John Avaricious

By Cernig

John Avaricious Aravosis. When the Right moans about latte-sipping liberals, this is the kind of thing they mean.

According to AP, congressional leaders have reached a deal on those economic stimulus checks. And rather than being geared towards helping the economy, they're apparently geared towards redistributing wealth (that would be our wealth) to the poor. What a surprise. Folks in the middle (i.e, those who are not rich or poor) are screwed by the Democrats (and Republicans) yet again. Let me give you the details that just leaked, and again this may not be the final deal, but it sure sounds like it.

...That's because far too often the Democrats don't give a damn about anybody who isn't a minority or starving to death (both valid causes to be sure, but are they the ONLY causes out there?). If you're in the middle, you're on your own.

I mean, wtf? The poor are getting so much help that they're now richer than middle-class jerks like Avaricious now? I'm here to tell you, from experience, that isn't the case. As for saying that aiding the poor is just as bad as aiding the rich...that's got to be the most stupid bit of false moral equivalence I've ever heard.

His commenters aren't being kind, in the main, with the most apposite being that now would be the wrong time to hold that AmericaBlog fundraiser. As Wolfrum at Shakes' Sis points out, the wingnuts will lap up this greedy rant. James at the Mahatma X Files gets closest to my own view. I am so far from agreeing with Avarosis that he's from a different dimension. If I ever accidentally link to or blogroll this latte-sipping leech from this day on, please bash me over the head until I come to my senses.

Update Kevin Drum has a rather saner version of what lies behind the rebate story:

Basically, Republicans insisted that all aspects of the plan had to take the form of "income tax rebates," which automatically excludes the poor and favors the well off. It also does a lousy job of stimulating the economy, but who cares about that? Pelosi managed to improve things a bit, but as long as George Bush is in office we still have to make our ritual obeisances to voodoo economics.

A Scottish Lesson For U.S. Progressives

By Cernig

Over at The Left Coaster, paradox is making a case for staying with the Dems (who are now supping more juice from the military/industrial complex than Republicans). He writes:

I have looked high and low, near and far, with microscopes and telescopes, I talked to Jesus and the Gypsies, I read history and political science, and there is no other way. Believe you me after this last year if there were another alternative I’d be freaking taking it, yeah.

We are the party, the party is us, it’s our duty to change it, and there is no other alternative.

As I read, it struck me that the Democratic party at the moment is not unlike Scotland a year back - ruled by an entrenched elite who had become corrupted by corporate back-rubs and a belief in their entitlement to power. Think of the Scottish Labour Party as the current spineless and triangulating Dem leadership who will do or say anything to keep power but have few actual principles.

Then, along came Alex Salmond of the Scottish National Party and a split in the democratic socialist consensus which had kept Labour in power in Scotland for decades. The SNP won over Labour by only one seat in the general election and were expected to lose out to the previous status-quo of a Labour/Liberal coalition. But through sheer determination and by ensuring none of the Labour party's more far Right rivals would support the status quo, they are now the party of government. Think of the SNP as the progressive almost-majority inside the Democratic party's broad-ish tent.

How are progressives going to turn around the Democratic Party? The same way Salmond turned around Scotland's political scene.

The Scottish Herald's veteran political reporter, Iain Macwhirter, takes up the story:

Salmond has created a new form of progressive nationalism, unlike anything seen in Europe in the past three decades. The image of nationalism as a backward and narrow-minded political force, preoccupied with ethnicity and hostile to foreigners, has finally been dispelled. The SNP has made a reverse takeover of the Scottish social democratic consensus that Labour has presided over for the past half-century.

Instead of the SNP being blown away by the unionist majority, Labour were almost blown away by the sheer verve of Salmond's hyperactive administration. Labour end this annus horribilis in a terrible state, with a leadership crisis and a donations scandal. The new Labour leader, Wendy Alexander, has failed to offer any intellectual challenge to Alex Salmond's populist nationalism, and the party organisation is disintegrating.

Labour have feigned opposition to SNP initiatives on issues such as bridge tolls, prescription charges, graduate endowment, and then ended up supporting them. In fact, it is hard to find much that the nationalists have done in the past nine months that Labour really oppose as a matter of principle. They even support Donald Trump's blessed golf course. The truth is that the SNP were doing a lot of things that Labour MSPs would have liked to do, but couldn't because of the London connection.

Despite being only one seat behind the SNP, Labour have yet to mount any coherent opposition in Holyrood, and have ceded the initiative on many key issues - such as police numbers, trams, class sizes - to the Tories and the Liberal Democrats. Even on the constitution, the Labour Party has now joined with the SNP and the Liberal Democrats and - incredibly - the Tories to campaign via a constitutional convention for more powers for Holyrood.

For the first time, all the parties in the Scottish parliament are committed to further constitutional change, including taxation. Nothing could better demonstrate just how much things have changed in Scotland in the past year than the fact that there is now no-one arguing for the constitutional status quo.

And who could possibly have forecast, 12 months ago, that nationalists would not only be in power in Scotland, but also in Northern Ireland and in Wales. Progressive nationalism is now the most potent political force in Britain.

Alex Salmond may have been radical in office, but in one sense he has been profoundly conservative. He has become a Privy Councillor and insisted that Queen Elizabeth II will remain head of state of an independent Scotland. The SNP are now talking about the "social union" with England remaining, even when Scotland wins political independence. This is a recognition, I believe, that the UK still has a future, and that the SNP has come to terms with the modern world. Whether the modern world has come to terms with Alex Salmond remains to be seen.

Or, as Napoleon would have it "l'audace, toujours l'audace."

Progressives keep observing how supine the Democratic elite is in opposition to Republicans but then seem to believe that they are far more active in opposition to progressivism in their own party. Somehow I doubt that's true - it's far more likely to be reflexive and just as likely to buckle if progressives stop being scared of the elite's money and safe sinecure seats to instead seize policy initiatives. I believe Reid's punt on the telecom immunity was just such a show of weakness in the face of progressive policy with a popular push behind it, but the elite should be given no chance to catch its collective breath. Sure, a charismatic leader who can push progressive policy without talking about UFOs would be handy - but in the absence of such a leader (check where the candidates get their campaign money) hundreds or thousands can do the work of one.

