Ted Kennedy Has a Brain Tumor

Crap.

527 Follow-up to That Last Post

There's been a lot going around about how Obama's trying to stamp out independent organizations, especially 527s. (Good bit on it in the Washington Post.)

I don't think I need to tell you that this ain't gonna work. Progressive 527s don't just exist to get Dems elected, but to threaten to not help Dems get elected unless they act, well, progressive. Of course Obama's going to be against that, when he's got a fundraising machine of his very own.

But his fundraising machine won't be useful when you're trying to put the squeeze on him. That requires time, money, and personnel, all of which he ain't gonna pony up the dough for.

Plus, let's be honest: negative campaigning WILL happen. When it does, Obama doesn't want to be directly tied to it. He CERTAINLY doesn't want to have fundraised for it. McCain's just going through the motions; he'll be setting the dogs loose just as soon as Obama's the official nominee. If the Dems need to respond in kind, they'll need to let the "B-B-B-BUT SAMANTHA POWER GOT FIRED!" reaction go, and start doing some comparisons. And if it can't be on Obama's dime? Then it'll have to be on someone else's.

Agonist: Obama's Anti-Blogginess?

Interesting bit on The Agonist by Ian Welsh about how Obama doesn't really care about blogs, but how that kind of makes sense because they didn't deliver anything to him.

Clinton and McCain have always been more blog-friendly, which is probably part of the reason why Clinton has managed to survive as long as she has; Clinton-backing blogs get a LOT of campaign support, even when the fix is undoubtedly in.

Anyway, Ian:

Progressive national bloggers as a group did not go pro-Obama until Edwards dropped out. Also, in most cases the readers were pro-Obama first, not the other way around. Obama reached our audience without going through us, and sees no reason to bother with outreach to us. Bloggers who now support Obama do so despite the fact that Obama can't be bothered to do blogger outreach.

Obama only works with groups who can deliver votes he can't easily get on his own. So SEIU has a voice. We do not because we did not deliver our readers, he got them on his own.

The two things we can do for Obama that matters are media pushback and atacking McCain. But we will do those things whether he's nice to us or not, and he may not even appreciate us attacking McCain, since he very clearly wants top-down control over message with no freelancers.

There is zero ROI on spending any time on us, for Obama, at least in the short term. Therefore Obama doesn't spend any time on us. He also, personally, finds us boring, and has said so.

This will come back to bite Obama if or when he's president and the bloom is off, and he finds he has few real friends amongst bloggers and thus amongst those who have some influence with the base. But that's a year and a half to two years down the road. I doubt he's thinking it through that far, or he may think that his charisma and skill is such that he can keep his followers so happy that they will scream us under if we dare criticize him when he, say, leaves a huge residual force in Iraq (or whatever.) I doubt it, because most bloggers will really only turn on Obama when the base starts being disillusioned. But, as I say, that's a long way out and is irrelevant to him right now.

Yeah, I find this a bit counterproductive as well, if only because bloggers have become really good at focusing resources on key races and (in some cases) making the primary campaigns of "Blue Dogs" really, really dicey.

Now, Welsh seems peeved, but it's still kind of makes sense. Obama isn't building on a blog model so much as a social networking model. He doesn't NEED DailyKos, becuase he has my.barackobama.com to serve as his hub, and it's based more on a Facebook-style online networking model than a Kos-style blog community model. People on his campaign can serve as the kingmakers, rather than the bloggers. Bloggers just aren't key to the process.

It shouldn't be a surprise, either. It's been the case from the beginning. Obama has always been pretty clear that he's not a big fan of the enormous partisanship of bloggers. While I thoroughly disagree with him on that, it's certainly consistent. It's Obama, not Edwards. Nonsense about the National Journal aside, he's by no means the most liberal leader in the Democratic party.

But Ian is very much right about the possible consequences. The real story coming out of this election is not my.barackobama.com, because that's a lightning strike that's unlikely to happen again. The real story is the importance of small donations, and the utter irrelevance of the big DLC-style donors that were the lifeblood of the Clinton campaign. While Obama is likely to become president, the true shocker is that Clinton didn't win in the first place; that the machine backing her lost so badly.

As I said a while back, bloggers will benefit enormously from that machine's decline. Obama can't replace it; no single president could. No, that will be resolved on a much bigger scale, and the successes that American bloggers HAVE had will put them in a good position to take advantage of the situation.

And once the sheen is off the president, he'll need to draw on the bloggers' resources. And all this benign neglect now is only going to increase the asking price when it matters.

On the Broader "Engagement" Issue...

The question here is absurdly simple. Do you want to conquer Iran or not?

If you don't, you must acknowledge that you will eventually have to talk to them.

If you do, then you can legitimately claim that talking with them is unnecessary "appeasement", stirring up the ghosts of WWII, because you desire the same conclusion.

Everybody knows this, even if they don't say it.

So the question then becomes: what are the "no talking" people really saying?

Well, it's pretty clear, isn't it?

"What'd He Do, Kevin? What'd He Do?"

I don't praise Tweety often. I can barely stand to watch Tweety most of the time.

