All-Purpose NuILX thread for American Politics

where pissy, priggish evangelicals can get their prayer on and intermingle in the barely sustainable queer tension of talking about gay sex with like-minded evangelicals. 'Cause, apparently, if gays get married, now it's actually gonna cause churches to burst into flames and ministers to tear off their own genitals in front of their congregations, who will roll around in the dirt as hidden demons fuck them from behind.

Meanwhile, there's this rundown of certain House races, including Randy Graf, from Arizona. Randy's campaign manager slept with two underage girls, crimes which Randy describes as "no more serious than providing a teenager with a beer." Then there's the guy from Indiana, who wanted to rename Interstate 69 b/c it was deemed, "too risque."

Michele Bachmann sincerely wants to help homosexuals deal "with the very real issue of sexual dysfunction in their life.…It's a very sad life. It's part of Satan." She believes that gay marriage is the "biggest issue in 30 years" because "the immediate consequence, if gay marriage goes through, is that K-12 little children will be forced to learn that homosexuality is normal, natural and perhaps they should try it." She also believes that "the number one issue for our country right now, how are we going to deal with this threat of radical Islam." And of public education, she says, "That's my number one issue." Her opponent Patty Wetterling doesn't even have a number one issue, as far as I know, while Bachmann has at least three!

if nothing else it undercuts potential voter worries that Ford is a goodie-two-shoes or -- post-Foleygate, a risk for any unmarried male member of Congress -- gay, which would seem to do his campaign more good than harm.

You post some good links, kf. And we think along the same lines politically. But if I wanted to read metafilter.com, I'd go to metafilter.com.

You're a good guy who probably has much more to add than blue hyperlinks. More zombie pictures and stomach ulcer stories, thnx.

And no stomach ulcer stories from me, tho i will have zombie pics at the end of the week.

lol

KLESTADT said that there is a "significant amount of interest" in the network, which has been given until NOVEMBER 22 to find a buyer, although no potential buyers were identified. The court approved the network's temporary financing plan that requires a deal to be in place by NOVEMBER 22 to allow the financing to continue past then.

Meanwhile, a "no-buy" list of advertisers who have instructed ABC RADIO NETWORKS that their ads not run on AIR AMERICA RADIO is rapidly circulating in the liberal blogosphere. The list of about 100 advertisers is similar to much longer "no-buy" lists for other talk programming, including most top conservative talkers and "shock jocks." MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA and THINKPROGRESS.ORG are among the liberal websites circulating the list.

former WH speechwriter finally lets it all out. Ned linked to that one before, but it's fun to actually read the entire thing, where the guy goes on about his self-proclaimed hatred for Harry Belafonte, et al.

The trouble is that public opinion is often ignorant, confused and contradictory; and so the policies it produces are often ignorant, confused and contradictory

that thing I quoted above was from allaccess.com, a subscription radio website.

The list of about 100 advertisers is similar to much longer "no-buy" lists for other talk programming, including most top conservative talkers and "shock jocks."

and includes an advertiser or two, like REI, that donates 100% to Democrats

xp

http://www.observer.com/data/articleimages/photoimages/120406_article_horowitz.jpg

TESTOSTERONE: IT'S NOT JUST FOR MEN

I think he left for San Diego to go work for IBM.

i forgot how far Frist had his dick into that whole SchaivoGate thing until reading that CNN peice.

that's not how it works - the Hussein thing will be brought out here and there to reinforce other things more relevant to people who don't have their minds made up.

but anyway, I think some other parts of the world might think differently about us if we elect a guy with Hussein in his name.

The thing is an interesting read, but it's a forced reg site, so here goes. I

The New Republic Online

THE UNSPOKEN TRUTH ABOUT THE GOP.
Southern Discomfort
by Rick Perlstein
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 11.29.06

In the days after the 2004 election, the same CNN exit poll was on every pundit's lips: Asked about their most important issue, a plurality of voters cited "moral values." Eighty percent of that plurality voted for George W. Bush--no matter that cooler heads soon demonstrated these findings to be statistically meaningless. For "most of the last 100 years, politics has been defined by economic interests," Bill Clinton's former press secretary, Dee Dee Myers, pronounced on MSNBC. "That's no longer true." And so, a refrain developed: Without making significant inroads among churchgoing Southerners, Democrats could never hope to win a governing majority.

But this month's election yielded data that, unlike CNN's exit poll, was irrefutable: For the first time since 1953, the party that dominates the South is the minority party in Congress. November 7, 2006, may well go down in history as the day the modern Republican Party became a mere Southern faction. There's only one problem: No one's talking about it on TV. Instead, Heath Shuler became the cable news bookers' new favorite guest, as if the election of a pro-life Democrat from North Carolina was the election's most important trend: As Bob Schieffer announced, "These Democrats that were elected last night are conservative Democrats." Meanwhile, the one man whose book predicted the election's actual revelation--that the South and its conservative ways were irrelevant to the Democrats' victory--has been shut out. "I managed to squeeze onto Chris Matthews once," says Thomas F. Schaller, a professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, "but we didn't even talk about the book."

Schaller's book is Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South. Published this October, it argues, "The South is likely to become more Republican in the decades ahead," that Democrats can make and keep the Republicans a mere regional party, and that the best shot at a Democratic majority "in the immediate term is to consolidate electoral control over the Northeast and Pacific Coast blue states, expand the party's Midwestern margins, and cultivate the new-growth areas of the interior West." That's exactly how it went down November 7. The last prognosticator of structural shifts in American politics this accurate--Kevin Phillips, in his 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority--became a household name. But, because he is a friend, it pains me to have to make a prognostication of my own: Tom Schaller will never become a household name. The reasons are ideological.

The people who have paid most attention to Schaller have been hysterics. Former Representative Glen Browder, a founder of the Blue Dog Democrats, was asked in the Anniston Star what he thought of Whistling Past Dixie. Browder, also a Ph.D. in political science, replied that Schaller was spouting "foolishness," but that "fortunately, most national leaders today understand that the road to the magic 218 number inevitably runs through this region." He said this oblivious to the fact that Schaller's "foolishness" had, in fact, just come true.

Still, Browder will always have an easier time winning a seat alongside Schieffer on Face the Nation than Schaller. TV punditry is not a meritocracy. Points aren't awarded for being right. (If they were, how many talking heads who saw only rosy things ahead in Iraq would still be on air?) It is an ideological system, with perverse ideological rules. And Browder has just honored one of them: Glorify what the French call l'Amerique profunde--the "heartland," of which the South is the sacred center.

Schaller speaks ill of the South. The very heart of his argument is a taboo notion: that the South votes Republican because the Republicans have perfected their appeal to Southern racism, and that Democrats simply can't (and shouldn't) compete.

But, among scholars, this is hardly news. Schaller builds this conclusion on one of the most impressive papers in recent political science, "Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South," by Nicholas Valentino and David Sears. Running regressions on a massive data set of ideological opinions, Sears and Valentino demonstrate with precision that, for example, a white Southern man who calls himself a "conservative," controlling for racial attitudes, is no less likely to chance a vote for a Democratic presidential candidate than a Northerner who calls himself a conservative. Likewise, a pro-life or hawkish Southern white man is no less likely--again controlling for racial attitudes--than a pro-life or hawkish Northerner to vote for the Democrat. But, on the other hand, when the relevant identifier is anti-black answers to survey questions (such as whether one agrees "If blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites," or choosing whether blacks are "lazy" or "hardworking"), an untoward result jumps out: white Southerners are twice as likely than white Northerners to refuse to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate. Schaller's writes: "Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters ... the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past."

What's more, if Republicans have succeeded by openly baiting a region of the country not really American (the latte-swilling Northeast), Schaller says, "The Democrats need their own 'them,' and the social conservatives who are the bedrock of Southern politics provide the most obvious and burdensome stone to hang around the Republicans' neck." Democrats should cite "Southern obstructionism as a continuing impediment to the investments and progress the country must make in the coming century." There's just one problem: You can't do that on TV.

Once upon a time, of course, pundits used to say what Schaller says: The South, sometimes, is backward. Since the late '60s, however--not coincidentally, around the time Kevin Phillips rose to fame--a new, unspoken set of rules evolved.

