|
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: |
 1/31/2005 HOST A HOUSE PARTY To Help Save Social Security (Earlier post moved to top of page) Help save Social Security! Join up and SIGN UP TO HOLD A HOUSE PARTY WEDNESDAY the night of the State of the Union address! There will be a conference call when the speech ends, which will include question and answer time, so your guests will learn about how to help fight back about Bush's drive to phase out Social Security. This website is being developed as I write, so sign up now, but check back at the site regularly. Update - FLYERS for handing out at your party or otherwise. --- Posted at 1/31/2005 03:40:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post  
Iraq Vote If the turnout reports are accurate (i.e. not propaganda) this is a great day for Iraq and for all of us. Congratulations to the Iraqis! On the other hand, I'm a bit concerned by the early turnout reports. Somehow the American mainstream media's crowing about massive turnout reminds me of the story of the JFK "Oswald did it" assassination headline running an hour before the assassination. "In the heart of the so-called Sunni triangle, a total of just 300 ballots were cast in the town of Al-Ramadi, many of them by police officers and soldiers."I love some of the headlines, like Bush critics admit turnout triumph, and High turnout a win for White House. --- Posted at 1/31/2005 11:49:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Dean Supporters Dear Dean Supporters - Threatening to destroy the Democratic Party if your guy doesn't win is probably not a super strategy for convincing DNC members that your guy is a dedicated and committed supporter of the party. Think about that. Update - The day after their executive committee voted to back Fowler, State Democrats back Dean for DNC post. This represents a lot of votes on the DNC. Comes close to clinching it. --- Posted at 1/31/2005 08:28:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/30/2005 Stabbed-in-the-back
I've been waiting for the stabbed-in-the-back talk to start getting serious. I had expected it to begin about January 21, so it's a little late -- I guess the operatives took a well-earned break right after the inauguration. Here's Instapundit:
Here's John Hinderaker: John H. Hinderaker, founder of Time Magazine's "Blog of the Year," and clearly a reasonable, rational person, was just on WABC-AM with Larry Kudlow. After calling the Iraq elections a "bombshell" (interesting word choice) for the Middle East, he went on to say that it was "pretty clear" that in our country, "the Left had lined up behind the terrorists." LinkThese are not marginal figures, but two of the most respected conservatives on the net. Basically, they've taken over the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler's message and cleaned up his language a bit. I really don't think that Democrats are prepared for what's coming. This isn't going to be business as usual, especially when they start getting public opinion ready for war against Iran. --- Posted at 1/30/2005 04:21:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
National Conference for Media Reform Carolyn Kay of Make Them Accountable just notified me of the 2005 National Conference for Media Reform to be held from May 13 to May 15, 2005, in St. Louis, Missouri. Al Franken, Robert McChesney, Amy Goodman, and a lot of other good people will be there.( More information here. Early registration ends March 31.) It looks good, but it's just the usual suspects - I don't see any signs of money people. My estimate is that it will cost about $500,000,000 to redress the media balance in this country, making sure that every American has free-media access to the liberal point of view, the way every American is already automatically exposed to the wingnut point of view. Many people just accept the ambient opinion, and in today's world the majority of them end up Republicans. I don't think any more that this can be done by voluntarism. So if any of my readers is able to unload ten million bucks or more, now is the time for them to do it. --- Posted at 1/30/2005 07:13:00 AM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/28/2005 Defined benefits and defined contributions Guest-poster Camilo Wilson lives in Monterey, California. He has had a long, long career in computers and software, including writing the popular VolksWriter word processor and publishing Correct Grammar and the American Heritage Dictionary. He is the founder of his very privately held cogix.com. He studied political philosophy in Berkeley in the 60's and incorporated that world view into a self-designated fiscally responsible liberal in 1980. He likes living in the forest. Currently, Social Security pays a predictable amount until the end your days, just like a "defined benefit plan". The privatization proposals take 2/3 of employee contributions and invest them in a classical "defined contribution plan". This terminology is important, as many people who care about retirement understand the difference perfectly well. A defined benefit spells out what you're going to get, and it is the government/employer's problem how it will meet its obligations, not yours. A defined contribution plan relieves that burden from the government/employee and transfers it squarely onto you, who now must make wise investment choices to make the money last until the end of your days. The need to invest aggressively guarantees that people will make poor choices, and makes them specially vulnerable to greedy promoters. With the privatization option, you're giving up a rock solid, predictable pension for the rest of your life in return for a small amount of money you can --- Posted at 1/28/2005 02:23:00 PM by Camilo Wilson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
There Is No Crisis There Is No Crisis is liveblogging the Senate Democratic Policy Committee hearing on Social Security. --- Posted at 1/28/2005 10:06:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Who are the "Rational Conservatives"? The otherwise-rational conservatives who remain on Bush’s team remain there on the basis of a personal anti-liberal existential commitment that they made after some life-changing experience, perhaps after rehabbing from drugs while blaming liberalism for all their problems. (The pro-conservative aspect of that kind of rehab is always weaker than the anti-liberal one). For them to cease to be illiberals now would require a second existential crisis, and most people don’t want to have too many of those in one lifetime. It’s not just Iraq. There still are many who, flying in the face of 24 years of political reality, call themselves fiscal conservatives and for that reason absolutely refuse ever to vote for a Democrat. Their politics is like their body type, changable only with major surgery. The starve-the-beast Armageddonist neo-Confederate World War Four advocates are influencing policy now, and we aren’t -- and neither are the hapless rational conservatives who continue to support Bush. We’re just watching, and so are they (whether they know it or not.) People are pleased that Bush’s attempt to destroy social security seems to be failing, but that’s sort of as though Boston, all alone, were making a stout defense against the forces of Robert E Lee. Bush has the Democrats fighting in their last ditch. And no, I don’t think that I am the irrational one here. The Bush loyalists are a bunch of very sick puppies. Arguing with them is pointless. Update: Corrected from New York City to Boston per Lizardbreath. --- Posted at 1/28/2005 05:03:00 AM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Arnold No Moderate Just look at what he is doing! California regulators suspend wireless customer protections: "California utility regulators on Thursday suspended an 8-month-old crackdown on abusive practices in the wireless telephone industry, rebuffing the protests of consumer activists and the state's top law enforcement officials. [. . .] the PUC's makeup has changed with the terms of two commissioners expiring. [. . .] ...first week on the job after being appointed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last month. Schwarzenegger has appointed high-tech entrepreneur Steve Poizner to fill the PUC's remaining board seat. [. . .] "I fear what we are going to start to hear is that what's good for business is necessarily good for consumers, and we know that's just not so," said Robert Finkelstein, executive director for The Utility Reform Network. [. . .] The decision also provoked objections from consumer groups, state Attorney General Bill Lockyer and all 58 district attorneys in California. The district attorneys say widespread consumer complaints about the wireless phone industry are diverting their attention from other law enforcement issues. "You get the picture. Consumers of California, vuck ovv! Big corporations rule! --- Posted at 1/28/2005 01:53:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Iraqifying Social Security --- Posted at 1/28/2005 01:48:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/27/2005 Our Rule Remember the Seeing the Forest rule: when you see a Republican accusing others of something, it means they are probably doing that thing. So we have a Republican reporter, (the same one mentioned in an earlier post) saying, "the press corps, which, of course, deserves to be gone around because they're not telling the truth about Social Security reform. They continue to work off of the talking points provided them from the opposition."Got that? He's accusing "the press corps" of using Liberal talking points. So a little research uncovers ... wanna guess? Oh yes! Talon News "reporter" lifts from GOP documents. --- Posted at 1/27/2005 06:43:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Simon Rosenberg For DNC Chair I am a reform Democrat. My endorsement for the DNC Chair race goes to Simon Rosenberg first, second to Howard Dean, third to Donnie Fowler. I'd be very happy if any of these three win, and the Party will benefit greatly. (I also have some comments on Dean at the end of this post.) My endorsement of Simon is based on his plan, "Renewing the DNC: Simon's Plan". Regardless of your own choice for a DNC Chair, please read his plan. Information about Simon is available online at SimonForChair.org. Info on Dean for Chair is available at DeanForChair.org. Info on Fowler is available at ChangeTheParty.org. I'll let Simon's plan speak for itself. From his plan, (and regular readers will understand that this is close to my heart): "A New Commitment to Persuasion, Advocacy, and Mobilization One of the greatest tasks in the next four years will be to move all the parties into the 21st century communications era. My background as a successful television writer and producer, veteran of the Clinton War Room, manager of the 31 state Clinton communications operations in 1992, technologist, often-quoted spokesperson, and seasoned message-crafter makes me uniquely qualified among the candidates for Chair to take on this challenge. I come from the successful Clinton school that built our politics around a powerful, optimistic vision for our nation, and believe that we must make modern advocacy a more important core competency of our parties in the years ahead. At the core of the new politics of advocacy are changes in media and technology. We are leaving a 50 year-long run of the broadcast era of political communications, where the model was a single message centrally managed and broadcast out to many. The new era we are entering requires a much more distributed, real time, personal, and intimate type of communications. The vital investment by Terry McAuliffe in the DNC Datamart has given all of us the opportunity to build a new politics for a new era of communication that will require us putting people once again at the very center of our Party. To facilitate our adoption of new techniques and learning, I will create a New Politics Institute at the DNC. The NPI will be charged with bringing in some of the top technologists, social networkers, netroots and community activists and media executives to help us together imagine and implement a new 21st century politics built up from people and databases using the very latest technology. In the years ahead, succeeding at the new politics and countering the conservative machine also will require the party?s willingness to partner with think tanks, policy shops, commentator/bloggers, interested academics, and governments that Democrats control. Having worked at a think tank, and as a veteran of the successful Clinton policy years, I can bring concrete expertise in forging these vital national and state links. For more details on how I plan to utilize the ?blogosphere,? please visit my web site at www.simonforchair.org."Naturally a lot of readers will wonder why I endorse Simon over Dean when I was an enthusiastic support of Dean for President? My reason is that the DNC Chair is primarily a "behind-the-scenes" nuts-and-bolts position. I agree with Dean that reform of the party is badly needed, but I believe this will actually be better accomplished by electing Simon Rosenberg. If you read Simon's plan you will see the level of detail that is behind his run for DNC Chair. This guy has thought it through. I also believe that Howard Dean would be a GREAT candidate for President in 2008. But becoming DNC Chair means pledging not to run for President in 2008. I have heard many Dean supporters say that after everyone sees how well Dean does as DNC Chair, they'll ask him to run anyway. I don't see where the idea of taking a pledge not to run in 2008 means running in 2008, and I trust that he means it! And this brings in the issue of party unity. Dean represents a wing of the party. I support that wing. But I remember how the Dean people felt when we thought the DNC was opposing Dean. I can imagine how this could be usable as a wedge to divide all the other parts of the Democratic Party coalition during the next election. And, finally, what becomes of Dean's organization Democracy for America should he become DNC Chair? This is one of the most vital, valuable movement organizations I have seen, and I think it is very important that it retains its independent-of-the-party role. This would be hard to do with its leader serving as DNC Chair. So if you are a voting DNC member, please consider Simon Rosenberg to be Party Chair. (Other Seeing the Forest writers might have other preferences.) What do YOU think? Leave a comment. Update - this MyDD diary. --- Posted at 1/27/2005 06:25:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Press Conferences From Now On Earlier today I linked to a story about how government employees will soon be paid according to the level of service they are performing in the effort to consolidate the power of The Party. I have previously posted links to stories about people being fired for opposing Bush, or doctors refusing to see them as patients anymore, or getting tickets for having bumper stickers opposiing Bush... All ovre the blogosphere we are reading stories about reporters being intimidatred for using "private accounts" language even though the President used the same wording as recently as last week. Now we have a glimpse of what to expect from the press in the future. Chris at MyDD has a post about a MEMBER OF THE PRESS prefacing a question to the President with the following, "[H]ow are you going to work with people [Democratic leaders] who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?"Watch your backs. --- Posted at 1/27/2005 05:42:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Fraud In Ohio The