Even Democrats Can Be Idiots

This from Michigan senator Carl Levin:

We should not be cowed by the terrorists so we don’t even keep them in maximum security prisons in the U.S. We cannot allow the terrorists to be intimidating us from trying them and keeping them in our jails.

The Democratic Governor, Jennifier Granholm, is not quite as confident as Levin.

Many of the people captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere who are held in Guantanamo and Bagram are, in fact, hardened, battle-tested terrorists. These guys received some pretty hard-core training, training that I believe would rival our Army Rangers, Navy Seals, etc. They are trained to seize any opportunity to escape. I'm not trying to characterize the lot of them as super-human villains in the movies. But there have to be enough of them dangerous enough and committed enough through their belief systems that nothing short of supermax incarceration is in order.

Doubt

In his movie "Doubt," writer/director John Patrick Shanley explored the effects of certainty on the lives of priests and nuns in a Boston Catholic school. The last line of the film, spoken in agony by Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius Beauvier, is "I have doubt." As a nun with absolute certainty -- about her faith, about Father Flynn's behavior with a student, about her certainty -- she suddenly falls to pieces when she steps back and looks at all the facts before her.

In today's Los Angeles Times, Gregory Rodriguez highlights a new book by two sociologists about doubt as an effective weapon against fundamentalism of any kind. Money quote:

The most important core certainty, and one found in most belief systems, is "do unto others ..." -- the Golden Rule. It leaves enough wiggle room for your beliefs, my beliefs and their beliefs to coexist. And what makes it all work is the same thing that burdened us all to begin with: doubt. Berger and Zijderveld believe that doubt can serve as a type of psychic cushion between all our different certainties.

This article has made me take a step back and re-examine what I had believed was my high level of tolerance for other belief systems. I believe that there are spaces in my tolerance for certainty to step in: certainty that I am right and others are wrong. Still, I also believe that I have enough doubt about my own beliefs, about politics or religion or the economy, that keep me open to new ideas. This blog was itself a product of doubt and uncertainty, as I spent a lot of time reading bloggers of different ideologies and hearing some level of truth in all of them. I think that's why I get so riled by the Malkins and Hewitts and other hard-core wing-nuts on the right: because in some ways they make sense to me while they are using language that pushes my buttons. God, I hate that!

Fear is the Fuel

Which keeps alive the incessantly nasty and often vicious actions of the teabaggers at these various town halls across the country. Here are two posts from Sullivan which illustrate these points vividly.

First money quote:

The America which Europe fears is the America of the Reaganites. The America once of the Scopes trial; the America of prohibition; the America of ignorant isolationism. The America then of ‘‘better dead than red’’; the America of McCarthyism; the America of the last fundamentalists of the 1950s. The America now of the new evangelicals; the America of the Moral Majority; the America of a now ignorant interventionism; the America which can see homosexuals as a conspiracy; feminists as a conspiracy; perhaps even women as a conspiracy.

If you'll notice, not one of these movements ever survived past a few years.

Second money quote:

When I tried to reasonably protest [his] statement, he just spewed forth a tirade of vile invectives.

We were outside and there were about 30 people milling about. I was shocked, embarrassed and literally frozen in place. I managed to turn and walk away. This is a man I have known and respected for the entire length of my sobriety. I am fairly certain this friendship is over. Reasonable discourse is over. The lies and hate spread by the right-wing have won.

This woman has given up trying to reason with her friend of 18 years. I can relate to this in a small way, as there are people I have known for a long time with whom I simply don't discuss politics. There is just no point debating someone when they are possessed of a bundle of "facts" culled from media machines that have no interest in disseminating them.

What will soon -- I hope -- hit these irrational people is that their tactics will accomplish nothing. Let them spew, let them cry "socialism" and "death panels" all they want; the healthcare industry in America will undergo a significant change. Even if Obama loses some key provisions of the current program, they will eventually return. What the movement conservatives have not yet realized is that their time in the sun has ended for the next generation. As we have seen repeatedly, younger Americans (and older ones like me who think like them) are sweeping into politics with greater tolerance, greater empathy, and a firm desire to separate from the elders who have held the reins for far too long and who have literally lay waste to both our economy and our environment.

The America of Fear may try to resist change, but change is gonna come.

A Reality Check

Sullivan posts a reader's comments about the true nature of the populist right (what I call wing-nuts). Money quote:

They have always been with us, the people who believed in manifest destiny, who delighted in the slaughter of this land's original inhabitants, who cheered a nation into a civil war to support an economic system of slavery that didn't even benefit them. They are the people who bashed the unions and cheered on the anti-sedition laws, who joined the Pinkertons and the No Nothing Party, who beat up Catholic immigrants and occasionally torched the black part of town. They rode through the Southern pine forests at night, they banned non-European immigration, they burned John Rockefeller Jr. in effigy for proposing the Grand Tetons National Park.

