New Voters and the Democrats' Passivity

(This would be New Voters vs. Swing Voters V.)

In my previous post, "New Voters vs. Swing Voters IV", I commented on the passivity and defeatism of the Democrats regarding proposals to recruit among the non-voting 50% of the voting age population. What are the reasons for this passivity?

One reason is probably the left/right question which has been in the background of this discussion all along. I suspect that moderate and conservative Democrats also believe, as I do, that the working poor in fact are a big chunk of the non-voters, and that the issues most likely to rouse their interest are the old-fashioned lunch-bucket issues such as an increased minimum wage, decreases in payroll rather than in income taxes, and government provision of medical insurance.

Democrats, including New Democrats, have never openly renounced those goals, but in emphasis these issues have tended to take a back seat to middle-class issues, free trade, and social liberalism. This slant is usually justified on pragmatic grounds based on what the voters think. In reality, though, I think that it's not the voters but the donors who are calling the shots. With exceptions, Hollyood liberals and other liberals with money are militant about free speech, choice, diversity, and the environment, but notably silent about the lunchbucket issues. (And the same is true of the media we've been afflicted with).

A second reason for the Democrats' lack of interest in the non-voters is that the working poor are often sort of tacky. The populism of millionaire Republicans is an enormous fraud, but there is a germ of truth in the idea that Democrats tend to be collegiate -- perhaps professionals, perhaps government workers, maybe a little artsy, and so on. A white guy working for $8.00 / hr. in an assembly plant in Kentucky is very likely uneducated, unstylish, religious, and not too pretty to look at. For whatever reason, Democratic outreach to a guy like that is almost certain to be much weaker than Democratic outreach to a black or Hispanic worker who is similiar to him in every way except race.

Here's a first suggestion on what to do. The Democratic Party's move from reliance on volunteers, neighborhood groups, etc., to the use of paid staff was probably inevitable. In my experience, however, low-level paid staff seem overwhelmingly to be college students and recent college graduates who have nothing better to do at the moment. For recruiting the working poor, however, it would make infinitely more sense to recruit staff from among the working poor themselves. (Not to be cynical, but one advantage of this is that, by definition, the working poor are willing to work very cheaply.) So what you'd want to do would be to find a sharp individual who's trapped in a crappy job, convince him that the Democrats can help him and his friends, and then give him a job spreading the word.

A final reason for Democratic passivity in this respect is slavery to social science. I've been told many times that "the trend toward declining participation has continued for for many years and is a fact of life we have to live with". But everybody admits that Democrats benefit from high participation and suffer when participation is low, so that statement might just as well be translated "the trend toward Republican victory has continued for for many years and is a fact of life we have to deal with". Should we just lie down and die?

Social science facts are not like science facts. Water is always going to be water, and gravity is always going to be gravity, but "trends" can be changed. A trend is not something to live with, but something to deal with -- in this case, something to fight against. Republicans who come from an entrepreneurial, gambler background are much better equipped than sociology students to find the weak spots in the opponent's armor and the turning-points of political history. Polls are fine, but in the last analysis the best way to see if an approach will work is to try it, rather than run a poll.

The Republicans do their polling, but they win mostly bacause they've tried all kinds of approaches and some of them worked. Over a lot of trials, the guy who says "Let's give this a shot" will whip the guy who always says "How can we be sure this will work?"

Over At the american street

Over at the american street I have posted two pieces: Win With the Base or the Mythical Middle? and Growing the Base.

4ew Voters vs. Swing Voters IV

Below Dave has collected the links so far which discuss this issue.

I have some new ideas to add, but right now I'd just like to summarize what I think now. First, long-term strategy is the real question, here, not the 2004 election. Not much energy has been put into strategy since the New Dems took over in 1984. The New Dem strategy has been OK but not great, and in any case it's twenty years old.

Partly because the party is usually financially strapped, the long-term party-building efforts have tended to be cannibalized in favor of each year's election. (That's what the "soft money" controversy was all about way back then). We shouldn't let this continue to happen.

The question of whether to put effort into "growing the base" is independent of the left vs. right / new voter vs. swing voter controversies. Active efforts to get moderate independents to identify as Democrats count as "growing the base" too.

The Democrats have been too passive, lazy, and defeatist about recruiting new voters and non-voters. My hypothesis is that a lot of non-voters are working poor and that they are natural Democrats if the Democrats can convince them that they can deliver medical care, an increase in the minimum wage, lower payroll deductions for social security, etc.

I have never heard anything whatsoever from Democratic wonks and pros about the 50% of Americans who don't vote except "No one really knows why non-voters don't vote; they have all kind of different reasons for not voting and don't form a coherent group of any kind; they're impossible to organize and probably aren't Democrats either; and besides, non-voters don't vote so they're not going to help us at all".


Those things may all have some truth in them, but they're all reasons for quitting. Much as I hate Robertson, Norquist, and Rove, I'll give them 100 points for enterprise. And I'll give their nameless Democratic counterparts zero. The bad guys have tried dozens of things, some of which worked. They didn't just take polls and then say "That's not going to work" and sit down and chill. (Right now they're going after the Dem base: at the moment, Jewish voters.)

(Edited: changed 2000 to 2004)

Horay!

Hooray for Digby!:

"We simply cannot compromise on policy anymore. No more 'pilot programs' on privatization, no quarter on 'faith based' initiatives, no bipartisan cover on anything. It only hurts us. Any experimental ideas can be tested in the states. As a national party, and particularly as congressional delegation, we have moved as far to the right as we can go and it is time to hold the line.

Just as important, we must counter their obfuscatory rhetoric and never, ever adopt it as our own. Any Democrat who uses terms such as 'tax relief,' 'tort reform' or 'partial birth' abortion should be fined 1000 dollars per instance."

The Base Or New Voters Discussion

This is part of a something I posted over at the american street.

In the last few days several weblogs have written about, and many, many readers have left comments about whether it is better for the Democrats to “move left” and appeal to “the base,” to “move right” and appeal to the “middle,” or to try to get “new voters.”

Here are some of the weblog posts, hopefully in this order (if I have missed any weblogs writing about this issue, please point to them in the comments here AND at the american street!):

John Emerson at Zizka: Why do we Lose? Five Ways the New Dems Hurt the Democrats
Nick Confessore at TAPPED: WHAT NEW VOTERS?
Kevin Drum at Calpundit: New Voters
John Emerson at Seeing the Forest: New Voters and Swing Voters
Kevin Drum at Calpundit: THE BASE vs. THE MIDDLE....
Mathew Yglasias: SWING, SWING
John Emerson at Seeing the Forest: New Voters vs. Swing voters II
South Know Bubba: Swing voters
The Mysterious Atrios: Swing Voters and Nonvoters
The ever-amazing Digby, with The Base, The Base Part II and Swingers
John Emerson again at Seeing the Forest: New Voters vs. Swing Voters III
And a while back, Simon Rosenberg at the New Democrat Network Blog: WE CAN DO BETTER II - THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES

Suppose

Suppose our government learned that North Korea was planning an invasion of South Korea. Suppose our government learned that the Serbians were planning to invade Albaina, possibly triggering a wider conflict. Suppose they learned that Venezuela was planning an action against its neighbor, triggering a conflict that threatened to destabilize Mexico, maybe bring enemies of the U.S. to power, and in any event sending millions of refugees rushing north to our borders.

What actions would be available to them? Could they go to the UN to make a case? Could they go to the country to ask for support for military action to protect our interests?

After Iraq, the government could not realistically go to the UN to ask for action. They have no credibility -- they have been caught lying. They could not go to the country to make a case for military action because they have been caught lying AND because have intentionally divided the country, using "wedge issues" and using national security for political purposes.

And, with our military completely tied down in Iraq, they couldn't even take action on their own.

Look at the mess we are in should a REAL national security threat emerge. THIS is a practical example of why what Bush has done is so bad. He has left us vulnerable. He has destroyed our credibility with the world. He has destroyed the credibility of our government with US. By using terror alerts politically, we can't even trust if Bush comes to us to say there is a new threat. What is he going to say, "This time I mean it, this time it's for real"?

New Voters vs. Swing Voters III

Adapted from a Calpundit comment thread:

What I especially argued for in my piece (here below) was a long-term strategy of party-building. The registration shift toward the Republicans Godless speaks of didn't just happen. It was the result of about four decades of effort and investment. It's my understanding that the Democrats have not made that effort, and that their only long-term strategy is continued courtship of the swing voters. Since the Republicans are building their base and we aren't, the rightward shift really is inevitable.

To me the Dem strategy is comparable to a weak basketball team playing a slowdown game and hoping for the last shot. A strong party could certainly play more aggressively.