Sideshow has a story about possible fraud in the Ohio recounts. --- Posted at 1/27/2005 05:26:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Troll Policy Many Progressive bloggers have been noticing a recent increase in "trolls" -- right-wingers showing up and disrupting the comments. The recent trolls also seem more sophisticated. Whatever the reason for the increase, I'm not going to let them disrupt Seeing the Forest. If you want to have a discussion in the comments here, that is encouraged. In fact I have even invited commenters with opposing viewpoints to be guest posters here. If you (are a right-winger and) insult other people in a comment, your comment will be deleted and you will be banned, which means you will be unable to post comments here from then on. (Left wingers are free to insult right-wingers at will in the comments.) If you insult me or another Seeing the Forest writer, or say anything even remotely unpleasant about the blog, your comment will be deleted and you will be banned. If I even catch a whiff that you are a professional, or that you are a skilled volunteer familiar with the current right-wing talking-points and tactics, constructive comments or not, you will be banned and won't get your bonus. --- Posted at 1/27/2005 01:59:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Democrats Fired, Not Hired Now that the Party has merged withthe State, new employent policies will be in effect. From the story, "A raise or promotion -- moving up in a pay range or rising to the next one -- will depend on receiving a satisfactory performance rating from" ... the Party. --- Posted at 1/27/2005 01:10:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/26/2005 Ted Turner compares Fox to Nazis MediaLife reports that Ted Turner, founder of CNN, compared Fox News to the Nazis during his address to the National Association for Television Programming Executives conference in During my own experience with Ted in launching an environmental program on TBS and socializing at CNN parties when my wife was VP at CNN, Ted told a story about the time he and Rupert Murdoch, Chairman of Fox, once went skiing on Ted’s ranch. “There we were on our skies, stopped on a cliff overlooking the valley. Just one little shove from me, and ….” May have something to do with Ted's oft- stated reason for selling Turner Broadcasting System to Time-Warner...he was afraid Murdoch would get it in a hostile takeover. --- Posted at 1/26/2005 03:13:00 PM by patrick@mansworld Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Comment Of The Month! praktike wins the coveted Seeing the Forest "Comment Of The Month" award. Regular reads of Seeing the Forest will know what a rare and true honor this is. See praktike's comment in context, following Matthew Yglesias: Personal Or Private post. --- Posted at 1/26/2005 02:25:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
The National Mood of Intimidation High School Journalist Faces Firing: "When high school journalist Ann Long sent a recent edition of her school's newspaper to the printer, she hoped her profile of three gay students would generate some discussion in the hallways. But she didn't expect to be punished for writing the article."The national mood of intimidation is getting worse. If you write pro-Bush stuff, you get government money. If you oppose Bush and the Right, you get fired, arrested, refused service, beat up, canceled, taken off airplanes, etc. It doesn't have to happen every time for the "message" to be clear. --- Posted at 1/26/2005 10:16:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Bush Sends Holocaust Denier to Ukraine Inauguration Mary beat me to it. I was going to kink to this story, and then I saw that Mary at Left Coaster beat me to it, so I'll link to her instead. (It's a blog thing.) A delegation sent by President Bush to Ukraine's presidential inauguration last weekend included a Ukrainian-American activist who has accused Jews of manipulating the Holocaust for their gain and blamed them for Soviet-era atrocities in Ukraine.Republicans... --- Posted at 1/26/2005 10:08:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Bush Said Social Security Would Be Bankrupt In 1988! Chris at MyDD has a great story up, Social Security Will Be Bankrupt in 1988. In 1978 Bush, running for Congress, said Social Security would be bankrupt in ten years. As Chris puts it, Back then, he was completely wrong. Now, he is just lying. --- Posted at 1/26/2005 10:02:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/25/2005 No on Gonzales I'm writing this to add my voice to Daily Kos :: No on Gonzales: "With this nomination, we have arrived at a crossroads as a nation. Now is the time for all citizens of conscience to stand up and take responsibility for what the world saw, and, truly, much that we have not seen, at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. We oppose the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General of the United States, and we urge the Senate to reject him."Go to the original post to see which bloggers have signed up so far. --- Posted at 1/25/2005 01:54:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Why Republicans Win A typical generic blog post written by a Progressive in the last several months would read something like this: "Everyone can sum up the Republican core beliefs in a sentence or two, while Progressives need to search for a candidate who can articulate core Progressive values." Some bloggers might also refer to George Lakoff's "framing" work as a solution to the problem. Not being able to explain your product concept in a sentence is a classic marketing problem, and what these posts show is a budding awareness that Republicans have been outmarketing Democrats. Think about this - if you are in a "red state" area you are told a hundred different ways every day why business is good and government is bad and why unregulated free markets work better than democracy. But you are never told the other side of the story. The Republicans win because the modern Right has developed around the core idea of persuading people to support their ideology, which then leads to support for their issues and candidates. In other words: marketing. The Right developed this persuasion capability in reaction to the dominance of the existing "liberal establishment." Because of this, most of their organizations are designed as advocacy and communications organizations, with the mission of reaching the general public and explaining what right-wing ideas are and why they are better for people. Today's Progressives, on the other hand, think there already is a public consensus supporting their ideals and values, so they have not developed a culture that is oriented around persuading people, and their organizations are not designed at their core to persuade the public to support them. For example, everyone used to think that it is moral to help the poor or protect the environment, so there are organizations that are designed to do that. Then along comes the right, funding organizations designed to convince people it is wrong to do these things. The result today is that on one side you have organizations trying to help the poor, protect the environment, etc. On the other you have organizations telling people what those organizations are doing is wrong. But now you have no one explaining to people that it is GOOD to help the poor and protect the environment so over time support for helping the poor obviously will erode and eventually the organizations that help the poor will be in trouble and have little public support. So you can see how things got to be the way they are. Democrats understand themselves as a political party, not as a movement. The party grew out of a time when people already understood why they were Democrats or not, so there was no need for organizations that talked to the general public about why it is good to be a Democrat. Instead the party naturally focused on elections. And it is still that way. Democrats look for the "right candidates" to appeal to voters. The candidate is expected to "voice" the issues, and develop messaging that works, and is expected to do it after putting together a campaign team, which happens during and after the primaries. The Democrats use the election cycle as a time to come up with specific "issues" and "messages" and educate the voters. Then the campaign is supposed to reach the voters and educate them about the candidate and the issues... This is the old way of understanding politics. The problem is that times have changed -- they have been changed by the rise of "movement conservatism." On the Right, they developed their movement in response to the existing liberal consensus, which means that their movement developed based on the idea of changing people's minds away from those liberal ideas and values. So the result is that today the Right is structured around persuasion, while the Democrats are not. And their organizations have spent decades studying how best to persuade people. For Republicans, functions like message and issue development are handled by the multitude of "conservative movement" organizations, not the Republican Party or its candidates. A Republican candidates' job is to voice the messages of the Right but not to develop the messages, like a Democratic candidate is expected to do. The job of Republican campaigns is to take advantage of the issues that their constituency has already been exposed to, not to define the issues from scratch like Democrat candidates have to do. And the Party's job is to harvest the voters at election time. Organizations like the Heritage Foundation comprise the persuasion machine of the Right. Republican candidates get their talking points from these organizations. They get their issues - tort reform, Social Security privatization, NCLB Act, etc. - from these organizations. The organizations spend years educating the public about the particulars -- "lawsuit abuse", woman gets a million for spilling hot coffee in a moving car, environmentalism costs jobs, Social Security is going broke, etc. They do the core research to learn how to reach the public, what words to use, etc. A focus group might show that some voters will change their minds if they think Democrats are "rich elites who drink lattes" and a week later every single columnist, talking head, talk show host, etc. is saying that Democrats are rich elitists who drink lattes. It is not about their candidates -- I mean, look who they run! Compare Bush the person or the candidate to Gore or Kerry, and then try to tell me it is about the candidates! The Party is not the SOUL (ideology) of the Right. It is the other way around: the Right and their organizations are the soul of the Party. And what is the Right, in this context, at this time? Understanding this points us to a path out of this. The Right as I use it is the "conservative movement" -- a few hundred well-funded ($300 million per year that is NOT counted as "election spending") and centrally coordinated (Grover Norquist, Philanthropy Roundtable, etc.) advocacy organizations, all preaching right-wing "free-market" ideology. They preach the ideology. They persuade people. THEY define the issues and educate the public. Not the Party, not the candidates, not the campaigns. The way out of this is to understand that we need to EDUCATE AND PERSUADE THE GENERAL PUBLIC about the fact that core Progressive ideas and values are good for them. What we are instead doing now is spending a LOT of money on narrow-interest environmental and other kinds of interest organizations that largely talk to the converted. Environmentalists have to combine forces with civil justice advocates, consumer litigation advocates, peace activists, etc. and all together go after the Right AS ONE. We need to change what our existing organizations see as their core mission. They need to understand that the public consensus they thought they have is not there anymore. They need to understand that to survive a good part of their effort has to be toward persuading the public that the core progressive values of democracy and community are good, and benefit them, and only then can they also do the work that before now they thought was their core mission, be it environmentalism, helping the poor, or whatever else they do. And, more important, we all need to understand that new organizations have to be started, with their entire mission being to educate and persuade the general public that core progressive values of democracy and community, and all the things that means, are better for them than right-wing ideology. See Don't Blame the Democrats. --- Posted at 1/25/2005 11:01:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/24/2005 Matt Wrote A Great Post Matt's History Is Never Past is a great post: "The post-Civil War thinkers, pragmatists, believed that truth - objective truth - is a real notion, but that objective truth cannot be owned by any one person. It can only be owned by a social group, if at all. Diversity of perspectives, and real critical debate and discussion, led to the scientific method and the modern notion of science and academia. Right-wingers believe either that there is no such thing as truth, only interpretative variations that are a proxy for power, or that truth is held by atomized individuals or groups. [. . .] Liberals are those who see the endpoint of a media system as a broad culture of tolerance, discussion, and argument leading to a socially higher truth. Reactionaries either want to limit participation to a small group of social liberals or conservatives, or the more extreme version of the them seek to remove the concept of truthfulness from discourse altogether." --- Posted at 1/24/2005 09:12:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/23/2005 Approaching the Post-Democratic Era "We had planned for the new Not In Our Name statement of conscience to run on Friday, January 21, in the New York Times. We had a contract and a confirmation number. This ad was to be our answer to the inauguration, and it was timed to appear in the middle of the inauguration news coverage. The ad did not run. The advertising department were themselves deeply surprised by this, and have not been able to explain what happened. In fact, we were told that to their knowledge this had never happened before. At the same time, the Times lead editorial said that this should be a time of legitimacy and acceptance for the President -- and that this was especially something that the opposition has to come to terms with. It is unacceptable that we do not yet know why something that "has never happened before" happened -- a full page paid ad, accepted and slotted in, did not run. This is especially so when the content of the ad, the need to resist the course that this administration has set, is so important to the people of this country and the world. There needs to be an investigation of what went wrong and why. If it was just an honest mistake, we expect that the Times itself would want to know why in order to prevent it from occurring again."No-one is forcing the Times to run ads they don't care for. It's their paper. They have no business ignoring their contractual obligations. Perhaps Mr. Okrent would be interested in hearing what you think about this. Yeah, well, perhaps you should tell him anyway. CONTACT . E-mail:public@nytimes.com> . Phone: (212) 556-7652 . Address: Public Editor The New York Times 229 West 43rd St. New York, NY 10036-3959 Story --- Posted at 1/23/2005 03:32:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Accountable One of the wingnut trolls assigned to Seeing the Forest asked in a comment below why don't Democratic leaders just go ahead and do something themselves about criminal acts by the Bush administration, if they really think it's so bad? Democratic leaders do not have any power to investigate anything. They can not call hearings, they can not issue subpoenas, they can not ask the FBI. They can't even petition the courts -- that's what the whole thing about Bush's judicial appointments has been about. The Right currently controls every single investigative and legal agent of our government, from top to bottom. And, as a result of this, can any of the readers here think of even ONE member of the Bush administration - at any level - who has been held accountable for even one transgression of any kind, whatsoever? One who has even been fired? Even demoted? Even scolded? I think this might be something to use against Republicans in Congress for the next election. Pick the ten worst examples of Bush corruption, and start going after heads of Congressional committees in their own districts for refusing to do anything about it! Letters-to-the-editor would be a good start, leading to radio and TV spots, leaflets, etc. Put the pressure on. Point out the corruption, but give it a target - the members of Congress who are not doing the job of holding people accountable for their acts. --- Posted at 1/23/2005 01:52:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