Why I don't want Clinton as the nominee

I was lifting weights and talking politics with a good friend and fellow political junky last week and he asked me who I want the Democrats to nominate. I'm still unsure as I believe any of the major candidates have a very viable path towards the nomination, and there is something about Edwards, Clinton and Obama that raises some serious doubts. I have tactical questions about Edwards, knowledge that people like me and my normal allies are the people who Clinton will screw when faced with a tough decision as well as a distrust of her foreign policy judgement, and severe questions about Obama's decision making process as he consistently decides to not decide and the decry 'old politics'. However I'm going to steal Publius's work at Obsidian Wings on why I won't vote for Clinton in the primaries:

the Clintons are so scarred that they’re scared. Nothing bold will come from a second Clinton administration – and there’s a non-negligible chance that she’ll be pressured into doing something hawkishly stupid on the foreign policy front. Whether the flaw is action or inaction, the reason will be the same – they are intensely, neurotically afraid of appearing too liberal. The scars cut too deep.

As Sullivan and others have noted, the Clintons came of age in a different time. In their formative political years in Arkansas, they internalized the lesson of distancing themselves from the dirty hippies. And it worked for them – both in Arkansas and in 1992. And that’s all fine – politicians have to play the cards that historical context deals them. More power to them.

But 2008 is a new world....

I'm not a dirty f*cking hippy --- too damn young for starters, but I also never liked weed, and I have no rhythm or tone so I can't play the guitar --- but the DFH are my allies on a regular basis. And as John Cole noted earlier this week "you don’t diss the insight of the smelly dirty hippies. Once again, they were right.

Hillary Clinton can win the White House, but she won't be willing to attempt to get that much done besides immediate damage control. I don't think we can afford that opportunity cost.

Oh so extravagent....

Andrew Sullivan does not like Social Security, but that does not give him the right to be uninfomred in arguing for its demise today:

Not a total guarantee that the gold-plated benefits of the late-century will keep growing and growing. And not a peg to wages rather than prices, linking retirees to current wage-earners rather than actual needs. I agree with Amy that the obvious, simplest reform to keep social security solvent is to remove the peg to wages, and keep it indexed solely to price inflation.

Via the 2003 CBO report, the following chart shows projected replacement rates of the first year of retirement income for different ages of retirement over the next seventy years or so. Remember that the three different age levels and their different respective rates aim to provide the same acturial earning levels [get more if you start collecting later/older; get less if you retire/collect early].

Ooohhh --- 40% wage replacement is now 'gold plated.' Yes, the replacement rate for very poor individuals is signifcantly above this; up to 90% for people whose AIME is less than $8,600/year but it is not just to harm the worst off in order to balance a budget. The American who has a lifetime of earning exactly the wage index amount, who retires today at normal retirement age, will see a 44% replacement rate. That number will decrease in the future according to the current schedule.

Kevin Drum notes the size of the benefit under current law and under the proposed law that Andrew Sullivan supports because Sullivan believe's today's benefit is extravagant:

That's $881 per month. There are lots of things you can call that, but "gold plated" isn't one of them.

Oh, and one other thing. The average benefit in 1960 was $981. If benefits had increased since then only at the rate of price inflation, today's benefit would be $6,680. Subtract the Medicare premium and divide by 12 and the monthly benefit works out to $435.

On a personal note, my parents' retirements are in decent shape because my dad has a union pension in a very well funded union controlled pension trust that is legally segregated from any single company's ability to pillage it, so Social Security is not the only thing standing in the way of my parents moving in with me or any of my siblings due to destitution in their old(er) age. However not everyone is so lucky, and having a reliable, fully transportable, non-exposed to systemic risk defined benefit pension that replaces between 33% to ~40% of pre-retirement income is not 'gold plated.'

There is a place for retirement income that is held at some degree of investment risk, at some degree of systemic risk, and at some degree of potential information asymetry risk, but that level of income is, or at least should be, past the basic levels needed to feed, clothe and shelter oneself.

Naomi Klien - "Is Another World Possible?"

By Cernig

A massive hat-tip to long-term Newshoggers reader and news aggregator Kat for pointing me to the Democracy Now! transcript of a portion of Naomi Klein's speech at a recent conference entitled "Is Another World Possible?" Go read the whole thing - it might even make up for the lost minutes reading Rudy's warmongering foreign policy.

I want to be very clear that I don't believe the problem is a lack of ideas. I think we’re swimming in ideas: universal healthcare; living wages; cooperatives; participatory democracy; public services that are accountable to the people who use them; food, medicine and shelter as a human right. These aren't new ideas. They’re enshrined in the UN Charter. And I think most of us still believe in them.

I don't think our problem is money, lack of resources to act on these basic ideas. Now, at the risk of being accused of economic populism, I would just point out that in this city, the employees of Goldman Sachs received more than $16 billion in Christmas bonuses last year, and ExxonMobil earned $40 billion in annual profits, a world record. It seems to me that there’s clearly enough money sloshing around to pay for our modest dreams. We can tax the polluters and the casino capitalists to pay for alternative energy development and a global social safety net. We don't lack ideas. Neither are we short on cash.

And unlike Jeffrey Sachs, I actually don't believe that what is lacking is political will at the highest levels, cooperation between world leaders. I don't think that if we could just present our elites with the right graphs and PowerPoint presentations -- no offense -- that we would finally convince them to make poverty history. I don't believe that...That’s because elites don't make justice because we ask them to nicely and appealingly. They do it when the alternative to justice is worse.

The real problem, I want to argue today, is confidence, our confidence, the confidence of people who gather at events like this under the banner of building another world, a kinder more sustainable world. I think we lack the strength of our convictions, the guts to back up our ideas with enough muscle to scare our elites. We are missing movement power...Do you want to tackle climate change as much as Dick Cheney wants Kazakhstan’s oil? Do you? Do you want universal healthcare as much as Paris Hilton wants to be the next new face of Estee Lauder? If not, why not? What is wrong with us? Where is our passionate intensity?

I think that what lies at the root of that lack of confidence is that we’re told over and over again that progressive ideas have already been tried and failed. We hear it so much that we accepted it. So our alternatives are posed tentatively, almost apologetically. “Is another world possible?” we ask.

