Dan Rather: ‘Straight With No Chaser’

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

Dan Rather gave a talk today at the Big Tent, and it was an impressive and genuinely important one. When the video is available I’ll put it up here so you can watch the entire thing.

Much of it was a critique of modern mainstream media, as well as the business of conventions. This in particular stood out for me:

I’m sure the broadcast and cable-news outlets will do a couple of short pieces here and there about how the real story of these conventions is the vast sums of money being raised at private parties all around town. But aside from, in most cases, simply mentioning this fact, they don’t follow up on just what that money is going to do to our political system now.

As one reporter, I think the best story here is who gives the big money to whom, expecting to get what. Now maybe the coverage does not for the most part center on this, because the larger news organizations — of which I was part for a long time, it’s important for you to understand that I do not except myself from the criticism inherent in some of the things I’m going to say today — it may be, in terms of the larger news organizations, that they don’t cover stories such as who gives the big money, to whom, expecting to get what, because after all they are part of the system. The money raised by the parties and the campaigns for advertising doesn’t go to charity.

And that’s why I’m glad to see all of you here today. Those of you in the new media are afforded a great opportunity to tell the story straight with no chaser. Because your bottom line is not tied to the status quo in ways you won’t see with those running the evening news. I hope you take advantage of the freedom this gives you to report news that is worthy of the name.

There is nothing more important, more vital, to the democratic process than an independent — a truly independent press.

 Dang, you’d think the guy was reading Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald or something.

user The Crazies Start Coming Out Of The Woodwork

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

I got back to our hotel late last night and put on CNN as I was getting ready to fall over into my bed, when the report came on about the three men arrested in the Denver area for suspicion in a plot to assassinate Barack Obama:

The action started around 1:30 a.m. Sunday when police in the eastern suburb of Aurora stopped a truck that was swerving erratically. The driver, 28-year-old Tharin Gartrell, had a suspended driver’s license, and the truck was rented in the name of another person, said Aurora police Detective Marcus Dudley.

In the truck, officers found two rifles, including one with a scope; a bulletproof vest; boxes of ammunition; walkie-talkies; and suspected narcotics, Dudley said.
Aurora police, on edge because of heightened security surrounding the Democratic
convention in Denver, alerted federal authorities.

Three hours later, at 4:30 a.m. Sunday, federal agents arrested Johnson, 32, at a hotel in Denver. He was being held on drug charges, Dudley said.

A half-hour after that, 33-year-old Shawn Robert Adolf jumped from a sixth-story window when authorities tried to arrest him at a hotel in suburban Glendale, police said.

Adolf was hospitalized and was being held on $1 million bond for several outstanding warrants involving drug charges.

Dudley didn’t say what tied the men together but said more arrests were possible. One of the rifles was stolen, and authorities had traced it to Kansas, Dudley said.

We’ve already discussed here the likelihood that a looming Obama presidency would drive the far-right wingnuts completely over the edge and back into the realm of violence. Fortunately, these men — if they really were plotting to kill Obama — were neither very competent nor much of a serious threat to Obama, though I would wager they’d have wound up hurting someone had they not been caught.

The report on CNN occurred during the Larry King Live convention wrapup. Immediately after the report, who should show up on the screen but Michael Reagan, as part of King’s show, which featured a regular phalanx of right-wingers who then got their shot at telling viewers why the Democratic convention sucked. (Side note: Gotta wonder if King will do the converse for the Republican convention.)

Yes, that Michael Reagan. The one who on his radio talk show two months ago attacked the "9/11 troofers" by telling his listeners repeatedly that someone should "take them out and shoot them." This is the kind of speech that, if spoken by a liberal, would earn them permanent banishment from the ranks of pundithood. But Reagan’s hate speech made barely a ripple — and there he is on CNN.

Obviously, the 9/11 troofers have nothing to do with Obama. But violent speech like this raises the cultural temperature enough that people start believing that shooting the people they disagree with is a legitimate expression. Especially when the people telling them it’s OK to shoot the people they hate are showing up on CNN.

And then when the violence breaks out, of course, the Larry Kings of the world host programs wondering why things like this could happen.

An Open Letter To The Associated Press

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

Before I joined the ranks of dirty foulmouthed hippie bloggers, I was your basic mainstream journalist. I started in newspapers in 1978 at small towns in the Northwest, where the rule of thumb is that most everyone in the newsroom is a jack of all trades. I was a news reporter, a photographer, a music and movie critic — but more than any other job, I was a news editor.

I started out ripping newswires back when it was fed to us by ticker tape, and by the early ’80s was pulling news from the wires by computers. In those days, there were two competing news  services — United Press International and the Associated Press. But about the same time UPI was in serious decline, and most of the newsrooms where I worked did not carry their services. By the 1990s UPI for all intents and purposes was nearly dead (and when Rev. Sun Myung Moon bought them up in 2000, it was a fait accompli) leaving the field to the AP.

In all those years ripping wires, I and the editors I worked with operated with at least a modicum of confidence that the AP was providing them with balanced, evenhanded and reasonably accurate news. Sure, it was bland work, and far too often relied on simplistic "he said/she said" journalism as a means of achieving a facsimile of balance. There wasn’t a lot of great investigative work, but there was some. Mostly, we counted on AP to provide us with the news like a basic meat-and-potatoes diet.

Which is why Ron Fournier’s unimstakable bias in his reportage on the 2008 presidential campaign is such a profound betrayal of the AP’s mission. As a monopoly — every single daily newspaper in the country now relies on the AP for its basic news services — the AP has a profound and unmistakable duty to avoid even the appearance of bias. Fournier’s reportage some time ago began reeking of bias, made worse by his dalliance with the McCain campaign last year and his footsie-playing with Karl Rove. And his recent work attacking Barack Obama makes the stink worse than meth lab’s.

Our protest of Fournier’s work, and our demand that he be removed from the presidential campaign, isn’t simply a matter of crying because our ox has been gored. Rather, it’s about recognizing the profound impact that biased reporting like Fournier’s has on the nation’s political discourse — and how seriously it damages the AP’s reputation as a reliable source of solid reportage.

Every one of those little papers I used to work at runs Fournier’s work. Indeed, every paper in the country, from the New York Times to the Sandpoint Daily Bee, runs it. The editors, the reporters, the publishers, and especially the readers of those papers can no longer rely on AP to be fair in its handling of the news — and because AP is a virtual monopoly, that is a serious problem.

It’s not, as some have suggested, that we want Fournier fired. But the conflict of interest his reporting represents is unacceptable. Every other news operation in the country, faced with such a conflict, typically will keep reporters with such conflicts from reporting on stories related to it. And that is what AP clearly must do in this case.

Perhaps AP doesn’t care enough about those editors who use their product each day with almost blind reliance on their journalistic standards. But it ought to care about its own reputation and standing in the news business to act now, and act decisively.

Off to Denver

-- by Dave

Will be in Denver for the DNC. Hope to drop in some posts, but I can never be certain about these things.

Leave John McCain’s Houses Alooooooooone!

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

Hey, ask any Republican: John McCain is just a good ol’ average Joe Six Pack. Ask the Assrocket dude:

I can relate, though. For example, if a reporter asked me how many ties I own, there’s no way I could answer. Just like McCain, I’d tell him he has to ask my wife. Likewise if someone wants to know how many Wii games my kids have.

