Winning Friends and Influencing People Since 1996.
by matttbastard
Someone want to chip in for a fainting couch? Jason “Richard Cohen is Jesus” Arvak is apparently afflicted with such a serious case of the false equivalency vapors that he’s hallucinating, and may need to lie down for a bit. Then again, maybe I really am the objective “EXTREME LEFT!!1one” equivalent to unrepentant far-right domestic terrorists. I mean, anything is possible in an upside-down world where Sonia Sotomayor = David Duke.
*blink*
(Make sure the cushion is extra soft; Jay-Jay obviously has a very tender bottom.)
On Murder and a Culture of Hate
On February 23rd this year, commenting on a Glenn Beck show segment which discussed armed civil conflict due to Obama’s election victory, I asked: “One wonders how far they’ll tank political discourse before somebody gets f—–g killed.”
BREAKING: Dr. George Tiller Assassinated
George Tiller, the Wichita doctor who became a national lightning rod in the debate over abortion, was shot to death this morning as he walked into church services.
Tiller was shot just after 10 a.m. at Reformation Lutheran Church at 7601 E. 13th, where he was a member of the congregation. An anonymous police source confirmed Tiller was the victim.
NOW do all the pearl-clutching conservative bloggers get why that fauxtroversial DHS report on far-right activity was so goddamn pertinent?! As GallingGalla just said on Twitter, “forced-birthers are TERRORISTS on US soil.” This latest killing of a health care provider, martyred for daring to provide women with a vital medical service (in the same week that, here in Canada, the Ontario Provincial Police decided to let another anti-choice assassin evade accountability), only reinforces that all-too-clear fact.
Seriously, this is supposed to be an expression of ‘pro-life’ sentiment?! Look, Operation Rescue can offer hollow denunciations all they like. They are still morally complicit and should rightfully be held accountable for their inflammatory rhetoric and tactics.
Fuck them and their deadly, pro-natalist fanaticism.
h/t Atrios
(updates below the fold)
If Obama Has Lost Ted Rall…
That’s how Robert Stacy McCain titles his post about Ted Rall’s bizarre article today declaring that Pres. Obama should resign (links to both Rall and McCain are at Memeorandum).
The finish of McCain’s title is too stupid to repeat, so I’ll just give it the correct finish here:
If Obama has lost Ted Rall, he hasn’t lost anything at all.
I agree with James Joyner on this one: Rall is “eminently quotable, if in a train wreck sort of way, but constantly pointing out that some commentators are crazy attention whores really doesn’t advance the debate much.”
Clarifying What Doesn’t Need to be Clarified
I’m very pleased to see that the Obama administration’s inexplicable decision to concede the right’s illegitimate “racist” argument is getting some well-deserved criticism in blogtopia:
Getting Down to Basic Truths
Gawker, that rock-solid investigative reporting site (just check out the article teasers at the top if you doubt their reportorial chops), puts up an article saying that Erich “Mancow” Muller faked his waterboarding. It wasn’t a “hoax,” exactly, according to Gawker’s informed sources — it was meant to “look real” but actually was only “simulated.” Mancow, in short, was not really drowning — it was a staged waterboarding, not an actual one. No, really. It’s true. It was fake. So just don’t anyone put down investigative journalists while I’m around, cuz man, how else would we find out about the lies we’re being told if dedicated seekers of truth like The Cajun Boy were not willing to work so hard to dig out the truth?
If a White Male Were to Make Such Racist Comments, He Would Have His Own Radio Show
I have a blog post up at The Moderate Voice about implied gender bias in a New York Times article about supposed concerns among SCOTUS watchers that Sonia Sotomayor’s so-called “sharp tongue” and “blunt style” raise “temperament” issues.
Push back
The knee jerk, “Oppose anything Obama does!,” response to Sotomayor by some on the right has been so insane that even the Wall Street Journal is telling Republicans to grow up:
The New York Post’s front page the day after her announcement said it all: “Suprema!” with a picture of the radiant nominee. New York is proud of her; I’m proud of our country and grateful at its insistence, in a time when some say the American dream is dead, that it most certainly is not. The dream is: You can come from any place or condition, any walk of life, and rise to the top, taking your people with you, in your heart and theirs. (Maybe that’s what they mean by empathy: Where you come from enters you, and you bring it with you as you rise. But if that’s what they mean, then we’re all empathetic. We’re the most fluid society in human history, but no one ever leaves their zip code in America, we all take it with us. It’s part of our pride. And it’s not bad, it’s good.