But, honestly, I'll give Chris Matthew credit here. This, right here:



Was an absolutely beautiful smackdown. An ignorant little Republican troll who exists only to feed raw meat to other ignorant Republicans got his ass absolutely handed to him, and rightly so. He hadn't the faintest idea what WWII was about beyond his talking points. When somebody doesn't even know what Chamberlain did, but just knows to label him an "appeaser", you know you need not waste your time with this waste of flesh.

But you know what? The real idiot here isn't Kevin James. It's the guy who pays him. Why does he have a radio show? He doesn't give good Radio Voice, he's not smart enough to be honestly controversial, and he doesn't appear to have an especially impressive background. He's just a jumped-up lawyer, and probably not even a good one at that. A good lawyer would be able to BS this.

Hat tip: TPM

Haloperidol is an Anti-Psychotic

It's used in order to calm persistent aggressiveness and hallucination in those with truly severe psychiatric disorders. A normal dosage is 0.5 twice a day; a maximal dose is 5 milligrams, three times daily. A hospital will only use up to 10 milligrams in an emergency situation.

The Department of Homeland Security is Injecting 30 to 40-- IN HEALTHY, COMPLIANT, NON-AGGRESSIVE DEPORTEES.

Well, that and a cocktail of other powerful drugs.

Here's what happened to one deportee:

Even some people who had been violent in the past proved peaceful the day they were sent home. "Dt calm at this time," says the first entry, using shorthand for "detainee," in the log for the January 2007 deportation of Yousif Nageib to his native Sudan. In requesting drugs for his deportation, an immigration officer had noted that Nageib, 40, had once fled to Canada to avoid an assault charge and had helped instigate a detainee uprising while in custody. But on the morning of his departure, the log says, he "is handcuffed and states he will do what we say." Still, he was injected in his right buttock with a three-drug cocktail.

In one printout of Nageib's medical log, next to the entry saying he was calm, is a handwritten asterisk. It was put there by Timothy T. Shack, then medical director of the immigration health division, as he reviewed last year's sedation cases. Next to the asterisk, in his neat, looping handwriting, Shack placed a single word: "Problem."

He suffered from no mental illness, and was perfectly compliant. He wasn't even supposed to be deported yet: his case was still under appeal.

When he landed in Lagos, Nigeria, Afolabi Ade was unable to talk.

"Every time I tried to force myself to speak, I couldn't, because my tongue was . . . twisted. . . . I thought I was going to swallow it," Ade, 33, recalled in an interview. "I was nauseous. I was dizzy."

As he was being flown back to Africa, his American wife alerted his parents there that he was on his way. His father was waiting at the Lagos airport. It was the first time in three years that they had seen one another. Shocked by how woozy the young man was, his father decided not to take him home and frighten the rest of the family. Instead, he checked his son into a hotel.

Ade was in the hotel for four days before the effects of the drugs began to abate.

Citizens of the United States of America, meet your Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. Your tax dollars hard at work.

(They have a lovely careers page if you'd like to sign up. Apparently it's Where Leaders Go to Work!)

Edit: Fixed some quotation issues.

Ollie North, Novelist-Hero

I didn't think Seth McFarlane was this funny anymore, but check it out:



Good stuff.

Einstein an Athiest?

Maybe, maybe not, but he did call the bible 'pretty childish' at one point.

The letter up for sale, written to philosopher Eric Gutkind in January 1954, suggests his views on religion did not mellow with age.

In it, Einstein said that "the word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."

"For me," he added, "the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions."

Addressing the idea that the Jews are God's chosen people, Einstein wrote that "the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."

Bloomsbury spokesman Richard Caton said the auction house was "100 percent certain" of the letter's authenticity. It is being offered at auction for the first time, by a private vendor.

That said, it's quite possible he's not an atheist. There are a few indicators that he's more of a Deist- someone who believes that God may have build the machinery of the universe, but doesn't tinker with it. That's the God that a lot of enlightenment figures (and American Founding Fathers) believed in, and certainly not the personal Savior of, say, modern evangelicalism.

It probably won't change the battle between hardline theism and the increasingly strident "bright" atheist movement much, but it does provide a bit of context, and a reaction to the "chosen people" concept in Judaism that you don't see aired much in the western world. Interesting stuff.

"Traitors to the cause of economics as a whole"

Over on Crooked Timber, Kathy G. is finding out via the minimum wage debate what many of us have known for years, and which is going to cause a lot of heartache among Obama supporters who think his staff are "non-ideological pragmatists":

Yes, Virginia, economists can be ideologues.

(Especially at the University of Chicago.)

Quake Kills Thousands in Western China

What the New York Times said.

The earthquake was the worst to hit China since the Tangshan earthquake of 1976 when more than 240,000 people died.

The 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit in Sichuan Province on Monday afternoon, and the death toll steadily increased throughout the evening, raising concerns that the number could go far higher.

By 11.40 p.m. local time, the state news agency Xinhua quoted local authorities as saying that the number of dead had risen to 8,533 in Sichuan Province alone. Provincial disaster relief officials said that 3,000 to 5,000 people were feared dead in Beichuan County where roughly 80 percent of the buildings were reportedly destroyed.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who arrived in the earthquake region on Monday night, described the situation as a “severe disaster” and called for “calm, confidence, courage and efficient organization.”