It happened in a moment of trauma. After the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, all the top news executives sent a wire to Mayor Richard J. Daley protesting the way their employees "were repeatedly singled out by policemen and deliberately beaten." Such was their presumption of cultural authority they couldn't imagine how anyone could disagree. Then Mayor Daley went on Walter Cronkite's show and shocked the media establishment by refusing to apologize to the beaten reporters: "Many of them are hippies themselves. They're part of this movement." Polls revealed 60 percent of Americans agreed with Daley. For the press, it triggered a dark night of the soul. In an enormously influential column, the pundit Joseph Kraft, shaken, wrote, "Mayor Daley and his supporters have a point. Most of us in what is called the communication field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary Americans--in Middle America."

That air of alienation--that helpless feeling that we have no idea what's going on out there--has structured elite discourse about the rest of the country ever since. A set of constructs about what "the great mass of ordinary Americans" supposedly believes--much more conservative things than any media elitist would believe, basically--became reified. Pundits like Kraft--a social class that spends much of their time among people like themselves, inside the Beltway--learned to bend over backward to be fair, lest they advertise their own alienation from everyone else. On subjects that chafed them--say, the relevance of certain ugly folkways of the South in electoral politics--they just had to bend harder. Or ignore the matter altogether.

It can produce in today's TV talking head a twisted kind of neurosis: an instinctual distrust of the political appeal of anything that can be categorized as liberal, even in defiance of the actual data; and an inability to call a spade a spade--say, that people shouldn't have been beaten indiscriminately in the streets of Chicago in 1968. That's why nobody on TV says Democrats can't win in the South in the short-term--and Schaller, it has to be said, is optimistic about Democrats winning Southern gains in the long term--without playing to white voters' inclinations to see blacks as lazy. It's much easier to say that Heath Shuler represents a trend. That offends nothing but the facts.

RICK PERLSTEIN is the author of Nixonland: The Politics and Culture of the American Berserk, 1965-1972, which will be published next year.

It's only when he has to "act like a politician" that he turns into Gorebot.

http://hotlineblog.nationaljournal.com/archives/2006/11/the_2008_democr.html#more

Interesting thought. Maybe after another 4 (or 8) years of Gore as VP, the country might be ready for a Gore presidency.

who else we got? former fattay huckabee?

i am confused. how's this play out? is there a candidate for the loco religious 35%? someone to syphon them so mccain squeaks by? or is it that mccain is just a figment of the media's wild minds and once people really get a load of this pork-chop-hued psycho they'll run into the bland waiting arms of daddy romney?

i don't know.

and while i do agree that the south is likely lost for a while on the presidential level, it doesn't mean there aren't congressional seats, governorships etc to be had there.

i have full confidence that a significant chunk of the electorate will see what an unappealing ass guliani is once they get a good look at him - he's ugly, he's a jerk, even his voice is gross.

if he's the veep, they probably won't

who says he'll be in the primaries, or that, if he is, the other candidates will attack the guy they most want on the ticket, or that attacking the Saint of 9/11 won't blow back on whoever goes down that road?

so you think he's not gonna run at all, just wait for the nod?

http://www.tricountyjog.homestead.com/files/kerik.gif

he's mob connected and he's rudy's best friend.

which problem?

no one gives a shit about bernie kerik.

—Rich Galen, strategist for Newt Gingrich, admitting his candidate doesn't stand a chance yesterday at a forum of GOP strategists. Galen spoke of Gingrich's potential role as a candidate who could pitch ideas and affect the debate, but had little optimism about an actual victory.

heh

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/06/AR2006120600221.html

Unfortunately, the experts have spoken, and Jesus would not vote for him. Oh well.

http://img297.imageshack.us/img297/5105/bushsopranospi0.jpg

"...Is there any other major public figure who dresses the way [Obama] does? Why, yes. It is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who, unlike most of his predecessors, seems to have skipped through enough copies of GQ to find the jacket-and-no-tie look agreeable. And maybe that's not the comparison a possible presidential contender really wants to evoke.

[...]

Now, it is one thing to have a last name that sounds like Osama and a middle name, Hussein, that is probably less than helpful, but an outfit that reminds people of a charter member of the axis of evil, why, this could leave his presidential hopes hanging by a thread. Or is that threads?"

Nobody got fired. People are still talking about Kramer, though.

(hint: "poverty is bad" is not a position)

soooo inspiring. God, you are an android.

I thought Sam Brownback had the fundies locked up

he might be their favorite, but he isn't going anywhere

It's kinda his version of "conservatism never fails; it is only failed."

Can anyone see there NOT being more troops sent? Who's gonna stop W? Will the Masses actually put down the fucking remote and raise hell over it? Can't see it.

romney seems more formidable in a general election, although this mormon thing is likely a huge liability. we'll see if he can talk his way out of it.

my money's on obama.

Thank you for your recent communication. When I raise my hand to take the oath on Swearing In Day, I will have the Bible in my other hand. I do not subscribe to using the Koran in any way.

The Muslim Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.

We need to stop illegal immigration totally and reduce legal immigration and end the diversity visas policy pushed hard by President Clinton and allowing many persons from the Middle East to come to this country.

I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped.

The Ten Commandments and “In God We Trust” are on the wall in my office. A Muslim student came by the office and asked why I did not have anything on my wall about the Koran. My response was clear, “As long as I have the honor of representing the citizens of the 5th District of Virginia in the United States House of Representatives, The Koran is not going to be on the wall of my office.”

Thank you again for your email and thoughts.

Sincerely yours,
Virgil H. Goode, Jr.
70 East Court Street
Suite 215
Rocky Mount, Virginia 24151

via glenn greenwald. ugh.

that's the key word. You already get the feel that these guys are quakin' in their boots, freaked out that them muslims are gunna start asking for their own restrooms, water fountains, ability to pray, etc

Obama's staffers found out, and Barack personally called the guy to apologize.

"Messin' up your game" and all that.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/19/AR2006121900880.html

In a December 18 column headlined "Barack Hussein Obama: Once a Muslim, Always A Muslim" and posted on her website, right-wing pundit Debbie Schlussel argued that because Sen. Barack Obama's (D-IL) middle name is Hussein, his late, estranged father was of Muslim descent, and he has shown interest in his father's Kenyan heritage, Obama's "loyalties" must be called into question as he emerges as a possible Democratic presidential candidate. In the column, Schlussel asked: "So, even if he identifies strongly as a Christian ... is a man who Muslims think is a Muslim, who feels some sort of psychological need to prove himself to his absent Muslim father, and who is now moving in the direction of his father's heritage, a man we want as President when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam? Where will his loyalties be?" She ended her column by asking if Obama becoming vice president instead would be acceptable. Answering her own question, she wrote: "NO WAY, JOSE ... Or, is that, HUSSEIN?"

Yup. War against Islam, fun for all round.

spotted here

Dick Morris is now threatening to split the U.S. if Clinton/Obama wins, 'coz "I do not want Hillary Clinton controlling the FBI and the IRS and the CIA and the DEA."

Oh yeah, and apparently Hillary will win the nom, so the GOP will have to run Condi against her.

my congressman. robin hayes. the one who won his election with slightly over 300 votes. sigh.

did anyone else read the Harper's cover story on Obama and the Atlantic cover story on Hillary?

[from TNR]

Village People
by Martin Peretz
Post date: 12.22.06
Issue date: 01.15.07

She's not sure whether she is running for president. But she is certain that the time is right for a woman to try. Maybe Hillary Clinton thinks that Nancy Pelosi should be the Democratic candidate. OK, Hillary is not a candid person. This time--actually, the day that I write--she was not candid on NPR's "Morning Edition." Yesterday, it was on another platform. Tomorrow, she won't be candid on still another one. So, what else is new? We've accommodated to her trying to figure all the angles. Hillary has been scheming for the presidency since the day her husband entered the White House, which is why she didn't much take to Al Gore. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if she conspired with James Baker--or is that just me?

