Is there another way to say "Happy New Year"?

Peter, Paul and Mary (or, to be technical, Paul, Mary and Peter) -- a bunch of years later. Note that Peter, the co-writer of "Puff," has always been touchy about those rumors that the lyrics contained hidden drug references. And now this!

Ever since Noah told us the appalling story about Republicans wetting their pants over some sad soul's transformation of "Puff the Magic Dragon" into a racist giggle, I've been trying to think, What do you say to, or about, people capable of doing such a thing? Or, worse, to people who think it's funny?

I haven't come up with anything. Maybe this is one of those things where either you get it or you don't. So let's just say, Thanks, Peter, and (co-writer) Lenny, and, oh yes, Paul and Mary too!

By way of an encore, though unfortunately in audio-only form, here's the original:



Happy New Year, everyone, from everyone here at DWT! -- Ken

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Harold Meyerson: "Laissez faire be damned, the ideologues concluded: When handed a Lehman, make Lehman aid"

It's a terrible price to pay for such a modest benefit, but it's something. At least our friends on the Greed-and-Selfishness Right have learned their lesson and won't dare open their mouths on economic matters for, oh, a long long time!

Nah, I suppose that's too much to hope. Lesson-learning doesn't come easily to those folks. Harold Meyerson proposes a couple of lessons in his Washington Post column today which we might hope they learn, though. -- Ken

The Big Bailout Lessons

By Harold Meyerson

Two things we learned about our politics and our economy in 2008:

Lesson One: If it's big and you don't regulate it, you end up nationalizing it.

One of the major lessons of the year is that unregulated and underregulated capitalism ends up confronting democratic governments with a subprime choice: Either let a major institution go down and watch as chaos follows (the Lehman option) or funnel gobs of the public's money into such institutions to avoid such Lehman-like chaos.

It was the Bush administration, more than the government of any other nation, that demonstrated this iron law of economics, for it was the Bush administration that was most committed to laissez-faire economics. The White House and the Treasury, under George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, let an entire unregulated financial world rise alongside the more regulated consumer banks and brokerages. Uniquely under Bush, however, the regulation of regulated banks and brokerages broke down as well. In 2000, the Justice Department filed 69 cases of securities fraud based on Securities and Exchange Commission investigations. In 2007, it filed nine. And this year, Bush's Office of Thrift Supervision allowed IndyMac Bank to doctor its books so it wouldn't appear to be as insolvent as, in fact, it was.

When the American financial industry came tumbling down this year, the laissez-faire ideologues of this most ideological administration indulged their ideology just once, allowing Lehman to go under. Thereafter, as one giant institution after another tottered under the weight of dubious deals, the administration tossed ideology out the window and funneled money to the banks.

Laissez faire be damned, the ideologues concluded: When handed a Lehman, make Lehman aid.

The lesson for 2009 couldn't be clearer: To avoid nationalization, you need regulation. Or, the lesson's ideological corollary: To avoid socialism (to whatever extent throwing public money at banks is socialism), you need liberalism (that is, the willingness to restrain capitalism from its periodic self-destruction).

Presumably, these lessons haven't been lost on Barack Obama, who has pledged to re-regulate Wall Street. Whether he's selected the right people for this task remains to be seen. To head the SEC, he chose Mary Schapiro, who led the financial industry's own regulatory authority, over such proven investor advocates as former SEC commissioner Harvey Goldschmid. The issue isn't Schapiro's competence or probity, which are well established, but whether she shares the "deep suspicion of bankers, of Wall Street lawyers, and of corporation lawyers in general" that characterized (in the words of FDR consigliere Raymond Moley) Tommy Corcoran and Ben Cohen, the New Deal attorneys who drafted the original and highly successful Securities and Exchange Act. If she doesn't, considering that Wall Street and its apologists are already warning about the dire effect of new regulations on the economy -- and, one presumes, their annual bonuses -- we'll be bound for a new cycle of light regulation and heavy public bailouts.

Lesson Two: In matters economic, the Civil War isn't really over.

If Abraham Lincoln were still among the living as he prepared to turn 200 six weeks from now, he might detect in the congressional war over the automaker bailouts a strong echo of the war that defined his presidency. Now as then, the conflict centered on the rival labor systems of North and South. Now as then, the Southerners championed a low-wage, low-benefits system while the North favored a more generous one. And now as then, what sparked the conflict was the North's fear of the Southern system becoming the national norm. Or, as Lincoln put it, a house divided against itself cannot stand.

Over the past century, of course, the conflict between North and South has been between union and non-union labor. The states of the industrial Midwest and the South had common demographics (Appalachian whites and African Americans, though the Northern states also were home to Catholics of Eastern European origin) but developed two distinct economies.

Residents of the unionized north enjoyed higher living standards, both from their paychecks and the higher public outlays on health and education, than did their counterparts in the union-resistant South.

But, just as Lincoln predicted, the United States was bound to have one labor system prevail, and the debate over the General Motors and Chrysler bailout was really a debate over which system -- the United Auto Workers' or the foreign transplant factories' -- that would be. Where the parallel between periods breaks down, of course, is in partisan alignment. Today's congressional Republicans are hardly Lincoln's heirs. If anything, they are descendants of Jefferson Davis's Confederates.

The Republicans in the White House, however, couldn't afford to be so sectional, since they were still subject to Lesson One: Even if the cars were lemons, they had to make -- okay, once per column.

Happy regulated new year.

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Did the hair scientists who cured Chimpy the Prez's Brillo hair save the Imperial Unitary Executive?

The one image of the old Bush Brillo hair that the Hair Revisionist Police haven't been able to obliterate is the one that was used on the $200 bill.

by Ken

Everyone's doing their year-end retrospectives. Heck, we offered our own over the weekend. But the one that will be remembered, the one that really held up a mirror to who and what we are, is that supreme patriot Gen. JC Christian's "2008: The Year in Hair" -- from Bush to Blagojevich by way of Princess Sarah Palin.

The one point on which we might offer a quibble, or a correction -- or no, an amplification, is in the matter of the one incontestable positive development of the Bush regime: the Deliverance of the Dear Leader from the Deadly Scourge of Brillo Hair.

The General rightly pays tribute to the near-miraculous cheveluriferous adaptability of Chimpy the Prez:

Let us begin with the hair of Our Glorious Leader, George W Bush. Gray one day and brown the next, the Chosen One's hair served as a threat level indicator to a fearful public. Times of relative calm were announced with shades of ancient dirty white, while a deep chocolate, symbolic of youth and vigor, signaled a crisis like dropping poll numbers or cash-flow problems in the lobbying sector. Ever-shifting polychromatic hair is not easily managed, but Our Leader boldly and bravely met the challenge by constantly adjusting his body chemistry via an internal application of alcohol.

Think back to the way that hair used to look, back in the days before five brave Supreme Court justices stood up for America by saying, "This boy has no shot at ever landing a real job. The Gore kid could probably get a job in any mail room in the country, but if we don't make the Bush boy president, let's face it, he's essentially unemployable." It was like Brillo pads had been Crazy Glued to his scalp. Like the guy had just stepped out of the dishwasher, after a particularly vicious "dry" cycle. Back then the only thing that could be done with that hair was to simply plaster it to his head with the Greasy Kid Stuff.

Well, you better remember, because the Hair Revisionist Police appear to have erased all photographic evidence from the Google with the exception of the shot used on the $200 bill (above).

Now it's true that if the masters of chevelurology (well, there must be some technical term for the science of hair) hadn't been able to come up with a cure for the Bushian Brillo hair . . . well, it's almost unthinkable. The son of a bitch probably would have been impeached by August of 2001 and would likely have been awaiting his Senate trial on 9/11. Off his triumph as the Mayor of 9/11, Rudy Giuliani would have been declared president by unanimous acclaim.

Fortunately, a crash hair-care research program kicked in just in time, thereby sparing us the need to look at the hard question: What the hell is the use of the Imperial Unitary Executive if it can't do anything about hair like that?

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Ringing-out-the-old-year update: (1) Tonight at 11, Rachel Maddow is doing a New Year's Eve special. (2) Howie waves good-bye to Mali.

(1) FOR NEW YEAR'S EVE: IT'S THE FIRST ANNUAL
RACHEL MADDOW AWARDS FOR EXCELLENCE

If you haven't made your New Year's Eve plans, or even if you have, note that Rachel's got this special airing tonight -- according to the MSBNC website "at 11 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. (two halves with the ball drop in Times Square in the middle)."

Now that sounds like just the way to get the new year off to the right start.


(2) LEAVING MALI: IF NOTHING ELSE, HOWIE
REPORTS, YOU CAN EAT WELL IN BAMAKO

By now, if I'm calculating correctly, and barring unforeseen developments, Howie is in Paris. I'm waiting to find out whether Down With Tyranny is actually blocked in France, as appeared to be the case on the outbound leg of the trip.

Yesterday there was a new post on his Around the World travel blog with some parting thoughts from Mali: "Bamako May Be Hot, Dusty, Expensive & Polluted, But They Sure Make Some Good Chow."

On his return to Bamako the other day, by the way, Howie wrote, "The trip to Dogon country was amazing, and I took tons of photos, but that must all wait til I get back." We haven't heard much about the trip to Dogon country, either here or on Howie's Around the World blog. He promises, "The real story I'll write when I get back."

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Somewhat belatedly, we pass along Melissa Etheridge's thoughts on the Pastor Rick situation

I've already had my say about Pastor Rick and the regrettable invitation ("It seems safe to say that President-elect Obama doesn't give a damn what we think of the choice of Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation"), and so has most everyone else. Last week from Africa Howie passed along a HuffPost post by Melissa Etheridge, which I've held off passing on -- frankly because I thought it was too easy to foresee the reflexive response to it, and the reflexive response to the response, and in all likelihood the reflexive response to that. So I tossed it on my steadily growing pile of "stuff I want to come back to when I have a chance to draw a breath."

Somewhat belatedly, I commend it to your attention, and I hope folks will at least listen to Melissa, not because she's a "celebrity," or because she claims any great political sophistication, which, please note, she doesn't. But clearly a lot of people take her seriously as an artist, and I think the qualities that make her an artist who has won a place in so many hearts -- including, apparently, Pastor Rick's! -- are apparent here. -- Ken

The Choice Is Ours Now

By Melissa Etheridge - The Huffington Post, Dec. 22, 2008

This is a message for my brothers and sisters who have fought so long and so hard for gay rights and liberty. We have spent a long time climbing up this mountain, looking at the impossible, changing a thousand year-old paradigm. We have asked for the right to love the human of our choice, and to be protected equally under the laws of this great country. The road at times has been so bloody, and so horrible, and so disheartening. From being blamed for 9/11 and Katrina, to hateful crimes committed against us, we are battle weary. We watched as our nation took a step in the right direction, against all odds and elected Barack Obama as our next leader. Then we were jerked back into the last century as we watched our rights taken away by prop 8 in California. Still sore and angry we felt another slap in the face as the man we helped get elected seemingly invited a gay-hater to address the world at his inauguration.

I hadn't heard of Pastor Rick Warren before all of this. When I heard the news, in its neat little sound bite form that we are so accustomed to, it painted the picture for me. This Pastor Rick must surely be one hate spouting, money grabbing, bad hair televangelist like all the others. He probably has his own gay little secret bathroom stall somewhere, you know. One more hater working up his congregation to hate the gays, comparing us to pedophiles and those who commit incest, blah blah blah. Same 'ole thing. Would I be boycotting the inauguration? Would we be marching again?

Well, I have to tell you my friends, the universe has a sense of humor and indeed works in mysterious ways. As I was winding down the promotion for my Christmas album I had one more stop last night. I'd agreed to play a song I'd written with my friend Salman Ahmed, a Sufi Muslim from Pakistan. The song is called "Ring The Bells," and it's a call for peace and unity in our world. We were going to perform our song for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, a group of Muslim Americans that tries to raise awareness in this country, and the world, about the majority of good, loving, Muslims. I was honored, considering some in the Muslim religion consider singing to be against God, while other Muslim countries have harsh penalties, even death for homosexuals. I felt it was a very brave gesture for them to make. I received a call the day before to inform me of the keynote speaker that night... Pastor Rick Warren. I was stunned. My fight or flight instinct took over, should I cancel? Then a calm voice inside me said, "Are you really about peace or not?"

I told my manager to reach out to Pastor Warren and say "In the spirit of unity I would like to talk to him." They gave him my phone number. On the day of the conference I received a call from Pastor Rick, and before I could say anything, he told me what a fan he was. He had most of my albums from the very first one. What? This didn't sound like a gay hater, much less a preacher. He explained in very thoughtful words that as a Christian he believed in equal rights for everyone. He believed every loving relationship should have equal protection. He struggled with proposition 8 because he didn't want to see marriage redefined as anything other than between a man and a woman. He said he regretted his choice of words in his video message to his congregation about proposition 8 when he mentioned pedophiles and those who commit incest. He said that in no way, is that how he thought about gays. He invited me to his church, I invited him to my home to meet my wife and kids. He told me of his wife's struggle with breast cancer just a year before mine.

When we met later that night, he entered the room with open arms and an open heart. We agreed to build bridges to the future.
Brothers and sisters the choice is ours now. We have the world's attention. We have the capability to create change, awesome change in this world, but before we change minds we must change hearts. Sure, there are plenty of hateful people who will always hold on to their bigotry like a child to a blanket. But there are also good people out there, Christian and otherwise that are beginning to listen. They don't hate us, they fear change. Maybe in our anger, as we consider marches and boycotts, perhaps we can consider stretching out our hands. Maybe instead of marching on his church, we can show up en mass and volunteer for one of the many organizations affiliated with his church that work for HIV/AIDS causes all around the world.

Maybe if they get to know us, they wont fear us.

I know, call me a dreamer, but I feel a new era is upon us.

I will be attending the inauguration with my family, and with hope in my heart. I know we are headed in the direction of marriage equality and equal protection for all families.

Happy Holidays my friends and a Happy New Year to you.Peace on earth, goodwill toward all men and women... and everyone in-between.

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The people who voted twice for Chimpy the Prez already seem to have forgotten him. The rest of us, suggests Tom Schaller, can at least try

by Ken

I think it was in a comment that I mentioned I was going to a periodic brunch of some New York-area bloggers, and it came off fine -- either helped by or in spite of the weird weather, with temperatures in the 60s! (Around Christmas we had a stretch of several days where the temperature didn't get up to freezing.) But there was a heavy gray overcast all day, and a uniform coat of wet on the pavement everywhere, even though no one could recall it raining.

Anyway, over the dim sum someone mentioned something that someone had mentioned, or proposed, or something for the final day of Chimpy the Prez in office. I honestly don't recall what the proposal was, and I'm not even sure it really registered at the same time. I was just overwhelmed with the thought of "the final day of Chimpy the Prez in office." We knew it had to happen eventually, but there were times, I tell you, when I wondered. (For years my poor mother, now just past midway between her 89th and 90th birthdays, would say that she wouldn't live to see it, and while it looks like she may be proved technically wrong, I'm afraid it's coming to late for her to be aware.)

Anyway, today's Baltimore Sun column by our colleague and friend Tom Schaller caught Howie's eye (still in Mali, if my calculations are correct), and we'd like to share it with you. Tom, a regular columnist for the Sun, is a political scientist by profession, and is perhaps famliar to you as the author of the enormously influential 2006 book Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South. Given the "countdown" format (it took all I had to resist spoiling the buildup by pulling "No. 1" out to exerpt at the top of this post), rather than try to excerpt the column, I'm just going to pass it on whole:

43 reasons we won't miss President Bush

Thomas F. Schaller
December 30, 2008

The Bush family devised a simple, numerical means to distinguish between the presidencies of father and son: George H.W. Bush was called "41," and George W. Bush became "43." To mark the imminent -- and merciful -- end of 43's reign, here are 43 remembrances of the departing administration.

There were actions to pacify or mobilize the right-wing elements that brought Mr. Bush to power:

43. Restoring the so-called Mexico City policy prohibiting American aid to groups that provide abortion counseling in other countries.

42. Brokering an embryonic stem cell compromise by falsely claiming there were 60 viable cell lines (about five times the actual number).

41. Attorney General John Ashcroft's puritanical cloaking of the Justice Department's semi-nude "Spirit of Justice" statue.

40. Political adviser Karl Rove's use of gay marriage ballot measures to rally evangelicals for the 2004 election.

There were poor staffing choices and the willful ignoring of sound advice:

39. White House adviser Claude A. Allen's arrest for illegal merchandise exchanges at Target.

38. The Supreme Court nomination of Harriet E. Miers, whose sycophancy trumped her lack of qualifications for the bench.

37. Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill's puzzlement that the president could sit through an entire briefing without asking a single thoughtful question.

36. "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job."

35. Rejecting Gen. Eric K. Shinseki's estimate that "several hundred thousand" American troops would be needed in Iraq.

34. Dumping Secretary of State Colin L. Powell even though he risked his reputation with the 2003 U.N. testimony about supposed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which he later deemed the "lowest point" of his life.

33. The president's petulant refusal to consult with his actual father, who knew something about invading Iraq, in favor of war counsel from a "higher father."

There was a penchant for deception and secrecy:

32. A gay male escort, working under a pseudonym for a bogus news agency, was permitted access to White House press conferences.

31. The executive order rebuking the Presidential Records Act, sealing 41's vice presidential papers from public view.

30. The altering of a 2003 Environmental Protection Agency report showing evidence of global warming.

29. Hiding from Congress the Medicare prescription plan's internal cost estimate until the bill passed.

28. The creation under Vice President Dick Cheney's supervision of the Office of Special Plans to cherry-pick Iraq intelligence data.

27. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction stored "around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."

26. The later attempt to blame pre-war intelligence failures on CIA Director George J. Tenet.

And, at No. 25, Mr. Bush's infamous 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Though Mr. Bush in 2004 couldn't cite a single mistake he had made (No. 24), for the self-described "Decider" (No. 23) indecision was often costly:

22 through 18: As the terrorist attacks unfolded on Sept. 11, 2001, he froze for seven precious minutes in that Sarasota, Fla., classroom, reading The Pet Goat; he wasted vital weeks that autumn before dispatching special forces to hunt down Osama bin Laden; his re-election at stake in summer 2004, he delayed for six months sending troops into Fallujah to suppress the growing insurgency; he fiddled for three days in August 2005 before delivering federal resources to New Orleans after Katrina; and he sank four years, 4,000 deaths and billions of dollars into Iraq before changing his failed strategy there.

On the domestic front, there were tax cuts for the wealthiest sold as an economic stimulus that never occurred (No. 17), a failed attempt to privatize Social Security that would have cost the treasury billions (No. 16), and budget deficits all eight years (No. 15). Despite trillions borrowed or lost to tax cuts, the administration claimed there were insufficient funds for children's health insurance (No. 14), college tuition assistance (No. 13) or veterans' benefits (No. 12).

Nos. 11, 10 and 9: Opponents were smeared, from John Kerry via the Swift Boat Veterans front group to Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV by outing his wife, CIA asset Valerie Plame, to triple-amputee Vietnam veteran Max Cleland during the 2002 Georgia U.S. Senate race.

American values were sullied abroad in Abu Ghraib (No. 8), at home through domestic wiretapping (No. 7) and in between at the jurisdictionally murky Guantanamo prison (No. 6).

Most of all, there was hubris, from Mr. Rumsfeld's glib "known unknowns" monologues at press conferences (No. 5) to Mr. Cheney's media-dodging after shooting his friend in the face (No. 4), and from Mr. Bush's infantilizing habit of giving everyone nicknames (No. 3) to his failed promise to be a "uniter, not a divider" (No. 2).

If polarizing the country, wrecking the economy and turning the world against us was the goal, then the No. 1 entry is painfully obvious: "Mission accomplished."

Thanks, Tom! Mission accomplished!

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So Illinois has a new senator -- or does it?

Former state Att'y Gen. Roland Burris is named by Governor Rod.

First the announcement:

Blagojevich Names Obama Replacement

CHICAGO (Dec. 30) – Defying U.S. Senate leaders and his own state's lawmakers, Gov. Rod Blagojevich on Tuesday appointed former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris to replace President-elect Barack Obama in the U.S. Senate. Blagojevich, accused of trying to sell Obama's Senate seat to the highest bidder, praised the 71-year-old Burris' integrity and asked that the corruption allegations not "taint this good and honest man."

"The people of Illinois are entitled to have two United States senators represent them in Washington D.C.," Blagojevich said. "As governor I am required to make this appointment."

Burris, standing at the governor's side, said he's eager to get to work in Washington. He said he has no connection to the charges against Blagojevich, who was arrested on Dec. 9 and accused of trying to profit from appointing Obama's replacement.

Burris was the first African-American elected to major statewide office. He's served as Illinois' comptroller and ran for governor three times — the last time losing to Blagojevich.

The Democratic governor's announcement as Burris as his pick may be an empty gesture. Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White, who must certify the appointment, said Tuesday he will not do so. And U.S. Senate leaders reiterated that they wouldn't accept anyone appointed by Blagojevich, who was arrested Dec. 9 on federal corruption charges.

In a statement Tuesday, Senate Democrats maintained that Blagojevich should not make the appointment because it is unfair to Burris, unfair to the people of Illinois and ultimately won't stand.

"It is truly regrettable that despite requests from all 50 Democratic Senators and public officials throughout Illinois, Gov. Blagojevich would take the imprudent step of appointing someone to the United States Senate who would serve under a shadow and be plagued by questions of impropriety," the statement said.

"Under these circumstances, anyone appointed by Gov. Blagojevich cannot be an effective representative of the people of Illinois and, as we have said, will not be seated by the Democratic Caucus." . . .

[Blagojevich's] own lawyer said recently that there would be no point in Blagojevich naming someone to the Senate because leaders there would reject his appointment.

White, who handles the state's paperwork, said he would not formally certify any appointment made by Blagojevich "because of the current cloud of controversy surround the governor."

It's not clear whether White's administrative hurdle would be enough to prevent a Blagojevich appointment from taking effect.

Burris, 71, was the first black politician elected to major statewide office in Illinois and has connections across the state. He's a native of Centralia in southern Illinois who graduated from Southern Illinois University before earning his law degree from Howard University.

Burris served as Illinois' comptroller from 1979 to 1991 and as the state's attorney general from 1991 to 1995. He also served as vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 1985 to 1989.

More recently, however, Burris has had a string of political disappointments. He lost campaigns for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 1994, 1998 and 2002 -- the last time losing to Blagojevich. In 1995, he was badly beaten when challenging Chicago Mayor Richard Daley in the primary.

Before taking public office, Burris worked in banking and served as national executive director and chief operating officer for Operation PUSH, the Chicago-based civil rights organization. . . .

Now some political analysis from Politico's Arena, in the form of a "bold prediction for 2009" from attorney Thomas C. Goldstein:

Roland Burris is very likely to be a U.S. Senator until the Illinois Legislature can hold a special election to replace him, which they may now decide to do quickly. It's clear that if Burris were elected and duly qualified, the Senate couldn't refuse to seat him. That's the Supreme Court's holding in the Adam Clayton Powell case, Powell v. McCormack (1969). The question is whether there is a different rule for appointments by governors rather than elections. Those are covered by the Seventeenth Amendment, which lets states give the appointment power to governors "until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct."

But what if Blago gave the seat to someone who bribed him? The Senate could probably refuse to seat that person as not genuinely fulfilling the "qualifications" of the seat (which it gets to decide under Article I of the Constitution) because the appointment would be unlawful under other provisions of federal and state law (due to the bribery) and therefore not a valid exercise of the appointment power under state law. But there presumably was no bribe with respect to the Burris appointment, which means that he gets the seat.

The Senate's remaining option would be to seat Burris but then turn around an expel him by a 2/3 vote (another power under Article I). But that would open up another can of worms because Burris will not have engaged in misbehavior and it would be an obvious attempt to circumvent his right under the Constitution to be seated.

Stay tuned!


UPDATE: THE PRESIDENT-ELECT WEIGHS IN

President-elect Obama, whose Senate seat it is that is being filled (or not), issued the following statement:

Roland Burris is a good man and a fine public servant, but the Senate Democrats made it clear weeks ago that they cannot accept an appointment made by a governor who is accused of selling this very Senate seat. I agree with their decision, and it is extremely disappointing that Governor Blagojevich has chosen to ignore it. I believe the best resolution would be for the Governor to resign his office and allow a lawful and appropriate process of succession to take place. While Governor Blagojevich is entitled to his day in court, the people of Illinois are entitled to a functioning government and major decisions free of taint and controversy.

Meanwhile, what I'm still hearing from legal eagles familiar with applicable law, neither the folks in Illinois nor the U.S. Senate appear to have legal or constitutional grounds to reject Governor Blagojevich's appointment, absent indication that there was something illegal about the actual appointment, like a bribe -- of which there is no indication that anyone is aware of.

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An agency with "occupational" and "safety" and "health" in its name was always a sitting duck at the hands of the merciless Bush regimistas

"Heckuva Job Foulkie" (left) at a 2007 congressional
hearing, alongside injured worker Eric Peoples

by Ken

So, another federal agency bites the dust. Or, to be technical, turns out to have bitten the dust.

Oh, I know, I'm as bored as you are with this tiresome procession of Inspector General reports, congressionally mandated inquiries, GAO reports, CBO studies, independent inquiries, and on and on -- each revealing that yet another arm of the federal government was either reduced to impotence or transformed into an enforcement arm of the Far, Far Right totalitarian, megalomaniacal, constitution-shredding goons of the Bush regime. So what else is new?

Is there really much point sifting through the wreckage? Maybe trying to figure out how it all happened? Aren't we supposed to, you know, just get on with it?

Just like with Iraq. Why would troublemaking lefites insist on asking embarrassing questions about how the country got snookered into playing neocon war games, only for real? I would have thought that the "for real" part is explanation enough all by itself for why yes, we have to know how it all happened.

But I suppose we need to get some of the dreary facts on the record. Yesterday's Washington Post story began, typically enough, with a now-familiar sort of Incriminating Episode:

Under Bush, OSHA Mired in Inaction

By R. Jeffrey Smith

In early 2001, an epidemiologist at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration sought to publish a special bulletin warning dental technicians that they could be exposed to dangerous beryllium alloys while grinding fillings. Health studies showed that even a single day's exposure at the agency's permitted level could lead to incurable lung disease.

After the bulletin was drafted, political appointees at the agency gave a copy to a lobbying firm hired by the country's principal beryllium manufacturer, according to internal OSHA documents. The epidemiologist, Peter Infante, incorporated what he considered reasonable changes requested by the company and won approval from key directorates, but he bristled when the private firm complained again.

"In my 24 years at the Agency, I have never experienced such indecision and delay," Infante wrote in an e-mail to the agency's director of standards in March 2002. Eventually, top OSHA officials decided, over what Infante described in an e-mail to his boss as opposition from "the entire OSHA staff working on beryllium issues," to publish the bulletin with a footnote challenging a key recommendation the firm opposed.

The usual stuff, right? Next, of course, comes the revelation (gasp) that this was (a) by once-normal standards extraordinary, even unprecedented behavior inside an executive-branch agency, and (b) this behavior wasn't the exception, it was the rule at OSHA:

Current and former career officials at OSHA say that such sagas were a recurrent feature during the Bush administration, as political appointees ordered the withdrawal of dozens of workplace health regulations, slow-rolled others, and altered the reach of its warnings and rules in response to industry pressure.

The result is a legacy of unregulation common to several health-protection agencies under Bush: From 2001 to the end of 2007, OSHA officials issued 86 percent fewer rules or regulations termed economically significant by the Office of Management and Budget than their counterparts did during a similar period in President Bill Clinton's tenure, according to White House lists.

Then of course there's the regimistas' standard indignant how-dare-you denial of all:

White House officials have dismissed such tallies, emphasizing in recent regulatory overviews that their "objective is quality, not quantity," and that heavy restrictions on corporations harm economic performance. During Bush's presidency, they said in a September report, average annual regulatory costs were kept 24 percent lower than during the previous two decades. OSHA says it has issued many rules of lesser consequence that nonetheless clarified industry responsibilities.

Talk about pathetic! Do they think that at this late date they don't owe us better lies and cover-ups? (Maybe they've given up even trying?) We don't have to wait long to hear from people who actually care about occupational safety and health, and are actually for it, people who've known what's been going on -- and have probably been trying to get someone to listen -- for years:

"The legacy of the Bush administration has been one of dismal inaction," said Robert Harrison, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco and chairman of the occupational health section of the American Public Health Association. It has been "like turning a ketchup bottle upside down, banging the bottom of the container, and nothing comes out. You shake and shake and nothing comes out," Harrison said.

More than two dozen current and former senior career officials further said in interviews that the agency's strategic choices were frequently made without input from its experienced hands. Political appointees "shut us out," a longtime senior career official said.

I suppose we should go through the whole bloody thing. Listen, for example, to former administration director Edwin Foulke (technically "assistant secretary of labor for OSH," since OSHA is an agency within the Labor Dept.) brag --

* about "levying heavy fines after major workplace disasters" (after major disasters? and what constitutes "major"? and were the fines actually collected?),

* about continuing "a drop in reported workplace injuries that began in 1974" (without mentioning the "14 percent drop in U.S. production and manufacturing jobs since 2001" and the "2002 change in the government's record-keeping rules").

Heckuva job, Foulkie!