This idea of our intellectual and ideological failure is the dominant narrative of our time. It’s embedded in all the catchphrases that we’ve been referring to. “There is no alternative,” said Thatcher. “History has ended,” said Fukuyama. The Washington Consensus: the thinking has already been done, the consensus is there. Now, the premise of all these proclamations was that capitalism, extreme capitalism, was conquering every corner of the globe because all other ideas had proven themselves disastrous. The only thing worse than capitalism, we were told, was the alternative.

Now, it’s worth remembering when these pronouncements were being made that what was failing was not Scandinavian social democracy, which was thriving, or a Canadian-style welfare state, which has produced the highest standard of living by UN measures in the world, or at least it did before my government started embracing some of these ideas. It wasn't the so-called Asian miracle that had been discredited, which in the ’80s and ’90s built the Asian “tiger” economies in South Korea and Malaysia using a combination of trade protections to nurture and develop national industry, even when that meant keeping American products out and preventing foreign ownership, as well as maintaining government control over key assets, like water and electricity. These policies did not create explosive growth concentrated at the very top, as we see today. But record levels of profit and a rapidly expanding middle class, that is what has been attacked in these past thirty years.

What was failing and collapsing when history was declared over was something very specific in 1989, when Francis Fukyama made that famous declaration, and when the Washington Consensus was declared, also in 1989. What was collapsing was centralized state communism, authoritarian, anti-democratic, repressive. Something very specific was collapsing, and it was a moment of tremendous flux.

And it was in that moment of flux and disorientation that several very savvy people, many of them in this country, seized on that moment to declare victory not only against communism, but against all ideas but their own.

Right there Klein puts her finger on one of the reasons conservative policymakers and speechwriters hate "nuance". It lets them decide which gray black should be contrasted with which graywhite. (The other reason, of course, is that so much of their rhetoric is aimed at a base audience who can only really appreciate stories told in black and white.)

She continues:

Now, what was interesting and never quite stated...was that you basically had two streams: you had democracy, which you can use to vote for your leaders, and then you had a single economic model. Now, the catch was that you couldn't use your vote, you couldn't use your democracy to reshape your economy, because all of the economic decisions had already been decided. There was only -- it was the final endpoint of ideological evolution. So you could have democracy, but you couldn't use it to change the basics of life, you couldn’t use it to change the economy. This moment was held up as a celebration of victory for democracy, but that idea, that democracy cannot affect the economy, is and remains the single most anti-democratic idea of our time.

...We who say we believe in this other world need to know that we are not losers. We did not lose the battle of ideas. We were not outsmarted, and we were not out-argued. We lost because we were crushed. Sometimes we were crushed by army tanks, and sometimes we were crushed by think tanks. And by think tanks, I mean the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks. Now, most effective we have seen is when the army tanks and the think tanks team up. The quest to impose a single world market has casualties now in the millions, from Chile then to Iraq today. These blueprints for another world were crushed and disappeared because they are popular and because, when tried, they work. They're popular because they have the power to give millions of people lives with dignity, with the basics guaranteed. They are dangerous because they put real limits on the rich, who respond accordingly. Understanding this history, understanding that we never lost the battle of ideas, that we only lost a series of dirty wars, is key to building the confidence that we lack, to igniting the passionate intensity that we need.

Klien was supposed to debate Jeffrey Sachs but just before the conference he withdrew.

You can watch more of Klein's speech here. It's about 21 minutes in.

There will no doubt be those who accuse Klein (and me for posting this) of empty-headed idealism. I would respond "What exactly do you think the last six years of neo-conservative pipedreams have been all about?"

Instahoglets June 28 2007

Some more links from my stint guest-blogging the roundup at Crooks and Liars:

You'd be amazed how often there's a 9/11 in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Like creationists, greenhouse doubters really need to stay away from testable predictions.

The conspiracy lovefest that is the extreme Right.

I knew the Grand Obstructionist Party was bad, I didn't know it was this bad.

So let the Republican "rebels" talk about jumping on Iraq, and keep pointing the others at the ever-closer cliff.

How do you get someone charged with a "genocide" while all the "victims" are still alive? Like this.

Yeltsin's P.M. tells the neocon AEI think-tank that Reagan's arms buildup was less important than the Saudi royal family and Deutsche Bank in the fall of the Soviet Union.

Bizarre Idea of the Day: build the Israeli wall on the Mexican border (presumably without immigant labor).

Is this really the kind of "emotion-free crisis management" that's looked for in a President?

Fear in the newsroom makes for a lapdog media.

The Future is Pro-Choice

by shamanic

Following up on last week's post about Democrats and abortion, where I responded to Melinda Hennenberger's NYT column that claimed that Democrats are leaving many liberals behind with their pro-choice language, this caught my eye.

Today the Times has polling data on young Americans which finds, not surprisingly, that they generally take Democratic policy positions on issues like gay equality and universal health care. Additionally,

Their views on abortion mirror those of the public at large: 24 percent said it should not be permitted at all, while 38 percent said it should be made available but with greater restrictions. Thirty-seven percent said it should be generally available.

Got that? According to this poll, 75% of people between 17-29 believe in legal abortion. Some want more restrictions, but fundamentally they support safe, legal abortion in America. 75%!

To get numbers higher than that, you have to ask questions like "Do you like candy?" or "Aren't puppies cute?" And even then there's that perverse block of weirdos who hold the numbers to the upper-80s.

Melinda Hennenberger may feel left out of the Democratic caucus because of her position on abortion, but polling suggests that's because she's out of step with public opinion on an issue that has been screeched about and debated endlessly for decades. She simply couldn't be more wrong that the future of the Democratic Party is in anti-choice policy positions. That's because the future is pro-choice.

2009 Polarization and a Freeper Hostage Crisis

Political analyst Larry Sabato has some interesting words to say about the probable impacts of Hillary Clinton winning the White House in 2008. [h/t Andrew Sullivan]

Let's suppose Mrs. Clinton wins in November 2008. Democrats would have to live with the consequences. There is simply no question that Senator Clinton would be the third deeply polarizing President in a row, following her husband's divisive and partially wasted tenure and George W. Bush's deeply disappointing turn at bat. We bet that she would have a short honeymoon and would be unable to convince her millions of critics and detractors that she had changed - or was different than they long ago concluded she was. At a time when the nation could use a unifier and a healer - to the extent that any President can perform those roles - partisan warfare would be at fever pitch from Day One.