One of the problems about figuring all the angles is that you can't. And, believe me, Hillary tried. She has had an apparatus in place for just that chore for years. Not long enough ago to include Harold Ickes's father, the other Harold Ickes, who schemed for FDR. But this Harold Ickes (who ran Eugene McCarthy's campaign in New York), and Mandy Grunwald and John Podesta and Mark Penn and Tony Podesta and Susan Thomases, unless any of these have been unceremoniously pushed off the ship, much like Marian Wright Edelman--Hillary's closest sister and ideological soulmate--was pushed, never to be let on board again. In its youth, the team was a band of idealists, self-styled. Now it's made up of hardened cynics, no pretense otherwise. But the same folk.

Hillary and Co. prepared for Mark Warner and John Edwards, Bill Richardson and Joe Biden, Tom Vilsack and the really impossible--no, deluded--dreamer John Kerry. She probably had a strategy against Gore, too. She was confident and contemptuous. And then, suddenly, she found herself running against a latter-day Martin Luther King Jr.

There was no way to see Barack Obama coming. And, damn it, he is a picture of America's future, black and white. African father. Columbia. Harvard Law School, where he was president of the Law Review, no slouch he. Taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, greater evidence of his brilliance. Supple in mind and bearing, evoking energy and thoughtfulness. Ah, yes, his most important public quality: He is comfortable in his own skin. She is not. Oh, is she not! What could Hillary possibly say against him? In the Democratic Party, it is still difficult to honestly criticize an African American. You can't even say a bad word about Al Sharpton, even though you can't say a truthful good word about him, either. But what, for heaven's sake, is there to criticize about Obama? Nothing.

Hillary is holding séances with Democratic politicians in New York. They can't but be for her. Even though my old student Chuck Schumer is more popular than her and more respected. And certainly deeper. The same is true for Eliot Spitzer. If they actually endorse, their endorsements will be discounted. New Mexico Representative Tom Udall probably supports New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. And that means exactly what? Nothing. On the other hand, maybe Hillary will be able to entice Eleanor Roosevelt into her corner.

I have a question I've been reluctant to ask. Do the Clintons have any friends who aren't really rich? Maybe just a few, for old time's sake. But, as I read the clips about them, they consort largely, and maybe only, with zillionaires and very high-pay Hollywood types. It is not an axiomatic vocational hazard of politicians. Let me take Gore as an instance. He and Tipper have musician friends and professor friends and artist friends and just plain worker friends and farmer friends, for sure. Not that they don't mix with computer magnates, as well. But the Gores are rooted in ordinary life--in real, even quotidian activity. For example, he actually writes his own books. Believe it or not, it's true. The indulgent wealth that surrounds Bill and Hillary is, I am sure, corrupting. And that corruption--of taste, of moderation, of what is essential--cripples the soul and distorts life itself.

No wonder that Bill Clinton flies with frequency to Dubai and other sand eruptions in the Gulf to speak at conference after conference on topics so orotund that no one reports what he says. But isn't it a degradation of the presidency for this former president to shmooze, for money and money alone, with men (yes, only men) who want from him only his presence? But perhaps this sexism is a relief. The robed hosts do allow women to be among their foreign guests. At least they allow Madame Albright, who flatters them, also to address them. And Wesley Clark. But Clinton is the king of the Emirates Airline route. The indisputable king.

Which brings me back to Hillary. Does the American public really want her husband in the White House once again? And with nothing to do? Right now, what with George W. and Laura ensconced in the upstairs rooms, the return of the previous first couple may seem attractive, even alluring. But the hardened woman, who lost her health care proposal not to a GOP Congress but to a Democratic one, does not evoke the capacity to persuade, to compromise, to administer, to govern. Her coterie is too tight. Her mind too rigid. And her husband's is too, well, loose.

Hillary started out in 1993 with "the politics of meaning," that pretentious and portentous phrase that actually means nothing. She had leapt at it out of the mouth of a foolish "rabbi," Michael Lerner, earnest and oleaginous (he the enthusiast of tikkun olam, a theology rooted nowhere so firmly as in a Peter, Paul, and Mary song). But she dropped it quickly when she discovered that the American people were on to her preacher-teacher's banal words. Then she peddled It Takes A Village as book and slogan. It soon appeared too soft for her own entry into politics, and so she also sidetracked this theme. But now she is running for president. Tough-minded she was on Iraq, right up there with that junior senator from Massachusetts. A few days ago, she said that, had she known what she knows now, she wouldn't have voted for the war. Then, today, she said she wished she had voted against the war, whatever. She has fumbled and disenchanted the left, and the left is not easily forgiving. Still, as a gesture to that flank of the party, Hillary has republished It Takes A Village. But what it really takes is a majority of the electoral college. Which I don't see.

Maybe Peretz doesn't pay close attention or maybe Obama's just too new to him, but there is definitely something odd going on with Obama's habit of responding to all sorts of questions in the second person.. "Well, you do this, then you think this, and you don't want to react this way" like he's constantly observing his own behavior from somewhere offstage. Because he is. And there's nothing wrong with that. And there's nothing wrong with Hillary doing the same except that she isn't as good at faking candor.

Right now, today, I'd prefer Edwards or Obama were nominated over Hillary but some folks' views of her can border on the pathological

if you'd like some evidence that her scheming long ago went off the rails see: HER FUCKING DISGUSTING RECORD ON THE IRAQ WAR.

obama's thing, shockingly, contains a large element of actual thoughtfulness.

that Marty Peretz article has some points worth considering, but I tend to avoid anything expressing irrational-obsessive hatred of the Clintons from either side, especially when it's often personal axe-grinding (like Dick Morris being forever remembered for his toe fetish). With Peretz it's hard to figure out given that it's a guy who both sided with Bush on the war as late as '04 and was a big Gore fan. But I imagine it might have something to do with the impact the Clintons had on the Third Way and its import for TNR - maybe they weren't centrist enough for him, or maybe they so embodied and Democratic-branded the movement that he lost his brand.

The second person thing *might* also be an inclusive gesture, as if he is inviting the questioner to occupy his shoes and thus seems more reasonable as a result. Obama does 'reasonable' very well.

Kerry didn't - and dry wit doesn't play well in a politician outside of his/her core supporters.

hotter

marty peretz is the ed-in-chief of TNR, right? the one who kinda went unhinged due to summertime joementum?

R:
Romney
Giuliani
Brownback(?)

D:
Edwards
Vilsack
Kucinich

http://electioncentral.tpmcafe.com/blog/electioncentral/2007/jan/02/edwards_coins_new_phrase_for_escalation_the_mccain_doctrine

lol

bad news: Iraq is worth it, and never mind how much blood & treasure we waste on it.

good news: America is ready for a black president

Ed Kilgore argues that there will be no "True Conservative" horse to show this time around, and I still think that this faction ultimately grudgingly comes around to Romney. But maybe there will be a Perot-sized Buchanan in '08?

http://www.spatcave.com/lineandespn/mDSC05442.jpg

When's the election down there, anyway?

http://time-blog.com/swampland/2007/02/nicorette.html
Obama responded that Australia currently has 1400 troops in Iraq and if Howard feels so strongly about "fighting the good fight" he should "send 20,000 more Australians to fight in Iraq."

I know Atrios (for one) has been on a neverending shit-fit since the Swampland blog started with Joe Klein as one of its contributors, but it's actually been pretty good.

Not soon enough! Labor are surging out in front now they have a decent leader. What Howard said about Obama is so fucking embarrasing.

Conservatives having second thoughts about Romney

Moveon.org making plans for 07 elections in LA

Giuliani appeals to midwest. O RLY?

Dodd & Biden plan to be more than wallflowers.

I sure can make a bunch of fake links when I want to.

http://www.barackobama.com/page_elements/08_logo2.jpg

And here's the main campaign placard:

http://d.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/afp/20070212/capt.sge.rnm42.120207153227.photo03.photo.default-512x349.jpg?x=380&y=259&sig=_Egu1w4yzYIpPiGOefKlWg--

I like it.

I don't like it much, there is something peculiar.. it looks like a credit card company trying to update their image..