In retrospect, without any investigation or inquiry we can say two things about the decimation of OSHA with a high degree of certainty:

(1) We can date the beginning of the agency's demise to the day those five Supreme Court justices decided (as Noah was just recalling), "To hell with counting the votes, for the good of the country let's make the guy who's trying to steal the election president." Maybe the idea was that since his people wanted it so much more, that would mean good things for the country? (In which case, oops, the joke's on them!)

(2) An outfit with a name like Occupational Health and Safety Administration was a sitting duck from the outset. In Bushworld, these are weasel words for "just drains money out of the pockets of deserving, regulation-oppressed businessmen, in order to do stuff no right-thinking [or, particularly, Right-thinking] person gives a crap about." Safety and health in the workplace? Gimme a break! Who says workers have any right to either? The only right workers have is to the absolute minimum financial compensation management can get away with giving.

I almost fell into the trap of saying "the absolute minimum the law allows." But that, as Richard Nixon might have said, would be wrong. (And who would know better about what's "wrong"?) It assumes that your Right-thinking managers:

(a) can't get laws and administrative rules changed (in which case, what was the point of buying up a whole government?), and

(b) feel any obligation to follow either laws or administrative rules (after all, the president they bought didn't).

We don't need no stinkin' reggolation, the Good Friedmanite intones solemnly. All's we need is God's Own Free Market.

But of course they don't really want no stinkin' free market. They want a market that's rigged to relieve them of as much obligation to society and to their workers as possible -- and by golly, they were (and still are) prepared to buy a government to do it. In addition to which, the Good Friedmanite's doctrine is a fantasy -- always was, especially is now, and always will be.

The Friedmanite theory is that if workers are sickened and injured or maimed or even killed on the job, the competitive pressures of a free market will lead those managements to upgrade their health and safety practices in their own economic interest. Which is nonsense, of course. Especially if those managements can get their bought government to lighten the administrative burdens of paying for their lapses. Far cheaper than keeping those old workers on the job is jettisoning them and replacing them with younger, less experienced, and above all cheaper workers. Heck, it's not as if workers get trained to do their jobs anymore. (Too expensive! Unproductive!)

Do we not have that executive memo from WalMart? You know, the one detailing corporate policy to do everything possible to shed older, more experienced, and above all more expensive workers so they can be replaced by less skilled people who are more desperate for work, any kind of work, including (especially?) work for minimal pay, under any conditions, and with few if any benefits?

The only shame about the OSHA "revelations" is that they come within weeks of the final slinking away of the Bush regime. Where the hell have we been all this time?

Oh, there have been malcontents shouting about this as well as the innumerable other Bush regime depredations, going back before 9/11 -- the event that in retrospect provided cover for ideological ransacking of our legitimate government which followed. But nobody wanted to hear. They were dismissed and derided as "Bush-bashers."

Can we at least hope that the Obama transition team is paying attention? Close attention.


POSTSCRIPT: THE NEW YORK TIMES WEIGHS IN EDITORIALLY

While we're on the subject, and while outgoing Labor Secretary Elaine Chao (aka Mrs. "Miss Mitch" McConnell, and as labor secretary OSHA's overboss), who has presidied over what we have abundant indications is a similar reign of political terror and enforced ineptitude within the department as a whole, but lately has been attempting, astonishingly, to portray her stewardship as a boon for working people, yesterday's NYT carried this editorial, which I think speaks for itself:

December 29, 2008

EDITORIAL
The Labor Agenda

There is no doubt that President-elect Barack Obama has chosen a labor secretary who could be a transformative force in a long-neglected arena. The question is whether he will let her.

Hilda Solis, a United States representative from Southern California, is the daughter of immigrant parents with union jobs. She has been an unfailing advocate of workers’ rights during eight years in Congress and before that, in California politics.

Ms. Solis has been a leader on traditional workplace issues, like a higher minimum wage and an enhanced right to form unions. She also has helped to expand the labor agenda by sponsoring legislation to create jobs in green technology, and in her support for community health workers and immigration reform.

Her record in Congress dovetails with the mission of the Labor Department, to protect and further the rights and opportunities of working people. It also dovetails with many of the promises Mr. Obama made during the campaign, both in its specifics and in its focus on the needs of America’s working families.

The main issue is whether the Obama administration will assert a forceful labor agenda in the face of certain protests from business that now — during a recession — is not the time to move forward.

The first and biggest test of Mr. Obama’s commitment to labor, and to Ms. Solis, will be his decision on whether or not to push the Employee Free Choice Act in 2009. Corporate America is determined to derail the bill, which would make it easier than it has been for workers to form unions by requiring that employers recognize a union if a majority of employees at a workplace sign cards indicating they wish to organize.

Ms. Solis voted for the bill when it passed the House in 2007. Senate Republicans prevented the bill from coming to a vote that same year. Mr. Obama voted in favor of bringing the bill to the Senate floor and supported it during the campaign.

The measure is vital legislation and should not be postponed. Even modest increases in the share of the unionized labor force push wages upward, because nonunion workplaces must keep up with unionized ones that collectively bargain for increases. By giving employees a bigger say in compensation issues, unions also help to establish corporate norms, the absence of which has contributed to unjustifiable disparities between executive pay and rank-and-file pay.

The argument against unions — that they unduly burden employers with unreasonable demands — is one that corporate America makes in good times and bad, so the recession by itself is not an excuse to avoid pushing the bill next year. The real issue is whether enhanced unionizing would worsen the recession, and there is no evidence that it would.

There is a strong argument that the slack labor market of a recession actually makes unions all the more important. Without a united front, workers will have even less bargaining power in the recession than they had during the growth years of this decade, when they largely failed to get raises even as productivity and profits soared. If pay continues to lag, it will only prolong the downturn by inhibiting spending.

Another question clouding the labor agenda is whether Mr. Obama will give equal weight to worker concerns — from reforming health care to raising the minimum wage — while the financial crisis is still playing out. Most members of his economic team are veterans of the Clinton administration who tilt toward Wall Street. In the Clinton era, financial issues routinely trumped labor concerns. If Mr. Obama’s campaign promises are to be kept, that mindset cannot prevail again. Mr. Obama’s creation of a task force on middle-class issues, to be led by Vice President-elect Joseph Biden and including Ms. Solis and other high-ranking officials, is an encouraging sign that labor issues will not be given short shrift.

There are many nonlegislative issues on the agenda for Ms. Solis. Safety standards must be updated: in the last eight years, the Labor Department has issued only one new safety rule of its own accord; it issued a few others only after being compelled by Congress or the courts. Overtime rules that were weakened in 2004 need to be restored. To enforce labor standards, the Labor Department will need more staff and more money, both of which have been cut deeply by President Bush.

Only the president can give the new labor secretary the clout she will need to do well at a job that has been done so badly for so long, at such great cost to the quality of Americans’ lives.

#

When a left-leaning crook leaves progressive charities teetering on the brink, we have to help

by Ken

I'm trying to remember who it was among Calvin Trillin's coterie of battling old-time lefties who was the author of the timeless aphorism, "There's no goniff like a left-wing goniff." I'm thinking maybe Harold the Committed? (Somebody out there must remember!)

This was, note, decades before Bernie Madoff staked his hard-to-dispute claim to the title of Goniff of Goniffs. Since our Bernie's empire came crashing down, we've been hearing a growing chorus of institutional cries of agony, an alarming number of them turning out to be death throes, from charitable organizations that had come to count on the G of G's contributions -- or, frequently, contributions from foundations supported by Madoff and Ponzi Partners.

Many of them turn out to be organizations dear to many of our hearts. I don't know whether anyone has yet attempted to compile a master list of the pained and actually imperiled (not to mention already-defunct) organizations. At a time when so many of us are buckling under the weight of the meltdown and recession, it isn't going to be easy for those of us who feel their pain to help plug the budget gaps, but for those in a position to help out, even a little, it would be nice to know (in verifiable form, or at least from credible sources) which worthy nonprofits are really hurting, or even teetering on the edge.

No doubt inspired by the reality that a couple of days remain for donors making qualifying charitable contributions to make them count toward their 2008 tax year, MoveOn.org's Civic Action wing has circulated an e-mail appeal on behalf of "some really important progressive organizations."

Groups that fight for human rights, fair elections and racial justice are getting hit hard—just in time for the holidays. We've worked side-by-side with many of them.

If these groups can't replace the funding that came from investment accounts that Madoff stole, they may be forced to start cutting important projects or, in some cases, even lay off staff.

Can you pitch in $25 or $50 for each of the four organizations we're highlighting below? Our friends at Atlantic Philanthropies and the Open Society Institute will each match every dollar that comes in until January 1! So, for the next three days, your donation of $25 or $50 means $75 or $150 for groups affected by Madoff. If a few thousand of us give together, it can make an enormous difference -- and help repair some of the damage Madoff has done.

MoveOn has set up a webpage to collect contributions ("we will forward 100% of your contribution to the organizations you select") for four organization they've "worked closely with over the last few years":

The Brennan Center for Justice is a nonpartisan institute that focuses on fundamental issues of democracy and justice. Their work ranges from voting rights to redistricting reform to checking presidential power in the fight against terrorism. MoveOn has worked with the Brennan Center closely in the fight for fair elections.

Human Rights Watch is one of the world's leading independent organizations dedicated to defending and protecting human rights. By focusing international attention where human rights are violated, they give voice to the oppressed and hold oppressors accountable for their crimes. Its rigorous, objective investigations and strategic, targeted advocacy build intense pressure for action and raise the cost of human rights abuse. MoveOn has worked with Human Rights Watch on campaigns to preserve the constitution and protect human rights in America and abroad.

Advancement Project is a policy, communications and legal action group committed to racial justice founded by a team of veteran civil rights lawyers in 1998. They have pursued critical litigation to protect voters and also support grassroots movements for universal opportunity and just democracy in the areas of education and immigrants' rights. MoveOn has worked with Advancement Project to stop vote suppression, especially among minority folks.

The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a nonprofit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change. MoveOn has worked with CCR to hold President Bush accountable for his unconstitutional acts, from illegal wiretaps to Guantanamo.

There are still two days left in 2008. For anyone in a position to help, these are obviously worthy causes. And if anyone has information about other verifiably imperiled and deserving organizations, please pass it on. The right-wing goniffs always seem to manage to take care of their own. Maybe we can help cushion the blow on our side.

And if you're reading this after December 31, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that worthy organizations that were in need in 2008 will be just as worthy and at least as needy in 2009.

#

Will Repugs who see their world ending ever be able to overcome their deep-rooted racism?

Music lover and would-be RNC chairman Chip Saltsman

by Noah

If ever there was a doubt about just how deep racism runs in Republican veins, the Repug reaction to both Barack Obama's campaign and his election present us with a reeking pile of proof. In his post about Coultergeist's latest fetid verbiage, an attack on Kwanzaa, Ken almost rhetorically asked yesterday, "But what would lead an individual, no matter how inappropriately self-important and flat-out deluded, to invest herself in something as harmless as Kwanzaa?" I agree with his hypothesis that she is becoming increasingly more desperate for attention. I also suspect that it goes back to various high school experiences or perhaps something even earlier in her childhood, a childhood that seems to be still in progress.

But I'm not here to psychoanalyze Annie's inner screaming child. It's irrelevant to the bottom line. That bottom line is that Repugs across the country are in shock about Obama's victory over them. They can't stand it. They are incredulous, even if they don't know what the word means. For them, the world is over, under, sideways, down, and they are lashing out -- in Coulter's case, by attacking a harmless holiday because, in her twisted mind it's a symbol for something she doesn't like.

They can't accept that "someone who looks like he does" is about to enter the White House and live there with his family and, worst of all, be president of the country. They bizarrely blame the media, yes, but they are also expressing themselves in some very sad ways, ways that reflect just what it is to be a repug, what's at the very core of being a Republican. Some examples from the list:

* Michelle Malkin's "baby mama" aspersion. Well, to Malkin it was an aspersion, a description of our about-to-be First Lady meant to convey severe negativity. Note to MM: Millions of us who live in the 21st century see nothing wrong with the Obamas and their heritage.

* Alaska state government e-mails have been recently discovered which make racist jokes about how yet another black family will be living "in Washington on government subsidized housing."

* The nonstop use of code words for "he's B-L-A-C-K," words like Muslim and terrorist, and pointing extra attention to his "unusual" name. If any of you listen to righty radio, you know this hasn't stopped one bit with the election.

* Continued attempts to make it more difficult for African-Americans to even vote during the election, by making fewer machines available in certain parts of town or even by sending threatening mail to households in those certain parts of town, mail that threatened arrest if proper ID wasn't shown (may we see your papers, please!) or maybe if you had some outstanding minor traffic-ticket problem.

* The chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, Katon Dawson, felt he was perfectly qualified to be national chairman of his party, and certainly there was nothing in his resume that would preclude his getting the job. Not only that, many in the party agreed. Until some little irritating so-what of a technicality became public, that technicality being that he belonged to a whites-only club. Let me point out that this wasn't in the distant past, but this year! Repugs apparently see nothing wrong with that and rushed to his defense. Sadly for him, some of us see something wrong in it. Of course, to them it was just one more thing to blame the media for, rather than their own "shortcomings."

* And, now, we've come to the "Barack the Magic Negro" song (sung to the tune of "Puff the Magic Dragon," a former Top 40 hit that is a classroom staple with young children). It's "welfare queens" and Willie Horton all over again. The term "Magic Negro" was coined by an L.A. Times op-ed writer who defined a magic Negro candidate as one who enough white folks would feel comfortable with to vote into office. A certain resentful open racist and Oxycontin freak has been playing "Barack the Magic Negro" on his radio show.

This little slice of bigotry was recently sent out as part of a holiday CD by Chip Saltsman, who "served" as Mike Huckabee's campaign manager and is an RNC official in Tennessee. Saltsman feels like Katon Dawson -- that he too is a perfect fit for the national RNC-chairman slot. The irony is, of course, that being a bigot DOES boost your credentials for the RNC Chair job. Also, think about the fact that this CD was sent out as a holiday greeting, peace and goodwill towards men and all that. Peace and goodwill haven't been Repug attributes in almost 100 years, so maybe this guy is very qualified.

Man, you just can't make this stuff up. If you did, no one would believe it possible -- unless they know some Republicans, that is. I can even see them thinking that this song could be a way to capture minds at an early age. To them it's probably more of that "catapult the propaganda" stuff. It's worthwhile to note that Saltsman's candidacy has been endorsed not only by Huckabee but by former Senate Majority Leader Bill "Let's Play Doctor" Frist, while former House Speaker Newt Gingrich takes a rare reasonable position, saying, "This is so inappropriate that it should disqualify any Republican National Committee candidate who would use it." No wonder Gingrich is on the outs with his party.

Current RNC Chairbozo Mike Duncan says he's "shocked and appalled." Reminds me of the famous moment in the movie Casablanca when Claude Raines says he is "shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on" at Rick's, when he's bribed to allow it. Imagine that! The head of the RNC is "shocked and appalled" to find racism in the Repug Party! Who knew?

The assclown who sent out the CD to 40 of his dearest fellow Repugs just can't understand why we don't appreciate the "humor" and the "satire." Well, guess what, bozo. We get the humor and the satire. Too bad you don't get that it's still racist. The source of humor in your sick, puny mind is someone's skin color.

Saltsman even tries to explain his actions by bringing up the Repug-talking-point explanation, spewed nonstop on righty radio, that Obama only got elected because of "white guilt," that the senator was considered "safe enough" to enough whites, blah-blah-blah. To Republicans, Obama couldn't possibly have gotten elected on his own qualifications and merits. I guess sometimes it takes a racist to not see that something is racist.

Today some Repugs are saying that the reaction against this incident is overblown and that some people are just being oversensitive. There they go again, blaming the victim. But what should we expect from a party that runs a guy for President who tells jokes about a woman enjoying being raped on the sidewalk by a gorilla?

What does Peter Yarrow (of Peter, Paul and Mary), one of the writers of "Puff the Magic Dragon," think about all of this?

"I and my co-writer of 'Puff,' Lenny Lipton, have been eagerly awaiting an end to the mean-spiritedness, outright disrespect and bigotry that was commonplace prior to this last presidential election. What might have been wearily accepted as 'the way it was' in the campaign is now unacceptable. Obama is not a candidate. He is president-elect, and this song insults the office of the presidency, the people who voted for him, as well as those who did not -- and taking a children's song and twisting it in such a vulgar, mean-spirited way is a slur to our entire country and our common agreement to move beyond racism."

Well said, Peter. Too bad, though, that Republicans obviously do not agree about that moving-beyond-racism stuff. This sort of thing has a proud history in the party of Trent Lott, a man who still wishes Strom Thurmond and his segregationist party had won the Presidency back in 1948 when things were more like they should be and everyone knew their place. The Republicans welcomed racist "Dixiecrats" to their ranks after LBJ signed various civil rights bills into law back in the 1960s and racist Democrats fled to a place where they could be more comfortable.

Current Louisiana Repug and KKK Grand Whizz David Duke has boasted that Senator Obama's election is boosting enrollment in the KKK as we get ready for the January 20th inauguration. Then there's the infamous anti-Harold Ford "call me" ad that actually helped elect Bob Corker to the U.S. Senate in Tennessee. This sort of thing goes on and on and on. Repugs even do it to each other, as evidenced by the Bush "McCain fathered a black child" phone calls during the 2000 South Carolina primary.

I'd like to point out at this point that while there are no Republican African-Americans in Congress, there are actually two Republican African-American candidates for the party chairman position. One is Ken Blackwell of Ohio 2004 fame. The other is former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele. Watch the Repugs trip all over themselves to choose one of the two and get all smug and tell us, "See, nasty racism all gone -- it's a brand new day."

So, my questions to Coultergeist and all these others who are bashing at various things African-American start with: What are you afraid of?

Is this fear of a black planet? Fear of the unknown? Just plain fear? Well, look around you. Why do you fume about Kwanzaa? Why do you still fume about Martin Luther King Day? Does it hurt so much that your presidential candidate, who voted against MLK Day, not only lost but lost to "one of them" (aka "that one")?

Why not join the great American experiment where all are created equal? You were the party of Lincoln once. Wake up! It's not a Dobie Gillis world anymore. In fact, Zelda Gilroy might have another surprise for you that you can't handle. You are acting just like your forebears did when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball back in 1947, when things were more like you would apparently like them to be now. Many major leaguers threatened to refuse to play on the same field with Jackie. Some, even among his own Brooklyn Dodger teammates, would not even shake his hand.

It was damn ugly then, and it's damn ugly now. How'd that all work out for you? You can slow social progress down, but you haven't been able to stop it. You'll keep trying, though. But you just might chose to look at this "magic negro" thing the way I'm about to suggest. Warning: This might cause you to convulse at the horror of the truth.

Yes, racism is still very much a problem in our society, but Senator Obama's election is a sign of progress to many of us. Some, apparently, even overcame lingering misgivings about voting for a, er, a "you know." Maybe you should look at it this way. (Remember, I warned you.) Maybe you think your feelings are the norm. Sadly, that may be true, at least for too many people in our country, but -- are you sitting down? -- maybe your guy Bush was so bad that America did the unthinkable (to you) and voted for a black man.

If you do think, in your warped little minds, that it was unthinkable, then enjoy your own personal hell that you set up for yourself.

#

Do Virginians understand that Terry McAuliffe's fund-raising genius is unlikely ever to be used to benefit them? Plus: Rahm slips out of the House

Former Democratic National Committee chair (and current

Virginia gubernatorial candidate) Terry McAuliffe

"[Terry McAuliffe] has an astonishingly strong personality," said [Virginia billionaire Randal J.] Kirk, a biotech and investment mogul. "When you meet someone, you often get a gut feeling whether this is an integrated personality. Are they the same with Joe Blow as they are with me? To me, this guy just seems utterly consistent."

-- quoted by Tim Craig in today's Washington Post

by Ken

In case you didn't see the article, it starts like this:

McAuliffe's Prowess As Fundraiser Grabs Spotlight in Va. Race

By Tim Craig

RICHMOND -- With his booming voice, quick wit and gregarious nature, Terry McAuliffe established a reputation as one of the world's best political fundraisers, soaking up hundreds of millions of dollars for Democratic causes and candidates.

Now, after spending much of his adult life soliciting donations for others -- most notably, former president Bill Clinton and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) -- McAuliffe is considering using those prodigious skills and extensive contacts for himself, as a candidate for governor of Virginia. McAuliffe's potential candidacy has created what Michael Toner, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, calls "the perfect fundraising storm."

Virginia is a state with no limits on how much an individual, corporation or union can donate to a candidate running for state office, and some say McAuliffe could wage an $80 million campaign -- triple what Kaine spent four years ago -- if he is the Democratic nominee.

"I think the sky is the limit in terms of Terry McAuliffe's fundraising potential in Virginia," Toner said. "I suspect there will be a lot more interest in Virginia politics in Manhattan and Palm Beach than there usually is."

Already, McAuliffe is showing what's possible. . . .

And it goes on from there. Boy, does it go on. And on and on. Anyone looking for a glimpse at the behind-the-scenes world of fund-raising -- or a highly sanitized version of same -- has come to the right place. Ah yes, the sky is the limit. I think we get it: This man can fund-raise the feathers off a chicken. Check.

I suppose this is the sort of thing that gives Rahm Emanuel or Chuck Schumer a hard-on. We're talking about that prized political species the self-funding candidate. Usually SFCs self-finance from their own personal fortunes, exercising the right of no-price-too-high free speech which the non-activist strict constructionists of our Supreme Court cherish. But it would be unfair to say that our Rahm and Chucky only like rich people. Rich people certainly do occupy a special place in their, er, hearts, it's true, but if you've got a guy like Terry McAuliffe who can extract campaign cash from a stone, well, sign him up! (To my knowledge, our Terry isn't exactly a candidate for welfare himself.)

I know a lot of people out there don't understand why Howie and I are always going off on Rahm Emanuel, would-be master of the political cosmos. Why, isn't he the Democratic answer to Karl Rove? A Dem with the muscle and balls to stand up to the blasted Other Side?

Um, no and no. As a matter of fact, Master Rahm often seems to get along with Republicans better than Democrats. (Many of his most prized new "Democratic" candidates actually are Republicans, often up to the very moment of the filing deadline.) As Howie has frequently suggested, Master Rahm in his tactics and goals much more closely resembles a Dem version of Tom DeLay, a man for whom the political cosmos begins with money (lots and lots of it), continues with influence-peddling (the backbone of American democracy, no?), and ends -- if you've done it right -- with power (lots and lots of it).

As to the uses of that power, it's hard for a long-term observer to divine much vision or even principle at play, unless you count the clearly felt urgency of protecting the interests of fat-cat donors, the people and corporations who cough up all that campaign cash. It's not hard to understand why Master Rahm values those candidates who are long on cash and short on political vision: because he will own them. Even new representatives who join the House infected with some nasty desire to make the country and the world a better place quickly find themselves under pressure to be coopted to the bosom of the master's Realpolitik -- the way things are done, Rahm-style.

People I trust insist that Master Rahm really didn't want to take the job of White House chief of staff, that in fact he regarded it as a derailment from his painstakingly laid fast track to power in the House of Representatives. But, say these sources, his old pal Barack Obama maneuvered him into a position where he couldn't say no. Howie has already reported that Master Rahm has made clear his ardent wish that his House seat be filled on a temporary basis by a "caretaker" who will step aside as soon as he's ready to return to the House.
(This represents high-quality political maneuvering on the president-elect's part, but highly questionable judgment. Rahm looks to be the pre-installed cancer on the Obama presidency. I'll bet the Vegas oddmakers already have him as the odds-on favorite to be the first member of the new administration to be the target of a congressional investigation and the first to be indicted.)

From all accounts, Master Rahm was already exercising considerable influence within the House Democratic caucus. And yet I'm not aware of any significant instance where the public good benefited from his use of his vaunted political "muscle" in a meaningful tough fight.

I keep coming back to the point David Sirota made some months after the Democrats retook control of the House: that the likely reason why the new majority was doing squat to end the war in Iraq was that important segments of the leadership didn't want to. As we know, Speaker Nancy Pelosi explained the House's consistent record of inaction on "not having the votes." I would love to hear just once that there was ever a meeting at which Master Rahm looked the speaker in the eye and said: "We have to stop that damned war, Nancy -- whatever it takes to do it. Don't you worry about the votes -- I'll get you the votes! We'll show that friggin' David Sirota!"

It may seem that we've ventured far afield from our subject: Terry McAuliffe's fitness to be governor of Virginia. I would argue, though, that this is just what we've been talking about. What made Terry chairman of the Democratic National Committee and what makes him a force in Democratic politics is his prodigious fund-raising ability.

Hassan Namazee, a New York investment banker who was a top fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, said McAuliffe has a gift for persuading people to invest in causes that matter. He has "the most fundamental skill that you have to have when you ask people for money. . . . He makes you feel good when he asks you to write a check."

And what more could you ask from a prospective governor?

I suppose at some point candidate McAuliffe will say a word or two relative to some sort of policy he might wish to enact as governor -- like a solution for Virginia's long-simmering, crippling transportation crisis. Or maybe it's just going to be an unending string of well-tried, consultant-tested bromides about responsible and fiscally prudent government.

Here's about as close as we get to good news, policy-wise, in the Post article:

Advisers to [rival Democratic candidates Brian] Moran and [Creigh] Deeds said they had been expecting that it would cost about $3 million to win the June 9 primary, but McAuliffe could spend triple that amount, launching a wave of television advertisements early in the spring that could drown out his opponents' messages. [No, no, that's not the good news! Just wait. -- Ed.]

Political strategists said it's not clear whether money will make the difference. [Emphasis added. This is the good news, or the good-as-it-gets news. -- Ed.] In the 2006 primary contest between Sen. James Webb (D-Va.) and lawyer Harris Miller, Webb was outspent 4 to 1. But he won the race because antiwar activists and liberal bloggers were drawn to his military background and opposition to the war in Iraq.

"I think the money is important, but you have to have a message," said Democratic strategist Kristen Denny Todd, who was Webb's communications director. "I strongly feel that Virginians expect it to come from the heart and come from the soul, and I don't know if it can be manufactured or if Virginians can be bought."

Confidential to Virginia Democratic voters: Have you heard the old saying "Money talks, bullshit walks"? Did somebody out there say, "Money talks bullshit"? Yeah, that too.


UPDATE: THE SEARCH FOR A CARETAKER . . . ER, REPLACEMENT
FOR MASTER RAHM'S HOUSE SEAT IS OFFICIALLY UNDER WAY

After writing the above, I found the following e-mail from Howie (in Bamako):

I don't know if you're in the mood for some Rahm-bashing or not but...

http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docid=news-000003001169

As I wrote back promptly, "Not in the mood for Rahm-bashing? When would that be?" I explained that at that very moment I was in the act of Rahm-bashing.

Howie's link is to CQ's report of Master Rahm's announcement -- in a letter to Illinois Gov. Rod Blogojevich (well, it's not Rahm's fault that that's who he has to announce it to) -- that he will resign from the House as of January 2.

Emanuel’s resignation will trigger a special election in Illinois’ 5th District, which takes in parts of Chicago and its suburbs and is strongly Democratic. At least 10 Democrats have filed candidacy papers with the Federal Election Commission or announced plans to run. Republican Tom Hanson, who received 22 percent of the vote as Emanuel’s Republican opponent in 2008, also intends to run.

It’s not clear when the special primary and general elections will be held. The Illinois election law gives Blagojevich five days after a vacancy occurs to set the date for the special general election, which must be held within 115 days.

The timing of Emanuel’s resignation will make it difficult if not impossible for the special election schedule to coincide with regularly scheduled local elections on Feb. 24 and April 7 because Illinois law calls for a candidate filing period 50 to 57 days before the primary election.

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To Timbuktou and back -- Howie reports from Mali

Roland and I were traipsing around Sanga last week -- a place so foreign to the American experience that one would have to be on another planet to find something more exotic -- when we ran into a gaggle of American Peace Corp volunteers on holiday. They're stationed around West Africa, mostly Mali and Burkina Faso, I gathered, and the State Department and U.S. Embassy in Bamako have decreed that no Peace Corp volunteers are allowed to venture north of some imaginary line (like around Mopti, I think), which means no Timbuktou. They said it is too dangerous because of Tuareg bandits on the roads, and that the local airlines, C.A.M. and M.A.E., are too dangerous (i.e., noncompliant with FAA guidelines) for Americans to fly on, so that their employees could not go to the northern two-thirds of the country.

We spent a few days in Timbuktou, which gets bad-mouthed by most tourists as not worth the trip. They're wrong. Timbuktou is fascinating and exotic, and if it doesn't live up to your dreams of the 13th century or to Paul Bowles' Sheltering Sky, get real and open up to what there actually is being offered. As for danger, there's nothing remotely dangerous, other than a difficult road getting there, the bad exhaust fumes from motorbikes in town and the fucking mosquitoes. (We've just given up on not being bitten; it's not possible. Just learn to love the Malarone.)

We were waiting for a couple hours for the ferry to take us across the Niger on the way to Timbuktou.

The settlement there is a Bella one. Until 1973's epoch drought nearly wiped out the Tuareg's camels and herds, the Bella had been their slaves. In 1973, basically because the Tuareg couldn't feed them anymore, they emancipated them -- although I have heard that there are still some small services that many of them do for the Tuareg (like when there is a wedding or something).

