I'm a gay, progressive, political blogger, born & bred in New York. I started blogging because I was really pissed off at what 8 years of Bush/Cheney did to my country. This is not the America I was brought up to believe in. It's going to take a generation to repair their damage. My intent with this blog is to aggregate news from a progressive viewpoint; not to defend my beliefs or debate conservathugs on the validity of their warped worldview. I don't mind posting contrary viewpoints, as long as they don't include conspiracy theories, flat out lies, GOP talking points or racist, xenophobic & homophobic attacks. Unfortunately, I haven't had many right-leaning visitors who have left comments that fit the bill. Oh, and I like to curse. (Email link available in my profile)
The Spell of Wall Street
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“Seek first to understand, then be understood.” -Anonymous Understanding
Wall Street mentality is a bit like understanding military mentality.
There’s some...
Another $300 Million
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After an unprecedented year just passed, when the United States experienced
a record 12 major disasters --most of them climate related-- costing more
than ...
The Morning Plum
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How GOP benefits politically from blocking fixes to the economy: As I’ve
ranted about here far too often, perhaps the single most important
political dynam...
Park Police Tase Occupy DC
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Park Police Tase Occupy DC
SaveOccupyDC.org -- Jan. 29, 2012. National Park Police tase a peaceful
Occupy DC participant
From: BoldProgressives
Views: 78...
The 'Buffett Rule' in History's Grand Sweep
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*President Obama has proposed a specific new minimum tax rate for
millionaires. Should America's rich feel angry or relieved? We check the
IRS tax data a...
What We're Reading for the Week of January 23rd
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This week’s *What We’re Reading* reflects just how many political issues
are unfolding around the nation. Whether it is a reflection of President
Obama’...
Not much of a shocker, but newly minted Democrat, Arlen Specter, is on board the Sotomayor Supreme Express.
Another one from HuffPo's Ryan grim today:
As far as Sonia Sotomayor is concerned, Sen. Arlen Specter's defection to the Democratic Party couldn't have come at a better time. Specter (Penn.), long the most powerful Republican on the Judiciary Committee, has played pivotal roles in previous Supreme Court nomination battles.
This time he's fighting for the Democrats. On Fox News Sunday, Specter came to Sotomayor's defense when quizzed about a controversial Sotomayor ruling against a group of white firefighters in New Haven, Ct. More broadly, he defended the notion that race is still a factor in American society, which needs to be taken into account.
"I think she was well within the ambit of discretion of a judge. Different judges see issues differently. You have [the] Supreme Court deciding cases 5-4. But I think her judgment there was very sound," he said.
"Is race a factor? It really is in our society. There's no hiding from it. Notwithstanding all of the progress which has been made. [The] New Haven firefighter case, like so many tough ones, you want to be sure that the white applicants get a fair shot, but you want to be sure that minority applicants get a fair shot. It's a tough call. She made [a] justifiable call in my legal opinion."
The second Commie, Pinko, Librul sellout RINO today!
From HuffPo (scroll down piece to last part):
South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham did express concern about Sotomayor's comments regarding the ability of a female Latina to reach a better conclusion than a white man, and called on her to apologize for the remarks, but nonetheless disagreed with Gingrich and Limbaugh:
No, they interject themselves into the debate. They've got an audience to entertain. Newt's a political commentator; I'm a United States senator... I don't think she's a racist.
Two influential Republican senators, Lindsey Graham and Jeff Sessions, broke with controversial comments made by Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh calling President Obama's Supreme Court nominee Sonia S...
Two influential Republican senators, Lindsey Graham and Jeff Sessions, broke with controversial comments made by Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh calling President Obama's Supreme Court nominee Sonia S...
He just leveled loads & loads of high praise on Judge Sonya Sotomayor. He's a goner. They're going to lambaste him all day tomorrow if they find the time between defending the right-wing terrorist's killing of an family planning doctor and and shock that the Obama's came to New York to see a show.
From HuffPost's Ryan Grim:
Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, had effusive words of praise for Sotomayor.
"Let me just say that this lady has got a good record, as Pat said, for a judge," said Sessions, while sitting next to Leahy. "Prosecutor, lawyer, judge, district trial judge, federal judge--she's smart, she's capable."
Sessions didn't end there, adding, "She's got the kind of background you would look for, almost an ideal mix of private practice, trial prosecution and circuit judge. That's strong in her favor."
Sessions warm remarks are an early indication of just how difficult it will be for Republicans to block her nomination.
Former Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-AZ) wants 8 more years, but that’s not the craziest part — he also accuses Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and George Soros of launching a “sneak attack” on the nation’s financial system to hurt the economy.
This should brighten up your morning. It's another example of your Permanent Republican Majority. Michael Steele must be proud.