President Hu Jintao ordered an “all out” effort to aid people in the region and soldiers were dispatched for disaster relief efforts. Minutes after the western temblor, a second, smaller quake struck hundreds of miles away, in an outer district of Beijing. Thousands of office workers were evacuated, but no damage was reported in the city, which is preparing to play host to the Olympics in August.

Sorry, nothing pithy for this.

Skewin' Right

Well, this is cute. Doug Schoen has a bushel of advice for Obama in an editorial in the WSJ. Since it is the WSJ, though, every bit of it is advice that would be well-suited for a Republican.

I mean, look at this:

First, and obviously symbolically, he must start wearing the flag lapel pin. He simply cannot afford to raise doubts about his patriotism.

More substantively, he must also unabashedly support measures that reflect and emphasize his commitment to traditional American values.

For example, he should commit to enhancing and strengthening the earned income tax credit, to provide tax relief to the working poor and to continue transferring people from welfare to work. This will demonstrate his preference for hard work and initiative as opposed to entitlement programs.

Mr. Obama must also demonstrate concretely that he is sympathetic to the victims of crime -- in ways that go beyond the abstract rhetoric of his March 18 speech on race relations in Philadelphia. He needs to make clear, in no uncertain terms, that he understands American concerns about law and order, and that he puts public safety at the top of his priorities. To be sure, there is an increasing role for rehabilitation in the criminal justice system. But Mr. Obama must emphasize first and foremost that he is on the side of law-abiding people.

To win southwestern states such as Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico, he must demonstrate his intention to secure our borders, and to integrate those immigrants who are here into American society with a clear path to citizenship. Mr. Obama should also reemphasize his support for the rights of gun owners to hunt and use firearms safely and responsibly.

On foreign policy, Mr. Obama must refute the presumption that he is not fully committed to the war on terror, or that he believes every problem can be solved by negotiating with the leaders of rogue nations. He must reassure people that he understands diplomacy has its limits. Part of this reassurance should consist of a speech that Mr. Obama should give on the subject of what Ronald Reagan called "American exceptionalism" -- still a core value for most Americans, and particularly swing voters. Our role in the world, and our unique democratic experience, make us a nation that has to be prepared to stand alone if absolutely necessary.

So the politician who is supposed to transcend old politics should prove himself by...acting exactly like a moderate Republican?

I mean, look at the stuff I bolded. "secure our borders"? "committed to the war on terror"? "On the side of law-abiding people?" "Traditional American values?"

And to cap it all off, AMERICAN GODDAMN EXCEPTIONALISM???

You must be joking.

Yes, buddy, I'm aware that you (barely) won Tennessee for Clinton in 1996. Guess what? It isn't 1996. Triangulation doesn't work anymore. It never did, really, which is why your ilk kept getting beaten over and over and over again in Congressional elections across the country, and why your chosen president is best remembered for enacting policies that make Republicans far happier than Democrats.

(Which is one of the under-discussed reasons why his wife got smoked by Obama, but I digress.)

And for the comedy coup d'etat, I give you the last paragraph:

If Barack Obama is going to win the election, he needs to be able to fight the contest on the core economic issues that clearly work to the Democrats' advantage -- such as job creation, expanding access to health care, and providing relief to homeowners who have trouble paying their mortgages. But unless he is able to present himself as being part of the mainstream on core cultural and values issues, the Republican attack machine will be able to make this election about issues having little to do with the economy and our role in the world.

Ah yes. The siren call of DLC-style triangulation. I've asked before, I'll ask again. Does this ever work?

Really?

When the candidate isn't already possessing enough advantages that he probably doesn't need to pull this in the first place?

Is anybody, in 2008, still naive enough to think that positioning yourself in the middle of the field won't cause the Republicans to run the goalposts past you and attack you from the new middle? I didn't figure they were. It certainly didn't explain 2006, and by even trying it, you're guaranteed to piss off the online supporters that form the bedrock of 21st century fundraising.

I don't know, maybe this guy is a former Hillary supporter that's trying to sabotage Obama's campaign, although I can't see Axelrod, Plouffe et al being this dumb. I certainly hope not, anyway.

Edit: Oh, crap, that's where I know the name from. He's the strategist at Mark Penn's outfit. He's also the guy who said, in the Washington Post, that Clinton should keep on hammering Obama with as many negative attacks as possible, while repeating that "most liberal member" nonsense!

I'd be surprised if Obama's people even acknowledge his existence.

"But Whitey Loves Me!"

When your campaign is reduced to barely concealed race baiting, you need to stop, Sen. Clinton.

Edit: I should probably add to this; it's a big story.

But, honestly, what else is left to say? Clinton's done, the nation is dismissing her, and she's been reduced to trolling the media. She probably doesn't even care if she's called racist, now, because at least it'll keep her name in the headlines. Which is the last thing anybody needs. It's over.

Symbolism, Eh?

The Victory Fund.