Because, you know, most of us just change our houses like we change our ties. Toss around the domiciles like so many video-game cartridges.

The truth is that McCain isn’t out of touch with "ordinary people" because he’s rich, he’s out of touch with his own domestic arrangements because he cares little about material things, and for many years has devoted his extraordinary energies not to enjoying his wife’s money, but to serving the American people.

I’m sure this is true. In fact, mebbe we ought not to go so hard on McCain.

After all, he doesn’t own any of the houses. He never has owned any of the houses. His wife is the one with the money, she’s the one who owns everything. She is the business man in the family. She wears the pants in the McCain family.

John has never had to make business decisions, buy a house, know what gas costs, or really know anything about managing money; his wife takes care of all that for him. I’m sure that it’s tough to keep track of all those houses under those conditions.

Like I say, just an average Joe Six-Pack.

UPDATE: The media (experts in Joe Six-Packdom themselves) want you to leave him aloooooone, too.


[H/t to bmaz.]

When Progressives Fight Back: Object Lesson In Washington

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

 For years, progressives have been at a singular disadvantage when it comes to the money/media infrastructure needed to wage effective political campaigns. Here in Washington state, we’ve seen that manifested in the free ride afforded the building-and-development industry’s lobbying arm, the Building Industry Alliance of Washington, which has run amok waging negative smear campaigns against Democratic candidates and bolstering their own hand-picked Republican, Dino Rossi.


This year, progressives are fighting back. They’re armed with $2.4 million in cash.

And oh, the mewling that’s resulting makes Doug and Wendy Whiner sound thick-skinned.
Today’s Seattle P-I carried a report about it:

Independent from Gov. Chris Gregoire’s campaign, the newly formed Evergreen Progress PAC is flooding the airwaves with attack ads designed to tear apart Rossi’s carefully crafted public image.

"We have a pretty hard-hitting message about Dino Rossi, about what he’s done in the past, what his record is and what we think that translates into in terms of policy on issues that people care about," Evergreen Progress Committee Chairman Rick Desimone said.

Up to now, the Building Industry Association of Washington’s committee ChangePAC has been the major force behind gubernatorial independent expenditures, but with $2 million contributed thus far this election cycle, it is a runner-up to Evergreen Progress.

"It makes us look like a Chihuahua," BIAW spokeswoman Erin Shannon said.
Desimone said Evergreen Progress is a direct response to the BIAW’s independent political actions — nonstop attacks on Gregoire.

Evergreen Progress is funded with money from the Service Employees International Union, the state employees union and the state teachers union, among other sources.

It’s the union’s involvement that has the right up in arms. Because, you see, whoever is governor is going to be negotiating state labor contracts.

Nevermind, of course, that whoever is governor is also going to be setting environmental standards, revising tax codes, and handling a multitude of issues that are the BIAW’s meat and potatoes too.
It’s only when their interests are at stake that negative campaigning is allowed, evidently.

The best thing about the Evergreen Progress ads: They’re not nasty — unlike the BIAW’s ads. They’re factual (which also distinguishes them from the BIAW). And they’re effective. (Ditto.)
When progressives fight back — and especially when they do it well — they win. As we saw in Tuesday’s primary, Rossi is not gaining on Gregoire at all, but rather losing it. And these ads probably have a lot to do with it.

One’s heart bleeds for the BIAW, too. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of folks.

So much for that 'respectful campaign'

-- by Dave

One thing I, in all my travels here -- Americans want a respectful campaign. They do, they want it. Now, people say, well, negative ads move numbers. They may. But do we have to go to the lowest common denominator? I don't think so.

John McCain, July 2008

So the latest WSJ/NBC poll (the same one showing Barack Obama's lead slipping away) also shows that Americans think John McCain is running a negative campaign:

By a nearly six-to-one margin, voters say Republican presidential candidate John McCain is running a negative campaign against his Democratic rival, Barack Obama, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

Nearly three in 10 voters, 29%, pointed to McCain as the candidate running a negative campaign, compared to just 5% who said Obama is running a negative campaign. McCain’s 29% rating is the highest of any one candidate in the previous two presidential elections according to the WSJ/NBC News survey.

Know what? They're right. It's not just their opinion. It's a quantifiable fact.

The other week the Boston Globe created a word pile (click on the graphic to see it full size) analyzing the words being used by the two campaigns and teasing out which were used the most, and in what connotation. Obama's campaign, as you can see, is largely about Obama, and it's overwhelmingly positive. McCain's campaign, like a mirror image, is likewise all about Obama, and it's overwhelmingly negative.

It wasn't exactly by accident that his high-school classmates dubbed him "McNasty."

[H/t to Silent Patriot.]

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

Good signs for Darcy Burner

-- by Dave

Photo by Karen Ducey/P-I

Darcy Burner didn't quite get the victory in Washington's primary election last night she was hoping for -- but it was close: Dave Reichert outpolled her only 48-45 percent.

Two factors were at play here, and both are good signs for Burner's campaign going forward:

• This was a low-turnout primary, and in those conditions, Republicans have traditionally outperformed the general-election results in this district.
• There were more total votes cast for Democrats (Burner had two opponents) than for Reichert.

Indeed, it has to be deeply discomforting for any incumbent congressman -- especially one in a district that has never elected a Democrat to Congress -- to look at those results. Anything under 50 percent in a primary means that he's losing serious ground.

Indeed, out of the 94 congressional races in this kind of primary in the state between 1982 and 2002, incumbents missed the 50 percent mark only 10 times. Out of those 10, seven went on to lose in November.

As the P-I reported this morning, all signs point to another razor-thin margin in the 8th District this year.

On the other hand, the fact that Burner didn't outpoll Reichert clearly tells her -- and everyone -- that she has her work cut out if she wants to win in November. It will be an uphill battle, and it'll take a supreme (and supremely smart) effort on everyone's part to get her on the winning side of that thin margin.

Go to Darcy's Blue America page to help if you can.

‘Audacious’ Is The New ‘Presumptuous’, Formerly 'Uppity'

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

A few weeks ago it was "presumptuous." Now we’re seeing "audacious" as the new word of choice among the wingnuts to describe Barack Obama.

It’s kind of clever, really — take a keyword from the title of one of his books and use it to call him "uppity" without actually saying it. But then, the dog-whistle components of this campaign, as we’ve seen, are becoming increasingly sophisticated.

David Fredosso at The Corner uses it to counter Obama’s attack on the smear merchants peddling the "Obama is a baby killer" theme. Evidently, he’s "audacious" for calling a pack of liars exactly what they are.

Even better was James Taranto’s wielding of the term in his attack on Obama in today’s WSJ. According to Taranto, Obama showed "amazing chutzpah" in his effort to call on John McCain to reel in his vicious attacks on Obama’s patriotism and acknowledge that both of them have worked over the years for America’s security and place it atop their priorities. Here’s what Obama said:

I have never suggested that Sen. McCain picks his positions on national security based on politics or personal ambition. I have not suggested it because I believe that he genuinely wants to serve America’s national interest. Now, it’s time for him to acknowledge that I want to do the same.

And Taranto?

Of course, if Obama were to accuse McCain of picking his positions on national security based on politics or personal ambition, everyone would laugh, because it obviously is not true.