From HuffPo:
Lest you think this is a parody, I direct you to their website, where they lay out their goals in a lengthy mission statement hailing "Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King Jr., and arguably Jesus [as] the flag-bearers of the true conservative movement."
The "official" lyrics to the Young Cons Anthem can be found here.
From you betcha country comes this asinine article in the Frontiersman by some nutter name Ron Hamman. Ron write this garbage but then asks us not to blame him for asking the question: "...it is important to assert the question does not originate with me, lest someone out there think that I am bringing some new doctrine out to bolster the political climate."
Well I blame you, you piece of shit. Was your article born out of immaculate conception?
But will the Antichrist be a homosexual? Having seen what the Bible says of sodomy, we have no further to look than the book of Daniel, chapter 11 to find our answer. It says, “Neither shall he [Antichrist] regard... the desire of women....” As I said at the onset, I am not the first to draw attention to this, but the verbiage is clear.
From a lost perspective, the reason sex sells, pornography is profitable, and prostitution is “the world’s oldest profession” is mankind’s desire of women. From Christianity’s position, it is part of the glue for the bond of marriage and the propagation of a godly heritage. But homosexuality does not regard this — in their unbridled lusts they burn for their own gender.
But consider this: The time is ripe for such a leader. Indeed, it should not be surprising that the one who is against everything Biblical and Christian should be a partaker of so great a sin; there is no greater way to reject the Creator than to reject your gender and his design for it. And at what other time have we seen such perversion come out of the closets onto our streets, threatening violence if we do not accept their ways?
Wikipedia has banned the Church of Scientology and its members from editing its site after discovering that members of the church were editing articles in order to give the church favorable coverage.
The move is being hailed as "an unprecedented effort to crack down on self-serving edits," and it is the first instance in which Wikipedia has banned a group as large as the Church of Scientology.
Along with Satanism, Scientology and the GOP's friends over at the Moonie newspaper. I've often said that the radical Mormon activists who we're forced to deal with - the ones who forcibly baptize dead Jewish Holocaust victims in an effort to steal their souls, the ones who spend tens of millions in other states to force Christians and others to live according to Mormon views of morality - bear a striking resemblance to Scientologists. We have a Scientology mother ship here in DC, and if you ever talk to any of its inhabitants it's remarkably like talking to activist Mormons. Sweet as pie to a fault until you question them on anything, then the long knives, and the lawyers, come out.
The Pentagon is denying the facts: Photographs of Abu Ghraib torture are even more sexually explicit than first reported, including rape and sodomy, writes The Daily Beast's Scott Horton, who has obtained specific and detailed corroboration of the photos.
The Daily Beast has confirmed that the photographs of abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, which President Obama, in a reversal, decided not to release, depict sexually explicit acts, including a uniformed soldier receiving oral sex from a female prisoner, a government contractor engaged in an act of sodomy with a male prisoner and scenes of forced masturbation, forced exhibition, and penetration involving phosphorous sticks and brooms.
[snip]
In response to the Telegraph account, Bryan G. Whitman, a deputy assistant secretary of Defense, attacked the newspaper. “That news organization has completely mischaracterized the images," he said. “None of the photos in question depict the images that are described in that article.” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, later in the day, widened the assault to a general one against British journalism. “If I wanted to read a writeup today of how Manchester United fared last night in the Champions League Cup, I might open up a British newspaper,” Gibbs said. “If I was looking for something that bordered on truthful news, I'm not entirely sure it'd be in the first pack of clips I'd pick up.”
[snip]
Whitman has used this sort of bludgeoning attack on news organizations before. Ask Michael Isikoff at Newsweek. When Newsweek’s April 30, 2005, issue ran a brief Periscope piece referring to an internal report’s description of an incident in which a Quran was thrown down a toilet, Whitman launched a dramatic attack on the publication, pressuring it to retract and apologize. The report had, it later turned out, been correct. In 2007, the ACLU secured, through a Freedom of Information Act request, a copy of a 2002 FBI report which documented a prisoner’s charge that his Quran has been thrown in the toilet; five other cases of mishandling Qurans were reported, although the Pentagon insisted that none of them amounted to desecration.
The most prominent victim in the past of Whitman’s disinformation may have been none other than Barack Obama. On the campaign trail, in Austin, Texas, candidate Obama said he had gotten a message from an Army captain in Iraq who described how his unit had been shorted in munitions and equipment. I learned from reporters that Whitman started a whispering campaign with the Pentagon press corps telling them (not for attribution) that he didn’t believe Obama’s claims were true. Whitman’s game, however, was stopped by ABC reporter Jake Tapper, who tracked down the captain, interviewed him and fully verified the account.