That's what the Canadian Liberals are calling their new donation scheme, where you sign up to have ten or twenty or however-many dollars pulled out of your bank account per month. It's a nice idea; people sign up for this sort of thing and then benignly forget about it, like a subscription to an old MMO that you used to play, but can't be bothered to cancel.

But don't think about that. Think about the name. "The Victory Fund."

What does it conjure up?

It conjures up images of WWII. Of sacrifice and victory against terrible, maniacal, mad fascist dictators. Of a glorious struggle, perhaps the last truly glorious struggle the world has ever known.

And they're using it as a weapon against the most secretive and all-controlling Prime Minister Canada has ever known; one who (possibly) cheated his way to victory, cloaks himself in an image of "the common man", and who has nothing but contempt for those who disagree with him.

God DAMN, these guys might be better at messaging than I thought.

Somebody Find a Fork

North Carolina was a blowout for Obama, and Indiana is, at best, a squeaker for Clinton. (And it's still theoretically possible that Obama could win it)

Clinton's pretty much done. She needed a split decision to go on, and a pair of wins to be a credible nominee. That isn't what happened. And post-Wright, Obama can credibly say that he's thoroughly "vetted" and has overcome the worst that can be thrown at him.

Yes, she'll win West Virginia, but that just doesn't matter. Obama achieved almost everything he could have hoped for tonight, and broke her short streak.

(Gave a good speech, too.)

She's probably frantically calling superdelegates pleading her case, but I imagine she's getting one response: "end it before you ruin your Senatorial career." It was a hell of a run, but the Change guy won.

Edit: From Ambinder:

Dear XXXXX,

Tonight's victory in Indiana was close, and a margin that narrow means just one thing: every single thing you did to help us win in Indiana helped make the difference.

Every call you made, every friend you spoke to about our campaign, every dollar you contributed made tonight's victory possible. And I couldn't be more thankful for your hard work.

Every time we've celebrated a victory, we've celebrated it together. And tonight is no exception. This victory is your victory, this campaign is your campaign, and your support has been the difference between winning and losing.

Thank you so much for making this campaign possible. Let's keep making history together.

Sincerely,

Hillary Rodham Clinton

The entire thing is in the past tense, except for "let's keep making history together." And there's no call for more donations.

Yeah, this doesn't sound like a nominee. It sounds like a eulogy.

Re-Edit: CNN projected Clinton in Indiana by a hair. Doesn't change much, though. Her bragging rights were all about the margin, and there' s no margin there.

Plus, let's be honest: If you subtract the Dittoheads, Obama probably won.

Clinton Wants to Try to Break up OPEC

Good luck with that.

Whining about how OPEC has "a monopoly" is just silly; American anti-monopoly laws don't have much effect on other countries for obvious reasons, and there's just no way that yelling about "monopoly" will affect states that have nationalized their oil production. The reaction to the accusation of monopoly will be "yeah? And? So?" Or some variation thereof.

Between this and the gas tax holiday, I really get the sense that Hillary knows that Wright isn't a winning issue, and wants to ride the gas price issue all the way to Denver. The problem is that she's being dumb about it; instead of using it as a springboard for interesting renewable energy proposals, she's pulling out proposals that every expert in the country says will have no positive effect whatsoever. She's just as tired as Obama, but it's coming out in a different way; her actual ideas are slipping, instead of her delivery.

Or maybe she's just desperate. Either way.

Little Brother

Just finished reading Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother." I might have more on it later, but right now I just want to echo this: bit from Neil Gaiman

But I'd recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I've read this year, and I'd want to get it into the hands of as many smart 13 year olds, male and female, as I can.

Because I think it'll change lives. Because some kids, maybe just a few, won't be the same after they've read it. Maybe they'll change politically, maybe technologically. Maybe it'll just be the first book they loved or that spoke to their inner geek. Maybe they'll want to argue about it and disagree with it. Maybe they'll want to open their computer and see what's in there. I don't know. It made me want to be 13 again right now and reading it for the first time, and then go out and make the world better or stranger or odder. It's a wonderful, important book, in a way that renders its flaws pretty much meaningless.

Funny thing; I thought the only weakness was that "don't trust anybody over 25" tagline, which makes sense for a YA novel. What Doctorow's book does is vital for anybody who's heavily engaged in social networking, which is pretty much everyone under 30 or so: it shows why control over your information is important. The oppression that the kids in Doctorow's books face is not only plausible, but a lot of it strikes me as inevitable, and I think a lot of people don't really see what's on the way.

There is a massive and worrisome trend of gleefully jettisoning any concern about privacy or information control of any sort within the popular culture of the past few years, especially among the young; Doctorow's book reminds us of how incredibly disastrous this sort of thing can be.

(I'd link to the book, but I'll just wait until it shows up on his website; Cory releases all his books online under a creative commons license. )

Gaiman said that "I'd want to get it into the hands of as many smart 13-year-olds as I can." I agree and disagree. I agree that it should get into as many teenagers' hands as possible, but I'd go far farther: I'd say that people should agitate to have it put on reading lists. This book should be required reading; I know that's death for the popularity of books among teens, but there are parts of it that absolutely everybody should know about. The bit about "the paradox of the false positive" alone is such a powerful correctional to people's complacency about governmental (and private-sector) surveillance that I honestly don't think kids should be able to graduate junior high without having read it.