For the last couple of years, anyway, I have not asked the Democrats so much to move to the left on the issues, as to play a tougher, more aggressive game. It's hard to win when you've forbidden yourself to take the game to the enemy. And this plays to the main weak spot in the Dem's image -- the wimp factor. A party that campaigns wimpy will be perceived as wimpy on everything. As the infamous (though moderate on most issues) Bartcop asks, how can the Dems fight for the American people when they can't even fight for themselves? (This is why the Lieberman candidacy is such a joke. Conservative Southern Dem policy wonks like him on the issues, but to the average Southern voter he projects about as much macho as my mother would, and for the Dems losing the wimp image is probably at least as important as the issues.)

So, as I keep saying, I'm Clark/Dean neutral, and I don't especially propose a leftward shift right at the moment. I just think that, win or lose, after the election the Democrats should rethink their long-term strategy. (If we win, it will only be the Presidency. Congress will still be solidly theirs).

Here's something I wrote in the past on how DLC caution has materially hurt the Democrats (i.e., has been a loser strategy):

How the New Democrats have Hurt the Party

New Voters vs. Swing voters II

Confessore's Tapped article (which I discuss below) is now the subject of a thread on Calpundit.

This has unfortunately become a left-right Dean-Clark debate. One point I was trying to make, though, in addition to advocating the "increase the base" strategy, was that the Democratic party should be taking some initiatives and setting some long-term goals, rather than merely starting to talk about strategies right before each election.

And one of my premises, denied by some, is that we haven't been doing too well recently. I'm thinking mostly of the loss of Congress here, but partly also of some of the things Clinton and Gore had to do in order to get elected. (And in that sense this is indeed a left-right disagreement).

And so my conclusion is that the swing-voter strategy, which has been dominant for almost two decades, isn't enough. I'm not saying we should forget the swing voters.

So it seems to me that the Democrats should be looking here, there, and everywhere for the votes we need. The Republican core is pretty solid, so we have a choice between looking for votes among the 20% of the voting-age population who are swing voters, and among the 50% of the voting-age population who are non-voters. Shouldn't we be looking in both places? Should the rejection of the very idea of trying to find new voters be as unanimous as it is? Isn't that lazy, fatalistic, and defeatist?

Confessore mentions a number of unsuccessful Democratic attempts to find new voters, but they were all flash-in-the-pan one-time efforts organized by one man's campaign. He does not mention all the work that the Republicans have been doing since 1964 or so to develop new constituencies.

ReBuilding Iraq 2

Naomi Klein in the Guardian describes December's crony imperialism trade show.

The reconstruction of Iraq has emerged as a vast protectionist racket, a neo-con New Deal that transfers limitless public funds - in contracts, loans and insurance - to private firms, and even gets rid of the foreign competition to boot, under the guise of "national security". Ironically, these firms are being handed this corporate welfare so they can take full advantage of CPA-imposed laws that systematically strip Iraqi industry of all its protections, from import tariffs to limits on foreign ownership. Michael Fleisher, head of private-sector development for the CPA, recently explained to a group of Iraqi businesspeople why these protections had to be removed. "Protected businesses never, never become competitive," he said. Quick, somebody tell Opic and US deputy secretary of defence Paul Wolfowitz.

The issue of US double standards comes up again at the conference when a CPA representative takes the podium. A legal adviser to Bremer, Carole Basri has a simple message: reconstruction is being sabotaged by Iraqi corruption. "My fear is that corruption will be the downfall," she says ominously, blaming the problem on "a 35-year gap in knowledge" in Iraq that has made Iraqis "not aware of current accounting standards and ideas on anti-corruption". Foreign investors, she adds, must engage in "education, bring people up to world-class standards". It's hard to imagine what world-class standards she's referring to, or who, exactly, will be doing this educating. Halliburton, with its accounting scandals back home and its outrageous overbilling for gasoline in Iraq? The CPA, with its two officers under investigation for bribe-taking and nonexistent fiscal oversight?

UggaBugga Must Be Stopped!

Before he kills me.

New Voters and Swing Voters: Letter to Nick Confessore (TAPPED)

I sent the letter below to Nick Confessore of Tapped in response to this piece.

One thing I neglected to say in the letter is that the "new-voter"/"swing-voter" strategies are not mutually exclusive. It should be possible to do some of both, and what we're really talking about here is the mix. The reason that Dean's "new-voter" strategy seems extreme is that during the period during which we've lost control of Congress. the Democratic emphasis has been almost entirely on swing voters.

Nick:

One reason talking about getting new voters has never brought forth any results is that since 1984 or so (DLC takeover) this strategy has not actually been tried. "Party-building" soft money was deliberately diverted into big media buys with only immediate effects and no long-term gain, and the swing-voter strategy has been the only one in effect.

Per voter won, the swing-voter strategy is more effective, but there are more non-voters (~50%) than swing voters (<20%) to work on. Furthermore, by now swing voters have to be either pretty conservative, or dumb as stumps. There's scarcely an issue on which the Bush-DeLay adfministration has not taken a strongly conservative initiative.

From my point of view but not yours, the rightward pull of this strategy is bad. However, if it is true (as I suspect) that the lame Dem pros and the right-wing New Republic types (Sullivan and Krauthammer still work there, right?) would actually prefer to lose with a right-center swing-voter strategy than to win with a left-center new-voter strategy, then I think that even the mad-dog-moderate Matt Yglesias might come around to my point of view.

Some of the bad advice Gore got in 2000, in my paranoid opinion, came from people who would rather lose than win the wrong way. I think that Gore might agree with me by now.

The working poor are one group which tends not to vote, and they're a natural Dem constituency. Yeah, they're hard to organize, but they said that about labor in the old days too (ethnically fragmented, semiliterate, poor, embattled, unstable, etc.) Young, poor, alternative-culture cynics are another such difficult group, and in fact the groups tend to merge in later years (e.g. restaurant workers). I don't think that failure can be declared before the strategy is tried. It would indeed be a big job, but we've been losing with the other strategy. I doubt that it's ever possible to tell in advance whether something genuinely new will work; my guess is that poll-driven caution will normally tie you to an unventuresome policy leading to continuous gradual decline.

jje/ ex-zizka

Hilarious

Let me just say in ADVANCE this time that this is a spoof: Tom Burka at the american street: GOP To Reshuffle Swing States; Plan To Redistrict America:

"The boundaries of New York State now include only the relatively conservative upstate area and Staten Island, which is solidly Republican. Democratic New York City is now part of Rhode Island, which will have four electoral votes in November.

[. . .] Republicans were aghast at charges by Democrats that redistricting American states in this way was unconstitutional. "It is amazing to me," said Republican Senator Zell Miller (D - Ga.). "These Democrats whine at the drop of a hat whenever they don't get their way."

BloggerStorm! From Iowa

Blog for America: BloggerStorm!So far: annatopia, DailyKos, Howard Dean 2004, Seth-Tech, Southpaw, Taegan Goddard's Political Wire, Robert Baren for Delegate, Pacific Views, yin, Wanderlust and Jim Moore's Iowa blog aggregator

Divide And Conquer

Leaked letters reveal plot to split US church:

"A letter, written within the past fortnight by a senior American dissident pastor to like-minded parishes, details how the dismantling of the US Episcopal church can be achieved. Marked 'confidential, share it in hard copy only with people you fully trust, do not pass it on electronically to anyone under any circumstances', the document was passed - electronically - to this newspaper.
Written by Geoff Chapman, rector of St Stephen's church, Sewickley, Pennsylvania, one of the leaders of the breakaway movement, it openly boasts that while the current tactic is to seek oversight by conservative bishops for parishes that cannot accept the authority of the two-thirds of American bishops who supported the consecration of the gay bishop Gene Robinson last November, the ultimate goal is much more radical.

It is nothing less than a realignment of the US and Canadian churches for 'biblical faith and values' - code for a much more conservative, even fundamentalist, church to replace the liberal Episcopal church. Traditionalists have threatened a break-up before, over the ordination of women in the 70s, over the consecration of the first woman bishop in the 80s and over gay clergy in the 90s, but Bishop Robinson's ordination has given the movement new momentum.
[. . .]
Its break-up would be enormously welcome to the religious right, including wealthy and fundamentalist supporters of the Republican party who would like to see a more militant Bible-based Christianity spreading across all areas of public life. "

Those pesky Republicans -- everywhere there's trouble and divisiveness, there they are.

Al Gore

From Al Gore's MoveOn.org speech on the natural environment:

These and other activities make it abundantly clear that the Bush White House represents a new departure in the history of the Presidency. He is so eager to accommodate his supporters and contributors that there seems to be very little that he is not willing to do for them at the expense of the public interest. To mention only one example, we’ve seen him work tirelessly to allow his friends to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Indeed, it seems at times as if the Bush-Cheney Administration is wholly owned by the coal, oil, utility and mining companies.

While President Bush likes to project an image of strength and courage, the truth is that in the presence of his large financial contributors he is a moral coward – so weak that he seldom if ever says “No” to them on anything – no matter what the public interest might mandate.

Read it or watch it.