Oh, we’re laughing all right. I’m sure last week’s display of McCain’s militarism — particularly the "We’re all Georgians now" speech — had nothing whatsoever to do with politics or the Georgian lobbyists with whom McCain surrounded himself.

Chutzpah indeed.

Hannity Thinks Those Evil Liberals Think Conservatives Are Evil

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

 We’ve already gotten a preview of David Zucker’s attempt at right-wing humor in the form of the fall movie American Carol. If the preview at right is anything to go by, it’s going to be about as funny as Mallard Fillmore. Or cancer. Take your pick.

It’s also a preview of the main theme we’re going to hear come October, just in time for the election: liberals hate America, Democrats can’t be trusted to stand up for the country. In fact, they just oughta be slapped silly at every opportunity. Or perhaps worse.

So last night Zucker was on Fox’s Hannity & Colmes program, whining about how liberals all think conservatives are bad people — because evidently this somehow justifies making a film depicting liberals as bad people. And out of Sean Hannity’s mouth came this nugget of wisdom in response:

HANNITY: I think — I think they think we’re evil. You know, I mean, if you read, you know, the things — it’s funny because there is this double standard out there in both radio and television.

You know, if I were to say on my 530 radio stations or right here on the FOX News Channel half the stuff that liberals say about me, lies told on a regular basis — and I don’t really pay attention to it because I don’t care — I would be probably thrown off the air, targeted for boycotts.

Quoth the author of Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism.

Quoth the guy who thinks it’s just peachy for right-wing rock stars to announce death wishes for liberal politicians from the stage.

Quoth the host who agrees when his guests compare Obama’s black church to the KKK.

Quoth the man who called Harry Reid a "propaganda minister for our enemies."

Well, I could go on all day, but you get the idea. Sean Hannity thinks liberals think he’s evil, though he’d have to go dig up some anonymous e-mails to prove the point (and we’re sure he will).

Meanwhile he authors a book, and spends every one of his Fox broadcasts, declaring liberals evil.
Projection: Not just for theaters anymore. Indeed, as we’ll see this fall, it’s a concrete political strategy.

Who Is Orson Swindle And Why The Hell Should We Believe Him?

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

The exquisitely named Orson Swindle has stepped up to claim that he remembers John McCain telling the "cross in the dirt" tale back in the early ’70s, even though the earliest appearance of it in any speech of McCain’s is in 2000. The wingnutosphere invariably is describing him as "a fellow POW." But as usual, he’s much more than that.

Of course, this is all about people claiming to be eyewitnesses to certain events, and the only evidence is their say-so, which makes their credibility paramount.

How credible, exactly, is Orson Swindle? Well, consider, for instance:

Swindle served as executive director of "United We Stand, America", and spokesman for Ross Perot‘s 1992 presidential campaign.

Swindle is a Senior Policy Advisor at the lobbying firm of Hunton & Williams in Washington, DC. …

Swindle is also on the board of Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), an independent political advocacy group that seeks to eliminate waste, mismanagement, and inefficiency in the federal government. Throughout its history, CAGW has been accused of fronting lobbying efforts of corporations to give them the appearance of "grassroots" support. In part, this is because CAGW has accepted donations from Phillip Morris, the Olin Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, Microsoft, Merrill-Lynch, and Exxon-Mobil. CAGW also has ties to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff. While CAGW describes itself as non-partisan, it has endorsed John McCain for president and donated $11,000 to his campaign or groups controlled by him.

OK, so here we have a lobbyist — one of many on McCain’s support team — who’s also a right-wing Republican operative with a history of setting up sham "grassroots" organizations that do the bidding of business and corporate interests. He’s pouring thousands of dollars into McCain’s campaign and lining up thousands more.

And you want us to take his story backing up McCain at face value?

Sure we will.

This sort of "eyewitness account" brings to mind Bill Calhoun. You may remember him: He was the former Alabama National Guardsman who claimed to have spent time with George W. Bush in the early 1970s; it turned out, of course, that Bush wasn’t at the base at all at the times Calhoun claimed to have met him.

It’s possible John McCain really did have the "cross in the dirt" experience exactly like Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s. It’s also possible that little fairies encapsulated in lightly scented bubbles fly out his ass when he farts.

But until the McCain campaign comes up with a more credible witness, you’ll have to pardon us if we choose not to swallow this one. Because the scent suggests otherwise.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan notes that Swindle had quite another version of their discussions in May. 

Meanwhile, another former POW who served with McCain writes that he won’t be voting for McCain, and why.

Why Democrats Face An Uphill Battle In The Suburbs

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

Matt Stoller has been out canvassing in my onetime stomping grounds, the suburban precincts of the greater Seattle area’s Eastside — specifically, Mercer Island — trying to help get out the vote for Darcy Burner, who’s running against Republican Rep. Dave Reichert in Washington’s 8th District.

He came away with a keen insight into the uphill fight Democrats face on the ground this year, despite their many surface advantages:

All of this is to say that walkable neighborhoods and public spaces are very good for politics. As most of the country is suburban, it is very hard to find public spaces where politics can be conducted. Robocalls, TV ads, radio ads, direct mail, and phone banks are all proxies for a lack of civic culture, in which pestering voters with jackhammer-like messaging screaming IRAQ or TAXES takes the place of engaging with people in real conversations. This kind of politics is literally built into the fabric of the suburbs, which is one reason why certain types of authoritarian messaging works really well in both the Democratic and Republican parties. The web functions differently, based on varying levels of trust, but that is not how relating to the general electorate operates.

One of the realities I recall from my years of working on the Eastside as a reporter and editor (at the old Bellevue Journal American, where I was the news editor) was that it was not unusual to send a reporter out to talk to neighbors of someone who had made the news (usually through some tragedy or crime) and come away empty-handed. Neighbors often did not know each other at all; the preferred lifestyle in many of the suburban neighborhoods was simply to roll into their fortresses at the end of the workday, roll the garage door behind them, and retreat to their little patches o’ heaven.

And as I explored a bit in my book about a slice of the Eastside’s history, Strawberry Days, suburbs like these were essentially founded as exclusively white enclaves, and predicated on providing homeowners personal security, away from the crime of the cities. So making political appeals in these districts entails finding ways to break through the barriers they build around themselves — while still reassuring them that you intend to help keep their "way of life" intact.

For Democrats, it takes a special awareness and finely tuned framing. You have to speak in their language. Candidates like Burner have their work cut out for them — especially when their opponents are paternalistic authority figures like the former sheriff.

Tomorrow is Washington’s primary election. Burner has built up terrific momentum so far — she’s out-raising Reichert by a wide margin (inspiring a certain desperation on his part) and closing the gap in the polls. She’s even managed to overcome the loss of her home to fire, thanks to the outpouring of support from around the country and her district.

But on Tuesday it will be up to voters on the ground in the 8th District to make that momentum real. Getting a majority of the votes in the primary won’t mean anything concrete, but it would provide an important psychological boost, as well as change the narrative in the campaign.

Once again, regional media are pretending that Reichert is a "moderate Republican," and Darcy is being dismissed as a netroots darling. It hasn’t been pretty. A primary win could alter that narrative for good.

So for those of you who are voters there, remember at the least to make sure you make it to the polls today. And for those who can, sign up to volunteer for Darcy today. You can make a difference in getting out the vote.