Plus, since it's Creative Commons, it's not like it'll be especially costly if you don't want it to be.

(Oh, and Iron Man was great too.)

A Tip for Hillary, in the Name of Balance:

When they're praising you for being such a "fighter?"

They're setting you up for something else entirely.

I'm not going to say what it is, but here's a tip: do a google blog search for Huma Abedin, and think about how these things percolate.

And think about how the Republicans set it up so that even if there's no proof for an allegation, they've defined your character to the point where it's just plausible enough that they can get away with it.

Senator, they are not your friends.

What'd I Tell You, Barack?

I can appreciate the thought, but buddy, this ain't gonna help.

Yes, you did grow up less privileged than your counterparts. Hell, you're the only one of them who hasn't been a Republican at some point.

But that isn't why they're calling you "elitist". It has nothing to do with privilege, which the media and Washington both fall over themselves to adore.

It has to do with the fact that you're a tall, well dressed, well groomed, good looking, slender man who speaks well. That doesn't signal "privileged" in these people's minds. It signals something else.

They're calling you queer, Barack. They're calling you gay, Barack. They're calling you a fag, Barack. When Brooks goes on and on about "bobo"? Gay. When O'Reilly is railing against your comments? Gay. When Candy Crowley is saying "the people think he's an elitist?" Gay.

Gay, gay, gay.

But they know they can't get away with that overtly, so they're using proxy terms like "elitist", which they've invested in all this effete baggage over the years, and which now have a dual meaning.

That dual meaning makes it wonderfully flexible, too. They can use terms that actually signal elitism, and make them serve a dual purpose. Intellectual elites are more likely to be secular than the common man, so secularity is tied to a certain brand of elitism. So if you're secular? Gay. Elites go to Ivy League schools, though generally because of their families, an advantage you didn't have. So if you went to a Ivy League school? Gay. And so on.

(Of course, Republicans of various stripes are definitely elitists, and they seem to be turning up in hot tubs and airport washrooms on a regular basis getting their "not-hetero" on. But they're Republicans, so obviously they aren't gay, because not-gay people vote for them!)

So, yeah, they can get away with it. It helps that the Dems are so relatively gay-friendly, but it has more to do with their weak and womanish views towards helping the less fortunate and saving the environment and whatnot. REAL men (read: hetero) would never stand for it. Let 'em die in a gutter whilst guzzling domestic beer and eating raw meat, that's what real men do!

Points for effort. And were this a serious question of elitism, it might even help. But talking about being underprivileged won't help you, because it's not about privilege. It's about exploiting the carefully-crafted confusion in American society between signifiers of status and signifiers of homosexuality in order to turn your real best strength (your charisma) into a weakness (lol ur a fag). Nothing more.

It's, well, perverted, but it's the truth.

Attention, People of London:

If you vote for Boris Johnson, you're a prat.

(Not that Livingstone is much better, but at least he's not a gimmick dripping with racism.)

That is all.

Arugula and Beer and "Elites"

Amanda Marcotte (who is apparently embroiled in some conflict over her book, but whatever) points to something that people seem to miss a bit.

Where do wine coolers sit on the elitism scale? Sure, they’re about as cheap and disgusting as you can get, more so than even Budweiser, but they are also known as girly drinks, and the slur of liberal elitism is just as much about feminizing someone as it is invoking class anxiety.

Bingo.

People, "elite" as it's being applied against Obama (or other Dems) has nothing to do with actual elitism. Real elites (hell, even the "real" stereotype) don't drink wine or beer necessarily; they drink expensive single-malt scotch. They don't eat arugula or NOT eat arugula... they eat whatever's trendy and expensive.

No, this is all about masculinity, and by that I mean "not gay". It's about what straight men supposedly do that gay men don't. "Real" men don't drink wine... gay men do! "Real" men don't pay attention to what they're eating...gay men do! "Real" men know how to bowl... and gay men don't! "Real" men don't live in cities and drive hybrids! Gay men do!

(Real men drive pickup trucks and live on a "ranch", you see, though since not everybody can afford a ranch an overpriced, poorly made house in the exurbs will do in a pinch.)

When David Brooks et al are attacking Obama for being an "elitist", for drinking wine and eating arugula they're not saying he thinks he's above regular people. They're saying that he's womanish. They say he's fey. They say he wants to be "sodomized". They're calling him a "Batty-Man".

That's what this is about. "lol ur a fag" cleaned up for television. Nothing more.

Wright's Return

Digby isn't terribly impressed by Wright's comments.

I'm not either.

I have frankly been a little bit confused by the reaction to Reverend Wright's recent comments around the sphere and even here on this blog. I thought most people in the Netroots were big Obama supporters and yet they defend Reverend Wright, which I find rather surprising considering what he did.

It's true that after Obama's Philadelphia speech, I too defended Wright's sermons and even got a more positive sense of Barack Obama's worldview as a result of hearing what he'd said and listening to Obama's explanations for them. Other than a vague sense that he was something of a showboater, I was not hostile to to the man.