Lies Lies Lies Yeah

Atrios points us to this excellent column by James O. Goldsborough that demonstrates, once again, that W and the boys were lying about their intentions for Iraq:

Richard Haass, Powell's head of policy planning, resigned when it became clear that Bush demands for Iraqi disarmament were only a pretext for war.

Haass, now head of the Council on Foreign Relations, calls Iraq a war of "choice," not "necessity." He recounts a meeting with NSC director Condoleezza Rice in July 2002, two months before Iraq hit the headlines and three months before Bush went to the U.N. Security Council putatively to seek a resolution on Iraqi disarmament.

As head of State's policy planning, Haass' mission to the NSC was, he says, to discuss "the pros and cons" of escalating toward war with Iraq. Says Haass: "Basically, she (Rice) cut me off and said, 'Save your breath – the president has already decided what he's going to do on this.' "

So when Condi said two months later in September of 2002 (and for many months afterward) that Bush hadn't made up his mind about Iraq, we now know she was lying. Impressive.

Anyway, this column also mentions another of the mounting multitude of lies and exaggerations by this administration, the desperate (and hilarious) attempt to claim that the situation in Iraq was like that of post-war Nazi Germany. (Here's what I had to say about it here.)

But this reminded me of my favorite moment of historical illiteracy on the part of this administration. That would be the even more desperate attempt of Rummy to claim that the post-war Iraq situation was just like that faced in the wake of the American Revolution. More specifically, he claimed it was just like Shays' Rebellion.

All three of these instances bring up a couple of rather obvious questions: Is there anything they won't say? Is there any lie they won't tell?

I'm sorry folks. I just couldn't resist this little trip down memory lane.

I hope you enjoyed it.

Me too

Announcing CJR Campaign Desk

The new Columbia Journalism Review Campaign Desk will provide, "Critique and analysis of 2004 campaign coverage from Columbia Journalism Review."

Weekly Unemployment Insurance Claims Report

This week's ETA Press Release: Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report:

In the week ending Jan. 10, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 343,000, a decrease of 11,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 354,000. The 4-week moving average was 347,500, a decrease of 3,000 from the previous week's revised average of 350,500.

And the UNadjusted numbers?

"The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 677,883 in the week ending Jan. 10, an increase of 128,233 from the previous week. There were 724,111 initial claims in the comparable week in 2003."

I report, you decide.

Dead Armadillos

Adapted from a comment thread:

If you decide in advance that the truth is always in the middle, it makes your life easier, but it cripples you with a jellified inability to respond effectively whenever one side or the other happens to be right.

Likewise, if you decide that they're all crooks, you become incapable of spotting crooks.

The Republicans have learned to game the moderate voters by noisily claiming that liberals are really dangerous radicals, that moderates are really liberals, and that the conservatives are the real moderates.

Since one category of moderate voter is dumb as a stump, this strategy works far too often. I know that you can't win by running against the voters, but -- bless their little hearts -- some of them are really hard to talk to.

Dean Article

There's an article on Dean here: U.S. News: Is Dean the one? Campaign heats up as wary Democrats look for a winner(1/19/04).

Though Dean did not enter the race with the expectations of winning, he did see a way to win. "Karl Rove [President Bush's political guru] discovered it, too, but I discovered it independently," Dean says and adds that the theory is embodied in the writings of George Lakoff, a professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California-Berkeley. "What you do is crank the heck out of your base, get them really excited and crank up the base turnout and you'll win the middle-of-the-roaders," Dean says. The reason, according to the theory, is that swing voters share the characteristics of both parties and eventually go with whatever party excites them the most. "Democrats appeal to them on their softer side--the safety net--but the Republicans appeal to them on the harder side--the discipline, the responsibility, and so forth," Dean says. "So the question is which side appears to be energetic, deeply believing in its message, deeply committed to bringing a vision of hope to America. That side is the side that gets the swing voters and wins."

Since it's dated the 19th, it might tell us who wins in Iowa.

Bush Imposes ISLAMIC LAW On Iraq!

Think I'm kidding? From Juan Cole * Informed Comment *:

"But the American-appointed Interim Governing Council has suddenly taken Iraq in a theocratic direction that has important implications for women's rights. As reported here earlier, the IGC took a decision recently to abolish Iraq's civil personal status law, which was uniform for all Iraqis under the Baath. In its place, the IGC called for religious law to govern personal status, to be administered by the clerics of each of Iraq's major religious communities for members of their religion. Thus, Shiites would be under Shiite law and Chaldeans under Catholic canon law for these purposes."

Of course, read the entire story. And yes, this means what you think it does for women in Iraq:

For the vast majority of women who are Muslim, the implementation of `iddah or the obligation of a man to support a woman for 3 months after he divorces her (a term long enough to see whether she is pregnant with his child) has the effect of abolishing the divorced woman's right to alimony. This abrogation of alimony was effected for Muslims in India in the mid-1980s with the Shah Banou case, as the Congress Party's sop to Indian Muslim fundamentalists. The particular form of Islamic law that the IGC seems to envisage operating would also give men the right of unilateral divorce over their wives, gives men the right to take second, third and fourth wives, and gives girls half as much inheritance from the father's estate as boys.

Priceless

Josh Marshall gets it just about right:

Number of days between Novak column outing Valerie Plame and announcement of investigation: 74 days.

Number of days between O'Neill 60 Minutes interview and announcement of investigation: 1 day.

Having the administration reveal itself as a gaggle of hypocritical goons ... priceless.

BuzzFlash Interviews Lakoff

We'll Grant This to the Republicans: They Know How to Frame Issues and Keep the Democrats on the Defensive. A BuzzFlash Interview with "Framing" Expert, UC Berkeley Professor George Lakoff - A BuzzFlash Interview

the american street Today

Digby has a post up over at the american street.

O'Neill Poll

Did O'Neill retract his Iraq charges faster than you thought he would?
	Yes - I thought he would know to hide his grandkids
	No - I figured they located his grandkids as soon as they knew he had a book coming
Free polls from Pollhost.com

THAT Didn't Take Long

From this:

"These people are nasty and they have a long memory," he tells Suskind. But he also believes that by speaking out even in the face of inevitable White House wrath, he can demonstrate loyalty to something he prizes: the truth. [. . .] That goal is worth the price of retribution, O'Neill says. Plus, as he told Suskind, "I'm an old guy, and I'm rich. And there's nothing they can do to hurt me."

to this: CNN.com - O'Neill says war plans account distorted - Jan. 13, 2004

"Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said Tuesday his account of the Bush administration's early discussions about a possible invasion of Iraq has been distorted.

"People are trying to make a case that I said the president was planning war in Iraq early in the administration," O'Neill told NBC's "Today" show. "Actually, there was a continuation of work that had been going on in the Clinton administration with the notion that there needed to be regime change in Iraq."

THAT didn't take long. This was a guy who SAID he knew what they were capable of, but was going to stand up to them.

Well, I guess he DIDN'T know what they were capable of. But I bet he does now.

Angry, Angry Dean

Angry Dean.

"It makes you wonder what happens to ordinary Iraqis."

Guardian Unlimited | US military 'brutalised' journalists:

"The international news agency Reuters has made a formal complaint to the Pentagon following the 'wrongful' arrest and apparent 'brutalisation' of three of its staff this month by US troops in Iraq.

The complaint followed an incident in the town of Falluja when American soldiers fired at two Iraqi cameramen and a driver from the agency while they were filming the scene of a helicopter crash.

The US military initially claimed that the Reuters journalists were 'enemy personnel' who had opened fire on US troops and refused to release them for 72 hours.

Although Reuters has not commented publicly, it is understood that the journalists were 'brutalised and intimidated' by US soldiers, who put bags over their heads, told them they would be sent to Guantanamo Bay, and whispered: 'Let's have sex.'

At one point during the interrogation, according to the family of one of the staff members, a US soldier shoved a shoe into the mouth one of the Iraqis.

The US troops, from the 82nd Airborne Division, based in Falluja, also made the blindfolded journalists stand for hours with their arms raised and their palms pressed against the cell wall.

'They were brutalised, terrified and humiliated for three days,' one source said. 'It was pretty grim stuff. There was mental and physical abuse.'

He added: 'It makes you wonder what happens to ordinary Iraqis.' "

This is just one more instance of Americans violating the Geneva Convention. There is no accountability.

Thanks to Calpundit.

A Must Read!

Editorial: The wrong war/Why Iraq was a mistake:

"Imagine that President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell had made a case for the invasion of Iraq along the following lines:...

[great reading, go read it]

...the most sacred duty civilians have to their armed forces is to ensure they are never called to sacrifice their lives unless this nation faces a real threat."

at american street today

Kash from Angry Bear, and Mark A. R. Kleiman are posting today, over at the american street. Also, it's american street founder Kevin Hayden's birthday.

Warning -- PLEASE be alerted that I only post there on Mondays. I'm telling you this now, so you don't become too overly disappointed when you get there, and don't see a fresh post from me. I'm pre-alerting you in order to want to avoid trouble with guns and stuff, and rioting, and any potential suicides. I'll still be here for you, at Seeing the Forest.

