Age of Reason

10 Ideas for 2008

[Updated.]

This is the post of the day. Stop. Do not pass go. Go immediately to read 10 Ideas for 2008 from Pericles at Dailykos. For those who need further encouragement, I've posted a summary below, grouping them by which of our Core Values each is part of -- but quit messing around here, go read it all.

What ideas will liberal candidates be able to campaign on in 2008? The ones we start developing and promoting now. I have ten suggestions.

1. 9/11 didn't change everything. What didn't 9/11 change? Lots of things. The United States still needs allies. The Geneva Convention still makes sense. Imprisoning people without trials is still tyranny. Torture is still wrong. You still need to double-check your intelligence before you start shooting people. Stuff like that. If we take those issues one by one, and let the Right respond with "9/11 changed everything"-- we're going to lose.

3. America must be a leader in the world.

7. Free citizens must have courage. Today, Americans are afraid of terrorism, and so our freedom is slipping away. When George Bush says, "We're fighting them over there so that we don't have to fight them over here," his implicit message is that ordinary citizens don't have to be brave -- that's what we hire professional soldiers for. In the Right's vision, America only needs enough courageous citizens to staff the armed forces.

5. Globalization belongs to us. [Quoting Howard Dean] "Globalization is here to stay whether we like it or not, but the rules for globalization are not. Both NAFTA and the WTO help large multinational corporations but ignore the needs for the people who work for them. In order to make globalization work we also have to globalize worker protection, labor rights, environmental rights and human rights. Free trade won't work under the present circumstances." The model for liberal globalization is the European Union.

6. Capitalism belongs to us.Capitalism does not mean corporatism. (According to Mussolini, fascism does.) Due to a mistake the Supreme Court made in 1886 - damn those activist judges! - corporations were declared "persons" and given the protection of the Bill of Rights. That's why it's so hard to get them under control. The First Amendment protects their political contributions, for example, while their right to privacy limits how much data the government can force them to reveal. (God help us if they ever start testing the limits of their right to bear arms.) Sadly, it will take a constitutional amendment to undo this, and we should get right on it.

If we look deeply into the roots of capitalism, we can understand it better than the conservatives do and find a way to make it our own.

8. Protect the Commons. Over the past few decades, the Right has taken the word common out of common political usage. We no longer talk about the common good, for example. Public property doesn't belong to us, it belongs to nobody.

If you want a government that will take good care of all of your property, public as well as private, then you want a liberal government.

9. America is worth paying for. But if the government really belongs to us, then taxes just move our money from one account to another. From our personal accounts we can buy personal goods; from our common account we can buy common goods. If that notion sounds strange, think about stockholders and corporations. When a corporation retains its earnings for future investment rather than paying them out as dividends, the stockholders don't scream about theft. The corporation just owns that money for them; as long as it manages the money well, the stockholders are happy.

Taxes are your fair share of the expense of keeping the country going. And a good country is worth paying for. People who try to get out of paying taxes are denigrating our country. They're saying that America is not worth paying for. They are unpatriotic.

A progressive tax system recognizes the obvious fact that the rich gain the most from America; they should pay the most to keep it going.

2. Morality is not sex. Practice this line: "You keep saying 'morality' but really you're just talking about sex." When Jesus listed the admission standards for Christians to get into Heaven (Matthew 25), not one of them concerned sex. The key idea was "Who did you help?" Letting the working poor get priced out of the health care system is immoral. Trumping up bogus charges about WMD and terrorism in order to start a war is immoral.

4. The Religious Right are Pharisees. Christianity belongs to us. All through the gospels, Jesus is being heckled by the Pharisees, a group that promoted a strict interpretation of Mosaic Law. Again and again, Jesus sides with the spirit of the law against the Pharisees' loyalty to the letter of the law. When Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and their ilk get going, you don't hear much about compassion and common sense; but you hear a lot about the letter of the law. That's the Pharisee position; it's not Christian.

Does reclaiming Christianity mean that the Left needs to throw out all the Jews and atheists? Of course not. It also doesn't mean that non-Christian liberals should give lip service to a religion they don't believe. But we need to recognize that Jesus is a cultural icon in this country, and he is on our side. When the Right claims that Jesus is on their side, we need to be able to argue convincingly that they are wrong. That means getting educated about the Bible and learning how to speak its language comfortably -- as Kerry could not. (Check out Forrester Church's God and Other Famous Liberals, John Shelby Spong's Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, or John Buehrens' Understanding the Bible.) You don't have to be black to quote Martin Luther King, you don't have to be Hindu to quote Mahatma Gandhi, and you don't have to be Christian to quote Jesus.

10. Democracy means trusting the people.

posted by conchis @ 11:00 PM 54 comments

Domestic Violence

Mel Gilles provides this fine analogy.