Bob Cochran, who created the show with Surnow, admitted, “"Most terrorism experts will tell you that the ‘ticking time bomb’ situation never occurs in real life, or very rarely. But on our show it happens every week."µ According to Darius Rejali, a professor of political science at Reed College and the author of the forthcoming book “Torture and Democracy,µ the conceit of the ticking time bomb first appeared in Jean Lartéguy's 1960 novel “"Les Centurions," written during the brutal French occupation of Algeria. The book's hero, after beating a female Arab dissident into submission, uncovers an imminent plot to explode bombs all over Algeria and must race against the clock to stop it. Rejali, who has examined the available records of the conflict, told me that the story has no basis in fact. In his view, the story line of “Les Centurionsµ provided French liberals a more palatable rationale for torture than the racist explanations supplied by others (such as the notion that the Algerians, inherently simpleminded, understood only brute force). Lartéguy’s scenario exploited an insecurity shared by many liberal societies—that their enlightened legal systems had made them vulnerable to security threats.

Another neat bit that I didn't know is that the Parents Television Council, which is Brent Bozell's conservative anti-media group, is actually logging the torture scenes on the show. Also, the Brigadier General in charge of West Point flew out to meet w/ the creators of the show:

In fact, Finnegan and the others had come to voice their concern that the show's central political premise--that the letter of American law must be sacrificed for the country's security--was having a toxic effect. In their view, the show promoted unethical and illegal behavior and had adversely affected the training and performance of real American soldiers. “"I'd like them to stop,"µ Finnegan said of the show's producers. “"They should do a show where torture backfires.µ"

Oh yeah, except that the main guy in charge of the show(and big Limbaugh friend) Joel Surnow didn't show up for the meeting. This guy's also working on the Fox News response to the Daily Show.

The other scary thing is the guys working on the show who have actual law degrees, but are straight outta the Alberto Gonzalez school, holding that torture is legal & fine & good in certain circumstances.

any news on this one?

omg plz make and post youtube version now.

In recent years, Surnow and Nowrasteh have participated in the Liberty Film Festival, a group dedicated to promoting conservatism through mass entertainment. Surnow told me that he would like to counter the prevailing image of Senator Joseph McCarthy as a demagogue and a liar. Surnow and his friend Ann Coulter—the conservative pundit, and author of the pro-McCarthy book “Treasonµ—talked about creating a conservative response to George Clooney’s recent film “Good Night, and Good Luck.µ Surnow said, “I thought it would really provoke people to do a movie that depicted Joe McCarthy as an American hero or, maybe, someone with a good cause who maybe went too far.µ He likened the Communist sympathizers of the nineteen-fifties to terrorists: “The State Department in the fifties was infiltrated by people who were like Al Qaeda.µ But, he said, he shelved the project. “The blacklist is Hollywood’s orthodoxy,µ he said. “It’s not a movie I could get done now.

A year and a half ago, Surnow and Manny Coto, a “24µ writer with similar political views, talked about starting a conservative television network. “There’s a gay network, a black network—there should be a conservative network,µ Surnow told me. But as he and Coto explored the idea they realized that “we weren’t distribution guys—we were content guys.µ Instead, the men developed “The Half Hour News Hour,µ the conservative satire show. “ ‘The Daily Show’ tips left,µ Surnow said. “So we thought, Let’s do one that tips right.µ Jon Stewart’s program appears on Comedy Central, an entertainment channel. But, after Surnow got Rush Limbaugh to introduce him to Roger Ailes, Fox News agreed to air two episodes. The program, which will follow the fake-news format popularized by “Saturday Night Live,µ will be written by conservative humorists, including Sandy Frank and Ned Rice. Surnow said of the show, “There are so many targets, from global warming to banning tag on the playground. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit.µµ

Which reminds me a lot of something Molly Ivans once wrote:

Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel -- it's vulgar.

Laura Ingraham, the talk-radio host, has cited the show’s popularity as proof that Americans favor brutality. “They love Jack Bauer,µ she noted on Fox News. “In my mind, that’s as close to a national referendum that it’s O.K. to use tough tactics against high-level Al Qaeda operatives as we’re going to get.µ Surnow once appeared as a guest on Ingraham’s show; she told him that, while she was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer, “it was soothing to see Jack Bauer torture these terrorists, and I felt better.µ Surnow joked, “We love to torture terrorists—it’s good for you!µ

KRISTOL: We’re electing a war president in 2008. If I can go back to Obama and Lincoln for just one second, Lincoln’s “house dividedµ speech in 1858 was a speech saying we cannot live as a house divided on slavery. And he implicitly says we’ll have to fight a civil war if necessary on this.

Obama’s speech is a “can’t we get alongµ speech — sort of the opposite of Lincoln. He would have been with Stephen Douglas in 1858. Let’s paper over these differences, rise above politics and all get along. That’s not Giuliani’s mode. And I think in a war context, social conservatives want to win the war against Islamic jihadism.

Of course, there's that little thing about Douglas' attitude about slavery, but...

By the way, the Crystal Ball is waiting for at least one '08 candidate to pick a Vice President early, in order to run as a team. Ronald Reagan shocked the GOP National Convention in 1976 with precisely this gambit, choosing Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania and nearly grabbing the nomination from President Ford.

so who do you think:
a) will go this route
b) with which veep
c) at what stage in the process

http://www.libertyfilmfestival.com/

if you're waiting for the onrush of celluloid

Mr Howard said this morning that Australia is making a “very significant and appropriate contributionµ given its population.

“I think the most interesting thing about (Senator Obama's comments) is that it didn't really address the substance of the issue,µ Mr Howard told ABC Radio.

9:00AM "Curse the Darkness" - World Premiere!

Meanwhile, more white guys talking about how white Obama is

7:15PM - 9:15PM "The Testament of Dr. Mabuse" (121 mins., 1933; German with English subtitles)

Directed by: Fritz Lang. The acclaimed German Expressionist thriller by Fritz Lang ("Metropolis," "M") that was banned by the Nazis. A Berlin police inspector investigates a spree of crime and terrorism in which all clues lead to a madman - Dr. Mabuse. Mabuse's 'empire of crime' is eerily similar to the Al Qaeda terror network of today.

a. acacia Says:
February 12th, 2007 at 12:21 pm

Bob: (which is why you don’t see them publically having a fit over the gay-hostility of rap lyrics, another non-starter.)

I think you’re missing the main point: see, it’s off limits to attack another member of what I would call the Diversity League of America (DLA). There’s a chain of command here, with blacks, having suffered through slavery and Jim Crow, at the top of the DLA pyramid, basically UNTOUCHABLE (see Michael Richards). Gays are on the protected list, too. So they can’t, and won’t, run down a fellow member.

a. acacia Says:
February 12th, 2007 at 1:46 pm

Actually, change the above to VLA - the Victims League of America.

Yeah, better.

Buck Turgidson Says:
February 12th, 2007 at 5:56 pm

Maybe I’m insensitive, but I’m at a loss as to what was cruel about the going home with AIDS the lips joke.

Directed by: Alex Cox. A gritty urban comedy featuing a young Emilio Estevez, about what happens when a shiftless miscreant decides to become a product member of Reagan's America. Numerous other deviants, criminal elements, and burn-outs from 60's liberalism are shown getting their just deserts. Features the heroic work of federal agents and scientists trying to recover a stolen weapon of mass destruction.

Directed by: Ridley Scott. An allegorical fantasy adventure featuring a young Tom Cruise as a free market hero trying to destroy the dark secular communism of FDR's New Deal(played by Tim Curry). This lush, timeless epic includes a riveting score by Tangerine Dream and teaches lessons just as relevant in today's War on Terror as they were back in the Cold War. Keep an eye out for cameos by noted movement conservatives Billy Barty and Robert Picardo!

Directed and Produced by: Clark Baker. In their own words, Democrats present their strategic philosophy for 2006/2008. Parental advisory: this film contains veiled sexual humor. (Comedy/Documentary, 3 minutes, 2006)

Jesus christ, the college republicans have taken over the term-end F/VS screening

On Iraq, Romney reiterated his support for President Bush's policy in the nearly four-year-old war, although he did not name the president, and said that failure in Iraq "could be devastating" for the United States and could mean a future with far more military involvement and far more loss of American life.