Senile Broder accidentally gets it right

David Broder has been brain-dead for so long that you're surprised that he's able to locomote or respire. But in this piece, which he all-but-confesses is a recycled version of things he wrote decades ago ("Coming back to Iowa after a long absence...."), he says something which is made striking by the implied contrast.

".... I was struck, as I have been before, by the extraordinarily conscientious way that those few souls approach what they see as their serious responsibility in starting the process that leads, a year later, to the inauguration of a president. They sort and weigh personal attributes and policy positions, then do it again, before finally deciding which hopeful they will stand up to support."

Yeah, a bunch of ordinary people in flyover country who all have other jobs take America seriously. It's just the hip, well-educated, highly-paid, ever-so-professional national media who can't seem to get around to doing that.

No, Broder didn't mean that; he is really and truly brain-dead. But the contrast is frightening and very real.

Sometimes it really does seem like...

this is the most petty and vindictive administration in American history, doesn’t it?

I think most of us would agree there are two types of classified documents. There are documents that genuinely endanger national security – launch codes, defense strategies, etc. These documents are classified because to have this information made public would threaten the safety of us all.

And then there are other documents that are classified because um, well, you don’t want people to know you’re corrupt scheming bastards who have planned for years to take over Saddam’s oil fields in order to, presumably, make big profits for your rich buddies and campaign contributors in the oil industry.

I agree wholeheartedly with charging someone with a crime for releasing a document that really threatens national security. However, I’m afraid W and the boys will look terrible if they charge O’Neill with a crime for exposing that their little scheme to invade Iraq had nothing to do with terrorism and 9/11 and had been hatched since the earliest days of the administration.

I’m afraid he’s got you boys. You might as well just grin and bear it.

Boy and you know O’Neill has got them when the best thing they can do is retaliate with something petty like this. My goodness, they’d set a new low for an administration if they actually charged a former cabinet member with a crime for exposing them as the scheming fiends that we all knew they were. If that’s the best they can come up with, you know they’re in trouble.

But this is the minor one folks. When Richard Clarke’s book comes out in April, it is possible that the entire Karl Rove 2004 gameplan may rapidly unravel over the course of a few days. In his book, Clarke is reportedly going to explain how W and the boys turned a deaf ear to his dire warnings about terrorism during the summer of 2001 and, therefore, are, at the very least, partially responsible for the 9/11 disaster.

If Clarke’s book is the bombshell it’s likely to be, this administration may well go down in $150 M a blaze of glory.

At least we can all hope, can’t we?

Update: Paul Krugman addresses this today -- and gets it just about right:

So far administration officials have attacked Mr. O'Neill's character but haven't refuted any of his facts. They have, however, already opened an investigation into how a picture of a possibly classified document appeared during Mr. O'Neill's TV interview. This alacrity stands in sharp contrast with their evident lack of concern when a senior administration official, still unknown, blew the cover of a C.I.A. operative because her husband had revealed some politically inconvenient facts.

Indeed.

Heh.

Can Dean Survive This One?

Pandagon: Democratic Candidate Can't Answer Question; Democracy "Will End" Unless Bush Elected

Tuesday update -- It was a spoof! I guess it was a little bit too weblog-reader-insider... Here's the joke: There is an AP reporter named Nedra Pickler who writes "news stories" from an extremely pro-Bush angle. Other weblogs have been pointing out her stuff lately. So pandagon wrote this as a spoof of the kind of thing she writes. Here is one example of her writing a "news story":

"Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean on Friday criticized President Bush for restricting stem-cell research based on religious beliefs even though his own faith affected his decision to extend legal rights to gay couples. "

The Iron Law Of Wages

I referred to this piece in an update in the piece below, "Jobs Americans Won't Take". But I want to bring special attention to it, because I think it says a lot: William Pfaff: The price of globalization .

(Thanks to Sideshow)

What It Means

What does it mean, that former Treasury Secretary O'Neill says they were planning to invade Iraq right from the start, long before 9/11?

It means that after we were attacked on 9/11, the Bush administration betrayed us, and instead of going after the attackers, and instead of putting 100% of their efforts and resources and energy and brainpower and skills and talents into protecting us from additional attacks, they used that event to accomplish a different, PRE-EXISTING agenda. PRE-EXISTING! They harnessed our shock and emotions, and redirected them, and used them, and used us, and, worst of all, used our 3,000 dead in a cynical, corrupt, dishonest, drive to win an election and then to commit aggressive war against a country that had not attacked us, had not even threatened us.

WE all knew this, because we are informed. But much of America-at-large still thought that Iraq was behind 9/11, and now they are hearing this news -- on 60 Minutes, no less. Let that sink in a while.

(cross-posted at the american street)

Fourth Annual Weblog Awards

Fourth Annual Weblog Awards. Go nominate someone.

The Bush Defense

The defense of the Bush administration against the charges by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill that they began planning the Iraq invasion immediately upon taking office is breaking down into two camps:

1) O'Neill is a liar. He is a disgruntled employee who was fired for incompetence, who nobody ever listened to anyway, and who is lying to get back at Bush for firing him. Quote: "A senior administration official said O'Neill's "suggestion that the administration was planning an invasion of Iraq days after taking office is laughable. Nobody listened to him when he was in office. Why should anybody now?"

2) Of course we did it. The stated policy of the administration, and the previous administration, was regime change in Iraq, and the Bush administration would have been remiss to NOT be planning to invade Iraq. (I guess this covers the bases, for those who don't fall for the smears on O'Neill's credibility...)

So they would be remiss if they weren't planning a war, and anyone who says they were planning a war is an incompetent liar.

See the forest: they lie. They just lie. Look at what they DO and ignore everything they say. Remember, before the war, when they were running their "marketing campaign," they had us all arguing about whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and whether that necessitated our immediate invasion. And for many of us, that's where our focus went.

Update - (And smear people. They do that, too.)

Update 2 - (Oh yeah, they steal, too.)

Update 3 - (Cheating. I forgot cheating. Definitely cheaters.)

Update 4 - (Right. Hypocrites. Sorry.)

Update 5 - (Sorry, I'm not going to say "poo-poo heads" in my weblog. No matter how many e-mails you send.)

Why did we go to war? Ask the experts

Head over to the DNC weblog and scroll down to "Why did we go to war? Ask the experts. Leave a comment. Get involved.

Then scroll up to "Why we went to war, Part II," and "More revelations from Paul O'Neill" and, finally, "The right wing goes into attack mode":

"As Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame know, this administration will turn no stone when it comes to destroying people who tell the truth about President Bush's deceptions."

It's good to see the DNC acting like they "get it."

the american street

the american street has new posts up today, by different bloggers than yesterday. ;-)

(I'll be posting there regularly on Mondays. TWO places to get your Dave!)

"Jobs Americans Won't Take"

We hear Bush talking about "jobs that others won't take," to sell his new "guest worker" plan. He is talking about importing workers for jobs that are not filled by American workers -- largely agricultural jobs, but also including jobs in restaurants and others. Sounds reasonable, right?

Economists talk about "the law of supply and demand." This law applies to labor as well as consumer goods. What this law is supposed to mean is that if you can't find enough workers to fill your jobs, you raise wages until you can. What is happening in this instance is that the American companies are not paying enough, so people are not taking the jobs. These are not jobs that can be exported to China -- the farms and restaurants are here. So, instead of raising wages until they are able to fill the jobs, they are proposing to allow more Mexican and other immigrant workers into the country to take these jobs, keeping wages low.

This "guest worker" scam is just one more example of the Bush administration working against the interests of American workers. The minimum wage need to be raised.

Update - 7:30pm - (Thanks to Sideshow) - William Pfaff: The price of globalization:

Ricardo, however, had a second theory, which he called the "iron law of wages." You do not hear much about the iron law, in part because you wouldn't want to hear about it, and also because experience has seemed to prove it untrue. But times are changing.
The iron law of wages is also simple and logical. It says that wages will tend to stabilize at or about subsistence level. That seemed inevitable to Ricardo, since while workers are necessary, and so have to be kept alive, they have no hope of any better treatment since they are infinitely available, replaceable, and generally interchangeable.

Ricardo's wage theory has seemed untrue. The supply of competent workers in a given place is not unlimited; neither workers nor industry are perfectly mobile, and labor demonstrated in the 19th and 20th centuries that it could mobilize and defend itself. The iron law of wages would seem to function only if the supply of labor is infinite and totally mobile.

Unfortunately that day, for practical purposes, has now arrived, thanks to globalization.

Globalization is removing the constraints imposed in the past by societies possessing institutions, legislation, and the political will to protect workers.