Watch Dan Rather apologize for not getting his facts straight, humiliated before the eyes of America, voluntarily undermining his credibility and career of over thirty years. Observe Donna Brazille squirm as she is ridiculed by Bay Buchanan, and pronounced irrelevant and nearly non-existent. Listen as Donna and Nancy Pelosi and Senator Charles Schumer take to the airwaves saying that they have to go back to the drawing board and learn from their mistakes and try to be better, more likable, more appealing, have a stronger message, speak to morality. .... Hear the cacophony of voices, crying out, “Why did they beat me?”

And then ask anyone who has ever worked in a domestic violence shelter if they have heard this before.

They will tell you, every single day.

The answer is quite simple. They beat us because they are abusers. We can call it hate. We can call it fear. We can say it is unfair. But we are looped into the cycle of violence, and we need to start calling the dominating side what they are: abusive. And we need to recognize that we are the victims of verbal, mental, and even, in the case of Iraq, physical violence.

As victims we can’t stop asking ourselves what we did wrong. We can’t seem to grasp that they will keep hitting us and beating us as long as we keep sticking around and asking ourselves what we are doing to deserve the beating.

How to break free? Again, the answer is quite simple.

First, you must admit you are a victim. Then, you must declare the state of affairs unacceptable. Next, you must promise to protect yourself and everyone around you that is being victimized. You don’t do this by responding to their demands, or becoming more like them, or engaging in logical conversation, or trying to persuade them that you are right. You also don’t do this by going catatonic and resigned, by closing up your ears and eyes and covering your head and submitting to the blows, figuring its over faster and hurts less is you don’t resist and fight back. Instead, you walk away. You find other folks like yourself, 56 million of them, who are hurting, broken, and beating themselves up. You tell them what you’ve learned, and that you aren’t going to take it anymore. You stand tall, with 56 million people at your side and behind you, and you look right into the eyes of the abuser and you tell him to go to hell. Then you walk out the door, taking the kids and gays and minorities with you, and you start a new life. The new life is hard. But it’s better than the abuse.

We have a mandate to be as radical and liberal and steadfast as we need to be. The progressive beliefs and social justice we stand for, our core, must not be altered. We are 56 million strong. We are building from the bottom up. We are meeting, on the net, in church basements, at work, in small groups, and right now, we are crying, because we are trying to break free and we don’t know how.

Any battered woman in America, any oppressed person around the globe who has defied her oppressor will tell you this: There is nothing wrong with you. You are in good company. You are safe. You are not alone. You are strong. You must change only one thing: stop responding to the abuser. Don’t let him dictate the terms or frame the debate (he’ll win, not because he’s right, but because force works). Sure, we can build a better grassroots campaign, cultivate and raise up better leaders, reform the election system to make it failproof, stick to our message, learn from the strategy of the other side. But we absolutely must dispense with the notion that we are weak, godless, cowardly, disorganized, crazy, too liberal, naive, amoral, “loose”, irrelevant, outmoded, stupid and soon to be extinct. We have the mandate of the world to back us, and the legacy of oppressed people throughout history.

Even if you do everything right, they’ll hit you anyway. Look at the poor souls who voted for this nonsense. They are working for six dollars an hour if they are working at all, their children are dying overseas and suffering from lack of health care and a depleted environment and a shoddy education. And they don’t even know they are being hit.

posted by conchis @ 1:50 AM 0 comments

Winning the South

A southern Dailykos diarist on winning the south:

Direct Connection: A candidate, especially for President, must be able to communicate with voters in such a way as to show them that he/she knows what they are going through, and what is important to them.  Telling people that you have a plan, and then referring them to johnkerry.com was just not a good way to do this.  The key here is to be able to break down complicated policy into common sense terminology that everyone can understand and relate to.

posted by conchis @ 10:15 PM 1 comments

Fighting Democrats Better Fight for the South

So says Texas Democrat and recent TX Supreme Court candidate David Van Os, who is obviously a fighter.

In my recent race for the Texas Supreme Court against a right-wing pro-corporate Republican, I carried some rural Texas counties that John Kerry lost handily. My statewide margin of loss was 400,000 less than Kerry's margin of loss (of Texas). The difference between my campaign and Kerry's was that I directly challenged corporate power in a give 'em hell manner that wasn't crafted on the basis of any damn polls, but from my own passion because I'm mad as hell about the corporate takeover of government and Republican Party totalitarianism, and I said it on the stump just exactly the way I really feel it. Whereas John Kerry is so used to basing his votes and his positions on what pollsters tell him, he doesn't even know what he feels or believes. Rural Texas audiences didn't lynch me; to the contrary they responded with standing ovations. They are HUNGRY for FIGHTING Democrats to return, in a way they haven't seen the Democratic Party act in years. Their mommas and daddies loved "give 'em hell"  Harry Truman, and they were brought up to think of the Democratic Party as the party of the people. But they don't see that any more. Party of the people means you mean what you say and say what you mean, and you don't run away from fights, and you fight for the people. For myself, I am not going to campaign for any Democratic nominees any more who are softies who are afraid to confront corporate power and Republican totalitarianism with passion and toughness.