Some, and they are idiots, look at Judge Sotomayor and say: attack, attack, kill. A conservative activist told the New York Times, “We need to brand her.” Another told me a fight is needed to excite the base.
Excite the base? How about excite a moderate, or interest an independent? How about gain the attention of people who aren’t already on your side?
The base is plenty excited already, as you know if you’ve ever read a comment thread on a conservative blog. Comment-thread conservatives, like their mirror-image warriors on the left (“Worst person in the woooorrrlllddd!”) are perpetually agitated, permanently enraged.
The Right’s Chrysler Dealership Conspiracy Theory
There is a trend going on in Wingnuttia that I have been noticing for months now: Right-wingers are engaging in exactly the same behaviors that they condemned or mocked the left for doing when George W. Bush was president. Attacking a sitting president’s foreign policy in a time of war? Check. Helping the enemy by showing that Americans are divided and disunited? Check. Politicizing national security? Check. Ignoring or not taking seriously laws that forbid public officials from revealing classified information? Check.
To these, we can now add: tinfoil hat conspiracy theorizing:
A whole lot of right-wing blogs are worked up today over a report about the political affiliations of Chrysler dealers who’ve been shut down.
Evidence appears to be mounting that the Obama administration has systematically targeted for closing Chrysler dealers who contributed to Repubicans [sic]. What started earlier this week as mainly a rumbling on the Right side of the Blogosphere has gathered some steam today with revelations that among the dealers being shut down are a GOP congressman and closing of competitors to a dealership chain partly owned by former Clinton White House chief of staff Mack McLarty.
The basic issue raised here is this: How do we account for the fact millions of dollars were contributed to GOP candidates by Chrysler who are being closed by the government, but only one has been found so far that is being closed that contributed to the Obama campaign in 2008?
Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.), who has a dealership that will close, called this “an outrage.” A variety of far-right bloggers chose more colorful language.
And what is the “evidence” of a partisan conspiracy that “appears to be mounting”? As you might have guessed, like most conservative theories, this one is extremely thin. The argument, in a nutshell, is that Chrysler dealers owned by a variety of Republican donors are being closed, the government is now involved with Chrysler’s restructuring, so that points to “evidence” that the Obama administration is deliberately punishing GOP contributors.
There’s one big problem with this reasoning, says Nate Silver (linked from Steve’s post):
… Nobody has bothered to look up data for the control group: the list of dealerships which aren’t being closed. It turns out that all car dealers are, in fact, overwhelmingly more likely to donate to Republicans than to Democrats — not just those who are having their doors closed.
Duh:
It shouldn’t be any surprise, by the way, that car dealers tend to vote — and donate — Republican. They are usually male, they are usually older (you don’t own an auto dealership in your 20s), and they have obvious reasons to be pro-business, pro-tax cut, anti-green energy and anti-labor. Car dealerships need quite a bit of space and will tend to be located in suburban or rural areas. I can’t think of too many other occupations that are more natural fits for the Republican Party. …
Sonia Sotomayor
Over the next few days (weeks?) I will be attempting to round up and make some sense of the voluminous blogtopic response to Pres. Obama’s nomination of Judge Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. The confirmation hearings will probably start in July, so that gives us all a little over a month to get up to speed.
Charlie Savage’s New York Times piece about the relative confusion surrounding Judge Sotomayor’s views on abortion is a good place to start. That aspect of Sotomayor’s background has not been written about as much as other aspects — and I figure it’s at least as important as a remark Sotomayor made at a conference in 2001 about how growing up female and Latina in impoverished circumstances might deepen the wisdom of her judicial decisions.
Savage includes links to Sotomayor’s abortion-related opinions (although none of them go directly to her views on Roe v. Wade), and also linked from the article is a separate page titled “Sotomayor’s Notable Opinions and Articles.”
Who could have predicted this reaction?!
I have to hand it to Obama: The man is a political genius. He nominates a hispanic woman to the Supreme Court and it took about 5.2 seconds before GOP pundits busted their prejudice nut nationally — that certainly sours the Republicans among a minority whose votes they need.
As usual, though, Glenn Beck’s comments on the matter prove to be the most precious. After claiming Obama’s thought process on nominating Sotomayor consisted of the thought, “Hey, hispanic chick lady! You’re empathetic … You’re in!,” Beck must have thought to himself, “Christ, I haven’t been prejudiced enough yet.” So he drones on:
Matthew Alexander: Torture Has Cost Us American Lives
If a picture is worth a thousand words, this video is worth at least a hundred thousand:
Via The Huffington Post.