If you have time read the entire piece as well as Sideshow's comments:

That'd be things like, oh, unions, for example, and laws that prevent import of goods produced under unacceptable worker conditions, and that old stand-by, import duties. Fantasies about free trade are all very nice, but if ultimately they mean stabilizing wages at subsistence globally, you're not doing much good with it for anyone but that small handful of nobility at the very top.
During the '90s you had all these economists who should know better claiming that the modern economy had somehow magically risen above everything that had gone before and that now there could be no down-cycle. And I said, "No. It doesn't work that way." And I was right. So now when economists are rhapsodizing about the wonders of free trade and how it will make everything better for us all, I'm again saying, "No."

Globalization is good if it means retaining high standards of treatment for workers at home and exporting those standards to other nations when we trade with them, but not if it means exporting American jobs without the encumbrance of those standards. You don't have to be a genius to work this out, you just have to be able to separate the hype from what you can see with your own eyes.

Excellent.

Chinese Coal Miner

Interesting

I received this in the e-mail:

The first in the nation caucus was held in Santa Cruz on Saturday, January 10. It was a lot of fun with donkeys, bagpipes, banners, cheers... Congressman Sam Farr spoke at the event and noted that when Democrats form a firing squad, they form it in a circle.

Three candidates generated the most energy - Dean, Kucinich and, surprising, Clark. BUT... Dean won the vote of over 400 participants at 49%. Kucinich was 2nd with about 25% and Clark not far behind with about 21%. The remainder of the field garnered the remaining 5% of the vote.

Interesting that Kucinich didn't win! If you know Santa Cruz (Rasta Cruz to locals), you're as surprised as I am.

Announcing A New Group Blog - The American Street

the american street

We Are The Street Where You Live
by Kevin Hayden

Welcome to The American Street. Ours is not the typical street gang. Our neighborhood is larger.

Our gang is spread out from coast to coast. We come from many regions, from city streets and country roads, from every economic class. We are blue-collar, white-collar, self-employed and unemployed.

We are single, married and divorced. We have children and are childless. We attend church and we don't. We have advanced degrees, college and high school educations, and have dropped out of high school. We work, we play, we cry, we laugh, we love, we get angry and we work things out.

We love America. We love its freedoms and ideals, its achievements and possibilities. We live and breathe the American Dream and refuse to surrender it to anyone.

We might live in your neighborhood. Our hopes and dreams and fears and beliefs are likely not much different than yours. We are The American Street. Our opinions matter as much as yours, no more and no less.

We believe America can do better. Let's talk about how.

Please bookmark this weblog, and if you are a weblogger, please add it to your blogroll!

Go have a read, and return often. There will be new posts through each day, and there will be different people posting through the week.

Libertarians have to put up or shut up

How can any libertarian even consider voting for Bush?

Some of the ones I've talked to recently point out that the Democrats have given no strong signs of being much better than Bush on this issue. Be that as it may, however, it seems very unlikely that they're worse, and what the Bush administration is doing is totally unconscionable. (E.G. sending innocent suspects to Syria for torture, or holding an American citizen incommunicado without a lawyer for a full year, plus major changes in American law) And this is not just temporary state-of-emergency stuff -- they're permanently changing our whole legal system.

I obviously have an axe to grind. I'm not a libertarian, though I am a civil-libertarian liberal and have had problems supporting corporate Democrats who seem to be unaware of this kind of issue. Still, if the libertarians in this country don't at least vote for a Libertarian for President this year (but preferably the Democrat, of course) the whole libertarian movement should just pass out of existence and be forgotten. It's at critical turning points like this one that you find out whether someone's ideals are real or phony.

Leaving the ballot blank doesn't cut it. It says nothing and does nothing.

(Based on a comment I made on Brad Delong's site).

The Rational Conservative Republican: A Mythical Beast

What "conservativism" means today is a knee-jerk, partisan, anti-intellectual, faux-populist blend of Armageddon Christianity, anti-government rhetoric, homophobia, and chauvinist militarism (with a concealed neo-Confederate element).

If you read James Fallows at the Atlantic, or Lewis Lapham and John MacArthur at Harper's, you'll find that they are strongly anti-populist and don't really repeat the liberal pieties. Their fundamental ideas and their tone are conservative, but they all count as liberals, because of what American conservativism has become.

There's really no contradiction here. "Liberal" and "conservative" are nominal opposites in American politics, but the opposite of "liberal" is "repressive", and the opposite of "conservative" is "rash, radical, and adventurist". The Republicans today are neither liberal nor conservative.

In the arguments over the long-term consequences of Bush's ten-year tax plan, I've repeatedly heard conservatives argue that since economists cannot predict in any detail farther than a rather short time into the future (true), we should give no thought whatever to the long-term consequences of Bush's long-term plan. Elsewhere the notorious "Al" has argued that one single little order of magnitude isn't really very much. Complete idiocy.

I often wonder whether the idiot trolls who inhabit liberal blog comments are characteristic of the conservative movement. My belief is that they are. For them,arguing about politics is like arguing about football teams -- fling all the shit you can come up with and hope that some sticks. It isn't in their nature to listen or think.

Until I have reason to believe otherwise, I will remain convinced that the rational conservative Republican is an extinct or mythical beast. I expect the Tacituses and the Brookses and the Drezners ultimately to fall obediently in line behind Karl Rove, Tom Delay, Pat Robertson, and Grover Norquist.

(This post is adapted from a comment I made on Kevin Drum's site. One reader there cited two excellent articles by Fallows in the Atlantic, one from the summer of last year and one in the forthcoming issue.)

Community

Democrats' Killer App

It Begins

The smearing starts:

"A senior administration official said O'Neill's 'suggestion that the administration was planning an invasion of Iraq days after taking office is laughable. Nobody listened to him when he was in office. Why should anybody now?' "

Man, is this guy gonna get smeared, or what? I can hear Rove now, "Paul, I don't want to do this to you, but I have a reputation to maintain. It's business, not personal. If I let you get away with this, pretty soon every cabinet member or reporter will be telling what they know. It's business, Paul, not personal."

Let's hope Cheney doesn't die

Because according to the Constitution, if Cheney dies George W. Bush will become President!

Juan Cole on the Paul O'Neill interview.

Is It For Real?

Drudge has this report up: SAYS INVASION OF IRAQ WAS PLANNED IN THE FIRST DAYS OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION LONG BEFORE 9/11... (Second source here):

The Bush Administration began laying plans for an invasion of Iraq including the use of American troops within days of President Bush's inauguration in January of 2001, not eight months later after the 9/11 attacks as has been previously reported. That is what former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says in his first interview about his time as a White House insider. O'Neill talks to Lesley Stahl in the interview, to be broadcast on 60 MINUTES Sunday, Jan. 11 (7:00-8:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network.

[. . .] O'Neill, fired by the White House for his disagreement on tax cuts, is the main source for an upcoming book, "The Price of Loyalty," authored by Ron Suskind. Suskind says O'Neill and other White House insiders he interviewed gave him documents that show that in the first three months of 2001, the administration was looking at military options for removing Saddam Hussein from power and planning for the aftermath of Saddam's downfall, including post-war contingencies like peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals and the future of Iraq's oil. "There are memos," Suskind tells Stahl, "One of them marked 'secret' says 'Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq.'" A Pentagon document, says Suskind, titled "Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," outlines areas of oil exploration. "It talks about contractors around the world from...30, 40 countries and which ones have what intentions on oil in Iraq," Suskind says.

This is huge! If you combine this with the reports that Cheney's "secret energy task force" was meeting with oil companies to divide up Iraq's oil, long before 9/11, we have a criminal conspiracy to invade another country. And I don't mean in our own paranoid fantasies where we imagine the worst about this crowd, I mean for real.

Update -This is serious shit. From the Nuremberg Indictments, Count 2, "Crimes against peace":

All the defendants with divers other persons, during a period of years preceding 8 May 1945, participated in the planning, preparation, initiation, and waging of wars of aggression, which were also wars in violation of international treaties, agreements, and assurances.

So this has got me re-reading the indictment from the start, and I have to say it is not all that unlike a description of what has been happening here. Like this:

(c) The Nazi conspirators conceived that, in addition to the suppression of distinctively political opposition, it was necessary to suppress or exterminate certain other movements or groups which they regarded as obstacles to their retention of total control in Germany and to the aggressive aims of the conspiracy abroad. Accordingly:

(1) The Nazi conspirators destroyed the free trade unions...

(2) The Nazi conspirators, by promoting beliefs and practices incompatible with Christian teaching, sought to subvert the influence of the churches over the people and in particular over the youth of Germany.

Or how about accomplishing the same results by infiltrating and taking over Christian organizations, and telling the public that our leader is taking directions from God...

(3) The persecution by the Nazi conspirators of pacifist groups, including religious movements dedicated to pacifism, was particularly relentless and cruel.

etc...

Does any of this strike a familiar chord?

No Mystery: The Iraq War was a Fraud

Following Kenneth Pollack, Kevin Drum asks "Why were we so wrong about Iraq's WMD?"

The Iraq war was a successful fraud abetted by a hopelessly servile press and foreign-affairs establishment. Pollard played a key role.