Anyway, this Bella settlement was all festive and bustling, like all the villages we visited in Mali, when a couple of pickup trucks filled with Tuaregs pulled up to the bank of the river. Suddenly things got much quieter. Many of the little children seemed to disappear. It reminded me of a scene from Star Wars, when some alien warrior people dropped by a space cafe.

Anyway, the Tuaregs were pretty well-armed with swords and daggers and God knows what else, and they don't seem to smile much -- no chatty "bonjour"s, and they certainly don't ask you for a Bic or an empty water bottle or candy. The Tuareg War ended in the mid-'90s, though, and they seem to be peaceable enough (except around Kidal) and way in the northern Sahara where Mali, Algeria and Mauretania share vast trackless wastes. In Timbuktou, they were certainly easy enough to get along with.

In fact, one of our most memorable adventures was when our guide, Mohammed, took us out into the desert one night to meet some Tuaregs who had just come from Araouane to trade for millet. They were also open to trade for the stuff we no longer needed -- mostly stuff Roland had picked up at the 99-cent store before coming here, like a pair of cheap extra sunglasses, as well as my REI walking sticks, half a dozen cans of sardines, shaving kits from Air France, a T-shirt, a roll of toilet paper, organic mosquito repellent (which seems to attract mosquitoes), etc. We got some nice Tuareg "silver" bracelets, a pipe and an agate necklace, and had a long Tuareg tea ceremony before this whole thing got started -- all by the light of the moon and stars.

I mentioned the other day that Mali is a Muslim country, in the context of how Muslim countries are normally safe places to travel. Like I've been saying, Mali certainly seems safe enough, but it doesn't actually seem all that Muslim. Women aren't covered up, and are everywhere, and seem to play leadership roles in society. I've seen more women covered head to toe in London than in Bamako. And the dancing -- well, to say some of it is erotic doesn't even begin to suggest how a Muslim fundie cleric would react.

The dour Tuaregs seem to take it more seriously than most.

A couple weeks ago I went to a wedding celebration out in the sticks. For some reason I had imagined it would be something like one I went to in a small village in Afghanistan in 1969 -- real small, two family compounds. There were no women at that one. No bride, no groom's mother. No, it wasn't a forerunner of a "No on 8" reform in pre-Taliban Afghanistan. The women were kept in strictest purdah, and although I was living in the house for months and the groom was my best friend, I never did meet his new wife. Instead of women, the entertainment at the Afghan wedding was dancing boys -- really, really young ones-- with some kohl and cheap jewlery. My friend's grandfather grabbed one, quite forcibly, and raped him behind a building while the festivities proceeded. Afterwards the disheveled boy straightened his outfit and got back into the dance, looking mighty pissed off.

The Malian festivities were nothing like that -- a fully integrated affair with raucous joy, lots of music and dancing, mostly led by women. Almost all the local celebrities who were made a big fuss over were women, including celebrated singer Mah Kouyate, who now lives in Burkina Faso and made the trip all the way to Mali. The only male celebrity, other than a famous drummer who was playing, was some local version of Liberace, who fancied himself the M.C.

But below the surface, Malian women have some big problems to contend with, even if you don't consider polygamy a problem in and of itself. Everyone tells me that as soon as a Malian man marries he's out looking for as much side action as he can find and that the women are pretty pissed off. They're also pregnant a lot. Men here hate condoms. One guy we met in Dogon country -- although he's from Segou and has been to NYC -- says he would never use a condom because it would make him unable to perform up to par. And, yes, AIDS is a gigantic problem here.

Anyway, if you're now forewarned about the dangers of sex here, consider the road travel -- or any travel. We didn't let the knowledge that a hippo can break apart a pinasse ruin our wonderful day of floating down the Niger and Bani Rivers near Mopti visiting Bozo fishing villages. Some tourists took the three-day boat trip (two nights camping) from Bamako to Timbuktou. We drove from Sanga in Dogon country after three days there. Simply put, the road from Sanga to Douentza, halfway from Dogone to Timbuktou, has to be the worst road on earth. People talk about how bad the Timbuktou road itself is -- and it's rutted, washboardlike and uncomfortable, and we broke down in the desert twice -- but it is nothing compared with the Sanga road, which is just various-sized boulders that you drive over while praying.

Roland fears Tupolevs [Russian aircraft] the way I fear sharks and crocodiles, but he was willing to pay anything to get on one to get out of Timbuktou without having to get back on the terrible road again. (I might mention that the road from Bamako in the west to Gao in the east, which covers much of the populated parts of the country, is a decent two-lane paved road.) The airlines were a little lax and dicey, but we made it fine, and who cares if there was no security whatsoever, and if the stewardess returned some guy's spear as soon as we took off?

[This is drawn from a post on Howie's Around the World blog.]


UPDATE FROM HOWIE

Roland reminded me that I should have mentioned that in every Dogon village we visited, there was a "special" women's house, where menstruating women are quarantined while they have their period. Pretty primitive!

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A lot of lawyers played a key role in the Bush regime's law-breaking. Shouldn't they pay a price?

John "Mr. Torture" Yoo

We've been talking about what can be done to hold the law-breakers of the Bush regime to account for what they've done. Last night I passed on the suggestion by Georgetown law professor David Cole in a current NYRB article:

The next administration or the next Congress should at a minimum appoint an independent, bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission to investigate and assess responsibility for the United States' adoption of coercive interrogation policies. If it is to be effective, it must have subpoena power, sufficient funding, security clearances, access to all the relevant evidence, and, most importantly, a charge to assess responsibility, not just to look forward. We may know many of the facts already, but absent a reckoning for those responsible for torture and cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment -- our own federal government -- the healing cannot begin.

As Professor Cole points out, with regard to possible prosecution, John "Mr. Torture" Yoo's infamous "torture memo," drafted in the bowels of the Justice Dept., "would be a legal defense for any but the lawyers who wrote it." Well, what about the lawyers?

I've taken the liberty of yanking this comment by reader drinkof out of our comments section to make sure everyone sees it. -- Ken

"Surely Yoo, Gonzales or Addington's offenses are worth a couple of Clinton units of suspension time?"

by drinkof

For various unfortunate reasons, criminal prosecutions are unlikely.

On the other hand, there is a mechanism which can make a substantial statement as to our dedication to the rule of law, and for which there is ample (and, for critics, inconvenient) precedent. Lawyers involved at various points of approving, and covering up, torture and related practices in their official capacity should face disbarment.

Yoo, Gonzales, Addington, for that matter, Jack Goldsmith (sorry, but the half-ass mea culpa doesn't cut it) and dozens more should answer for their actions.

Complaints as to criminalizing policy differences simply don't apply. Law practice is a privilege, not a right, and it's time the legal profession begin to purge its ranks of these practices.

And recall, Bill Clinton got his license to practice suspended for 5 years for whatever it was that he did. Surely Yoo, Gonzales or Addington's offenses are worth a couple of Clinton units (e.g., 10 years) of suspension time?

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This really smart professor suggests something we can do about the Bush regime's war crimes

"Absent a reckoning for those responsible for torture and cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment -- our own federal government -- the healing cannot begin."

-- David Cole, in "What to Do About the Torturers?"
in the Jan. 15 New York Review of Books

by Ken

It's a relief to find that some really smart people are worrying about some of the same stuff I am. On Friday, you'll recall, I asked, "Is there anything we can do about the criminals Chimpy the Prez and 'Big Dick' Cheney?" Note that I was referring to the full range of crimes committed by the Bush regime, the domestic ones (notably the plundering of the Justice Dept.) as well as the international ones (including what surely need to be treated as war crimes). Since then I've had a chance to look at the above-cited review-essay by David Cole, a Georgetown law professor (and, as he notes in a footnote, a member of the board of the Center for Constitutional Law).

Among the books considered, by the way, is the painstaking investigation of the story of torture at Guantanamo by the amazing British legal scholar-activist Philippe Sands, who made such an impression with his House Judiciary Committee testimony and TV appearance with Bill Moyers last May. Another of the books is The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book by Michael Ratner and the Center for Constitutional Rights. (This is where Professor Cole has occasion to note his connection to the Center, adding that "I did not take part in the efforts to have criminal proceedings initiated against Rumsfeld.")

Cole isn't optimistic about real war-crimes trials against the Bush regimistas, legally warranted though they may be. For one thing, they took pains to insulate themselves from any such possibility by "grant[ing] retrospective immunity to officials involved in the interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects in the wake of September 11" in the Military Commissions Act. For another, "The Justice Department's 'torture memo' would be a legal defense for any but the lawyers who wrote it."

And while it's technically possible for our suspected war criminals to be indicted and tried by tribunals abroad, Cole doesn't see that happening either: "As a matter of realpolitik, it is difficult to imagine any nation greeting the Obama administration with an international prosecution of former high-level US officials."

Still, Cole insists (bless him!), "Even if criminal prosecution seems unlikely, the acts of the past administration demand accountability." (The boldface is my embellishment.) He goes on to quote a statement from several months ago by Attorney General-designate Eric Holder:

Our government authorized the use of torture, approved of secret electronic surveillance against American citizens, secretly detained American citizens without due process of law, denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants and authorized the procedures that violate both international law and the United States Constitution.... We owe the American people a reckoning.

Yes, Mr. Attorney General!

Cole argues, "Without prosecutions or an independent investigation, significant progress toward repudiating the administration's approval of cruelty and torture has already been made." He cites the Supreme Court's 2006 rejection of "President Bush's position that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to the conflict with al-Qaeda"; the military's return to the no-torture policy set out in the Army Field Manual; reports of the CIA's abandoning waterboarding; and positions taken by various other government officials against the use of torture.

However, he understands that this still isn't enough:

The United States has never taken full responsibility for the crimes its high-level officials committed and authorized. That is unacceptable. In the long run, the best insurance against cruelty and torture becoming US policy again is a formal recognition that what we did after September 11 was wrong -- as a normative, moral, and legal matter, not just as a tactical issue. Such an acknowledgment need not take the form of a criminal prosecution; but it must take some official form.

"We have been willing to admit wrongdoing in the past," he says, citing the official apology signed by President Reagan in 1988 for the Japanese wartime internments, including payment of reparations. "That legislation, a formal repudiation of our past acts, provides an important cultural bulwark against something similar happening again."

And he concludes:

We cannot move forward in reforming the law effectively unless we are willing to account for what we did wrong in the past. The next administration or the next Congress should at a minimum appoint an independent, bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission to investigate and assess responsibility for the United States' adoption of coercive interrogation policies. If it is to be effective, it must have subpoena power, sufficient funding, security clearances, access to all the relevant evidence, and, most importantly, a charge to assess responsibility, not just to look forward. We may know many of the facts already, but absent a reckoning for those responsible for torture and cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment -- our own federal government -- the healing cannot begin.

Thanks, professor! That's something.

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Has Ann "My Triumph Over Kwanzaa" Coulter simply flipped out, or is she just desperate for attention? Is anybody listening?

by Ken

No, I'm not making this up. The Coultergeist has actually penned a post called "My Triumph Over Kwanzaa!" -- and just to be absolutely clear, the exclamation point is part of the title.

The obvious question is whether our Annie is jealous of fellow wingnut Bill O'Reilly's monopoly on the War on Christmas, or is this intended as an hommage? (Just so you can keep your scorecards straight, Billo is against, Annie for hers.) This screed begins:

Is it just me, or does Kwanzaa seem to come earlier and earlier each year?

This year, I believe my triumph over this synthetic holiday is nearly complete. The only mentions of Kwanzaa I've seen are humorous ones. Most important, for the first time in eight years, President George Bush appears not to have issued "Kwanzaa greetings" to honor this phony non-Christian holiday that is younger than I am.

From here, I'm afraid, the discussion degenerates immediately into a miasma of lies, poisonous delusions, free-floating hate, galloping racism, and the kind of fake-Christian-girl bullying ignorance that you like to think makes any true Christian cower in shame. Normally we wouldn't pay any attention, but we do hav

Setting aside the question whether all "non-Christian holidays" are phony (or could she be saying that it's not a real non-Christian holiday? huh?), apparently word hasn't reached our Annie about how "synthetic" a holiday her beloved Christmas is. Jesus, scholars seem quite agreed, was born in the summer (I believe July is the current star-aligned favorite), and most of the traditions associated with the American holiday (and I mean apart from the shop-till-you-drop ceremony), stuff like the "Christmas" tree, derive from Northern European pagan traditions.

But what would lead an individual, no matter how inappropriately self-important and flat-out deluded, to invest herself in a war on something as harmless as Kwanzaa? Only our Annie could answer that, but the possibility I would like to believe is that year by year she becomes increasingly desperate for attention, and therefore has to raise the stridency volume level. Hey, it got some attention from us, didn't it? (Actually, our attention was drawn by a tip from ReidReport. JReid freely owns that he has mixed feelings about Kwanzaa himself, but as an African-American he has no doubt who the Coultergeist's target is.)

It's too grim to think that there's actually a ready audience out there for this pathetic, misanthropic nonsense.

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Sunday Classics: The Magic Flute -- Mozart, at 35, lived just long enough to leave us this spiritual testament

Soprano Dorothea Roeschmann and baritone Simon Keenlyside give a lovely account of the haunting Pamina-Papageno duet from Act I of The Magic Flute (with Colin Davis conducting, Covent Garden, 2003).

SHE: With men who feel love,
a good heart can hardly be lacking.
HE: To share these sweet urges
is then a woman's first duty.
BOTH: We want to enjoy love.
We live through love alone.

SHE: Love sweetens every trial.
To it every creature sacrifices.
HE: It adds spice to the days of our life.
It works in the circle of nature.
BOTH: Its lofty purpose shows that
there's nothing nobler than wife and man.
Man and wife, and wife and man
reach toward godliness.

[Note: It's tricky to translate something as seemingly simple as the variously repeated "Weib und Mann" and "Mann und Weib," since "Mann" really does mean both "man" and "husband" while "Weib" could refer to either "woman" or "wife." Clearly the overlapping senses are intentionally blurred here. We do this in English to an extent with the phrase "man and wife," so I tried to fall back on that. -- K]

by Ken

It doesn't take much to get me thinking about Mozart's Magic Flute. In this case I'm guessing it was a combination of:

* flipping on the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast yesterday while I was huddled over the blogging machine, and landing in the midst of an arid performance of the Met's abridged "kiddie" version of the opera, out of which all soul had been carefully drained -- at least for the portion of the performance I stuck with. (Once upon a time my weeks were organized around the Saturday-afternoon Met broadcasts. I had to learn to fit the entire repertory onto C-60, C-90, and C-120 audio cassettes. Nowadays I may go whole seasons without tuning in to a Met broadcast.)

* having been reminded a couple of days earlier that, faced with a price I couldn't pass up, I'd bought, but never listened to, a DVD set of Glyndebourne Festival performances of six Mozart operas: Idomeneo plus the five masterpieces: The Abduction from the Seraglio, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi fan tutte, and of course The Magic Flute. I wound up watching the Magic Flute, from 1978 and quite a nice performance, with an especially lovely Pamina and Papageno in soprano Felicity Lott and baritone Benjamin Luxon. (Later I watched the Don Giovanni and Act I of the Cosi.)

Abduction, I admit, has its awkwardnesses, at least some of which I attribute to the fact that Mozart was trying so desperately to prove himself as an operatic composer worthy of decently compensated commissions. Mozart flexing every last bit of compositional muscle puts me in mind of the inspired cartoon from the Rocky and Bullwinkle series in which Bullwinkle-as-magician tells Rocky to watch him pull a rabbit out of his hat, and Rocky says things like, "Again? That trick never works." I'm thinking of the one where Bullwinkle pulls a giant roaring head (a lion?) out of the hat, then quickly shoves it back in, saying, "Oops! Don't know my own stren'th!" Alternatively, you might imagine the future Superman as a child, before he comes to understand that, measured against earthly mortals, he has superpowers.

By the time of The Marriage of Figaro Mozart had it all in sync, but already in Abduction we have a composer with direct access to the human soul such as few other creative artists ever have had. I like to point out that in the characterization of the "villian," the ferocious Osmin, we see a depth and delicacy of characterization that I doubt would have occurred to anybody else.

Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosi, the three Italian-language operas Mozart wrote to splendid librettos by Lorenzo da Ponte, are of course among the supreme products of the human imagination. Still to come was one last take on the clunky old German Singspiel (or "song play") form -- musical numbers that are joined by spoken dialogue, more or less the way the typical Broadway musical is constructed, The Magic Flute.

In plot synopsis, it looks like a simple, not to say simple-minded, fairy tale. Handsome young Prince Tamino has found his way to Egypt, where -- accompanied by the jolly bird-catcher Papageno -- he is pressed into service by the "star-flaming" Queen of the Night to rescue her daughter, Pamina, from the clutches of the evil priest Sarastro. The prince has only to see a tiny portrait of Pamina to fall hopelessly in love with the princess. Only when he arrives at Sarastro's temple, everything seems turned upside-down. Here he is led to believe that the all-wise Sarastro is the font of virtue and the Queen of the Night the font of evil.

I don't think it's a coincidence that these four supreme operatic masterpieces of Mozart's all have this same basic format: The characters start out thinking they're working toward some fairly straightforward objective, but somewhere along the line, often without their quite realizing it, they find themselves in serious search of something quite different. Much the way real life has a way of working out. In The Magic Flute, Pamina and Tamino -- and even Papageno, in his more down-to-earth way -- find themselves grappling with some of the most basic of human issues: appreciating and acquiring real wisdom and maturity as well as generosity of spirit, finding purpose in life, balancing the realities and needs of our "daylight" and "nighttime" selves.

Of course, in the hands of another composer, it might have wound up as trivial and cliched as it sounds. To anyone who knows and has lived with The Magic Flute, it's nothing less than a miracle. It's Mozart at the peak of his amazing maturity, and never mind that it had its first performance some two months before the composer's death, not quite two months before what would have been his 36th birthday. There are some achievements that are beyond explaining.

I've been living with The Magic Flute for, well, a sizable bunch of years, and over those years it has -- in common with a number of other great works of art which have become part of me -- helped shape and define my understanding of the world around me, and given me a way of measuring that understanding over time.

When I was still young and impressionable, I encountered a memoir by the great conductor (and in particular great Mozart conductor) Bruno Walter, in which he wrote that as he had progressed through life the always-beloved works of Mozart, and in particular The Magic Flute, which he considered Mozart's "spiritual testament," had risen to the point of eclipsing everything else. The notoriously uncheerful Otto Klemperer said that one of the things he would most regret about dying was losing The Magic Flute.

Our clip is a really lovely performance of the great duet "Bei Maennern, welche Liebe fuehlen." In the mission to rescue Pamina, it's the sidekick Papageno rather than Prince Tamino who finds the princess, who responds with a tender outpouring of compassion to the luckless bird-catcher's revelation -- remember, a total stranger to her until just minutes before -- that he doesn't have "a girlfriend let alone a wife." A soprano-baritone duet is a tricky thing to write, since their normal vocal ranges are separated by a full octave plus an extra interval of a fifth or so, so that even if they are assigned equivalent vocal lines, they don't fall in the same part of the voice. Mozart turns this into a singular opportunity.

No composer, or creative artist, had a stronger sense of decency or empathy than Mozart, and a really fine performance of "Bei Maennern" -- a difficult feat, given the pure simplicity of the vocal lines -- is apt to send us searching for words like "sublime."

(Note: I've never seen the complete performance our clip is drawn from, but it is available on DVD. I can't help suspecting that we may be seeing/hearing the best of it right here.)


THE MAGIC FLUTE ON RECORDS

It's one of those oddities of fate that the two recordings I consider most indispensable were both made in 1964. If The Magic Flute was, as Bruno Walter suggested, Mozart's spiritual testament, then perhaps Karl Boehm's recording of it with the Berlin Philharmonic (in glorious form) -- dramatically vital and singularly songful -- may be his. The cast (Roberta Peters as the Queen of the Night, Evelyn Lear as Pamina, Fritz Wunderlich as Tamino, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Papageno, Franz Crass as Sarastro) is good to great, and the spoken dialogue is especially well performed. This remains among my handful of very favorite opera recordings. The DG Originals edition is attractively priced, though it doesn't include a libretto. (You can buy one, of course, or undoubtedly track one down online.)

There's no spoken dialogue at all in Otto Klemperer's Magic Flute, at the conductor's insistence; he believed that it made no sense to include it, badly performed by opera singers, on a recording. To EMI's consternation he was insisting on doing the same thing with the recording of Abduction from the Seraglio they were trying to make in the last year or two of his life. (A cast was actually assembled and sessions scheduled, but the conductor had to cancel for health reasons.) His Magic Flute recording, with a generally strong cast (Lucia Popp, Gundula Janowitz, Nicolai Gedda, Walter Berry, Gottlob Frick) probes deeper than any other, and often has a radiant beauty like no other. Shockingly, it's currently unavailable, though copies can still be found. His recordings of the three Mozart-da Ponte operas are even harder to find. Admittedly they're for somewhat specialized tastes -- they tend to be quite gradual, placing considerable demands on the singers. But you'll hear dimensions in all these pieces that go beyond what anyone else has looked for. It would be nice to have a box of all four Klemperer Mozart operas.

Among more recent versions I would put in a good word for the Philips recording sparklingly conducted by Neville Marriner, with a strong cast (Cheryl Studer, Kiri Te Kanawa, Francisco Araiza, Olaf Baer, Samuel Ramey). Georg Solti had a lifelong special affinity for The Magic Flute, an identification with it I can only describe as a feeling of special joy,. He had served as a musical assistant to Arturo Toscanini (and played the glockenspiel part) at the Salzburg Festival in the 1930s, and both of his Decca recordings, both with the Vienna Philharmonic, have solid but somewhat uneven casts. You might want to check out the later one (with Sumi Jo, Ruth Ziesak, Uwe Heilmann, Michael Kraus, Kurt Moll).

For the budget-conscious, there's a Classics for Pleasure issue of the lovely EMI recording conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch (with Edda Moser, Anneliese Rothenberger, Peter Schreier, Walter Berry, Kurt Moll) that can be had online for a paltry $8.50 plus shipping (without libretto, but you should be able to track one of those down online).


AND ON VIDEO

There's a genuinely outstanding Munich performance conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch (more vivaciously than the above-noted audio recording), with Edita Gruberova, Lucia Popp, Francisco Araiza, Wolfgang Brendel, Kurt Moll.

The legendary Ingmar Bergman made a deeply personal, deeply wonderful film of The Magic Flute (in Swedish), filled with the wonder of a child's-eye view. Happily, there's a Criterion Collection DVD.

RECENT CLASSICAL MUSIC POSTS

Berlioz' always-unexpected Childhood of Christ, for Christmas Day
(music: "Farewells of the Shepherds to the Holy Family" from Part I, with Charles Munch conducting the Boston Symphony)

Handel celebrates the true miracle of Christmas, for Christmas Eve
(music: the chorus "For unto us a child is born" from Messiah)

Maureen Forrester sings Mahler: It doesn't get more eloquent
(music: "Urlicht" from Symphony No. 2, Resurrection, with Glenn Gould conducting -- left-handed!)

Tchaikovsky's ballets: Terrific recordings of all three for $20!
(music: "Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy" from The Nutcracker)

Leonard Bernstein's Candide Overture: Guess who conducts our mystery performance
(music: Candide Overture)
The mystery conductor revealed, and further musings on Candide
(music: "Oh, Happy We," Candide-Cunegonde duet from Candide)

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2008: A YEAR ON STEROIDS, Part 3

Did the Big Three CEOs base their survival strategy on

this National Lampoon cover -- with us as the dog?

Random observations, thoughts, and rants on 2008,
Part 3 (of 3)


by Noah


1. THE ILLUSION OF NEWS

"CNN is one of the participants in the war. I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected president but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power."

-- Arthur C. Clarke

Sure, Clarke's quote refers to Desert Storm, but not much has changed. (One obvious change: Ted Turner is long gone from CNN, and most everything else he once controlled.) I stopped watching Corporate News Network after the 2004 "election," because their incessant pro-Bush programming sickened me beyond repair. To this day, if I find someone has left CNN on where I work, I grab the remote and put on the Weather Channel, just so some sense of reality is emanating from the tube. I often muse that Fox "News" exists just so CNN has an appearance of integrity by comparison. But really, how do you say one mass murderer is a nicer person than the other?

Then there's USA Toady. Every hotel I stay in drops this piece of journalistic flaming dog poop on my doorstep every morning. Not counting the tabloids, who make no pretense at being truthful, whatever the worst fast food chain out there is, this is its print-news equivalent. On its face, it presents an illusion of news just like pictures on a fast-food menu lead one to imagine that one is about to get food.

The illusion of food, the illusion of news -- what's the damn difference? Both give you the same thing in the end. Toady was a scheme from day one. Back around 1970, a crooked U.S. attorney general (imagine that, a crooked AG!) named Ed Meese proudly proclaimed, "We will turn this country so far to the right, you won't recognize it." One of the ways they're doing it is with free reading material that purports to be news, free fast-food news that you can grab as you leave your hotel or run through the gate to catch a plane. USA Toady, Weekly Standard, whatever. The corporations that run our hotels and airlines are all with the program. Catapult the propaganda, as Dubya says! Millions absorb and regurgitate it daily, until it becomes prevailing public opinion for those who aren't interested in having an opinion of their own. What did Goebbels say about repeating a lie often enough? It's the power to cloud minds.

Sean Hannity fits right in with all of this. In another century, he would just be regarded as someone's local village idiot, sitting on a wall in the park babbling to himself. But now we are so advanced that we put him on camera, and the effect is the same, multiplied ad infinitum. Dumbing down made easy.

It's worth pondering (to me, anyway) that we have been beaming our television programs out into space for about 70 years now. Suppose someone or something out there is watching. Picture beings who are unfamiliar with our ways, with our cultures. Imagine that, say, they only get some fractured broadcasts of prime-time cable "news" panels filled with incessant shrieking and shouting and jabbing of fingers, and some bits and pieces of Three Stooges reruns from TVLand. Could they discern the difference? Would we be put on a list for immediate extermination? Should we be embarrassed?

Hannity, Coulter, and Beck. Moe, Larry, and Curly.


2. STEROIDS WERE BIG THIS YEAR (PUN INTENDED)

I'm puzzled as to why you can go to jail for decades in some backward states like Texas for possessing two joints, yet not for selling something that has proven to be much more harmful. Oh, that's right, it's a question of who's making what you're selling!

The issue of steroid use is a complicated, multilayered one. Testing and laws haven't caught up to modern drug tech, and of course enforcement will always lag behind. When a lot of athletes started using steroids, you could buy the stuff in a health-food store just a block away from where I live; no prescription or back alley dealer necessary. They hadn't even been banned from Major League Baseball yet.

That doesn't excuse those who continued to use them or started using them after the ban, but we give the makers and promoters a pass, just as we give the sociopathic heads of tobacco companies a pass, even after they lie to Congress and it comes out that they have even targeted children not just by putting more nicotine in their product but by experimenting with chemical combos for the so-called "filters" that heighten the addictive properties of the product. We spend more time pontificating about toxic toys from China. Where's the even hand?

I love Rep. Henry Waxman, but the idea of a bunch of his grandstanding congresscreep colleagues with obvious alcohol-abuse and overeating problems pointing fingers while letting drug companies, including tobacco companies, off the hook also bugs me. Without public financing of campaigns, such absurdities and inequities will continue and continue. Inaction is bought and paid for. The issue of so many Southern Senators supporting foreign auto companies but not our own has a similar root cause. More on that below.


3. GEORGE W. BUSH, ROD BLAGOJEVICH . . .

How the hell do such ridiculous people get as far as they do? Certainly lots of people have seen the danger signs at the local level before they become national figures.

The answer lies in the means used to present these cretins to the public on a statewide or national scale. That means is the media, of course. It's more than the fact that there is virtually no investigative reporting anymore. We've gone way beyond that low. Obviously the media is all too willing to sell itself like the cheapest whore on the corner for campaign advertising revenue. Integrity and concern for our society never enter the equation for the media lowlife types. They make their money, and the country goes down the chute.

Nice folks. Money doesn't talk, it swears. Then again, maybe they just like such cretins. Maybe they see more than a bit of themselves in them.


4. EVERYWHERE, THERE ARE LOTS OF PIGGIES

Take that just-mentioned incredible cursing boy from Illinois. I'd have to say that Governor Bleepovich is crazy. Or at least he wanted to get caught, which may be the same thing. I mean, look, he knew he was being investigated and he still said what he said on his phone. Maybe he's just retarded, but then he would have run with the other party.

In any event, it looks like he crossed a legal line. Like it or not, and I don't, politicians make deals. That's at the root of what politics is. Most basic deal: They will give you something if you raise money for their campaign. It appears that this guy took it a step further and was saying, "Just give me the money." Either way, crazy or not, the guy is a sleazebag. Here in New York, we thought we had a real sleazo in Eliot Spitzer, but he can't be number one on the list anymore. Spitzer's case was a sex scandal, and no one in either party defended him, unlike what happened with Sen. David "Diapers" Vitter, who the Repugs all rallied around. There is a difference in the two parties, eh?