I Never Seem To Learn I never seem to learn. Why do I bother to even look at stuff like this anymore? Written by Howard Fineman should be a clue... The results of the Right's "conventional wisdom" machine - targeted straight at people like Fineman - at work before my eyes. But the 477 DNC members who choose the party chair haven't settled on a leader of the 2005 version of the Anybody But Dean movement. For now, the front-running alternative is former congressman Martin Frost of Texas, a pro-labor moderate with a lifetime of traditional organizing who survived 13 terms in Dallas before the GOP redistricted him into oblivion. He's followed by Simon Rosenberg, a young Washington-based fund-raiser and strategist who claims to be as digitized and Net-friendly as Dean?and yet more popular than Dean among the bloggers, who are emerging as new grass-roots powers in the party. Pro-lifer Tim Roemer is also running.Front-running alternative-to-Dean Martin Frost? Front-running? The rest of the piece is just barely-readable mush (if you know anything about the subject he is covering). I suspect what is going on here is that the guy gets paid well, but has to come up with something every week. So he sends them stuff like this. Also, he has to write things that fit inside of his editors' understanding of what is going on in the world - their own views cooked by the "conventional wisdom" machine - so he has to write in divisive contradictory trivialities. Like this: "As for Dean, he is playing it cool and trying to soothe fears within the citadel he may soon occupy. He has vowed not to run for president in '08 if elected chair? -- a kind of backhanded bribe that may induce many DNC members to vote for him."The DNC delegates dislike Dean so much that they will put him in charge of the party just to keep him from running for President. What? No wonder it was linked by Drudge. --- Posted at 1/23/2005 01:39:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/22/2005 Something More Serious This morning I blogged about the silly wingnut "SpongeBob Squarepants is gay story." Well, it turns out it might be more serious than it looks at first glance. I added an update to that post that reads as follows, David Neiwert points out why this is not just wingnuttery, it's more dangerous. It's an attack on the "leftist" Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). SPLC is an organization that keeps an eye on the violent right -- the Tim McVeigh types. Seeing the mainstream right now attacking the SPLC as "leftist" is very, very worrisome.I wanted to bring this more attention than just an update. --- Posted at 1/22/2005 08:55:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
What Doc Says Facing evil: I know pictures like this serve as propaganda for the enemy, which has no remorse about routinely doing worse than what these American soldiers will regret terribly for the rest of their lives. We can debate strategy for the duration. Meanwhile, we have this, and countless other tragedies like it. Blame who you will; it won't make this little girl one bit happier. It won't bring back her parents, who lost their lives for... what? I don't have an answer. If you do, tell it to that girl.I cry every time I see the picture. And this one. What happened: Nighttime Anguish An Iraqi girl screams after her parents were killed by U.S. troops during a dusk patrol in the northern city of Tall Afar. Witnesses said the soldiers, from the 1st Battalion, 25th Infantry Division (Stryker Brigade), fired on the family's car after it failed to heed warnings to stop and come toward the troops. One of the five children riding in the back seat was injured. The military said it was investigating. --- Posted at 1/22/2005 08:31:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
School Policy - No Dems Gingrich Speech at CU Opposed: Newt Gingrich's scheduled speech at Catholic University next week is prompting criticism from students who contend that the appearance would violate the school's policy barring speakers who have espoused positions contrary to Vatican teachings. Frank Lankey Jr., 20, political director for the College Democrats, said that Gingrich's support for the death penalty and his extramarital affair in the 1990s contradict church teachings and should prohibit him from appearing. Last fall, organizers of an Italian film festival considered inviting actor-director Stanley Tucci to their event, but Catholic University officials objected because of his support for abortion rights organizations. [. . .] Victor Nakas, the university's spokesman, denied that Gingrich's appearance violates the speaker policy, though he declined to explain the substance of the regulations.In other words, clearly the school's policy is that Republicans and their cronies may speak, and others may not! (By the way, besides adultery and support for the death penalty there's also Gingrich's greed, lying, support for war, contempt for the poor, lust, gluttony, pride, sloth, and wrath. Have I missed any? Oh yeah, envy.) (Found at Crooks and Liars.) --- Posted at 1/22/2005 05:10:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
No Williams So where did the Armstrong Williams case go? One more instance of blatant criminality by Republicans... Maybe it's that we all know it won't be investigated - who would investigate? Who would be held accountable? And anyway, Bush has said that the "accountability moment" is so last year. Even bloggers dropped it - taking the so obvious bait when the Right falsely accused two bloggers of taking payments from the Dean campaign. "LOOK OVER THERE!" Off they went... I came across a column on the subject, by John Young. He thinks the reason might be: "This is what I've come to believe: It's all about business. The White House is an enterprise of which members of a slim voting majority see themselves as stockholders. Those on the outs are stockholders of a group that didn't win the contract. To the stockholders whose firm again won the bid, what the management group does to achieve its business plan is of less importance than what it delivers--say, tax cuts and a stock market that purrs."Maybe, but something he wrote just before that got me thinking: "...in pondering the lack of a sufficient uproar over the administration's having paid black commentator Armstrong Williams $240,000 to tout the No Child Left Behind Act on the air. It's one of several examples of a stealthy use of tax dollars to manipulate opinion. What explained the lack of public outrage? I asked."I think a good part of the answer is right there: "Stealthy use of tax dollars to manipulate public opinion." And not just tax dollars - although that is a big deal, and a big, big crime (that we know no one will answer for). There's also the $300-million-a-year stealthy persuasion campaign of the Right's network of think tanks that I frequently write about here. Combine that with the effect of Fox News, almost all of AM radio's all-day-every-day right-wing persuasion campaign, the $100 million per year put into the Washington Times, and let's not forget the corporate money involved. After a while this kind of money just has to have an effect. "What explained the lack of public outrage?" he asked? I think maybe the well-funded manipulation of public opinion is ... wait for it ... manipulating public opinion. --- Posted at 1/22/2005 02:58:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Study How They Did It I just posted a comment over at Kos: "Study How They Did It": We all need to study how the Right has built such an influential "infrastructure" and how they use it to manipulate the press and public discussion. They craft "framed messages" and repeat them over and over (and over) until they become "conventional wisdom." For example, Social Security is NOT going broke. But it is "conventional wisdom" that it is because they have repeated this message over and over. Another one is "children trapped in failing public schools." They have been working to change minds for 30 years. But they have also created a model for how we can fight back. It is up to the people on our side who have money to start funding a counter-infrastructure of organizations designed to bring basic UNDERLYING ideas to the public. DEMOCRACY and COMMUNITY are fundamental concepts that have been undermined. Popel believe in one-dollar-one-vote solutions to problems now. They talk about "market solutions to public probles." Well that's not democracy, folks. Read Brock's book The Republican Noise Machines. Spend some time at Media Transparency and read everything there! Check out Commonweal Institute's page of links to articles about how the Right has built and uses this movement. Read EVERYTHING by George Lakoff. And start giving money to organizations like Media Matters, Media Transparency, Center for American Progress, Commonweal Institute so they can start working to turn this around. --- Posted at 1/22/2005 10:32:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Serious, Serious Nuttery At Heritage Foundation's ConservativeLog: The big deal about SpongeBob they are defending wingnut attacks on SpongeBob, saying that the mainstream media "continually tries to paint religious conservatives as nuts." "Bottom line: Religious conservatives are not calling SpongeBob gay. They are attacking a video (remake of the song "We Are Family" that features cartoon characters) that liberals are trying to shove into schools to promote "tolerance" and "diversity."The post includes links to another blog. You have to read both posts to get just how absolutely nutso the right-wing cult is getting. From the other post, "The song itself is about multiculturalism and diversity. But some things on the WAFF webpage go further, including a Tolerance Pledge which says, "I pledge to have respect for people whose abilities, beliefs, culture, race, sexual identity or other characteristics are different from my own."Oh, it goes even "further" than multiculturalism and diversity! It actually dares talk about respect! Well, then! Update - Thanks to Angry Bear, I learned the definition or C.R.A.C.K.P.O.T.: "Many, if not most, Christians understand the true message of Jesus. But there is a frightening number of so-called Christians who can be best described as creepy, rigid, arrogant, cruel, know-it-all, pompous, obnoxious and treacherous — better known by the acronym C.R.A.C.K.P.O.T."Update - David Neiwert points out why this is not just wingnuttery, it's more dangerous. It's an attack on the "leftist" Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). SPLC is an organization that keeps an eye on the violent right -- the Tim McVeigh types. Seeing the mainstream right now attacking the SPLC as "leftist" is very, very worrisome. --- Posted at 1/22/2005 09:08:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/21/2005 Fox News Meltdown See the Fox News Meltdown. --- Posted at 1/21/2005 11:41:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Alert Your Member Chris at MyDD writes Attention All Democratic Congressional Chiefs of Staff. Please read this, locate your member of Congress' office address, and mail a printed copy of Chris' post. --- Posted at 1/21/2005 11:32:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Why Did NY Times Attack ACLU? OK, I haven't read past the first sentence in this story, and I have to back up and say, "Wait a minute!" The story A.C.L.U. Will Consider Disciplining 2 Officials begins, "The American Civil Liberties Union, which since its inception has fought to protect free speech rights, is scheduled to begin a debate today over whether to discipline - or potentially move to oust - two board members for speaking to reporters."I am familiar with the First Amendment, which is the source of our "free speech rights" that the ACLU fights to protect. The First Amendment reads, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.Now, there is a very big difference between the government, which the amendment prohibits from abridging the freedom of speech of its citizens, and anything any private organization does. The ACLU is not the government. In fact, the ACLU has fought to protect the rights of private organizations to do as they please. This is not just a mistake -- a misunderstanding of the distinction between a government and a private organization -- this is an attack. The construction of this sentence declares that the ACLU is acting hypocritically by pretending to be an organization that protects rights while violating those very same rights of its Board members. The sentence might as well read, "ACLU says one thing but does another." And, of course, such hypocrisy undermines the credibility of the organization in the mind of the reader. It is a serious matter when a newspaper like the New York Times so forcefully attacks the credibility of an organization like the ACLU. The editors at the Times must have been aware of this when they approved this story. Yet the attack rests on a misuse of the term "freedom of speech" that any informed person would catch, along with a reversal of the positions that the ACLU has taken! Why did the Times do this? It is like I am reading the Moonie right-wing Washington Times! I guess I'll go read some blogs instead. --- Posted at 1/21/2005 10:45:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Air America recoups, expands Media Life reports that nine months after it looked like Air America radio network would fold almost as soon as it started, it is expanding to three more large markets to reach 45 total. Programming will begin today on affiliates of the heavily Republican-oriented Clear Channel Network in Washington, D.C., Detroit and Cincinnati – an irony many listeners will understand. After Air America launched last spring, two affiliates accused it of failing to pay bills, and it soon went off the air in Chicago and Los Angeles, leaving it in only a handful of small markets. After two of its founders were forced out and some of the staff went without salary, the network stabilized over the summer and began adding markets. Advertising has picked up boosting revenues. Additionally, Media Life says that $19 million of private funding has been secured, and that the network is in talks to get back on the air in LA, one of the most critical and largest media markets