The Rove administration fully believes that perception is more real than reality, and indeed, at crunch time very few people were corny, old-fashioned, or stodgy enough to stick out their necks and reject the hype. A lot of people who thought they were inside players turned out to be suckers. It happens all the time: "You can't cheat an honest man".

Adventurists are gamblers: "Let's take a shot at this and see what happens". Very few in the administration believed either the al Qaeda story or the WMD story; those stories were just PR. They figured that once the rubber hit the road, the combination of hysteria, gloating, and rabid patriotism would keep dissent intimidated.

The only thing that screwed them up was that the occupation turned out be a lot tougher than expected. They believed that everyone in Iraq hated Saddam (not true) and that once Saddam and his supporters were gone, all problems would disappear (also not true).

The official story changed several times, and not everyone cared. Up until recently (they aren't saying it much any more) the semi-offical line was "The details don't make any difference: WE WON, and that will be enough for the American people!"

It almost worked. And it might still, if they manage to find another crisis.

Voting Machines Story

According to this Miami Herald story, New system no easy touch for 134 voters in Broward,

"In Tuesday's special election to fill state House seat 91, 134 Broward voters managed to use the 2-year-old touch-screen equipment without casting votes for any candidate.

How so many happened to cast nonvotes remains a riddle. Unlike with punch cards or paper ballots, there's no paper record with electronic voting that might offer a clue to the voter's intent.

The percentage of nonvotes -- 1.3 percent -- is modest compared to the days of ''hanging'' and ''pregnant chads.'' But in Tuesday's race, every vote was crucial. In a seven-candidate field, Ellyn Bogdanoff beat Oliver Parker by just 12 votes."

So one candidate "won" by 12 votes, but somehow 134 votes were not ocunted. And there is no paper trail to show what happened.

A Comment I Left

Here's a comment I left to this post at Hullabaloo, talking about the Club For Growth's anti-Dean ad:

"The thing is, ANYthing that is repeated over and over, without being countered in time, will become accepted as a truth. Marketers do this because it works.

My favorite example is people saying they shouldn't switch to satellite TV because wind knocks over the dishes. And also, DSL is better than cable modems because cable modems are shared with lots of people. Both of these claims are just hogwash, of course, but the ads were repeated into a vacuum - an area where people had no other information but did have an interest in learning, and the claims sounded reasonable.

This stuff WORKS. If you can plant your message repeatedly before counter messages are out there you win. It is VERY difficult to counter a "conventional wisdom" once it has taken hold. The Right's marketing infrastructure operates on this principle.

One thing the Right has that moderates and progressives don't seem to understand very well, is marketing. I mean, the Right is populated by people with corporate backgrounds and a cynical view that you can sell air if you just market it right -- coming from tobacco company marketing people who were able to convince people to kill themselves while handing over their money to their executioners.

Marketing works. Repetition works. Repeating simple catch-phrases to the public works.

THE MEATRIX

THE MEATRIX (found at CalPundit).

By the way, I'm not pushing vegetarianism. The article I posted before Thanksgiving on turkeys suggested buying family-farmed "heritage" turkeys. The Meatrix suggests family farms. And organic meats won't give you CJD. It is important to me that the animals have better lives.

Dean and Clark

I wish I could see a debate between just Dean and Clark.

Mad Cow

Could Mad Cow Disease Already be Killing Thousands of Americans Every Year?:

"October 2001, 34-year-old Washington State native Peter Putnam started losing his mind. One month he was delivering a keynote business address, the next he couldn't form a complete sentence. Once athletic, soon he couldn't walk. Then he couldn't eat. After a brain biopsy showed it was Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, his doctor could no longer offer any hope. 'Just take him home and love him,' the doctor counseled his family.[1,2,3] Peter's tragic death, October 2002, may have been caused by Mad Cow disease."

There are hundreds of "sporadic" cases of CJD in America, considered to arise on their own, not from eating meat. But now studies are showing that they arise in meat-eaters and may not be sporadic after all. The article is detailed, but worth reading.

Compared to people that didn't eat ham, for example, those who included ham in their diet seemed ten times more likely to develop CJD.[27] In fact, the USDA may have actually recorded an outbreak of "mad pig" disease in New York 25 years ago, but still refuses to reopen the investigation despite petitions from the Consumer's Union (the publishers of Consumer Reports magazine).[28]

Sporadic CJD has also been associated with weekly beef consumption,[29] as well as the consumption of roast lamb,[30] veal, venison, brains in general,[31] and, in North America, seafood.[32,33] The development of CJD has also, surprisingly, been significantly linked to exposure to animal products in fertilizer,[34] sport fishing and deer hunting in the U.S.,[35] and frequent exposure to leather products.[36]

We do not know at this time whether chicken meat poses a risk. There was a preliminary report of ostriches allegedly fed risky feed in German zoos who seemed to come down with a spongiform encephalopathy.[37] Even if chickens and turkeys themselves are not susceptible, though, they may become so-called "silent carriers" of Mad Cow prions and pass them on to human consumers.[38]

What it all boils down to is they ahve been feeding animals to other animals that shouldn't be eating animals, and the animals are getting or carrying this disease, and now it looks like people might be getting it, too.

The recent exclusion of most cow brains, eyes, spinal cords, and intestines from the human food supply may make beef safer, but where are those tissues going? These potentially infectious tissues continue to go into animal feed for chickens, other poultry, pigs, and pets (as well as being rendered into products like tallow for use in cosmetics, the safety of which is currently under review[42]). Until the federal government stops the feeding of slaughterhouse waste, manure, and blood to all farm animals, the safety of meat in America cannot be guaranteed.

Regular readers of Seeing the Forest already know about the problem in deer. Are we seeing the tip of an iceberg -- a new disease that will emerge in the next decades, thanks to deregulation and corporate greed?

The hundreds of American families stricken by sporadic CJD every year have been told that it just occurs by random chance. Professor Collinge, the head of the University College of London lab, noted "When you counsel those who have the classical sporadic disease, you tell them that it arises spontaneously out of the blue. I guess we can no longer say that."

Just how bad might it be?

The most frequent misdiagnosis of CJD among the elderly is Alzheimer's disease.[55] Neither CJD nor Alzheimer's can be conclusively diagnosed without a brain biopsy,[56] and the symptoms and pathology of both diseases overlap. There can be spongy changes in Alzheimer's, for example, and senile Alzheimer's plaques in CJD.[57] Stanley Prusiner, the scientist who won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of prions, speculates that Alzheimer's may even turn out to be a prion disease as well.[58] In younger victims, CJD is more often misdiagnosed as multiple sclerosis or as a severe viral infection.[59]

Over the last 20 years the rates of Alzheimer's disease in the United States have skyrocketed.[60] According to the CDC, Alzheimer's Disease is now the eighth leading cause of death in the United States,[61] afflicting an estimated 4 million Americans.[62] Twenty percent or more of people clinically diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, though, are found at autopsy not to have had Alzheimer's at all.[63] A number of autopsy studies have shown that a few percent of Alzheimer's deaths may in fact be CJD. Given the new research showing that infected beef may be responsible for some sporadic CJD, thousands of Americans may already be dying because of Mad Cow disease every year.[64]

Still eating meat?

Voting Machines Story

Doubts will Persist until Secure, Accurate Elections Become a National Priority.

NPR Hates America

NPR : Measuring Costs of Iraq War:

NPR's Daniel Zwerdling reports on the number of wounded in Iraq. It's a number that is much higher than many think and also extremely difficult to come by. And of the close to 9,000 wounded, few details are available concerning their injuries.Keep in mind as you listen, these numbers are only for the Army.

What kind of disloyal, unpatriotic freak would try to report on our casualties. This guy should be locked up.

Thanks to Atrios.

Weekly New Unemployment Claims - UNadjusted

According to the ETA Press Release: Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report:

"The advance number of actual initial claims under state programs, unadjusted, totaled 546,823 in the week ending Jan. 3, an increase of 30,431 from the previous week."

Digby Says About Republicans

About the Plame affair:

"These guys control all branches of government and operate above the law in plain sight with no repercussions. They’ll keep the media merrily chasing decades-old rumors of gossip of whispers that say that as a Lt Governor, Howard Dean was once seen using the office telephone for personal use, which while not specifically illegal is nonetheless shockingly improper in its appearance of impropriety."

Credit crunch coming?

Are Americans facing a credit crunch?:

" The American Bankers Association (ABA) reported Tuesday that 4.09 percent of all credit-card accounts were delinquent in the third quarter, the highest rate on record, and said the weak job market was probably to blame.

But Morgan Stanley senior economist Bill Sullivan suggested there may be another culprit -- the end of the mortgage refinancing boom.

"It is no coincidence that households found it more difficult to maintain current payment schedules just as the volume of refinancing activity began to dry up as the second half of the calendar year got underway," Sullivan wrote in a research note Wednesday.

