Some of the demographic and other wonk explanations in the article might be partly true, but overall I think that it is fundamentally misleading. The more partisan the Democrats get, and the more partisan Democrats there are, the happier I'll be. The two-party system only works if there are plenty of partisans, as the Republicans very well know. We have to learn to play the game the way it's played. --- Posted at 4/09/2004 08:23:00 AM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Time to cut some brush The Washington Post via Josh Micah Marshall: "Bush has spent all or part of 500 days in office at one of his three retreats, or more than 40 percent of his presidency." The whole Bush family has always taken the whole month of August off. If you want an image of The Bosses, forget about top hats and cigars and the other cartoonist's cliches. Just think of every member of a large family being able to say "Oh, by the way, I'm taking August off". That's not the common American experience. Few workers can schedule their vacations whenever they want to, and few indeed get a whole month off. On my mother's 80th birthday we moved heaven and earth so that finally 20 out of 22 children, inlaws, and grandchildren were able to be there at some point during the same week. In France, of course, because of a strong labor movement and strong labor laws, most people do get a full month off (often in August). And any good Republican can tell you how terrible a thing that is, when it's workers who are able to do it. And the Republicans have done a good job of making sure that that kind of thing doesn't happen here. Supposedly Bush "works from home". Most people have heard that one before too. Sometimes the people working at home actually do work, and sometimes you're pretty sure they don't, but almost always you know that they're able to do it because they're the boss. As Bush says about himself, they're the boss and don't have to answer any questions. Of course, we can also ask ourselves whether Bush has ever really been management either. Harken and Arbusto seem mainly to have been shell companies used to launder funds being transferred from one mysterious entity to another, like a Mafia-owned cafe. And with the Texas Rangers, Bush lent his name and face as a front, but otherwise was a silent partner. Of course, there's a standard troll answer to this: "Work smarter, not harder! Look how hard Jimmy Carter worked, and look at the terrible results he got!" Which might be fine, except that the wheels are coming off Bush's cart. The biggest job loss since Hoover, and a lose-lose war of attrition in Iraq. Bush's campaign only has two things to run on: first, smears against Kerry, and second (if things improve slightly) talk about how "He turned things around". Which amounts to running against himself, because he can't afford to compare himself to Clinton. "Things are a lot better now than they were during my first 3 1/2 years!" Sounds like a good time for the trolls to be spending some time with their families. I bet there's a lot of brush to cut on those little troll ranches. --- Posted at 4/09/2004 07:24:00 AM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/08/2004 What Really Happened Today What really happened today is we learned about "the memo." You're going to be hearing a lot about this memo. Bush Administration Warned 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States' - Center for American Progress: "Two and a half years after 9/11, the American public learned today that President Bush received explicit warnings that Osama bin Laden was planning to attack the United States -- including activities 'consistent with preparations for hijacking.' Yet, there was no domestic follow-up by the Bush administration. No high level meetings. No sense of urgency. No warnings to FBI agents across the country.OK, on August 6, 2001, Bush gets a CIA briefing memo titled 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States'. It says they're going to hijack airplanes. The next day Bush left on the longest vacation any President had taken and the administration ignores the warning. (Read this one for a real kick - but look at the date first.) I think this is going to sink in. The title of the memo makes it too easy to see that they just blew it off. And the things they have been saying - that they were never warned, even that the only things in this memo were in obscure footnotes... AND that they have been doing everything in their power to block the public from learning about this memo. Now we know why. Meanwhile, Bush is on vacation again, while Iraq falls apart. As of the last time I turned on the news (a few hours ago) at least 41 American soldiers dead in combat so far this week. Today may have been it for Bush. --- Posted at 4/08/2004 08:02:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