But Wright's latest round of media appearances have not seemed to me to be any kind of defense of liberalism or the black church or even Black Liberation Theology so much as one man's desire to deny a rival his destiny. This was personal and I find it very creepy.

John Amato shared some of my impressions:

Seeing Wright go on Moyers Friday night—at first, I didn’t understand why he’s doing this. Why did he need to come out now and use such loaded rhetoric that the media would pounce on? In the middle of a ugly primary race, he makes himself the story for another three news cycles. Then after I watched his National Press Club appearance, I wondered if he was actually trying to hurt Obama’s chances of winning even the primary because his ego wouldn’t allow him to hang back until December to have his say. It seems Obama has the same feelings.

And rightly so. Reverend Wright called into question the entire premise of Obama's campaign, a campaign built on changing the very nature of politics, when he said, "he did what politicians do." There was no need for him to speak out now except to gin up the controversy at the worst possible time. Any person of sensitivity would have at least waited until this tough, hard fought primary had ended. It was a self-aggrandizing, personal attack and it says something important about the man....

...Clearly [Obama] sees it as a betrayal and a deeply personal one. And so it was. So much so that I felt uncomfortable even watching it. Obama trusted Reverend Wright. As he pointed out, Wright had married him and Michelle, baptized their children, prayed with them over major events in their lives. Obama was very generous with him in his Philadelphia speech, offering a personal endorsement of his good character. And yet, knowing that Obama is fighting this ridiculous rumor about being a Muslim, Wright shows up at the National Press Club with bodyguards from the Nation of Islam and praises Farrakhan? Outrageous.

This all really doesn't seem to have an upside for anybody.

Wright looks like an asshole. Sorry for the language, but it's true. Had he said he understands Obama et al that'd be one thing, but his comments about Obama being "just a politician" are an asshole move of the highest order, one he's smart enough to understand the consequences of. Plus, by repeating the AIDS nonsense, he's lost all credibility. Foreign policy is debatable, as is white America's reaction to America's black churches, but the AIDS comments are beyond the pale. I had thought that these were remnants of past ignorance, long remedied. A bit too charitable, I suppose. He's getting fame, but it's more infamy than anything else.

(The sad thing is that the US Government is somewhat culpable for the spread of AIDS in that it ignored its existence and threat. But that's a more complex and difficult issue of rampant homophobia and ignorance; far easier to claim a conspiracy. Bit like the "truthers", that.)

Obama has to deal with this, and with the man he refused to "throw under the bus" doing the same thing back to him. There is a bit of an upside to it all, in that Obama can now repudiate the man without worrying about looking like a traitor, but the whole "20 years" thing has gained salience. Obama deserved credit for not willing to abandon a friend that he disagreed with; I still believe that, and always will. But he did, apparently, misjudge Wright's character.

Yet Clinton and McCain are now in tricky positions as well. Clinton has to play this very carefully. She's already on the verge of having to sacrifice the African-American and progressive communities if she wants the superdelegates to overturn Obama's near-insurmountable grassroots advantage. That would almost certainly cost her the election; the white middle class voters that she's counting on in the primary aren't likely to be overwhelming supporters in the general, and the ones that would vote for her are the ones who are almost certainly willing to vote for any Dem.

As for McCain, he has to deal with the reality of his own party's racial issues. Hit Wright too hard, and it will almost certainly embolden the racist, nativist elements in the party to come out in force. We're already starting to see hints of that, and they're already going to be pressing McCain to see just how much of a conservative he really is. While the black vote is already lost to the Republican, this could have an effect on OTHER minorities. If Obama is the nominee (as is still almost certainly the case) and the bleeding out of white Obama supporters is halted over the summer and fall, this could come back and bite McCain in the face. Remember, the press has a short attention span, and we've already seen their tendency to "build up and knock down". They haven't knocked down McCain yet, but he has to be aware of the possibility and plan for it.

Digby also brings up a really important point: that much of this is tied to the Dem's hamfisted attempt to wrap themselves up in religion. That was always a key part of Obama's campaign, one of the ones that I was never a huge fan of, and we've once again seen the Republicans pull the "strength into weakness" trick. But digby understands the broader point:

Amy Sullivan, one of the primary proponents of putting religiosity at the center of Democratic politics doesn't seem to know what to make of the problems Wright has caused for Obama. Apparently, she never considered the possible downsides of hewing so closely to religion that people think it's definitional. She and he friends didn't seem to realize that all the blather about secular Democrats was never about religion, but about social conservatism. You get no points for going to the "wrong kind" of church. You'd think they would have figured that out a long time ago.

Bolding mine. This continues to be the Dem's biggest weakness: they mistake methods for reasons. They see religion being used to attack Dems, and they think that the reason is because Dems aren't religious enough. So they emphasize their religion, and are surprised when it doesn't work. It doesn't work, though, because the reason has been, and always will be, to serve the interests of conservatism.

If they go to church? It's the wrong church. If they go to the right church? They pray the wrong way. They pray the right way? They're not "real" Christians because of disagreements with social conservative positions on issues.

The Dems need to figure out that they can't win this game. Not at this point. Not when the Republicans have become so very good at it. Obama can't win it, Clinton can't win it, Kerry couldn't win it, nobody can win it.