I disagree with a good deal of his argument but it is an interesting leaping point.

I am not a fan or supporter of Hillary Clinton. I do not think that she will make a great president. I don't trust her governing instincts or judgment. At best I think she'll be a competent placeholder. But again I have to defend the notion that Hillary Clinton will be uniquely polarizing figure once the general election season come along.

Right now the country is not particularly polarized on the Presidential level. 26% of the country thinks George W. Bush is a good president, and the rest of the opinions range from 'nice but incompetent' to a 'freaking disaster." 70% super majority opinion on any issue and outlook in American political life is not a polarized position.

Bush is not popular. He has not been popular for a very long time and that popularity was solely the result of his incompetence combined with short term brilliance in exploiting a terrorist attack against us for political gain. The country is not polarized under George W. Bush. Liberals, moderates, independents and a growing chunk of conservatives have come to the opinion that George W. Bush is not a good president. The timing has varied, but the opinion is now a consensus opinion. The remaining 26%-ers are the dead-enders of the American political landscape.

It is these same Freepers and their establishment enablers, who supported the 'polarization' and the impeachment of Bill Clinton despite his approval ratings being in the high 60s and low 70s during the Christmas of 1998. These are the folks who ginned up the Arkansas Project, who shot water melons with handguns as part of a 'forensic investigation', who claimed that Hillary Clinton was both a lesbian and the illicit lover of Vince Foster before she had him killed.

This is also the same group that everyone was afraid of during the Florida recount. Vice President Gore was told to lie down and take a defeat despite most likely having the votes in Florida to win the electoral college and definately having a popular victory because the Freeper-right had made life so unpleasant for the elites in the 90's. This is the group that was the Brooks Brother rioters in Miami-Dade to disrupt the recount.

I noted in April that I make a couple of assumptions whenever I am analyzing scenarios:

When I analyze problems and scenarios, I am interested in looking at the things which have the potential of changing. After a very short while, I only pay attention to constants when the laws of reality and physics force me to pay attention to them. I assume unhinged and substantially fact free attacks against Democrats are a prerequisite of any GOP campaign. I assume that these attacks will occur, and the only variance will be the internal details of the attack. If any Democrat wins the Presidency we'll have the crazy lunatic brigade of the VRWC trying to gin up a scandal where there is nothing there.

The Freeper right is a constant of American politics, at least in the short and intermediate term. The only way to appease the Freeper Right is to elect their favored candidates and implement 100% of their agenda and conducting mass conversions of the remaining population to their viewpoint. At the same time a small caste of unabashed liberal caricatures are needed to be the object of their daily two minute hate. Even reactionary authoritarians like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) can be the target of this vitriol if there is a break from the script on immigration.

They try to leverage their ability to create embarrassment to the 'responsible adults' of the discourse by throwing a crazed tantrum anytime that they do not get what they want; the facts, reality or the Constitution be damned. It has worked because the set of Republican politicians who are not Freepers per se have benefited from this arrangement more than it has cost. I am assuming that the same pattern of behavior will be in effect for any Democratic Presidential nominee no matter who that person is. The difference will be in the internal details of the attacks, not the meta-structure of the attacks.

The Yorkshire Ranter has an interesting take on the historical process of the Freeper temper tantrum strategy and the corrective to it: " In the US, the problem is that one party has gone berserk and dragged the Overton window off across the countryside with it. The corrective is to whack it in the teeth."

This corrective will work in the intermediate to long term as we can marginalize the poltical influence of the loudest and least grounded screamers in politics, but the process will produce a stronger scream in the short term. The 2006 Congressional elections virtually eliminated the Northeast moderate Republican wing of the Congressional Party (Chaffee, Simmons, Johnson et al) and seriously dented other Republicans who compete in marginal districts. The survivors of the 2006 wave election are disproportionally from safe, and conservative districts.

The remaining marginal House members expect to face a strong challenge in 2008 and more of them will go down. The probable GOP gains are either from deep Red scandal seats (TX-22) or re-gerrymandered seats in Georgia where the probable GOP winners will be to the right of the current GOP caucus anyways. The districts will self-select conservative and very conservative candidates and the GOP caucus will move further to the right in the short term. The lack of a moderate wing as a counterbalance to local factors and grassroots pressure from the Freepers will make the Congressional GOP more conservative in the short run.

So if my assumption that the Freepers and their ridiculous attacks are a short term constant, what should we do? We could appease and only elect reactionary Republicans, or we can actually behave like adults and not allow these political two year olds dictate our entire political discourse. We can do it by ignoring the obvious conspiracy theories, the wildly contradictory and lurid tales, and by actually bringing facts into the debate. Otherwise, we give a loud and wrong quarter of the country a de-facto veto.

Wingers afraid of a fair fight

By Libby

I usually don't post on a story already covered here but I'd like to build on Shamanic's post in response to the relentlessly insipid Jeff Goldstein and the rest of Wingtopia who have their knickers in a knot over this report that reveals "conservative" talk radio programming is wrongfully monopolizing the public airwaves.

I love how these wingnuts are thumping their chests, crying out about the suppression of the free market while simultaneously demanding that their favorite hatemongers be protected from open competition. And they have good reason to be so terrified of the liberal voice. As progressive radio host Ed Schultz points out:

I beat Sean Hannity in Denver. I beat him in Seattle. I beat him in Portland. I beat in San Diego. How many markets do I have to beat Hannity in before I get 200 or 300 stations? It’s an ownership issue. … The fact is, it’s market opportunities and liberal talkers, progressive talkers are being held to a totally different standard than conservatives.

I find the prevailing meme the wingers are promoting, that the liberals are trying to silence the "truth-challenged" conservative rage machine, rather comical. What part of Fairness do they not get? Nobody is trying to take the hate jocks spittle flecked microphones away. By all means, let the malicious idiots shriek to their heart's content. The Fairness Doctrine will simply ensure that the seven rich white guys who literally own the media, can no longer deny their opponents equal air time.