in the nation. --- Posted at 1/21/2005 08:10:00 AM by patrick@mansworld Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/20/2005 I'm Still Sick Sorry, still sick. No blogging. Got some cough syrup with codeine in it, though. --- Posted at 1/20/2005 08:34:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Social Security Social Security --- Posted at 1/20/2005 06:11:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/18/2005 Blog Action on Social Security A new site is going up tonite called ThereIsNoCrisis.com. ThereIsNoCrisis.com is intended as a fact repository and an initiator of action on this issue. It will help you with letters to editors, FAQs, links to articles, and, of course, a blog. The site will be promoted through a press and media campaign, including radio ads (which you can hear on the site). Chris at MyDD adds, "The site will also feature, among other things, rapid response, fact-checking, Google-bombing, links to allied organizations, printable resources, fainthearted faction updates, and new ads when they are ready." From the site: America promises that those who work hard and play by the rules deserve a secure retirement. For 70 years, Social Security has made sure we kept that promise. Social Security is in a healthier financial situation now than it has been for most of its history. Even the most pessemistic of economists agree it will remain solvent for decades. There is no crisis.The Bush administration is using strategic lies to scare people into supporting a phase-out of Social Security. They are telling the public that there is a "crisis" and that Social Security is going "bankrupt." This is a lie. This is a strategic lie designed to lead the public down a path toward accepting their phase-out plan. But the truth is: There Is No Crisis. And the truth can be more powerful than lies, if the public can hear the truth. Blogs reach opinion leaders. Their reach goes far beyond just their daily readership because blogs link to each other, and are read by the press and political leaders. When enough bloggers pick up a subject you soon see what they are writing reflected in the press. You can already see the press reacting to blogger complaints about their coverage of the "crisis." Bloggers - grab the blog ad below and put it on your site. Tell your readers about this new site, and ask them to tell others.  --- Posted at 1/18/2005 06:46:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Flu Blogging I didn't get a flu shot, and now I have the flu. Fever, bad cough, aching, fatigue, etc. Ugh. --- Posted at 1/18/2005 05:46:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Take The MyDD DNC Poll There is a poll over at MyDD asking who you support for head of the Democratic Party. This is for real, because Washington Democrats have started paying more attention to the "netroots" lately. (That's you.) If you care about this race for DNC Chair, go take the poll, it's in the right-hand column. --- Posted at 1/18/2005 01:22:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Throw Cursor a Buck Cursor and Media Transparency are trying to raise a bit of cash to cover expenses. --- Posted at 1/18/2005 09:24:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/17/2005 Letter to Editor Editors, Why do you run a comic strip that tells your readers not to read or trust newspapers? How does that fit into your business model? --- Posted at 1/17/2005 08:48:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Prepare for the Onslaught Recently I've been posting less for various reasons -- a family event, long-postponed non-political writing, and the need for R&R and time to think things over. Another reason, though, is pessimism. To an extent I've been reluctant to say what I think because what I think is so depressing. Nonetheless, it has to be said. In a recent New Yorker piece, Seymour Hersh has reported that the Bush administration plans to begin air attacks and covert actions against Iran this year, with the goal of toppling the Islamic regime. Bush himself has made it clear that he believes that the voters have given him a blank check, and that his critics (left, right, and center) are now irrelevant. I think that we can count on these attacks as a done deal. (The "Salvador option" we recently heard about might also still happen, though it might very well have just been a smokescreen. Even the Social Security reform he's been talking about might just have been intended to distract us from his big international plans.) These new attacks are presumably just the second stage in the multi-nation plan Wolfowitz spoke about right before the war. In other words, we can plan to be at war for five to twenty years. The Army and Guard are already being pushed to the limit. Thus, there will have to be a draft. But in order for there to be a draft, anti-war groups and spokesmen will have to be marginalized and crushed. So those of us who are anti-war should prepare to be called traitors and cowards with an intensity that we haven't seen so far. Ann Coulter is soon going to go completely mainstream. As long as the wars are going reasonably well, they will be almost impossible to oppose. A lot of so-called moderates decided last November 2 to take another chance on Bush, and if they change their minds now it won't make a damn bit of difference. A big chunk of the Democratic Party will try to curry favor by supporting the new wars, too, but that won't do anyone any good either. The Democratic hawks won't be able to bring the whole party with them -- and anyway, why would the voters want to switch hawks in midstream? Bush is going to be in the driver's seat for some time. As soon as the Iran phase starts, all of our criticisms of what happened before will be forgotten (if they haven't been already.) This is what Suskind's source meant when he talked about "creating reality". By using the power of the Commander in Chief to completely change the ball game, Bush is going to make a big chunk of recent political discussion permanently inoperative. I always hated the complacency of the people who smirkingly bragged about being "reality-based". They missed the point of what had been said. Democrats figure out what past reality was like, and assume that future reality will be pretty much the same. Republicans figure out how future reality will be different from past reality, and then ask themselves what they can do to change and exploit this new reality. And they win that way. I don't think that anyone in the Democratic Party (or the left blogosphere) is at all prepared for what's coming next. What I see now is people doing and saying the things that they should have been doing and saying in 2000. As for me, I'm getting ready to hear myself being called a traitor by more and more, louder and louder voices during the next several years. And wondering how the Patriot Act will change things. And wondering whether I'll be able to stay here. And wondering whether this is really my country at all any more. Revised 8:30 AM PST Jan 18 P.S. Nobody seems as worried about this as I am. I've raised the issue at Yglesias and Drum's sites -- not everyone is as complacent as Matt and Kevin are, but I haven't noticed a feeling of urgency anywhere except at the The Talking Dog. The specifics of Hersh's piece aren't the most important thing -- they just confirm some conclusions that I think were already pretty reasonable without his piece. Nobody really seems to be asking themself what the Bush people are getting ready to slam us with, now that their power is secure for another four years. In a way I can't blame anyone, because my conclusions don't lead to a plan of action or to any optimistic scenario. But in the face of the Bush onslaught which I expect, the slight tweaks of business-as-usual that Democrats are talking about seem really futile. --- Posted at 1/17/2005 08:20:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Digby! Digby! Digby! Just go read every word! --- Posted at 1/17/2005 05:56:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/16/2005 Big Lies Whiskey Bar: Game Plan --- Posted at 1/16/2005 04:28:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Increasing Our Numbers - Things You Can Do I have been writing about how Progressive blog readers are so much more well-informed than those who get their information only from the "mainstream" media. There are many factors at work, including the Right's targeting of mainstream opinion leaders with what I call their "conventional wisdom machine." There's also concentration of ownership, corporate control and general cost-cutting (leading to overworked members of the media trying to quickly cover subjects about which they are not well-informed.) So I think we all agree that blogs are an important supplement for those wishing to understand what is happening in the country and the world - including members of the media. There is also a surprising consensus of opinion on many issues among progressive bloggers. (My favorite is how bloggers and blog-readers were almost unanimous in their support of Senator Boxer for voting to examine the Ohio election results.) And this consensus is so often at odds with the elected officials of the Democratic Party. So here's the thing. If we're going to have an effect on events - and get more leaders to stand up for us like Boxer - we're going to have to get more people reading Progressive blogs. So I am asking blog readers to recruit more readers. This is a call to action. Send e-mails to like-minded friends and relatives suggesting blogs to read. Send this post to political e-mail lists. Write letters to editors mentioning blogs - and include the web addresses of those blogs. Call phone-in radio shows and mention blogs. Leave flyers at coffee shops listing blogs and their web addresses. Hand out these flyers at Democratic Party meetings, environmental group meetings, etc. (Here is an article I wrote for local Democratic Party organizations (alternate source) that can serve as a template for a flyer. Add your favorite blogs.) --- Posted at 1/16/2005 02:26:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Religious Right outraged at Consumer Reports birth control comparison The Religious Right is outraged at a Consumer Affairs comparison of birth control methods that includes some very innocuous language on abortion. CR tells readers that “Women having an abortion in the --- Posted at 1/16/2005 01:00:00 PM by patrick@mansworld Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/15/2005 The Party IS The State Now This story, Social Security Enlisted to Push Its Own Revision, about the Republicans using the Social Security Administration to scare the pubic into supporting privatization is WAYYY beyond the Armstrong Williams scandal! That was the government using tax dollars to pay journalists to propagandize the public. This is using the government itself to propagandize the public to support the policies of one political party. The Congress will not investigate. The FBI will not. The Justice Department won't. The media will drop it in a day or two. This is bad. The Party has merged with the State. --- Posted at 1/15/2005 11:40:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
More on the astonishing Harvard blogging conference It turns out that Zephyr Teachout's high-minded accusations against Kos and Jerome Armstrong were in some way connected to the astonishing, nearly-blogger-free blogging conference at Harvard which I dissed last week. She was one of the very few bloggers invited, even though her blog is barely a week old. So anyway, I left a message at their site which I thought I'd share (slightly edited):
--- Posted at 1/15/2005 08:00:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Fake Blogging-Ethics Crisis The Wall Street Journal concocts a story, twisting the work of one of its reporters and garbling the statement of a Dean staffer. Then O'Reilly, Novak, Instapundit, and Hugh Hewitt pick up the story, speaking gravely about a crisis in blogging ethics and grossly misrepresenting the facts to millions of people. (The hapless, well-paid Paul Begala goes along for the ride.) What should Democrats do in a case like this? There are various possible right answers to that question. (It is not an easy one, mostly because of our weak media presence). But the wrong thing to do is to start talking about blogger ethics. This was a fake story. Rule One should be "Never take fake stories at face value". Dean, Kos, Jerome Armstrong, bloggers in general, and the Democrats have all been hurt to some degree. The William Armstrong story about the Republican misappropriation of government funds for bribes has been mostly forgotten. And all because of a fake story. Hasn't this happened before? Aren't people watching for this kind of thing by now? How many more times can Lucy play her trick on the Charlie Brown Democrats? --- Posted at 1/15/2005 05:06:00 PM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/14/2005 The Dean Blogging Controversy I've been gone all day at MacWorld Expo. I'm back and I see that this Dean Blogging controversy has . broken . out . all over. An observation. The "Republican Noise Machine" threw out some trash - this ridiculous story - to get us all talking about something other than who ELSE besides Armstrong Williams was on the take -- AND IT WORKED. DOH! So tomorrow let's all get back on the story about who else the Right is paying, and how much they are paying, and stick with it. It's a big story and it has "legs" with average people, and if we keep at it, it will lead somewhere. I would like to hear what Dean has to say about it. (Simon Rosenberg blogged about it.) The story is more about Dean and his campaign than about bloggers doing anything wrong. Thinking they could buy bloggers for $3,000? AND NOT EVEN TELLING THE BLOGGERS THEY WERE TRYING TO BUY THEM OFF? Heh. And if they were tryng to buy off two bloggers, why so cheap? -- on the Right someone as far from the mainstream as Armstrong Williams gets $240,000, and we KNOW that's only the tip of the iceberg even with Williams! That was probably just his payoff for the one year. That says a LOT right there, in my opinion. "Our side" is just too cheap to win anything. --- Posted at 1/14/2005 10:04:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Washngton State Election Story Preemptive Karma has a post about the Washington gubernatorial situation, Truth and consequences. --- Posted at 1/14/2005 09:48:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Muslims protest Fox's "24" The Council on American-Islamic Relations has objected to "24"'s? first two episodes Sunday and Monday, according to MediaLife. The show depicted an ordinary Muslim family as terrorists, with the mother killing the son?s non-Muslim girlfriend to shut her up. Fox thinks it can smooth things out by supplying public service announcements sponsored by the Council, but is leaving if and when the spots run up to the local TV stations themselves. Fox is not changing the storyline. --- Posted at 1/14/2005 06:01:00 PM by patrick@mansworld Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/13/2005 Social Security Brad DeLong, in Violating the Constitution, points out that Section Four of the Fourteenth Amendement of the Constitution of the United States begins, Section. 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.Shall not be questioned. Remember that the next time you hear a right-winger talking about the bonds that make up the Social Security Trust Fund being somehow different from other government bonds. --- Posted at 1/13/2005 08:38:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