Bryan Whitman remains on the job in the Pentagon today. But the effort to suppress the shocking photographs is already failing, as they leak to the public and reliable sources verify their authenticity. A senior military officer told me that in the months before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Pentagon officials engaged in strange maneuvers to avoiding viewing the pictures. That, he noted, didn’t make the photos any less real. But it apparently made it easier for Pentagon officials to dissemble about them. That process hasn’t stopped.
There are two kinds of Domestic terrorists. The kind Beck, Hannity, Newt & Rush cater too, and then there are the Neocons. As dangerous as hate-radio & Fox new followers are deep down, they have nothing on the the Neocons.
A new report for a leading neoconservative group that pushes a belligerent "Israel first" agenda of conquest in the Middle East suggests that in future wars the U.S. should make censorship of media official policy and advocates "military attacks on the partisan media" (via MuzzleWatch). The report for JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, was authored by retired U.S. Army Col. Ralph Peters. It appears in JINSA's "flagship publication," The Journal of International Security Affairs. "Today, the United States and its allies will never face a lone enemy on the battlefield. There will always be a hostile third party in the fight," Peters writes, calling the media "the killers without guns."
[snip]
It is, of course, very appropriate that such a despicable battle cry for murdering media workers appears in a JINSA publication. The organization has long boasted an all-star cast of criminal "advisers," among them Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, James Woolsey, John Bolton, and Douglas Feith. JINSA, along with the Project for a New American Century, was one of the premiere groups in shaping U.S. policy during the Bush years and remains a formidable force with Obama in the White House.
Reading Peters' sick and twisted essay reminded me of the report that emerged in late 2005 about an alleged Bush administration plot to bomb al-Jazeera's international headquarters in Qatar, which I covered for The Nation:
"Britain's Daily Mirror reported that during an April 2004 White House meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, George W. Bush floated the idea of bombing al-Jazeera's international headquarters in Qatar. This allegation was based on leaked 'Top Secret' minutes of the Bush-Blair summit. British Attorney General Lord Goldsmith has activated the Official Secrets Act, threatening any publication that publishes any portion of the memo (he has already brought charges against a former Cabinet staffer and a former parliamentary aide). So while we don't yet know the contents of the memo, we do know that at the time of Bush's meeting with Blair, the administration was in the throes of a very public, high-level temper tantrum directed against al-Jazeera. The meeting took place on April 16, at the peak of the first U.S. siege of Fallujah, and al-Jazeera was one of the few news outlets broadcasting from inside the city. Its exclusive footage was being broadcast by every network from CNN to the BBC.
Cheney’s “no middle ground” speech on torture at the American Enterprise Institute arrived with the kind of orchestrated media campaign that he, his boss and Karl Rove patented in the good old days. It was bookended by a pair of Republican attack ads on the Web that crosscut President Obama’s planned closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention center with apocalyptic imagery — graphic video of the burning twin towers in one ad, a roar of nuclear holocaust (borrowed from the L.B.J. “daisy” ad of 1964) in the other.
The speech itself, with 20 mentions of 9/11, struck the same cynical note as the ads, as if the G.O.P. was almost rooting for a terrorist attack on Obama’s watch. “No one wishes the current administration more success in defending the country than we do,” Cheney said as a disingenuous disclaimer before going on to charge that Obama’s “half measures” were leaving Americans “half exposed.” The new president, he said, is unraveling “the very policies that kept our people safe since 9/11.” In other words, when the next attack comes, it will be all Obama’s fault. A new ad shouting “We told you so!” awaits only the updated video.
The Republicans at least have an excuse for pushing this poison. They are desperate. The trio of Pillsbury doughboys now leading the party — Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Cheney — have variously cemented the G.O.P.’s brand as a whites-only men’s club by revoking Colin Powell’s membership and smearing the first Latina Supreme Court nominee as a “reverse racist.” Republicans in Congress have no plausible economic, health care or energy policies to counter Obama’s. The only card left to play is 9/11.
Most of the punditocracy scored the fight on a curve, setting up a false equivalence between the men’s ideas. Cheney’s pugnacious certitude edged out Obama’s law-professor nuance. “On policy grounds, you’ve got a real legitimate fight here,” David Gregory insisted on “Meet the Press” as he regurgitated the former vice president’s argument (“You can’t compromise on these matters”) and questioned whether the president could “really bring” his brand of pragmatism “to the issue of the war on terror.”
One New York Daily News columnist summed up Cheney’s supposed TKO this way: “The key to Cheney’s powerful performance: facts, facts, facts.” But the facts, as usual, were wrong.
At the McClatchy newspapers’ Washington bureau, the reporters Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel detailed 10 whoppers. With selective quotations, Cheney falsified the views of the director of national intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, on the supposed intelligence value of waterboarding. Equally bogus was Cheney’s boast that his administration had “moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and their sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks.” In truth, the Bush administration had lost Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, not least because it started diverting huge assets to Iraq before accomplishing the mission of vanquishing Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. That decision makes us less safe to this very minute.
