FCC FU

Central Air Conditioning: The end of democracy as we know it

It's been pretty hot here in the DC/Baltimore metro area the last week or so and the humidity went from "not so much" to "I can actually swim in it". It used to be part of the Washington DC culture that all the politicians when home for the summer and the President vacated the White House for wherever presidents hied themselves off to when the heat index got so that lobsters cooked just crossing the street.

Going home for the summer got them back in touch with the hometown folks and the hometown ways, but with the advent of central air conditioning they get to stay here and build their own little culture and conspire their little conspiracies, wreaking the country on a 365/24/7 schedule.

So, Mr. DC Politician when you turn your thermostat down today just remember you're turning it down for Saddam.

For all of our sakes, please go home.

You too, Cheney.

Portrait of Lincoln as a young man?

The evidence is compelling. There's more discussion here, here, and here.

I cleaned up the original image (I loves me my Paint Shop Pro) and the result is above. It is evident that the man in the portrait is pretty robust which doesn't jibe with later images of Lincoln but does square up with his early career as a rail splitter.

The Problem

We can (and we can't) send a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand additional troops into Iraq, but Bush has no idea what to do with them when they get there (and they won't). McCain's embrace of a "surge" of troops is a cynical, political posture that plays to the remaining wingnuts who are still fantasizing a noble victory.

Get this - George W. Bush and every crackpot on his payroll lost this war the second they decided to 1. wage it and 2. send a minimal amount of troops to secure the country after they went in.

It is also evident that nothing will be done to end (impeachment and removal from office) his mismanagement of this war until it gets a whole lot worse. And that is a future I am dreading.

The real Man-of-the-Year

Taylor Marsh asks who is your man of the year. Here's my answer...

In a better world this man would be in his second term and the country and the world wouldn't be embedded in this disaster. It is my fervent wish that he runs for president in '08 and we have a chance to re-elect him.

The Cult of Obama

Look, I donated to his campaign and urged my family in Chicago, good democrats all, to vote for the guy. Since then his record as a "progressive champion" has been spotty (see David Sirota: Mr. Obama goes to Washington). I'd give him a year to show us why he should be president. In the mean time, there are other excellent people, with records of achievement, who, to me, have made a better case as potential candidates.

This "cult of personality" that has grown up around him is creepy.

Massive Victory for the Rule of Law and Democracy

I can't stop smiling. Did you hear me? I said...

This is what the Republicans think of America?

And our troops. And the evangelicals? And working men and women?

Or maybe you are getting the message.

NY Times: Circulation Plunges at Major Newspapers

N Y Times

Circulation at the nation’s largest newspapers plunged over the last six months, according to figures released today. The decline, one of the steepest on record, adds to the woes of a mature industry beset by layoffs and the possible sale of some of its flagships.

Overall, average daily circulation for 770 newspapers was 2.8 percent lower in the six-month period ending Sept. 30 than in the comparable period last year, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported. Circulation for 619 Sunday papers fell by 3.4 percent.

But some papers fared much worse. The Los Angeles Times lost 8 percent of its daily circulation, and 6 percent on Sunday. The Boston Globe, owned by The New York Times Company, lost 6.7 percent of its daily circulation and almost 10 percent on Sunday.

Ya think the problem might be because you're sucking up to the radical right? Want to make some real money? Start reporting honestly and change your editorial policies to support Progressives.

Idiots.

Yikes McGee: Bad President

Yikes McGee Website

What Time Magazine was too polite to show you

The Perfect Republican Storm - Cliff Notes Version

Unclaimed Territory

Glenn Greenwald encapsulates it perfectly...

"The perfection of this scandal lies in its substance, not its theatrics. The Foley scandal is not -- as even some Bush opponents have asserted -- an aberrational, isolated, inconsequential melodrama that is unrelated to the substantive and important critiques of the Bush movement and which just coincidentally emerged as a cynical weapon that can be used to defeat the Republicans. The opposite is true. This scandal has resonated so powerfully because it is shining such a powerful light on the towering hubris, utter lack of intellectual and ethical integrity, and deeply engrained corruption that accounts for virtually every other Bush disaster -- from Iraq to law-breaking scandals to torture to Abrahmoff-type corruption schemes and everything in between...

But for so many reasons -- its relative simplicity, its crystal clarity, the involvement of emotionally-charged issues, the salacious sex aspects -- this Foley scandal circumvents that whole dynamic. People are paying attention on their own. They don't need pundits or journalists to tell them what to think about it because they are able to form deeply held opinions on their own. None of the standard obfuscation tactics used for so long by Bush followers are working here. To the contrary, their attempted use of those tactics is making things much worse for them, because people can see that Bush followers are attempting -- through the use of patently dishonest and corrupt tactics -- to excuse the inexcusable. And seeing that, it gives great credence to all of the accusations voiced over the last five years that this is how the Bush movement operates in every area, because people can now see it for themselves...