So much of this stuff centers around the corrupting influence of money. It's another reason for public campaign financing. Right now you have some Southern Senators against present and future auto bailouts because they are financially heavily supported by foreign automakers who have plants in their states. The U.A.W. supported their opponents, so they'd like to blame them for everything and get rid of them, too. Senators literally have to raise thousands of dollars per day to get reelected. To me, the reason to oppose bailouts is because the CEOs will likely just pocket the money and little if anything will change. To me it's welfare, although the pols and their media slaves don't call it that -- though they would if you or I were asking for the money.

The problem is that there is also a reason to support bailouts for the Big Three which the media didn't mention for a long time and barely mentions now. That reason is the jobs that are not Big Three auto-company jobs but jobs in related industries like parts suppliers, metal workers, etc. Three million people stand to lose their jobs over this crisis, but they are not of a class that Repugs like Alabama Senator Dick Shelby care about. Wall Street, yes. Our class, no.

Another unspoken thing is: What will happen to the advanced tech that our auto companies have? The answer is that, if the Big Three go bankrupt, selected divisions of them will be bought up by various foreign interests, especially Chinese. China is dying to get its hands on this stuff, and it's nowhere near as simple as just buying one of our cars. It's like when we sell planes and missile parts; we don't do it until we have something more advanced that renders what we sell to foreign interests out of date. China wants our R&D, future tech. It's like the Big Three CEOs copied that old National Lampoon "If You Don't Buy This Magazine, We'll Kill This Dog" cover, only this time the dog is us.

We're now stuck between a rock and a hard place for real. It's extortion. And it's very ironic that the party that says it's more patriotic is the one that's in favor of aiding and abetting foreign interests, not to mention screwing the middle and working classes while pushing the economic meltdown further into a full-blown depression. Who hates America? At least those lowlife senators haven't pulled the gold from our teeth, like their idols from another time. Who can afford a dentist now anyway?


5. THOSE SUPREME FOLKS WHO GAVE US PRESIDENT DUBYA

I understand the idea that Bush is a prime source of material for standup comics and that people will miss that about him (if you need a fix, check out this clip), but what he's done to all of us is tragic. The damage he has done will never be over. No political figure has ever damaged our country more. Somewhere -- in a cave, a tent, or a deluxe high rise -- Bin Laden has a smile of satisfaction and accomplishment on his face.

One can only hope that history is once again taught in our schools someday and that the names of the criminal "Supreme" Court judges who gave us President Dubya are memorized by future students as examples of how corrupt judges can be and what tragedy they can inflict on the populace. It would be nice if the graves of Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, William Rehnquist, Sandra Day O'Connor, and Anthony Kennedy are well-marked and well-known, so that future American dog-owners know right where to take their dogs for walkies.


6. A PARTING THOUGHT ON CAMPAIGN 2008

More than a few times I heard the argument for McCain-Palin that they would "protect the babies" or some such not-thought-out nonsense. Of course Repugs are never concerned about the health or future of the already-born. To Repugs, it's "once you're born, you're on your own." If, for example, you grow up in your local Love Canal, it's your fault. So, all you Focus on the Family types, think about this if you can grasp it: No American pol killed more babies in the womb than your sainted George W. Bush. He did it with his environmental policies, his health-care policies, his bombs, and a smirk. You voted for him. Nice work, suckers.


7. AND A PARTING THOUGHT TO SENATE DEMS RE. 2009

Senate Repugs have acted like schoolyard bullies for far too long, and the Dems just lie down and take it, getting run over by a Mack truck every time.

Change is coming!

However, there's only one way to deal with a bully. We're in a culture war, and a war is a war. I have no use for that "turn the other cheek so they can slug that one too" stuff. In the real world, though, I'm sure we'll see the Senate once again tied up by obstructionist Repugs who make sure that the Dems need 60 votes to pass every piece of Obama's legislative program, 60 votes that they will hardly ever be able to get. Then in 2010 the Repugs will say the Dems have accomplished nothing.

Maybe there's a chance. But only if the Dems change their attitude and grow a spine. That starts with getting rid of Harry Reid as majority leader.


FRIDAY IN PART 1: Sarah P and Joe the P, Gov. Spritzer, Keith and Rachel, the Repugs stuck in mid-20th century, and more

YESTERDAY IN PART 2: Dubya's pardons, Hank the Grifter's bailout, GOP election-stealing, and more

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An awful truth we don't pay much attention to: "Social networking" sites like Facebook are being used to foment hatred and actual violence

In case you don't read Serbian, the crucial text of this poster, recently posted all around central Belgrade, is translated below.

by Ken

When it comes to Facebook and Atwitter and all those other newfangled social-networking-type websites, it could be that nobody on the planet knows less than I do -- with, always, the exception of Young Johnny McCranky, who's still on the far side of the mysteries of the Google. But from our friend Andy at the invaluable UK Gay News website, we've got a true stomach-churner of a story: Serbian hate groups have been using Facebook to foment violence, including death threats, against gays.

Even with the update at the top of the story, carrying the news that Facebook finally responded to terrified pleas and zapped the two immediately offending groups (and "others are being investigated," according to another UK Gay News report), this remains one scarifying story:

Please Protect Us, Serbian Gays Plead: Death Threats, Attacks Faced as Facebook Fails to Remove Two Hate Groups

NOTE: The two “gay hate” groups mentioned here have now been removed by Facebook - added December 27 at 18:00. Click HERE for report.

BELGRADE, December 25, 2008 – Please protect us. That is the plea tonight from gays and lesbian in Serbia to their government, the police and the wider world this holiday season.

The staff and contributors of the Serbian gay and lesbian website Querria Centre, are constantly receiving death threats and threats of physical violence, it emerged this evening.

“Every day threats are being sent to the website’s official email address to the effect that the website is going to be hacked, that we are sick people who should be treated, that all of us (LGBT population) should be killed,” said Predrag Azdejković, the editor of Queeria and one of the main targets.

“Such threats are also posted among the comments made on the website.”

BELGRADE, December 25, 2008 – Please protect us. That is the plea tonight from gays and lesbian in Serbia to their government, the police and the wider world this holiday season.

The staff and contributors of the Serbian gay and lesbian website Querria Centre, are constantly receiving death threats and threats of physical violence, it emerged this evening.

“Every day threats are being sent to the website’s official email address to the effect that the website is going to be hacked, that we are sick people who should be treated, that all of us (LGBT population) should be killed,” said Predrag Azdejković, the editor of Queeria and one of the main targets.

“Such threats are also posted among the comments made on the website.”

The report goes on to identify the two Facebook groups, adding, "Both are 'open groups.'"

Members of both groups are publicly advocating death threats to the activists at Queeria, whose photographs, Queeria say, are circulating among the members of both groups.

Additionally, the groups are advocating breaking and entering the Queeria Centre premises, as well as the homes of gay activists.

The groups suggest violence against all gays and lesbians population.

“A week ago," the report notes, "posters [reproduced above] were put up in the centre of Belgrade by the nationalist group, Naši (Ours), that said:

“While Serbs are being laid off, look who is being financed by Boris Tadić [the Serbian president] and the government of Serbia. The Serbian Ministry of Culture, within its remit for projects in the field of public information, has recently granted 256,500.00 dinars for the website of a faggots organization - Queeria Centre - which is promoting faggots’ rights and slandering the Serbian Orthodox Church in the most despicable way. Is this what the democrats had been promising before the elections? The association Naši.”.

To all of this, and a good deal of other steadily rising Serbian anti-gay hate-mongering, Predrag Azdejković says, “The police and the Public Attorney showed no reaction."

“It is our opinion that by keeping silent the national authorities of the Republic of Serbia support violence against the gay and lesbian population and activists of gay and lesbian rights groups, and thus provide homophobic forces in this country with an additional impetus,” he charged.

“We are asking national and international human rights NGOs to raise their voices in this case with similar vehemence like in cases when threats are directed to non-gay human rights activists."

What we all need to do: Be aware, spread the word, and raise a stink.

#

Annals of gov't outsourcing: Hey, big spenders, wanna catch a drug trafficker for Uncle Sammy? Watch out, kids, it's a trick question!

We really want to curb the Afghan drug trade. Uh, don't we?

"From the perspective of the CIA and Defense Department, Noorzai could be a useful intelligence asset. But law enforcement officials continued to consider him a notorious criminal whose drug proceeds supported militants battling U.S. forces. Rosetta's interest seemed purely commercial: to pump him for information that could be reported back to its clients, the Rosetta documents indicate. . . .

"Whatever else it was, the sting operation was a unique blending of public and private sector efforts that appears to have taken the outsourcing of federal law enforcement to new levels, according to interviews and internal Rosetta documents reviewed by The Washington Post."

-- from Richard Leiby's "careful examination" of the curious case of Haji Bashir Noorzai in today's Washington Post (see link below)

by Ken

Maybe somebody can tell me whether the appropriate response to this story is to laugh, cry, or throw up.

It seems, according to Richard Leiby's account in today's Washington Post ("Tangled U.S. Objectives Bring Down Spy Firm"), that our very own Drug Enforcement Agency was so hot to get its mitts on "a major Afghan heroin trafficker and Taliban supporter," one Haji Bashir Noorzai, that it turned the job over to "an unusual three-man private intelligence firm called Rosetta Research and Consulting." And Rosetta delivered, literally:

At the instigation of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Rosetta agents lured Noorzai to America and delivered him right into the feds' hands. He spent 11 days in an Embassy Suites Hotel in Manhattan in 2005, enjoying room service and considering himself a guest of the U.S. government -- until he was arrested. He was imprisoned for three years awaiting his trial, which concluded in September.

Noorzai ("a hulking, 6-foot-4 bearded Afghan in his early 40s who lived in Quetta, Pakistan, with three wives," and who was "chief of a million-member familial tribe in the Kandahar province of Afghanistan") was "swiftly convicted" by a federal jury in New York, and now "faces up to life in prison when he is sentenced in January." The government issued a quick press release "thanking the men and women of the DEA and FBI for their 'countless sacrifices' in making the case," with no mention of Rosetta, which actually did the job, and would wind up making the ultimate sacrifice. You see, unbeknownst to out stalwart federal anti-drug warriors, Noorzai was considered an "asset" by our very own Dept. of Defense and some of our super-intelligent intelligence folk:

Noorzai's capture should have been Rosetta's finest hour. Instead, it led to the company's downfall. A close examination of the case reveals how a spy firm trafficking in sensitive intelligence for profit got sandwiched between conflicting government goals: Noorzai, one of the company's best sources, was considered an asset by the intelligence side of the government, even as the law enforcement side considered him a criminal.

Now there's one big oops! It turns out that not getting credit was the least of Rosetta's problems:

The company that thought it might get a $2 million reward was dragged into an internal Justice Department investigation. The FBI employees who helped the firm ended up in trouble with their own agency.

Rosetta, which spent lavishly in its pursuit of Noorzai, got nothing for arranging his capture and ended up going broke. Investors thought their money was going toward building an anti-terrorism database, not to helping the government snare a drug kingpin.

"I certainly -- my partner and I -- had no idea," said Paul Hanly, a New York lawyer who joined with four others to invest $1 million in Rosetta Research. >

Well, oops again! Reporter Leiby really does seem to have done a remarkable job piecing this curious story together, especially with hardly anybody willing to talk on the record. Needless to say, the Rosetta principals had the predictable network of links to people on the inside, on up to an aide to Defense Sec'y Donald Rumsfeld, and of course one hand had no idea what the other -- make that any of the others -- was up to.

The story even includes a characteristically blundering appearance by our very own Chimpy the Prez: "In hindsight, Rosetta's future took a major turn when an opium grower it was tracking was designated by President Bush in June 2004 as one of the world's most wanted drug kingpins." In fairness, who would expect Chimpy to know what was going on inside his government when nobody else did?

Now if Leiby hasn't gotten the story right, I'm sure officials from a host of gov't agencies will be only too quick to set the record straight! (Ha ha ha!)

#

In case you thought it might be easy to hold the Bush Crime Family to account for their crimes . . .

Of course the Nuremberg trials were derided as a sham, as mere "victors' justice." The Allied powers claimed to be setting precedent for applying principles of international law. Ha, we're such kidders!

by Ken

Just yesterday, you may recall, I was asking, "Is there anything we can do about the criminals Chimpy the Prez and "Big Dick" Cheney?" Now I wasn't speaking only of their war crimes, but certainly those are at the top of the list for which some kind of formal reckoning is needed, both as a matter of justice and as a lesson and warning to the people who follow them in their offices.

This morning I found an e-mail from Noah with this link:

http://digg.com/politics/LAW_SCHOOL_TO_ORGANIZE_BUSH_WAR_CRIMES_TRIAL/who

The link takes you to this Digg item:

LAW SCHOOL TO ORGANIZE BUSH WAR CRIMES TRIAL
Organizations that want to put President Bush and his accomplices on trial for war crimes will convene at the Massachusetts School of Law September 13-14 to map out an action blueprint to bring them to justice.

Naturally I was already imagining a blogpost that would take note of this while branding it "Not Much, but It's a Start." These days, while Howie is away, Everything I look at, I automatically imagine as a blogpost. It's an occupational hazard. (Wait, this doesn't qualify as an "occupation," exactly, even if it has been pretty much full-time. Is there such a thing as an "avocational hazard"?) So it would be nice to have more information, right?

The Digg item links to a lengthy post -- with, like, 1850 Diggs! -- which begins:

A conference to plan the prosecution of President Bush and other high administration officials for war crimes will be held September 13-14 at the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover .

"This is not intended to be a mere discussion of violations of law that have occurred," said convener Lawrence Velvel, dean and cofounder of the school. "It is, rather, intended to be a planning conference at which plans will be laid and necessary organizational structures set up, to pursue the guilty as long as necessary and, if need be, to the ends of the Earth."

"We must try to hold Bush administration leaders accountable in courts of justice," Velvel said. "And we must insist on appropriate punishments, including, if guilt is found, the hangings visited upon top German and Japanese war-criminals in the 1940s."

Dean Velvel is quoted as saying. "For Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Yoo to spend years in jail or go to the gallows for their crimes would be a powerful lesson to future American leaders."

Hold on now. "September 13-14"? It doesn't seem likely that this refers to 2009. Sure enough, the original story circulated in early June 2008. Meaning that the conference has already taken place, right? Or if it didn't, there's some further development to report, surely.

A job for Google, surely. As you might guess from the number of Diggs, you'll find some version of the original post plastered all over the Net. This was followed by a sprinkling of posts noting indignantly that the MSM is predictably ignoring this important news. Then, well, it's hard to find anything.

Finally I find this report, from Andover (good sign!), on the website of a local paper:

Published: September 13, 2008 12:02 am

Law school dean's war crimes
conference starts today

By Brian Messenger
bmessenger@eagletribune.com

ANDOVER -- A two-day effort by lawyers and academics to coordinate war crimes prosecution against top U.S. officials begins today at the Wyndham Andover hotel.

The conference was originally scheduled to be on the Federal Street campus of the Massachusetts School of Law, but met with opposition from some alumni.

The conference is being hosted by law school Dean Lawrence Velvel.

The 18 participating speakers include authors, academics, lawyers, journalists and members of the American Civil Liberties Union and New York City-based Center for Constitutional Rights.

The conference will begin at 9 a.m. today and concludes Sunday afternoon.

Perhaps the best-known participant in the conference is author and former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi. Bugliosi prosecuted Charles Manson with the Los Angeles County district attorney's office, a trial he later outlined in his best-selling book "Helter Skelter."

Velvel did not return calls seeking comment this week, but wrote in a June statement announcing his plans to hold the conference that President George W. Bush and other top U.S. leaders must be tried for war crimes.

The present location of the conference was not made public by Velvel or the law school, but was revealed this week by North Andover-based public relations agency Bulldog Communications.

Andover lawyer and Massachusetts School of Law graduate Peter Cotch said he was pleased the conference was moved off campus.

Cotch urged the school's board of trustees to review Velvel's standing as dean when the conference was first announced.

"Larry Velvel is certainly entitled to his own political activities and cultural pursuits, but they should not be confused with the mission of the law school, which is to educate lawyers," Cotch said.

Andover attorney Arthur Broadhurst, a member of the school's board of trustees, said he called Velvel after learning of the conference and was told by the dean the event would be held off campus.

"He wasn't ordered to," said Broadhurst. "When I had talked to him to find out what was going on, he had told me he wasn't going to be doing it on campus."

It turns out that this very same Eagle-Tribune had editorialized on the subject back in July:

Published: July 08, 2008 10:46 pm

Our view: Velvel's 'war crimes' charade is preposterous

The words and actions of the dean of the Massachusetts School of Law cast the Andover school in ill repute and raise doubt over whether anyone can expect serious legal training there.

Lawrence Velvel, dean and co-founder of the law school, says that President Bush and members of his administration should be placed on trial for war crimes and, if found guilty, hanged -- just like the leaders of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan.

The "Bush is Hitler" argument is a common one in the less rational corners of the Internet. Overblown rhetoric is one thing. Propounding foolishness as a matter of public policy is another matter entirely.

Velvel is planning a two-day conference for September titled "Planning for the Prosecution of High Level American War Criminals." Originally slated for the school's Federal Street campus, the conference has been moved to an undisclosed location.

Velvel declined to comment to our reporter on his motives for the conference. But in writings promoting it, Velvel has said this is no mere academic exercise.

"Because domestic politics are obviously useless for holding the guilty accountable, we must try to do what was done in the 1940s to the leaders of nations who committed evil," wrote Velvel.

"We must try to do what was done to the German and Japanese leaders from top Nazis and Tojo right down to lawyers and judges. ... Not unless leaders fear prison or the gallows for actions that violate law will there be anything to check the next headlong rush to war for allegedly good reasons that later prove false," Velvel wrote.

Velvel names Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as specific targets of his "war crimes" charade. Not surprisingly, Velvel makes no mention of former President Clinton, under whose administration "regime change" in Iraq became official U.S. policy. Nor does he mention the numerous senators and congressmen -- Republican and Democrat -- who in 2002 granted the president authority to use military force against Iraq.

Velvel's conference and war crimes rabble-rousing amount to a political exercise, not a legal one. Indeed, why even hold trials at all? Let's proceed directly to the hangings. It's clear that's where Velvel stands. His attempt to smear a veneer of legality over his hatred of Bush administration policy in Iraq is transparent.

It is perfectly fair, reasonable and just to oppose the war in Iraq and to condemn the president's role in it. The people of the United States are welcome to boot Bush, his administration and its supporters out of public office for as long as they see fit.

But in a democracy, differences in opinion over national policy are not criminal matters. Those who lead law schools should be resisting such nonsense, not encouraging it.

Is it possible for an entire newspaper even a regional one, to fit its entire head up its collective butt? Is it possible that these people who run a newspaper are that utterly clueless about the abundant war crimes committed -- or at the very least in need of adjudicating -- by the Bush regime? (Is this possible? A: yes.) Or are they just reflexive right-wing propagandists?

Or are they just fans of war crimes when we do 'em? It's worth keeping in mind the common description of the Nuremberg trials as "victors' justice" -- a holding-to-account that, for all its fancy kowtowing to supposed higher principles of international law -- would never have been prosecuted except by a winning power upon a losing one.

Somebody deserves to be held up to widespread ridicule and scorn here, but I don't think it's Dean Velvel. One suggestion: If war crimes tribunals ever are held, how about adding the name of "Andover lawyer and Massachusetts School of Law graduate Peter Cotch," on a charge of obstructing international law?


SINCE WE HAVE THE REPORTER'S E-MAIL ADDRESS
(ASSUMING HE'S STILL AT THE EAGLE-TRIBUNE) --

Once this post posts, I'm going to e-mail him and see if he can fill us in on further developments in Andover. I'll let you know anything I find out.

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2008: A YEAR ON STEROIDS, Part 2

December 2006: Time's (in)famous "You" Person of

the Year cover. What a difference two years makes!

Random observations, thoughts, and rants on 2008,
Part 2 (of 3)


by Noah


1. PARDONS, PARDONS, WHO'S GETTING PARDONS?

There has been justifiable concern about who so-called President Bush might pardon before he says "My work is done here" and smirks, slithers, and slinks off into the rest of his life of failure. There's even speculation as to whether he might try to pardon himself along with the rest of the sleazoids in his administration. Not much talk about it at all in the MSM, though, and even less talk about the pardons Bush issued for Thanksgiving.

That's right. Although Dubya has been stingier with pardons than any president in memory, he quietly issued several you may not have heard about, among them five issued to people convicted of crimes related to the mid-1980s S&L scandal, including John Smith (if that's his real name), a former Dallas banker; David McCall Jr. from Plano, Texas; Mark Hale of Henderson, Texas, who went for the gold to the tune of $5 million; and one William Hoyle McCright Jr. of Midland, Texas. The last one there just happened to be a McCain donor. Gee, look at all these guys from Texas. What a coincidence!

Of course, the MSM's blanket of secrecy continues to protect the Bush Crime Family. It's like the S&L crimes never happened. No mention of Neil Bush's role, and still no mention of Jeb Bush's default on a $4.5 million "loan" from Broward Federal Savings. Some guys took a fall. Smaller fish, perhaps. Now they get pardons for keeping silent, I suppose. That's the way it works. The Bush Crime Family sure knows how to get its hands on money, especially our money. Still lots of mention about Clinton's seedy pardon of Marc Rich, but these? Not so much.


2. SPEAKING OF MOVING MONEY AROUND: HANK THE GRIFTER

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is pulling off what those bankers who plotted to overthrow FDR back in the '30s wanted to do. Everyone wants a crack at Bernie Madoff for making $50 billion disappear. Why not Hank the Grifter for making who-knows-how-many-times that disappear? (And I mean that as a question. Does anyone have any idea how many billions have vanished down the Grifter's rathole?) He is turning over a major percentage of our GDP to a few cigar-chomping, meth-snorting fat cats. He is the master enabler. It's thievery that any two-bit Middle Eastern or Latin American dictator can only dream about, all being done before our eyes while politicians and media whores call it something else.

I remember when Saddam Hussein was being shocked and awed, he took a couple of trailer trucks to the bank and loaded up the cash and gold. What's the difference? Where'd the "bailout" money go? It was sold to us as money that would go to people looking for loans to purchase homes and cars. In reality, it went to buy up smaller banks, pay bonuses for bankers (over $1.6 billion to date), and pay stockholder dividends. Understand this: They took our tax dollars and redistributed them -- to themselves. Car and home loans? Nope. The new bank mantra is "Just Say NO."

With the S&L scandal, the participants in the scam took out loans from banks which they had no intention of repaying. Investors and depositors be damned. This time they take it from the U.S. Treasury and hand it over to their slimy buddies. Poppy Bush once described the goal as to get more money into the hands of fewer people. Saddam was known to give the contents of his country's treasury and foreign aid to himself, his family, and a small circle of friends. He created a class of the superwealthy. The Bush Crime Family has aimed at the same goal for decades, across generations. Strip away all the "he tried to kill my daddy nonsense," and you're left with this: Saddam was merely a very nasty rival -- they didn't hate Saddam, they envied him. He wasn't an enemy, he was a role model.


3. BUSH'S EXIT INTERVIEWS

When asked what he would miss most about not being (playing) president, El Heinisio replied wistfully that he would most miss riding on Air Force One and having the White House chef at his call. Oh well, maybe missing the opportunity to make the country and the world a better place finishes a close third. With most people on the way out, we'd say, "Don't let the door hit you where the good lord split ya," but in this case it might be nice if the door had some extra snap in its springs. He used to talk about catapulting the propaganda. Maybe there's an idea here.


4. TIME MAGAZINE'S PERSON OF THE YEAR

A few weeks ago, Time's Mark Halperin spoke out from his cuckoo-clock rest home about how some perceived "extreme pro-Obama bias" on the part of the mainstream media had -- shock, horror -- fooled the public into electing Senator "That One." That Halperin witnessed this imaginary bias may, in fact, be the long-sought proof of parallel universes and previously unknown dimensions that top physicists have theorized. However, on this planet, in this dimension, the 2008 election may just be the watershed moment where the public took a lead from the classic '70s movie Network and started to really scream, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore," back at the MSM talking heads, jive-ass spinmeisters, and assorted foaming-at-the-mouth, rotating-head right-wing sideshow attractions.

Halperin must be totally beside himself with sputtering rage and frustration at the naming of President-elect Obama as Person of the Year by his obviously biased employer. His own employer! What a betrayal! Hopefully, someone at Time will film Halperin's near convulsions and upload it to YouTube asap.

Note to Mark Halperin: The tide may be moving the other way. You are obsolete, a caricature of the past. The MSM has always spewed little but the propaganda of the neocon artists, memos from the desk of Karl Rove, and the semicoherent mumblings of religious goons like Pat Robertson, who has become a multigazillionaire off of his "nonprofit" organization. Even when the MSM has a dreaded liberal on one of its political chat shows, they make sure to "balance" the token liberal with two to four screaming ditzbrains who start yelling every time the alleged liberal-commie-terrorist sympathizer tries to get a word in edgewise.

It's time to just turn these loons off. Hell, in my parallel universes I'd make them walk the plank off the lip of an active volcano. Now, that would be a reality show! Kudos to Ed Schultz for actually just getting up and walking off in the middle of one show (the execrable Fox and Friends) this year, leaving the shrieking, hooting, jumping-up-and-down, armpit-scratching righty monkeys to throw their monkey poop at each other in their mass confusion. It was a beautiful thing to behold.


5. GOP ELECTION-STEALING: A TICKING TIME BOMB

In all of the discussion of Barack Obama's victory, something has been ignored. It's a time bomb waiting to blow up in our faces on some future Election Day. It's a voting-machine time bomb. Diebold, a company so heinous, it had to change the name of its voting-machine division to Premier, is still in control of a huge percentage of our election tabulating. Diebold whistle-blower Christopher Hood has provided information as to how the Georgia 2002 Senate election was rigged in favor of Saxby Chambliss; more specifically, how he was ordered by Bob Urosevich, the president of Diebold, to secretly install software "patches" in clear violation of state law on voting machines in Democratic-leaning counties.

Stephen Spoonamore, a talented cyber expert who has done much work for our government (and who is a lifelong Republican) has stated publicly that he believes the 2002 Georgia election was rigged. "If you look at the case of Saxby Chmablis, that's ridiculous. The man was not elected. He lost that election by five points. Max Cleland won. They flipped the votes, clear as day." You can watch him say it on YouTube if you like.

Funny how YouTube provides us with more real information now than the so-called news networks. Was Georgia 2002 just a test for Ohio 2004? You decide. A RICO case is in motion in Ohio. Depositions have been taken, and the Georgia secretary of state was told to save everything -- every hard drive, every memory card, every document relating to Georgia's more recent runoff election. Cliff Arnebeck, lead attorney in the case, has said, "Karl Rove has made a career out of rigging elections. Electronic voting machines like those being used in Georgia are his favorite tool."

Now, just last week, the key Rove IT guy, Mike Connell, who began testifying seven weeks ago in an Ohio vote-tampering case, died in a plane crash on a clear, good-weather night. Spoonamore called him "vital to uncovering the truth" about missing White House e-mails and related things, including the firings of nine U.S. Attorneys who held legal principle above Rovian politics. According to Spoonamore, Connell had asked him about ways to "permanently destroy hard drives." Connell also did IT work for the infamous Ohio secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, designing a program for him that enabled him to see the 2004 election results in real time, as they were counted.

Connell's other dubious accomplishments include being computer guy for the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, RNC.org and numerous House committees and building and managing congressional servers and George W. Bush's election websites and communication networks. This includes the nongovernment e-mail systems that Rove used for virtually all his important e-mail communication, much of which is now -- surprise, surprise! -- mysteriously missing. Connell was an extreme Bush loyalist and also a Christian extremist, an anti-choice zealot who, along with his wife, spoke of electing Bush as a mission from God which no law of man should get in the way of. He was doing God's work, after all!

This guy was the man who knew too much. Talk about knowing where the bodies were buried! But since he was forced to testify, he and his wife have been receiving threats, and now he has gone to his great reward, although it's probably not the one he was expecting. His death is a very convenient one, to say the least.

Remember how confident Rove was going into Election Day 2006? Then remember how completely shocked the White House was by the massive Democratic turnout? Even then, there were dozens of suspicious results, the most famous of which was in Katherine Harris's old congressional district in Florida. I guess the Repugs thought they had it all set up. Things would look close again, but they would prevail again and keep their majorities.

Sigh! There's only so much tampering you can do. Just like in November, the only way to beat machine tampering is with massive turnout. One wonders what the election results would be with no tampering! How one-sided could the Obama and congressional victories have been? There were reports of vote-flipping this time in West Virginia and upstate New York, to name two. What happens the next time there is a tight election, an election where vote-flipping in just one state can change who gets in the White House or who gets to be your Senator?

It's a time bomb, and it needs to be addressed and disarmed, now. It threatens democracy itself. The excuse often given for not acting on this matter runs something like this: "Well, the people might lose faith in their electoral system." Either Washington is the last to know, yet again, or they like things just fine the way they are.


6. TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN

Bush's final looting of the treasury, the Halliburton no-bid deals, the tax cuts for the wealthy, and bailouts to nowhere are all about starving the government while stealing as much as they can. The easiest way to starve out funds for things like education, health care, infrastructure, enforcement of environmental laws, etc. is to just take the money, all under the guise of fiscal conservatism. This is what "conservatism" is about now -- conserving your money for the few at the top, while we buy into media myths like "trickle-down economics."