Ah, those Democratic wimps:
Yet even before Cheney spoke, Congressional Democrats were quaking in fear, purporting with straight faces that the transfer of detainees to “supermax” American prisons constituted a serious security threat. Many of the same senators who signed on to the Iraq war resolution in the fall of 2002 joined the 90-to-6 majority that put a hold on Obama’s Gitmo closure plans.
When the next occurs, it won't be anyone's fault but Bush & Cheney's:
What we need to be doing instead, as Suskind put it, is to “build the thing we don’t have — human intelligence. We need people who are cooperating with us, who step up and help, and who won’t turn away when they see things happening. Hearts and minds — which we’ve botched — must be corrected and corrected quickly. That’s what wins the battle, not going medieval.” It’s not for nothing, after all, that Powell, Gen. David Petraeus and Robert Gates, the secretary of defense — among other military minds — agree with Obama, not Cheney, about torture and Gitmo.
The harrowing truth remains unchanged from what it was before Cheney emerged from his bunker to set Washington atwitter. The Bush administration did not make us safer either before or after 9/11. Obama is not making us less safe. If there’s another terrorist attack, it will be because the mess the Bush administration ignored in Pakistan and Afghanistan spun beyond anyone’s control well before Americans could throw the bums out.
Boss Tweed basically just threatened Joe Sestak -- a real Democrat mind you - because he dares to consider running against Arlen Specter.
From Sam Stein:
Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell sent an unusually blunt message to prospective senatorial candidate Joe Sestak on Friday, saying that if the congressman ran against Arlen Specter in the Democratic primary he would lose and fade into political obscurity.
Appearing on the "Ed Show", Rendell didn't apply even the slightest bit of sugar coating to his advice. Specter, he said, would kill Sestak in a primary largely because he has a history of aiding constituents, has the backing of the party machinery, and is supported by the president.
"I'm a great admirer of Joe Sestak and worked hard to get him elected and re-elected," Rendell said. "And I'm going to work hard to get him re-elected when he runs for Congress next year. Not for the Senate. Joe should not run for the Senate in the Democratic primary. He would get killed."
Gen. Petraeus joined FOX News and Martha MacCallum today and gave a blockbuster interview, but probably not the one Fox expected. Once again, he called for the responsible closure of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay. He also said that mistakes were made after 9/11 and that the Army Field Manual is all that we need to use to interrogate prisoners. In addition, he said that we have to have faith in our judicial system and we should try the Khalid Sheikh Muhammads in a court of law.
Martha tried to give him the ticking time bomb scenario to justify torture and he really didn't bite. He did say maybe an Executive Order could be appropriate, but that it really wasn't necessary. Petraeus repudiated pretty much most of what Limbaugh Republicans and the Rove/Newt/Cheney Party have been saying.
Think Progress reports the Daily Telegraph's stand behind its claims about the new and extremely graphic Abu Ghraib pictures. The reporter form the original piece explained more about the photos.
From ThinkProgress:
This week, the Daily Telegraph reported that the torture photos President Obama recently decided to withhold from the public depict “rape and sexual abuse.” The Pentagon denied the report, saying, “None of the photos in question depict the images that are described in that article.” But yesterday, Scott Horton reported that he has confirmed that the photos do, in fact, “depict sexually explicit acts,” including “a government contractor engaged in an act of sodomy with a male prisoner and scenes of forced masturbation,” as well as “penetration involving phosphorous sticks and brooms.” Horton writes further:
David Gergen wrote a wonderful piece on Barack Obama's nomination of Judge Sonya Sotomayor, and what really means:
To watch the first African-American President from a broken family promote to the U.S. Supreme Court an Hispanic woman from a broken neighborhood was one of those moments that Americans will long savor. In his announcement today of his first nominee to the Court, President Obama quickly brought back memories of why the country elected him.
I was in the White House in 1981 when President Reagan nominated Sandra Day O’Connor as the first woman to join the Court, and I can remember greeting her in Chief of Staff Jim Baker’s office just before the announcement. It was Reagan’s first nomination, too – a highly symbolic occasion – and enormous pride flowed through every one of us present that day.
President Obama’s announcement stirred those same, overwhelming feelings. It is said that a president campaigns in poetry and governs in prose. Today was almost all poetry. It is likely to be remembered as one of the President’s finest hours. read more...
The President discusses the breadth and depth of experience held by his nominee for the Supreme Court. In the course of a life that began in a housing project in the South Bronx and brought her to the pinnacle of her profession, Judge Sonia Sotomayor accumulated more experience on the federal bench than any incoming Supreme Court Justice in the past 100 years, touching nearly every aspect of our legal system. May 30, 2009.