The refinancing boom, triggered as mortgage rates fell to the lowest level in a generation, offered homeowners a ready source of cash. Most consumers plowed that cash back into their houses, for new washers and dryers, carpeting or to build that new deck.

But others used it simply to pay bills, including their credit-card bills. Shut off the refi spigot, and you may have shut off the ability of some cardholders to pay. "

Shit hitting fan yet?

Overcome At A Meeting

I was at a Dean precinct-walking organizing meeting last night. One woman attending the meeting raised her hand to speak, and started to say something concerning precinct walking, and then suddenly was in tears. She explained that she had been watching some news about Iraq earlier, and had been thinking about it, and in the middle of talking she was overcome by how terrible it is what is happening, and how great it was that she was able to attend a meeting in a room full of people who are trying to do something about it.

This wasn't a "latte-drinking, body-piercing, public radio listening" caricature that the Republicans have of their opponents. This was a corporate executive. What is happening in our country is NOT the usual "political cycle."

Best Anti-Bush Ad

Bush In 41.2 Seconds. Warning, this is a SATIRE of the MoveOn ads! In fact, it captures what I thought was wrong with many of the submissions. Some of the submissions were very good, but many were just angry blasts at Bush, guaranteed to turn off most Americans. Several of the finalists fall into this category.

To reach people, it's better to show images they will identify with at an emotional level, and people who are like them, expressing views that the viewer might express. You can use a negative message to undermine support, but it's better to plant a question than to blast anger. Don't just say "Bush lies." Say something that the viewer can relate to. Remember, the viewers are starting from an attitude of liking Bush and believing his message. So you are insulting them if you are just saying Bush is wrong, or Bush is lying. That's calling the viewer a fool.

In my opinion, the MoveOn finalists that are most effective are "Child's Pay," "What are we teaching our children?," "Imagine" (borderline), and "Human Cost of War" (for other reasons - it has an emotional impact). Unfortunately there were some excellent submissions that didn't make it to the finals. One of the best that I remember was women talking to each other over coffee.

Time To Boycott NPR

Read this at Eschaton, and be sure to read the references a Media Whores Online.

I think it is time for a very public boycott of NPR. I think we're seeing an example of NPR's response to the pressure from the right. Well, guess what, WE are Americans. too. OUR interests are just as legitimate as those of the right-wingers.

The Nation: University of California's Institute for Labor and Employment under attack by Olin/Scaife funded "think tank"

[This arrived in my inbox via the LaborGreens mailing list. The line below prompted me to post:

"Yet the question indicates how far public discourse has moved since the National Labor Relations Act became the nation's basic law giving unions legal status."

The context is a discussion of whether it is appropriate for the taxpayer to fund anything that promotes the interests of labor [in this case, academic research]. The author highlights the fact that the government spend untold millions (tens of millions? hundreds of millions?) funding programs that promote the interest of business, and that (at least on paper), the official policy of the federal government, since 1936, has been to encourage (not merely permit) collective bargaining.

Again, appropos to the theme of this web log... this is an excellent example of how the far right has attempted to shift the ground on which public policy debates occur, and of how they do it (hundreds of thousands of dollars from in Olin and Scaife money to the Pacific Research Institute in this case), with the ultimate goal being to defund and disable institutions which support progressive action and the rights of the average working person. -Thomas]

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040112&s=bacon

Class Warfare

by David Bacon

in The Nation, January 12th, 2004

The best labor studies programs like to think of themselves as
activist-oriented--firmly grounded in the gritty world of workers.
They don't usually find themselves at the center of high-profile
political disputes. But in Sacramento cloakrooms, where lobbyists
normally whisper blandishments into legislators' ears, the University
of California's labor studies program is now being discussed in
language once reserved for reds, and worse. The program, lobbyists
say, not only organized meetings to stop the recall of then-Governor
Gray Davis, but last summer "union thugs" supposedly even left those
meetings to beat up recall petition circulators.

The accusations sound pretty wild, even considering California's usual
election histrionics, but they're more than just overheated rhetoric.
It's payback time in Sacramento. When newly elected Governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger unilaterally imposed draconian budget cuts on the state
just before Christmas, he wiped out this year's remaining funding for
the Institute for Labor and Employment. If he does the same thing with
next year's appropriation in March, the institute will be destroyed.

[...]

--Thomas Leavitt

Blurring the line between journalism and lobbying (from Washington Monthly).

[The item below arrived in my mailbox via the Politech mailing list, which all free thinkers and free speech advocates are highly advised to subscribe to. Thought it was appropriate to the theme of this web log. -Thomas]


Declan,

I thought you [and Politech] might enjoy this essay on the blurring line
between journalism and lobbying. The title is "Meet the Press", by
Nicholas Confessore from the December 2003 Washington Monthly.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0312.confessore.html

[snip]

James Glassman and TCS have given birth to something quite new in
Washington: journo-lobbying. It's an innovation driven primarily by the
influence industry. Lobbying firms that once specialized in gaining
person-to-person access to key decision-makers have branched out. The new
game is to dominate the entire intellectual environment in which officials
make policy decisions, which means funding everything from think tanks to
issue ads to phony grassroots pressure groups.

[snip]

But TCS doesn't just act like a lobbying shop. It's actually published by
one--the DCI Group, a prominent Washington "public affairs" firm
specializing in P.R., lobbying, and so-called "Astroturf" organizing,
generally on behalf of corporations, GOP politicians, and the occasional
Third-World despot. The two organizations share most of the same owners,
some staff, and even the same suite of offices in downtown Washington, a
block off K Street. As it happens, many of DCI's clients are also
"sponsors" of the site it houses. TCS not only runs the sponsors' banner
ads; its contributors aggressively defend those firms' policy positions, on
TCS and elsewhere.

[snip]

--Thomas Leavitt

Jim Hightower's Weblog

Did you know that Jim Hightower has a Weblog?

Unprecedented In Modern Times

Reporter Mistakenly Covers Issues of Presidential Campaign @ Oliver Willis:

"The calm of the presidential campaign today was disrupted by an unprecedented event. White House press secretary Scott McClellan called the event 'disturbing', and promised it would 'be looked into at the highest levels of government'. At approxiamately 2:34pm (EST), reporter Mo Godwin of the Topeka News Tribune filed a story about the presidential campaign consisting only of perspectives on policy issues."

How could this happen in America!

Prisoners Tortured?

CincyDemo blog asks: Is it true that Bush's occupation forces have tortured Iraqi POWs?.

"Ownership society" scam on the way

The good things in your life can be your own property, or they can be things which have a monetary value but aren't property in a legal sense (such as a good job with benefits, or Social Security and other entitlements), or they can be public goods such as safe neighborhoods or good public schools.

For various reasons Americans (compared to Swedes, for example) have always preferred property they can solely control to the good things which take other forms. Americans also tend to overestimate their own success and their prospects for future success. For these two reasons, Republican attempts to deliver big benefits to their rich contributers (e.g., the elimination of the "death tax") get an amazing amount of support from people who basically are fooling themselves. They think that they're property owners, but they're not. They're labor.

Almost all Americans are still labor -- dependent on their own or someone else's wages. Various legal fictions invented in order to bust unions or to evade taxes (such as declaring certain categories of workers to be "contractors" or "supervisors") obscure this fact. But if you can't live off your property but have to work for a living, you're labor. (Small businessmen are a borderline case).

Take a 45-year-old guy with a paid-up $100,000 home, a $50,000 / year job with good benefits and a pension plan (in addition to Social Security), and two kids 6 and 8 whom he plans to send to the pretty-good public schools in his neighborhood*. And suppose that he also has $30,000 on the stock market.

Because he's a home owner with money on the stock market, he might be tempted to think of himself as part of the investor class. But he's not. If he loses his job and can't get another one, he and his family will be destitute in three to five years. If his neighborhood decays, he won't be able to move. If the local schools decline, he won't be able to send them to private schools. A net worth of $130,000 really isn't very much.

But his property is his alone. He doesn't share it or depend on anyone else for it. The other goods are much more valuable all put together, but they are not his property and not in his control.

The present trend in fake Republican populism is to reduce taxes while converting various forms of government entitlements (Social Security, education, Medicare, etc.) into cash benefits or vouchers. Simultaneously, workers with piddling little stock market nest-eggs are encouraged to believe that now they've "made it". Both scams depend on the fact that money in the hand has a definite countable value and is controlled by the owner, whereas it's harder to put a dollar value on good public schools, which are a shared good.

In the vast majority of cases the guy with the money in his hand will end up worse off in the "ownership society". There is no intention to improve his life. He's being sold a pig in a poke, and once his signature is on the dotted line (i.e., once the bill passes Congress) he'll be dead meat.

There are people who will benefit from the "ownership society", of course. But they are not the ones who it's being sold to, but the ones who are selling it. That's the way scams work.

* NOTE: In large areas of the U.S. the public schools still are pretty good. Oddly, a lot of the outcry about "our failing public schools" comes from Southerners, whose schools have never been very good. You'd think they'd put their own house in order before preaching to others, but human nature doesn't work that way.