You've Probably Heard It An e-mail I just received: Have you heard of the No-Carb Diet for 2004? NO C-heney NO A-shcroft NO R-umsfeld NO B-ush and absolutely NO RICE! --- Posted at 4/08/2004 10:53:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Why Are We In Iraq? A simple question. Why are we in Iraq now? There is no threat to the U.S. No weapons of mass destruction. Saddam and his sons no longer run the country. The people in our military did not sign up and put their lives on the line to defend Iraq or to build democracy in the Middle East (a cover story for going and getting the oil -- watch what they DO, not what they SAY; putting Chalabi in charge in Iraq has NOTHING to do with building democracy. NOTHING.) These people signed up and put their lives on the line to defend America, their families, you, and me. That might sound extremely self-centered, but we're when talking about asking people to do and die I don't think America's youth signed up to lay their lives down for reasons having so little to do with the defense of America. I think that being self-centered about lives might be a good idea. It is supposed to keep us from doing stupid things like starting wars. So now we are in Iraq BECAUSE we are in Iraq. Now that we have invaded we can't leave. It's a fact on the ground now. As Chalabi said, with a smug smile, what happened in the past doesn't matter because we're in Baghdad now. Bush wants to cut and run, starting June 30. Great. Leave the place a mess, like Afghanistan. Put corrupt cronies in charge to keep the oil flowing our way, and bug out, timed perfectly for the election. Elections in Afghanistan in October, troops out of Iraq by October, too. Chaos delayed until December but the past won't matter because we're in the White House for good now. But we have a "we broke it, we fix it" situation. Now we have to stay because if we leave now the country descends into chaos -- and it will be our fault if that happens. The Geneva Convention says we are responsible because we invaded. AND the country could actually become what Bush said it was. It could become a cauldron of terrorism directed at the United States -- developing weapons of mass destruction, with terrorist training camps in the country and financing terrorist activities around the world. So we have to stay. None of us signed up or this. I think the country is going to start realizing this. I think the people in the military are realizing it already. I think the people who were thinking of joining the military are realizing that, too -- so I think the draft is inevitable now. I think Bush has created the terrorist nightmare. It's only just beginning now. And we can't leave. Update - A comment I left somewhere: A cousin's son is in the Marines. He's in Recon and went into Iraq BEFORE the war started. People with relatives or friends over there don't talk so much about the strategic benefits or higher meanings of all of this, they talk about their relatives and friends and worry that they'll be OK. Strategery and higher meaning I guess is for the country's leaders - NONE of whom have relatives at risk. I guess that's why they're our leaders? Because they can strategize and move chess pieces around the world without worrying about it hitting home. I think about all the people in the military who signed up and put their lives on the line to DEFEND AMERICA. I don't know when there has ever been such a betrayal of them as this. It could be reasoned that Vietnam was about defending America, but not this. No way this. Yes, it's late. I can't sleep tonite for some reason. More here. Mindblowing. --- Posted at 4/08/2004 12:21:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/07/2004 Expect a Terror Alert President Bush is vacationing today, after a pleasant day yesterday joking around on the campaign trail. Meanwhile the nightmare in Iraq has started to unfold. The Shias and the Sunnis are working together, there is fighting in seven or more different cities, and some of the Iraqi police we trained are joining the rebels. Nothing Bush has said about the war has been true, and the planning for the occupation was insanely optimistic and unbelievably sloppy. How can anyone still support the guy? In the Washington Post, Meyerson says what we've all been saying -- dump Bush. Even George Will seems shaken, as if he's starting to realize how worthless our President is. (Though all he really recommends is a delay in the fake transfer of sovereignty). Bush has to counterattack, but he's running out of tricks. Expect the worst. Meyerson -- Washington Post: "The only unequivocally good policy option before the American people is to dump the president who got us into this mess, who had no trouble sending our young people to Iraq but who cannot steel himself to face the Sept. 11 commission alone." George Will in the Washington Post: "Not much else having gone as planned since the fall of Baghdad, a delay in the transfer of sovereignty, scheduled for June 30, should not be unthinkable. A delay would trigger violence. But, then, the transfer on schedule probably would be preceded by an offensive by the insurgents. The transfer is to be from the Coalition Provisional Authority, whose authority does not extend throughout the country. A U.S. official in Baghdad says Sadr will be arrested if he appears "any place that we control." --- Posted at 4/07/2004 10:14:00 AM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/06/2004 Pandagon: Corporate Taxation I left a comment to this post: Pandagon: Corporate Taxation about whether companies pass taxes along to their customers: (ETMMLB) Taxes are not a COST. You don't even know your taxes until the end of the year, after you figure your costs and revenues. THEN you compute your taxes. So you can't pass on your taxes to customers. AND, if you did add something for taxes, what about your competitors? They don't have to, and that makes them more competitive because they aren't tacking on some extra price, so why would you add to the price? AND if you are not optimally pricing your