"Declaration Banned" Story -- Parents Still Dealing With It Do you remember the story about the right-wing lie that the Declaration of Independence was banned at a school? (See also eRiposte.) Well, it served the purposes of the Right very well -- according to Google there are about 8200 websites that talk about it. But the local parents are still dealing with the fallout from this right-wing hit-and-run attack. See the site of We the Parents. Our grassroots organization has come about as a way of responding truthfully to the negative media campaign crafted by a group of lawyers who have filed a lawsuit, which we feel is frivolous, against our school, our principal, Patricia Vidmar, and the Cupertino Union School District board of Education. Our mission is to clarify the misconceptions created about our school so that we can rescue our reputation as one of the best schools in the area, State, and our Great NationThese are just regular people in a local school district that one day found itself used as a pawn in the Right's game. It's intersting to see how they are responding. Go to the "Parents Pages" and read some of the essays and letters. --- Posted at 1/13/2005 06:19:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Registered Democrat? Companies Don't Want Your Business Corporate retribution for being a Democrat is moving beyond hiring and firing. See NH Woman Loses Insurance Coverage for Her Politics at Common Dreams. Update - Nor do doctors. (Thanks to Take Back the Media) --- Posted at 1/13/2005 03:37:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/12/2005 It Has Come To This Go read Bush's 'Death Squads' at Consortiumnews.com. Also, this whole thing stinks enough to drive Billmon to surface and post The Salvadoran Option. Both thanks to Cakewalking on Graves ~ Death Squad 'W' and the Shining City on the Hill by the farmer at corrente. --- Posted at 1/12/2005 06:02:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Social Security I have a new post at American Street, The Alternate Plan Trap. Excerpt: I think one trap to watch out for is that they have created an unconscious “frame” in people’s minds in which Social Security is the symbol of the Democratic Party. So when anyone talks about Social Security, they’re really talking about the Democrats. So repeating that Social Security is outdated, bankrupt, etc. is really a tactic for framing the Party itself. By the same token, saying Social Security needs changing is saying that the Democratic Party is not serving the public. So what is really going on here is every time they SAY that Social Security is broken what they are really communicating - and reinforcing in the public mind - is that the Democratic Party is old-fashioned, broken, not worthy of trust and support. This means that if the Democrats respond by offering an alternative “fix” what they are really doing is agreeing that Social Security - and therefore in the public mind the Democratic Party - is “broken.” --- Posted at 1/12/2005 01:59:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Good Book - Confesseions of an Economic Hit Man I have started reading the book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins. I can already tell this is going to be a great read, and an important book. It's about how we get third-world countries to borrow money to build dams or other projects that make a few people rich but hurt most of the population, and then the country owes so much money that they have to knuckle under to the multinational corpocracy. I'll write more about it as I get through the book. Also, I used to link to books at Amazon, and I'd get a quarter or something if you click through and buy it. I don't do that anymore because BuyBlue.org tells me that Amazon is a company that funds the Republicans. So click on the Donate button in the right column and throw me a couple of hundred dollars instead. Also, I used to have an Amazon Donate button in the right column, and that's gone, too. Update - Choose The Blue says Amazon's donations are about 50/50. So I have to think this over. --- Posted at 1/12/2005 08:57:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Not One Damn Dime Day An e-mail I received: I'm all for the sentiment, and I think attacking the funders of the right economically is a great idea that we should develop. (Don't forget to visit BuyBlue.org!) I'm not sure anyone will notice one day of non-spending, and we'll all make up for it the next day so it cancels itself out. I think it is better to target specific companies and never spend any money with them, and publicize the reasons, and make the practice widespread. The old "boycott grapes" and "dolphin-safe tuna" campaigns worked. I think the blue half of the country should make it clear that we do not tolerate corporate funding of fascism. Update BuyBlue's list is down. Use Choose The Blue. One thing for sure -- avoid doing business with these companies. --- Posted at 1/12/2005 08:28:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
The Real Question You'll probably read a lot today about President Bush's interview with the Washington Times. President outlines role of his faith: "'I think people attack me because they are fearful that I will then say that you're not equally as patriotic if you're not a religious person,' Mr. Bush said. 'I've never said that. I've never acted like that. I think that's just the way it is. 'On the other hand, I think more and more people understand the importance of faith in their life,' he said. 'America is a remarkable place when it comes to religion and faith. We had people come to our rallies who were there specifically to say, 'I'm here to pray for you, let you know I'm praying for you.' And I was very grateful about that.' "The REAL question here should be why is the President giving an interview to the Moonies? What is his relationship with the Moonies? Why is he validating their propaganda operation - the paper costs the Moonies $100 million a year - by giving them exclusive interviews? The Right uses attacks on credibility to win their arguments. Instead of arguing the facts in Fahrenheit-9/11, for example, they attack Michael Moore, and try to use humiliation and shame as a weapon. As a result, many "centrist" Democrats run from any association with Moore and from the points he makes. Yet right-wingers feel free to say and do the most outrageous things. One of the most outrageous is their relationship with the Moonies. --- Posted at 1/12/2005 08:20:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/11/2005 Joe Trippi Endorses Rosenberg, Not Dean, For DNC On the day Howard Dean announces his candidacy for Chair of the DNC, Joe Trippi Endorses Simon Rosenberg. --- Posted at 1/11/2005 07:20:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
We Need A Blog Drumbeat Chris, at MyDD, in Armstrong Williams is a Crack in the Matrix: "The only way that Armstrong Williams can be considered an isolated incident is that he is the rare crack in the matrix of the Republican Noise Machine that actually is now visible to the public. [. . .] The FOIA requests underway on this matter are an excellent piece of work, but they are not enough. This is perhaps the best chance we have ever had to hold the Republican Noise Machine up to public scrutiny and do real damage to the "liberal media" narrative. We must take immediate action on this story. [. . .] We do not have a large window on this story, and I have little doubt that many people with a great deal of influence over our national discourse would prefer to see it swept under the rug. However, if we can start the ball rolling on this story before the FOIA requests even come out, it could have a tremendous snowballing effect. We need to act now."We need a blog drumbeat on this story until the "mainstream press" has to cover it. This is a BIG DEAL. This is our government paying right-wingers to repeat right-wing propaganda. It is a major crime. And it says a lot about what has been happening in this country! WHO ELSE IS BEING PAID? AND WHO IS PAYING? Beyond direct government payments, who is being paid by the Right's heavily-funded network of "advocacy" organizations to propagandize us? Who is being paid by corporate trade associations to advocate "tort reform?" Who is being paid by oil companies and their fronts to say global warming is not a problem? The Armstrong Williams case opens up a crack in the door to this use of paid propaganda disguised as "news," designed to influence the public to support Republican policies and candidates! And, this case demonstrates the reach of this practice -- I mean, Armstrong Williams? If they're paying HIM a quarter of a million dollars cash, just imagine who else is getting paid, and just imagine the amounts they are paid! This is huge. This is the White House again caught red-handed engaging in criminal activities. Bloggers, keep this story alive! --- Posted at 1/11/2005 03:15:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
More on Roemer/Mercatus TAPPED has more info about the Mercatus Center, a right-wing-financed "think tank" where DNC candidate Tim Roemer currently works. (I had a post on this the other day.) Tapped asks: "Democrats, such as Roemer, who shill for the Mercatus Center are giving bi-partisan cover to an institution that has a long track record of working against much of what the Democratic Party's leadership and interest groups have fought for over the past 35 years. I'd be curious to know what Mercatus paid Roemer to promote their Capitol Hill Campus outreach and education program."I think we should all be asking Tim Roemer why he is running for Chair of the Democratic Party, while working for a right-wing-funded organization that exists for the purpose of persuading Members of Congress to support right-wing proposals! --- Posted at 1/11/2005 03:04:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
FINALLY! Mac mini - $499. Apple becomes reality-based. --- Posted at 1/11/2005 01:08:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Blog Ads I just took a short cruise around the right-wing blogosphere. I noticed that lots of sites have several ads. I don't see this happening, at least not as many, at Progressive blogs with roughly the same level of readership. What's up? Why is the Right ALWAYS more willing to support their own financially? --- Posted at 1/11/2005 11:19:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Use Them As Food? Slacktivist says Eating people is wrong --- Posted at 1/11/2005 10:54:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/10/2005 I Swear - Now Your Turn, Journalists I swear that I have never taken money -- neither directly nor indirectly -- from any political campaign or government agency -- whether federal, state, or local -- in exchange for any service performed in my job as a journalist (or commentator, or blogger, or whatever you think I should be called). (VIA Atrios) --- Posted at 1/10/2005 08:31:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
The "Conventional Wisdom" Machine I was having a conversation today about the gap between what blog readers know and the "conventional wisdom" that the "Washington Elite" -- opinion leaders, legislators, their staffs and the circles they associate with -- think they know. It brought to mind an old post (Sept 2002!), Getting Rolled. From that post: How often have Congressional Democrats been rolled by the Republican machine, voted for something they shouldn't have, and then been blamed by the Republicans for the drastic consequences? The events typically follow a pattern. The extremely powerful Republican media machine sets up an environment that convinces the Washington politicians that it will be very difficult politically to vote against them, and makes sure that the vote happens quickly - before opposing forces have time to realize what's going on and rally enough real people on the other side to demonstrate that there really is support for non-Republican positions. How many times have we seen this process at work? It is the careful creation of a local environment calculated to maximize pressure on the legislators at the best possible moment. The phony Republican news events, the "independent" media playing along & following their script, the AM radio 24-hour-a-day Republican drumbeat pounding out the lies, the slurry of misleading or blatantly deceitful op-ed pieces filling the editorial pages, the dittohead letters to the editor (or "astroturf" - phony grassroots letters generated by a marketing firm), the pack of columnists writing according to instructions FAXed over from the Heritage Foundation (follow the NEA smear for an example) (second NEA smear link here), pretty soon all the news stories reflect the Republican line and repeat the Republican falsehoods. It becomes a drumbeat of constant repetition of the same lines over and over and over until they become "conventional wisdom." "Everybody knows that" so-and-so is true so there's no point wasting your energy trying to say it ain't so. Polls then show that the public (deprived of any contrasting information) solidly favors the Republican position. Calls and letters flood in to Congressional offices (from Christian Coalition phone banks). Democrats start to worry about their chances of holding office if they oppose the Republicans on this one vote. Then the vote comes up in the Congress, and enough Democrats - afraid that Rush Limbaugh will say something bad about them, and mired in a Washington "bubble" environment cut off from their constituents - vote with the Republicans to get the issue through and out of the way. Tax cuts, budget cuts, right-wing judges, "compromises" on health care or welfare or energy... and Bush slides it past the voters as a "bipartisan" win for the Republicans. I call this process "The Forest." We have now seen it happen enough times that we can recognize what's happening and even predict the next move. What's unfortunate is how the Democrats in Washington fall into the same trap every time. Now it's happening on the ultimate issue - war and peace, life and death.America's political elite live in an information bubble. It's like the Right has set up a "conventional wisdom machine" that is targeted at opinion leaders, legislators, their staffs and the circles they associate with. Heavily-funded right-wing organizations work to infiltrate their message into the information that these "leadership elite" receive. They achieve this in many ways. One way, of course, is that they have their very own bought-and-paid-for media outlets like Fox, the Washington Times, and most of AM radio. But they also have worked to get the more mainstream opinion leaders under their influence. Influential columnists and reporters receive large speaking fees from corporations and trade associations. They get free "retreats" where they learn about "market solutions." And everyone is certainly afraid of the shame and humiliation should they become the target of the character assassination machine. That acts as a powerful incentive to toe the line and reject "marginalized" information sources -- people like Scott Ritter and Michael Moore, constituents complaining about election fraud, and Progressive online news sources or blogs (those terrible things that leaked the exit polls) -- and stick to "credible" sources. The Armstrong Williams scandal shows us the amounts of money involved in, and the "reach" of this effort. I mean, Armstrong Williams? If Armstrong Williams is getting $240,000 directly from the government, imagine what mainstream opinion leaders are getting from the big-money corporate trade associations, right-wing think tanks, etc. -- over (speaking fees, travel, gifts) and under (bribes, like Williams got) the