It's painfully apparent that the only ones who fear equal access to the public airwaves are those bloated bigots who benefit from the right wing noise machine. Probably since the only reason they rose to prominence in the first place is because Reagan revoked the Fairness Doctrine in order to build their echo chamber free from competition. Restoring the Fairness Doctrine would only mean they have to protect their ratings in a fair fight for market share.

If they're so bloody sure they have a corner on that, then why are soiling their trousers at the mere thought of having to fight fair to keep it?

Why Pro-Choice Is the Only Choice

by shamanic

Who are these people urging Democrats to abandon women's health and reproductive rights? In the New York Times today, Melinda Hennenberger argues that Democrats are abandoning pro-life liberals by their support of safe and legal abortion.

At Hullabaloo, Tristero reframes the debate, dubbing the pro-life hordes "pro-coathanger" and working to restrict health care access to only the rich. His response is worth a read, but misses a larger point.

And here's the larger point: The numbers of abortions in America have been declining for nearly three decades, and declined dramatically under Bill Clinton's economic stewardship (graph). In other words, Democratic economic policies, which keep more wealth in more hands, reduces the incidence of abortion.

The Democratic Party must support safe and legal abortion, period. But that doesn't mean it can't support a reduction in abortion rates and work to build a society where abortion is less necessary for women. Where there is economic security, unplanned pregnancies are less frightening. Where there is job security, unplanned pregnancies can be brought to term. These are the policies Democrats implement in office, and this how Democrats should communicate their support for safe and legal abortion that is necessary less often.

Digby

by shamanic

It never, and I mean never, occurred to me that Digby is a woman. I've been reading Hullabaloo for a really long time, and I'm just astonished! You'd think that as a woman reader, I might have suspected now and again, but no.

Just. Speechless.

Shock! - Republican Tells Truth, Agrees With Rights Group

By Cernig

You could have knocked me down with a feather.

President Bush's alliance with Pakistan's leader came under fire from a Republican congressman who said Thursday the U.S. should not support what he branded a military dictatorship. At a House hearing on human rights, shortcomings in Saudi Arabia, Iran and Uzbekistan were the designated topics.

But an official from Human Rights Watch added Pakistan to the mix. Tom Malinowski, a former State Department official, characterized the government of Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, as "the most egregious and harmful example of a human rights double-standard in American foreign policy today."

Bush's support for Musharraf, Malinowski said, "appears to align the United States behind one man against virtually every decent segment of Pakistani society - against the very people in the country who are most likely to be America's friends and to support a moderate, modern course for Pakistan."

Musharraf is estranged from moderates, relies politically more on Islamists and refuses "to crack down on the Taliban elements who are killing American and NATO troops in Afghanistan," Malinowski said.

"It is a classic case of muting human rights concerns to protect a security relationship," Malinowksi said. "But it is in fact as contrary to U.S. security interests as it is to America's commitment to democracy."

The top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on human rights, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California, endorsed Malinowski's criticism.

Pakistan's army "is allied with radical Islam and always has been," the lawmaker said. "Let's not support a military dictatorship in Pakistan."

Next up, the Right hammers Sen. Rohrabacher for speaking truth to power the way they have Harry Reid? I think not, somehow. It's a pity Reid's people and the liberal bloggers involved made such a mess of what could have been a "backbone" moment.

As Kevin Drum says:

there's nothing wrong in principle with criticizing high-ranking military leaders. Too many people (some deliberately, some not) conflate this with "not supporting the troops," but that's claptrap. General officers who support lousy policies deserve brickbats, and plenty of them have done just that in the Iraq war. If Reid has legitimate criticisms to offer, there's nothing out of line about offering them.

Taylor Marsh says the delays and prevarications allowed the Right to frame the issue and Dems will now be eating it for a while. She's right.

Let's see some liberals step up and grab Sen. Rohrabacher's comment and frame it properly as an indictment of Bush's foreign policy double standards and weasel wordings, which have caused untold havoc for America's prestige and credibility. (E.g. "we do not torture", because the Bush administration redefined the word until they could say they don't torture.)

Retrocessive Intellectual Evolution

By Cernig

This has to be one of the saddest things I've read all week:

The majority of Republicans in the United States do not believe the theory of evolution is true and do not believe that humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. This suggests that when three Republican presidential candidates at a May debate stated they did not believe in evolution, they were generally in sync with the bulk of the rank-and-file Republicans whose nomination they are seeking to obtain.

Independents and Democrats are more likely than Republicans to believe in the theory of evolution. But even among non-Republicans there appears to be a significant minority who doubt that evolution adequately explains where humans came from.

It is sad because it is entirely symptomatic of the lazy thinking that infests too many issues. It has become de rigeur to ignore nuanced or complex positions in favor of simplistic narratives and a very narrow, linear notion of causation. It's part of the Homer Simpson trend in society, where education and the ability to think clearly about complex issues is actively discouraged and denigrated by many. Politicians, in particular, seem to have caught on to this idea as a means to playing to the lowest common denominator - in other words, grubbing for votes.

There's no doubt in my mind that such a current is more advanced in conservative circles (global warming, the war on terror, tax cuts, welfare, abortion, gay rights, etc), but as this survey shows liberals can be guilty too.

Proof positive that evolution doesn't have to be "forward" it can be a backwards step too.

Update Just when I think I've seen everything there is to see in blind-faith conservative stupidity, one of John Cole's commenters provides a link to Blogs4Brownback, a blog that supports the Kansas Republican senator as presidential nominee. There, you can find such stupifyingly wonderful examples of the genre as "Heliocentrism Is An Athiest Doctrine".

What’s even worse than the debate raging in American schools about the teaching of the soulless doctrine of evolution, is the non-debate over an issue that rational Americans have foolishly conceded to the secular among us: the issue of Heliocentrism, or the idea that the Earth revolves around the Sun.

...However, for both moral and theological reasons, we should always bear in mind that the Earth does not move. If it moved, we would feel it moving. That’s called empiricism, the experience of the senses. Don’t take my word for it, or the evidence of your own senses, Copernicans. There’s also the Word of the Lord.

and another post in which one of the bloggers there re-writes a CNN report on a space shuttle mission to be more "accurate" - i.e. that the mission is somewhere in the Nevada desert rather than in space. I had a look at some of the other blogs written by the authors and their friends and it isn't a parody site.