Right-wing violence and mental illness

-- by Dave

Cujo359, whose work I respect, has posted a challenge to me for characterizing the assassination of the Arkansas Democratic Party chairman as "starting increasingly to look like yet another case in which an unhinged wingnut decided to 'take out' more liberals." [Yes, this was an FDL post, but since FDL isn't the appropriate place to post a lengthy and detailed response, I'm doing it here.]

Obviously, in a post titled "Looking For Hate In All The Wrong Places," this was not a characterization I made lightly. In fact, I'd had a backstage disagreement with Sara over whether this case qualified as a politically eliminationist act -- at the time, I didn't think the evidence was in. But, after gathering more info, including my own sources, I decided the case was looking increasingly like a political killing.

There was also, in fact, what we knew publicly about Johnson, particularly that he had a large stash of guns, and these were not collector items. Such a collection is typically not indicative of a left-wing bent, but rather a right-wing one. There was also a note found in his home indicating he had selected Gwatney as his victim in advance.

Max Brantley at the Arkansas Times blog has more on Timothy Johnson and the evidence for him having a political motivation. Similarly, David Coon at the same blog fills in more of the gaps, including a local-TV report that interviewed some of Johnson's classmates and people who knew him reasonably well. Says one:

"I would always remember going to class and I would see that he had a Bill Clinton anti-campaign sticker [on his car] that says I don't miss Bill. [No such bumper sticker was on the pickup he crashed in a police chase, however.] "He would surf the internet and he would see that a Democrat had died and he would laugh about it."

An earlier version of this story referred to "weird political conversations" these classmates had had with Johnson, indicating that he held NRA-type views about gun rights (which is fairly typical of people who own 14 guns). It's hard to say what Johnson's motives were for participating in Democratic primaries, as he evidently did, but considering his animus for the Clintons specifically and Democrats generically, it seems likely if he ever was a Democrat to any great extent, it wasn't as a member of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party in Arkansas; far more likely, it was from the "Justice Jim" Johnson wing.

I happen to believe that as more details about Tim Johnson emerge, my earlier assessment will prove to be correct. But I also expect that we will learn a great deal more about Johnson's mental instability -- and the case will be dismissed by ascribing it simply to that cause. Indeed, Cujo says: "There seems to be no reason to believe that Johnson's actions were any more than a result of the unfortunate combination of a depressive personality and firearms." Yet that fails to explain why someone with this combination of traits would target a political figure like Gwatney.

Part of the problem is that we actually have seen this happen time after time after time: A mentally unstable person is inspired by hateful right-wing rhetoric to act out violently -- and yet because of that mental state, the matter is dismissed as idiosyncratic, just another "isolated incident." And over the months and years, these "isolated incidents" mount one after another.

But simply ascribing these acts to mental illness is a cop-out. It fails to account for the gross irresponsibility of the people who employed the rhetoric that inspired the violent action in the first place, and their resulting moral culpability.

The clearest illustration of this is a case that occurred here in Seattle in the mid-1980s, about which I've written previously:

People who study the far right have known many of these people over the years: Gordon Kahl. Robert Matthews. Tim McVeigh.

One of the most memorable of these, for me, was a man named David Lewis Rice.

On Christmas Eve 1985, Charles and Annie Goldmark were at home with their sons Derek, 12, and Colin, 10, preparing for a holiday dinner when the doorbell rang. It was Rice, a 27-year-old unemployed transient, posing as a taxicab driver delivering a package. He brandished a toy gun and forced his way into their home, then set about using chloroform to render all four Goldmarks unconscious. He then proceeded to kill them slowly, using a steam iron and a knife that he used to insert into at least one of the victim's brains. Annie was pronounced dead on the spot, Colin pronounced dead on arrival, while Charles died there a short while later; Derek finally succumbed 37 days later.

But Rice wasn't just a deranged loony -- though he probably fit that description too. He also was a deranged loony who had been set into action by the malicious lies of a group of right-wing haters, whose venom became his inspiration, as the HistoryLink piece explains:

David Rice, a former steel worker from Colorado, joined an extremist group in Washington called the Duck Club. Although the Duck Club was almost defunct, the Seattle chapter still functioned. The group convinced Rice that Charles Goldmark was Jewish and a Communist. (Charles Goldmark's parents, John and Sally Goldmark, had won a highly publicized libel case in 1964 when they were accused of being Communists.)

The Goldmark case is a centerpiece of James Aho's study of the far right, This Thing of Darkness: A Sociology of the Enemy (which I've discussed previously). Aho goes into more detail about what drove Rice, as well as the circumstances surrounding his decision to kill:

Conversion (resocialization) ... occurs not through brainwashing of passive victims or through obsessive self-conversion. It takes place through active efforts of the disciple, sometimes indifferent to ideology or theology as such, to solidify and preserve social ties with his mentors.

... Ed Fasel [fictitious name] was head of the local Duck Club chapter. It was from Ed that Rice received the tragic misinformation that Charles and Annie Goldmark were leading Seattle Communists. In the course of discussions concerning local subversives and crooks who were presumably frustrating Rice's efforts to secure a job, Fasel, mistaking Charles for his father John, related to Rice that the Goldmarks had been investigated and that Charles was "regional director of the American Communist Party." Rice took this to mean that Charles was the "highest obtainable target I could reach, the greatest value informationally." After handcuffing the Goldmarks, Rice intended to interrogate them about the next person in the conspiratorial hierarchy, possibly to preempt at the last moment the impending invasion of alien troops [a conspiracy theory to which Rice subscribed].

What occasioned Fasel to dredge up a name associated with an event that had occurred two decades previously in another part of the state? In a Seattle Port Commission election during the summer of 1985, one of the candidates was Jim Wright, a Republican. Wright's campaign manager was none other than Ashley Holden, a defendant in the Goldmark trial. [Holden had been a leading torchbearer in the McCarthyite "Red fever" that swept Washington state in the late 1940s and '50s, and had been one of the people who falsely accused the Goldmarks in print of being part of the Communist Party.] Upon discovering this unusual link, the Seattle media jumped on it, and the name "Goldmark," with its unfortunate connotations, "got out again," to use one informant's phrase.

In my interview with him, Holden convincingly insisted that he knew nothing of the Duck Club nor any of its members. "I deplored the murder," he said. "There is no question," he went on, parroting local wisdom, "Rice was demented."

I have met some of the old leaders of the Duck Club, including "Fasel" -- whose real name was Homer Brand. They reminded me of Richard Butler: they had a moral stench about them like rotting corpses. Of course, they never faced legal liability for their role in the murders. But they had blood on their hands, just as surely as does the "Libertarian National Socialist Green Party" and whoever else gave Jeff Weise his inspiration.

The issue arose again two years ago here when a Muslim man named Haq -- who, it quickly developed, had a history of mental instability -- went on a rampage inside the Jewish Federation building in Seattle. As I wrote at the time:

Seattle has a history of dealing with tragedies like these -- especially in which the Jewish community is targeted by a mentally unstable person who has bought into the dogma of anti-Semitic hatemongers. The most notorious of these was the 1985 murders of the David Goldmark family by David Lewis Rice, who had decided he was going to singlehandedly eliminate the "top communist" and "top Jew" in Washington -- even though Goldmark was neither. (The Goldmark family had long been politically active progressives; Goldmark's brother Peter, incidentally, is currently running for Congress as a Democrat in eastern Washington's 2nd District.)