Full Transcript:
This week, I nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the U.S. Court of Appeals to replace Justice David Souter, who is retiring after nearly two decades on the Supreme Court. After reviewing many terrific candidates, I am certain that she is the right choice. In fact, there has not been a nominee in several generations who has brought the depth of judicial experience to this job that she offers.
Judge Sotomayor’s career began when she served as an Assistant District Attorney in New York, prosecuting violent crimes in America’s largest city. After leaving the DA’s office, she became a litigator, representing clients in complex international legal disputes. She was appointed to the U.S. District Court, serving six years as a trial judge where she presided over hundreds of cases. And most recently, she has spent eleven years on the U.S. Court of Appeals, our nation’s second highest court, grappling with some of the most difficult constitutional and legal issues we face as a nation. She has more experience on the federal bench than any incoming Supreme Court Justice in the past 100 years. Quite simply, Judge Sotomayor has a deep familiarity with our judicial system from almost every angle.
And her achievements are all the more impressive when you consider what she had to overcome in order to achieve them. Judge Sotomayor grew up in a housing project in the South Bronx; her parents came to New York from Puerto Rico during the Second World War. Her father was a factory worker with a third grade education; when she was just nine years old, he passed away. Her mother worked six days a week as a nurse to provide for her and her brother, buying the only set of encyclopedias in the neighborhood and sending her children to Catholic school. That’s what made it possible for Judge Sotomayor to attend two of America’s leading universities, graduating at the top of her class at Princeton University, and studying at Yale Law School where she won a prestigious post as an editor of the school’s Law Journal.
These many years later, it was hard not to be moved by Judge Sotomayor’s mother, sitting in the front row at the White House, her eyes welling with tears, as her daughter – who had come so far, for whom she sacrificed so much – was nominated to the highest court in the land.
And this is what makes Judge Sotomayor so extraordinary. Even as she has reached the heights of her profession, she has never forgotten where she began. She has faced down barriers, overcome difficult odds, and lived the American dream. As a Justice of the Supreme Court, she will bring not only the experience acquired over the course of a brilliant legal career, but the wisdom accumulated over the course of an extraordinary journey – a journey defined by hard work, fierce intelligence, and the enduring faith that, in America, all things are possible.
It is her experience in life and her achievements in the legal profession that have earned Judge Sotomayor respect across party lines and ideological divides. She was originally named to the U.S. District Court by the first President Bush, a Republican. She was appointed to the federal Court of Appeals by President Clinton, a Democrat. She twice has been overwhelmingly confirmed by the U.S. Senate. And I am gratified by the support for this nomination voiced by members of the legal community who represent views from across the political spectrum. There are, of course, some in Washington who are attempting to draw old battle lines and playing the usual political games, pulling a few comments out of context to paint a distorted picture of Judge Sotomayor’s record. But I am confident that these efforts will fail; because Judge Sotomayor’s seventeen-year record on the bench – hundreds of judicial decisions that every American can read for him or herself – speak far louder than any attack; her record makes clear that she is fair, unbiased, and dedicated to the rule of law. As a fellow judge on her court, appointed by Ronald Reagan, said recently, "I don’t think I’d go as far as to classify her in one camp or another. I think she just deserves the classification of outstanding judge."
Congress returns this week and I hope the confirmation process will begin without delay. No nominee should be seated without rigorous evaluation and hearing; I expect nothing less. But what I hope is that we can avoid the political posturing and ideological brinksmanship that has bogged down this process, and Congress, in the past. Judge Sotomayor ought to be on the bench when the Supreme Court decides what cases to hear this year and I’m calling on Democrats and Republicans to be thorough, and timely in dealing with this nomination.
As President, there are few responsibilities more serious or consequential than the naming of a Supreme Court Justice. The members of our highest court are granted life tenure. They are charged with applying principles put to paper more than two centuries ago to some of the most difficult questions of our time. And the impact of their decisions extends beyond an administration, but for generations to come.
This is a decision that I have not taken lightly and it is one that I am proud to have made. I know that Justice Sotomayor will serve this nation with distinction. And when she ascends those marble steps to assume her seat on the Supreme Court, bringing a lifetime of experience on and off the bench, America will have taken another important step toward realizing the ideal that is chiseled above its entrance: Equal justice under the law.
Be prepared from a KKK rally near you this July 4th. This is what real racism looks like. The kind Glenn Back, Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity -- and all rest of the hate-radio/Fixed news nutters support wholeheartedly. Just because they don't go to these kinds of rallies -- in hoods and with burning crosses -- doesn't mean they don't feel exactly the same way. Hell, they can barely contain the facade now that Obama has nominated a strong Latino woman to the highest court, despite knowing she'll be confirmed no matter what they say or do -- their racism and xenophobia couldn't be controlled.