table. The amounts of money the Right is putting into their outside-the-election-process propaganda effort -- over $300 million a year just for the think tank/advocacy communication infrastructure -- ought to warn us that most of the traditional channels through which "the leadership elite" get their info are likely targets of this effort. Marginalizing sources like blogs is one way to scare Washington types away from the info they contain. Reading blogs is a way to break through that bubble. Update - See also The Conservative Marketing Machine, by Laurie Spivak --- Posted at 1/10/2005 08:00:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Vote For Gonzales == Vote For Torture From Will the U.S. Senate Endorse Torture? . . . In the past, Congress has meted out punishments to presidents or their prospective appointees for far lesser transgressions than culpability in torture. For example, President Bill Clinton was impeached—a rarity in American history—by Congress for having sex with an intern and lying about it. Although Clinton was guilty of bad behavior, this breach of ethics nowhere approached the severity of enabling the brutal treatment of prisoners in the government’s custody. Similarly, Congress denied Judge Robert Bork a seat on the Supreme Court, not because his sentencing of prisoners was too harsh, but because it merely viewed his policy views as out of the mainstream. Although I dislike the term “un-American”—since throughout U.S. history it has often been applied to people who disagreed with whatever war was then the rage—I think the term can safely be applied to torture. Congress should deny high office to anyone who helps create a bureaucratic climate that implicitly endorses such reprehensible behavior. Gonzales has done exactly that. --- Posted at 1/10/2005 07:41:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Jail time for moms who miscarry That is what HB1677, or the “Report of Fetal Death by mother, penalty” bill, introduced into the Virginia Legislature by Delegate John Cosgrove, would require. If you are a woman and you have a miscarriage--not an abortion--away from a medical center where such things are automatically reported, Cosgrove's bill would require you to report the miscarriage to the police department within 12 hours-- barely enough time to get over the physical pain and exhaustion, the tears with your partner over losing the child you have been prayng for, and the grieving call to your parents and in-laws. Miss that 12 hours by one minute, and you could find yourself facing a self-rightous prosecutor who wants you put you in line for a $2500 fine and a 12 month jail term with the well-know potential for jailhouse rape and beatings. The full story at Democracy for Virgina. An email campaign to Delegate Cosgrove, the author of this attempt to further control women's bodies can be found at mansworldnot. --- Posted at 1/10/2005 12:27:00 PM by patrick@mansworld Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Credibility A letter to the editor, NY Times, Online Debate Forums, As the administrator of the Web site Democratic Underground, I am perplexed as to why you would consider an obscure posting on a busy Internet discussion forum to be worthy of an article ("Myths Run Wild in Blog Tsunami Debate," news article, Jan. 3). Your article did not make clear that the message in question was posted by a completely anonymous individual, whose identity and political agenda are impossible to determine. The article also did not mention that the posting appeared to be an innocent question from a person guilty of nothing more than ignorance. Indeed, the posting's title (which you did not mention) was "One more dumb question regarding the earthquake in Asia." Our discussion forum is different from a traditional blog. We get approximately 25,000 messages posted each day, and we cannot possibly check them all for accuracy. It is fairly common for right-wing Web sites to cherry-pick the most extreme or outlandish posts from our forum in order to paint all liberals as wacky or extreme. I was surprised to see The Times doing it, too.But BLOGS don't have credibility. The NY Times and the Washington Post and Armstrong Williams have credibility. --- Posted at 1/10/2005 10:30:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Trademark I really should have trademarked the name. --- Posted at 1/10/2005 10:24:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/09/2005 What's So Funny? As I walk through This wicked world Searchin’ for light in the darkness of insanity. I ask myself Is all hope lost? Is there only pain and hatred and misery? And each time I feel like this inside, There’s one thing I wanna know: What’s so funny ’bout peace love & understanding? And as I walked on Through troubled times My spirit gets so downhearted sometimes So where are the strong And who are the trusted? And where is the harmony? Sweet harmony. ’Cause each time I feel it slippin’ away, just makes me wanna cry. What’s so funny ’bout peace love & understanding? So where are the strong? And who are the trusted? And where is the harmony? Sweet harmony. ’Cause each time I feel it slippin’ away, just makes me wanna cry. What’s so funny ’bout peace love & understanding? --- Posted at 1/09/2005 09:01:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Screw Credibility Recently Digby wrote about an astonishing Harvard conference on political blogging. Of the 43 participants, only about 3 or 4 were free-lance bloggers. Everyone else represented an institution, and while all but two had some internet presence, the majority were best known for their non-internet work. Bloggers apparently don't have credibility. Judy Fucking Miller has credibility, and William Fucking Safire has credibility, but bloggers don’t. Matt Yglesias, Kevin Drum, and Josh Micah Marshall strive for credibility, but they weren't invited. They might as well all have been off in Vegas playing poker with the infamous Bartcop. The major media has lost the ability to control the political dialogue. No one can say “That’s the way it is” any more. But media people are fighting hard to maintain their status, and that’s why the credibility issue is raised. (In Digby’s comments, the blogger Susan Madrak – once a professional journalist – talks about the fear and hostility she encounters when representing bloggers at journalistic events.) People who promote Judith Miller, but fire Robert Parry, really need to shut up about credibility. “Credibility” is just the conventional wisdom -- if you disagree with it, you’re not credible. (Scott Ritter knew as much about the facts of Iraqi WMD as anyone did, and he was right when almost everyone else was wrong, but do you see him on TV any more, or read him in the NYT? No. Not credible.) Two things are happening here. First, there is no middle any more. This is mostly because the hard right is trying to take over the country by any means necessary, and destroying moderates (including Republican moderates) is part of their game. They have many plants in the media itself -- especially at the relatively-anonymous high levels, including ownership – and rightwing activists outside the media have learned that if they complain all the time about everything, often they’ll get their way. (This accounts for a supposed paradox: why do both liberals and conservatives hate the media? It’s because the conservatives are faking it. They know as well as liberals do that Dan Rather wasn’t really a liberal, but they can win by lying and smearing, so they do it.) The second thing is more positive. Faceless copyeditors and other behind-the-scenes pros try to control the spin of news by highlighting some stories, downplaying others, and hardening or softening the main point. Various tricks can be used to suppress a story: putting it on page 16 with a small, misleading headline and burying the point of the story in the 9th paragraph sum up the most common ones. With the internet, this arbiter function is lost. Every man can be his own I.F. Stone now. Stone used to say that you could always find the truth in the newspapers, but it would often be in a short paragraph on page sixteen. Most of the damage that bloggers do to the established media doesn’t come from independent reporting, but from displacing the copy editors by highlighting stories the editors wanted to downplay. I’ve talked about this before, and I’ll have lot more to say later. For right now, I’ll just say that the Democratic Party’s timidity about bloggers is a good example of the way that Democrats’ institutional, bureaucratic commitments cripple them, and that the quest for credibility is not worth bothering with, since Rove, Norquist, Bush, and Cheney are out to destroy us any way they can. There's no middle any more. P. S. Note that I didn't even mention Armstrong Williams. --- Posted at 1/09/2005 09:50:00 AM by John Emerson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/08/2005 Payolagate Oliver Willis is blogging up a storm over the news that the Bush administration has been illegally paying journalists and PR firms big bucks to sway the public toward their policies. (Never mind the speaking fees, free travel, etc. that corporations and trade associations give to journalists...) So it seems like a good time to remind readers of this story. The Bushies awarded the contract to supply oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to one of the core funders of the Right. What a coincidence! At a time when oil prices are higher than ever, many have questioned why the government wouldn't at least put a hold on oil purchases -- not to mention pumping some oil OUT of the reserves to lower demand. But that would mean that Koch gets less of our money to put to use funding the Right! Well, it isn't about the interests of the people of the country, it's about the interests of The Party. --- Posted at 1/08/2005 09:44:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Local Boy Makes Really, Really, Really, Really Good! Blogger Tom Burka, in NY Times, The New York Times > Opinion >Washington Week in Revue. It's a humor column, so you serious, serious Seeing the Forest regulars will probably want to skip it. --- Posted at 1/08/2005 07:22:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Torture Is So Last Year -- Now It's Death Squads Pentagon May Use Death Squads in Iraq: "Now, Newsweek has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration's battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported 'nationalist' forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. [. . .] Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. [. . .] The interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi is said to be among the most forthright proponents of the Salvador option."I'm actually too upset to comment on this. I keep writing something, deleting it. It's fear. Laws just don't matter. ALL the checks and balances have been removed. And if they are willing to do it there ... --- Posted at 1/08/2005 06:38:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Freedom? Iran Government Censors Blogs: "Friends in Iran, journalists and technicians, are saying that judiciary officials have ordered all major ISP to filter all blogging services including PersianBlog, BlogSpot, Blogger, BlogSky, and even BlogRolling."What were our troops fighting for, again? Correction - Oops. I screwed up. I mistook IraN for IraQ. Well at least I didn't invade and kill tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of people and destroy America's credibility. --- Posted at 1/08/2005 09:12:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/07/2005 Washington Democrats I think I've found a pretty good definition of what some of us characterize as "Washington Democrats." Tim Grieve, in Salon's Not with a bang but a whimper sums up what it is about the "Washington Democrats" that bothers me: "And the Republicans weren't the only ones who seemed to give the protest short shrift. Minnesota Sen. Mark Dayton, a Democrat, took to the floor to criticize Boxer for facilitating the protest, saying she would undermine the country's confidence in its democracy if the protest were to succeed and the election were thrown to the House of Representatives. And while Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid ultimately spoke of the need for election reform, he spent much of the protest debate on the other side of the aisle, kibitzing with Santorum and a few other Republican senators. When it came time for the roll call, Boxer was the only senator to vote for the protest; John Kerry, who had announced Wednesday that he wouldn't take part in any protest, conveniently found himself on a mission to Baghdad. In the House, 31 Democrats voted to support the objection. Eighty-eight House Democrats voted against it, and 80 of them didn't bother to vote at all. For their efforts, Rep. John Conyers and the others who pursued an investigation in Ohio got neither a serious debate over the voting irregularities nor a commitment from Republicans even to think about electoral reform."It doesn't matter where you stand on whether the Ohio vote produced legitimate results. When a substantial block of your party feels strongly about something like this, you don't mock them, you treat them with respect and take the issue seriously. The grassroots and the "netroots" don't feel that we are taken seriously by the "Washington Democrats." I think the problem is that many of these Representatives and Senators probably don't KNOW how so many people they represent feel about issues like this! My recommendation is that the DNC have someone on staff who writes up a daily digest that is delivered to Congressional offices? They could start with the Daou Report. Update - I have heard the argument that this only gives Republicans an opening to overturn election results next time should a Democrat win while Republicans still control the Congress. This is what I call the "Democrats who are afraid that Rush Limbaugh will say something bad about them" syndrome. If the Republicans are going to try to overturn a Democratic win, they're going to -- it's what they do, and they don't do the things they do in reaction to Democrats. They do them because they are pursuing an aggressive offense strategy, and it is working. --- Posted at 1/07/2005 02:07:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