Obama has easy trip to New Hampshire
Obama, who entered the race on Saturday in his home state of Illinois, came to New Hampshire on the heels of New York Sen.
Hillary Rodham Clinton. She faced criticism last weekend for not saying her vote to authorize the use of force in
Iraq was a mistake.

Obama, by contrast, faced little of that skepticism. Even his sharpest questioners began by offering praise and support.

"He hasn't gotten into specifics, but that'll come," state Rep. Jeffrey Fontas said after a Nashua house party with 60 activists. "It's early, so we'll see more and more."

That house party in Nashua brought questions about:

_An Equal Pay Act. Obama helped a state measure during his time in Illinois but didn't commit to a national version.

_Childcare. Obama said it was a problem; he didn't offer specifics.

_The USA Patriot Act. Obama is against parts of it but didn't offer an alternative.

Even while the first-term senator from Illinois didn't have specific solutions, voters in this first-in-the-nation primary state gave him a pass.

"He takes time, he answers fully," said state Rep. Melanie Levesque. "I think we need people who can bring people together. He can do that. We're going to have a tough decision to make."

Obama called for a national solution to health care but stopped short of endorsing or rejecting proposals for mandatory insurance. He said more young people should consider teaching but stopped short of specific incentives.

Later Monday, at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, Obama discussed Iraq. "Unless we bring that war to a close, we cannot deal with all those other problems I just mentioned," he said. "Not only has it resulted in the tragic loss in our brave soldiers, but it means we're spending $400 billion rebuilding Iraq with money that could have been used here."

Obama did outline an energy plan — a reduction in emissions, cap-and-trade plans for polluting industries, and development of biofuels including ethanol. He also repeated his stance on gay marriage — that civil unions are fine, but marriage is a religious bond.

"I believe that every American has basic rights that have to be respected," said Obama, who noted that his parents perhaps broke the law when they entered into a biracial marriage in the 1960s.

A member of the university audience asked about his appeal to social conservatives. Obama said one of the best lessons he learned in politics was that he couldn't make 100 percent of voters happy. He then noted his friendship with the Rev. Rick Warren, who leads one of the nation's largest megachurches.

And of course this has recieved a lot of attention:

Targeted blogger quits Edwards campaign
One of the chief campaign bloggers for Democratic presidential candidate
John Edwards quit Monday after conservative critics raised questions about her history of provocative online messages.

Amanda Marcotte posted on her personal blog, Pandagon, that the criticism "was creating a situation where I felt that every time I coughed, I was risking the Edwards campaign." Marcotte said she resigned from her position Monday, and that her resignation was accepted by the campaign.

Kate Bedingfield, a spokeswoman for the Edwards campaign, confirmed that Marcotte was "no longer working for the campaign." She declined additional comment.

Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, demanded last week that Edwards fire Marcotte and a second blogger, Melissa McEwan, for remarks he deemed anti-Catholic. Edwards, a former North Carolina senator, called the messages personally offensive, but decided to keep Marcotte and McEwan on staff.

"No matter what you think about the campaign, I signed on to be a supporter and a tireless employee for them, and if I can't do the job I was hired to do because Bill Donohue doesn't have anything better to do with his time than harass me, then I won't do it," Marcotte wrote Monday night.

Earlier Monday, Marcotte wrote on her personal Web site, "The Christian version of the virgin birth is generally interpreted as super-patriarchal, where ... women are nothing but vessels."

Donohue called both Marcotte and McEwan "foul-mouthed bigots." He did not return a phone call seeking comment Monday night.

McEwan remains on the Edwards campaign staff. She did not return messages left Monday.

criticising religion != bigotry

"The Christian version of the virgin birth is generally interpreted as super-patriarchal, where ... women are nothing but vessels."

And men are nothing but cuckolds.

Directed and Produced by: Benjamin Wilbanks. A group of American Christians travel to Iraq to teach a group of Iraqis how to operate a printing press, and in the process discover that Iraqis are grateful for America's help and want freedom and progress as much as anyone else. "A Journey to Iraq" shows a side of the War on Terror that is rarely seen in the mainstream media. (Documentary, 43 minutes, 2006)

Directed by: John Cameron Mitchell. An aspiring young capitalist (John Cameron Mitchell) struggles to escape the communist Eastern Bloc only to be betrayed by a confused deviant youth who does not respect intellectual property rights (Michael Pitt).

Right now, I'm leaning toward John Edwards in the primaries. He has problems -- a thin political résumé, a fancy estate at odds with his populist message, and a dated hairstyle that looks femme and foofy at a time when military buzz cuts and Caesarian close crops are in. But Edwards is a ferocious, knife-sharp debater with foxy, seat-of-the-pants smarts, and I hope he creams his opponents. It would be a relief to have an articulate president again...

I love the way Barack Obama has nimbly upstaged the ponderous Hillary machine. It's a Bette Davis/Joan Crawford bitch fest! But Obama's effusive gusts of generalities irritate me; it's all sizzle and no steak right now. He needs seasoning: 2012 may be his year...

On the Republican side, I've never understood liberal journalists' infatuation with John McCain, who's as mercurial as Hillary in his ideology-of-the-day. Those two are peas in a pod -- always dialing up the weather report and sleeping next to a window with their fingers in the wind. If Rudy Giuliani improbably wins the Republican nomination, which would require primary voters shutting their eyes to his liberal social views and checkered sex life, he would roll like a juggernaut into the White House on the strength of his macho authoritarianism in this time of war. Giuliani's got balls, but do we want this democracy drifting any further toward a police state?

http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2007/02/14/return/print.html

If he can really channel the Wellstone thing, he has a shot.

Well Alfred, she also accuses A___ N___ Smith of having comic verve or something.

also, C. Paglia is no longer worth any of my neuronal function

i'm glad paglia is back, she's always interesting to read. strangely i see the dem presidential field in much the same way & am def. supporting edwards right now, i like his straightforwardness and the fact that he doesn't have much to lose this time around, and i also like that he doesn't take obama's "transcend politics" approach which might sound nice but is arrogant and kind of insults the voters' intelligence, politics is everywhere and not any more/less dirty than anything else in life. hillary prob has too much $$$/organizational savvy for edwards to defeat her but you never know.

you rule out the possibility that he's playing left because there's no other way for him to get sufficient $ and primary voters?

I am leaning Edwards for the moment... dar1a, how will you bear it if we support the same horse?

Franken tackled some heckler during the '04 campaign!

his hem/hawing about s.s. unions has been discouraging tho.

It doesn't matter re: far-left appeal, the far-left isn't going to win you anything (most dem primary voters aren't far-left, esp Iowa, NH), being against the war & for starting to bring troops home is mainstream right now, universal healthcare has a lot of mainstream support, Edwards has a lot of ties to organized labor & has been working on building/strengthening them since 04, he's also by far the savviest in use of blogs/technology without showing any sign of letting that aspect of his campaign pick up and run away with wild fervor a la Dean. and like Iowa last time around I see him as.. having enough of his own support + being seen as a viable alternative by supporters of the other candidates, it could be a winning formula - he's not polarizing.

I wouldn't call Obama dead in the water but I don't see his campaign as having near the solid support of Edwards and expect him to be the Dean type flash in the pan this time around, albeit less likely to have a spectacular crash and burn

My ref to the far left/money angle was just in response to gabbneb's comment about Edwards' need for $$$. (I know the far left doesn't have a) a lot of money or b) the sole power to win elections)

here's a link to the proposals

do you see Obama having this same problem? this is an honest question, I'm not sure myself.

"And to the extent you believe that he was 'taken out', the people purportedly responsible for same are part of the coalition lining up behind Obama now."