Leering and smearing

By Libby

Look, when I screw up I'm willing to own up to it. When I inadvertently implied that Jeri Thompson was a gold digging bimbo, which I don't think she is, I took the heat for it. I apologized. That apparently didn't satisfy all my critics. Now comes Dr. Helen, who deliberately contorts my words beyond their clear meaning in order to justify her own anti-feminist rant.

Dr. H cites this part of my post as "evidence" that I'm one of those man-hating femi-nazis.

But what really struck me about this piece was the photo. If you didn't know, you would think it was a father and daughter, well except for the slightly lecherous look in his eyes. It's clear he's proud of his beautiful young wife, who is actually four years younger than his real daughter....

Even assuming they fell crazy in love and just had to be together, it's somewhat jarring to see them together in the photo. She looks so young, you expect that she signs her name with a little smiley face instead of a dot on the "i" at the end. In studying that shot, I couldn't help but think if Fred has been dating her only a few years eariler it would have been considered a sex offense [see update].

And she responds:

Now Libby updates her post to mention that she misread Ms. Thompson's age, thinking she was in her 20's when she was actually forty but I say, so what?

Now I could take those words out of context and deliberately misconstrue her meaning too. I could ask if that means she thinks it's okay for fathers to leer at their daughters? Perhaps she would have no problem if Glenn started leering at their own 16 year old? But I wouldn't do that since it would be dishonest. I know that she didn't mean it that way, just as it should be clear to any objective reader of my post that I used Fred's "slightly lecherous" attitude as a neutral qualifier to rule out that he was Jeri's father.

But the good Dr. H is not content to simply twist my meanings, she apparently feels it necessary to put words in my mouth in as well.

This is yet another example of a woman who deep down believes that men have no right to leer at women, lest it be considered a sex offense. ...In their eagar quest to control men's sexual rights, some "feminist" women (and other prudish ones too!) go to extremes to shame, expose or intimidate men who let their lust for women dare come to the surface.

I might remind Helen that if Jeri was really 24 years old, rather than 24 years younger, Fred would have been dating her as a 54 year old when she was only 15. In most states that will get a man a one way ticket to the sex offender registry list. You would think the wife of a law professor would know that. Again, I could ask if Dr. Helen meant she would have no problem with a 54 year old dating, (and leering at) her teenage daughter but I know she didn't mean that, so honesty compels me to refrain from such a cheap shot.

Dr Helen apparently prefers not to exercise the same restrain and goes on to accuse me of wanting to criminalize consensual sex. And what's with the scare quotes around my name? Is that supposed to imply that I'm not really Libby Spencer, or that I'm barely worth mentioning except that she needed my post in order to frame her own?

Now I know I'm just a B-list blogger who doesn't have the benefit of insta-name recognition by dint of being married to a Very Important Blogger, but it would take all of 30 seconds to determine that I blog under my real name and a google search would even turn up a very unflattering photo of me, along with a slightly outdated bio, so should I take that as a deliberate insult or should I just chalk it up to "tipping point blogger" elitism? Whatever.

For the record, I fully support leering. I love seeing a couple obviously in lust -- especially a married couple. It's a beautiful thing to behold. In fact, I think great sex was God's reward for making us go through all the other angst of being human. I also support father's rights, having seen all too many men denied equal custody of children based on just such trivialities as leering or knocking back a couple of beers on the weekend.

I'm all for pornography and in fact think prostitution should be legalized. I think it's as unrealistic to think you can stop sex, as it is to think you can stop drug use by criminalizing it. Furthermore, contrary to Don Surber's contention that liberals are prudes, I also support smoker's rights, drinker's right and yes, even the showing of cleavage at any age.

My post was never about judging the appropriateness of either leering or the age difference in the Thompson marriage. The photo elicited a reaction in me that I found surprising. So I blogged about it, honestly, and wondered aloud if others would react the same and whether it would have an impact on Thompson's campaign. It's not only disingenuous to pretend that I had any deeper agenda, but also unfair.

Maybe the real problem is that the right wing bloggers are so used to their own "truthy" talking points, they just don't know how to react when confronted with genuine honesty.

DFA Pittsburgh June Meeting

I need to remember to use this platform as a communication flow for things that I consider important more often, so I might as well get started now.

Pittsburgh for Democracy, the local Democracy for America branch is having their monthly meeting this coming Wednesday at Mario's on 15th and Carson. The meeting starts at 7:00pm and goes until about 9:00 in the upstairs back room.

RSVP HERE

Pigpile on Stupidty

This is a recurring macro that I implement whenever a seemingly intelligent liberal hawk argues that there was no way to no that their threat assessment and political assessment in the Fall of 2002/Winter of 2003 could have been wrong. This one is being initiated by a post by Scott Winship at TPM-Cafe for the following paragraph:

Of course, there are limits to how far evidence can take us. Evidence is often ambiguous, and so multiple interpretations may be consistent with what we know. Sometimes the facts are wrong. And at times we may lack the necessary evidence when decisions must be made. The Iraq war illustrates these problems particularly well.

While progressives quite effectively assessed the (stunningly weak) evidence around Saddam Hussein's efforts to obtain uranium from Niger, for instance, many prominent hawks such as Ken Pollack had important facts about Iraq's WMD capabilities wrong. The invasion of Iraq required advocating a policy without all the ideal information being available.

Information is a very valuable thing and you can buy new information --- that is why I spent $.50 today to see how the Pirates are continuing to embarrass --- and smart, evidence based liberals had the opportunity to assess the quality of information and reassess their evaluations multiple times. So now I'll start my policy-evaluation macro for Iraq:

There was significant uncertainty in the spring and summer of 2002 as to the status of the ABC programs in Iraq, and SOMETHING HAD TO BE DONE. And the AUMF in conjunction with an approach to go to the UN for coercive inspections could have been that something. If the support for the AUMF was based on a desire to gain information and reduce uncertainty as to the status of the ABC programs of Saddam Hussein, then the vote is defensible if the voter quickly changed their mind.

The inspections combined with increased US and UK surveillance of Iraqi territory should have produced significant new information. And they did. The information was null information that to the best of the US, UK and UN knowledge the biggest threat in Iraq was minor book-keeping errors and some short range ballistic missiles that either were just within the allowable range limits or under unusual circumstances 10-15% over allowable limits. By mid-January one of three conclusions should have been drawn from the new information.