Yes, the Democratic Party can get the heartland back. Whenever it rediscovers a politics of the heart and throws out all the polling, Democratic participation indexes, computer projections, and targeting and the consultants who peddle it, out the nearest window. That includes throwing out the "battleground" tactics. We damn sure aren't ever going to win in the South if we don't have the guts to fight for the South. Communicating from the heart will reclaim the heartland.

posted by conchis @ 8:53 PM 0 comments

Howard Dean for DNC Chair

Set aside the issues of Dean as a personality (because the DNC Chair is fundamentally a real job rather than a celebrity position) and whether he's too liberal (he was, recall a darling of the centrist DLC).

The case for Dean, as I see it, is that a long series of Establishment Democrats have failed to articulate our party's core values, and as a result our coalition is missing some of the people who would naturally join it. Howard Dean's internetcentric campaign offers a model for how to fix this: a model of how, in the current age, to raise funds in record-setting amounts, to keep our base linked together and activated, and to do much of our business in the open, so that good ideas can get from the grass roots of the coalition to the top. We want to develop core values with explicit input from thousands of people, in the manner of MoveOn.org. We want coalition-building to take place in this sort of public fashion. Following Matt Stoller's suggestions, we want focus group results from swing voters and polling data to be public, we want policy discussions to emerge through wikis culled out of blogs, and we want the internals of ad campaigns to be open. We want to fix the primary system so that voters in swing states pick our presidential nominees.

Only with a Reform DNC Chair like Dean can we hope to begin winning elections like this last one by 20 points like we should be. Inasmuch as there are other candidates who looked like reformers, I'm looking at them too, but the pickings are mostly Dean. I see two immediate sorts of action that are needed.

I. Contact your DNC Members and ask them to vote for Howard Dean

II. Money

posted by conchis @ 8:20 PM 0 comments

Howard Dean for DNC Chair

From Draft Howard:

The Republicans and media elites who manufacture conventional wisdom diagnose our problems for us: we’re wrong on the issues, they say, and we’re on the wrong side of what they call culture. They are wrong.

Our first problem is message. We let Republicans define the debate. They run on guns, God and gays—and instead of standing up for our values we try to excuse their extremism. We move further and further to the right and we fear standing up against what we know to be wrong. We compromise our values for the sake of victory and wind up with neither integrity nor victory.

Our other problem is morale. It says something about the state of our party that so many of us believe what Republicans and a complicit media tell us about ourselves. Many of our leaders and our ordinary members have been convinced that our fundamental values are simply wrong.

We are a party that passionately believes in every person’s right to see a doctor; that poverty and inequality in the world’s richest nation are a disgrace; that we have a responsibility to help people grow old with dignity; that a nation must manage its finances responsibly and not pass more and more debt to our children; and that America should be both the military and moral leader of the world.

Our party is in crisis. We need a leader who will not only convince America that we are right—we need a leader who will inspire us to stand up for the fundamental values we know are right.

posted by conchis @ 7:34 PM 0 comments

Howard Dean for DNC Chair

Rep. Mark Cohen (D, PA) speaks out in support of Howard Dean:

The Democratic National Committee has never had a party chair like Howard Dean. That is one of the reasons why the Republicans control the White House...

A Dean Chairmanship will open the party up to the grassroots. It will be the best funded Democratic Party ever. It will be the party with the most volunteers ever, the party that builds on the many successes of the 2004 campaigns.
...
Traditionalists will scoff that Dean is too liberal, that Americans do not want liberals. What Americans do not want is arrogant, isolated, holier than thou elitists. Some such people are liberals,and the image of liberalism has been tarred by these examples, but most are not. Howard Dean is a straight-talking above average American who can lead, inspire, and mobilize. He is a liberal in the broad generic sense in which the vast majority of Democrats are liberals, but not in the narrow, derogatory sense of the term.

He can be the greatest Democratic Chairman we ever had. Hopefully, the Democratic National Committee will be wise enough, independent enough, and responsive enough to give him--and us--that opportunity.

posted by conchis @ 7:20 PM 0 comments

Reform Democrats

This is generated by the Brand Democrat Flyer generator, which is an easy-to-use page for generating fancy looking flyers anchored by the donkey, with text you specify. The slogan seems appropriate as a test phrase for this tool, because it is the example set of core values from daunte's detailed plan for reforming the Democrats' core values and message.

posted by conchis @ 6:20 PM 1 comments

Campaign Finance Reform

Suggested by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times:

Funnel campaign donations through a blind trust. The funkiest idea in politics is to make donations anonymous even to the recipient. Citizens would make contributions through a blind trust, so that candidates wouldn't know to whom they were beholden.