Form the Anti-Defamation League (ADL):
The Tea Party phenomenon, which began with anti-tax rallies staged across the country on April 15, 2009, will continue as activists in almost every state are planning similar events on July 4. Notably, white supremacists are again planning to participate. As they have done with other political and social issues, for example, promoting the Ron Paul campaign and using the immigration debate, white supremacists and anti-Semites are planning to exploit Tea Parties to disseminate their hateful views and recruit a larger following.
Extremists plan to recruit at Tea Parties
Stormfront, the most popular white supremacist Internet forum, is home to discussion between extremists eager to influence the events. In addition to circulating a list of local organizers and promoting planned rallies, Stormfront members are trying to find ways to involve themselves in the events. In posts to the forum, many voice their intent to attend the Tea parties for the purpose of cultivating an "organized grassroots White mass movement."
So on a flight to London over the weekend I caught the Bristol Palin magazine cover and was blown away. What does it take to get discredited as a moralizing right-wing ”family values” merchant these days?
Race, gender, and power. Sotomayor's nomination has turned the low-simmering feud in the American right into a full blown war.
[snip]
After a week of escalating race and gender rhetoric from the right over the Sotomayor nomination, it's now looking like some in the Republican Party -- those concerned with actually getting elected -- have become alarmed by the political damage the more extreme members of their party may be doing and are moving to rein in the vitriol. It's the starkest example yet of an interesting division within the right, one that has been apparent for some time, but which the Sotomayor nomination has not only crystalized but accelerated: the right-wing bomb-throwers obsessed with ideological purity versus the right-wing pragmatists who want the party to actually win election again some day....
I meant to blog this last week, but it got lost in my bookmarks. HuffPo's Bill Mann looks further into how & why the right dominates radio:
From Bill Mann:
Ever wonder why the right wing continues to dominate talk radio, even as it loses elections?
"Your Huffington Post piece showed only the tip of the iceberg," a major talk-show figure e-mailed last month following my blog here on Rush Limbaugh's empire being built initially by giving his show away for free to hundreds of smaller-market talk stations.
My veteran radio source, assured anonymity, added, "The main story here is vertical integration in the radio business" and the way the big urban talk stations get their programs.
Vertical integration: Precisely what the federal government has moved to ban in the television and movie industries with anti-trust actions. But the radio business has gotten a free pass.
Premiere Radio Networks, which syndicates righties Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Dr. Laura, among others, is owned by the nation's largest radio-station conglomerate, Clear Channel. Clear Channel, thanks to FCC deregulation, was allowed to gobble up over 1000 radio stations -- including 16 of the most powerful, (lower-case) clear-channel AM stations in major markets...
Media Matters as compiled all the racist, xenophobic attacks on Judge Sonya Sotomayor since she was nominated to the Supreme Court:
Yesterday, Media Matters released a special report noting that in coverage of Obama's announcement, the media have advanced numerous myths and falsehoods about Sotomayor. In some cases, the media assert the falsehoods themselves; in others, they report unchallenged the claims of others.
The report suggests that in addition to evaluating these claims on their merits, the media should also consistently report that conservatives were reportedly very clear about their intentions to oppose Obama's nominee, no matter who it was. Their attacks must be assessed in the context of their reported plans to use the confirmation process to, among other things, "help refill depleted coffers and galvanize a movement demoralized by Republican electoral defeats."
In all, this week, Media Matters released more than 100 research items, blog posts, video clips, and columns surrounding media coverage of the Supreme Court and Sotomayor's nomination.
As the week went on, it became clearer that Sotomayor would be a victim of attacks from conservatives in the media reminiscent of those on Obama:
Read the rest of this incredible accounting of the lunatic fringe's seriously deranged attacks on Judge Sotomayor.
In countdown's second spot, Keith looks at the increasing attack on Judge Sonya Sotomayor that have become even more vile and more outrageous as the week went on:
Check out Countdown's next segment in the post above, GOP steps up attacks on Sotomayor. In it, Keith looks at the continues and escalating attacks on Judge Sotomayor.
Greg Sargent's reports on Carl Levin's Smack down of Dick.
From Greg Sargent:
There’s some important news about Dick Cheney and torture in a speech that Senator Carl Levin gave before the Foreign Policy Association this week.
Specifically: Levin confirmed that he’d seen the classified CIA documents that Cheney has been asking the CIA to declassify and release — and said that they don’t prove Cheney’s claim that torture worked by any stretch.
Levin’s comments are highly newsworthy because they give us the most detailed picture yet of what’s in the documents Cheney wants. You can watch Levin’s speech right here at TPM. This is what Levin said about the documents:
Mr. Cheney has also claimed that the release of classified documents would prove his view that the techniques worked. But those classified documents say nothing about numbers of lives saved, nor do the documents connect acquisition of valuable intelligence to the use of the abusive techniques. I hope that the documents are declassified so that people can judge for themselves what is fact and what is fiction.