The Friday shootings also echoed the 2000 rampage of Buford Furrow at a Los Angeles Jewish day-care center. Furrow, you'll recall, was a white supremacist from Washington state who'd been undergoing mental-health treatment in the Seattle area for several years.

The city, in fact, is still reeling from the more recent killing rampage by a young man from Montana named Kyle Huff, who gunned down six ravers in the early-morning hours after a rave because he hated ravers and "this world of sex that they are striving to make," telling his brother in a letter that he wanted to "kill this hippie shit."

The Huff massacre was not a classic hate crime, because these typically involve prejudice against race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation, while Huff's hostility was almost purely cultural. But if we see more of this trend, it may be time to rethink that.

What all of these incidents have in common is the mental instability of the actors; and I've explored previously how that affects the way society and the law must deal with the perpetrators. In the case of Buford Furrow, for instance, his mental illness became a mitigating factor in his eventual sentence, as prosecutors decided not to seek the death penalty in large part because of it.

Marking off rampages like Furrow's, Huff's, and Haq's as "isolated events" caused by mental illness is a cop-out, however. Because, as the case of David Lewis Rice made all too clear, these mentally unstable types are almost always stirred up and driven to their insane acts by haters of various stripes, the kind whose voices seem each day to be growing louder in our public discourse. These cultural vampires have developed a real knack for inspiring mentally unstable people into horrific acts of violence.

If it turns out that Timothy Johnson was mentally disturbed, that fact hardly exonerates the people who have constantly demonized Democrats as the root of all evil over the past two decades. On the contrary, it only underscores the gross irresponsibility of this rhetoric -- and stands as one of the important reasons why this kind of talk has to stop.

So when Cujo says this:

There is no doubt that liberals and progressives are the target of hateful rhetoric these days. There is no doubt that, at least on occasion, there are unstable people who take that rhetoric too seriously.

The problem is that this has happened more than "on occasion" -- rather, there is a history of this kind of violence, and there's a consistent pattern to it. What's most noteworthy is that the violence expands with the increasing use of eliminationist rhetoric. When people look at the Gwatney shooting and ask "Why?" -- as so many are -- that history and that pattern are a good place to start looking.

McCain’s Character Issues: What Kind of Honor Izzat?

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

 
A group of moderate evangelicals calling itself Matthew 25 is running an ad tonight during the joint appearance by John McCain and Barack Obama with evangelist Rick Warren in California. It’s all about Obama’s commitment to his family, and it damns McCain in a subtle but unmistakable way, as Bruce Tomaso observes:

McCain is never mentioned in the ad, but at one point, Caldwell says, "Throughout his entire career, Sen. Obama has stood by familes."

Caldwell’s wife, Suzette, seated next to him, responds: "Including his own."

Caldwell nods, smiles, and says, "Hmmmm."

I was particularly amused by the reaction from the McCain camp:

A Republican strategist speaking on the condition of anonymity reacted to the Caldwell comments by telling ABC News: "My advice to the Obama people: ‘proceed with extreme caution.’ They don’t want to get into a discussion of character and background. They are opening a door that they will not be able to close. They are putting on the table issues and personalities that they do not want to discuss."

Oh really?

Just for the record, here’s what John McCain did with his first family: When he returned from Vietnam, he found that his first wife, Carol, had been disfigured in an auto accident. He began cheating around on her, and eventually hooked up with his current wife, Cindy, when she was single and he still married. He then divorced the first wife.

McCain has dealt with it somewhat forthrightly, casting all the blame (appropriately) on himself. (Nicholas Kristof lays out what happened here.) He was estranged from his children as well, and did not reconcile with them until later.

But owning up to mistakes does not mean McCain ever could undo the stain on his honor from casting aside his first family in such a callous manner. McCain constantly talks about honor and integrity and good-feeling stuff like that.

But what kind of honor was that? And what does that tell us about his character?

Bush's deportation policies dumping thousands of children into squalor

-- by Dave

We've already seen, here in the States, the travesties created by the Republican push to deport illegal immigrants: police-state tactics, the bastardization of justice, the destruction of families, the inhuman treatment of cancer victims. But that's just the beginning of the ugliness.

Then there's what happens afterwards -- particularly to the children. A La Jornada report (translated; see original here) gives the basic outline:

During the first seven months of the year, at least 90,000 Mexican children were deported by the U.S. government, in the context of its anti-immigration policy, reported a study of the working group for migration issues of the PRI in the Chamber of Deputies. It also has deported around 300,000 adults.

He reported that about 15 percent of children, some 13,500, are living along the Mexican border, without any government protection. Those best off are attended by religious institutions or NGOs.

The group's coordinator and secretary of the Commission on Population, Borders and Migration Affairs, the PRI deputy Edmundo Ramirez Martinez, pointed out that children are entrusted to polleros, or traffickers, to be brought to the United States with their parents and if the would-be migrants are deported, the children are virtually stranded on the Mexican border.

In addition, the report states that for every three adults deported from the United States, a child of Mexican origin is left in that nation. He said that many children accompanied their parents in the adventure of reaching the country from north to find work, but were deported by the authorities of that country.

A more localized La Jornada Michoacan report (translated version -- original here) describes the outcome for these children:

Preznit McCain: Look Who’s Presumptuous Now

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

While Obama has been working to dispel the McCain-inspired notion that he is somehow "presumptuous", McCain himself, by thrusting himself into the Georgia mess, has been busy making sure everyone sees him as "President McCain".


But even the Washington Post isn’t sure this is such a hot idea:

The extent of McCain’s involvement in the military conflict in Georgia appears remarkable among presidential candidates, who traditionally have kept some distance from unfolding crises out of deference to whoever is occupying the White House. The episode also follows months of sustained GOP criticism of Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, who was accused of acting too presidential for, among other things, briefly adopting a campaign seal and taking a trip abroad that included a huge rally in Berlin.

"We talk about how there’s only one president at a time, so the idea that you would send your own emissaries and really interfere with the process is remarkable," said Lawrence Korb, a Reagan Defense Department official who now acts as an informal adviser to the Obama campaign. "It’s very risky and can send mixed messages to foreign governments. . . . They accused Obama of being presumptuous, but he didn’t do anything close to this."

And apparently, that November thing is just a formality:

Asked about his tough rhetoric on the ongoing conflict in Georgia, McCain began: "If I may be so bold, there was another president . . ."

He caught himself and started again: "At one time, there was a president named Ronald Reagan who spoke very strongly about America’s advocacy for democracy and freedom."

So evidently that ad he ran awhile back crowning himself president was no joke.

More orcas

-- by Dave

I was out in the San Juans again last week and had another close encounter with the killer whales there. It was very close; you can hear us knocking on the hull of the kayak to let them know where we were.

And related orca news: The southern residents' oldest matriarch, is confirmed to have passed away. (That's her fin you see adorning the still version of this video. She was in her 90s, so this wasn't a surprise -- though still sad and noteworthy.

Meanwhile, there's a new calf in L pod, and this is very good news indeed.

The Copperhead Libel

-- by Sara

Bill O'Reilly has taken his war on the blogs to the next level, engaging an "Internet Cop" who regularly appears on his show to provide examples of just how over-the-top outrageous those potty-mouth liberal bloggers are. The argument is that while conservative blogs may be rough-and-tumble, they're nothing like those liberal blogs, where commenters routinely make death threats against conservatives. (I know. I know. Conservative projection in action, once again. When Ann Coulter calls for us to be executed as traitors on national TV, that's just incisive commentary in Bill's World. When some hothead with issues corks off on our pages -- even when the rest of us cut him off or shut him down -- it's a cardinal sign that liberal blogs have become a danger to the nation.)