The only way to win is not to play; to ignore the snipes, build your own narrative, and run with that. Sure, you should respond, but not with "nuh-uh, I AM good enough, see?" You'll never be good enough for them. Riposte their attacks and hit back on all the things that they are terrible at.

With Republicans? That's pretty easy.

Problematic Analysis

I'm normally a big fan of Feministing. And I'm a committed supporter of feminism.

But as someone who's also a committed supporter of interactive gaming as an art form, may I simply suggest that anybody not willing to even consider the thought of playing a game like GTA4 refrain from throwing out any and all attacks that might occur to them after watching one clip? Especially of a "free-form" game that specializes in extremely dark humor?

After all, someone who had ever played a game ever might know that games have, yes, had female protagonists. Sometimes, they're even violent. Someone who had played a GTA game might also know that the characters are deliberate comedic caricatures, whether male or female, and that the series has featured female characters who are just about as developed as their male counterparts. (Though, again, they are all caricatures played for comedic effect, as anybody would figure out after about, oh, five seconds of playing the game.)

The commentariat there are a bit more divided, though again between the "I've actually played one of these games" group and the "I'd never touch it, clearly it's sexist trash, though I'm not sure what they're about other than hookers." A few people started yelling about all the rape (which the game has never contained in any way, shape, or form) or killing children (there are no children or animals in any of the games, for obvious reasons.)

Again, as a committed supporter of feminism, it really bothers me that people would harm the movement by reinforce the most negative stereotypes about its supposed humorlessness, hypersensitivity, and unwillingness to engage with the subject of its critiques. And I know for damned sure that loud-mouthed, ignorant jeremiads against gaming isn't going to do anything to close the abyss between the feminist movement and the growing number of Americans who play electronic games.

(Though I will say one thing: We've definitely hit the point where a GTA-style open world game should have a female protagonist. It'd be a tough sell in a series focusing on the hyper-masculinized and -sexist world of organized crime, but it's certainly possible.)

It's not that I don't think that there might be troubling elements to modern gaming. But the feminist critique of GTA4 smacks right into the wall that I see all the time: substituting easy criticism of what doesn't exist, for a complex critique of what does.

Hat tip: the somewhat NWS "Reverse Cowgirl", who thought the whole thing was a hill of crap, though for far more complex reasons.

Edit: Here's a good example of what I'm talking about. From one of the commentators on Feministing:

As an aside, there's a new competitor to World of Warcraft coming out, Warhammer Online, that limits the classes that male and female players can be. This makes absolutely no sense, and is one of the reasons I won't be buying it.

Here's the response:

That stinks about Warhammer. I don't know why they can't try to make things at least a bit more neutral. I mean if I can't be a female character, at least try not to have all the female characters in the game be damsels in distress or prostitutes with no names.

Warhammer is a fantasy game, from an established fantasy setting. Said setting includes several species with no female gender (Orcs, specifically), others who are beings of pure destruction of no gender whatsoever ("Chaos" beings), and one where only females can join a certain group of murderous savages, and said group consists of one of the classes (the Dark Elves' "Witch Elves").

Now, there's something to be said for a critique of a setting like this, though Warhammer has been around for longer than the blog's author, and sexism in medieval societies is kind of a given. But the game designers actually had very good reasons to restrict genders for some of the classes. But instead of taking all of three minutes to google up this "Warhammer" thing and find out why these restrictions existed, there was this jump to "ooh, that's terrible" and unthinking agreement.

Yes, these are just two posters in a long thread, and a later poster set them straight. But they're just an easy example. There are lots of others.

Next Edit:

The best one? The person saying "It's not like this game has any structured plot with a complex resolution like a book or a movie. So let's cut the crap." Actually, that's exactly what it's like, why the game has received universal plaudits for its "surprising narrative richness", and why you don't have the choice of protagonists.

Tomb Raider and Metroid Prime don't give you the choice of being male, and GTA4 doesn't give you the choice of being female, precisely because they do have a "structured plot with a complex resolution."

(Shortly thereafter, somebody trotted out Craig Anderson.)

Honestly, the only useful thing that came out of the whole discussion, and almost any discussion of this, is that Rockstar needs to put a female protagonist in a future GTA game. I'm wholeheartedly in favor of that, and of said female protagonist being able to do all the nasty things the male protagonists can do in the current games. Fair's fair. Get to it.

Obama's Running Mate!

Well, not really. But he, and everybody else, was inspired by the passion of Jean Weiss, 82, who told him:

"Don't hit on Hillary," Weiss advised, "Bring us all back. Let her do that stuff. Leave her alone, you don't need to do that. You are higher than that."

The video's all over Youtube.



Also DailyKos.

(He did answer her question about water, by the way. Just not on the video.)

In the Interests of Fairness

I'm thoroughly in agreement with Kos that Obama's Fox News appearance was dumb, dumb, dumb. They're going to pocket the victory and keep on attacking their asses off.