Your 401(k)? As if an evil worm like Bush even cares. Ten to one he had to ask what a 401(k) was when it came up in September during the market crash. Bush leaves office snickering and smirking, muttering "Let them eat rum cake" under his reeking-of-alcohol breath. The crashing economy is the end result of 30 years of deregulation, destruction of a balanced tax code, and destruction of a balanced tariff mechanism, which built the middle class and led to a prosperity that deprived the upper class of their favorite weapon against the rest of us, fear. To them, prosperity had to go. It was an anathema that stood in the way of greed. Too much was never enough. The needs of the greedy outweighed the needs of the needy.

Dems like former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin shouldn't get off the hook either. He says he didn't know it was coming. He didn't see it. "I saw nothing. I see nothing." Drop the Sergeant Schultz act, bozo.


7. FINALLY, AN OPEN LETTER TO ALAN COLMES

Dear Alan,

I hate to think that you actually enjoyed your last job. The money must have been really good, but you were just a sideshow geek to the rest of the people (and I use the word "people" loosely) on the show. You were, at best, a professional patsy, a punching bag for total jerks. Maybe you could go on Dirty Jobs. I used to hope that just once you would go postal on-air, but you always disappointed me.

Then again, conspiracy buffs might notice the timing of the announcement of your leaving, matching up with word that Ann Coultergeist has a broken jaw. If that's what happened, you have redeemed yourself and taken The Man's money at the same time. Not bad!

Yours,
Noah


YESTERDAY IN PART 1: Sarah P and Joe the P, Gov. Spritzer, Keith and Rachel, the Repugs stuck in mid-20th century, and more

TOMORROW IN PART 3: CNN and the illusion of news, piggies everywhere, the Supremes who gave us Pres. Dubya, and more

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The Fox Noisemakers couldn't get away with their propagandistic BS if their viewers weren't begging to be beaten into submission like rabid dogs

Next thing Plato knew, rumors were running wild about, and commentators demanding a full investigation of, his relationship with that radical troublemaker (and suspected prevert) Socrates.

"While FOX made sure that viewers knew Obama's report was not prepared by “independent investigators,” the “We report. You decide” network did not think it worth mentioning that its own scrutiny was not being provided by an independent analyst.

"Rove announced that he saw no problems in the report. But then he launched into a series of 'take-aways' that suggested there was something sinister being covered up."

-- from News Hounds' report on "Fox News contribuor" Karl Rove's contributions to a discussion of the Obama report on involvement with Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich

by Ken

As promised, we have a report from Ellen at News Hounds (their motto: "We watch FOX so you don't have to") on some jolly hi-jinks at Fox Noise. It's probably par for the course for the propagndists and mental midgets who keep the fires burning at Uncle Rupert's Lie Factory, but it's an eye-popper all the same. I have some thoughts, but let's look at the report first:

FOX News Teams Up With Karl Rove To Baselessly Suggest An Obama Report Cover Up In Blagojevich Scandal

The release of the Obama team's report wasn't just not good enough for FOX News but they trotted out Karl Rove, without disclosing either his Republican partisan activities or his own questionable role in Republican scandals, to raise unfounded suspicions that sinister facts had been concealed. Rove never found any actual evidence that any damning evidence existed but that didn't stop him from wildly speculating that something (he never offered up what, exactly) was amiss. With video.

In a 12/23/08 discussion on Hannity and Colmes, the suspicion-mongering began in the scripted introduction which baselessly suggested that Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, may have been connected to the bribery: “It's also worth noting that from the report it appears that Emanuel did have several conversations with the governor's chief of staff about the open seat and even suggested names... (such as) Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. You will remember that it has been suggested that Jackson was one of the candidates whose supporters may have tried to bribe the governor. Jackson has denied that but his own attorney admits that the Congressman was indeed the so-called Candidate Number 5 named by the federal prosecutor.”

Nothing further was presented to indicate Emanuel had any improper ties to Jackson nor even that Jackson had committed any wrongdoing.

The introduction also stated, “It's important to remember that this report was not prepared by independent investigators but by the Obama transition team, themselves.”

The only guest for the discussion was Republican operative Karl Rove, disingenuously presented as a “FOX News contributor” who would provide “analysis.” So while FOX made sure that viewers knew Obama's report was not prepared by “independent investigators,” the “We report. You decide” network did not think it worth mentioning that its own scrutiny was not being provided by an independent analyst.

But FOX News was not just being disingenuous but cynically partisan in the extreme by putting forth Rove as a champion of ethics and transparency in government. It was a choice that can only be described as - well, Rovian.

Rove announced that he saw no problems in the report. But then he launched into a series of “take-aways” that suggested there was something sinister being covered up.

“First of all, Barack Obama was more involved in this process than he let on two weeks ago in his news conference,” Rove said. “On the 9th of November, he has a meeting with people in which they agree upon a list and he directs Rahm Emanuel to give that list to Blagojevich. There's nothing wrong with that. Nothing unethical. But I wish that he'd sort of laid that out to the American people at his first news conference.”

Rove implies that Obama said otherwise. But, in his press conference, Obama stated, “In terms of our involvement, I'll repeat what I said earlier, which is I had no contact with the governor's office. I did not speak to the governor about these issues. That I know for certain. What I want to do is to gather all the facts about any staff contacts that I might -- may have -- that may have taken place between the transition office and the governor's office. And we'll have those in the next few days, and we'll present them. But what I'm absolutely certain about is that our office had no involvement in any deal-making around my Senate seat. That I'm absolutely certain of.” This is consistent with what Obama said in his briefer previous statements.

There is nothing in Obama's statement that contradicts the later report and there's nothing in the report to suggest that Obama's statement was in any way misleading. Instead, it was Rove doing the misleading.

This is disconcertingly similar to the attack methods used against the Clintons during Whitewater, as Media Matters' Jamison Foster noted in an excellent post discussing the similarities in the ways the media inflated the two scandals.

Rove's second and “most interesting” “take away” was that Emanuel suggested Obama-friend Valerie Jarrett for the Senate seat before talking to Obama. “Why is Rahm Emanuel recommending Valerie Jarrett (before Obama had officially approved the recommendation)? Is he advocating her? Did he check with Obama? Was he trying a get a erstwhile competitor within the White House on a separate track to become a United States Senator?”

Other than Rove's ominous inference that something may have been amiss, there is nothing in that bit of transition team trivia that even remotely smacks of anything improper or even significant. OK, so Emanuel spoke out of turn. So what? It's not like he did any harm like – oh, I don't know – outing a CIA agent as a result.

Rove's “third interesting thing” was, “Where did Rod Blagojevich get the idea that he was only gonna get appreciation only if no one had a discussion about some quid pro quo?”

Once again, who cares? Maybe it was because, as had been previously leaked, someone from the governor's office asked Rahm, “All we get is appreciation, right?” in return for naming Jarrett to the Senate. Rahm is reported to have answered, “Right.” Or maybe it was because the governor knew, from the obviously ethical behavior of all his Obama contacts, that there would be none?

It was another non-issue that Rove tried to conflate into “quid pro quo.” And yet even Rove acknowledged that the evidence shows there was no quid pro quo. He could not even find any evidence to suggest that anyone on Team Obama discussed a quid pro quo, much less became involved in any way. All he could do is raise a passle of unsupported suspicions.

Alan Colmes commented, “All that interesting analysis, Karl, but obviously, the real issue here is whether or not there was a quid pro quo - whether or not one was offered. Certainly, we know that one was not accepted.”

“We know that right from the beginning,” Rove agreed. But then he continued his spurious, suspicion-enhancing speculation, this time suggesting that Obama might be involved in the scandal in some other, unknown way. “Where did Blagojevich get the idea that he was gonna get nothing from except appreciation if there was no discussion of a quid pro quo? There's other characters who have entered into this... and there might be others that are not involved directly in the Obama operation but nonetheless seem to be taken by (unintelligible).”

Rove added that the Obama report “goes out of its way to say... explicitly there was no discussion of a quid pro quo or any personal benefit for the governor but if the governor's over on one side and having all kinds of conversations with his own people about what he wants out of this and what we get out of the report is that nobody had a discussion about a benefit and yet Blagojevich is saying, 'Hey, they're gonna give me nothing but appreciation, where did he develop that sense?”

And other than casting suspicion on Obama, this would be significant - why? Rove never said.

Now, it should go without saying that this crude exercise in smear-style propaganda is journalistically appalling, and about as far from either "fair" or "balanced" as it's possible to get. It's just an old-fashioned hatchet job. Which might not be so bad if it weren't being fobbed off as, you know, fair and balanced.

Still, easy as it is to jump on the Fox heavies, they're just giving their viewers what their trained instincts tell them those viewers want. Of course folks like Karl Rove and Fox News puppetmaster Roger Ailes, having been in the forefront of the modern American right-wing propaganda putsch, have had a lot to do with training Americans to want to hear this alternate version of reality, but even that groundwork was laid based on insights into the kinds of story lines, and the kinds of heroes and villains, their target Americans crave.

I think commentators have tended to underestimate the continuing success of this kind of mind manipulation. I have no studies or statistics to back me up, but I'm going to pick a number out of a hat and venture that the nonstop campaign of slime, innuendo, and free-floating hate against the Democratic candidate was responsible for a swing of 5 percent in the final voting. I'm sorry, but I refuse to believe that 47 percent of the electorate could have agreed with the views of Young Johnny McCranky, if only for the obviousl reason that it would have been impossible to ascertain the views of Young Johnny McCranky.

I wish I understood better why so many people choose to believe in the mostly nonexistent reality that they do. Maybe Rove and Ailes could explain it, or then again maybe they couldn't -- they just understand it and know how to exploit it.

I guess what I'm saying is that all those awful people who toil for the cause of untruth on Fox Noise aren't so much the problem as a symptom. A dreadful, gut-wrenching symptom. And if people truly don't want to be less stupid than they are, I have no idea how to treat the symptom.

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There's no expert like a CNN-certified "expert," helping them serve up the illusion of reality

Oh, that CNN! They always know the bestest experts,
willing to go way out on a limb. (This is from 2002.)

by Ken

Noah passed this screen shot along as a possible illustration for Sunday's final installment of his three-part year-end retrospective, "2008: A YEAR ON STERIODS" (Part 1 appeared earlier today), in which he has some, shall we say, unkind things to say about CNN. Without giving too much away, I can say that the phrase "the illusion of news" figures prominently.

(This is, by the way, an honest-to-gosh undoctored screen shot from 2002, as verified by Media Research Center, which noted that apparently somebody at CNN was watching their own show, and after two minutes the graphic was changed to "Al Qaeda Leader Out Of Sight For Months.")

Okay, we all make little goofs. The thing about this one is that for many of us it sounds like only the slightest exaggeration of CNN-ishness, which always has "another side" to air, especially if anyone on its air has the temerity to utter anything that's the tiniest bit removed from the ingrained orthodox worldview.

Note that this rule emphatically doesn't apply to right-of-center viewpoints, and it doesn't seem to matter how far to the right they may roam -- even if it's into the next gallaxy over. As Noah notes in his cable-news rant, any commentator whose viewpoints are known to deviate in the slightest from the agreed-upon center has to be "balanced" with at least one certified right-wing crackpot. The exact ratio is a subject of some controversy -- two-to-one is the minimum, with something on the order of four-to-one being far from uncommon.

Yesterday I offered a quick visceral response to David Sirota's report of his first-hand discovery that at Fox News a nutty revisionist version of the history of the New Deal, whereby the New Deal is said to have prolonged the Great Depression, turning the facts on their head, is regarded as agreed historical fact. Of course these are people who wouldn't know the difference between a fact and a loony revisionist theory if their sorry lives depended on it. The sadder fact is, their viewers don't seem to have any idea that they don't know the difference.

Commenting on my rant yesterday, our friend Balakirev offered a helpful walk-through of the rest of the process:

And of course, the media will take the viewpoint of trying to look balanced by letting the liars have equal airing with those who point out the facts.

The rightwing cynics will continue to spew as much garbage as they can to invigorate the troops and cause the left to lose focus. Like I've noted before, progressives need their own stalking horses, such as the Fairness Doctrine. Keep the nut-bound right engaged, so they can't strategize so much.

"The illusion of news" indeed, Noah. We might go so far as to say "the illusion of reality."


NEXT UP: Just how dumb are Fox Noise viewers?

In the land of the "fair and balanced," Karl Rove analysis of the Obama report.

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The clock is ticking. Is there anything we can do about the criminals Chimpy the Prez and "Big Dick" Cheney? (Tick-tock, tick-tock.)

"That Cheney, by his own admission, had revised the talking points in an effort to have the reporters examine who sent Wilson on the very same day that his chief of staff was disclosing to [NYT reporter Judith] Miller [Valerie] Plame’s identity as a CIA officer may be the most compelling evidence to date that Cheney himself might have directed Libby to disclose Plame’s identity to Miller and other reporters.

"This new information adds to a growing body of evidence that Cheney may have directed Libby to disclose Plame’s identity to reporters and that Libby acted to protect Cheney by lying to federal investigators and a federal grand jury about the matter."

-- investigative reporter Murray Waas,
in a report this week on Crooks and LIars

by Ken

At least the lords of Ruddigore, under the term of their Witch's Curse, only had to do one crime a day, once every day, forever. (Okay, to be technical, the terms of the curse were "one crime or more," but a mere onespot would get the job done.) Whereas the Bush regimista have spent night onto eight years now committing every war crime they could wrap their heads around and shredding the Constitution.

I would include "shredding the economy," but again, to be technical, this was done under the terms of "Republican governance," much of which is not -- astonishingly enough -- strictly speaking illegal. Of course that still leaves a goodly amount of plundering and profiteering that clearly falls on the far side of the law, and should certainly be available for inclusion on anyone's master list of "high crimes and misdemeanors" -- the constitutional specification for impeachment, of course.

Is there anything we can do here?

It's not a matter of retribution or "getting even." There's an important principle at stake. Because while the judgment of history on these people is likely to be fierce, that really isn't enough. The principle is that when you allow crimes to go unpunished, that tends not only to legitimize the behavior but to encourage the criminals and the people who follow them to do even worse stuff.

I'm not smart enough to know in what form the perpetrators of the Bush regime's crimes can still be held to account. In retrospect it becomes ever clearer that both Chimpy the Prez and his master, "Big Dick" Cheney, should have been impeached. Now we know that hindsight is 20/20, but this isn't just retrospective wisdom. Since it became clear the kind of extremist, law-be-damned regime this was going to be, there have been plenty of people shouting for impeachment, both before and after then-incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously declared it "off the table."

But hold on before jumping all over Speaker Pelosi. I am not at all saying that her political calculation was necessarily wrong. The fact is that a movement for impeachment against the president and vice president (and it would have crucial to do both, ideally in the same time frame, not only as a matter of basic criminal justice, but as an assurance that in the admittedly unlikely event that the president was actually removed from office, that office wouldn't simply have been turned over to that spawn of Satan . . . I mean to the vice president) wouldn't have gotten anywhere.

Even in the regime's second term, as it began falling apart, and then starting in 2007 with the Democrats in nominal control of both houses of Congress, there would have been no support from Republicans (and remember that what drove Richard Nixon out of office was growing Republican support for impeachment and almost surely, if he had allowed it to come to that, for conviction) and probably not all that much support from congressional Democrats, among whom impeachment was considered risky, dirty-fucking-hippie-type behavior.

Some observers said, "So what? It's important to get some kind of official condemnation of the regime's high crimes and misdemeanors on the record. And perhaps so. But consider, might it not have been worse to have an impeachment movement flicked off, for permanent dismissal as a partisan witchhunt? In other words, a larger version of the charge routinely hurled at the hardy band of Democratic House and Senate committee chairmen who actually tried to investigate even a tiny bit of the regime's rampant lawlessness after the congressional takeover?

Which hasn't entirely prevented additional investigations and revelations from materializing. And in just the last couple of weeks we've had Big Dick's almost certainly legally self-incriminating statements about his role in making possible the regime's use of waterboarding, which got Rachel Maddow all excited, and which Sen. Carl Levin for one agreed needed to be investigated to get the information on the record.

And just a few days ago crackerjack reporter Murray Waas dropped the bombshell on Crooks and Liars from which I've quoted above. Drawing on "a still-highly confidential FBI report," Waas reports that Big Dick admitted to federal investigators "that he rewrote talking points for the press in July 2003 that made it much more likely that the role of then-covert CIA-officer Valerie Plame in sending her husband on a CIA-sponsored mission to Africa would come to light," acknowledging "that in drawing attention to Plame’s role in arranging her husband’s Africa trip reporters might also unmask her role as CIA officer."

I don't know what to do about this, but I have a pretty good idea of the consequences of doing nothing. Tick-tock, tick-tock.

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2008: A YEAR ON STEROIDS, Part 1

To fans, Sarah P is "the fatted golden calf being marched in glory

around the bonfire" -- painting by Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665).

Random observations, thoughts, and rants on 2008,
Part 1 (of 3)


by Noah


1. SARAH PALIN, A ONE-WOMAN CELEBRATION OF IGNORANCE

To Repugs, she is the fatted golden calf being marched in glory around the bonfire by her chanting supporters. She is the end product of Repug religious and education policy, their ideal. Africa is a country. Obama is a Marxist. The world was created only 6000 years ago.

Similar things could easily be said about that other Repug icon of ignorance named Joe the Plumber, who sits on Sean Insanity's surreal circus of a TV show and pronounces himself an expert on foreign policy because he "looked up some stuff in the dictionary."

Great for you, Joe! You can read. Now how about working on that comprehension problem you have. Better yet, get a plumbing license before you call yourself a plumber, and while you're at it, pay the taxes you owe before you bitch about taxes you don't.


2. GOVERNOR "SPRITZER" AND THE VALUE OF A BUCK

As governor of New York, Eliot "The Spritzer" Spitzer -- the poster boy for politician arrogance -- was in charge of the budget for one of the biggest states in our country. We trust these people to make judicious choices when it comes to spending money. I have to question whether he did this with his own money. I mean, he was spending $4000 a spritz on a 22-year-old hooker! Only he could tell us if he thinks he got his money's worth, but if that's the way he measures "bang for the buck," it may be a good thing that he's no longer governor of New York.

And I still have questions. Clearly, my world is different from the Spritzer's, but are there really 22-year-old girls these days who are worth that kind of money in bed (even in cheap 2008 dollars)? Is anyone? When I was that age, the girls were lucky if they got a cheap dinner and a movie.


3. RACHEL MADDOW AND KEITH OLBERMANN: IT'S A START

Rachel is a strong breath of fresh air, an honest, totally uncontrived TV personality and journalist. Keith opened the door for real progressive voices on television, and Rachel ran right through it. Thank you, Keith. You have given voice to the concerns and feelings of millions who are not otherwise served by the holders of FCC licenses.

I really think that Olbermann and Maddow have had a positive effect on how Americans look at the issues of our time. MSNBC has been pleasantly shocked by the ratings. They had nothing to lose, and they lucked out.

It's a start. Let's hope that there is more to come, maybe on some other networks too. Someone should have the sense to give Thom Hartmann a TV show. Instead, we get the likes of Greta van Himmler, Glenn Bug-Eyes Beck and tired old Larry King, seemingly actually held together by his suspenders.


4. THE REPUG PARTY IS STUCK IN THE MID-20TH CENTURY

The Repugs lost the White House because they ran in the wrong century. Right now, instead of looking inward, they are lashing outward, bizarrely blaming the media, who bent over backwards and forwards to not expose the dark undersides of John McCain, Sarah Palin and a whole toxic cloud of candidates with the big red R on their chests and next to their name. They partied in Minneapolis like it was 1949. They ran an irascible, corrupt old coot who lives in a cave at the edge of town and who picked the George Wallace of the North for his running mate.

They didn't realize that the average voter has grandparents younger than John McCain. The most vibrant part of the voting pool now has grown up learning their way around a computer before they even went to first grade, and there's still no evidence that McCain has ever touched a keyboard -- or a cell phone, for that matter. To those voters, being gay is not a crime of any kind and skin tone does not determine one's place in line.

Go ahead, Repugs, make my day. Stay in the mid-20th century. The rest of us have productive lives to lead.


5. BUT ARE REPUG VOTERS MOVING INTO THE 21ST?

During this year's campaign, John McCain actually stopped being a living fossil for a brief moment in time and uttered something that is a complete, utter blasphemy to Repugs. He said that if elected he would make climate-change issues a priority!

"Suppose we're wrong, and there's no such thing as greenhouse gas emissions [a major Repug mantra], and we adopt green technologies. All we've done is give our kids a better planet. But suppose we're right, and do nothing?"

Mentioning such a possibility, even if you don't believe it, counts as evil if you are a Repug. You may go home one night to find that your Fox "News" access has been denied, or an intervention team has been sent to kidnap you. No wonder the Repugs never warmed to the old geezer. I'm surprised they didn't march on his home (all 11 of them, or however many it is) with torches and burn him at the stake like the witch they must think he is. Or maybe, in their primitive minds, they just thought he was possessed by evil spirits.

The question is: Does the little window McCain opened portend that some Repugs may start coming around to reality on this issue? Well, probably not. Such "free thinkers" will always be a terribly minuscule minority in a party that doesn't take to minorities well. The whole talking point that the deniers recite, like the mindless robots that they are, is nothing but programming from corporations that stand to lose something in the short term if we take steps to deal with the problem -- corporations that contribute mightily to purchase politicians, especially Repug ones.

The irony is, of course, that corporations stand to lose a whole lot more in the long term if they don't do something to meet the problem head-on. Putting it in terms of what they stand to lose is the only way to reach corporatistas and their minions. What we or "the earth" stand to lose will never move them.

But what of Repug voters? This past summer, Ayers, McHenry and Associates polled registered Repug voters and discovered that a whopping, eye-opening 75 percent of them believed that global warming is a problem. They also agreed by greater than two to one that reducing CO2 emissions could be tied to creating more American jobs and reducing dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

Repug politicians can't wrap their oil- and alcohol-soaked brains around such concepts. It doesn't compute. Instead, they and the talking heads they own just stand around like the Beavis and Butt-Head clones they are and ridicule Al Gore by pointing at his beard or his increased weight. That's as substantial as they get on the issue. They have way too much invested in the "idea" that global warming is a hoax.

Independents are moving toward the Democrats over this and other issues. How soon before some Repug voters do the same? Like I said, the Repug Party is stuck in the mid-20th century. Hell, some of them are still fighting the Civil War, so maybe it's even earlier.


6. JOHN EDWARDS: LIAR, LIAR, PANTS ON FIRE FOR REAL!

Just imagine if this guy had ended up being the Democratic Party's presidential nominee. We'd be saying "Hello, President McCranky" on January 20. It wasn't just a crime of personal responsibility, John boy.


TOMORROW IN PART 2: Dubya's pardons, Hank the Grifter's bailout, Person of the Year, GOP election-stealing, and more

SUNDAY IN PART 3: CNN and the illusion of news, piggies everywhere, the Supremes who gave us Pres. Dubya, and more

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Is it fear of a new New Deal that has the Right feverishly rewriting the history of the old one?

Not many of us see Obama as a new FDR, but the
possibility seems to give the Far Right nightmares.

by Ken

The domestic political world has changed a lot since the Clinton administration, and even since the first term of the Bush regime. We are no longer surprised by the wholesale lies and rewriting of history, and the campaigns of manufactured smears, that Republicans, especially of the extreme right persuasion, by now do so casually. Of course over time they've become ever more brazen and utterly lacking in shame about lying all the time, but again, it's no longer a surprise.

A colleague suggested recently that the incoming administration needs to organize a response team to be as ever-ready as the campaign was during the election period, and this seems to me an excellent idea, bearing in mind how well the opposition succeeded in crippling the Clinton White House by forcing it to devote such massive resources to defending all the legal and propaganda initiatives launched against it. I really hope the Obama people aren't so deluded about the coming era of postpartisanship as to assume that anybody on the other side has signed on.

It also seems to me important to stay on top of the "story lines" being manufactured by the fantasists on the Right, and our friend David Sirota has just called attention to one that he got caught up in during a journey into the belly of the beast, aka an appearance on Fox Noise. Clearly the Righties, watching the economy sink in ways that increasngly conjure images of the Great Depression, and recognizing that this is not apt to be a happy position for them (even they seem to have grasped that it was no help, during the 2008 presidential election, having both Chimpy the Prez and Young Johnny McCranky identified with the Republican president, Herbert Hoover, whose response to the great stock-market crash of 1929 and the ensuing economic chaos and panic was to sit tight and wait for it to turn into a full-fledged depression.

Apparently the Righties have also come to recognize the danger in allowing the Democrats to be associated with the New Deal that President Franklin D. Roosevelt ushered in after voters sent President Hoover back where he came from. The solution, apparently, is to rewrite the history of the New Deal:

Fox News: "Historians Pretty Much Agree"
That FDR Prolonged the Great Depression

By David Sirota
Campaign for America's Future

I appeared on Fox News to discuss both the Blagojevich flap and the imminent economic recovery package from the Obama administration. You can watch the clip here. As you'll see, on that latter issue, Fox News is starting its campaign to stop Obama's big spending plan by stating - as assumed fact - that "historians pretty much agree" that Franklin Roosevelt prolonged the Great Depression, and that therefore, Obama shouldn't try another New Deal.

When I say Fox News' assertion about historians is patently false, they literally laugh at me as if I've said something so clearly untrue, something Americans supposedly assume is so obviously stupid, that it's worthy of ridicule.

The Depression issue was brought up by conservative pundit Monica Crowley - not surprising since this is the conservative talking point du jour ever since the "center-right nation" meme started looking idiotic and ever since fringe-right-wing bloviator Amity Shlaes published her since-discredited book claiming FDR essentially created the Great Depression. Crowley supported her the "FDR ruined the country" meme with the very authoritative-sounding statement that "based on all kinds of studies and academic work done on the great depression" she knows that the New Deal's "massive government intervention prolonged the Great Depression."

Of course, she doesn't offer up a single study or "academic work" as any kind of proof, and yet, when I say her assertion is absurd, Fox News anchor Greg Jarrett starts laughing at me - as if my assertion that FDR's New Deal helped end the Great Depression is so fantastical as to prompt guffawing. Jarrett proceeds to state that historians "pretty much agree" that FDR prolonged the Great Depression, and resorts to insisting that he knows that's true because "it's in the books" - whatever the hell that means. Indeed, Fox wants us to believe that what was only very recently the deranged propaganda of a handful of conservative political pundits is now such a consensus opinion among historians that to say otherwise is to evoke laughter.

David goes on to detail the slight evidence the R's can bring to bear, and then marshall the broad historical rejoinder.

Even I know that in the later 1930s President Roosevelt actually retreated from a lot of the New Deal policies he had instituted in his first term, and there is a lot of feeling that that did indeed prolong the depression. But far from repudiating the New Deal, that reflected a lack of will to stick to the principles that had been set out.

In particular those of you who frequently dialogue with right-leaning folk, be prepared for this wholesale rewriting of history. If you want to be ready with a response, David can guide you.


TOMORROW THROUGH SUNDAY: Noah takes a three-part look at "2008: A YEAR ON STEROIDS"

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Silly NYT! Trying to stop anyone from talking about the relationship between Caroline and Pinch will have everyone talking about it!

Only Caroline and Pinch know the truth, but even the NYT
surely understands that it has become part of the story.

by Ken

Let me stress that I'm not aware of any independent verification of the rumors that Gawker has been hawking. That said, let's look at Pareene's report there on a NYT blog reader's report of having a comment deleted by an online censor:

Times City Room Will Not Mention Caroline Kennedy's Special Friendship With Pinch Sulzberger

Don't even bother to leave a comment at the Times local news blog suggesting a sexy patrician affair between the Senator-to-be and the publisher of the Times.

It seems like a mostly legitimate question to ask, doesn't it? Whether or not they're having sexy sexy old rich scion sex, the special friendship between Sulzberger and Kennedy is well-documented. And when the publisher of your paper is BFF with a public figure, asking whether that friendship affects coverage of that public figure is certainly fair game.

But no, no comments allowed asking about the affair. When this guy tried, the City Room editors asked him to please not bring it up again. "we don't report stuff like this, regardless of the people involved." Stuff like... what? The Times certainly does report on the sexual lives of public figures, all the damn time, from Giuliani to Spitzer to Paterson. But reporting on the Sulzbergers not so much.

For the record, in the e-mail exchange Gawker reproduces, the City Room points out to the complaining reader that "Paterson called a new conference," and this is absolutely true. Is it really that hard to see the difference between reporting on rumors and reporting on the subject matter of a public figure's own news conference?

So David Paterson, at least, is a lousy example. And I'm not sure that Giuliani or Spitzer is a better one. In both those cases, there was actual news being reported.

However, the reality is that the Times's situation is much graver than whether or not to report on unsubstantiated rumors, and I can't believe that they don't know it. Rightly or wrongly, their publisher has become part of the story of Ms. Kennedy's candidacy for the Senate appointment. Talk about a nightmare!

Imagine what it must be like if you're a high-ranking NYT editor -- and I guess, realistically, we're talking about the highest-ranking NYT editor, Exec Ed Bill Keller, since who else would dare talk to Pinch Sulzberger about this? I have to assume that the subject has already come up in conversation, though I'm not at all sure that our Bill has had the nerve to say, "Now lookit, Pinch, just between us, you gotta level with me. Is there any truth to these rumors, 'cause if so, do have you any idea the size damage-control problem we got?"