These are the folks who drove Teddy Roosevelt out of the Republican Party and called his cousin Franklin a communist, shut their town's borders to the Okies and played the protectionist card right up til Pearl Harbor, when they suddenly had a new foreign enemy to hate. They are with us, the John Birchers, the anti-fluoride and black helicopter nuts, the squirrely commie-hating hysterics who always loved the loyalty oath, the forced confession, the auto-da-fe. Those who await with baited breath the race war, the nuclear holocaust, the cultural jihad, the second coming, they make up much more of America then you would care to think.

Makes you think twice about dismissing that portion of our population, doesn't it? They have a long history, and, while they have won some battles, are pretty much losing the war to progressives.

Change is in the blood of every American, because nearly every one of our forebears arrived here because change was what we wanted. Those who were forced to come here wanted change from their circumstances as well. We are a wandering people, always striving for something new, something more. Those who want things just the way they are have forgotten what it means to be an American. They have become old, they have stopped growing, and they are absolutely terrified. Worst of all, they are bearing children and rearing them with the same backwards, regressive belief systems that they have.

"Great Spirits Have Always Encountered...

...violent opposition from mediocre minds." Albert Einstein said that.

As we bear witness to the insanity of the far right as they try to disrupt Obama's health insurance reform plans, Mark Kleiman over at The Reality-Based Community makes a great observation:

"No doubt it would shock the teabaggers - no doubt most of them churchgoers - who are now chanting slogans to shout down Members of Congress to know that their behavior is rather ... pagan. Notice that the motivations are the same; the mob at Ephesus was organized by the idol-makers, whose lucrative trade was threatned by Christianity, just as the mobs disrupting the town-halls are organized by the health-care industry racketeers."

Source: Acts 23-41.

Plus the public face of the "movement" is the former head of HCA, whose company was hit with a federal fine of $1.7 billion for Medicare fraud. Watch the Rick Sanchez smack down on YouTube to get a load of this guy. What irony!

Fear and Rage

Andrew Sullivan rightly takes Peggy Noonan to task for her commentary (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204908604574334623330098540.html) regarding the Obama health insurance reform plan.

The GOP (and some Dems too) cheerfully enabled eight years of Bush fiscal irresponsibility of massive tax cuts for the wealthy while waging unchecked warfare on two fronts. On top of that, Sullivan notes, they never objected to the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit, which over time will cost $32 trillion. Yes, that's trillion with a "t." And Bush never even bothered discussing how to pay for it.

The Obama plan will cost $1 trillion over 10 years, and there has been much discussion on how to pay for it. Hmmm, maybe that's the problem here. Tell the truth about something and one opens up a can of worms. Deliberately obfuscate and mislead and everything's just fine.

This is GOP fear and rage in action. They lost, they can't stand that their war hero lost to an inexperienced black liberal, and they're acting out. Teabaggers, most of whom are older and most of whom already benefit from a government-run healthcare program that's more efficient than most privately-run programs, stand up and shout down any Congressman who's willing to meet with his/her constituency about it. Cowards, every last one of them.

The Second Most Useful Website Ever

Second to my own, of course.

Need to get up during the movie to pee? Want to know when would be the best time to do so? Go to Runpee.com.

"With the guards of Magog swarming around..."

Secular Humanist -- and newspaper editor -- James A. Haught details the obsession former President George W. Bush had with going to war in Iraq. Money quote:

For six years, Americans really haven’t known why he launched the unnecessary Iraq attack. Official pretexts turned out to be baseless. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction after all, and wasn’t in league with terrorists, as the White House alleged. Collapse of his asserted reasons led to speculation about hidden motives: Was the invasion loosed to gain control of Iraq’s oil—or to protect Israel—or to complete Bush’s father’s vendetta against the late dictator Saddam Hussein? Nobody ever found an answer.

Now, added to the other suspicions, comes the goofy possibility that abstruse, supernatural, idiotic, laughable Bible prophecies were a factor. This casts an ominous pall over the needless war that has killed more than four thousand young Americans and cost U.S. taxpayers perhaps $1 trillion.

Truth be told, I'd always suspected that Bush was thinking apocalyptically, and was leading the country into what he perceived was a Christian crusade. With Rumsfeld attaching biblical text to reports on the war that he was providing the president, this all sort of falls neatly into place. Non-Christians on the right might say I'm as bad a conspiracy theorist as the birthers, but here we have the former leader of a major US ally on record with this. As Sullivan remarks, I am agog.

666 is no longer alone
He's getting out the marrow in your backbone
And the seven trumpets blowing sweet rock and roll
Gonna blow right down inside your soul
Pythagoras, with the looking glass, reflects the full moon
In blood, he's writing the lyrics of a brand new tune

(Note: lyric above and in title from "Supper's Ready" by Genesis)

Quid Pro Quo

In a typically stinging piece that is a must-read, Glenn Greenwald posts some very disturbing facts and insights about a recent agreement between General Electric, the parent company of NBC and MSNBC, and News Corporation, the parent company of FOX News. In the piece, G.E. agrees to silence Keith Olbermann, host of MSNBC's Countdown, who has been very critical of Fox News and and Bill O'Reilly, so that O'Reilly and Fox stop reporting on G.E.'s business dealings in Iran, to wit from a NY Times article last Saturday:

In late 2007, Mr. O’Reilly had a young producer, Jesse Watters, ambush [G.E. CEO] Mr. [Jeffrey] Immelt and ask about G.E.'s business in Iran, which is legal, and which includes sales of energy and medical technology. G.E. says it no longer does business in Iran.