product... I mean, if you are not charging what you can get ALREADY you are n't doing a good job. This argument that companies pass on their taxes to their customers is so silly. A corporation SHOULD be taxed. Otherwise there is no reason for us to charter them. We let corporations do business (and give the stockholders benefits like limited liability) IN ORDER TO BENEFIT US. So if they make money, we tax them and have schools and stuff. Jeeze. How far have we been pushed by this right-wing stuff?And now thinking about it, the people who really ARE taxed when corporations are taxed are the rich clucks who own most of the stock in corporations. So by convincing people not to tax corporations they're convincing the public to give the rich clucks a break and tax themselves instead. Nice work if you can get it. What think you? --- Posted at 4/06/2004 10:24:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Iraq seems to be falling apart I know that no one comes here for late-breaking news, but it's Tuesday afternoon and all hell has broken loose in Iraq. At least 20 coalition troops have died in the last 24 hours, and the uprisings seem to be by many different groups in at least 4 different places -- and the Fallujah offensive is continuing. Juan Cole has speculated (and mild-mannered Kevin Drum seems to agree) that hawkish elements in the administration, sensing confusion (!!) at the top, have deliberately escalated military action in order to leave the relative doves in the State Department a fait accompli which would be hard to withdraw from -- Ariel Sharon's old "facts on the ground" trick. I have never gone wrong so far in expecting the worst from the Bush administration. The worst we can see here would be continued escalation (with each American death being used as a reason for further escalation) coordinated with vicious domestic attacks on the patriotism of any American who criticizes or opposes the Bush plan. War is going to be the only thing Bush has to sell this fall, and a hot war of revenge would be easier to sell than the piecemeal war of attrition we have been seeing up until today. I don't see any possible positive outcome in Iraq itself, but I can easily imagine that if the killing continues the Bush propaganda machine might be able to spin his disastrous failure into a heroic defense of freedom -- and re-election. I was not active in the last three anti-war movements, and I only really opposed the second Iraq War. However, if we see Bush continuing to escalate the killing while demonizing his opponents and supercharging his election campaign, I think that the time to take to the streets wil have come. Even if you never call your Congressman, call him now. Marshall Cole Drum --- Posted at 4/06/2004 03:09:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/05/2004 The Truth Really IS "Out There" Cross-posted at The American Street. The Bush campaign is marketing a candidate as a consumer product. Where Senator Kerry talks of "issues" and "has positions" the Bush campaign talks about "feelings and values" and avoids specifics. As a person with a marketing background I understand that the Bush approach is very effective. After all, his campaign is handled by the kind of people who sell tobacco, convincing people to kill themselves and hand over their money while doing it; they are very good at what they do. But as a citizen I blanch. bl Sales and marketing is not about "truth," it's about forming an emotional attachment with a "brand." Consumers tend to make purchases seeking short-term emotional satisfaction rather than long-term value. They buy "brands" based on emotional things like a "new car smell" or because "nothing says loving like something form the oven." (Psychological studies show that this ad's target demographic -- homemakers -- feel they best express their love for their families by cooking or baking things for them. So instead of selling taste or ease-of-baking or other attributes, they sell "says loving.") When we hear that Bush is trying to "define" Kerry, it means he is trying to establish a "brand identity" and an emotional attachment in the consumers' mind. (Negative emotions for Kerry, positive for Bush.) Bush is selling himself as the "low taxes, leadership" brand. Here's the key: in branding you only have to repeat it over and over, not actually be it, for the brand identity to stick. "Compassionate Conservative" is a great example of this. By repeating over and over that he was a "compassionate conservative" Bush BECAME that in the public mind. You don't have to BE it, you just have to SAY you're it. It works. Unfortunately segments of the American public are increasingly trained to see themselves as consumers rather than citizens, so there we are. Bush blasts out another $10 million in ads funded by corporate special interests, and we see poll numbers move in his favor. (Bush is the "low taxes and leadership brand." Can you tell me what brand Kerry is?) Just this morning in a Washington Post article about the Republican National Committee’s Ed Gillespie, we read the following: "Gillespie's mission is stripped-down simple: He has a presidential election to win. You do that by having the most votes (okay, usually). To get the most votes, you expand your party. To expand your party, you make your message very clear, distilling policy until a voter can throw it down like a shot of whiskey."And, of course, you repeat it over and over. And again. Most of us