("The Rise of the Worker-Investor" by Rich Lowry of the National Review is a recent example of this scam).

Originally from this discussion on Brad DeLong

We want our jokes!

Ok, now. Neil Bush has admitted in court to suffering from herpes and to having had sex with an unknown number of mysterious women in two cities of Asia. His ex-wife is being sued for claiming that Neil was the real father of another man's child. So where are the jokes?

Leno and Letterman won't touch the story. Like all normal Americans, Leno and Letterman love scurrilous gossip. Herpes is funny. Whores are funny, especially if you don't know who's paying them. Libel suits about adultery are funny. We can all agree on that.

If any of these stories were about Bill, or Bill's no-good brother Roger, or Hillary (to say nothing of Chelsea!), we'd be having a regular laff riot right now.

So where are the jokes? Come on, guys, what's the problem? What are you afraid of? We want our jokes! We want our fun!

(Originally from a discussion on Atrios),

Introducing Zizka

Zizka here. Dave has invited me to be guest blogger here at Seeing the Forest, and I am very happy to accept his offer. Some of you may remember me from my own site, the final incarnation of which was here. I tried to kill my site for months, mostly because it took too much energy to update it often enough to keep the readers coming. Being a guest blogger will a real treat for me.

More very soon.

Blog Hero Award

I hereby grant the coveted Blog Hero Award to this post today: Whiskey Bar: Slander.

Calexico

Another Calexico fan!

Whiskey Bar: Deflation Nation

Whiskey Bar: Deflation Nation. I know it's long, but I feel like I'm giving everyone a heads-up if I suggest reading this. I'd feel guilty reading it and not passing it along.

The Finalists

Here are the finalists from MoveOn.org's Bush in 30 Seconds ad contest. I think they should run them all.

Stocks

Today's S&P 500 PE ratio is 30.6. See how this fits into a historical perspective here.

Update -A better chart, going back pre-1929 here.

Bush Knew

William Rivers Pitt | Two Loud Words:

"George W. Bush is going to run in 2004 on the idea that his administration is the only one capable of protecting us from another attack like the ones which took place on September 11. Yet the record to date is clear. Not only did they fail in spectacular fashion to deal with those first threats, not only has their reaction caused us to be less safe, not only have they failed to sufficiently bolster our defenses, but they used the aftermath of the attacks to ram through policies they couldn't have dreamed of achieving on September 10. It is one of the most remarkable turnabouts in American political history: Never before has an administration used so grisly a personal failure to such excellent effect."

We were attacked, and instead of dealing with the attack, the Republicans turned our grief and anger to their own political advantage. They passed tax cuts handing billions to campaign contributors, led us into pre-planned wars, and shamelessly set us against each other.

To put what the Repubicans are doing into perspective, think about this: Just the act of saying Republicans are better for protecting America than Democrats is a gross politicization of what happened, and is extremely divisive at a time when we should be sticking together. It weakens us. But the Republicans are going far, far beyond that. They accuse Democrats not only of lack of patriotism, but of actually "hating America" and supporting our enemies.

Donate To Disabled American Veterans

Juan Cole has a story about the large numbers of wounded in Iraq (11,000 medical evacuations). He suggests donating do the Disabled American Veterans.

Dem Debate

A quick observation. Gephardt several times took past statements or positions by other candidates, distorts them, and then tries to claim this means the other candidate has a different position than that candidate really has, or that the candidate has somehow flip-flopped. He has done this several times. I like Gephardt -- a lot -- but this is the kind of thing that is so distasteful about "old politics." This is one of the tricks Republicans use.

Lieberman did this, about Dean's records. And now Kerry is doing this. What do they think they gain? The uninformed vote?

Who the hell is Michelle Norris, asking questions about "tax relief?" Tax RELIEF? She gets her questions from the Republican Party? From Lakoff:

"On the day that George W. Bush took office, the words "tax relief" started appearing in White House communiqués. Think for a minute about the word relief. In order for there to be relief, there has to be a blameless, afflicted person with whom we identify and whose affliction has been imposed by some external cause. Relief is the taking away of the pain or harm, thanks to some reliever.

This is an example of what cognitive linguists call a "frame." It is a mental structure that we use in thinking. All words are defined relative to frames. The relief frame is an instance of a more general rescue scenario in which there is a hero (the reliever), a victim (the afflicted), a crime (the affliction), a villain (the cause of affliction) and a rescue (the relief). The hero is inherently good, the villain is evil and the victim after the rescue owes gratitude to the hero. "

Brilliant

Madeleine K. Albright: Endangered friendships,

"The Republican strategy could play well among those persuaded by the administration's implicit claims that the invasion of Iraq was essentially a retaliatory measure for Sept. 11 and that attacking Saddam Hussein was simply another way of attacking Osama bin Laden.

Although unsupported by the facts - Bush himself has acknowledged that there is no evidence linking Iraq to Sept. 11 - this argument casts the war not as a subject for pragmatic discussion but rather as a moral test. The Germans and French failed this test, those advocates say, essentially deserting under fire.

The spectacle of the lone sheriff facing down the bad guys while the cowardly townspeople tremble in the background, crystalized in the classic film High Noon (1952), has deep resonance for the American electorate. Casting Bush as the rugged individualist taking on terrorists might well appeal to voters more than any Democratic insistence that the terrorist threat can be confronted and turned back only with the aid of old alliances and established institutions.

If the Republicans pursue an ideological campaign and win, the world will change in highly combustible ways.

It is one thing for an American administration to depart from traditional policies under stress and for a limited time, but it would be quite another for a president to win election with a mandate to make that departure permanent."

This Is How They Campaign For Office

This is how they do it: The following is from The Howard Dean implosion,

"Dean's success amongst Democrats can be largely attributed to the fact that he has been able to galvanize and energize certain factions of the Democratic Party: namely the "new age hippies" and those who are seriously desperate for either a date or a party.

[. . .] Essentially, it's a revamping of the "political love-in" from the '60s, where pot-smoking hippies would use politics as a guise for picking up dates. Now, Dean -- having "liberated" the gays of the state of Vermont by legislating civil unions, much in the same way he might imagine that Lincoln "liberated" the slaves -- is out to "free" every sex-starved, party-deprived Democrat and give them what they really want: a good time.

[. . .]Man, is this guy ever angry. I mean, seriously agitated. Then again, he is the poster boy for the same state (Vermont) that the Drug Enforcement Administration ranks No. 2 in the country in per-person Ritalin use, so perhaps his constant agitation is fitting.

Dean rants and raves and flings and flails so much during debates, events and appearances that I honestly don't know how anyone could picture this guy in the Oval Office, within an arm-fling's distance of the Big Red Button. It seems that once the blood gets flowing to Dean's reddened face, it all gets diverted directly from his brain, since he has a tendency of getting worked up and running off at the mouth with unsubstantiated, knee-jerk claims.

[. . .]Dean seems to have cornered the market on anti-war supporters -- the same ones who boo George W. Bush's and Ronald Reagan's names on liberal college campuses, yet cheer dictators like Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro. If you wish Saddam Hussein was still in power, then Dean is your man.

[. . .]The obvious lesson here is if you want a safer world and a more secure America, vote for Bush; if you want Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-Il in sensitivity training, then Howard Dean is quite clearly the guy for you."

This is not just an accidental, glib, throw-away wingnut hit piece. This is part of a coordinated, researched, tested, professional character assassination campaign that will phase in and ramp up between now and the election. This is the modern Republican Party. This is Norquist's Wednesday Meeting, and Karl Rove and the Wurlitzer, and cigarette company marketing people, and former CIA destabilization specialists all working together to do their job ON YOU! (Also see here.) This is George Bush "staying above the fray" while his subordinates engage in the nastiest kind of character assassination and voter manipulation -- spreading lying, humiliating, ridiculing smear after lying, humiliating, ridiculing smear until even YOU hate Dean! You'll see thousands of these smear jobs this year. You're going to see literally 10 or 20 of these every single day until the slime and humiliating and ridicule build up so deep that you even hate yourself just for thinking of voting.

Here's the author's bio. Note this: "Rachel has served as a Director of a Washington, DC-based political think-tank". Try Googling her, and see how she's connected to "the movement." Go here to see the letters of praise from the White House and Ken Starr. "Thanks for everything you are doing, and have done, on behalf of the President's agenda." This is a professional, working for The Party.

Steel yourself, prepare yourself, get ready for a year of this, getting worse every single day. This is what is coming. This is what they do!

The way to fight it is to recognize that this is what they do, and not get confused by the words, and not get bogged down trying to refute each smear. Recognize that this is what they do, and tell everyone you can that this is what they do. Do your research, so you understand who is doing it and how it works. Talk to others. Write letters to newspapers. Call talk shows. Send e-mails to reporters. Demand that they stop it! And help others get angry at the perpetrators rather than fall for the scam.