Preventive Detention Is a Non-Starter
Pres. Obama’s preventive detention idea, so far, is not going over too well, reports Glenn Greenwald:
The backlash against President Obama’s extraordinary proposal for indefinite “preventive detention” — already widespread in the immediate aftermath of his speech — continues to grow. On Friday, Sen. Russ Feingold sent a letter (.pdf) to Obama which, while praising some aspects of his speech, vowed to hold hearings on his detention proposal, and in the letter, Feingold rather emphatically highlighted the radical and dangerous aspects of Obama’s approach[.]
[...]
On Twitter on Friday, Rachel Maddow pointed to the civil liberties questionnaire from Charlie Savage which Obama answered during the Democratic primary and asked rhetorically: “This is the same guy now proposing ‘prolonged detention’ without trial?”
[...]
It’s a bit difficult to claim that what Obama is proposing is nothing new, nothing out of the ordinary, given that his own White House Counsel just last February told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer that it would be “hard to imagine Barack Obama as the first President of the United States to introduce a preventive-detention law.” As acknowledged by two of the leading proponents of preventive detention — Bush OLC lawyer Jack Goldsmith and Obama’s Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal — the real purpose of preventive detention (contrary to what some are arguing) is not to classify and treat all detainees as “prisoners of war” (since some of them, by Obama’s own description, will get trials in real courts and others in military commissions), but rather, to give “the government an overwhelming incentive to use trials only when it is certain to win convictions and long sentences, and to place the rest in whatever detention system it creates” (h/t EJ). I defy anyone to re-read that description of what this “preventive detention” system does and then claim that what is being described is a “justice system” in any meaningful sense of that term.
Digby has more.
Proposition 8: Reading the Tea Leaves
Sara Robinson at Orcinus speculates on what might happen if California’s Supreme Court overturns Proposition 8 tomorrow:
Nobody has a clue which way they’re likely to rule. Activists on both sides have been scrying the tea leaves and chicken bones on this ever since the court heard the case back in March, but have divined nothing. But there’s one forecast I can offer right now: if Prop 8 is overturned by the courts, the backlash from the right is likely to be far more ferocious and intense than anybody on the left reckons right now.
In recent weeks, I’ve been in discussions with some of the state’s gay leadership about how the hardcore right across the country is likely to react if Prop 8 is overturned. From their viewpoint, even a loss in the courts will only be a momentary setback. In that case, they’ll simply put the issue back on the ballot, over and over, for as long as it takes to regain their right to marry. They know (and the most recent polls support them in this) that time, demographics, and the generally tolerant culture of California are all on their side. They may or may not be able to outspend the Mormons and the Catholics; but they know for sure that they can outwait them.
For that reason, they’re not particularly worried about the right-wing reaction to a decision in their favor. In their view, victory is (sooner or later) preordained. In the long run, the anti-gay-marriage forces are fighting a losing battle. If they’re not irrelevant now, they will be soon. And so they’re not much worried about that.
But they should be.
Yes, the right wing is losing on gay rights issues. That is, very precisely, why they’re more dangerous now than they have been in the past. Their impending irrelevance is not a reason to worry less; it’s a reason to worry more. And getting Prop 8 overturned in the courts would ignite the situation, because it will hit absolutely every angry-making right-wing button there is[.]
The Dick and Liz Cheney Traveling Road Show
Steve Benen wrote on Friday about the extraordinary ubiquitousness of Liz Cheney lately. In the past 10 days (as of Friday afternoon) she had appeared on a dozen different tv shows — mostly Fox News and right-wing talk show hosts like Joe Scarborough and Sean Hannity.
The Paul Bunyan of National Security
The trouble with Dick Cheney is that he believes his own tall tales — and he wants everyone else to believe them, too:
Reporting from Washington — In the bitter debate over the nation’s counter-terrorism policies, former Vice President Dick Cheney has introduced an assertion that substantially raises the stakes.
Twice in the last two weeks — including during his speaking duel with President Obama on Thursday — Cheney has said that the Bush administration’s approach may have saved “hundreds of thousands” of lives.
It is a claim that goes beyond anything Cheney or former President George W. Bush said while in office — crediting their approach with preventing casualties on a scale that the United States has not seen since World War II.
But terrorism experts said that though it is possible to envision scenarios that involve casualties of that magnitude, no evidence has emerged about the plots disrupted during the Bush administration to suggest that Cheney’s claim is true.
“It’s an easy thing to say and a difficult thing to prove,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. “I think it’s another broadside in this ongoing feud.”
Cheney: Still Cherry-Picking After All These Years
Jonathan Landay of McClatchy goes through the long list of lies, distortions, and convenient omissions in Cheney’s “national security” speech yesterday:
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