PrivatizeThis.com PrivatizeThis.com :: Don't Let Bush Gamble with Your Retirement! --- Posted at 1/07/2005 01:40:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Government Paying Journalists To Promote Right-Wing Policies! Are They Paid To Promote Bush, Too? "Our" government is paying big money to journalists to promote right-wing legislation. Think about that for a minute. White House paid commentator $240,000 to promote No Child Left Behind "...the Bush administration paid a prominent black pundit $240,000 to promote the [NCLB] law on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same."This $240,000 bribe is ON TOP of what the guy makes for his show, speaking fees, OTHER bribes, etc. The contract may be illegal "because Congress has prohibited propaganda," or any sort of lobbying for programs funded by the government, said Melanie Sloan of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "And it's propaganda."MAY be illegal? Is there any question about it? The government is giving money to journalists to promote legislation that is before Congress? And with that kind of money being handed out I wonder if this journalist - or any other journalists receiving or hoping to receive payoffs will EVER question anything Bush does? This explains a LOT! This humble blogger wants to know, what OTHER payoffs to journalists are being handed out by the Bush administration? Did journalists receive money from the government to promote the Iraq war? To help the Swift Boat Vets smear Kerry? This $240,000 was a direct payoff from the government itself. But what about other kinds of payoffs? Corporate and trade association speaking fees are payoffs. Exclusive retreats are payoffs. Gifts, dinners, travel ... there are may ways to pay people off. Government payments to journalists is obviously, flatly, blatantly illegal. But is there a chance that the Bush Justice Department will investigate? Is there a chance that the Republican Congress will investigate? The Republican FBI? And here is the real laugher -- with $240,000 payoffs to journalists in the air, how many "journalists" will look into this? We'll have to wait and see. Because this government payoff story places all journalists under suspicion I think it would be a good idea for all journalists to disclose whether they have received speaking fees, gifts, travel, etc. from any interest group of any kind. But that's just me. --- Posted at 1/07/2005 09:32:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/06/2005 Tucker Carlson to be ousted from CNN Apparently CNN’s viewers have had it with right wing shouter Tucker Carlson and “shout shows” in general. TV insider blog Cynopsis reported this morning that the bow-tied Carlson has been told his contract will not be renewed, and that his program vehicle, Crossfire, will be canceled. Crossfire itself is getting tired and Carlson's conservative rants and half-truths have not pulled viewers away from Fox to boost its slumping Nielsen viewership ratings. Carlson, who had to eat his words on air when his prediction that Hillary Clinton’s book would bomb bombed, has been petulantly complaining about his TV exposure and rumors are that he will move to the more right-wing friendly MSNBC to fill Deborah Norville's spot at 9 pm at the end of the month. A bad trade for MSNBC viewers but a good one for the CNN audience. Now if only he would vacate PBS. Email PBS CEO Pat Mitchell at viewer@pbs.org and suggest that if Carlson is not good enough for CNN, he is darn sure is not good enough for PBS. --- Posted at 1/06/2005 10:55:00 PM by patrick@mansworld Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Seeing The Forest Nominated For Best Group Blog Wampum: The Koufax Awards: Best Group Blog --- Posted at 1/06/2005 08:15:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Congressional Ethics The other day I wrote that the media had been fooled again - that the Republican "reversal" on ethics rules actually wasn't. It was a trick. The new rule -- the supposed "reversal" -- does the following: "This package represents a very serious and grave threat to the credibility and integrity of this institution. And sadly, is being forced upon the Congress and the American people for the benefit and protection on one man, Tom DeLay." "The Republican Party has already gone to extraordinary lengths to cover for and protect Mr. Delay from his long pattern of unethical behavior. Now they are changing standing rules of the House to gut the ethics process, a shameful business for the Majority to be involved in."The rules package is set to be debated before the full House this afternoon. A vote for adoption will follow. If you live in a Republican district, call your representative today and complain about this! If they think the public is paying attention, it could make a difference! --- Posted at 1/06/2005 09:59:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
DNC Candidate Roemer, Please Explain Tim Roemer is one of the candidates for DNC Chair. Here's something I came across, Roemer's bio at the Mercatus Center: Tim Roemer is a distinguished scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and president of the Center for National Policy.Is that THIS Mercatus Center and George Mason University? (Also, see this and this.) Explanation, please! Update - I was rushing out the door when I wrote that. I think I should explain in greater detail why I think this is important, so I'll try to do that in this update. What I probably should do is write a new post from scratch... At Seeing the Forest I write about the Right's network of organizations, and how they influence our politics by influencing public attitudes as well as setting up channels to influence politicians themselves. Some of these organizations are set up to "educate" opinion leaders and public officials on why they think right-wing ideology offers better solutions to public policy problems. (I'm trying to paraphrase typical right-wing wording...) Without going into detail, let me just say that their solutions are not always what you and I would consider to be in the best interest of the public-at-large. For example, their "market solutions" often translate to "one-dollar-one-vote" corporate-oriented policies -- as compared with boring, old-fashioned, democratic "one-person-one-vote" solutions that require such pesky oversight provisions as transparency, accountability, public consensus, equal opportunity, serving all citizens equally, etc. -- all those things the Right calls "inefficient" and "bureaucratic..." The Mercatus Center, for example, at George Mason University describes itself as promoting the "use of market-based tools and analysis to discover workable solutions to pressing economic and governmental problems"And just look at who is funding them, as well as the amounts! (Click here, and see the reports linked at the end of this post, for some background on who these funders are and what they stand for. Carthage Foundation is a Richard Mellon Scaife (more here) foundation, for example.) As I wrote above, before this update, Tim Roemer is "a distinguished scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University." Roemer's bio at Mercatus also says, "Roemer is a key spokesperson for the Mercatus Center's Capitol Hill Campus outreach and education program, which seeks to improve public policy outcomes by teaching economics and policy analysis to congressional staff."One of the ways the Right "educates" public officials, opinion leaders,etc., is to send them to expensive "retreats" at exclusive resorts, nice hotels, etc. where they are wined and dined and treated to first-class amenities. (This is not unlike the technique of giving free trips to people to attend presentations for time-share retreats or condos.) For example, the Right sponsors retreats for judges that have caused some controversy when reported. (See also here, here, here and here.) Following is the text of an e-mail Roemer recently sent out to Congressional Chiefs of Staff, inviting them to a retreat: Subject: 2005 Chief of Staff Retreat Dear Fellow Democrats, I would like to encourage you to join me in Philadelphia on February 4th and 5th, 2005 at the Ritz Carlton Hotel for the 2005 Chief of Staff Retreat. This Retreat is probably the best opportunity of the year for gathering with other senior-level congressional staff both from our party but also with our colleagues across the aisle. The Retreat is hosted by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. I have been affiliated with this organization for the past two years in an effort to promote sound economic thinking that leads to a more prosperous and fiscally responsible America. The Mercatus Center is a non-profit and non-partisan group that seeks to educate congressional staff about markets, global prosperity for the poor and economics as they relate to the issues you are working on in your congressional or committee office. This year's program is highly relevant to the issues facing the 109th Congress. We will discuss topics ranging from drug reimportation to Social Security, tax and pension reform, to understanding learning disparities between black and white children. I will be there to discuss national security and intelligence reforms. While we have made important progress in modernizing our intelligence system, there are several important issues confronting congress. At a time of partisan divide, this is an opportunity to share thoughts and ideas. Any time that you can get away from the Hill to view issues from different angles, you should do it. I look forward to seeing you there. If you are interested in learning more, or registering, please click here: http://www.mercatus.org/capitolhillcampus/article.php/933.html Best regards, Tim RoemerA flyer for the retreat says: The Mercatus Center provides lodging and meals for all Retreat participants and their guests. In addition, we will provide complimentary transportation to/from Philadelphia via select Amtrak trains. Information on these trains will be posted here as the retreat draws closer.I'm not saying there is anything illegal here. But I am saying that this sounds suspiciously like other activities of the Right that have come to light, designed to spread right-wing ideological influence. Here are some things that this humble blogger would like to know. What will be going on at this "retreat?" What kind of "sound economic thinking" is a right-wing-funded organization going to be promoting at the retreat? What sort of "Social Security, tax and pension reform" is a right-wing-funded organization going to be promoting to Democratic Chiefs of Staff? Who is funding this retreat (and why?)? And, most important to me, what is a candidate for head of the Democratic Party doing working for this crowd? Anyone interested in the race to become head of the Democratic National Committee deserves answers to these questions, and a full explanation. I would also be interested in knowing if any Democratic Chiefs of Staff have accepted the invitation! For those interested in more infomation about the right-wing organizational infrastructure see the tables of contents of reports here and here. While these reports are written for trial lawyers and teacher unions, their intent is to describe the Right's infrastructure of advocacy/communication organizations, who is funding it, what their goals are, and looking at what we might do to counter this effort and recover our democracy. See also: A collection of links to articles, reports and resources for learning about the right-wing movement, its history, how it is funded and how it operates. (This update was revised at 5:30pm PST.) --- Posted at 1/06/2005 09:35:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/05/2005 My Moral Values My Moral Values --- Posted at 1/05/2005 08:27:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Happening Here Orcinus worries about where things could go: "My very clear impression of the rank-and-file American right is that many if not most of them, at the behest of their leaders, now believe that opposing George W. Bush and the Iraq War, as well as his handling of the War on Terror, is an act of genuine treason worthy of the ultimate social condemnation, including incarceration and execution. They feel not only vindicated but profoundly empowered by the election result, empowered to silence their opposition, by force if need be."I've been noticing this in the tenor of posts and comments at right-wing sites but especialy on the radio, saying us Progressives hope America loses in Iraq and siding with Saddam or bin Laden, that we hope our troops get killed, that we are helping undermine troop morale... If you have relatives or friends in Iraq, and you believe this stuff, what is it encouraging you to do? The leadership of the Right certainly isn't asking them to tone it down or to stop. Have you heard Bush condemn such talk - ever? From a comment following the Orcinus post I discovered this piece at the Libertarian Lew Rockwell site: "Year's end is the time for big thoughts, so here are mine. The most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing. This huge shift has not been noticed among mainstream punditry, and hence there have been few attempts to explain it – much less have libertarians thought much about what it implies. My own take is this: the Republican takeover of the presidency combined with an unrelenting state of war, has supplied all the levers necessary to convert a burgeoning libertarian movement into a statist one. [further down, talking about increasingly violent right-wing rhetoric] ... I'm actually not surprised at this. It has been building for some time. If you follow hate-filled sites such as Free Republic, you know that the populist right in this country has been advocating nuclear holocaust and mass bloodshed for more than a year now. The militarism and nationalism dwarfs anything I saw at any point during the Cold War. It celebrates the shedding of blood, and exhibits a maniacal love of the state. The new ideology of the red-state bourgeoisie seems to actually believe that the US is God marching on earth – not just godlike, but really serving as a proxy for God himself. Along with this goes a kind of worship of the presidency, and a celebration of all things public sector, including egregious law like the Patriot Act, egregious bureaucracies like the Department of Homeland Security, and egregious centrally imposed regimentation like the No Child Left Behind Act. It longs for the state to throw its weight behind institutions like the two-parent heterosexual family, the Christian charity, the homogeneous community of native-born patriots. [. . .] In short, what we have alive in the US is an updated and Americanized fascism."This from the head of a Libertarian think tank! There's more there, worth reading. So go read. An alliance between Progressives and Libertarians to fight the Republicans? --- Posted at 1/05/2005 06:15:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
At American Street I have a post up at American Street, titled The Gap, about the information gap that exists between boggers, blog-readers, and Washington Democrats. And it is surprising how so many Washington Democrats seem so ill-informed about so many of the issues, or so out of touch with things that every single Progressive blogger and blog-reader understands. How many of them understand that the Republican Social Security proposal phases out Social Security? But webloggers and their readers know this. --- Posted at 1/05/2005 10:06:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/04/2005 Journalists challenge Fox, threatened with $1 million legal bill TV Spy’s ShopTalk reported Monday that two TV journalists have challenged the license renewal of WTVT Fox-13, charging that it deliberately broadcast false news reports about Monsanto’s secret use of potentially cancer-causing growth hormones in milk. Reporters Jane Akre and Steve Wilson filed the petition Monday against Fox’s Tampa station after a Florida Appeals Court overturned a $425,000 jury award to them and then ordered them to pay court costs and issued rullings allowing Fox to seek $1 million in legal costs from them for defending itself against their Whistleblower lawsuit. The court said broadcasting false news reports is not a crime, striking grounds for their suit. The journalists are appealing. Their petition to the Federal Communications Commission to deny the station's license renewal includes evidence that the station’s managers repeatedly ordered them to distort a series of news reports about Monsanto’s secret use of the artificial hormone in dairy cattle throughout Florida and nationally. The reporters charge that station executives demanded their news stories be falsified to avoid a lawsuit by Monsanto and potential loss of advertising from the dairy industry. The petition also charges WTVT violated federal rules by removing complaints about the hormone story from its files.