If officials don't know who their major contributors are, they can't invite them to spend the night in the Lincoln Bedroom or write tax loopholes. A donor might boast about having made a contribution, but special interests will realize they can save money by telling politicians that they have donated when they haven't, and then politicians will doubt these boasts.

Such a system of shielding names of donors exists in 10 states, to some degree, for judicial candidates. A provocative book by Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayres, "Voting With Dollars," makes an excellent case that the system be applied more broadly, but we need some innovative state (Oregon, do you hear that?) to take the leap.

posted by conchis @ 5:31 PM 0 comments

Our pompous right-wing press

Weldon Berger, writing on PressThink, caught Sam Donaldson bloviating:

Sam Donaldson told an audience at the University of North Carolina: "Anybody who goes windsurfing as the great American sport doesn't understand what they do in Omaha." (In this instance, it's the down-home Donaldson who's clueless about Nebraska, home to the Toucan Open stop on the US Windsurfing national circuit.)

posted by conchis @ 3:35 PM 4 comments

From Atrios, Red State, Blue State

Our friends at Atrios do a little debunking of the red-state blue-state nonsense.

The red state-blue state divide ... is nothing more than a rebranding of David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise argument that there are two competing and incompatible cultures in America today. But when a reporter tried to verify the facts underlying Brooks’ thesis they didn’t check out [Philly Magazine]. The post-2004 election version of the "Bobo" theory is on just as flimsy grounds.

The modern conservative movement sells itself as “a revolt of the little people against a high and mighty liberal elite.”. It feeds on a feeling of victimization and resentment that many "red staters" feel right now. And the ability of the right to play into that feeling of victimization rests on the premise of a divided america: us versus them, red versus blue. There is no reason we have to adopt their framework.

As I made my journey, it became increasingly hard to believe that Brooks ever left his home. "On my journeys to Franklin County, I set a goal: I was going to spend $20 on a restaurant meal. But although I ordered the most expensive thing on the menu -- steak au jus, 'slippery beef pot pie,' or whatever -- I always failed. I began asking people to direct me to the most-expensive places in town. They would send me to Red Lobster or Applebee's," he wrote. "I'd scan the menu and realize that I'd been beaten once again. I went through great vats of chipped beef and 'seafood delight' trying to drop $20. I waded through enough surf-and-turfs and enough creamed corn to last a lifetime. I could not do it."

Taking Brooks's cue, I lunched at the Chambersburg Red Lobster and quickly realized that he could not have waded through much surf-and-turf at all. The "Steak and Lobster" combination with grilled center-cut New York strip is the most expensive thing on the menu. It costs $28.75. "Most of our checks are over $20," said Becka, my waitress. "There are a lot of ways to spend over $20."

posted by conchis @ 10:12 PM 0 comments

DNC Committee-Members Contact List

Complete DNC roster, 2004-2008 term, compiled Nov 8, 2004, and sent to me last week. These are the people who vote on the new DNC Chair, so if you want to support Howard Dean, these are the people to call (especially the officers and the members from your state).

The State Democratic Party Executive Directors also sit on the DNC, but I keep them in a separate list here.

If you prefer the official PDF version, aldon has made it available here.
* denotes Chair
# denotes member of the Executive Committee

posted by conchis @ 6:28 PM 35 comments

Gay Smoking Ban

Here in New York, we're hoping to impose a gay smoking ban.

Gay smoking is a threat to the institution of smoking.

posted by conchis @ 6:20 PM 0 comments

Howard Dean for DNC Chair

One reason to support Howard Dean for DNC Chair is the fine language put forward in support of him at DraftHoward.com

Across the country our candidates failed to make the case for the Democratic Party.

The Republicans and media elites who manufacture conventional wisdom diagnose our problems for us: we’re wrong on the issues, they say, and we’re on the wrong side of what they call culture. They are wrong.

Our first problem is message. We let Republicans define the debate. They run on guns, God and gays—and instead of standing up for our values we try to excuse their extremism. We move further and further to the right and we fear standing up against what we know to be wrong. We compromise our values for the sake of victory and wind up with neither integrity nor victory.

posted by conchis @ 5:01 AM 0 comments

Wrong-wing Media and Relgion

Media allowed conservative religious leaders to define "moral values"

In five days following election, conservative religious figures made 15 media appearances to progressive religious leaders' five [on the tv networks].

