Xark!

re: My cabinet post

Nov. 14, 2008

Dear John Podesta:

How are things in Washington? Busy, I'm sure! Of course, it's probably a "good sort of busy," and I can certainly understand why you've not yet had a chance to reply to my e-mail of Nov. 5 (Subject line: "GREETINGS FROM YOUR NEXT SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES!").

To advance the matter just a bit while I've got your attention, I've been doing an awful lot of thinking about it since the election, and I just want you to know that I'm not "married" in any way to the HHS posting. I just thought, you know, that since HHS isn't the "sexiest" appointment there "inside the Beltway," maybe you might be open to volunteers. I looked it up online and found out that the current HHS secretary is some guy from Utah named Michael Leavitt. So there's my point. The bar's been set pretty low.

Amy Goodman arrested in St. Paul

Journalist Amy Goodman of Democracy Now is an honest, sensible, principled journalist and American.

What the hell is going on in Minnesota?

'You don't know what you're talking about'

Chris Matthew's talk-over-the-guest interviewing style on Hardball has always been nails on a chalkboard for me, but this might be the first time it ever came across as utterly appropriate. Kevin James, a right-wing talker from California, came on the show Thursday after President Bush's Knesset speech to talk about Israel, appeasement and Barack Obama, and his aggressive platitudes prompted Matthews to run a history check on his ass.

It immediately becomes clear that James doesn't have a clue who Neville Chamberlain was, or what happened in Munich. Partition of Czechoslovakia and dialog with Palestinians the Iranians? "It's the same thing!" he says.

What follows might be the greatest smack-down of a self-important, shallow idiot ever witnessed on national TV. Listen to the high-school essay-test evasion ploys and the empty wingnut counter-attack maneuver ("Thirty-eight or 39, Chris? Which one do you want?").

You've got to be morally and intellectually bankrupt if Tweety makes you look small in comparison.

FOX ATTACKS: Going after Obama

The FOX VIRUS...

Even Chris Wallace gets disgusted by it...

Just for context on the M.O. of Rupert Murdock's corporate news philosophy, The Investigators meet The Buzzsaw...

No, of course we're not surprised. I'm sure they originally prepared for an all-out assault on Hillary Clinton, but they retrenched, retooled, and sent their minions out after Barack Obama instead. And let's face it: The GOP is going to continue this steady drumbeat of sleaze from now through the election, supposedly at arm's length via their "remote operative," Roger Ailes, at the FOX News Division.

Our job is to recognize it, name it, talk about it, share it. Human beings, like many living things, are quorum sensors (bacteria do it chemically; we do it psychologically). So it isn't just the quality of the signals we receive from our environments that matter -- the number of signals of certain types that we receive quite literally count toward shaping our image of reality.

Ailes, Rove and others on the Right understood this many years ago.

Which is why I say: Share these videos. Embed them. E-mail them. Every time you use the power of human relationships and social networking to spread this exposure of media sleaze you are acting as an antidote to the sickening virus FOX keeps deliberately injecting into our culture. We have to become D.I.Y. media antibodies in defense of our society. We must inoculate ourselves against bullshit. When you show a thing that attempts to be secret, you remove some of its power.

To clarify: I have no quarrel with anyone who opposes Obama for policy reasons. Don't like his ideas about Iraq, or social security, or economics, or taxation? Fine. I disagree, but I respect reasonable disagreement.

But if you think that Obama is a Muslim, or a black racist, or a shadowy figure who secretly hates America? Conversation over.  You've just defined yourself out of  relevancy. My suggestion? Take another look at why you believe what you believe, and then rejoin the rest of us in our imperfect lurching toward a better future.

Hat tips: Janet, Revere at Effect Measure, MoveOn.org, Robert Greenwald.

I've got a bad feeling about this...

I'm generally a pretty optimistic guy, and there's a general logic to that attitude:  Things have pretty much always looked bad to some degree, yet things have, generally,  gotten better over time.  So you shut your eyes and you keep on walking and you whistle past the graveyard and then, you know -- the sun comes out.