Well right, which is one of the reasons why I don't think he faces the same intra-party threats as Dean.

absolutely not

Obama recently pulled a 17,000-person crowd outside a major metro in the freezing cold (admittedly in his backyard). Did Dean ever pull a crowd that size in a big city in good weather?

i'm stunned. but obama does come off as an egomaniac a lot of the time

re: edwards, he's never brought his son into it. i don't think that's all the motivation. the whole 'son of a mill worker' thing got to be a shtick after a while but there's something very relate-able about the story, that in this country anyone should be able to work hard, make a decent living, buy a house, send their kids to college, and even dream of them becoming president..

not as a theme, no. but some people, myself included, have long identified some hard-to-pin-down inauthenticity about johnny sunshine (I believe it was one of those Political Insider dudes who was complaining recently about the perceived put-on of his squinty-eye shtick), and I think it may be rooted in a protective shell built over an underlying familial sadness - to the extent that he (understandably) doesn't talk much about it, he's also in some sense not being totally on the surface. people don't want a guy wearing a mask.

no one stays hot forever

obviously, Little Obama would be satisfactory to me. but Big Obama is why I lean his way.

i don't think edwards is so much johnny sunshine any more and that's a good thing, it did seem like a mask because it's obvious, nobody gets elected to the Senate by really being mr nice guy.

One policy Hillary has ever "made," pls? The healthcare triumph?

[Dean's] support was limited to a sizable but insufficiently large minority without serious prospects of growing during the primary

Oh, bullshit. He was torpedoed by the DLC and MSM.

Worried about "authenticity" in prez candidate, yeah, LOL.

Limbaugh: Obama Should ‘Renounce’ His Race And Just ‘Become White’

rushblue.jpg Yesterday on his radio show, right-wing host Rush Limbaugh derided Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) — who is biracial — for saying, “If you look African-American in this society, you’re treated as an African-American.”

Limbaugh claimed that this statement meant Obama didn’t want to be black and should “renounce it”: “If it’s not something you want to be, if you didn’t decide it, renounce it, become white!” He added, “If you don’t like it, you can switch. Well, that’s the way I see it. He’s got 50-50 in there. Say, ‘No, I’m white.’”

The sweetest Valentine Republicans in the U.S. Senate could give to American women would be to announce that they will filibuster until Christmas if Senate Democrats try to ratify the offensive United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women...

Then, you have this one by Russ Limbaugh's brother, entitled "Barack Rodney King Obama"

Latest talking point about Obama is the word "platitudes."

If they want to turn this race into a referendum on my career as a comedian, I guess that’s their prerogative. But I think Minnesotans are smart people with a very low tolerance for b.s., and I’m going to keep talking about how we can make things better for working families. The attacks didn’t work in 2006, and they’re not going to work in 2008. They may work in 2010; it’s too early to say.

get me a gun

Unionbusting mayor of Minneapolis, sold out the Mississippi Freedom Democrats at '64 convention, no guts on Vietnam in '68... What a leader.

these guys are tracking the web use of the candidates, incl. flickr feeds and # of myspace adds. Obama & Clinton currently lead at 44K and 23K.

Sam Brownback has 184.

Altemeyer has now written an entire book about his work, called _The Authoritarians_, and is posting the entire thing, chapter by chapter, for free online. It's written for a mass-audience, but he actually takes the effort to add enough footnotes containing all the techie bits for those who want that. I like what i've read of it so far.

--
On a related note, John Dean's book was reviewed in an ish of the American Conservative last July, where Austim Bramwell spent the majority of the piece going after Altemeyer's work w/o understanding or explaining much of what it entailed.

Interestingly, the AmCon editors gave Altemeyer a chance to respond in the very same issue, which is great mix of "WTF are you on about?" and "here's what the stuff actually said had you read it."

hot warner on obama action

ppl who use this kinda test-marketed jargon are the cynics, my dear.

But the demand for tickets was so high they've moved it a much, much larger venue on the banks of Town Lake. It would involve missing a half day of work to go down there and back so I don't think I can go. yay for him, boo for me.

otm, we've already got most of the single people

http://www.civicyouth.org/quick/youth_voting.htm

and what evidence do you have that humphrey was a "union-buster"? this is the 1st time that i've heard this accusation about him.

Advocating “one side of a social, political, or cultural issue that is a matter of partisan controversy.”

even professional douchebag David Horowitz released a statement that thi s was going a bit far

That's Dan Perry one step closer to the White House, then.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070221/ap_on_el_pr/clinton_obama

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/02/20/dreamworks-geffen-slams-_n_41732.html

Barney Frank will not seek reelection

http://joemygod.blogspot.com/2011/11/breaking-barney-frank-to-retire.html

I think some other parts of the world might think differently about us if we elect a guy with Hussein in his name.

not so much as long as he keeps drone-bombing 'em, eh?

That Nobel Peace Prize may have been a mistake. Now that he has one, he obv isn't aiming for two.

Seeing Bill Frist and Sam Brownback's names on this thread remind me of how far we've sunk.

speaking of brownback

#heblowsalot

She tweets that a politician "sucks" and someone on his staff contacts her school principal about it?! I am speechless at this assininity.

yeh fuck him

wow!!!

I love the SRS BIZNIZ happening in the comments on that article

WDinDallas
Typical youth of today. No respect, no discipline, all about me attitude. She will not make it in the real world. Suicide waiting to happen.

very disappointed that there's no followup "oops that was supposed to only go to my friends" comment on that one

Loved this line from NRO yesterday: "This is the moment where it’s going to be hardest for Gingrich to restrain his Newtness."

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/the-future-of-the-obama-coalition/?hp

Giving up on trying to appeal to white folks who do not have college degrees-

For decades, Democrats have suffered continuous and increasingly severe losses among white voters. But preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.

All pretence of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.

It is instructive to trace the evolution of a political strategy based on securing this coalition in the writings and comments, over time, of such Democratic analysts as Stanley Greenberg and Ruy Teixeira. Both men were initially determined to win back the white working-class majority, but both currently advocate a revised Democratic alliance in which whites without college degrees are effectively replaced by well-educated socially liberal whites in alliance with the growing ranks of less affluent minority voters, especially Hispanics.

yeah that's based on very little evidence

"A top priority of the less affluent wing of today’s left alliance is the strengthening of the safety net, including health care, food stamps, infant nutrition and unemployment compensation. These voters generally take the brunt of recessions and are most in need of government assistance to survive. According to recent data from the Department of Agriculture, 45.8 million people, nearly 15 percent of the population, depend on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to meet their needs for food."

uh right clearly not things that would appeal to poor non-whites

basically there's a difference between 'the numbers look better for us in colorado than ohio' and 'obama gives up on poor whites'. if anything the story is 'poor whites gave up on obama'.

http://takingnote.tcf.org/2008/11/digging-into-th.html

(also mostly didn't vote for him in 2008)

That NYT article just accepts the reality that Reagan Democrats are now Rush Republicans.

The New Deal Coalition — which included unions, city machines, blue-collar workers, farmers, blacks, people on relief, and generally non-affluent progressive intellectuals — had the advantage of economic coherence. It received support across the board from voters of all races and religions in the bottom half of the income distribution, the very coherence the current Democratic coalition lacks.

Yes, although FDR flip-flopped a bit too. If Obama and the Democratic Party had offered a strong and consistent and coherent economic message (lets pretend the blue dogs and the Goldman Sachs crowd didn't exist) would that have won back Rush Republicans, or just aggravated them more?

we haven't had rush republicans for a long time and there's good reason to believe that the reason goes beyond economics.

we = San Francisco?

oh I'm sorry were you not aware I am a registered democrat

lets call the next politics thread #heblowsalot

sounds good to me

Iatee, I know there are/were cultural and race issues as well and that one can trace things back to attacks on Dem candidate Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s for being an egghead, and later the Republican southern strategy, and hippie bashing...As the article noted:

In an interview, Greenberg, speaking of white working class voters, said that in the period from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, “we battled to get them back. They were sizable in number and central to the base of the Democratic Party.” At the time, he added, “we didn’t know that we would never get them back, that they were alienated and dislodged.”