Falwell compared Kerry's unwillingness to oppose gay marriage through an amendment to the U.S. constitution to the unwillingness of many to strongly oppose slavery in the mid-19th century: "the fact that he [Kerry] would not support a federal marriage amendment, it equates in our minds as someone 150 years ago saying I'm personally opposed to slavery, but if my neighbor wants to own one or two that's OK. We don't buy that."

posted by conchis @ 11:18 PM 0 comments

Corporations Buy Republican Politicians

Politicalmonkeyline has the latest goods on corporate buy-offs of politicians, and the survey says.......Republicans. Of corporate PACs giving more than $100,000 this cycle, 245/268 (91%) gave most of that money to Republicans. ExxonMobil, for example, gave 96% of their money to Republicans. Wendy's, for another, gave 93% to Republicans. (They'd love to hear your (polite) comments.) Halliburton is not far behind.

Followed by J.C. Penney, ChevronTexaco, Ford, and (get out the hankies) Home Depot. Home Depot! But they sell such loving products.

posted by conchis @ 10:55 PM 0 comments

From Nepal

posted by conchis @ 10:51 PM 0 comments

Reform Democrats are Fighting Democrats

Kid Oakland of the Kososphere (and, one presumes, Oakland) offers this vision of reform Democrats:

When we look out to the broad playing field of Democrats, in the short term, the single most important characteristic to judge someone on is whether they will fight for our party and help us retake legislative majorities in the legislatures of this nation by fighting for our constituencies.

I don't care if you're liberal or progressive, and vote for everything I support...if you can't get out there, stick your neck out and pitch in to our common fight, then, sad to say, we don't need you.

What does this mean in pragmatic terms?  Well, for one, it means that in 2005 we are going to have to come up with a set of judgements about how our candidates are doing....and be prepared to run primary challenges in 2006 against those who are simply "phoning it in."  

Phone-it-in Democrats no longer cut it, and need to be told so...and that is the dominant message the activist wing of the party needs to send. (not ideological purity...not litmus test issues...not "we can help you with the internet"...fight in spirit and in deeds is our demand.

posted by conchis @ 10:40 PM 0 comments

Something is Broken with the Red State Idea

To wit: there are too many states where Republican Presidential candidates win by big margins, but the results in the state houses, governors' mansions, and even the US House and Senate don't correspond. Why did Bush beat Kerry by 20 points in Montana -- and Gore by 25 -- yet in Montana the Governor and one of the Senators are Democrats, as are a majority in the upper state house and 50/100 in the lower state house?

I've always taken this as a puzzle, but it's a big enough discrepancy that we have to face the fact that there is an answer, and we have to set ourselves the gola of finding it. Perhaps it's because retail politics plays a significantly bigger role at the state level? Perhaps the cheap, seedy divisive messages that Republican Presidential candidates use count on distance for their division (e.g. the Massachusetts librul attack)? Perhaps state candidates use a different message? Perhaps Dems problem is entirely due to how they message foreign policy?

As a politically aware Democrat who has lived only in large, Blue states, and whose friends are all solid Democrats, I have no idea. Presumably it involves the way that those undecided voters think about politics. But someone needs to figure this out.

Because this is the sort of problem that dominates the Democrats' ability to lose Presidential elections that they should be winning by 20 points: everything we don't understand about how we get our votes, we have to figure out. Right down to understanding the individual thought processes of individual voters in the 50 states. Right down to understanding how the things we say modify the attitudes of each American. The Dems are a coalition, and they're a much smaller coalition than they should be.

[Updated.]

After reading this, Rocky offered the plausible idea that the difference is due to the right-wing media. First, in the presidential race, Fox and the far-right media are there to shill for the Republican non-stop; they're too busy and important to shill for governors. Less idealogical outlets such as CNN provide a different problem to the presidential race. Because they are obsessed with the partisan bickering narrative, in which conflicts are always been the defined left and right (and because he-said-she-said journalism, which they refer to as 'objectivity', and which guides everything they do, says that there are two sides to every story and those two sides are the right and the left) they tar presidential politics politics with the brush of right-wing bias, and their coverage alone, according to this theory, is enough to skew Montana 20 points to the right. But since the national media only cover national candidates, state-level candidates escape relatively unscathed. Obviously there is local press, but it covers different issues -- more pork, less foreign policy -- and perhaps the inherent right-wing bias that the press has is less felt in local coverage.

posted by conchis @ 10:30 PM 0 comments

Bush Orders 50% Increase in Number of CIA Analysts

A fascinating development (audio) because it indicates either

(a) that he gets it, despite the fact that there is another closely related thing that he doesn't get (the fact that demanding political loyalty from fact-finding analysts harms our nation)

(b) fanfare about a soon-to-be-unfunded mandate

posted by conchis @ 7:00 AM 0 comments

Right-wing Bias in New York Times Coverage of the "Istook Amendment"

More right-wing lies from the New York Times.