Carl Levin calls Dick Cheney's bluff. Not only does he calls Cheney a liar, he agrees that the documents that Cheney's keeps whining about should be released.
From DKos' BarbinMD:
Yesterday, Carl Levin (D-MI), the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, gave a speech where he used phrases like "directly contrary," "false statements," "could not be further from the truth," and "colossal misrepresentation," to describe Dick Cheney's recent media tour to defend torture.
No seriously. This is real. You just have to read this latest conspiracy theory from the Permanent Republican Majority, as told by Media Matters' Eric Boehlert, to understand how far gone they are:
One of the questions I get asked most often as I do interviews about my new book, Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press, is why is it that conservatives trail so far behind liberals when it comes to building their side of the blogosphere into something important and influential. The simple answer is that so many right-wing bloggers aren't serious people and the nonsense they blog about revolves around loopy conspiracy theories that, aside for providing comic relief, aren't really good for anything.
Which bring me to the budding Obama scandal that's been hatched this week within the right-wing blogosphere, and which has all the hallmarks of previous failed Obama conspiracy theories that bloggers excitedly chased. The latest to be embraced is the idea that the Obama White House, as part of the restructuring that the auto maker has been forced to undergo, personally selected which Chrysler dealership would be closed. Not only that, but the Obama White House punished dealerships whose owners who gave campaign contributions to Republicans.
Another person who would know, calls Cheney not just a liar, but says he "literally cost us hundreds if not thousands of American lives."
From Brave New Films:
Dick Cheney says that torturing detainees has saved American lives. That claim is patently false. Cheney's torture policy was directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of American servicemen and women.
Matthew Alexander was the senior military interrogator for the task force that tracked down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq and, at the time, a higher priority target than Osama bin Laden. Mr. Alexander has personally conducted hundreds of interrogations and supervised over a thousand of them.
If you want a good laugh and some heartening news this morning, read this short piece from Dko's wmtriallawyer -- who is pretty certain about his claims that Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor is a done deal. And, if you follow him regularly, he's usually right
I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to be amused...or upset...or just shaking my head at the pathetic. But I think I'll take Door #3, please.
Let me state the foregone conclusion that seems to be getting lost on the punditry, some bloggers, and a few in the mainstream media:
Welcome to the Supreme Court, Madame Justice Sotomayor.
Yeah, you heard me right. JUSTICE Sotomayor. It's a done deal by the August recess...and she'll be confirmed by more than 70 votes.
Let me say again: it's a done deal. That's for all you out there claiming that JUSTICE Sotomayor doesn't have the intellectual chops to be on the Supreme Court...despite the fact your OWN intellectual prowess demonstrates you failed 3rd Grade math.
The Republican's will wear the label of racist for the next generation of two (see Newt Gingrich).
This post from DKos' BarbinMD is short, so here it is in full:
Just a few days ago, the Republican Party was struggling to disassociate themselves from the Party of No label, and now, with the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court of the United State, the new battle cry is, "We are not racists":
Lionel Sosa, a Texas-based Republican ad maker who designed Latino outreach for GOP presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, said that opposing Sotomayor "would be one more nail in the Republicans' image coffin in terms of Latino voters."
"When you're anti the first Latina on the Supreme Court, you're anti-my-family. . . . I would take it that these people are anti-Latino," Sosa added. "The worst thing the Republicans can do is oppose her."
The Senate's Republican leadership, aware of the potential pitfalls, began conferring Tuesday with several Latino strategists, seeking their assessment of conservative opposition.
The GOP's dilemma on Sotomayor is the latest example of the party's internal struggle over how to reinvent itself at a time that its voter base is increasingly dominated by Southern, conservative white men.
Which leads us to a classic case of, rock, meet hard place, because the very people given the "leaders of the party" label -- the Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich wing of the party -- aren't struggling at all. They've come out against Sotomayor in full attack mode, calling her, among other things, a "reverse racist," a "radical," and a "disaster." And it probably doesn't help when the media outreach person for the Republican National Committee is retweeting claims of racism against Sotomayor.
As Mr. Aftergood notes in the piece, this is great - but it's what comes of it that matters.
From the WaPo:
President Obama this afternoon directed his national security adviser and senior Cabinet officials to examine whether the government keeps too much information secret.
In a memo, Obama acknowledged problems with excessive classification of documents kept from the public eye for years and affirmed that he remains "committed to operating with an unprecedented level of openness."
Obama tasked national security adviser Gen. James Jones to canvas executive branch officials about their procedures for handling classified information and to make recommendations about better information sharing.
[snip]
Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, praised the move as a way to "set the wheels in motion."
"This is music to the ears of many of us," Aftergood said, "but the hard work remains to be done -- how to translate these goals into policies."
