Saturday, June 10, 2006
Evening Thread
Anyway, Yearly Kos really has been a lot of fun. Hopefully there's a sequel.
Hey Hey Ho Ho
If I wasn't quite courageous enough to do it now I'd make sure that if Joe leaves the party I'd be the first person to run to the microphone to do it then.
Friday, June 09, 2006
Grumpy Byron
Eschaton Exclusive
If you like it pre-order it here.
Plame Game
My Travel Diary
Bloggity Blog
Make sure you sign up for Air America's Yearly Kos stream. It's a great thing they're doing, and quite inexpensive.
Lies and the Lying Liars
I guess it fits their general love of authoritarian cultists.
Thursday, June 08, 2006
AJ Blogs so I Don't Have To
Self-Refuting Statement of the Day
Zarqawi
Anyway, I'm supposed to give the obligatory "YAY USA!" cheer here, but while it's good to get the bad guys I don't really think it's going to improve much. Hopefully I'm wrong.
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
Nedrenaline!
Why doesn't Joe, instead of continuing to insist that we are winning in Iraq, come up with a plan either to win (yes, that would take more troops but his friend John McCain is for that option) or to get out?
Wouldn't that be more to the point?
And hasn't Lieberman sacrificed something precious?
The whole point of being Joe Lieberman used to be decency, dignity, and thoughtfulness. Lieberman's attack ads look like the appeals of just another sleazy, desperate pol, grasping madly to hold on to office.
As one citizen, a Republican, said: We have always held him to the high standard he set for himself. We expected more of Joe.
Uh, Hello?
Mostly Pointless Victory
Organize, Organize, Organize
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Late Night
Privatizing Social Security
Congratulations Senator Inhofe
As you see here, and I think this is maybe the most important prop [the photo] we'll have during the entire debate, my wife and I have been married 47 years. We have 20 kids and grandkids. I'm really proud to say that in the recorded history of our family, we've never had a divorce or any kind of homosexual relationship.
Damn, no recordings of the homosexual incest in the Inhofe family.
Repair the Bridges, Take Out the Trash
We Are Not Their Customers
Stabbed in the Back
But, following up from below, the truly weird thing is how the mainstream media won't aggressively defend themselves from this stuff, but instead give this viewpoint a seat at the table they control.
Discouraging
This is something we see over and over again. I don't know if it's just ingrained habit, a way of pleasing the bosses who run things, or what, but it's truly bizarre. The conservative critique of the week regularly frames literally every issue, usually helped along by their chief enabler Howie Kurtz.
Max Speak
Everyone would prefer the U.S. to engage world problems through international institutions and use military force unilaterally as the very last resort. That is not controversial. What is controversial is the actual experience, one which cautions that a very high bar ought to be placed on the use of force. To call attention to this record, not least to the spectacular debacles of Vietnam and now, Iraq, and maybe in the near future, Iran, is a patriotic public service. To disparage this body of criticism as irresponsible, ill-considered, or anti-American is a calumny.
In the next presidential election, both parties' candidates will have huge problems. On the Democratic side, the electorate will be bitterly divided over staying and leaving Iraq. If things there continue to stagnate, not least for reasons that Peter discusses, the dissenters' number will increase. Peter's apparent strategy entails attacking that faction of voters that is growing. I'm no political genius -- it seems that we only learn who they are after the fact -- but I can count. I do not think this book unravels the political knot facing the Democrats. (The Rs have their own problems.)
Purges
But the importance of diversifying the voices and minds who shape liberal politics is not merely tactical. The extraordinarily limited range of “acceptable” opinions among a large segment of the Washington elite effected “smart” opinion prior to the Iraq war just as destructive as the syndrome Halberstram described that led to Viet Nam. This limited range of debate did not lead to “ a tragic choice that freedom requires,” but to a wrong choice, morally and strategically that has undermined freedom. If the same people, using the same world-view reject more diverse voices from future conversations about foreign policy, they greatly increase more tragic mistakes.
The “siren song of purity” exists more in Beinart’s mind than in the diverse and cacophonous American left. The “central debate” among Democrats is whether fear of that phantom leaves national Democrats with nothing more a homogenized conventional wisdom or whether the well educated and mostly competent elite can develop the confidence to allow into their world the emotional energy and reflexive questioning of authority that people like Michael Moore bring to a healthy political conversation. Beinart writes eloquently about the perils of American exceptionalism. But if Democrats and liberals are going to relevant they need to question certain kinds of Washington exceptionalism as well.
The latest whine from the establishment center is that crazy liberals like myself are trying to purge them. It's a funny charge, and Supreme Wanker #1 Joe Klein, makes it again. It's funny coming from a basic political camp whose entire schtick has been, for years, desperately trying to prove they're "not like those other liberals," marginalizing most liberal voices, outdoing the Right at every step in vigorously condemning anyone to the left of Joe Lieberman.
The problem I and many others have had for years with TNR Caucus is not their political views per se (generally) but their active attempts to define themselves as the left flank of acceptable opinion in this country.
Gore Mania
DraftGore08 is run by sensible trustworthy people. They're having a "$5 primary" go gauge support. And, also, they're seeing if their server can handle the load of getting linked to by a site like this. So, click through and see...
Sources
Basically, Schorr seems to accept that:
The Wen Ho Lee Case was bullshit from start to finish
Sources fed multiple news outlets horseshit about Lee and those outlets published it.
All that's fine...but that what does he conclude? That the resolution of the case was scary because it meant that conducting investigative journalism could now become an expensive undertaking due to legal concerns.
Look. Cut the fucking crap already. If your sources feed you horseshit, you are under no obligation to protect them. There is no journalistic principle which says that journalists should be information launderers for those who wish to libel people.