see Bush ads saying Kerry will raise taxes, or won’t protect us from terrorists, and we are insulted, and we wonder how anyone can be stupid enough to believe this stuff. We know lies when we hear them, and we resent that they would think we are stupid enough to be tricked by such deceptions. (We know that the Bush smell is anything but "new car" -- not by a long, long shot.) But unfortunately many, many people are not as well-informed as we are, and are busy, and don't know much about Kerry or about politics in general, so these ads do have an effect. Keep this in mind: polls show that most people STILL believe that Iraq was responsible for 9/11! Meanwhile Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the Right are telling people not to believe any news other than FOX. So the question is: How do we -- informed online blog-readers -- fight this? How do we do our part? We fight it with information. There is a tremendous power that comes from lots and lots of people with good information. And there are lots and lots of us. We must get more and more people connected to information and news sources that are willing to tell it like it is. There is a list of weblogs on the left side of this page, and every one of them is a great resource. (Start with BuzzFlash and go there every day.) Then we take our information out there and talk to people, and persuade them. Note – I’m talking about us here, the well-informed, online, active people. In hi-tech marketing we would be called the "early adaptors" and "influencers." We still need -- more than ever -- the short, condensed, focus-group-tested sound-bytes that convey our message in a few words, designed to be repeated over and over. That must also be there for the general public, and for US to use as talking points. And that's the job of the professionals. (I hope they're working on this -- where's my talking points?) Air America Radio is off to a great start, and I can feel the positive effect it has on our morale and our courage to FINALLY hear a counter to the incessant 24-hour 7-day right-wing pro-Republican propaganda. It is just so refreshing and I hope you are listening, too. (You can listen online from anywhere in the world by visiting their website.) One thing that I find very encouraging is that I am hearing them using bloggers as their pundits! Last week I heard Atrios, and Kos, and Josh Marshall on the air! This is a significant development because it further legitimizes what we are doing here, offering an alternative voice. --- Posted at 4/05/2004 10:41:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
What've I Been Saying? Ed the Quipper, about the head of the Republican National Committee: "To get the most votes, you expand your party. To expand your party, you make your message very clear, distilling policy until a voter can throw it down like a shot of whiskey."Bush is the "lower taxes, leadership" brand. Can anyone tell me what Kerry's short, simple message is? --- Posted at 4/05/2004 07:43:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Who Gets the Money? Today columnist Bob Herbert writes, We're More Productive. Who Gets the Money?: "American workers have been remarkably productive in recent years, but they are getting fewer and fewer of the benefits of this increased productivity. " Or, as I like to put it, Who is our economy FOR, anyway? --- Posted at 4/05/2004 07:25:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/04/2004 The Other Side of the Story People complain that we at STF don't give the opposition a chance to be heard, so I've decided to offer equal time to "Al" (none@none.com), who diligently defends our President on The Washington Monthly comments board and elsewhere. The topic is the claim that the Republicans have been demanding that Bush and Cheney be questioned together because they're worried that Bush will embarass himself if he doesn't have a handler present. I have deleted an unfortunate personal attack on Kevin Drum who, whatever he is, is a happily married man and in no sense a "fucking" liar. Al speaks: "This can easily be dealt with, and I'm confident that the President will do so in his usual masterful fashion. Get Bush's toughest press critics together (yes, even the fearsome David Broder -- Bush isn't afraid of anyone.) Bring out the gum, pass it around so everyone knows that it's really gum. Have him put the gum in his mouth in such a way that everyone can clearly see it. Then have [him] walk across the room and back without falling down, and the whole controversy is over and done with. And for a clincher, he can confidently and unerringly reach around and grab his butt with both hands, looking all of those bastards straight in the eye. A lot of people are going to have egg on their faces. And the whole story will disappear. Just like the fake Plame controversy, and the fake WMD conbtroversy, and the fake cocaine controversy, and the fake AWOL controversy, and the fake drug bill controversy, and the fake "jobless recovery" controversy, and the fake Harken controversy, and the fake Halliburton controversy, and the fake Florida election controversy, and all the other BS that the Democratic conspiracy theorists have dreamed up in order to cripple a lawfully elected President who is proudly supported by over two-thirds of the American voters. People say that Cheney is worried about the results of the gum-chewing photo-op and wants to videotape it just in case, but that's complete lying