There have been some commentary in various blogs that the "Republican Pederast" scandal is going to distract everyone from such "really" important matters as Bush's Failed War and the Corrupt Republican Political Machine. But, on the contrary, it is a perfect Cliff Notes version of both.

Comments are turned off for the duration

I'm getting "Comment Spam" bombed something fierce.

So Called Liberal Media

Colorado Suit: Ban computer voting

Rocky Mountain News

"Voting on computer screens is so vulnerable to massive fraud that Colorado's November election is "headed for a train wreck," says an attorney who is seeking to have the equipment barred at trial next week.

An expert would need just 2 minutes to reprogram and distort votes on a Diebold, one of four brands of computerized voting systems attacked in the suit, says attorney Paul Hultin. His firm, Wheeler Trigg Kennedy, has taken on the case pro bono for a group of 13 citizens of various political stripes..."

When all you care about is power and access, a fair and true voting system is the last thing on your mind. So long as it benefits the Republicans, either in the state houses or in Washington, nothing - repeat nothing - will be done to fix fraudulent voting in America.

It's so easy to disrupt an electronic ballot. If you have a Republican administration controlling the Board of Elections and you want to disrupt the vote in a largely Democratic county, why just make sure some necessary piece of equipment doesn't get delivered to the polling places until hours after they open.

Cheap, easy and you don't leave any paper trails by having to hire a hacker.

ABC 9/11-Porn: "Worse than you think."

Crooks and Liars

It is perhaps axiomatic that whenever the Entertainment divisions (and, AFAIK, the News Divisions are subordinated to the ED's) of the major networks get ahold of a historical event to "docu-dramatize" they inevitably screw it up. Badly.

They compress events, create "composite" characters, invent dramatic conflicts that didn't previously exits, and generally get the facts so thoroughly wrong that any semblance to reality is shattered.

Everything I hear about ABC's "Path to 9/11" contradicts all this. Somebody didn't "accidently" screw up this story because they're incompetent storytellers who just wanted to milk 9/11 for dramatic effect. From the people on our side of the fence who've been able to get their hands on a copy of the "pre-screening" dvd (that went out exclusively to the various right-wing media organs and blogs) say that it is a full-throated, swift-boated smear of Bill Clinton and his administration. A propaganda piece so dirty and despicable in it's lies and distortions, trotted out two months before a major election cycle, that it beggars the imagination.

It doesn't surprise me that there are right-wing crazies and organizations that engage in this behavior. What does surprise me is that a major media network, owned and operated, btw, by the Disney corporate empire, is distributing this filth. I can draw only two conclusions: either the ABC/Disney corporation is filled with right-wing crazies or they are so corrupted they think nothing about throwing their weight behind the Republican party to try to ensure the continuation of the most corrupt and criminal political machine that has ever existed since the signing of the Constitution.

Either way, if this piece of 9/11-porn is broadcast tonight on ABC I can promise ABC/Disney one thing. I will never watch another program on an ABC affiliated station for the rest of my life and that includes any product, either film or otherwise, created by Disney.

I hear that the second installment WILL contain commercials. I suspect a list will be posted of the sponsors and they can expect similar treatment from me and mine.

Really, there can be no half-measures with these people anymore.

President Dwight Eisenhower, Republican

What ever happened to this kind of Republican?

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

A man without honor

"He's a graduate student at one of America's most prestigeous business schools.

He is the leader of his class basketball team.

Without provocation, he hits the leader of the opposing team in the jaw to stop him from making a shot. A few minutes later, he blocks another shot by the same man by smashing his legs on a jump shot.

Years later after both had become successful businessmen, the fellow who'd been struck twice was still wondering what the hell all that had been about. One day he happened to run into the man's brother, now the governor of a state. Could he explain it?

Well, yes. You see, in Texas there are people who get satisfaction from being hard. This was an example of Texas hardness.

This explains a lot, I think."

Source: Ron Suskind's new book, The One Percent Doctrine.

John Dean: Triumph of the Authoritarians

truthout.org

"Contemporary conservatism and its influence on the Republican Party was, until recently, a mystery to me. The practitioners' bludgeoning style of politics, their self-serving manipulation of the political processes, and their policies that focus narrowly on perceived self-interest - none of this struck me as based on anything related to traditional conservatism. Rather, truth be told, today's so-called conservatives are quite radical.

For more than 40 years I have considered myself a "Goldwater conservative," and am thoroughly familiar with the movement's canon. But I can find nothing conservative about the Bush/Cheney White House, which has created a Nixon "imperial presidency" on steroids, while acting as if being tutored by the best and brightest of the Cosa Nostra.

What true conservative calls for packing the courts to politicize the federal judiciary to the degree that it is now possible to determine the outcome of cases by looking at the prior politics of judges? Where is the conservative precedent for the monocratic leadership style that conservative Republicans imposed on the US House when they took control in 1994, a style that seeks primarily to perfect fund-raising skills while outsourcing the writing of legislation to special interests and freezing Democrats out of the legislative process?