Talk about a conflict of interest! I have no idea how the paper would go about reporting on a story that includes its highest-ranking official.

Come to think of it, thanks to the gossip-mongers, the NYT is really in that situation regardless of the truth of the rumors, or lack thereof. Because now that Pinch has been dragged into the story, how can the paper claim that its coverage is uninfluenced by this if it continues to fail to acknowledge the involvement?

Damned if I see any way out for the poor buggers. The only thought that occurs to me is that it's Pinch's problem, and he's going to have to solve it. Certainly nobody else can. I think that means some kind of public statement, the very thing I assume all the Timespeople are trying to avoid. And that statement had better not be coy or weasel-worded, regardless of what the facts are, because in that case everybody's going to come down on them, and they'll deserve it.

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A holiday fable: These days, the house that Jack built is looking pretty ramshackle

Jack's house has seen better times -- as have we all.

Since we're all gathered 'round the fireplace this day after the Night Before Christmas, how about another shaggy-dog fable?

In that small group of smart folks I've come to turn to for insight into the economic mess, we've heard here recently from Dean Baker and Ian Welsh. Now Stirling Newberry has updated a classic for our parlous times (note that the version posted on The Agonist is chockful of links). -- Ken

The House That Jack Built

This is the house that Jack bought.

This is the mortgage that paid for the house that Jack bought.

This is the fraud, that the mortgage processor committed to get the loan, that paid for the house that Jack bought.

This is the bank, that dished off the loan, that was obtained by fraud, to pay for the house that Jack bought.

This is the quant, who sliced up the loan, by fudging the numbers, so he could take the dished loan, that was obtained by fraud, to pay for the house, the Jack bought.

This is the dealer, who without checking the numbers, shipped off the tranches, with the the quant's fudged up numbers, from the dished out loan, that was obtained by fraud, to pay for the house that Jack bought.

This is the monoliner, that papered the tranches, shipped off by the dealer, with the the quant's fudged up numbers, from the dished out loan, obtained by fraud, to pay for the house that Jack bought.

This is the investment bank, that securitized the the foreclosure, shipped off by the dealer, with the the quant's fudged up numbers, from the dished out loan, obtained by fraud, to pay for the house that Jack bought.

This is hedge fund, that sold the Default Swap, that securitized the the foreclosure, shipped off by the dealer, with the the quant's fudged up numbers, from the dished out loan, obtained by fraud, to pay for the house, that Jack bought.

This is the tax break, that fed to the hedge fund, that sold the Default Swap, that securitized the the foreclosure, shipped off by the dealer, with the the quant's fudged up numbers, from the dished out loan, obtained by fraud, to pay for the house, that Jack bought.

This is deficit, caused by the tax breaks, that fed to the hedge fund, sold the Default Swap, that securitized the the foreclosure, shipped off by the dealer, with the the quant's fudged up numbers, from the dished out loan, obtained by fraud, to pay for the house, that Jack bought.

This is the War, that ate up the money, that ballooned out the deficit, caused by the tax breaks, that fed to the hedge fund, sold the Default Swap, that securitized the the foreclosure, shipped off by the dealer, with the the quant's fudged up numbers, from the dished out loan, obtained by fraud, to pay for the house, that Jack bought.

This is the downturn, that followed the War, that ate up the money, that ballooned out the deficit, caused by the tax breaks, that fed to the hedge fund, sold the Default Swap, that securitized the the foreclosure, shipped off by the dealer, with the the quant's fudged up numbers, from the dished out loan, obtained by fraud, to pay for the house, that Jack bought.

This is the takedown, that accelerated the downturn, that followed the War, that ate up the money, that ballooned out the deficit, caused by the tax breaks, that fed to the hedge fund, sold the Default Swap, that securitized the the foreclosure, shipped off by the dealer, with the the quant's fudged up numbers, from the dished out loan, obtained by fraud, to pay for the house, that Jack bought.

This is the pink slip, because of the Takedown, that accelerated the downturn, that followed the War, that ate up the money, that ballooned out the deficit, caused by the tax breaks, that fed to the hedge fund, sold the Default Swap, that securitized the the foreclosure, shipped off by the dealer, with the the quant's fudged up numbers, from the dished out loan, obtained by fraud, to pay for the house, that Jack bought.

This is Jack's layoff, that is on the pink slip, because of the Takedown, that accelerated the downturn, that followed the War, that ate up the money, that ballooned out the deficit, caused by the tax breaks, that fed to the hedge fund, sold the Default Swap, that securitized the the foreclosure, shipped off by the dealer, with the the quant's fudged up numbers, from the dished out loan, obtained by fraud, to pay for the house, that Jack bought.

This is the foreclosure, brought on by Jack's layoff, that is on the pink slip, because of the Takedown, that accelerated the downturn, that followed the War, that ate up the money, that ballooned out the deficit, caused by the tax breaks, that fed to the hedge fund, sold the Default Swap, that securitized the the foreclosure, shipped off by the dealer, with the the quant's fudged up numbers, from the dished out loan, obtained by fraud, to pay for the house, that Jack bought.

This is the Fed, that bollixed the policy, to deal with the foreclosure, brought on by Jack's layoff, that is on the pink slip, because of the Takedown, that accelerated the downturn, that followed the War, that ate up the money, that ballooned out the deficit, caused by the tax breaks, that fed to the hedge fund, sold the Default Swap, that securitized the the foreclosure, shipped off by the dealer, with the the quant's fudged up numbers, from the dished out loan, obtained by fraud, to pay for the house, that Jack bought.

This is the Congress, that backed up the Fed, that bollixed the policy, to deal with the foreclosure, brought on by Jack's layoff, that is on the pink slip, because of the takedown, that accelerated the downturn, that followed the War, that ate up the money, that ballooned out the deficit, caused by the tax breaks, that fed to the hedge fund, sold the Default Swap, that securitized the the foreclosure, shipped off by the dealer, with the the quant's fudged up numbers, from the dished out loan, obtained by fraud, to pay for the house, that Jack bought.

This is Bush, they still let him fuck things up. Maybe it would have been different if he had been impeached. We will never know, now will we.

I don't know about you, but Jack is looking pretty fucked right now.

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And for Christmas day, our musical offering is Berlioz' always-unexpected "Childhood of Christ"

FAREWELLS OF THE SHEPHERDS TO THE HOLY FAMILY
(from Part II of Berlioz' L'Enfance du Christ, "The Childhood of Christ" -- text by the composer)

He's going away, far from the land
where, in the stable, he first saw day.
Of his father and his mother
may he remain the constant love.
May he grow, may he prosper,
and may he be a good father in his turn.

If ever, among the idolaters,
he comes to experience misfortune,
fleeing the unkind land
may he return to good fortune in our midst.
May the poverty of the shepherd
remain always dear to his heart.

Dear child, may God bless you!
May God bless you, happy couple!
May you never be able to feel
the blows of injustice.
May a good angel warn you
of dangers hanging over you.

by Ken

Once more I'm at the mercy of the clips, but at least this performance of the shepherds' farewells, from a 1966 telecast of the complete L'Enfance du Christ by the Boston Symphony under its former music director, Charles Munch (released on DVD by VAI), isn't as hopelessly sentimentalized as most. Munch was known as a Berlioz specialist, and while his performances may have tended to a certain overripe softness, they did capture the music's basic sense and stature.

Berlioz was a composer of such extraordinary imagination and originality that it's perhaps not surprising when performers try to drag his unique musical constructions back into something conventionally sing-songy. And the "Shepherds' Farewells" is meant to strike a note of the conventional; it's written in a notoriously dittylike meter, 3/8. But Berlioz is always concerned with what lies beneath appearances, especially conventional ones. Try to imagine these farewells sung -- yes, earnestly and with deep concern, but without sloppy sentimentality -- by a band of shepherds gathered to offer this sad but hopeful farewell to a family forced to flee, in order to save the infant son's life, into the unknown of the desert.

It's worth noting that these good shepherds have no sense that there is anything special about this particular newborn, or this particular family. As the narrator has told us in the remarkable opening narration of L'Enfance, "No wonder had yet made [the infant Jesus] known." (At some point we're going to have to come back and talk about this astonishing opening narration -- a mere 30 bars of music, lasting about two minutes, which as a matter of fact I've never heard performed really well.) No, to our shepherds the urgency is simply to save the life of the child.

As I was saying last night about the miracle announced in Handel's "For unto us a child is born," the clear sense is that the miracle is not the child's divinity, but the mere fact of the birth of a child, with all the attendant promise and hope. Actually, I suppose you could say that Berlioz' entire enterprise in L'Enfance is blasphemous, since Joseph is treated throughout as, simply and unequivocally, the baby Jesus' father.

When, eventually, the Holy Family arrives in Sais, on the brink of death from fatigue and starvation, their desperate pleas for help are rebuffed the the Romanized Egyptians who scorn them as "vile Hebrews" -- until one Ishmaelite householder unhesitatingly takes them in and nurtures them back to life. And like nearly everything else in L'Enfance, almost everything in the wonderful scene inside the home of the Ishmaelites is unexpected and unexpectedly miraculous.

In short order a bond is formed between Joseph and the Ishamelite Father as they discover that they're both carpenters. But first comes a moment of delicacy and gentility that's almost unimaginable -- except by Berlioz. The Ishmaelite Father asks his revived guests their names, and Joseph says, "Her name is Mary, I'm Joseph, and we call the child Jesus.

"Jesus!" their host replies. "What a charming name!"

Which is something I think we can all celebrate. And on that note, once again, Merry Christmas!


OH YES, A RECORDING OF L'ENFANCE? HMMM --

This is tough. So many Berlioz performances don't even try to get beneath those deceptively simple surfaces (and don't necessarily do that great a job of realizing even those surfaces), and L'Enfance poses the additional difficulty of generally being performed as if it's a simple exercise in Christmas piety, when that's just about the last thing it is.

There hasn't been a recording that really satisfies me. The one that came closest was a sparely recorded French Radio performance issued on LP by Nonesuch, with Jean Martinon conducting, and principal soloists mezzo-soprano Jane Berbie, tenor Alain Vanzo, baritone Claude Cales as Joseph, and bass Roger Soyer as Herod (a rare souvenir of the voice before it dried out). I don't believe that recording has found its way onto CD.

I can report that while I was working on this blogpost, I pulled out the recording by Charles Dutoit with the Orchestre symphonique de Montreal, with mezzo Susan Graham, tenor John Mark Ainsley, baritone Francois Le Roux as Joseph, and bass Philip Cokorinos as Herod. All I was actually listening for was the amazing two-minute opening narration -- and you know, the Ainsley-Dutoit performance isn't bad! Which is a virtual rave. I don't remember the performance as a whole making much of an impression on me, and I'm a little nervous about rehearing the whole thing, but those first two minutes are at least a good start. (Oops, the recording seems to be out of print! Well, copies do seem to be available. Of course, I'm not exactly recommending it, necessarily.)

Video-wise, though the Munch/Boston performance doesn't break any ground, and probably is less successful as a whole than their earlier RCA studio recording, I can certainly recommend it as a memento of this productive Berlioz collaboration. Throughout the long tenure of Seiji Ozawa, the Boston Symphony remained probably the world's finest Berlioz orchestra (with awfully good recordings of The Damnation of Faust and Romeo et Juliette to show for it.)

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For Christmas Eve, savor the true miracle: "For unto us a child is born"

"For unto us a child is born" ends Part I of Handel's Messiah.

by Ken

People keep telling me I shouldn't worry so much about the quality of the performances I put up here, but I know that this anemic, pipsqueaky rendering doesn't capture much of the sense of wonder, triumph, and miraculous excitement that Handel captured in the announcement: "For unto us a child is born." Really, Handel gives us the feeling that that is the miracle: that a child is born (and a son given). Even when this particular child's future responsibilities are set out ("Wonderful counsellor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father), note how Handel italicizes the additional role: "the Prince of Peace."

Still, it's better than the other performances I found online before I gave up searching, having discovered how much worse I could do -- namely, the most recent recording by Sir Colin Davis, in the LSO Live series, which reduces the piece to limp, soggy time-beating, creating no movement at all until it gets loud, and then it merely gets loud. It's the kind of performance that leads people to think, as I confess I once did, that it's just tendentious, churchy folderol.

(Really shocking, considering that some 40 years ago the younger Colin Davis made one of the most enduring, vital recordings of Messiah, also with the LSO. It's been reissued as an inexpensive Philips "twofer" set, which I can still recommend highly as a basic Messiah recording. Davis even did a pretty decent remake for Philips in Munich. Now this.)

Well, at least this clip allows you to follow along with the words and music. Merry Christmas and season's greetings to all.


COMING UP TOMORROW: MUSIC FOR CHRISTMAS DAY

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In Tennessee, the myth of "clean" coal meets the reality of crumbling infrastructure

by Ken

I assume everyone has heard about the coal-ash disaster. Here's an account by Dana from West Virginia from Monday, with an update:

Coal Ash Slurry Pond Bursts in Tennessee

Update: This Tennessee TVA spill is over 40 times bigger than the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, if local news accounts are correct. This is a huge environmental disaster of epic proportions, approximately 500 million gallons of nasty black coal ash flowed into tributaries of the Tennessee River - the water supply for Chattanooga TN and millions of people living downstream in Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky. We’re “lucky” it was sludgy, or thousands would have died. Click here to see an amazing aerial video of the spill - the big chunks in the river are mounds of coal ash.

—-

This is the kind of scary thing that people living with coal worry about every day, while the industry (and some big greens) say that coal will be “clean” if we find out how to sequester the carbon. Just today, 39 groups banded together to ask President Elect Obama to overturn Bush’s recent attempts to de-regulate coal ash even more.

In February 1972, Buffalo Creek Sludge Impoundment, a mere 132 million gallons, killed 125 people, left 5,000 homeless and thousands more with post traumatic stress disorder. In 2000, a 2.2 billion gallon coal waste dam failed in Martin County, Kentucky. The largest dam in the hemisphere is the Brushy Fork Sludge Impoundment, which holds 9 billion gallons of toxic coal waste.

So, this is the history coalfield residents hold in our hearts when we open our emails and see “Slurry Pond Bursts.” Last night, 4 to 6 feet of ice cold toxic coal ash and ice cold slurry burst out of the pond and buried 12 homes, 400 acres, and wrecked a train. This spill likely contained mercury, arsenic, and other toxic heavy metals like beryllium and cadmium.

Coal ash is what is leftover when you burn coal. The “Clean Coal” tools talk about putting “scrubbers” to “clean” the air coming out of the stacks, but that just isolates the toxins in the coal ash, which is generally stored in unlined pits near the power plant.

Coal ash is an enormous problem throughout the US. It is more radioactive than nuclear waste, according to Scientific American and is under-regulated. It is made into concrete, drywall, and as a road building material. People living near coal ash dumps have 900 times the national cancer rates.

I’m going to guess that cancer figure just increased even more in eastern Tennessee.

By the way, I love Dana's blog bio, and I think you will too:

Dana works on the national council of the Student Environmental Action Coalition in Charleston, WV Visit www.seac.org. She likes to make papier mache stuff with five year olds. She likes mountains that haven't been blown all to hell. She likes communities that fight back when their mountains have been blown all to hell. She doesn't like coal, or blowing up mountains. She especially doesn't like (not so) Clean Coal (no such thing) and thinks Carbon Sequestration is a bad deal for communities and kids. And really, who else matters?

INFRASTRUCTURE, INFRASTRUCTURE, INFRASTRUCTURE
From Reagan to Chimpy: A Legacy of Cluelessness

As Rachel Maddow has been pointing out, the Tennessee episode is also yet another entry on the growing list of failing-infrastructure disasters. One of the many things I love about Rachel is that she is a confirmed infrastructure worrier. And last night she provided an overview that may be obvious but hadn't quite occurred to me in quite this form.

In the '30s, she pointed out, the U.S. made a major investment in infrastructure -- notably with all those WPA projects. And again in the '50s we made a substantial investment. So we would have been due again, she suggested, oh, around 1980. And then she showed a clip of the sainted Ronald Reagan spewing his brilliant wisdom about government not being the solution to all problems.

Now, of course, we can recognize that eight years of Reaganism laid a superb foundation for the destruction of the country from within. That jovial smile -- and, yes, the withering sneer -- was the mask of Satan. That overweening self-confidence was built on nothing but arrogant imbecility combined with a healthy dose of megalomania.

Infrastructure needs constant maintenance and renewal as well as updating. The sainted Ronnie was too stupid, ideologically whacked out, and protective of the pocketbooks of the upper class to understand that yes indeed, infrastructure is absolutely the responsibility of government.

The next time you hear someone say good things about the scumbag Reagan, you can advise that person helpfully to shove it up his/her rectum.

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There are lessons to be learned from the Obama victory in Ohio, but those lessons aren't necessarily clear-cut or obvious

The 40-mile strip of I-75 visited by Michael Massing in October

"If President-elect Obama can find a way to win over Deb Erford as well as some of the regulars at the Gathering who may have stayed home on Election Day, the Democrats might succeed in winning Ohio, and the rest of the Rust Belt, for many years to come."

-- the conclusion of Michael Massing's "Obama: In the
Divided Heartland," in the Dec. 18 New York Review of Books

by Ken

"How many Joe the Plumbers are there out there in Middle America?" Rush Limbaugh fumed on my car radio as I drove down Interstate 75 from the Detroit airport toward Toledo. "How many of you are tired of people running down the country?" For the last six years, he declared, the "drive-by media"—his term for the mainstream press—has tried to convince people "that this is a rotten country." States like Ohio, he went on, were so foreign to elite journalists that they needed a visa to visit them.

It was mid-October, and Massing was on his way "to see if I could uncover some of the deeper, underlying currents in the body politic, using as his "laboratory" "a forty-mile strip of I-75 in northwestern Ohio,"which "offered a good cross-section of this key battleground state, stretching from an aging industrial city (Toledo), south to a college town (Bowling Green), down to a classic small town (Findlay)."

It's a long piece, but a terrific one. When it comes to reporting, you have to decide for yourself who you trust, and I've developed a high comfort level with Massing, knowing that: (a) his personal views are at least as leftish as mine, and (b) his personal views don't affect his powers of observation as a reporter. Since the entire piece is available free online, I encourage you to read it. I've been picking it up and setting it down for a couple of weeks now, and was especially intrigued by its conclusions now with all the controversies swirling around the president-elect's appointments and general positioning during the "transition."

The part that I just read concerns Massing's final destination in Ohio, Findlay. Let's focus on that.

A town of 39,000, Findlay has long been a conservative stronghold. Hancock County, of which it is the seat, gave George Bush 68.5 percent of its vote in 2000 and 71 percent in 2004. In 1968, Congress, in recognition of Findlay's patriotic displays, officially designated it Flag City USA, and on national holidays the town is a sea of red, white, and blue. Its esprit derives in part from its affluence. Though surrounded by farmland, it has a strong industrial presence. Cooper Tire & Rubber Co. is headquartered here. Marathon Oil, a part of the original Standard Oil, was headquartered here, too, until 1990, when USX, which had bought it, moved its corporate headquarters to Houston; its refining and marketing division remains in Findlay. Whirlpool, Consolidated Biscuit, Procter & Gamble, and American Standard all have plants in or around Findlay.

To his surprise, he quickly found not one but two Obama voters. A retired truck driver, fed up with the area's economic decline, told him that Findlay "isn't the Republican town it used to be."

As I discovered, Findlay is indeed changing. The Obama campaign had opened a very visible office on Main Street, the largest in memory by a Democratic candidate. Driving through town, I saw many Obama-Biden yard signs. There were many McCain-Palin ones as well, of course, but in my interviews I was struck by the number of people whose long-standing attitudes and attachments were being tested and shaken up by the region's changing fortunes. In department stores and parking lots, restaurants and churches, I kept hearing angry complaints about the endless march of mergers, acquisitions, layoffs, and plant closings. People denounced NAFTA, cursed China and Mexico, and inveighed against the corporations that were so blithely turning their backs on their communities. It was not just the decline in living standards that people were deploring but the resulting disruption of local life, with the loss of tax revenues reducing the support available for essential services. As a result, Main Streets across the Upper Midwest are declining and dying.

"Economics has shaken people out of their traditional patterns," Manning was told by Melissa Spirek, a professor of communication at Wright State University in Dayton, "drawing on the surveys her students regularly make of local residents." And yet, he writes, "The engrained belief in self-reliance and small government remains as well. These two strains -- resentment and traditionalism—seem today to coexist in uneasy and unpredictable competition."

At the Gathering, "an unpretentious but inviting bar and restaurant in the heart of town, where local notables and ordinary citizens mix," Massing had "a two-hour marathon conversation with a rotating array of factory workers, contractors, teachers, a reporter for the Courier, and the two women who owned the place." "As always, the loss of jobs loomed over all else." A lot of people, he discovered, were undecided about who they would vote for.

In the national press and the blogosphere, the category of "undecideds" was routinely ridiculed. With the choice between the candidates so clear, how could anyone remain up in the air? While in Ohio, however, I met many undecideds. Quite a few were Republicans trying to come to terms with a number of discomfiting realities: McCain's uninspired campaign; his choice of an unqualified running mate; the failures of George Bush; the promise of Barack Obama. A number seemed prepared to make the leap into the Democratic camp. Just as many, however, seemed hesitant. They objected to Obama's support for abortion rights. Or feared he was going to raise their taxes. Or thought he might be a Muslim. And, as an examination of the election returns shows, this group proved to be an important factor on election day.

Obama won Ohio, of course, "by 2,784,000 to 2,582,000 votes (51 to 47 percent)." Obama "got only about 45,000 more votes than John Kerry did in 2004," but McCain "got about 275,000 fewer than George Bush did." The turnout was only 67 percent. ("Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner had predicted a turnout rate of 80 percent.") The only plausible explanation, writes Manning: "Many Republicans stayed home on election day." And while "few other states had a fall-off comparable to Ohio's," "the huge surge in national turnout that had been so loudly forecast failed to materialize." Breaking down the numbers, he concludes, "Obama's margin of victory may have owed nearly as much to white Republican voters who failed to turn out as to black, Latino, and young voters who did." ("From both my interviews and press accounts," Massing writes, "it seems clear that the selection of Sarah Palin as the vice-presidential candidate did more than anything else to discourage potential McCain supporters.")

The Republican stay-at-homes amount to a huge disaffected and alienated population whose political loyalties remain up for grabs. Winning them over would seem critical to cementing the type of political realignment the Democrats so ardently crave. The key to achieving that, of course, rests with getting the economy moving again. Obama has proposed spending $50 billion to help states speed the construction of roads and other infrastructure. At a time of soaring deficits, two wars, and a $700 billion bailout, it's unclear where that money is going to come from—especially in view of Obama's promise of broad tax relief. The challenge is especially daunting in Ohio and other Rust Belt states, which are suffering from not only a cyclical downturn but also a long-term structural decline. Reversing this would probably require a bold public-works program on the scale of the WPA. With many Americans still opposed to the idea of activist government, Obama will have to draw fully on his extraordinary political and persuasive skills to pull this off.

Two days after the election Massing called Deb Erford, one of the owners of the Gathering, the bar he had visited in Findlay. Erford, a self-styled "conservative Republican," had been undecided. He wanted to see what her decision was.

"Right up to the last couple of days, I was not sure how I was going to go," she told me. In the end, though, she had decided to go "with policy over character." On such matters as taxes and small business, McCain's views largely coincided with her own, and so she had decided to back him. But, she was quick to add, she was not at all unhappy with the outcome. Obama "might be better for the country—and the world," she said, noting that with his character, charisma, and intelligence, he might be able to move the country forward. In fact, she said, she was very excited: "I thought the younger generation was apathetic, but I was proved wrong. So many young people got involved. That makes me happy."

You've already read Obama's conclusion, which follows immediately from the above. Here it is again:

If President-elect Obama can find a way to win over Deb Erford as well as some of the regulars at the Gathering who may have stayed home on Election Day, the Democrats might succeed in winning Ohio, and the rest of the Rust Belt, for many years to come.

Right now I have more questions than answers, and so for once I'm not going to sound off any more. I'll just say that there are perhaps a number of ways that a political leader might respond to the lessons Massing proposes here.

#

Princess Sarah reveals her "biggest mistake," but the clip doesn't work, so we're going to have to figure it out, gang

by Ken

So there I was, all set to hear the princess reveal what she thinks her biggest mistake was, and I waited, and waited, and waited, and the damned clip didn't play. (It was "CNN on AOL," or vice versa, and all I can think of was, man, you put those two sets of geniuses together, and what do you expect?)

Now I'm sure I could have rooted around and turned up a working version of the clip, but would that be any fun? No! I decided we can figure this out on our own.

For what it's worth, alongside the nonplaying clip there was a bit of text that said: "Alina Cho says Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin says she should've called more shots during the campaign." But that couldn't be it.

I think if we put our heads together, we can get it.

Here's what we've got so far:

from Bil

I saw something on a blog where she thought her biggest mistake was letting the McCain camp muzzle her. I will leave that as it is, too easy a shot and say THAT can't be it.

Guess 1.
That rash after her 3rd college?

Guess 2.
After her water broke in Texas with Trig, NOT taking MORE connecting flights back to Alaska?

Guess 3.
That rash after her 4th college?


from Anonymous

Not enough cowbell.


from kksf

She didn’t wear enough jewelry.

And I've got a few ideas:

* "That old guy from ABC who interviewed me, what's his name, Charlie something, I shoulda gave him a Bush doctrine in the gut -- you know, Wasilla-style."

* "I shoulda had Cindy tell John to keep his hands to himself. It's not like I never sleep with married guys, but jeez, he's like older than the earth, you betcha."

* "I shoulda decked that Couric bitch with her 'gotcha' trick questions."

* "That boy that knocked my Bristol up, we shoulda had him say his name was Leroy or maybe LeVar. 'Levi' sounds so Jewish."

* "I shoulda made a deal with them that I would be the president and John would be the vice president, and we could tell people that. Don't get me wrong, I like John, he's a sweetheart, but he sure does smell funny."

* "Todd thought I should like wear a crown, what's it called, like a tierra?"

* "A lot of people wanted Todd and I to do some naked photos, but I wouldn't do that. I mean, we're not so young anymore, and besides, I don't want all the girls to see what he's packin' if ya know what I mean. I got enough trouble with him. But I think we coulda done some nice soft-core stuff, very biblical, like Solomon and Beersheba, or Sodom and Gomorrah."*

It's bound to be one of those, dontcha think? Well, if you can do better, let's hear it. 'Tis the season!

- - - - - - - - - - - -
*With thanks, or apologies, to the great Preston Sturges.

#

So what do you think Princess Sarah said her "biggest mistake" was?

No, terrorism junkies, no matter how much you kick and scream, you can't get one of these calendars -- unless you "know someone"

by Ken

We've had kind of a grim day in the trenches of the meltdown, so let's return to our pal Al Kamen for another pick-me-upper. In today's Washington Post "In the Loop" column, Al comes ever so close to solving your last-minute Christmas shopping problem.

365 Days, and Not a Single Cute Kitten

Only two shopping days before Christmas and you still haven't found that special something for someone who's got everything? Stress getting to you?

Relax. We've got you covered. It's the National Counterterrorism Center's beautiful 2009 weekly planner, more jampacked than ever with insights, safety tips, historical data, and fine photos and drawings. In the right side of the 5-by-9-inch spiral, each day lists notable events in recent terrorist history.

Did you know that Wednesday, Dec. 24 -- 7 Muharram in the Arabic calendar -- is the 21st anniversary of the sentencing in France of Carlos the Jackal, who got life for three murders back in 1975? The left-hand page has terrorism facts and wanted posters, reward information, and some clues to help you locate some very nasty characters.

As usual, the first up is Osama bin Laden, still with a $27 million reward to anyone "for information leading directly to [his] apprehension and/or conviction." This year, for the first time, there's an altered photograph of bin Laden so you can see what he might look like if he decided he'd had enough of the fast life in Waziristan and settled down, perhaps as maybe the assistant manager of a Wachovia branch in Arlington.

And there's plenty of time to get a gift -- maybe a Predator missile strike? -- for bin Laden's birthday, which has been listed as July 30. Going to be a little harder to find Qari Mohammad Zafar, who is a suspect in a 2006 Karachi bombing. You can pick up $5 million for him, but the picture isn't a very good likeness. In fact, it's just a dark silhouette cutout. (He must be a shadowy figure.)

Somewhat distressingly, the calendar's most-wanted list continues to include many of our longtime favorites, such as Faker Ben Abdelaziz Boussora, a Canadian, who hasn't been caught even though he's got "prominently protruding ears and is believed to have a serious pituitary gland illness." Not to mention a need for serious orthodontic work on the uppers. A bounty of $5 million for Faker.

There's $10 million for former Taliban chief Mullah Omar, who's proven elusive even though he's blind in one eye from a shrapnel wound. (Maybe there are a lot of Afghans around Kandahar with that condition?)

One problem with the calendar is that, as these terrorist attacks continue, they are filling up all the space you need to jot down luncheon engagements or grocery lists. For example, Sept. 20, which next year is the last day of Ramadan, has so many memorable and not-so-memorable moments -- such as the anniversary of "US, EU pledge partnership against terrorism," there's hardly any space left. (Might be time to edit down some of the entries.)