Also, "we" still have blue dog Dems

Not that they help

2010 wiped out a lot of them actually

I naively dream that someday liberal/lefty ideas will win over the non-college degree demographic (and even win over the Democratic party too). It's all a dream...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/judge-rejects-sec-citigroup-settlement/2011/11/28/gIQA8KsH5N_story.html?hpid=z1

But this is real, and is good news (though slighly depressing but expected that Obama's SEC would push a weak settlement that only benefited Citigroup)

shd we start a separate Republican primary thread, because lol:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/28/politics/cain-accusation-affair/index.html

Just like black walnut ice cream, Herman Cain tastes good all the time. (stares at ILX and takes a thoughtful drag on his cigarette).

lol, herman cain.

pretty soon people will be able to set up a "6-degrees-of-herman-cain" game, based on your proximity to some woman, somewhere, who has been harassed or dated the man whose been screaming "999" into your television set.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9njHHyRI7g

I don't know...effective, but too early, looks panicky. And in a poor economy, I think the flip-flop strategy will cause massive shrugging. I also suspect, as unfair as it may be, that for a number of voters, Democratic flip-flopper (i.e., Kerry) = weak, spineless, but Republican flip-flopper = pragmatic, has no choice but to head-fake all the wingnuts.

OK, we need a primary thread in this here sandbox.

seriously, i don't think it's a very effective ad. there are much better clips to highlight romney's flip-flopping, and might tighter -- and tougher -- ways to go about it. i think perry's team did a very good job with their first ad, for instance.

but of course, obama has a top-flight campaign organization. this leads me to believe that they're "holding their powder," and will hammer romney with the better stuff in the general election.

IF ROMNEY IS THE NOMINEE

http://www.mediaite.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Newt_Gingrich.jpg

man that's begging for some homophotoshopping

<i>and much tighter -- and tougher -- ways to go about it.</i>

Agree with that. I think the biggest problem with the spot is that it's too jokey--the tone's all wrong.

Hertzberg's elegy to Barney Frank's house career.

...His press conference today, announcing his decision, was a fairly typical performance. He talked in his inimitable manner: fast, deadpan-humorous, lucid, sharp, delivering zingers in that gravelly voice of his, with its characteristic glottal L’s and fugitive R’s. He is a pleasure to listen to. Frank is frank. He does not bore. He does not condescend. He makes the complicated comprehensible. Going out, he’s as outgoing as he was coming in.

Frank may not have been simon-pure, but he was usually living in one of the better neighborhoods of politics and he was a pleasure to hear speak.

yup

In many ways you can judge him by the quality of his enemies.

Reviewing Justice Kagan's performances so far.

Lithwick also agrees with "most legal" experts that SCOTUS will uphold the AHCA by " a 6-3 or a 7-2 margin."

In many ways you can judge him by the quality of his enemies.

Nope. Wouldn't be all that hated if not gay. In the pocket of Wall St.

Frum's article in NYMag is pretty interesting: When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?

Much more honest than Chait's.

yeah, that frum piece was good.

In the aughts, Republicans held more power for longer than at any time since the twenties, yet the result was the weakest and least broadly shared economic expansion since World War II, followed by an economic crash and prolonged slump.

really can't beat this for a damning indictment of the GOP

that was barney frank's fault.

smile when you say that, mate

i am smiling.

http://www.billybobteeth.com/album/images/Barry1_jpg.jpg

obama shops at independent bookstore (albeit one that likely only exists because of its restaurant).

if he hadn't sold out, he'd have gone to politics and prose.

(fwiw bill clinton used to shop at borders)

Obama’s daughters Sasha and Malia picked up picture book Everyone Poops

aaaaaaahahahahahaha, right on

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obama_Republican

Support for Obama from writers afflicted with conservatism

obv belongs in the amazing wiki facts thread but i don't think there's a sandbox version

Ruth Marcus lectures the girl who said Brownback sucked.

I always get the impression that Ruth Marcus gets her news from CNN Headlines and then writes her pieces in one quick draft just before they are due.

It's a shame her editor doesn't shoot her every time.

marcus does sound "alarmingly crotchety here," and utterly wrong. attempting to invoke the limited rights of schools to restrain free-speech is utterly absurd in this instance. and, while i expect civility and propriety in my own 10 year-old daughter, i think it's good to see a teenager motivated enough to tweet about politics at all (even tho it would be better for her to actually discuss, or even participate in, politics).

“Just made mean comments at ruth marcs and told her she sucked, in person. #sheblowsalot.”

i would have spelled "marcus" correctly and in full, but i was just over the 140 character limit.

daniel otm

...and the term "potty-mouthed" is a nauseatingly priggish one, anyway, esp. in reference to two words mild enough to be used on US broadcast TV.

Reviewing Justice Kagan's performances so far.

Lithwick also agrees with "most legal" experts that SCOTUS will uphold the AHCA by " a 6-3 or a 7-2 margin."

― Lord Sotosyn, Tuesday, November 29, 2011 4:30 PM (2 days ago)

i usually like lithwick but this kind of dumbed down, isn't it? there's not much analysis of whether kagan's style is, like, worth it, or effective. why is befriending conservative justices a plus, exactly? lithwick herself quotes that these are the "big leagues" and that kind of buttering up won't work here. and whom is she writing to with the second-person narrative? why is that a good thing? why is it necessary to make it easier for ME to read her opinions? the people actually making use of them are jurists and academics, not laypeople like us.

the pertinent cold water, at any rate:

But while Kagan is assuredly a liberal, and likely also a fan of the health-reform law, a close read of her tenure at the Supreme Court suggests that she is in fact the opposite of a progressive zealot. By the end of Kagan’s first term, conservatives like former Bush solicitor general Paul Clement (who will likely argue against the health-care law this coming spring) and Chief Justice John Roberts were giving Kagan high marks as a new justice precisely because she wasn’t a frothing ideologue. The pre-confirmation caricatures of her as a self-serving careerist and party hack are not borne out by her conduct at oral argument, her writing, and her interactions with her colleagues. In fact, if her first term and a half is any indication, she may well madden as many staunch liberals as conservatives in the coming years.

can I just

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj6UX6OyXww&feature=player_embedded

That's some Double Impact special effect going on there, right?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/24/Double_impact.jpg

whoa, does van damme have a twin brother or something? that's amazing!!

i usually like lithwick but this kind of dumbed down, isn't it? there's not much analysis of whether kagan's style is, like, worth it, or effective. why is befriending conservative justices a plus, exactly?

I frowned at this too. I hadn't expected Lithwick to espouse the Beltway dictum that shitting on your own side guarantees immortality.

Senator Blobfish has ideas about stuff

About that repulsive terrorist detainee bill.

More on that bill. I wonder whether this is more shadowplay: the Senate Dems get to look like robust warriors to voters, while an Obama veto threat burnishes his liberal cred.

who were the dems who voted to defeat that amendment?

http://www.emptywheel.net/2011/11/29/udall-amendment-fails-37-61/

the official roll call is here:

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=112&session=1&vote=00210

http://store.barackobama.com/accessories/dog-bandana.html

has timellison found the sandbox?

this could be awesome: http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2011/12/us_supreme_court_to_review_iss.html

Lindsey Graham is a repulsive piece of shit:

One of the proponents of making no exceptions for Americans, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said it would be “crazy” to exempt Qaeda suspects who are Americans and are arrested inside the country from battlefield-style detention. He argued that, to stop other attacks, they must be interrogated without the protections of the civilian criminal justice system.

Citizens who are suspected of joining Al Qaeda are opening themselves up “to imprisonment and death,” Mr. Graham said, adding, “And when they say, ‘I want my lawyer,’ you tell them: ‘Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer. You are an enemy combatant, and we are going to talk to you about why you joined Al Qaeda.

innocent until proven gu...what was it again? oh well!

Shut up!

-but I believe I'm entitled to a lawye-

this really isn't politics, but it's notable that the newest unemployment figures are much better. it's still a bad picture -- 8.6% unemployment -- but it's trending in the right direction, and since there's no shortage of coverage when the news is bad, it should be noted when the news is good.

also: what would the unemployment rate be today if the public-sector wasn't shedding jobs as the impact of stimulus-funds wear off?

xpost to self

SHUT UP!