There's a real story about the Wen Ho Lee case. There's a real story about why the government jointly settled with various news organizations to make this story go away. There's a real story about why news organizations were willing to first pay their lawyers and then pay off Lee to allow sources who lied to them to remain anonymous.
There's a story there, and it has nothing to do with protecting sources.
Anyone want to look into it?
Monday, June 05, 2006
Yearly Kos At Home
Luckily for all of you Air America is going to be streaming the whole thing - three streams gavel to gavel - and you can get full access for a mere $10.
From what I understand this isn't exactly expected to be a big money maker for them - possibly the opposite given costs associated with doing so - so if you're interested and can afford $10 it'd be a good thing to support with your dollars. Sign up here.
Speaking of Values
Words Mean Things
Outdoing the Daily Show
You're redundant.
...adding, it's actually worse than that of course. Lehrer implicitly endorses the veracity of what important people say, providing additional credibility, while he has the easy task of not having to understand any of it.
Nice work.
Values
Six to Eight Weeks
Calling it “the biggest political and military blunder of my lifetime,” Sturgeon said to Bayh, “I’d like you to explain your vote on the war and why you gave the president a blank check to get us into this disaster.”
Bayh calmly answered that “I wouldn’t cast the same vote today as I did then.” He noted that “the French believed that (there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq), the Germans believed that, the Russians believed that, everybody believed he [Saddam Hussein] had weapons of mass destruction.”
Bayh said if the Iraqi factions “get their political act together — and we will know this in the next six to eight weeks… if they can form a government… then there’s something to work with there.” If not, then “we’re out.”
Six to eight weeks brings us to, say, July 31. What's Evan Bayh going to be saying then?
Can't Win With Cavuto
Heads they win, tails you lose, and it's always just another liberal media conspiracy to sap your precious bodily fluids and make you gay.
Happy Sodomy Day
Call your member of Congress and get the answers America needs to have.
Let's Hope
NJ Transit chief George Warrington is pitching a new rail service between Philadelphia and Newark, with the goal of giving central New Jerseyans a quick, cheap ride into Center City.
But the trains, which could be running within a couple of years, also would give another travel option to Philadelphians always on the lookout for a good deal into New York.
In an interview, Warrington outlined his plan for extending the line that links Atlantic City with Philadelphia's 30th Street Station. Eleven of the 14 daily trains would continue north, stopping in Trenton, Princeton Junction and Hamilton on their way to Newark Penn Station or possibly Hoboken.
There are many things which confuse me about SEPTA, but a simple one is their apparent inability (or indifference or unwillingness) to make a deal to allow SEPTA pass holders to ride the PATCO subway within the city.
And, while I'm bitching, stop digging up the damn trolley tracks.
Wen Ho Lee
Boehlert reminds us.
I wonder what Notra Trulock makes of last week's news? A discredited former Energy Department intelligence officer who often came across as a Clinton-hating dittohead, Trulock served as a key government source throughout the Lee witch hunt. (The charges against Lee crumbled in court after Lee had already spent 278 days in solitary confinement.) Trulock was the source some news organizations didn't want to reveal in court and the man who led key reporters around by their noses, spinning fantastic tales about Lee's diabolical deeds; half-baked tales that were often faithfully retold in the pages of the most important newspapers in America. Read: The New York Times. Last week's settlement might have included five news organizations--ABC News, the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post--but the Wen Ho Lee saga has always been about the woeful conduct of the Times and its embarrassing reliance on someone like Trulock who wielded such an obvious partisan ax as he chased after Lee, and by extension the Clinton administration, which Trulock argued was somehow protecting Lee's espionage. (Don't ask.)
Of course, the Wen Ho Lee tale and the Times' wildly over-heated reporting (eagerly hyped by the paper's editorial page, run at the times by Howell Raines) did not spring from a vacuum. Instead, it occurred at the pinnacle of the press corps' Get-Clinton years and fit into a distinct and troubling pattern at the newspaper of record. Recall that the Times embarrassed itself in the 1990s with its now-discredited Whitewater coverage; a story often fed to the Times by anonymous partisan Republican sources. The Times embarrassed itself with an innuendo-heavy Loral investigation that suggested the Clinton White House gave away weapons secrets to the Chinese in exchange for campaign contributions; a story often fed by anonymous partisan Republican sources. The Times embarrassed itself with its one-sided Wen Ho Lee coverage; a story often fed by anonymous partisan Republican sources. And more recently, the Times embarrassed itself with its pre-war WMD coverage; a story often fed by anonymous partisan Republican sources.
Sunday, June 04, 2006
Your GOP
SAN ANTONIO – Lt. Col. Brian Birdwell offered a greeting to delegates to the Republican convention. "It's great to be back in the holy land," the Fort Worth native said to the cheers of the party faithful.For the 4,500 delegates at last week's biennial gathering, it was both an expression of conservative philosophy and religious faith, a melding of church and state.
At Saturday morning's prayer meeting, party leader Tina Benkiser assured them that God was watching over the two-day confab.
"He is the chairman of this party," she said against a backdrop of flags and a GOP seal with its red, white and blue logo.
The party platform, adopted Saturday, declares "America is a Christian nation" and affirms that "God is undeniable in our history and is vital to our freedom."
Looking forward to the day when the Judean People's Front finally turns on the People's Front of Judea.
Gore Mania
Primaries
Nedrenaline!
Failing Upwards
Much Ado About Nothing
No Long Operative
I think Pony Blow is the next obvious step in the evolution of the press secretary. While Ari dazzled them with irrelevancies, Scottie just said nothing, and now Pony Blow just makes stuff up.
Anchor Babies
Hilarious.
I saw this awhile back and let it pass, but what the hell.