Progressives should jump in and help because (1) the Appeals Court’s finding that it is not illegal for Fox or any other TV outlet to broadcast news that is patently false gives all corporate media an on-the-record license to lie, and (2) the Court's ruling that Whistleblowers who lose a suit can be sued for huge legal bills by the companies they are suing shuts down a powerful tool for kicking corporate media in the teeth when they do lie. This is a big-stakes case and these two have been fighting it mostly alone for years. (They received a Goldman Prize in 2001 for reporting the story and fighting Fox and Monsanto.) They need money, volunteers, and moral support. If they lose this one, Monsanto can poison us all it wants and Fox can fool us with impunity. Full details of their case, the Appeals Court order for them to pay, their challenge to Fox 13’s license renewal, and how you can help can be found here. --- Posted at 1/04/2005 10:25:00 PM by patrick@mansworld Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Clear Channel Stations' enlarge your breasts contest Radio giant Clear Channel Communications Inc. ran a Christmas contest in which stations granted breast enlargement surgeries to women in four cities. In the "Breast Christmas Ever" contest, 13 women were awarded the procedure after writing essays to the stations explaining why they wanted larger breasts. Click here to add your complaints to those going to the FCC. --- Posted at 1/04/2005 10:19:00 PM by patrick@mansworld Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Media Fooled Again By now you're read that the Repubicans "backed down" on their ethics rule changes. Well, no. They changed the rules to prevent ANY ethics probes of ANY Repubicans, ever: "Five members of each party serve on the House ethics panel and under the current system, a tie vote would launch an ethics probe. Under the new rule, a tie or failure to make a decision within 45 days would mean no action would be taken." --- Posted at 1/04/2005 04:57:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Why Not Oppose Gonzales? The Bush administration has nominated Alberto Gonzales to be our Attorney General. Gonzales is one of the people behind the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo and in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also asserts that "quaint" international law does not apply to the United States, and that United States law does not apply to President Bush. From Gonzales Torture Memo Controversy Builds: The Justice Department in 2002 asserted that President Bush's wartime powers superseded anti-torture laws and treaties like the Geneva Conventions. Gonzales, while at the White House, also wrote a memo to President Bush on January 25, 2002, arguing that the war on terrorism "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."The article says, "The Democrats have not yet decided whether to try to block Gonzales' confirmation." OK, I know that some of you, and some on your staffs, read Seeing the Forest. Here's what I don't get: What do you get out of failing to oppose Gonzales' nomination? Is it that you're afraid that Rush Limbaugh is going to say bad things about you if you oppose him? Are you worried about how the media will portray you, maybe say you are "obstructionist?" Are you afraid that you'll be portrayed as "anti-Hispanic?" Here's what I think YOU don't get: THIS IS ALL GOING TO HAPPEN ANYWAY, NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO! Rush Limbaugh IS going to say bad things about you. The Right-wing echo-chamber WILL portray you as obstructionist. They WILL portray you as anti-Hispanic. THEY WILL DO AND SAY THESE THINGS NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO! And, the irony is, these past several years have shown that the more you cozy up to their side, the more they will do this to you, because it shows them that you think you are vulnerable and afraid of your constituents. This is their strategy of strategic lies, and the way you are going to get past it is by embracing truth and righteousness instead of worrying about how you will be "portrayed." The "portrayal game" is over and you lost. Get past that. Start doing the RIGHT thing and the truth of your righteous acts will shine through the fog. Your constituents want "tough and principled." --- Posted at 1/04/2005 09:04:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
A "West Wing" for the Pentagon NBC ordered a pilot from Jerry Bruckheimer called E-Ring (Warner Bros. TV) yesterday, focusing on the inner workings at the Pentagon. The idea was created by David McKenna, who wrote the script, and Ken Robinson a former Green Beret who consults for CNN on terrorism and military intelligence. McKenna also wrote S.W.A.T., Blow, and Get Carter. NBC describes "E-Ring," as a" West Wing" set at the Pentagon . Robinson has been fairly even-handed at CNN, once telling Wolf Blitzer that , “…we can't treat al Qaeda like it's the boogeyman and stop living. But there has to be vigilance.” The show could be an opportunity for Progressives to ramp down the fear and claims of endless war on terror trumpeted by the Administration and the Conservative echo chamber, or it could devolve into a “desert western” with good guys catching Muslim terrorists by trampling civil rights. Progressives with --- Posted at 1/04/2005 08:25:00 AM by patrick@mansworld Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/03/2005 More on Americans missing in the tsunami Some trolling Rethuglicans jumped on me for my cynicism about Administration motives in not preparing the American people for traumatic casualty counts in the tsunami. Get a life, one advised. I'd be curious as to how such folks would have reacted to the suggestion, Get a life, after 9-11. Well, Powell, one of the few grown-ups in the Administration, has touched this political hot potato. "The number of private citizens or citizens unaccounted for still lingers around 4-5000," he said, adding the figure was based on phone calls from relatives or friends inquiring about their whereabouts. Mr Powell said this did not mean they were necessarily casualties in the catastrophe. But he added: "We can't ignore the very distinct possibility that there are Americans within this number who have lost their lives. We just don't know that". Recall there has only been one missing victim recovered alive in the last 24 hours. --- Posted at 1/03/2005 03:24:00 PM by Camille Roy Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Is It Time? It might be the right time to start another Mac software company. What would you like to see on a Mac? Would you pay actual money for it? --- Posted at 1/03/2005 01:54:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
When Good Empires Go Bad In The Left Coaster: Successful Societies, Mary writes about why societies fail. Then in More on Declining Empires, soccerdad adds ... more. Good reads. --- Posted at 1/03/2005 08:24:00 AM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/02/2005 From this astonishingly dishonest Washington Post story: "In just 14 years, the nation's Social Security system is projected to reach a day of reckoning: Retiree benefits will exceed payroll tax receipts, and to pay its bills the system will have to begin redeeming billions of dollars in special Treasury bonds that have piled up in its trust fund. To redeem those bonds, which represent money taken in years when Social Security ran a surplus and used for other government operations, the federal government would likely have to cut other programs, raise taxes or borrow more money."Let me translate this into "regular people" terms: In just 14 days your bank faces a day of reckoning: your mortgage payment is due. You have spent the money, so the bank must lay people off, cut vacations and eliinate health insurance in order to reduce their financial requirements."What's REALLY happening? In just fourteen years, the full impact of Bush's tax cuts become clear. The money that paid for these tax cuts -- which went primarily to the rich -- was supposed to be saved for your retirement. That retirement money came from taxes on incomes below $75,000-$85,000 (depending on the year). A tax on the middle class and poor, that was handed to the rich. The most obvious solution is to increase taxes on the rich to pay back what was taken from your retirement money and given TO the rich. Duh. So instead smoke, sand, dust, fog and anything else they can think of are being thrown into the air to keep you from realizing what has happened to your retirement money. --- Posted at 1/02/2005 07:42:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
Santa Cruz Spent the day in Santa Cruz. One great thing about Santa Cruz is you can listen to KPIG on the radio. KPIG is a country/ reggae/ Grateful Dead/ folk/ rock/ bluegrass/ hippie/ dope-smoking-redneck-hippie kind of station -- playing music that you just will not hear on the kind of corporate Clear Channel-style station that saturates most "markets." (You're a "market," not a person.) KPIG was the very first radio station on the internet but had to stop when the new royalty rules killed free online radio simulcasts. More on that here. (You can listen online if you have AOL or RealAudio RealPass.) While we were driving home they played this song by James McMurtry, "We Can't Make It Here" Vietnam Vet with a cardboard sign Sitting there by the left turn line Flag on the wheelchair flapping in the breeze One leg missing, both hands free No one's paying much mind to him The V.A. budget's stretched so thin And there's more comin' home from the Mideast war We can't make it here anymore That big ol' building was the textile mill It fed our kids and it paid our bills But they turned us out and they closed the doors We can't make it here anymore See all those pallets piled up on the loading dock They're just gonna set there till they rot 'Cause there's nothing to ship, nothing to pack Just busted concrete and rusted tracks Empty storefronts around the square There's a needle in the gutter and glass everywhere You don't come down here 'less you're looking to score We can't make it here anymore The bar's still open but man it's slow The tip jar's light and the register's low The bartender don't have much to say The regular crowd gets thinner each day Some have maxed out all their credit cards Some are workin? two jobs and livin? in cars Minimum wage won't pay for a roof, won't pay for a drink If you gotta have proof just try it yourself Mr. CEO See how far 5.15 an hour will go Take a part time job at one of your stores Bet you can't make it here anymore High school girl with a bourgeois dream Just like the pictures in the magazine She found on the floor of the laundromat A woman with kids can forget all that If she comes up pregnant what'll she do Forget the career, forget about school Can she live on faith? live on hope? High on Jesus or hooked on dope When it's way too late to just say no You can't make it here anymore Wow I'm stocking shirts in the Wal-Mart store Just like the ones we made before 'Cept this one came from Singapore I guess we can't make it here anymore Should I hate a people for the shade of their skin Or the shape of their eyes or the shape I'm in Should I hate 'em for having our jobs today No I hate the men sent the jobs away I can see them all now, they haunt my dreams All lily white and squeaky clean They've never known want, they'll never know need Their shit don't stink and their kids won't bleed Their kids won't bleed in the damn little war And we can't make it here anymore Will work for food Will die for oil Will kill for power and to us the spoils The billionaires get to pay less tax The working poor get to fall through the cracks Let 'em eat jellybeans let 'em eat cake Let 'em eat shit, whatever it takes They can join the Air Force, or join the Corps If they can't make it here anymore And that's how it is That's what we got If the president wants to admit it or not You can read it in the paper Read it on the wall Hear it on the wind If you're listening at all Get out of that limo Look us in the eye Call us on the cell phone Tell us all why In Dayton, Ohio Or Portland, Maine Or a cotton gin out on the great high plains That's done closed down along with the school And the hospital and the swimming pool Dust devils dance in the noonday heat There's rats in the alley And trash in the street Gang graffiti on a boxcar door We can't make it here anymoreYou can download this song here for free! --- Posted at 1/02/2005 06:06:00 PM by Dave Johnson Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
What about American Tsunami Casualties? Well the Swedes have declared a day of mourning for the Swedes who died in the tsunami. The Germans are preparing their citizens for the worst. The American government, concerned as always more about image than death and suffering, has acknowledged 12 American dead, and advises the thousands of Americans missing to call Mom as soon as possible. Yeah, right. Why does this picture remind me of the Administration allergy to the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq? Cover up the bad news as much as possible. Keep voters from the truth, so the Rethuglicans and friends can keep their lock on power and continue looting the country. When are we going to have a government that gives a d*mn about the American people? It's a shame, a real shame. --- Posted at 1/02/2005 01:08:00 PM by Camille Roy Link to this | | | | e-mail this post
1/01/2005 Deal With It The Bush administration likes to hand us "facts on the ground." They do what they need to do to create a situation the way THEY want it, and tell everyone to deal with the way things are now rather than concern themselves with how they got that way. As Chalabi said, when asked if he regrets helping to mislead us into war, "We are in Baghdad now." Deal with it. And here we are. In Iraq, Militants issue threat on voting: "The radical Ansar al-Sunna Army and two other insurgent groups issued a statement Thursday warning that democracy was un-Islamic. Democracy could lead to passing un-Islamic laws, such as permitting gay marriage, if the majority or people agreed to it, the statement said. "Democracy is a Greek word meaning the rule of the people, which means that the people do what they see fit," said the statement. "This concept is considered apostasy and defies the belief in one God -- Muslims' doctrine."Sounds remarkably similar to the views of America's Christian Right, no? And it also sounds notably similar to those of Bush's favorite Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia, who writes of the "tendency of democracy to obscure the divine authority behind government". Meanwhile, Iraqi women are becoming afraid to go out in public without head covering: This is the new reality for many women in Iraq, Muslims and Christians alike. As the months have passed since the U.S.-led invasion, fewer women are daring to venture out without wearing a traditional Muslim head scarf, called a hejab in Arabic. In Baghdad, moderate Muslim women used to feel they had a choice whether to wear the scarf, even as religious oppression under Saddam Hussein grew over the past decade. Now, in many neighborhoods, it is hard to find a woman outdoors without a head scarf.We (America, us) have created a terrible situation in Iraq. Iraqis do not feel safe and secure, and this is entirely our fault. If we let things continue on their current path the resulting civil war and rise of theocratic Islamic government will mean misery and chaos for the people there, and means we will not be safe here at home. Here is what I think: Bush is right, we are there now, and we have to deal with it. But things are not going the way Bush expected, and the "we broke it we own it" rule applies. So regardless of how we got into this mess, now we have an obligation to do whatever is necessary to secure Iraq and bring law, order and justice to their society. I am sure that MOST of the people there just want to have a normal government and a normal life, but the ethnic, religious, cultural and geopolitical fractures -- and armed theocrats -- that Bush has unleashed aren't going to allow that if they can get control. We should never have started this, but we did, and now we have to fix it. We have to deal with it. We have to send enough troops to Iraq to secure the country, bring order and protect the people. We literally have to put armed forces on every streetcorner in the country until it is safe for anyone -- even women without headcoverings -- to go to school or shopping, be a policeman or a judge, etc. We have to make Iraq safe for everyone to express their opinion, vote, worship according to their OWN choices or not, etc. This means literally hundreds of thousands more troops and that probably means we need a draft, and soon. We owe it to the people there, we have an obligation to do this, and in the longer term it has to happen for our own protection. We can't just go over there, kill a lot of people, stir everyone up, and then have just enough troops there to be targets, but not enough to secure the country. But that is what we are doing. It is only for domestic political reasons that the Republicans refuse to send enough troops to Iraq -- it would be an admission of the failure of their policies. And they know that a draft would drive home the effect of their policies now and harm their political agenda. Problems that show up later are not problems. Deficits are paid for by our children, wars by the volunteers, the falling dollar will cause inflation later --all allowing Republicans to use lies and short memories to hold power. Especially never mind real national security, and never mind what happens if something starts up somewhere else, like Korea -- the Republicans like to talk the national security talk, but they won't walk the walk. They won't increase taxes to pay for it and they won't increase troop levels to provide the needed numbers. If we are not willing to provide security to Iraqis, then we must turn Iraq over to the UN. The rest of the world is not interested in participating in this nightmare as long as their entry must be on Bush's terms. We control the resources of Iraq and dictate its policies. We refuse to hand any of this over to others (including the Iraqis.) Our offer has been "come here and die so American corporations can benefit," and they see through this. For some reason they aren't taking that deal. That's what I think. Deal with it. --- Posted at 1/01/2005 01:15:00 PM by Dave Johnson 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 
|
|||
(As most STF readers know by now, since the election I've been alternating between fairly reasonable posts, and gloom and doom. This one is gloom and doom. I originally posted it, in somewhat different form, on the Crooked Timber comments, where some classic illiberals were defiantly holding the fort .)
Since the election I believe more than I ever did that all significant political debates in the US are now just matters of affiliation. Bush is in the driver’s seat, and people can affiliate for him or against him.