bullshit......" --- Posted at 4/04/2004 10:35:00 AM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/03/2004 I Haven't Been Posting Much I haven't been posting much because I am working on a union research contract. We've got John Emerson and Richard and sometimes Thomas, and I'm looking for guest bloggers (any volunteers?) to fill the slack as well. --- Posted at 4/03/2004 05:05:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/02/2004 Boring The word all the wingnuts must use to describe Air America Radio is "boring". On Crossfire yesterday, Tucker Carlson took care of his obligations to the talking points right off the bat. But he wasn't quite ready for Franken's answer. The whole place cracked up, even Bowtie Boy himself. CARLSON: Al Franken, thanks for joining us. Like all good liberals I spent a good part of my day listening to your show, "The O'Franken Factor." And I want to read back to you an exchange that took place between you and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. This is your pretty hard-hitting question. You said, quote, "Senator, you went to Iraq and Afghanistan right after Thanksgiving, right?" "During Thanksgiving," said Mrs. Clinton. Quote from you, "Tell us about that a bit." Now here's my question. You're not simply liberal, but you're a partisan Democrat. Doesn't an exchange like this give people the impression that you're not going to be tough on Democrats, that you're essentially part of the establishment? That you're playing for a team and not for an idea? And isn't the result boring? FRANKEN: I think that you took that out of context, because I said, I think you would have liked this better, because I think you left out, I said "Tell us a little bit about that, bitch." --- Posted at 4/02/2004 08:35:00 PM by richard Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Everything has changed Avedon deconstructs: While Journalistan was roaming around the dictionary after 9/11 declaring that "everything has changed," the administration, more than anyone, was acting like nothing had - nothing had changed even since 1987. But Journalistan, too, was letting the Bushistas get away with this refusal to understand that terrorism is terrorism. "Everything has changed," apparently meant, "We don't have to make sense anymore." 9/11 didn't mean we could no longer make ICBMs our principal (and maybe only) fear, or that terrorism was independent of individual states, or that 9/11 could happen - oh, no. "Everything has changed" was never meant to apply to the means of warfare that might be used against us or what we understood about the way the world sees us. It didn't apply to anything outside of the purest partisan politics. It only meant that our attitudes toward George W. Bush were supposed to have changed - that suddenly we were supposed to believe he was a great president. --- Posted at 4/02/2004 11:03:00 AM by richard Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Bush's reputation has taken a hit An earlier poll made it seem that the Clarke revelations were having no real effect on public opinion. This more recent CBS poll shows the opposite, and I think that the other poll was taken before the news had had time to sink in. Counter-terrorism is really one of the few things Bush has to sell, and he really needs overwhelming support on this issue if he's going to be reelected. "The latest CBS News poll, conducted Tuesday through Thursday, shows declines in the president's approval ratings in a number of policy areas, but especially changes in the evaluation of the president's handling of terrorism. Six in ten Americans are following the hearings closely; 56 percent say the administration is cooperating with the panel. But what the administration is saying does not receives high marks: 59 percent say it is hiding something it knew before Sept. 11, and 11 percent even say it is lying. Only one in four think the administration is telling the entire truth..... When asked whether Bush administration policies have made the U.S. safer from terrorism, 53 percent say they have – but that is a decline of nine points in two weeks." --- Posted at 4/02/2004 10:13:00 AM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
4/01/2004 I just sent my 2 cents to Air America Radio. Subject: Two words Mike Malloy. OK, more than two words. Randi is great. The "stars" are marginal. You need something hot, talented and radio-competent, and there's only one other (besides Randi) host in the country who can bring what you need. Do this: Kill the awful (sorry, but I don't know of anyone who can stand it) 7-8 show. Start Janeane at 7:00. Put on Mike for three hours at 10:00. Are you serious or not? --- Posted at 4/01/2004 07:13:00 PM by richard Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Jobs in Portland Oregon? I've been looking for a part-time job for the last while. I'd especially like a job doing writing, internet research or some kind of Democratic political work, but if I don't find that I will take almost anything. I need to earn $500-$1,000 / month one way or another. Details here. --- Posted at 4/01/2004 09:00:00 AM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Copyright © 2002-05. |
Blogger's RSS feed 
Please help Seeing the Forest meet expenses. You can contribute using Paypal or Amazon by clicking either of the following buttons. Thanks! I took out the Amazon "donate button" because they are a red company, helping fund the right. Archives 
|
|||