The really funny part of this is that his "cop" is Amanda Carpenter of Townhall.com, a site that recently called Michelle Obama a "race pimp" and said that congressmen who "damage the morale and undermine the military" should be executed as saboteurs. And no, those weren't comments -- those calls came on the front page. You'd think that would pretty much disqualify her as the Amy Vanderbilt in charge of enforcing good manners on blogs -- but, y'no, it's Fox, and reality is what they say it is.

The not-so-funny (and not-so-surprising) part is that Carpenter's own comments threads contain their fair share of precisely the same kind of ugly speech she purports to be digging up on the threads at liberal blogs -- and, in fact, much worse. Brad Friedman went out and found a choice series of eliminationist screeds that should give all of us pause (and perhaps send us out to the local gun shop this weekend):


FYI: "Copperheads" were Northern Democrats who opposed the Civil War on the grounds that it was expensive, unnecessary, bad for trade, and unlikely to save the Union. Many of them were small businessmen in the border areas of the Union states who lost significant trade with the South; others were out-and-out racists who didn't think freeing black slaves was worth the price in white blood. They got considerable political traction in the north in the latter years of the war, and helped split the Democratic party for the next two decades, allowing the new GOP to become entrenched.

Some Copperheads were overt Confederate sympathizers, and gave aid and comfort to the enemy during and after the war. That's why most Northerners considered them traitors, and advocated executing them as such. (My great-great-grandfather, a Union general who lived on the Indiana bank of the Ohio River, made a small career out of busting up Copperhead nests and arresting their members in the years following the war.)

Calling liberals "Copperheads" because we oppose the misadventure in Iraq is the kind of libel that seems likely to stick -- and will, in some minds, justify an eliminationist response. And the suggestion that American troops may come home from Iraq and turn their guns on their fellow citizens (like my grandfather did) is one we should take seriously. People who have committed heinous acts in the service of a cause are often deeply unwilling to step back and question the rightness of that cause -- because that justification is the single, slender post that keeps the moral weight of their actions from crushing their souls. They'd rather die -- or kill some more -- than allow anyone to point out that the only belief holding up their sanity is a lie.

BOR is, as usual, missing the big story here. It's no secret anywhere anymore: every national law enforcement and intelligence agency we've talked to is bracing for an onslaught of right-wing violence in the months ahead, which will intensify with an Obama win. (We may look back in a few years and realize Knoxville was the opening shot of a much larger wave of domestic terrorism.) The language and logic of that uprising are being worked out in the pages of Amanda Carpenter's own blog -- and yet he's got her on his show, explaining to America why liberals will be the ones to blame when the shooting starts.

Obama The Antichrist: It’s All About Scaring The GOP Base

[Crossposted at Firedoglake.]

Last night CNN aired a segment wondering aloud whether or not Obama is the Antichrist. It’s just the latest step in making what ought to be an outrageous and nonsensical bit of religious nuttery into an actual campaign issue. Raw Story has the details:

CNN notes that regardless of its intent, though, the ad seems to have spurred increased interest in the baseless speculation. At least one entire blog is devoted to the question and a Google search for "Obama Antichrist" returns nearly 1 million returns.

And regardless of CNN’s intent, it too managed to handle the story in such a "fair and balanced" fashion that the interest of which it speaks will, in turn, ratchet up yet another notch.
The story that inspired the segment — in which "Left Behind" authors Tim LaHaye and Dan Jenkins officially pronounced Obama NOT the Antichrist — was actually a clever bit of politicking: Even though the verdict was negative, it gave the very question a veneer of legitimacy it does not deserve. It made the question seem like a serious theological problem — one that could then be debated further — rather than the scurrilous nonsense it really is.

That story in turn was sparked by the discussion that followed the release of the McCain campaign’s anti-Obama ad, "The One", which was just chock full o’ nutty images that clearly were intended to lead viewers to wonder whether there was a sinister, even diabolical, side to Obama’s celebrity.
Back when the ad first aired, Amy Sullivan in Time pointed out:

A new TIME poll finds that the most conservative Evangelicals are the least enthusiastic about McCain’s candidacy. Convincing them that Obama does have two horns and a tail might be the best way of getting them to vote. That’s what worries Campolo, who also sits on the Democratic Party’s platform committee. "Those books have created a subliminal language, and I think judgments will be made unconsciously about Barack Obama," he says. "It scares the daylights out of me."

It probably should, because this is yet another component of the larger strategy being planned this fall by Republicans. Like their dog-whistle racial campaign ads, these are in fact very subtle appeals — the kind that let the McCain campaign send messages to their lizard-brain base while giving them a measure of plausible deniability about doing so. As Jane said awhile back, their strategy is to make "implicit" appeals without creating the backlash that would result from more explicit appeals.

The same theme courses throughout Jerome Corsi’s smear job. Indeed, it’s going to be an endless stream of this crap until November. The Obama campaign’s frontal assault on these smears has been somewhat effective, but the subtler appeals have proven a thornier problem — one that ain’t going away.

When wingnuts go looking for terrorists

-- by Dave

It seems a strange Somali man from Canada was found dead in a Denver hotel room this week with a pound of sodium cyanide in his room. It's an unusual case and certainly raises concerns about the potential for a terrorist incident at the Democratic National Convention later this month.

The wingnutosphere, of course, leapt quickly into action. Led by Michelle Malkin and her band of flying monkeys, the man's Somali ethnicity immediately became ground for suspecting yet another evil Muslim terrorist plot.

One small problem: They're wrong, as usual.

Now, the right-wing bigotsphere has been sharply on the lookout for would-be jihadis in America ever since 9/11. This has produced a seemingly endless parade of xenophobic hsyterics, led largely by the likes of Malkin, pointing to the presence of supposed Muslim terrorists -- from the guy who blew himself up with a pipe bomb in Oklahoma to the "mysterious" men on the Seattle ferry -- who turn out not to be after all.

In the meantime, of course, any incidents involving white, non-Muslim domestic terrorists does not interest them in the least -- especially when, as with the recent Knoxville shooter, there is a clear and unmistakable connection to right-wing ideologies.

In the case of the Denver cyanide carrier, the wingnuts leapt to all kinds of conclusions. Even though FBI agents found no evidence of a conspiracy and no clear evidence that the cyanide was being planned for terroristic purposes, Malkin and Co. were scoffing at this.

'Obama Nation' vs. 'The Real McCain': A Study In Contrasts

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

t certainly is interesting to see the amount of attention Jerome "Swift Boat" Corsi’s new smear book, The Obama Nation, is already garnering. We wait with breathless anticipation Corsi’s multiple appearances on cable TV talking about Obama’s "unanswered questions" and anti-American attitudes, yadda yadda yadda — during which, one can rest assured, there will be no questions about Corsi’s history of ugly hatemongering at Free Republic.

In comparison, Cliff Schecter’s expose of John McCain, The Real McCain, has been given the classic media blackout treatment. There have been some brief references — like the Jon Stewart skit that discussed the "c word" story — but otherwise, Cliff’s cable appearances could be counted on one hand, as can the book’s mainstream-media reviews.