JohnFugelsang -- The US added 120,000 last month, or 870,000 more jobs than George W Bush's last month in office....

be careful not to cherry pick data though - criticizing others when they do it (e.g., climate change deniers) means you have to be extra cautious not to do it yourself!

also not to be all negative nancy on the 'improving' unemployment rate, but isn't a lot of that driven by the peculiar way we calculate unemployment? as nyt says: "The jobless rate fell partly because more workers got jobs, but also because about 315,000 workers dropped out of the labor force, and the jobless rate counts only people who are actively looking for work. Even so, the country still has a backlog of more than 13 million unemployed workers, whose periods of unemployment averaged an all-time high of 40.9 weeks."

anyway, 8.6% is better than 9.6%

but your point is right. that's why i mentioned, in the initial post, that the overall picture still isn't good. not a counter to "cherry-picking," per se, but an acknowledgement that the data-points i mention aren't conversation-ending.

this really isn't politics, but it's notable that the newest unemployment figures are much better. it's still a bad picture -- 8.6% unemployment -- but it's trending in the right direction, and since there's no shortage of coverage when the news is bad, it should be noted when the news is good.

Lots of people have stopped looking for jobs too.

cross post

that's very true. in fact, analysts figure the rate will climb again next month, because drop-outs will again begin looking for jobs.

but still, it's positive news.

On a more positive note, the Labor Department revised upward the job growth in September and October by 72,000 jobs. Job creation in the last three months thus averaged 143,000 a month. That’s almost double the monthly average from May to August, but even at that pace, the unemployment rate won’t come down fast anytime soon.

The latest jobs report comes on the heels of other data suggesting a strengthening of the economy. Consumer spending, manufacturing and exports, and business investment and confidence all have edged higher since summer -- despite significant concerns about the European debt crisis, the still-moribund American housing market, government cutbacks and political paralysis in Washington.

Other indicators also show hints of improvement in the job market. The National Federation of Independent Business, a lobbying group for small firms, said its survey of members in November showed that the average number of workers per firm rose and that plans to create new jobs nearly doubled.

“Overall, the employment indicators delivered a significant positive signal, still at weak levels but a meaningful movement forward,” said William Dunkelberg, the group’s chief economist.

LAT.

and here's the answer to my earlier question

amsteinhp Sam Stein -- per @jonathanweisman, there has been 759,000 govt jobs lost since Nov 2010. That's 2,079 jobs lost every day over a year

that's a lot of jobs. haven't seen figures on what the unemployment rate would be if we hadn't lost those jobs.

I see three Facebook pals have already posted "Unemployment down! YES WE CAN!" type updates.

robot see, robot do

Republicans in the Senate rejected both the Democrat and Republican proposals on extending the payroll tax cut

zraklein Ezra Klein -- Bad news deep in the jobs report: most sectors down. The boost came from retail sales, so it might just be temp. holiday hiring.

In this Greenwald piece on the military detention bill, I was most struck by the Senate Dems' "rotating villain" tactic:

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/01/congress_endorsing_military_detention_a_new_aumf/singleton/

there's no sandbox New Yorker thread but george packer at the end of his (great) profile of libertarian billionaire peter thiel goes in on his subject

Yes, really enjoyed that piece.

Packer's been v. good lately -- see also his O.W.S. piece this week.

the end is almost fitzgeraldesque, honestly

Oh, and here he does a neat little compare-contrast of the two articles.

K3vin, can I ask you a question? What are you doing going to school for pharmacology? Are you just savvier than the rest of us aimless liberal-arts grads?

the end is almost fitzgeraldesque, honestly

― k3vin k., Friday, December 2, 2011 6:21 PM (1 minute ago

now that i think of it, the tone of the piece owes even more to 'gatsby' than i realized: his sketches of his characters are such that we can't help but like them even though we recognize the abject emptiness and meaninglessness of their pursuits, but in the final few paragraphs he absolutely stomps on everything they stand for with some memorable prose

K3vin, can I ask you a question? What are you doing going to school for pharmacology? Are you just savvier than the rest of us aimless liberal-arts grads?

― dyao think i'm sexy (jaymc), Friday, December 2, 2011 6:23 PM (4 minutes ago)

ha, is this a compliment? i have very little idea what i want to do with my life and probably wish i was in med school instead tbh

& just for the sake of the .xls it's pharmacy, not pharmacology; i'll receive a professional doctorate rather than a research doctorate

I guess I just think of you as a pretty sharp and passionate guy when it comes to politics, music, and writing, so it's weird to me that you're enrolled in the professional sciences. Not that you can't be genuinely interested in all of it, but I don't know many people for whom that's the case, so I wondered if maybe the pharmacy degree was a way of assuring yourself a reliable income.

Sorry if that's getting too personal or whatever.

k3vin, go to law school.

law is a spiritually fulfilling career.

tbh I prefer k3vin making real money as a pharmacist than as a liberal arts major. The world needs more literate pharmacists and doctors.

I guess I just think of you as a pretty sharp and passionate guy when it comes to politics, music, and writing, so it's weird to me that you're enrolled in the professional sciences. Not that you can't be genuinely interested in all of it, but I don't know many people for whom that's the case, so I wondered if maybe the pharmacy degree was a way of assuring yourself a reliable income.

― dyao think i'm sexy (jaymc), Friday, December 2, 2011 6:39 PM (21 minutes ago)

Sorry if that's getting too personal or whatever.

― dyao think i'm sexy (jaymc), Friday, December 2, 2011 6:45 PM (15 minutes ago)

not at all, and i'm very flattered. it's pretty safe to say that i wanted/want to be a healthcare professional of some sort, though i find myself more drawn to the public health side of things as i've progressed through school. i do wish more of my classmates cared/made time for stuff like literature and public policy (avoiding the word 'politics' but the two inevitably go hand in hand) but i do have a few friends there i can shoot the shit with about that kind of stuff, and that's also what i have ilx for. (coincidentally i was just bemoaning this in an email last night to a friend, one of the the smartest people i know, who works as a pharmacist at a refugee clinic in thailand. hopefully i'll work there temporarily after i graduate as well.) i have taken the occasional undergrad english class to force myself to leisure read and keep my writing skills somewhat sharp, which i've enjoyed doing.

anyway i'm much younger than most of the people who post here regularly and say more than my fair share of dumb things, and consider most of the regular posters here much smarter than me. ilx has made me think about things much differently for sure. don't let the confidence i can affect at times deceive you, ha

sorry for derail

You're one of my favorite posters.

alfred that means a lot, and the respect is reciprocated

consider most of the regular posters here much smarter than me.

you may consider it that way, but it's not so.

you guys are too kind

science sucks

i believe you're looking for the GOP thread!

http://rlv.zcache.com/someone_please_give_president_obama_blowjob_magnet-p147550112145114485qjy4_400.jpg

i believe you're looking for the GOP thread!

― k3vin k., Friday, December 2, 2011 6:48 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

:)

I like k3vin k too!

guys i'm not on a ledge or anything!

becoming a pharmacist is a defensible choice and an excellent career. you can remain a politics/music nerd too!

yes but all pharmacists are far-right republicans.

that is always 100% true in all cases, because my one pharmacist friend is one of those and owns a large gun

healthcare professionals are scum

actually he's not far right, but his gun is p big

proof.

Med school is rad. Especially 4th year of med school. All I have done this week is interviews and hangin' out in Midwestern hotel rooms (some of which are comped).

Also during an interview today I got asked the "if you could change one thing about medicine, what would it be" question, and I was feelin' a lil political and said "I would like to get for-profit corporations out of all sectors of medicine." It seemed to be well-received, even!

lol. you could have said "single-payer," or "public option," or maybe "repeal obamacare"!

actually maybe "public option, no wait! . . . repeal obamacare and end its death-panels" would have worked nicely.

"I would like to pay neurologists more than all other specialties combined."

lol

"i would outlaw all radiologists none of them can be trusted"

george mcgovern hospitalized after fall.

he was about to appear on c-span.

For reals, though, I think it'd basically be impossible to get physicians to fully sign on to single payer, if for no other reason than most of us spend enough time as students/residents/sometimes attendings in the VA system to get the impression that the VA is a place where getting stuff done is sort of impossible sometimes.

that may be. i've been doing a lot of health care-related work over the past few years, and one thing i'm sure of is that the old fee-for-service model is soon to be a thing of the past. everything will be managed care, of one sort or another (whether it be ACOs or HMOs or some other form).