1) There was nothing there
2) US intelligence sucks
3) Saddam Hussein is a competent evil genius who is able to coordinate the movement of multiple large labs, thousands of artillery shells, millions of pounds of highly fragile precise machinery, thousands of individuals without being noticed despite being under some of the most intensive electronic and visual surveillance in the history of the world.

#1 and #2 are reasonably highly correlated and the available supporting evidence strongly supported some combination of the two. The uncertainty costs had been dramatically reduced so opposition to the war would be a coherent position for an AUMF yes-voter to have if this is the justification.[/end macro]

I can understand people being wrong when there is bad information and insufficient information. I can understand people wanting better information before they lend their support to an extremely expensive proposition. I can not understand anyone who says with a straight face that the information environment by January 2003 was the same information environment of August 2002. We knew that either Saddam Hussein was an evil genius with magical Voldemortian powers to apparate away visible signs of massively capital intensive programs or he had next to jack shit.

Anyone who relies on informational uncertainty to argue that their support to invade Iraq in order to (potentially) disarm it was still retrospectively a good decision is either full of shit or delusional.

Confirming What We Already Knew

By Cernig

Valerie Plame was indeed covert at the time of her outing according to a newly declassified CIA document - so yes, it was a crime that she was unmasked, one no-one has yet been charged with. Scooter Libby should go to jail for his involvement but where's the real culprit? Some folks wonder how many wingnuts will retract and begin baying for traitorous blood...and aren't holding their breath.

Bush is an abject and pathetic failure - so it was only a matter of time before someone suggested he must be some kind of liberal. Truth be told, the GOP is so single-issue now that you can be a social liberal in truth and as long as you're a war-hawk willing to bomb Hadji you can be the Republican frontrunner.

The Nazi Gestapo invented the term "enhanced interrogation" and even they thought waterboarding and hypothermia were extreme forms of torture. Nor did their protestations that it was all legal because they were "only interrogating illegal combatants" hold any juice when they fell from power - they all deserved their death sentences.

Progress in Iraq is likely to miss the September expiry of the latest Friedman Unit, so it must be time to move the goalposts again.

And finally, we must realize that conservatives encourage ideological debate while liberals are just internally divided. And anyone who disagrees with the failed warmongering policies of the extreme Right is by definition a liberal.

The Pottery Barn Deception

By Cernig

The surge proposed by the Bush administration over the objections of the commanders on the ground - necessitating a change of those commanders to ones who would just say yes - was supposed to accomplish two things. It was supposed to reduce sectarian violence and so give breathing space to the current Iraqi leadership to reach out and touch their compatriots, forging a cross-sectarian reconciliation as a way forward which would stem the current civil war.

Unfortunately, the Maliki government has shown that it will drag its feet at every turn in that reaching out process. And now figures show that the original objective, reducing sectarian deaths, isn't being accomplished either.

From the beginning of May until Tuesday, 321 unidentified corpses, many dumped and showing signs of torture and execution, have been found across the Iraqi capital, according to morgue data provided by a Health Ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information. The data showed that the same number of bodies were found in all of January, the month before the launch of the Baghdad security plan.

In the face of this breakdown in their Plan A - one that was widely predicted by the same folks who were correct about how the invasion and occupation of Iraq would turn out badly in the first place - the Bush administration are casting about desperately for a Plan B which will accomplish their main objective. They plan to stay in Iraq forever, one Friedman Unit at a time.

In Iraq, Petreaus and his team are trying to stay loyal to Bush's parameters for their mission while making "course corrections" in the way that mission is carried out. In Washington, rival Bush administration factions are touting (and leaking) rival new spins on the mission. None will be effective because the original premises they are working from are flawed.

Bush cannot say outright that he wants the US to stay in Iraq permanently, but that is what he has always been working towards. Yet that drive for a permanent presence is itself what has fuelled not just the insurgency but the flawed political process set up in an attempt to guarantee that presence - and thus the current civil war. Because of this, the stated objectives - peace and an eventual withdrawal - will always fail in their stated aims, and succeed in their unstated aim of creating additional turmoil to justify staying the course.

The discussion today between Dale Franks at Q&O and Oliver Willis points this dichotomy up nicely. Dale comes up with a bunch of questions for liberals about the Iraqi occupation that could so easily be turned back on himself. He could so easily be asked 'how does what you advocate solve any of these questions, based upon the evidence?" Oliver does a convincing job of making a liberal reply, but I feel he misses on key point - a matter of framing which has always driven the Bush administration's doubletalk. We can call it "the Pottery Barn deception".

Dale asks "Do you reject the "you broke it, you bought it" idea?" and Oliver answers:

I didn't outright, but it's clear there's nothing we can do to fix what we broke. The simple act of us being there is preventing that, either through the Iraqis leaning on us to clean up all their messes or resentment provoked by having their country occupied by the world's sole superpower. The moment to fix it has passed us by.

In which he is correct if by "fix it" he means keep meddling. But that ignores the fact that the conservative framing of the Pottery Barn rule relies on twisting what that rule is.

As I wrote recently, the rule if properly applied demands the occupation's end:

You pay for what you broke.

You don't hang around to help fix it, glueing the wrong chunks together and maybe breaking some more stuff because you're just that clumsy. You don't loan the store the money for the breakages and you don't try to arrange it so that in return the store owners have to buy all their hardware from your store.

You pay and you leave...and you try to convince your equally clumsy friends, aquaintances and neighbours (Israel, Iran, Saudi etc) not to go blundering around in the store either.

But if the store-owners want to finish the destruction you began, that's their problem, yes? Likewise, they get to decide which workmen they call in to help clean up the mess.

So...withdrawal, reparations (apology cash), aid without strings, containment, non-interference, true sovereignty.

Let's begin planning for the first part of that Pottery Barn set of consequences for our actions. Withdrawal. I'm hoping my co-blogger Fester can step up with some ideas on that subject and I'll also be trying to put some ideas forward for what Bush won't allow the Pentagon to do.

Iran, Covert PsyOps And The Media

By Cernig

Tonight ABC have broken the story that Bush has authorized covert action against Iran. Quelle suprise! Who the f**k would ever have imagined that?