Today’s New York Times piece about Obama Nation sort of alludes to this when discussing how readily the right-wing media chamber picks up on books like Corsi’s:

“There’s just no doubt that in terms of longer-term infrastructure, there’s more out there on the right than there is on the left,” said Cliff Schecter, author of a liberal attack book on Mr. McCain, “The Real McCain,” which, with 35,000 copies in print, did not make the Times bestseller list.

Gee, I wonder if maybe the fact that the New York Times did not even bother to review the book — let alone treat its release as a news event worthy of thousand-word news piece — might have had something to do with the book’s relatively paltry sales.

Or maybe it was the fact that no one has yet come forward with anything even vaguely refuting the information in Schecter’s book. In fact, unlike Corsi’s entire body of work, The Real McCain is built out of well-established fact and thoroughly vetted information.

The Times piece, to its credit, does list the multiple falsehoods and distortions in Corsi’s book (Media Matters has a whole bunch more). So perhaps there will be at least a reasonable chance that this book will be treated more skeptically than Corsi’s Swift Boat book.

But you have to wonder why so much more ink and broadband will be devoted to this book than a similar book about McCain. Makes you wonder if those rumors about McCain’s people threatening the networks with retaliation for any airtime for Schecter are true.

Your librul media at work again.

Dave Reichert's lobbyist money

-- by Dave

Darcy Burner's opponent, Dave Reichert, likes to pose as a moderate, "independent" kind of Republican, even though he largely votes the GOP party line like a good footsoldier. And he's rewarded for that loyalty not just with visits from Preznit Bush and John McCain, but also with fund-raisers from the usual K Street lobbyists.

The problem with that, as Politico recently reported, is that those lobbyists represent business interests who work directly against the interests of Reichert's constituents -- particularly the Boeing employees who are in line to build the Pentagon's new tanker plane:

In Washington state, where Boeing would build the tanker if it finally got the contract, Rep. Dave Reichert, the Republican incumbent in the 8th Congressional District, has so far raised less money than his Democratic challenger, Darcy Burner. She has $1.48 million in the bank; he $928,000.

Just before the August recess, a group of well-connected young Republicans calling themselves Club 218 attempted to make up the difference, arranging a fundraiser for Reichert, according to news reports.

The problem?

Roll Call recently listed some of Club 218’s members, including Mike Chappell, a lobbyist for the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co. at Fierce, Isakowitz and Blalock; and Christopher Cox, a D.C. Navigators’ lobbyist for Alabama Aircraft Industries, which is fighting Boeing on a tanker maintenance contract.

EADS is teamed with Northrop Grumman in the tanker competition, to assemble the tanker in Mobile, Ala.

... “The fact that Congressman Reichert is benefitting from fundraisers organized by lobbyists for corporate interests trying to strip thousands of jobs from our district is the height of hypocrisy,” said Burner’s spokesman, Sandeep Kaushik. “It raises questions about his commitment to the district.”

Reichert's campaign denies that there's anything wrong with taking money from Club 218, and claims it hasn't taken any money from the EADS lobbyist (while saying nothing about Cox). But that's an evasion of what this story is about.

The K Street Republicans are savvy enough to keep an Airbus lobbyist off Reichert's FEC filings; the story is that this group of anti-Boeing/pro-Alabama lobbyists quietly organized a Capitol Club fund-raiser for Reichert.

This funder was a joint event with Darren White of New Mexico; one would assume that White was the object of any EADS lobbyists' largesse. But the event itself was reflective of how deeply, incestuously enmeshed the Republican House members have become with K Street lobbyists, and Reichert is as deeply entwined as any of them.

Which is why he'll go on TV and denounce the original decision not to award the tanker to Boeing (as he does in the video above) and then privately gather funds with help from anti-Boeing lobbyists. It's called talking out both sides of your mouth, and Reichert is a master.

It’s Not Just Immigrants On Sheriff Joe’s List — It’s Everyone

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

Right-wing nativist assholes are also right-wing authoritarian assholes. They come in the same package. Case in point: Arizona’s Crazy Sheriff Joe Arpaio:

PHOENIX – The American Civil Liberties Union is in a federal district court beginning today seeking to rebuff an attempt by Maricopa County and its sheriff, Joe Arpaio, to terminate a federal consent decree mandating that he maintain conditions at the Maricopa County Jail that meet constitutional minimums.

The ACLU will argue in U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona that deteriorating conditions within each of the jail’s five facilities that house pre-trial detainees – people who have been arrested but not yet tried or convicted – necessitate federal court oversight to ensure that Arpaio and other county officials maintain safe and humane conditions and provide the thousands of pre-trial detainees held there basic levels of medical and mental health care.

… Pre-trial detainees at Maricopa County Jail are regularly given moldy bread, rotten fruit and other contaminated food. Detainees with serious medical, mental health and dental needs receive inadequate care, and they are routinely denied beds or bunks at intake, forcing them to sleep on the floor. Additionally, severe overcrowding in three of the jail’s facilities has created extremely dangerous environments by significantly increasing the potential for violence among inmates.

In one recent and particularly galling example, jail officials chose to punish rather than treat the bizarre behavior of a young and severely psychotic African immigrant. Jail officials put him in disciplinary segregation and chose to house him with other inmates, resulting in his being so severely beaten by his cell mates that he had to be taken to the emergency room.

It was only last week that the ACLU was similarly taking Arpaio to court to force him to live up to a court order to transport female prisoners to abortion appointments.

This is the same wingnut sheriff who has been rounding up every Latino in Maricopa County, transforming his department into an immigration bureau and incapacitating his office’s normal law-enforcement duties. I guess it shouldn’t be a big shocker that someone who thinks brown people’s rights are expendable would feel the same about women. This is just the right-wing approach to the "rule of law" in action — it’s only the law if a right-winger says it’s so.

As the WaPo opined the other day: It’s time for someone sane to step in here. Kudos to the ACLU.

Obsession: Sally Quinn’s Old D.C. Fragrance

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

Ever notice how the adultery scandals always manage to draw Sally Quinn out of the society-maven closet?

Quinn awhile ago sorta donned her tatty and never-particularly-good old journalist’s hat back to co-author Newsweek’s "On Faith" column — which, true to form, has always been awfully short on actual faith and long on moralizing. What made Quinn an expert on faith? Who knows. But adultery scandals, well, that’s another parlor game altogether.

So of course, given the chance this week, she used her "On Faith" column space to weigh in on her favorite subject — adultery. The John Edwards foofara was perfect grist for her lofty moral mill — though she manages to discuss it with nary a reference to "faith," other than the marital kind:

Yes, I want to smack John Edwards across the puss. But more than that I want Elizabeth Edwards to do it for me. Not just for me but for all of us.

Oooh, yeah, smackin’ those hound-dog men around just feels sooo good. And smackin’ the wife around for lettin’ him hound-dog feels even better!

Note, as Megan Carpenter does, that we’ve heard this before: Sally Quinn said almost precisely the same thing about Hillary Clinton when Monica erupted — and is still saying it about her.

Why the obsession with adultery? Well, maybe it has to do with Quinn’s own marital history as a husband-stealer:

At the time Bradlee was married but separated; Quinn was living with journalist Warren Hoge, who would later work for the Times. Quinn and Bradlee became an item, Bradlee’s marriage failed, the two were married in 1978 — and Sally Quinn’s career took off.