Since June 1, Olbermann has not once mentioned Fox News or Bill O. in a single piece, cynically announcing at the end of his show that night that such a "quarantine" would help hasten the demise of O'Reilly's show.




All together now... Uh, yeah right.

As a Greenwald reader points out, whatever objections one has with O'Reilly -- I personally have many of them -- "this was one of the rare useful pieces of information O'Reilly ever presented to his audience, and Olbermann was there to show how lousy the rest of O'Reilly's information was. Though it was in the context of a bitter feud, the two men were actually engaging in real journalism, at least in this case."

"Real journalism" has become a joke in this country. Our major news outlets are owned by some of America's Very Large Corporations -- CBS by Viacom, NBC by G.E., ABC by Disney, and FOX by News Corp., plus CNN by Time Warner -- and the line between the parent corporation's interests and the news has never been blurrier. In fact, several former MSNBC on-air personalities have provided some rare insight into editorial policy:

Last May, CNN's Jessica Yellin said that when she was at MSNBC, "the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this [the Iraq War] was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation"; "the higher the president's approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives ... to put on positive stories about the president"; and "they would turn down stories that were more critical and try to put on pieces that were more positive."

...

MSNBC's rising star, Ashleigh Banfield, was demoted and then fired after she criticized news media organizations generally, and Fox News specifically, for distorting their war coverage to appear more pro-government. And, of course, when MSNBC canceled Phil Donahue's show in the run-up to the Iraq war despite its being that network's highest-rated program, a corporate memo surfaced indicating that the company had fears of being associated with an anti-war and anti-government message.

In a sickly ironic twist, the current temporary host of Countdown is Richard Wolffe. Those of you who have watched Olbermann's show know Wolffe as a frequent "political analyst." According to Greenwald, Wolffe left his job at Newsweek last March to join Public Strategies, Inc., a corporate communications firm run by former Bush White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett.

So having this non-journalist, who works as a P.R. man for some of the very corporate clients who own TV networks, be the face of a news show or even a frequent guest on that news show, is about the vilest thing I've ever seen happen in journalism. Public Strategies itself thinks Wolffe's position and access to the airwaves is an asset. From his bio page on the firm's website:

In addition, Wolffe is an NBC political analyst. He provides political commentary on several MSNBC programs, Meet The Press, and TODAY.

But wait, it gets better. Amazingly, Wolffe of course sees no conflict in his dual role as journalist and public relations man. As he said in an interview with Newsweek:

"The idea that journalists are somehow not engaged in corporate activities is not really in touch with what's going on. Every conversation with journalists is about business models and advertisers," he said, recalling that, on the day after the 2008 election, Newsweek sent him to Detroit to deliver a speech to advertisers.

"You tell me where the line is between business and journalism," he said.

Greenwald has some further updates today, including a link to a Talking Points Memo story reporting that MSNBC announces that they should have disclosed Wolffe's other gig and will do so in the future. Don't hold your breath waiting for that disclosure to reveal some of his or his employer's corporate clients.




What blows me away here is that this is all Journalism 101. When I was a novice reporter at the UCLA Daily Bruin in 1984-85, I learned that reporters needed to maintain a significant distance between themselves and those on whom they might be reporting. So, when I became friends with a member of the UCLA Communications Board, which oversaw funding and production for the paper and other campus media, I was moved off that beat to avoid the conflict of interest.

Even in the fantastic film Almost Famous, the character of Lester Bangs, who edited the great magazine Creem, said as he was counseling young journalist William Miller:

My advice to you: I know you think those guys are your friends. You wanna be a true friend to them? Be honest, and unmerciful.

Weeks ago I wrote that I would stop listening to NPR News because of their editorial policy as it related to torture. I see this as no different. I am also on record stating that Keith Olbermann is an American Hero and a patriot. But because he has agreed not to mention Fox and Bill O. on his show because of pressure he's gotten from corporate brass has completely undermined any credibility he had as a journalist. Not only will I stop watching Countdown, I'm also done with MSNBC, including Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews.




Soon I won't even need a TV. My wife will be so happy.

Lifted from HuffPost today

In the comments section of a piece about Bill Maher's show on HBO last night:

I have always made one prayer to God, a very short one. Here it is: "My God, make our enemies very ridiculous!" God has granted it to me. - Voltaire

Whether this is Voltaire or not, it's brilliant, and it represents the fulfillment of my dreams.