How can those who claim themselves conservatives seek to destroy the deliberative nature of the US Senate by eliminating its extended-debate tradition, which has been the institution's distinctive contribution to our democracy? Yet that is precisely what Republican Senate leaders want to do by eliminating the filibuster when dealing with executive business (namely judicial appointments).

Today's Republican policies are antithetical to bedrock conservative fundamentals. There is nothing conservative about preemptive wars or disregarding international law by condoning torture. Abandoning fiscal responsibility is now standard operating procedure. Bible-thumping, finger-pointing, tongue-lashing attacks on homosexuals are not found in Russell Krik's classic conservative canons, nor in James Burham's guides to conservative governing. Conservatives in the tradition of former senator Barry Goldwater and President Ronald Reagan believed in "conserving" this planet, not relaxing environmental laws to make life easier for big business. And neither man would have considered employing Christian evangelical criteria in federal programs, ranging from restricting stem cell research to fighting AIDs through abstinence.

Candid and knowledgeable Republicans on the far right concede - usually only when not speaking for attribution - that they are not truly conservative. They do not like to talk about why they behave as they do, or even to reflect on it. Nonetheless, their leaders admit they like being in charge, and their followers grant they find comfort in strong leaders who make them feel safe. This is what I gleaned from discussions with countless conservative leaders and followers, over a decade of questioning.

I started my inquiry in the mid-1990s, after a series of conversations with Goldwater, whom I had known for more than 40 years. Goldwater was also mystified (when not miffed) by the direction of today's professed conservatives - their growing incivility, pugnacious attitudes, and arrogant and antagonistic style, along with a narrow outlook intolerant of those who challenge their thinking. He worried that the Republican Party had sold its soul to Christian fundamentalists, whose divisive social values would polarize the nation. From those conversations, Goldwater and I planned to study why these people behave as they do, and to author a book laying out what we found. Sadly, the senator's declining health soon precluded his continuing on the project, so I put it on the shelf. But I kept digging until I found some answers, and here are my thoughts.

For almost half a century, social scientists have been exploring authoritarianism. We do not typically associate authoritarianism with our democracy, but as I discovered while examining decades of empirical research, we ignore some findings at our risk. Unfortunately, the social scientists who have studied these issues report their findings in monographs and professional journals written for their peers, not for general readers. With the help of a leading researcher and others, I waded into this massive body of work.

What I found provided a personal epiphany. Authoritarian conservatives are, as a researcher told me, "enemies of freedom, antidemocratic, antiequality, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian and amoral." And that's not just his view. To the contrary, this is how these people have consistently described themselves when being anonymously tested, by the tens of thousands over the past several decades.

Authoritarianism's impact on contemporary conservatism is beyond question. Because this impact is still growing and has troubling (if not actually evil) implications, I hope that social scientists will begin to write about this issue for general readers. It is long past time to bring the telling results of their empirical work into the public square and to the attention of American voters. No less than the health of our democracy may depend on this being done. We need to stop thinking we are dealing with traditional conservatives on the modern stage, and instead recognize that they've often been supplanted by authoritarians."

Gone native

The DNC (Democratic National Committee) developed a bad name with the progressive community over the last couple of decades. Instead of being the representative of the Democratic electorate as a whole, it became a single issue lobby group dedicated to one issue and one issue only: getting Democratic DC-insiders re-elected in spite of the will of the Democratic voters in the reps respective states. We're seeing this played out with the DSCC in Connecticut.

I saw a little of the politiking that went on here in Maryland to keep Howard Dean from being elected chairman of the DNC. You see it now when the heads of the DSCC and the DCCC snipe at him for not pouring cash into their efforts to re-elect the insiders.

The DNC under Dean's leadership is funding a broad-based policy that is Populist by it's very nature and antithetical to the interests of the entrenched Democratic powers who have gone native and who just can't bring themselves to needs and desires of the Great Unwashed Masses.

Steve Gilliard makes a good point in his post The Single Issue Trap...

"In this world, the NAACP is just one more interest group, along with the rest. Real issues of social justice become second place to consumerism and political game playing. Which is why the Green Party went from weak to irrelevant. Instead of developing as an adjunct to the Democratic Party, it wound up riven with factional disputes. Why? Because every idea is valid. Everyone has a voice and leadership is a debate. Which is fine in ordering pizza, but politcs is supposed to create leaders, not serve as a personal temper tantrum.

So I am constantly amazed that people expect NARAL and Planned Parenthood to see a bigger picture. Why should they? They have been trained to be single issue advocates. And those kinds of organizations are dedicated to schmoozing in DC and hiring Hill Rats. It is rarely about what the local members want or a larger picture..."

We need to throw these single issue organizations off the island and start supporting a broad-based organization that is better prepared to do the work needed to, say, protect reproductive rights, environment, etc. One that won't sell out by supporting Republicans (and Corporate Dems) who pay lip-service to these ideals while making sure bills that undermine these causes slip through Congress like greased pigs.

The next time NARAL calls and asks for a donation (and I have donated to them before), I'm telling them I'm giving my money to an organization that has a better chance of protecting woman's reproductive rights.

The DNC.