David E. Rosenbaum failed to verify claims made by people he quoted and omitted key pieces of information relevant to the story, including the exact language of the clause in question. While Rosenbaum filled in some additional details in a follow-up article on the subject published on November 23, he ignored contradictions between the two stories and failed to point out that an unverified claim made by a Republican committee staff member he quoted the previous day was, in fact, false.

posted by conchis @ 11:55 PM 0 comments

Verizon Fights to Keep Wireless Away from You

Mediachannel has the story

The reality today is that we live in an era where large corporations work hand-in-hand with lobbyists and compliant legislators to stifle any technology that returns control of our media system to the public.

The latest evidence lies hidden within a Bill en route to the desk of Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell. House Bill 30 -- an industry-drafted and inspired sprawl of corporate concessions -- has tucked within its more than 70 pages an amendment that effectively kills efforts in Philadelphia to provide citywide wireless access at little or no charge.

The bill cleared both Pennsylvania's House and Senate on Friday. A signature from Governor Rendell would scuttle "Philadelphia Wireless" -- an ambitious plan to build a Wi-Fi network to serve the city's working-class communities -- before the project could begin.
...
The industry pulls considerable weight in Washington -- spending more than $160 million since 1999 on efforts to woo legislators and win support for policies that effectively hand over publicly owned media assets, such as our airwaves, to private control. Industry lobbyists have also spread out across the country to uproot local competition and defend big media interests town to town.

posted by conchis @ 11:41 PM 0 comments

Ring-wing Bias in The New York Times

The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports U.S. Foreign Policy, by Howard Friel and Richard Falk, has just been released. From the publisher:

In this meticulously researched study—the first part of a two-volume work—Howard Friel and Richard Falk demonstrate how the newspaper of record in the United States has consistently, over the last 50 years, misreported the facts related to the wars waged by the United States. From Vietnam in the 1960s to Nicaragua in the 1980s and Iraq today, the authors accuse the New York Times of serial distortions. They claim that such coverage now threatens not only world legal order but constitutional democracy in the United States.

Falk and Friel show that, despite numerous US threats to invade Iraq, and despite the fact that an invasion of one country by another implicates fundamental aspects of the UN Charter and international law, the New York Times editorial page never mentioned the words “UN Charter” or “international law” in any of its 70 editorials on Iraq from September 11, 2001, to March 20, 2003. The authors also show that the editorial page supported the Bush administration’s WMD claims against Iraq, and that its magazine, op-ed and news pages performed just as poorly.

In conclusion the authors suggest an alternative editorial policy of “strict scrutiny” that incorporates the UN Charter and the US Constitution in the Times coverage of the use and threat of force by the United States and the protection of civil and human rights at home and abroad.

posted by conchis @ 2:57 PM 0 comments

Disclaimer Stickers for Science Textbooks

posted by conchis @ 2:44 PM 0 comments

DeLay Rule

Media Matters is going apeshit over the DeLay rule. I'm off to their site to send a few emails.

posted by conchis @ 8:00 AM 0 comments

Prosecuter Ronnie Earle on The DeLay Rule

The New York Times does a bit of its job, as usual on page 27.

Ronnie Earle is investiating Tom DeLay and his office for what appear to be illegal fundraising activities. DeLay, as you know, is the House leader of the Republicans, who are the party of personal responsibility. I mean, you know, in, um, the lies that they tell. That The Times prints on page.....1. Back here on page 27, Earle's Op-ed:

Politicians in Congress are responsible for the leaders they choose. Their choices reflect their moral values.

Every law enforcement officer depends on the moral values and integrity of society for backup; they are like body armor. The cynical destruction of moral values at the top makes it hard for law enforcement to do its job.

In terms of moral values, this is where the rubber meets the road. The rules you apply to yourself are the true test of your moral values.

The thinly veiled personal attacks on me by Mr. DeLay's supporters in this case are no different from those in the cases of any of the 15 elected officials this office has prosecuted in my 27-year tenure. Most of these officials - 12 Democrats and three Republicans - have accused me of having political motives. What else are they going to say?

For most of my tenure the Democrats held the power in state government. Now Republicans do. Most crimes by elected officials involve the abuse of power; you have to have power before you can abuse it.

There is no limit to what you can do if you have the power to change the rules. Congress may make its own rules, but the public makes the rule of law, and depends for its peace on the enforcement of the law. Hypocrisy at the highest levels of government is toxic to the moral fiber that holds our communities together.

The open contempt for moral values by our elected officials has a corrosive effect. It is a sad day for law enforcement when Congress offers such poor leadership on moral values and ethical behavior. We are a moral people, and the first lesson of democracy is not to hold the public in contempt.

posted by conchis @ 11:19 PM 0 comments

Ed Helms live from Iran

What will pass for election campaigning in the upcoming Iraqi election? "Assassinations and kidnappings -- or as they call it in Iraq, 'Going negative.' "

posted by conchis @ 11:08 PM 0 comments

Clinton Talks Back to the Right-wing Media

For those of you who thought ABCNews wasn't right-wing, this just in from Eric Boehlert at Salon.