But now a-days you look around, you do the math, and you realize: Holy shit, dude -- are we fucked?

I get the sense that this is one of those moments when things are much worse than "they" are letting on. Which makes me think: We need an "F-Scale."  Like, if stuff is just sorta screwed up, but things generally work and you can pretty much expect that you're going to be able to keep your job and your house and suicide bombers aren't going to move in next door and really downgrade your property values, that would be F-1.

And then an F-10 would be economic depression, the destruction of the Bill of Rights, civil war and environmental collapse. And so on.

So where does that put us? Because when the Feds are bailing out the banks and the President is giving the economy a "You're doin' a heckuva job, Brownie" pep-talk, and currency converters in Amsterdam stop exchanging dollars because their value is dropping so fast, that's got to be like an F-7.

And when we're five years into a botched, brutal war and still hoping that the latest strategy is someday going to give the Iraqis a chance to build a society that's stable enough to do simple shit like, say, provide electrical power to most of the grid for most of the day, that's at LEAST an F-8.

And then we've got a political campaign where the entire focus of the past few days has been a concerted, deliberate attempt to destroy an inspiring presidential candidate by endlessly looping out-of-context statements by his preacher?  At essentially the same time that the President of the United States of America is openly advocating TORTURE? And the media doesn't even think the torture veto is really all that NEWSWORTHY?

Where's the F-scale on THAT?

Answers, please, on a post card...

Iran, I-exaggerate?

I have to admit: My reactions when I saw the headline-alert Tweet announcing the "Iranian naval showdown" story were not pleasant. My first thought was that our government was hyping whatever happened for political reasons.  My second thought was that the News Lords were going to uncritically pound that hype right into the national consciousness.

I don't like either thought, but that's where I find myself today. The federal government says something, and I have to discipline my reaction to make sure that I at least give it the benefit of the doubt. I wasn't this way before 2004, but that where I am now, and it's based on experience, not ideology. The Bush  administration certainly didn't invent politicized bullshit (Gulf of Tonkin, anyone?), it's just that ... great Gawd, there's just so much of it, and the skeptical reporting is just so slow to catch up that it's practically irrelevant.

Lunch hour report: Hersh on Iran NIE

(Editor's note) Say what you want about reporter Sy Hersh, but remember this: History gets the last word. His coverage of the Bush Administration's wars just keeps on getting confirmed -- months, even years later, yes, but that's the way things go in the world.

So what does Hersh have to say about the NIE on Iran's nuclear weapons capabilities? Here's a transcript of what he had to say to Wolf Blitzer on CNN last night (-dc)...

Bailouts Aren't What They Used to Be

Late last week, I began reading a news story on MSNBC that centered on Bush’s “bailout” of those individuals who were losing their homes in the current mortgage crisis.  Before getting very far into the story, my attention was drawn to a link for a reader discussion entitled, “Should U.S. bail out subprime borrowers?”   Arriving at the discussion, I found page after page of angry notes, furious citizens fuming about how unfair a “bailout” would be.  The logic, which I’m completely sympathetic with, went something like this:  “I pay my bills; I only buy what I can afford.  I’ll be mad as hell if Bush bails out those people by paying their mortgage.”

The problem is, and this may well ultimately haunt Democrats as well (and it should bother all of us), the term “bailout” is misleading in this circumstance.  While Bush has proposed a number of ways to help keep borrowers lenders in their homes, most of these ideas seem ultimately aimed at allowing a refinancing of the loan—it’ll still have to be paid, but the time will be extended, different terms introduced or so forth.  Yes, in some ways, it’s a slight change in the rules, but the policies don’t carry the force that the term “bailout” implies.

Cheney on Iraq, 1994

Dick Cheney: Not part of Executive Branch

(Cartoonist note: I didn't really get to complete this one before I went to work this morning, so this updated, final version has some differences from the one I put up earlier today-- dc)