Still, it's odd that Kos would use language this vehement:

Brilliant! Fox ignores the entire interview, except the part that gives them permission to keep harping on Wright. Boy, no one could've predicted that! Note that while Fox itself ignored the bulk of their interview of the likely Democratic nominee on a show that supposedly covers the campaign, they did have time to show Bush pretending to conduct a military band and McCain saying healthcare was too expensive (because what ... he cares?).

Success! But of course, Obama's appearance was a great thing because nothing Obama does can be questioned by mere mortals!

Whatever. Stupid move, and in the end, ends up legitimizing the network while they continue spending their every waking moment trashing his very existence.

Is Moulitsas a little bit disenchanted with the Senator from Illinois, perhaps?

Mmm....

Pork:

Hillary enjoys the hell out of it. Taibbi:

But of the three candidates, no one can touch Hillary Clinton for her expertise in dispensing federal pork. She is fast becoming a sort of Heavyweight Earmark Champion of the Beltway -- one think-tank analyst has even dubbed her the "Queen of Pork" -- who excels as a favor trader not only in sheer quantity but in brazenness as well. A recent examination of this year's earmark requests shows her solidifying her champion status more and more with each passing year, even under the ostensibly bright lights of a presidential campaign...

...

Hillary's defense earmarks benefited some of the world's largest weapons producers, many of which have factories in New York. Among the most prominent include Northrop Grumman, which Hillary singled out for $6 million to develop a new radar system; Plug Power, for whom Hillary secured $3 million for a backup power system for Pentagon operations; and Telephonics, which Hillary gave $5 million for an intercom system for Black Hawk helicopters.

Her biggest coup of all was a multi-billion-dollar contract she helped to secure for Lockheed Martin to build the Marine One presidential helicopter -- a project derided by insiders as a typical example of Pentagon waste. "Oh, the presidential-helicopter thing is a classic boondoggle," says one congressional source. "They could have taken any old Black Hawk helicopter, put a nice interior in it and a decal on it, and it would've been OK. Instead, we got this thing that costs four times as much. It's nuts." Indeed, the Pentagon confirmed in March that the helicopter Hillary made sure would be built at Lockheed's plant in Owego, New York, would, in fact, cost $400 million per unit -- more than the modified Boeing 747 used as Air Force One. You heard right: $400 million for a single fucking helicopter.

With most of her earmarks, Clinton makes sure to get a return on her investment of taxpayer money. Lockheed donated $10,000 to Hillary's Senate campaign in 2006 and provided her with plenty of free rides on its planes. Plug Power officials have reportedly donated some $7,100 to her campaigns since 2003, and several Northrop executives gave the max to her presidential campaign. In that light it seems odd that Hillary was critical of a deal to award a refueling tanker project to Northrop -- except that she has also received maximum contributions from executives at the rival bidder, Boeing. Meanwhile, employees from Corning, for whom Hillary secured a $1 million earmark, donated $133,000 to her presidential campaign. The list goes on and on.

But Hillary's most brazen earmark this presidential-election season had nothing to do with defense. It had to do, oddly enough, with rock music. Back in June 2007, Hillary attempted to write a $1 million earmark for a museum commemorating the Woodstock festival in Bethel, New York. Not that anyone should have anything against Woodstock, but it seems weird to ask taxpayers to pay for it -- especially when the project is principally funded by one of America's richest men, a media mogul named Alan Gerry. Listed as number 297 on the annual Forbes list of wealthy Americans, Gerry reportedly has a net worth of $1.6 billion. Beyond the fact that he hardly needs the money, there is this to consider: On June 30th of last year, exactly three days after the earmark was officially inserted into an appropriations bill, Gerry and his wife both made maximum donations to Hillary's presidential campaign, totaling $9,200.

The deal stank, even by congressional standards. When Republican opponents introduced an amendment to kill the earmark, the measure passed easily. "Most of our amendments fail by fifty or sixty votes," says John Hart, a spokesman for Sen. Tom Coburn, an anti-earmark crusader who introduced the amendment to kill the handout. "But this one passed with no problem. It was so over-the-top.

Not that McCain is exactly innocent of big ol' earmarks. The man was part of the Keating 5, for heaven's sake.

To be fair, Obama's also caught up in it:

Hillary isn't alone among the candidates in selling us down the river for a few campaign contributions. Unlike Clinton, who has only disclosed the pork she actually succeeded in doling out, Barack Obama has supplied reporters with a list of every earmark he requested. But the list only served to highlight Obama's own pork, including $8 million for a "High Explosive Air Burst Technology Program" that would have been overseen by General Dynamics. Obama's Illinois finance chairman, James Crown, not only sits on the board of General Dynamics, he and his wife are both Obama bundlers who have raised more than $200,000 for Obama's campaign. Obama was also alone among the remaining candidates last year in using his leadership PAC to hand out money to politicians whose support he sought in his presidential run.

Yep, he's got earmarks too. It's how you become and stay a Senator.

But this gets to the Clinton strategy of being part of the machine, co-opting it to their purposes, and "playing the game." Well, kids, this is the game. This is how it's played: big ol' defense earmarks that move billions of dollars of contracts around in order to get a couple hundred thousand dollars in bundled campaign contributions.

I'm not saying you shouldn't recognize it. But I am inclined to look unfavorably on someone who wraps themselves up in it.