The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert "black" operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject, say President Bush has signed a "nonlethal presidential finding" that puts into motion a CIA plan that reportedly includes a coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation of Iran's currency and international financial transactions.

..."Vice President Cheney helped to lead the side favoring a military strike," said former CIA official Riedel, "but I think they have come to the conclusion that a military strike has more downsides than upsides."

Now some who were paying attention already suspected that the Bush administration's neocons had been using groups like the MeK for proxy attacks on Iran, and that will doubtless continue. But I've bolded what was for me the "leap of the page" part of the story - the use of disinformation and propaganda. I've some immediate thoughts on this.

Firstly, as I understand it, the federal government is prohibited by law from planting propaganda in the U.S. media (but John Yoo's probably already written the classified finding that The Decider Guy can decide otherwise) however there is no such stricture on planting stories designed to mislead in the foreign media and then making sure those stories get attention here in the U.S. from the Republican noise machine of blogs and Benadorian mainstream media pundits.

Which brings today's Guardian dross about a supposed secret plan for Iran to aid both Sunni and Shia groups in Iraq to mount a summer offensive into sharper focus.

It also may explain why mainstream press and rightwing bloggers are repeating as serious a claim by neocon Claude Moniquet that Iran is attempting to draw up plans to strike targets in Europe and has conducted reconnaissance of European nuclear power stations. Moniquet is head of the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center, which is described by the AP as "independent" but is essentially a foreign adjunct of The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a neocon Washington group which counts among its members a virtual A to Z of prominent anti-Iranian figures such as Bill Kristol, Richard Perle, Charles Krauthammer, Frank Gaffney, James Woolsey and Newt Gingritch.

In fact, it explains a heck of a lot about the myriad of "anonymous officials" who have become sources for anti-Iranian stories, many of which have later turned out to be utterly false. And incidentally, explains the entire output of the daily Telegraph's shills-in-residence Con Coughlin and Phil Sherwell. The drums in the deep aren't being beaten by accident or individually but instead in a co-ordinated concerto.

In fact, this story should call into question every single story involving anonymous sources on Iran, whether it be about their nuclear program or about their alleged involvement in Iraq. There's simply no way to know whether the story is true or a propaganda plant without independent, verifiable and named sources backing it up.

Which oddly enough includes The Blotter's story itself.

Remarkably quickly, rightwing pundits have marched in lockstep with a single message about this revelation: blame the leak on the liberals and add that the leak makes an attack on Iran the only option left.

The White House intended on using this plan to keep from having to use a military option to stop the mullahs from getting their hands on a nuclear weapon. In fact, ABC reports that Dick Cheney preferred the military option, but that Bush overruled him in favor of the covert action instead. As I have written repeatedly here, a military strike is a lousy choice given the terrain, battleground, and options for targets in Iran as well as the political situation on the ground.

Thanks to the loose lips at Langley and ABC, that option may have to go back to the top of the list. Covert actions that appear on national television tend to lose the element of surprise, after all, and the Iranians can now take steps to block these actions...Someone in the CIA or in the larger "intelligence community" can't keep their mouths shut. Thanks to them, we may wind up with no other option against Iranian nuclear ambitions except the military strike.

and Wizbang's Kim Priestly adds:

Prediction: at some point, the nutroots will accuse Cheney of ordering a member of his staff to leak the President's secret covert action to ABC in order to force the military strikes that Bush overruled.

Given the speed with which the extreme Right has established message discipline and given the admission that the Bush administration was already conducting propaganda operations against Iran, I think that's a perfectly reasonable accusation to make. Interesting that Kim thought of it first. But we may never know what the truth is.

Welcome, once again, to KremlinWatch D.C. The truth in the mirror may be closer than it appears.

Various and Sundry

by shamanic

Mondays have a way of making every idea into a swirling microcosm of every other idea, so here's the wide ranging contents of my skull this morning (rapidly becoming afternoon):

In the great war of the punditocracy vs. DFH bloggers, I point to this Slate piece as an example of why the "MSM" will always be crucial to our democracy. This type of take down is beyond my ability as a writer, largely because the aforementioned Monday swirly idea thing happens most other days too. Thus I am a blogger--and poet, where the swirly idea thing can come in handy--and not a reporter.

Bill Moyer's Journal is probably the finest bit of television I've seen in some time. I caught my first episode yesterday, and it was riveting.

Moyer interviewed Bruce Bawer, who wrote (among other things) the essay "Tolerating Intolerance", which I first came across not too long after 9/11. This essay strongly influenced my thinking before I became involved in the blogosphere. Imagine my surprise as time has passed and I still have not located a mainstream consensus on a liberal critique of Islamic fundamentalism. This is a huge issue for me. I'm a lesbian and a political liberal, but I run up against this taboo against criticizing a culture that thinks women should be wrapped up, hidden from view, denied even the most rudimentary education, and dominated in every conceivable way by male relatives and husbands. Oh yeah, and when they disobey, it's perfectly reasonable to kill women.

Why do we need a liberal critique of Islamic fundamentalism? Because we can't let conservatives with their nativism and xenophobia control the discussion. Or any discussion. Duh.

Things that suggest it might be time: I saw a friend get a standing ovation at a hippy arts festival doing a Slam poem on this very topic. Gray-haired liberals rose to their feet for her liberal critique of brutality towards women. I think it's time.

I missed the opening episodes of NBC's Heroes, but I've seen a fair amount of mid-season stuff and had some cool conversations with Heroes fans. I watched a few episodes Saturday night as Sci-Fi ran its marathon. Mostly because I like the term, I want to ask: Is it an exploration of punctuated equilibrium?

Can't wait for season 1 to hit my Netflix queue.

I'm with Atrios on the immigration bill, based only on what I've heard in commentary. Wait. Pass a better bill in two years. There's no rush, since the situation isn't going to change while we wait for Dubya to leave and the congress to get bluer.

Poetry, man! If you don't know who Buddy Wakefield is or who Andrea Gibson is, you oughta drop a few dollars on CDs, and fast!

These ain't your poppa's poets, by the way. They are to poetry what blogging is to punditocracy. Harold Bloom once called their style of poetry "the death of art". You gotta support that.

There's really never an idea swirl of mine that doesn't include poetry somewhere in it.

Enjoy your Monday. I know I feel better.