Ah, those moral paragons of the Beltway. They always know better than the rest of us.

The New McCain Salute

[Cross-posted at Firedolglake.]

The wingnuts are having lots of fun kicking around an LA marketing company’s dumbass idea for an "Obama salute" (you form an O with both hands). I have no idea why these geniuses thought authoritarian gestures would become a big thing with liberals and progressives, but what the hell. The market will speak on this one, I’d bet.

So all the wingnut bloggers, notably the A-listers like Ole Perfesser and Malkin, are all over this major pressing and campaign-changing story like stink on shit. One can only imagine the scene if anyone actually affiliated with the Obama campaign were behind a dumb idea like this.

I’m sure, however, that this is just jealousy. So in the spirit of political sharing, we dirty fucking trekkies of the left have concocted a similar salute for John McCain:

So Much For McCain’s Outreach To Latinos

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

 The folks over at The Sanctuary — one of the premier group blogs about Latino issues — last month sent out a questionnaire to the Obama and McCain campaigns trying pin them down on the specifics of key issues, particularly immigration. Here’s what happened:

By the July 31st deadline, only the Obama campaign had responded to the survey. The Sanctuary conducted extra follow-up with McCain’s campaign headquarters via e-mail and telephone to investigate their failure to meet the deadline.

"The first phone call I placed was answered cordially. I was told that someone would get back to me. I never heard back from anyone," said Sanctuary editor Kety Esquivel of www.CrossLeft.org, who has appeared on CNN to discuss the questionnaire. "The second time I called, the person I was speaking with hung up and the third time I called the line was disconnected."

Of course, it was only last month that McCain was cooing sweet nothings in the ears of Latino voters in Chicago, holding a late-night town-hall session that was closed to the public. Even then, it was obvious he was telling Latinos he was their pal — but just not to let anyone else know that. And it went over about as well as you’d expect.

Looks like he’s taking my advice and just embracing his party’s inner nativist wingnut.

The Anthrax Case Might Be Cracked, But It Is Far From Closed

Bruce Ivins

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

I hope everyone watching the anthrax/Bruce Ivins case has been reading Marcy’s stellar work, particularly her delving of the Justice Department’s selective document dump yesterday (see especially her wrapup on the documents and the timeline she constructed, as well as this morning’s note). The bottom line: "they haven’t solved this crime, but they want us to all go away and pretend they have."


Some of the evidence presented is fairly damning, to be sure. There’s a big red flag in the middle this affidavit: Ivins gave the FBI false anthrax samples during their investigation of the mailings in April 2002. What’s particularly noteworthy is that he appeared to be hiding the fact that his lab samples (which he originally did not hand over) matched the samples in the mailings.

Besides being extraordinarily suspicious behavior (Ivins’ explanations were far from convincing) this sort of non-cooperation is also obstruction of justice. And that, no doubt, was a club the FBI began holding over his head to get his cooperation in the years that followed.

It’s also worth noting that this event happened only days before Ivins was involved in discovering an anthrax leak at the lab, an event that set off a panic within Fort Detrick. (The Frederick News Post published an excellent series describing this event.)

At the same time, you have to be struck by some of the FBI’s behavior that emerges from these papers as well as other documents. The Washington Post story following the dump covers this well: It really was an extraordinary pattern of constant harassment, including showing up at a supermarket with autopsy photos to tell Ivins’ wife that he had killed those people.

I’ve been around federal law enforcement for a long time, and agents almost never engage in tactics like that unless they are dead certain they have their man and are trying to shake him into a misstep. Problem is, I’ve also seen agents be wrong about that.

What stands out in these documents is what we’ve gotten so far from the leaks (almost certainly coming from an investigator) that have fed us most of the public information about the case against Ivins: Namely, there are tons of cause for suspicion, and even a reasonable circumstantial case to make against Ivins, but it’s a dubious proposition at best that this evidence would have yielded a conviction — it’s more likely, in fact, that it wouldn’t have.

Indeed, it’s likely that Ivins would still be alive if their case against him had been stronger. After all, they could easily have taken him into custody after his release from the hospital where he was treated just before his suicide — but probably didn’t because their case was so weak and they feared it would be dismissed outright if they grabbed him.

What the public has to work on so far are affidavits for search warrants — which are fine for establishing probable cause, but don’t do diddly for establishing actual guilt. They may have gotten a good crack on the case, but the FBI is far from having solved it.

Indeed, the affidavit contains several inconsistencies. One of the key pieces of evidence it raises is his mysterious late-night work around the time of the attacks, emphasizing his refusal to explain what he was working on. Yet a later section quotes an e-mail showing showing that Ivins resumed work on a vaccine project at this time. And the “unusual” pattern of night work is clearly shown to have begun in August, well before the Al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. — meaning if Ivins was working on the attacks then, he conceived them before 9/11. And yet whoever was responsible for the attacks was clearly piggybacking off them (see the phony "Muslim" content of the letters).

This incoherency is also evident in the concluding final section, which makes clear that investigators are continuing to look outside of Fort Detrick for the location and the equipment used in making the anthrax and the letters. (It also makes it unlikely that the lyopholizer used in making the anthrax was the one recently linked to Ivins in news reports based on the leaks.)

Even if Ivins can be linked with hard evidence, the case still has many unresolved issues, particularly whether Ivins had any co-conspirators (the affidavits even indicate this was a possibility). And then there are the larger issues about what was happening at Fort Detrick — why security was so lax, and whether the facility was violating the international bioweapons convention if it was making this anthrax.

But it’s clear the Justice Department wants to walk away from this case — and with someone linked closely to Scooter "Germ Boy" Libby calling the shots, that seems increasingly likely. Hopefully, Congress will have something to say about that.

[Thanks to Warbaby for the links and pointers.]

You’re Not Being Paranoid If They Really Are Out To Get You

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

 Today’s AP story about the NRA spy who infiltrated Ceasefire NJ, a major gun-control organization, was perfectly in line with classic right-wing gun-nut behavior.


One of the ways that the paranoid mindset endemic to the American right plays out is that they always wind up doing the very things they like to suspect the rest of us of — like playing dirty tricks and infiltrating them. It’s because they start out fearful, and then move on to imagining what those they fear might be doing to harm them, and those imaginings inevitably are built out of what they themselves might do in reversed positions … all of which becomes a self-fulfilling rationale for doing it entirely on their own.

This is especially true of the gun culture. I grew up in it. I know.

Their integrity and honor — you know, the kind of values they like proudly announce they’re all about — is showing, too, in the NRA’s tight-lipped refusal to comment on the story. A press release on the purity of the essence of our bodily fluids is forthcoming, no doubt.

I think the comment from one of the spy’s supposed friends said it all:

Bryan Miller, executive director of Ceasefire NJ, said he feels betrayed by McFate. Miller’s brother, an FBI agent, was shot to death in 1994.

"To have somebody that I consider a friend, have been with dozens of times, shared meals with, treated as a friend, to have her be an employee, a subcontracted spy for the NRA, is just mind-boggling. It’s so venal," Miller said. "In the battle of ideas with the gun lobby, we’re at a constant disadvantage because we’re honest."

Heaven help us if we become as paranoid as they are. And the funny thing is, they keep proving that we ought to be.