But Clinton flashed real irritation when Jennings suggested some historians thought that Clinton's presidency had lacked "moral authority," without mentioning its having been tarnished by independent counsel Kenneth Starr's multiple investigations.

"You don't want to go here, Peter," snapped Clinton, who proceeded to criticize the reporting of ABC News, in particular, in the 1990s. "Not after what you people did and the way you, your network, what you did with Kenneth Starr. The way your people repeated every little sleazy thing he leaked.
...
A number of independent observers judge [ABC's stories about Whitewatever, by reporter Jackie Judd and producer Chris Vlasto] to have failed journalistic standards. Some have even suggested that Vlasto took on a unique role as a kind of unofficial advisor to the Starr legal team as he worked behind the scenes and confronted fellow journalists who did not hew to Starr's line.
...
other scoops from unnamed "sources" did not stand up. On Jan. 25, 1998, Judd appeared on ABC's "This Week" and reported, "Several sources have told us that in the spring of 1996, the president and Lewinsky were caught in an intimate encounter in a private area of the White House." The revelation set off a month's worth of cable TV chatter, but the report that Clinton and Lewinsky were found out proved to be fictitious.

The Los Angeles Times later reported, "Judd did not say who her sources were, how many sources she had or what the sources' affiliations or allegiances were. She had not spoken to the alleged eyewitness herself and didn't know who the eyewitness was or even, as she conceded on the air, whether the alleged witness was a Secret Service agent or a member of the White House staff."

Although Vlasto was covering the Whitewater story on an ongoing basis for ABC, he took the unusual step in April 1996 of writing a conspiracy-minded Op-Ed for a competing news outlet -- the right-wing editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. The column, which opened with key Whitewater figure Susan McDougal telling Vlasto off the record, "I know where all the bodies are buried" (a claim McDougal denies ever making), ran the same day McDougal appeared before a Little Rock, Ark., grand jury to answer Whitewater questions or face a criminal contempt indictment. Starr's prosecutors entered Vlasto's column as evidence to bolster their assertion that she was withholding information.

posted by conchis @ 9:09 PM 0 comments

DNC Chair: Rosenberg

From No Retreat, No Surrender:

For the first time in modern history, we have the potential to build a party free from the special interest strangehold that has corrupted our government and alienated people from the political process.

During this election cycle ordinary people became the biggest special interest. The next leader of our party needs to expand that base and solidify that support.

Howard Dean led the way and made the new model work. But Simon says he wants to take us back to the bad old days.

posted by conchis @ 8:36 PM 0 comments

An Anthropologist Among the Undecided Voters

From the New Replublic. Christopher Hayes's anecdotal observations from seven weeks talking to swing voters in Wisconson. These are highly recommended.

Undecided voters aren't as rational as you think. Members of the political class may disparage undecided voters, but we at least tend to impute to them a basic rationality. We're giving them too much credit. I met voters who told me they were voting for Bush, but who named their most important issue as the environment. One man told me he voted for Bush in 2000 because he thought that with Cheney, an oilman, on the ticket, the administration would finally be able to make us independent from foreign oil. A colleague spoke to a voter who had been a big Howard Dean fan, but had switched to supporting Bush after Dean lost the nomination. After half an hour in the man's house, she still couldn't make sense of his decision. Then there was the woman who called our office a few weeks before the election to tell us that though she had signed up to volunteer for Kerry she had now decided to back Bush. Why? Because the president supported stem cell research. The office became quiet as we all stopped what we were doing to listen to one of our fellow organizers try, nobly, to disabuse her of this notion. Despite having the facts on her side, the organizer didn't have much luck.

Undecided voters do care about politics; they just don't enjoy politics. Political junkies tend to assume that undecided voters are undecided because they don't care enough to make up their minds. But while I found that most undecided voters are, as one Kerry aide put it to The New York Times, "relatively low-information, relatively disengaged," the lack of engagement wasn't a sign that they didn't care. After all, if they truly didn't care, they wouldn't have been planning to vote. The undecided voters I talked to did care about politics, or at least judged it to be important; they just didn't enjoy politics.

The mere fact that you're reading this article right now suggests that you not only think politics is important, but you actually like it. You read the paper and listen to political radio and talk about politics at parties. In other words, you view politics the way a lot of people view cooking or sports or opera: as a hobby. Most undecided voters, by contrast, seem to view politics the way I view laundry. While I understand that to be a functioning member of society I have to do my laundry, and I always eventually get it done, I'll never do it before every last piece of clean clothing is dirty, as I find the entire business to be a chore. A significant number of undecided voters, I think, view politics in exactly this way: as a chore, a duty, something that must be done but is altogether unpleasant, and therefore something best put off for as long as possible.