The calendar also has helpful hints on what to do when there's an alert of an impending attack. For example, say there's a suspicious-looking white van on the street. If it's packed with explosives, then you need to run like hell until you're about half a mile away.

Or perhaps you're in a park and you see a "low-hanging cloud" at ground level. That "might be a sign of a chemical attack," your calendar warns you. But it may not be. So look for lots of animals or insects suddenly dropping dead. Or maybe you'll see "Numerous individuals experiencing unexplained water-like blisters, wheals" (similar to bee stings), who are all choking, coughing or keeling over. Probably too late, but you should try to repeat the action you took above.

Now you won't be able to buy this beautiful calendar just anywhere. Actually, you won't be able to buy it at all. A downloadable version should be available in January, but only 40,000 copies of the real thing are being printed. That's what makes it so special.

The calendar is given as a gift to folks in the counterterrorism community -- the intelligence spooks at the CIA, DIA, FBI and so forth -- and to visiting dignitaries and counterparts from allies or frenemies.

So you have to be in the business -- or know someone.

Well, at least you should be able to download it in January, though I'm not sure how well your home printout will work as a calendar. (For the 2008 calendar, the NCTC website offers both an "Online Multimedia Version" and a "Daily Planner Printable Version.") Still, for those hardest-to-shop-for people on your holiday list, you can always make up a gift card promising a wonderful surprise sometime in the new year.

Otherwise, you'll have to start asking around to see whether by chance you happen to know people who know people who know people who . . .


TOMORROW MORNING: SARAH PALIN REVEALS HER "BIGGEST MISTAKE"!

Can you guess what it is? Actually, you're going to be asked what it is, so get your thinking cap on now. If you want to start guessing, we're going to put up a post tonight around 8pm PT where you can get down your guesses.

#

Trapped in the meltdown (continued): As the Bush economic miracle plays out, we have deeper and wider cutbacks, and nonprofits in freefall

“When [Milton] Friedman’s Platonic ideas of free-market virtues are put into practice, they have too often generated a systemic orgy of competitive greed -- whose remedies, ironically, entail countermeasures of nationalization.”

-- Marshall Sahlins, University of Chicago emeritus professor of anthropology, quoted by John Lippert in a Bloomberg piece on the apparent collapse of "Chicago School" socioeconomics in its nest

by Ken

Am I the only one who's creeped out when Chimpy the Prez (you remember him, don't you?) emerges from his rathole and blithers about the non-existent "free market" and sneers sanctimoniously at "failed companies" that under normal circumstances should be allowed to fail? Is this the Twilight Zone, or what? George W. Bush pointing a finger at failed companies? Have we all taken leave of reality? This is a dunderhead whose history in business consisted of turning one company after another to a pile of shit. Anyone who would listen to anything he has to say about business or the economy should be in a straitjacket.

And so, given eight years at the helm -- and boy, do the people who voted for him have a lot to answer for -- of course he's done what he always does: turned everything around him to shit. With, true, the small exception of the family, friends, and cronies who piled up fortunes as immediate beneficiaries of his blithering incompetence. (In fairness, some of these must have been the same people who kept bailing Chimpy out of disaster after disaster through his so-called "business career," who may be presumed to have done so as an investment in the future, or rather their future.)

It still boggles my mind to think that so many people could have been so knuckle-draggingly stupid as to fall for a creature whose every cell screams out, "Fraud!" But more importantly, at least some of those people have to learn that the moronic bullshit he poured down their throats is in large measure the same bullshit that's been fobbed off on them for generations by "the business party."

Yessiree, what we needed to do was throw off all that awful regulation, which was holding business back and preventing us from achieving real prosperity. The reality, of course, was that all that regulation, by creating in some measure at least a sort of level playing field for business and providing for some of the basic needs of society, made possible both sustainable prosperity and a measure of civilization.

Business, of course, always wants the shackles removed. And when they get it, the result is always disaster, because there's no one to protect them from themselves. This time, with Cheney the war-maker (and war is always good for business) and regulation-stripper they bought themselves the pro-business government to end all pro-business governments. And naturally the result is economic catastrophe unprecedented since the Great Depression -- and we're still counting.

It's what doomed the McCranky campaign, though there are much better reasons why that campaign should have been routed. But in the end, it really had nothing to do with the lies and imbecilities Young Johnny was spewing. Voters just knew instinctively that the people in power had to be gotten out of power. It remains to be seen what happens once they discover that President Obama can't wave a magic wand and make everything OK. But will they look in the mirror, those people who voted for a lying simpleton not once but twice, and see the people who hate America so much that they twice voted for a man whose life's work was to destroy it?

Undoubtedly a lot of the people who voted to put Chimpy in the White House are now paying the price. After all, it's only the people who engineered his career and bankrolled his candidacy who made out like bandits from it. It would be nice to think that at least some of those people have come to understand what they did, in the hope that they won't be such easy prey the next time some huckster tells them what we really need is a government that's good for business. (There's some consolation in that at the academic level "the Chicago School" -- the slash-and-burn school of Friedmanite economic and social policy -- seems finally to have come into disrepute, as recorded in the Bloomberg piece quoted up top.)

And sad to say, we no longer have just one "business party." The lesson that Democrats like Rahm Emanuel have learned since the Dems were unceremoniously dumped out of power is that it's important to show those corporate wheelers and dealers that Democrats can be just as good friends as Republicans, maybe even better.

So now we survey the wreckage, as we wonder how much worse it's going to get. And how are we feeling the pain?

Here are some headlines pulled off the New York Times website which seem to speak for themselves:

* Home Sales in November Fell at Faster Pace Than Expected

* In Budget Crises, States Reluctantly Halt Road Projects

* As Economy Dips, Arrests for Shoplifiting Soar

The Washington Post, meanwhile, has a story that shouldn't surprise anyone, on the crisis facing charities and nonprofits generally, with a disastrous dropoff in giving. It begins:

For Charities, a Season of Need
With Donations in Free Fall, Groups Try to Capture Holiday Generosity

By William Wan and Brigid Schulte
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, December 23, 2008; B01

In the world of philanthropy, December is everything. It's the one month when people are at their most generous, when procrastinators rush to beat the year-end tax cutoff for donations, and when charities count on collecting as much as a third of their annual contributions.

This year, with rising unemployment and a tanking economy, donors have already informed at least one-quarter of nonprofits in the Washington that they will be giving less, according to the Center for Nonprofit Advancement. As a result, more than 40 percent of nonprofits plan to reduce programs or cut staff, and most are reevaluating the way they do business to weather the year ahead.

The piece surveys a number of D.C. charities and nonprofits that are scrambling desperately this month to make up for gigantic shortfalls in their operating budgets, without a great deal of success. However --

Earlier that day, in Northwest Washington, organizers of another kind of event were suffering the opposite problem: overwhelming interest.

Washington's top nonprofit leaders had called an emergency meeting downtown to try to figure out how to survive the economic crisis. It was supposed to be an intimate gathering of a few dozen leaders, but so many nonprofits registered that organizers had to create a waiting list. The meeting was dubbed "Nonprofit 911."

At times, the 500-person town hall meeting resembled tent revivals of old. There were prophecies of doom, messages of hope and testimonies from people struggling in hard times.

"If you think it's a storm, you just batten down the hatches and wait for it to pass," another said. "But this is more like climate change . . . like the coming of the ice age."

"As bad as this year has been," the Post writers write, "experts say, 2009 might be worse."

"No one knows what's going to happen, the kind of choices we're going to have to face," said Adam Tenner, director of Metro TeenAIDS. For weeks, anxiety over his group's finances has gnawed at him so much that his stomach started hurting.

"When the choice becomes which service we're going to cut, who we're going to stop helping," he said, "any choice is going to be a bad one."

The Post also has a piece that attempts an overview of the deepening recession:

Deeper Cuts, Widespread Pain
Few Industries Are Immune as Companies Shed Jobs in 'Serial' Downturn

By Annys Shin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 23, 2008; D01

Recessions can be notoriously uneven. They can wreak havoc with the livelihood of factory workers but not that of bank tellers or nurses. Whole industries can see jobs washed away forever, while others hum along and even grow.

This time, however, the pain is more widespread, economists say, affecting the investment banker, the auto worker, the warehouse manager and the toy store clerk.

So far this year, companies have announced layoffs that affect more than 1 million jobs, according to job placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Bank of America, the Dow Chemical Co., Anheuser-Busch InBev, General Motors and Circuit City are among the growing number of companies that are letting people go.

Another key difference with past recessions has been the downturn's "serial nature," said Jerry Nickelsburg, an economist with the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

In other words, the recession has not affected industries and regions at once, but has rolled out in spurts.

Industries with some of the steepest job losses include construction, financial services, retail and manufacturing. The regional differences in job losses reflect how large a role those industries play in a given area's economy.

Among the states most immediately and devastatingly hit have been California, which was hardest-hit by the bursting of the housing bubble (we haven't talked about their impending state-government crisis -- I assume everyone has been tracking that story), and Michigan and the Midwest, Ground Zero for the domestic auto-industry collapse. Shin notes:

Many of those who have been or are about to be laid off will have to find a new line of work, several economists said, because they won't be able to go back to their old one.

The construction industry has shed 780,000 jobs since September 2006 according to the BLS, and it isn't likely to go back to bubble-like levels any time soon, experts said. Further, an anticipated decline in the construction of office buildings, apartments and shopping centers is likely to spur more layoffs in 2009.

Rebecca Blank, an economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said she expects manufacturing jobs to keep vanishing steadily from the U.S. economy, including in the auto industry. "It's been a downward trend since the late 1970s," she said. "They are not coming back by and large."

#

So Howard Wolfson won't take the pay cut to work for his old boss Hillary? Awww! (Phew!)

by Ken

I know I promised more "Trapped in the meltdown" news, and we'll get to that, but first let's pause for a bit of happy news. Every now and then we dodge a bullet we didn't even know was heading toward us. So it is with the news, courtesy of our Washington Post "In the Loop" pal Al Kamen, that mush-mouthed mouthpiece (turned Fox News "liberal" commentator) Howard Wolfson will not be working for Sec'y of State-designate Hillary Clinton.

I know we'll be accused of Hillary-bashing, but when we think of some of the creepy people she had masterminding and fronting for her presidential campaign, and then think of some of them moving with her to the State Dept., well, we'd rather not think about it. I for one am relieved to be hearing of this particular rumor in the same story in which it's shot down:

No Bureaucrat, Wolfson

There's been chatter that the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign's communications director, Howard Wolfson, was in line to become perhaps assistant secretary for public affairs or some other top post in Sen. Clinton's new job at Foggy Bottom. We heard yesterday that that's not happening and that he may be landing a new gig in Manhattan.

Maybe he couldn't handle the salary reduction. The State Department position pays but $153,200 a year, a small fraction of his recent earnings. By one calculation, he was paid about $1 million for 18 months on the campaign trail. Another calculation has it at about $800,000.

Either way, government work would be a serious whack in the wallet.

Whoa there! Wanna run those numbers past us once more, a little slower? For 18 months on the campaign trail, our Howie was paid how much??? A million smackeroos??????

Getouttahere!

Well, if that's the salary bracket he's now accustomed to, we wouldn't want him to make that kind of financial sacrifice -- to do for the State Dept. what he did for Hillary's campaign.


STOP THE PRESSES: MAYOR MIKE BLOOMBERG
SHOWS OUR HOWIE THE MONEY -- AND HE JUMPS!

Wolfson to Work for Bloomberg

In an interview with NY1, top Democratic strategist Howard Wolfson announced that he will be joining New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's re-election campaign as a senior communications adviser.

Bloomberg was elected twice as a Republican and now is registered as an independent.

Asked about some of the tough words he has had for the mayor in the past -- including once calling him "an out-of-touch billionaire", Wolfson joked: "That was my evil twin."

Ha ha, good one, Howie. Evil twin. Yeah. Ha ha.

#

Trapped in the meltdown (continued): NPR's "Doyenne of Dirt" is one of 64 employees laid off

Ketzel Levine's aptly named new blog, at www.ketzel.com

by Ken

Don't worry, we've got some more substantial, hard-core measurements of the spreading economic gloom coming up. And while, except for Ketzel, this is hardly the most dire life-or-death manifestation (hey, it's only gardening, and it's only public radio), for a lot of NPR listeners it's pretty personal.

As I noted yesterday, for the present I'm more or less settled on (stuck with?) NPR's Morning Edition to help get me out of the house in the morning. This morning, while I was finishing up my earlier post about the bailout fun 'n' games, I was only half-listening, and so missed most of a report that turned out to be by NPR senior correspondent Ketzel Levine. I guess it was about layoffs, because somehow Ketzel had my full attention when, at the end of the report, she said she hadn't expected to become part of the report, and explained that she has been laid off.

Now we have to give NPR credit for allowing her to remain on the air. The usual situation in the broadcasting world when an on-air person is terminated is to hustle him/her off the premises and never let the poor bastard near another microphone, at least not one of your microphones, as protection against what he/she might say. Instead, she was allowed the dignity of announcing her own separation. And it appears she'll continue on the job for a while. (Her termanation takes effect January 12.)

I remember first hearing Ketzel doing garden reports with Scott Simon on Weekend Edition Saturday, I shudder to think how many years ago. Here's what "The Doyenne of Dirt" had to say yesterday on her NPR blog:

Talking Unemployment

In case this is the first you're reading of this, I'd like to confirm the rumor that I've been laid off.

Or, to put it as it suddenly occurs to me, That's no rumor! That's my life!

And on the outside chance you've just stumbled onto this year and a half old blog and want to catch up -- fast -- my name is Ketzel Levine, I'm a senior correspondent for NPR and my job ends January 12th, 2009.

I was given the news 36 hours ago and I've been on the proverbial roller coaster ride ever since. Earlier this morning, when I took my first shot at this blog item, I wrote something to the effect that my being rift was not personal, "it's just what it is." And that, wait for it, "I've been one lucky woman, why should it end now?"

What was she on? I could use some of that tonight, as I look over at the clock and see that in the last hour I've written three sentences and chewed my nails and cuticles down to stumps. I've also been eating compulsively, only the richest most fattening things: organic peanuts, candy-coated toxic peanut M&M's, and for my last act before sleep, organic raw cashews.

In truth, there is no reason on earth why I shouldn't continue having a long and lively career. It could be in radio, in print, online or in public lectures, on tv shows and in books.

But there's a journey in-between and it heads right through the land of loss, which is where I'm reporting from tonight, live! and up to my neck in decades of memories of the people I've met and the places I've been because of this job...and the nail-bitten terror that the loss will drown me and I won't be able to breathe.

Which reminds me of breathing deeply and fully and one of the happiest moments of the last year. And that's how I'm going to get to sleep tonight in anticipation of a far better day sometime soon. Maybe even tomorrow.

I missed the Dec. 11 Washington Post report that NPR, "faced with a sharp decline in revenue," has announced organization-wide cutbacks:

The cutback of 64 of NPR's 889 employees is designed to close a $23 million shortfall in the operation's current fiscal year, Dennis Haarsager, NPR's interim president and chief executive, said in an interview. The cuts will affect all departments, including reporters, producers, researchers and digital media employees.

#

Bailout fun: It seems if you know the right folks, it's not too tough to get $$$, without a lot of questions asked. (Next in line: developers?)

Maybe Bailout Czar Neel Kashkari knows where the $$$ went?
(But of course he'll never tell!)

"It's something any bank would demand to know before handing out a loan: Where's the money going? But after receiving billions in aid from U.S. taxpayers, the nation's largest banks say they can't track exactly how they're spending the money or they simply refuse to discuss it. 'We've lent some of it. We've not lent some of it. We've not given any accounting of, "Here's how we're doing it,"' said Thomas Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion in emergency bailout money. 'We have not disclosed that to the public. We're declining to.'"

-- AP summary of the result of its effort to get bailed-out banks to reply to a simple four-question survey on what they did with the money

by Ken

Rachel Maddow called attention last night to this AP (attempted) survey of recipients of bailout money. It was pretty enterprising of AP to try to get some information, especially since the Bushbailers don't seem much interested in following up on what became of the $335B or so already distributed, which is looking increasingly lake a Mad Money giveaway to the Wall Streeters' friends, associates, and cronies.

Since the Bushbailers don't seem ever to have arrived at an actual theory of how passing out that money was going to pry open the credit jam that was supposedly locking the economy up, I suppose we can hardly blame the recipients of their largesse for stockpiling their gifts, or using them to buy up other banks at fire-sale prices, or doing any damned thing they please -- not necessarily including lending any of it in a way that might, you know, ease the credit crisis.

As has been widely noted, in contrast to the hard-line, even oppressive (if not actually ruinous) strings that have been attached to loans to the U.S. automakers, with special urging from Senate Republicans who by amazing coincidence come from states with major presences by the U.S. automakers' foreign-based competitors (heavily subsidized by those states, of course.

Should you apply for bailout money?

Rachel also gave us a look at the actual application for TARP cash, which is a cinch to find online in the form of a pdf file. It's a six-page file, but four pages of it is just something called "Application Guidelines for TARP Capital Purchase Program," and I'm betting that only the goody-goody teacher's-pet types will read all that stuff.

The application itself, as you may have heard, is only two pages -- and a good part of that is just filling in names and contact info (all that goes on the first page is the institution name and address and contact info for Primary and Secondary Contacts) and a bit of financial info like how much money you'd like.

Technically, in order to apply for TARP money, you're supposed to be a bank holding company. I don't know how strict they are about this. You are supposed to provide your "RSSD, Holding Company Docket Number and / or FDIC Certificate Number, As Relevant," and it's quite possible that they check. Or then again -- "checking" doesn't seem high on the list of the Bushbailers' priorities . . . especially if you happen to know the right people, or the right kind of people.


AND NEXT UP FOR BAILOUT: THE DEVELOPERS?

From yesterday's Wall Street Journal:

Developers Ask U.S. for Bailout as Massive Debt Looms

With a record amount of commercial real-estate debt coming due, some of the country's biggest property developers have become the latest to go hat-in-hand to the government for assistance.

They're warning policymakers that thousands of office complexes, hotels, shopping centers and other commercial buildings are headed into defaults, foreclosures and bankruptcies. The reason: according to research firm Foresight Analytics LCC, $530 billion of commercial mortgages will be coming due for refinancing in the next three years -- with about $160 billion maturing in the next year. Credit, meanwhile, is practically nonexistent and cash flows from commercial property are siphoning off.

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Political quick hits (4): Who's out of the new administration, who's in, and who's in between?

by Ken

1. No room at the inn for Governor Dean

"Howard Dean was never afraid to challenge the established ways of the Democratic Party in Washington. That doesn't win you many friends in this town."

-- Joe Trippi, campaign manager for Howard Dean's 2004 presidential bid

Howard Dean always knew his time as chairman of the Democratic National Committee was going to end after this election. I find it hard to imagine that he would want to do such a thankless job any longer.

I guess the job hasn't been entirely thankless. Even washingtonpost.com's Chris Cillizza managed to come up with an impressive list of accomplishments in his "The Fix" piece today on Governor Dean's curious position as the Inauguration approaches: on the outside looking in. His 50-state strategy really did lay the groundwork for the resurgence of the party in places where it had been invisible as far back as anyone can recall, and in both concept and execution his 2004 presidential bid surely provided a framework for the Obama campaign. And Chris gave us the above quote from Joe Trippi.

Dean, it turns out, pitched himself for secretary of health and human services, and it seems to me that he was splendidly suited to the job. But there's that nasty current that he's not a "team player," in presumed contrast with HHS Sec'y-designate Tom Daschle, who is likely to team-play us into a corporatist version of health-care reform that Dean would never have stood still for. (He's not a team player, after all.)

Similarly, when we hear that Rahm Emanuel scorned Dean's refusal to engage in fund-raising, when all accounts I've heard indicate that he did a smashing job raising money for the DNC, isn't it likely that what we're really being told is that Dean didn't like fund-raising the way Master Rahm does it, in cahoots with the corporate bribers he's shaking down? And maybe that in distributing those funds Dean worried about the good of the party and the country rather than his own personal benefit and aggrandizement?

Of course, as we know, and let's say it all together now: Governor Dean isn't a team player. Am I the only one thinking it's maybe kind of a shame that it isn't his team the others are being recruited to play on?


2. Ray LaHood has President-elect Obama's, er, confidence -- or something

It turns out that we haven't been the only ones waiting to find out just what qualifications retiring Rep. Ray LaHood brings to the office of secretary of transportation -- beyond the nice things he has said about trains. Certain trains, anyway. (We know, for example, that he has no interest in the high-speed rail systems that are a transit mainstay in other parts of the world.) Our pal Al Kamen has been wondering too.

LaHood for Transportation? It Wasn't That Long a Stretch.

There was much surprise last week when President-elect Barack Obama selected outgoing Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) for secretary of transportation. After all, LaHood isn't an expert on transportation matters.

His district is pretty rural and not known for having great transportation problems -- save for when Capponi's Restaurant in Toluca closes on the weekends and diners head down the road to Minonk. Won't hardly see a traffic light for miles.

And okay, so maybe his congressional district isn't a passenger rail hub. (If you ask Amtrak for an itinerary from Washington to Peoria, the largest city in his district, you're offered a 17 1/2 -hour train ride to Indianapolis and then a four-hour wait for a bus to take you on a four-hour trip to the bus station at the Peoria airport.)

On the plus side, LaHood is on the House Appropriations Committee, so he knows how to spend money, he defends earmarks, and he's no doubt been to O'Hare Airport, so at least he's got air travel experience.

Still, there had been chatter for a while that LaHood was thinking of setting up shop at a law firm here in Washington when his term ends next month. So when word spread last week that incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel had called LaHood on Tuesday to offer him the job, the cognoscenti were taken aback.

But maybe they shouldn't have been. Obama did, after all, pledge to put Republicans in his Cabinet. We're told that when Obama and LaHood ran into each other on the House floor this past spring, LaHood went over to him and Obama said, "You're at the top of my list." Earlier, after Obama was elected to the Senate in 2004 and was planning to visit Peoria, he reached out to LaHood, who helped set up his schedule. Then there were those bipartisan lunches with Emanuel.

In retrospect, seems pretty obvious that LaHood was a solid contender for a top Cabinet post.

3. Why are the wingnuts targeting Hilda Solis?

People who pay attention to such things are chattering today about how Labor Secretary-designate Hilda Solis, an outspoken liberal from California, has been drawing fire from the Drum-Beating Right like no other Obama appointee this side of Attorney General-designate Eric Holder.

It's worthy of note that neither Solis nor Holder has the kind of political base that political "players" might be afraid to outrage. What's more, by coincidence no doubt, neither is what you would call a white male. Still, this doesn't explain why they would be automatic targets -- just why the Right wouldn't have much apprehension about targeting them.

The best guess in Solis's case seems to be her strong support for the Employee Free Choice Act. As Howie and I have noted frequently, EFCA, which if passed would greatly increase the opportunity of workers who want union representation to have it, not only enrages the hard-core anti-union Right but actually scares them. The fear is that a dramatic upsurge in union organizing (and I'm hearing "conservative" estimates of adding 20 million union workers to the rolls in the first year), which would likely produce large-scale infusions of cash into Democratic coffers. As Nevada Sen. John Ensign famously put it, "It would make Republicans the minority party for the next 40 to 50 years."

A more general theory I'm hearing is that the targeting of Solis is simply another stage in the Right's all-out war on labor unions.


4. And speaking of Eric Holder --

The wingnuts will have to work just a bit harder to obstruct his nomination. David Ingram reports on BLT (The Blog of LegalTimes):

Prosecutor in Marc Rich Case Endorses Holder

One of the prosecutors in the criminal case against commodities trader Marc Rich says that Eric Holder Jr. shouldn’t be disqualified from the job of attorney general because of his involvement in Rich’s pardon.

In a letter released today by the Senate Judiciary Committee, James Comey endorses Holder as President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for the nation’s top law enforcement official. Comey was in charge of the Rich case from 1987 to 1993 when he was an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York.

Comey later served as a U.S. attorney and then deputy attorney general -- two positions that Holder has also held -- and Comey wrote that his Justice Department service reinforced his opposition to the Rich pardon.

“From that experience, I have come to believe that Mr. Holder’s role in the Rich and [Rich co-worker Pincus] Green pardons was a huge misjudgment, one for which he has, appropriately, paid dearly in reputation,” Comey wrote to Judiciary’s Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Ranking Member Arlen Specter (R-Pa.).

The letter continues:

Yet I hope very much he is confirmed. I know a lot of good people who have made significant mistakes. I think Mr. Holder’s may actually make him a better steward of the Department of Justice because he has learned a hard lesson about protecting the integrity of that great institution from political fixers. I’m not suggesting errors of judgment are qualification for high office, but in this case, where the nominee is a smart, decent, humble man, who knows and loves the Department and has demonstrated his commitment to the rule of law across an entire career, the error should not disqualify him. Eric Holder should be confirmed as Attorney General.

Jim Comey, you'll recall, is one of the legal good guys -- possibly the only person to serve with honor in a position of authority in the Bush Justice Dept. He actually came out of his service with his reputation not only intact but actually enhanced.

Let me add a reminder that the charge against Rich in connection with the Rich pardon is almost always incorrectly made. He did not in fact give a "neutral leaning towards favorable" recommendation. What he said was that he was "neutral, learning towards favorable if there were foreign policy benefits that would be reaped by granting the pardon," based on information he had that the Israeli prime minister was supporting the pardon. The colleague who provides this reminder comments, "That strikes me as a big 'if,' especially since the GOP has spent the last eight years telling us that the President's view of foreign policy is ultimate trump card in policy debates."

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Howie reports, briefly, from "a place so foreign" that it feels as if he's gone to another planet

An overview of Bamako from the elevated north

In an e-mail from Howie, still in Bamako, I had this: "Right now I am in a place so foreign that I would have thought I would have had to go to another planet to find anything like it."

On his Around the World Blog you'll find a new post today, asking "How Safe Is It for Americans to Visit Dakar in Senegal and Bamako in Mali?" You'll find his assessment of both personal and health safety issues. (Hint: He has found both cities quite safe, the greatest "danger" being the mosquitoes in Dakar and the exhaust fumes in Bamako.)

He concludes, regarding Bamako:

I've walked all over the city, including to really remote areas without paved roads or the blessings of any kind of modernity, and the only vibe is friendly, friendly, friendly. People are unimaginably poor, but this is a Moslem country, and the level of personal ethics is very high.

I might also add, there are American flags everywhere and people walk around with Obama T-shirts! This has got to be one of the safest cities for tourists I've ever visited anywhere.

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Of course the government could limit executive compensation, says Dean Baker -- if the government actually wanted to

Economist Dean Baker is on the warpath.

by Ken

I recognized that it was frightfully naive of me, but back in the days when we thought, or at least hoped, that the 110th Congress, with its new Democratic majorities (however slight in the Senate), would actually do something about issues that had been left to fester under the all-Republican federal government, it just didn't occur to me there was one pretty good reason why nothing was being done -- for example, in the matter of extracting the U.S. from Iraq.

No, I don't mean the fashionable official reasons:

* There's nothing Congress can do. (Oh, like hell! Congress can vote to cut off the damned money! Yes, the Bush regime would have finagled and cooked the books and just plain stolen to find the money it needed -- well, let them!)

* We just don't have the votes. Maybe in the next Congress? (Oh, phooey! Why do you people have the word "leader" in your titles if you can't for once show some leadership? Knock some heads in your caucus, and if in the end you can't bring enough people around, make sure the ones you can't get to vote with you know that their votes will be hung around their necks for all to see.)

I'm embarrassed to say that it was a moment like the sudden clearing of a solidly overcast sky when David Sirota wrote a column suggesting that the reason the Democratic leadership in Congress couldn't do anything to end the Iraq adventure was that there were segments of the leadership that didn't want to.

Oh.

I would feel more embarrassed if there were any indication that I was one of the sleepy few who didn't get it. The indications, however, are the opposite: that a lot of Americans, even fairly well-informed ones, not only didn't get it then but still don't get it.

I still think it fairly likely that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would have liked to do something about ending the Iraq occupation, though note already that "would have liked to do something" isn't the same thing as "was determined to try to do something." I think now, though, that one reason she never had the votes -- for this or anything else at all controversial -- was that people she would have depended on to count and commandeer Democratic votes, Beltway insiders like House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (the majority leader she hadn't wanted, remember) and House Master of the Dark Arts Rahm Emanuel, didn't want anything done.

Once you see the principle at work . . .

This is a long way around to where I wanted to get, which is another application of the same principle: the seeming inability of the federal government to do anything to rein in executive compensation as part of the bailout package. I did try to suggest the other day that perhaps it wasn't a coincidence that even the toothless provisions that had been written into the bailout legislation suddenly turned out to be in fact meaningless, because of the way the Bushbailers had insisted on writing the bill.

Today Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, about the highest-ranking progressive economist you'll find stalking the corridors of D.C., takes withering note of a "lengthy business section article in the Washington Post" which "noted the failure of past efforts to restrict executive compensation" and "then implied that it is inherently impossible to effectively restrict executive compensation."

Dean points out, first, that this inherent impossibility would have to be something uniquely American, because the problem just doesn't seem to come up elsewhere. ("Companies outside of the United States seem to have no difficulty attracting highly qualified executives even though their pay is generally an order of magnitude lower than in the United States.")