All of Newt's & Rush's attack on Judge Sotomayor are bullshit. As Keith Olbermann pointed out last night, the faux rage and despicable attacks are based on HALF the actual quote. Judge Sotomayor was saying exactly the OPPOSITE of what she's being accused of by the usual suspects.
He just can't help himself. This is what Newt Gingrich, an actual racist, tweeted from Auschwitz yesterday about Judge Sotomayor. Keep in mind, that everything he (and Rush) are referring too is HALF her actual quote.
From ThinkProgress:
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich posted on his Twitter feed today a call for Judge Sonia Sotomayor to withdraw her nomination because she is a “Latina woman racist.” As evidence of her supposed racism, Gingrich posted an out-of-context quote from a lecture that Sotomayor gave in 2001 on diversity. Gingrich wrote, “new racism is no better than old racism” and added:
The White House responds. Personally, I thought it was a week response. People like Newt should be shamed publicly, not talked to in a third grader teacher's tone:
Then the RNC made it an official Rethug line of attack by retweeting Newt's Auschwitz Attack.
From Greg Sargent:
Does Todd Herman, the director of new media for the Republican National Committee, agree that Sonia Sotomayor is a racist?
Then we have Sen. Orrin Hatch smacking down Newt's line of attack.
Also from ThinkProgress::
Earlier today, ThinkProgress noted how former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) attacked Judge Sonia Sotomayor on his Twitter feed today as a “Latina woman racist” who should withdraw her nomination. On CNN this afternoon, Wolf Blitzer asked Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), who sits on the Judiciary Committee, if he agreed with Gingrich. “No, I don’t agree with that,” replied Hatch. Watch it:
ABC News’ Jake Tapper asked if the ousted speaker’s charge would “impact [his] former colleagues on Hill?” So far, it hasn’t affected Hatch, but as Media Matters has documented, much of the conservative movement has rushed to use out of context comments to tag Sotomayor as a “racist” and a “bigot.”
Never mind that all of this is bullshit. As Keith Olbermann pointed out last night, the faux rage and despicable attacks are based on HALF the actual quote. Judge Sotomayor was saying exactly the OPPOSITE of what she's being accused of by the usual suspects.
And just for add meassure, MSNBC's in house racist, Pat Buchanan got into the act.
We can always count on Buchanan to advocate in favor of a system that guarantees advantages for white men. With his arguments that slavery was a good thing for black people (“It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million”), wishing for a country where whites comprise 89 or 90 percent of the population, or saying that Hispanics “do not wish to assimilate,” Buchanan has little credibility left on issues of what is fair on race and gender.
“It’s like watching a dead fish flop around on the deck,” said Lawrence O’Donnell at the end of the segment. “You’re dead on this one, Pat. It’s all over.”
As far as I'm concerned, the more people like Newt & Rush continue taking these lines of attacks against the first Latino Supremer Court nominee, the quicker - and hard - that final nail in the GOP's "affiliation" coffin is hammered in. They're at 21% now. I can't imagine how the remaining handful of those in the Latino community who still do, will be able to continue calling themselves, Republican?
In case you missed this TPM Exclusive, Arlen Specter has a primary challenger. If nothing else, this will forces Specter to remain loyal at least through 2o10. Which I suspect is more of what Sestak is trying to ensure than actually taking on the Democratic establishment as a whole. His running can only be good for us in the long wrong.
From TPM:
Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA) is privately telling supporters that he intends to run for Senate, TPMDC has confirmed.
"He intends to get in the race," says Meg Infantino, the Congressman's sister, who works at Sestak for Congress. "In the not too distant future, he will sit down with his wife and daughter to make the final decision."
The move would constitute a primary challenge to Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA), who intends to run for re-election in 2010, after having switched parties earlier this year.
StopBeck is having their first big fundraiser! If you believe in the work Angelo does day in and say out on behalf of accountability in the media, please give whatever you can. If you're a progressive blogger that holds regular fundraisers of your own, there's NO excuse for you not to give. This guy is doing the real dirty work. Work I know I couldn't do. Please step of to the plate on this one.
Elephants In The Room – January 30, 2012
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A daily look at the Republican presidential primary campaign.
Newt Gingrich’s campaign launches TalesofMitt.com, highlighting Mitt
Romney’s flip flops.
...
Romney pulling ahead in Florida
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Sad. It would have been fun to watch Gingrich really muck things up. Via
Slate:
Mitt Romney widened his lead in Florida over the weekend as the last fumes ...
The* Journal *Hires Dentists To Do Heart Surgery
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After reportedly rejecting a climate change essay by 255 members of the
National Academy of Sciences in 2010, the *Wall Street Journal *has
published a f...
How Newt Gingrich Crippled Congress
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Alex Seitz-Wald
No single person bears more responsibility for how much Americans hate
Congress than Newt Gingrich. Here's what he did to it.