A disturbing number of undecided voters are crypto-racist isolationists....When I mentioned the "mess in Iraq" he lit up. "We should have gone through Iraq like shit through tinfoil," he said, leaning hard on the railing of his porch. As I tried to make sense of the mental image this evoked, he continued: "I mean we should have dominated the place; that's the only thing these people understand. ... Teaching democracy to Arabs is like teaching the alphabet to rats."
...
While Bush's rhetoric about spreading freedom and democracy played well with blue-state liberal hawks and red-state Christian conservatives who are inclined towards a missionary view of world affairs, it seemed to fall flat among the undecided voters I spoke with.

Perhaps the greatest myth about undecided voters is that they are undecided because of the "issues." ... More often than not, when I asked undecided voters what issues they would pay attention to as they made up their minds I was met with a blank stare, as if I'd just asked them to name their favorite prime number....The majority of undecided voters I spoke to couldn't name a single issue that was important to them....The undecideds I spoke to didn't seem to have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances qualify as political grievances. Often, once I would engage undecided voters, they would list concerns, such as the rising cost of health care; but when I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums, they would respond in disbelief--not in disbelief that he had a plan, but that the cost of health care was a political issue. It was as if you were telling them that Kerry was promising to extend summer into December. [Which, by the way, he has done, not by being elected, but through his personal relationship with God.]

To cite one example: I had a conversation with an undecided truck driver who was despondent because he had just hit a woman's car after having worked a week straight. He didn't think the accident was his fault and he was angry about being sued. "There's too many lawsuits these days," he told me. I was set to have to rebut a "tort reform" argument, but it never came. Even though there was a ready-made connection between what was happening in his life and a campaign issue, he never made the leap. I asked him about the company he worked for and whether it would cover his legal expenses; he said he didn't think so. I asked him if he was unionized and he said no. "The last job was unionized," he said. "They would have covered my expenses." I tried to steer him towards a political discussion about how Kerry would stand up for workers' rights and protect unions, but it never got anywhere. He didn't seem to think there was any connection between politics and whether his company would cover his legal costs. Had he made a connection between his predicament and the issue of tort reform, it might have benefited Bush; had he made a connection between his predicament and the issue of labor rights, it might have benefited Kerry. He made neither, and remained undecided.

In this context, Bush's victory, particularly on the strength of those voters who listed "values" as their number one issue, makes perfect sense. Kerry ran a campaign that was about politics: He parsed the world into political categories and offered political solutions. Bush did this too, but it wasn't the main thrust of his campaign. Instead, the president ran on broad themes, like "character" and "morals." Everyone feels an immediate and intuitive expertise on morals and values--we all know what's right and wrong. But how can undecided voters evaluate a candidate on issues if they don't even grasp what issues are?

Liberals like to point out that majorities of Americans agree with the Democratic Party on the issues, so Republicans are forced to run on character and values in order to win. (This cuts both ways: I met a large number of Bush/Feingold voters whose politics were more in line with the Republican president, but who admired the backbone and gutsiness of their Democratic senator.) But polls that ask people about issues presuppose a basic familiarity with the concept of issues--a familiarity that may not exist.

As far as I can tell, this leaves Democrats with two options: either abandon "issues" as the lynchpin of political campaigns and adopt the language of values, morals, and character as many have suggested; or begin the long-term and arduous task of rebuilding a popular, accessible political vocabulary--of convincing undecided voters to believe once again in the importance of issues. The former strategy could help the Democrats stop the bleeding in time for 2008. But the latter strategy might be necessary for the Democrats to become a majority party again.

Christopher Hayes is a freelance writer living in Chicago.

posted by conchis @ 7:54 PM 0 comments

The Cabinet of Yes Men

Fox's Brit Hume v. Juan Williams

WILLIAMS: No, no, the arrogance, the overreaching is you have a cadre of people who all agree with you about everything.

WALLACE: But they're his Cabinet.

WILLIAMS: No, they're his Cabinet, and therefore they're supposed to be smart, thoughtful people who know a great deal about their area of expertise. Instead, you have people who --

HUME: Wait a minute. What makes you think those people don't know about the area? Do you say that Condoleezza Rice doesn't know foreign policy?

posted by conchis @ 7:22 PM 0 comments

DNC Chair: Rosenberg

The notion that he even might be is still a wild rumor, but in case anyone asks you what you think, it might be a good time to review Stirling Newberry's Why Simon Rosenberg Should NOT by DNC Chair

1. Vision

Simon is well known as an individual of vision. We want a short sighted party, one that is always scrambling from one ad hoc battle to the next, with no idea of the future, and no ability to speak to the aspirations of Americans.

2. National Majority

Simon is well known as someone who wants the Democratic Party to nationalize the issues and seek a majority and governing coalition. We all know that the Democratic Party is much better off fighting every election over backyard issues, and having no principles that will get in the way.

posted by conchis @ 7:05 PM 2 comments