Then he moves in for the kill:

While it is possible that efforts to limit executive compensation failed because it is intrinsically difficult to limit executive compensation, it is also possible that these efforts failed because the politicians who designed them did not really want to crack down on executive compensation. While high CEO pay packages are very unpopular politically, top executives are important sources of campaign contributions and political support for politicians.

Therefore, it would be very reasonable for politicians to design measures that have no actual impact on executive compensation, even though this is their stated purpose. This strategy is especially attractive if the media don't point out that the measures will be ineffective, so that the public is unaware of the charade.

"This is exactly what happened with the restrictions on executive compensation that were put into the recent bank bailout bill," Dean points out, noting that some economists had in fact argued while the bill was being debated that the proposed compensation restrictions would "likely have no impact whatsoever," but that "this fact received almost no attention in the media."

And now --

If Congress actually wanted to limit executive pay, there are some simple methods to do it. For example, it could require that the pay packages for the five highest paid executives be subject to a binding vote by shareholders at regular intervals, in an election where ballots that are not returned are not counted. By changing the rules of corporate governance in a way that gives more power to shareholders, Congress can make it far more difficult for top executives to pillage the companies they work for.

In the context of the current bailouts, Congress could make demands that executives have pay parity with their foreign competitors, just as President Bush just demanded of the auto workers.

It is actually very easy to find effective ways to limit executive compensation. The problem is simply one of political will. The Post is badly misleading its readers with this article that implies otherwise.

AND SPEAKING OF THE WASHINGTON POST'S AGENDA --

Dean is also pretty hot today about an unsigned front-page piece (purporting to survey the economics of the bailout effort), which contains "the strong assertion":

"The boldness of the economic rescue is already straining the government's finances."

The only explanation he can think of is the title of his post: "Washington Post Does Full Merger of News and Editorial Section."

The piece never presents any evidence for the claim that the government's finances are being strained. Economists would usually look for high interest rates on government bonds as evidence for such strain, the argument being that excessive borrowing is causing lenders to view the U.S. government as a questionable credit risk.

In fact, the evidence here suggests the opposite. The short-term rates on Treasury debt are near zero. The 10-year Treasury rate is just over 2.0 percent, the lowest in more than fifty years. So, there is no obvious real world support for the Post's claim.

Of course the Post has editorialized against deficits for decades and its ed board has been on a near religious crusade to cut Social Security, so it would not be surprising to see them oppose a large stimulus package no matter how urgent the economic need. It is however somewhat surprising to see them editorializing on the front page in this way.

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Happy Channukah to all -- and fry up a storm! (Including my latest morning-radio rant, complete with the traditional dumping on Air America)

by Ken

I suppose I should really check it out before going into a public whine, but I'm wondering if the powers that be have really thought through the scheduling of The Takeaway, the alternative public radio morning show produced by PRI and WNYC in association with the BBC World Service, the New York Times, and WGBH Boston.

Here's the thing: As I've mentioned countless times here (well, I'm not about to try counting them), I've been adrift for media support for my morning get-out-of-the-house routine since Air America Radio cut us New Yorkers adrift. (It appears that AAR hasn't been able to figure out any way of muscling its way into the cutthroat New York radio market except by finding the 90-pound weaklings among local stations and strong-arming them -- with the gift of a few bronze coins, I assume -- into giving up their airways.

The last time they did one of these mind melds, it was with a station so puny that many of us in the metropolitan area can't even get it, and in the morning there was no reason to try, since they seem to have been unable (or uninclined?) to shove the station's old programming off the air, leaving us stuck with right-wing scumbucket Armstrong "Army" Williams. Yes, in the country's No. 1 media market, morning drive time on the progressive radio network was held down by a wingnut sleazebag who got caught taking money from the Bush regime to flog its wackadoodle No Child Left Behind racket in his newspaper columns.

Up till then, however, the morning drive had been the glory of AAR -- although it was probably no thanks to the succession of boneheads who ran the network. After they somehow allowed the creation of the gloriously irreverent, high-voltage Morning Sedition, a show that started building a fanatically loyal fan base, instead of nurturing and promoting the shit out of it as the potential franchise-builder it was, they sabotaged and finally pulled the plug on it. And even then, probably again by sheer dumb luck, they turned a couple of those hours to a host who had been exiled to the 5am time slot, where to her credit she had continued toiling, developing her on-air format and skills for the time when she would get a real chance.

You may have heard of her. Her name was Rachel Maddow. It was totally different from Morning Sedition, a smart and outrageous progressive comedy show, with genuinely talented comedy writers and performers, including a fellow named Kent Jones who landed a spot on Rachel's show. Rachel's morning show did an amazing job of informing and entertaining and, as I've said here before, providing a barely awake progressive with the basic briefing he/she needed to face the world on near-even terms, or at least get through the day.

Rachel deserved her promotion to the evening slot, but that didn't do me any good. It was a morning radio show I needed. (In fact, I wasn't able to listen to Rachel in the evening.) Even before that switch took place, we in New York lost her -- and Air America mornings -- to the station shuffle. I was barely able to get the new station, but after a week or two of Army Williams (see? I really tried to give the show a chance!), I fled in horror. Since then I think I've made one attempt to tune the new frequency in. As I recall, it failed.

I won't bore you with the litany of media alternatives I've tried to plug into this hole in my mornings. For a while USA's JAG reruns worked,but then we got back to the point where I'd come in.

Without a lot of enthusiasm I sort of settled in with NPR's Morning Edition. It's not a terrible show, and occasionally there's some really alert reporting or commentary. But so much of it is well-meant time-filling -- the sort of tedious, mealy-mouthed stuff you're always afraid of being choked with on NPR.

But now, at least in theory, we have a public radio alternative in The Takeaway, with personable hosts John Hockenberry and Adaora Udoji. For a while I was setting my alarm for 6 or 6:30, and I got to hear a little of the show, and it wasn't bad. But then I pushed the alarm back to 7, when WNYC-FM switches to, yes, Morning Edition! No more Takeaway for me, unless I'm up before 7 and ambitious enough to turn the radio on manually.

I just checked the scheduling online, to make sure I wasn't making it up. Sure enough, I'm not crazy. This is the way the show is really scheduled:

New York
New York, NY 820 AM WNYC-AM 8 a.m.–10 a.m. Mon–Fri
New York, NY 93.9 FM WNYC-FM 6 a.m.–7 a.m. Mon–Fri

Do you notice anything odd about here?

Let's look at it another way. Wouldn't it be fair to say that many if not most people have to be at work at 9am? And that all of those people consequently spend some if not all of the preceding hour traveling to work? (Actually, since my company moved all the way downtown in Manhattan, it now takes me about an hour and a quarter, maybe an hour and a half. But who's counting?) So for those of us who fall into this demographic, what would you say would be the most crucial hour of the morning schedule?

(a) 6am - 7am
(b) 7am - 8am
(c) 8am - 9am

Am I crazy, or is the answer not (b)? And if you look again at that schedule for The Takeaway in New York, when between 6am and 10am is the show not on the air? It's like it was carefully planned. Has WNYC been hiring some of the AAR program scheduling talent?

I'LL BET YOU THOUGHT I FORGOT ABOUT
THE CHANNUKAH PART -- WELL, HA!

As it happens, this morning I did flip the radio on early, and they were doing a sort of Channukah show. John and Adaora's guest, I figured out gradually, was New York Times food writer Melissa Clark, and she had a take on the holiday I've never heard, or at least never heard put quite this way.

After running through the historical event being celebrated, the miracle by which the insignificant amount of oil remaining in the Temple, needed to light the Eternal Light, lasted eight days, Melissa explained that that's why we fry stuff at Channukah, like potato latkes (and she provided two crucial latke-making tips: grate the potatoes coarse, not fine, and above all be sure to squeeze the moisture out of the grated potatoes before making your pancake mixture and frying), and that in fact frying anything counts as Channukah celebration, as long as there's lots of oil and grease.

That's why they do doughnuts for Channukah in Israel, Melissa explained. (Jelly or jam doughnuts, apparently. Not my favorites, but okay.) And why in Italy they fry chicken, and in Morocco something else. Anyway, you get the idea. For these eight days, frying stuff is practically a religious obligation.

This isn't the sort of thing you would want to carry through 365 days a year. But for eight days, knowing that you can fry any damned thing you can think of and get into appropriate oil and you're commemorating a religious observance, well, isn't this the sort of thing that gets people involved with organized religion in the first place?

Melissa had some other decidedly unfamiliar takes on Channukah celebration. Like she had apparently brought in "golden gelt cookies" she'd baked (not fried, eh?), for presumptive use in that fast-paced, high-stakes dreidel play common during Channukah. Normally we would use those golden-foil-wrapped chocolate coins, the way it says in the Bible. But Melissa explained that she's always looking for alternatives to the old chocolate coins, and the way she kept talking about those golden cookies of hers, the more I thought it would be churlish not to at least try them.

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Courtesy of Jesus' General, Gen. JC Christian, Patriot: Republican Jesus reaches out to Obama

[Thanks to Patriotboy]
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It doesn't get more eloquent than Maureen Forrester singing Mahler's "Urlicht"

The great Canadian contralto Maureen Forrester sings "Urlicht" with Glenn Gould conducting (left-handed!), from a 1957 Gould CBC telecast.

"Urlicht" ("Primal Light")

O rosebud red!
Man lies in the greatest need.
Man lies in the greatest anguish.
Far rather would I be in heaven.

Then I came to a broad path.
Then a little angel came and wanted to send me away.
But no! I didn't let myself be sent away.

I am from God, I want to return to God.
Dear God will give me a little light,
will light me all the way to eternal blessed life.

-- text from the collection of German folk poetry
Des Knaben Wunderhorn ("The Youth's Magic Horn")

by Ken

At some point we'll continue with Tchaikovsky, and come back to the comment left by our friend Balakirev in response to last week's music piece. I don't agree with much in it, except for the rather lengthy list of works by Tchaikovsky he gives a thumbs-up. The one thing that distresses me is that he so readily associates himself with the ranks of what I called "'serious' music critics," which leads me to believe that I wasn't sarcastic enough in dismissing such charlatans, whose "seriousness" resides only in their tiny brains. And yet here's someone proudly claiming membership in their ranks.

What distresses me is this evidence that I wasn't sarcastic enough. One charge I thought I would never have to face is being insufficiently sarcastic.

As I say, we can come back to Tchaikovsky. One point that might have arisen, which I thought might be interesting to talk about, is the way commentators' aesthetic dislikes may be less interesting than their likes, if they can make a useful case. Tchaikovsky himself, for example, wasn't the greatest fan of Beethoven, especially the later Beethoven, and that really doesn't tell us much, except about Tchaikovsky's own musical makeup.

Glenn Gould's eloquent case for early Beethoven

Which sent me back to thinking about the late Glenn Gould (1932-1982), the eccentric (to put it mildly) Canadian pianist, who had something close to unmitigated contempt for later Beethoven. Unlike most of us, who see the composer's artistic development as a process of unparalleled broadening and deepening, Gould thought Beethoven became ponderous, pompous, and tedious -- generally unbearable.

Again, this doesn't tell us nearly as much about Beethoven as it does about Gould, but that's still much less interesting than the case Gould made on behalf of the earlier Beethoven works, both in his writings and, in the case of the piano works, in his performances. To the works he believed in, he brought to bear the full resources of his singular imagination, and as a result, many of the earlier sonatas -- works too often thought of as way stations on the path to the composer's "greater" later sonatas -- achieve an emotional stature we rarely encounter.

(Among the Beethoven string quartets, you shouldn't be surprised to learn that Gould had no sympathy for the late ones, reckoned by most of us the composer's most searching and visionary imaginings, and not much more for the daring middle ones. But the Early Quartets, the six quartets of Op. 18 -- ah, these he loved! What a shame it is that we can't hear performances of them lit up with the kind of passion, not a word we often associate with the severely repressed Gould, and insight that abound in Gould's performances of the early sonatas.)

So who's your favorite composer?

One day we'll get around to that piece too, but so far it won't write itself. (And I need to be able to present appropriate musical selections in audio and/or video form.) That set me to thinking, how about tackling the question I'm asked so often and have never been able to answer in a way that satisfies or even means much to the questioner: Who's your favorite composer?

Because I have at least a dozen "favorite" composers, maybe more, depending on the particular kind of favoring in play. I thought it might be fun to play with that. I still think it may be, but not for now. With the weekend slipping away, I thought, well, what about offering just a glimpse one of my "favorite" composers? Then I thought perhaps I could communicate something about one of the composers whose way of looking at the world resonates most personally with me. That list would be (in provisional form):

Berlioz
Mahler
maybe Shostakovich

I went shopping on YouTube. If I could find just one decent clip, why, there we would be! Because I'm still fumbling with computer audio and video technology. In order to enable you to hear at least a sampling of the music I'm writing about -- and what's the point of writing about it if I can't? -- I'm still mostly dependent on "found" clips.

We hit paydirt!

Imagine my surprise to stumble across a clip I've looked for a number of times online -- the one at the top of this column, which was included in the first volume of Sony Classical's early-'90s Glenn Gould video series, drawn from the extensive work of various sorts he did for Canadian television throughout his career. This is a rare example of GG conducting -- and yes, conducting left-handed. (Normally left-handed conductors conduct just the way right-handed conductors do, for the simple reason that that's what every orchestra is accustomed to seeing. I guess GG figured that since he had no intention of presenting himself before the world's orchestras, he could conduct however he damned pleased, as long as it was "readable" by the little studio orchestra scraped together out of his modest CBC budget.)

It's a 1957 performance of the little Mahler song "Urlicht" ("Primal Light"), which serves as the fourth movement of the composer's monumental Second Symphony, the Resurrection. The soloist is one of the great Mahler singers, the Canadian contralto Maureen Forrester (born 1930), and the 1957 date would make this her first recording of "Urlicht," since she didn't take part in her first recording of the Resurrection Symphony until the following February, with Bruno Walter and the New York Philharmonic. (Unless I've missed one, she made her last Resurrection recording in October 1982 -- not a bad time span, 25 years. I'm alarmed to note that Forrester seems barely remembered today. How could that have happened?)

This haunting, childishly innocent little song sets the stage for the monumental half-hour finale of the symphony, where a soprano soloist, the alto, and a chorus join in for a setting of Klopstock's "Resurrection Ode." (The composer took pains to specifiy that these two movements should proceed without pause, but an appalling number of LP versions inserted a side break between them, and even on CD it's far from unheard-of to have a disc change here.)

The text of "Urlicht" comes from a remarkable collection of German folk or folklike poems called Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth's Magic Horn), "edited" by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano and published near the start of the 19th century. The anthology, which covers quite a wide range of subject matter, from idyllic flirtations to military horror stories, was an important source of inspiration for the budding German Romantic movement, and was invaluable to Mahler in the earlier stages of his career.

Not only "Urlicht" but the immediately preceding movement of the Resurrection Symphony, a nonvocal scherzo based on Mahler's wise and witty setting of "Antony of Padua's Fish Sermon," is Wunderhorn-based. (One of these days we will definitely get around to talking about that wonderful song, in which Saint Anthony gathers a large and surprisingly attentive crowd of fish species to listen to his harsh sermon about their behavior, after which the audience members, richly edified, all go back to doing exactly what they were doing before.)

To perform "Urlicht" successfully, you have to strip all artifice and manipulativeness from your performing arsenal. The singer is totally exposed, both vocally and emotionally. Sometimes the result can be surprising. Maybe the most moving performance I ever heard from Marilyn Horne was a live "Urlicht"; I wish I'd heard more performances from her with that degree of lack of artifice.

For a song of such cosmic implications, it plays above all on simplicity and directness. Enjoy!


RECENT CLASSICAL MUSIC POSTS

Tchaikovsky's ballets: Terrific recordings of all three for $20!
(music: "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" from The Nutcracker)

Leonard Bernstein's Candide Overture: Guess who conducts our mystery performance
(music: Candide Overture)
The mystery conductor revealed, and further musings on Candide
(music: "Oh, Happy We," Candide-Cunegonde duet from Candide)

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We've seen the early job-loss and unemployment numbers, but how do we measure the personal cost of the meltdown?

"'I've never seen anything like this before,' said Phyllis Waters, president of the Professional Child Care Provider Network of Prince George's County. 'You're seeing people just dropping out. . . . They're taking them out of day care and putting them into homes with grandmothers and neighbors and whoever else.'"

-- from "Squeezed on All Sides, Parents Forgo Day Care" in today's Washington Post

by Ken

Cheery reading. Before long it shouldn't require all that much creativity to find ways of measuring the pain caused by the economic meltdown and recession. For the time being, though, we have to settle for anecdotal evidence, like this report by Donna St. George.

The subhead, by the way, is "Education, Safety Sacrificed in Fiscal Crunch."

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The mysterious, convenient solo-plane-crash death of "Karl Rove's IT guru" has to turn the soberest soul into a Konspiracy Kook

Thanks to Brad Blog for digging out this lovely photo. Brad recalls that Mike Connell "had reportedly been threatened by Karl Rove over the summer, just prior to being forced to testify by a federal judge in Ohio in a 2004 election fraud lawsuit."

"I'm loyal to my friends and I'm loyal to the Bush family."

-- the late Mike Connell

"I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist."

-- Teresa Nielsen Hayden

by Ken

I didn't pay much attention to this story at first. But it caught Howie's attention in Africa, and I took a closer look. Here is Lisa Derrick's account on FireDogLake's Campaign Silo:

Plane Crash Kills Rove IT Guy, Testified in OH Voter Fraud Case, Key in White House Email Scandal

By Lisa Derrick Saturday December 20, 2008 9:47 am

Mike Connell, Karl Rove's IT guru -- who was compelled six weeks ago to testify in an Ohio vote-tampering case -- was killed late Friday night in a solo plane crash. His plane crashed into the garage of an empty house. Per Cybrinth CEO Stephen Spoonamore, Connell was also considered "vital to uncovering the truth" about the missing White House emails considered a critical link to the Justice Department and White House's involvement in the firings of nine US attorneys.

According to Spoonamore, as reported by Rebecca Abrahams, at an October 11, 2006 meeting between Spoonamore, Connell, and GovTech Solutions President Randy Cole -- who ran and lost for State Representative in Ohio this election --

Connell asked him about ways to "permanently destroy hard drives." Spoonamore said "If this is what I think you're talking about, this meeting is over."

Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board are on site today. Investigations typically take weeks and even months or longer to complete, according to an FAA spokeswoman.

Connell, president of GovTech Solutions and New Media Communications, was a website designer and IT professional who created the website for Ohio's secretary of state Kenneth K. Blackwell that presented the 2004 election results in real time as they were tabulated.

Connell created websites for Blackwell's election runs was well as the one which tabulated and displayed votes in real time. During the 2004 elections, Blackwell was also chairman of Bush-Cheney 2004 reelection effort in Ohio, successfully leading the campaign for the 2004 Ohio Constitution Amendment banning state recognition of same sex marriage or civil unions. Blackwell was unseated in 2006 by Ted Strickland.

Connell refused to testify or to produce documents relating to the system used in the 2004 and 2006 elections until compelled by a judge on on November 1 of this year.

The Ohio RICO lawsuit King Lincoln Bronzeville Neighborhood Association v. Blackwell, brought by Cliff Arnebeck, alleged alleging that vote-tampering during the 2004 presidential election resulted in civil rights violations. The lawsuit maintains that Karl Rove, with the assistance of Mike Connell, designed, built and directed a strategy to manipulate elections through the use of computers. On November 1, 2008, a judge ordered Connell to testify, though his resulting deposition two days later was disappointing to many. Connell's attorney advised him to not answer many questions including, "Who directed you to set up the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth IT Network?"

In addition to his with his work creating Blackwell's election websites and the anti-Kerry website swiftboatvetsfortruth.org, per reporter Rebecca Abrahams, Connell also developed websites for the House Intelligence, Judiciary, Financial Services, Ways and Means, and Administration Committees. The builder of RNC.org, and head of IT for the McCain campaign, Connell was also

the architect and cyber keymaster of George W. Bush election websites including GeorgeWBush.com and GWB43.com, the site Karl Rove used for 95-percent of his email communication. Connell is also the CEO of Govtech Solutions, the company responsible for building and managing congressional email servers and firewalls.

In 1999, Connell told Inside Business magazine, "I'm loyal to my friends and I'm loyal to the Bush family."

Let's pause here and take a deep breath before venturing into territory where sensible people really shouldn't be venturing. Breathe in, breathe out. Again.

Okay. So in other words:

* Mike Connell knew all of Karl Rove's electronic secrets. All of the systems by which Rove organized and exercised his control over the GOP and executive-branch propaganda operations, which of course were merged into a single operation,
went through Connell.

To the extent that communications were involved in Rove's far-flung machinations to subvert the Constitution and the whole body of federal law in order to perpetuate the totalitarian regime he had played such a large role in establishing, which is to say both his life's work and his every waking hour's occupation, to that extent, everything went through systems devised Connell. This included the creation of parallel e-mail systems devised to circumvent the government record-keeping requirements of federal law, and also to circumvent the requirements for separation of government business and partisan political activity, a separation that ran directly counter to the fundamental operating principle of the Bush regime, which was not only to break down the separation between government business and partisan political activity but to make them exactly the same thing.

* Clearly, e-mail communications were not only central to the political purge of U.S. attorneys who resisted participating in Rove's transformation of the Justice Dept. into an agency of political hatchet folk and partisan enforcers, but were central to the unraveling, documentation, and eventual prosecution of the various conspiracies.tiy, we'll never know.

* What's more, Connell was deeply involved with the Karl Rove of Ohio, former Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, including the period in which Blackwell likely oversaw the theft of the state's 2004 electoral votes for the presidential reelection campaign of George W. Bush, which enabled the never-elected president to steal a second term.

* Six weeks ago, after exhausting all efforts at stonewalling, Connell finally was forced to give a deposition concerning the Ohio electoral matters, though questions seem to have ranged into some of his other Rove-commissioned work.. He lawyered up, but what methods of persuasion might eventually have been brought to bear to persuade him to be more forthcoming, or what legal compulsions might in future have been applied to unearth what he knew about such other Rove secrets as the U.S. attorney firings, regarding which Rove himself is under increasing legal pressure to testy. Everything Connell knew about those activities also died with him in Friday night's plane crash.

* And that crash was of a single-passenger plane. All of a sudden, poof! No more Mike Connell. Oops. Well, accidents happen.

Now, I realize that this sounds like the most hysterical of conspiracy-mongering. It's just that where the activities of Karl Rove is concerned, it seems pretty clear that vast networks of conspiracies were in fact in daily operation, and that a substantial portion of the activity specifically involved bypassing or flouting the law. Where organized crime is concerned, such coincidences become automatically suspect, it seems hard to resist the suspicion that Karl Rove was a sort of operations manager for the most extensive political crime operation in the history of the republic.

Hmmm.


YOU ASK, WHO WAS MIKE CONNELL ANYWAYS?

Brad Blog has a veritable Mike Connell archive. The links are available on-site:

* 7/17/08: Ohio Attorney Files to Lift Stay on '04 Election Case, Cites Allegations, Evidence of Massive Fraud by a Number of GOP Operatives
* 7/22/08: GOP Tech Guru Mike Connell 'High IQ Forrest Gump...At Scene of Every Single Crime' Say Ohio Attorneys
* 7/24/08: Rove Threatened GOP IT Guru If He Does Not 'Take the Fall' for Election Fraud in Ohio, Says Attorney
* 7/25/08: Cliff Arnebeck, OH Attorney, Interviewed Live on Peter B. Collins Show
* 7/26/08: So Who Is Mike Connell? A Clip from 'Free For All' Gives You an Idea...
* 9/29/08: STAY LIFTED IN '04 OHIO ELECTION FRAUD CASE, GOP 'TECH GURU' SUBPOENAED
* 10/31/08: BREAKING: Federal Judge Compels GOP IT Guru Mike Connell To Give Deposition in Ohio '04 Election Case
* 11/24/08: 'Document Hold' Served by OH Attorney to GA SoS in Advance of State's U.S. Senate Run-off Election

LARISA ALEXANDROVNA REPORTS: "HE WAS AFRAID"

Raw Story, whose investigative team headed by Larisa Alexandrovna has been all over the Connell story, naturally is on this story too.

Alexandrovna revealed on her own blog that Connell was a source of hers, adding:

[H]e had information that he was ready to share.

You see, Mike Connell set-up the alternate email and communications system for the White House. He was responsible for creating the system that hosted the infamous GWB43.com accounts that Karl Rove and others used. When asked by Congress to provide these emails, the White House said that they were destroyed. But in reality, what Connell is alleged to have done is move these files to other servers after having allegedly scrubbed the files from all "known" Karl Rove accounts.

In addition, I have reason to believe that the alternate accounts were used to communicate with US Attorneys involved in political prosecutions, like that of Don Siegelman. This is what I have been working on to prove for over a year. In fact, it was through following the Siegelman-Rove trail that I found evidence leading to Connell. That is how I became aware of him. Mike was getting ready to talk. He was frightened. . . .

I am not saying that this was a hit nor am I resigned to this being simply an accident either. I am no expert on aviation and cannot provide an opinion on the matter. What I am saying, however, is that given the context, this event needs to be examined carefully. [emphasis in the original]

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As Chimpy the Prez and his White House team of legacy-polishers put the finishing touches on the job . . .

Via David Horsey in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
[click to enlarge]

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Howie reports from Mali: Bassekou is the Jimi Hendrix of the ngoni

"I'll bet Bassekou will become a real superstar in the U.S."

When last we heard from Howie, he had just heard Malian musical legend Basskeou Kouyate performing in the recording studio, and was looking forward to his live concert. He promised a follow-up report, and here it is. -- Ken


Bassekou, Master of the Ngoni, Rocks the House

Thursday I went out to Quizambougou to watch Bassekou Kouyate finish recording his second album, a follow-up to his amazing debut, Segu Blue. Like the first one, the new songs were being recorded at the famed Studio Bogolan across the way from Mali K7, Ali Farka Toure's foundation. (Ali Farka's son, in fact, played his father's guitar on Bassekou's new album.)

Bassekou isn't well known in the U.S. yet -- he's never been to our side of the Atlantic -- but he's a real star in Africa and Europe, wildly popular in Mali, and recognized as the best ngoni player in the world. The ngoni is kind of a cross between a banjo and a guitar, and what Bassekou does with it is pure magic. The music I heard in the studio seemlessly combined the two goals Bassekou set out to accomplish with his new album: respect for Mali's rich musical tradition, in which he is steeped, and an opportunity to explore the directions his own muse is drawing him.

I did my best to persuade him to come play in the U.S. and made a fun suggestion to help him gain some recognition there. If he follows my advice, you'll recognize it instantly when you hear the album.

I had an opportunity to meet two musical legends at the studio: BBC presenter/musicologist/producer Lucy Duran, who is probably best-known in the U.S. as the producer of President Obama's favorite album, Kulanjan by Taj Mahal, and Malian kora master Toumani Diabate. (I might add that the ngoni player on that album was, of course, Bassekou.) Anyway, Lucy is the most credible producer of West Africa music anywhere, speaking the local languages and having worked on Toumani's own records as well as with Kasse Mady Diabate and with Yasmin Levy. The sound engineer she and Bassekou were working with was Jerry Boys, one of the world's best -- a guy who recorded everyone (literally) from the Beatles, Stones, Pink Floyd, and REM to Ry Cooder, Buena Vista Social Club and Ali Farka Toure! (I recall him working with Everything But the Girl when I worked at Sire.)

Anyway, the studio was packed with TV, radio and print jounalists, as well as photographers from the record label and the media. It's like everyone in Mali who loves music -- and in Mali that means everyone -- is eagerly awaiting the new Bassekou record.

The happy citizens of Bamako didn't have to wait for the release to hear some of the new material. Friday night Basselou was onstage at the French Cultural Center doing a full-fledged concert. You think I went?

It was only about a mile from my hotel, so I walked over early. Bassekou had told me his sons have an ngoni band, and asked me to show up in time to hear them. I'm glad I did; you can see their influences, and they were pretty good.

But it was Bassekou's nine-piece extravaganza that well could have been the best live performance I had ever seen in my whole life -- and I've been seeing concerts since the early '60s, and haven't missed too many artists. The first time I was in Africa was in 1969, and I was hanging out with Jimi Hendrix in Essaouira, in Morocco. The first time I had seen Jimi play was years before that at the Cafe au Go-Go, when he was the guitar player in the Night Hawks, backing up John Hammond Jr. I don't say this lightly: Bassekou Kouyate is the Jimi Hendrix of the ngoni.

I don't know how to describe the concert without losing the essense of what the music did for everyone involved -- both on and off the stage. Let me tell you, though, as magnificent as the recorded versions of his songs are, the live show is what makes it so amazing. The concert defined hot. When those syncopated rhythms get going, there is no resisting their power. Mali is the birthplace of the blues -- and the blues is still very much alive and vibrant here -- and it is the ancestral home of rock 'n' roll in every imaginable way. Bassekou has that coursing through his blood, and he knows exactly how to convey it to the audience.

And the dancing was as good as the music! Absolutely breathtaking! Truthfully, I can't remember the last time music compelled me to jump out of my seat and dance in the aisle. Last night it did. If Bassekou and his band wind up on Leno or Oprah, they'll open America up to its own musical roots, and I'll bet Bassekou will become a real superstar in the U.S.

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