“Progressives have fallen into a trap. Emboldened by President Bush’s plummeting approval ratings, progressives increasingly point to Bush’s ‘failures’ and label him and his administration as incompetent. Self-satisfying as this criticism may be, it misses the bigger point. Bush’s disasters — Katrina, the Iraq War, the budget deficit — are not so much a testament to his incompetence or a failure of execution. Rather, they are the natural, even inevitable result of his conservative governing philosophy. It is conservatism itself, carried out according to plan, that is at fault.” — George Lakoff, Marc Ettlinger, and Sam Ferguson (via Political Wire)
Hmm…that sounds familiar. (And I certainly wasn't the only blogger who made the point at the time. I don't think it's that progressives have fallen into the trap as much as Democratic partisans, who find it easier to hope they will coast to victory on the idea that anyone could do better than Bush.)
Quote of the Day
Have you seen this book?
It came out in May of 2003, and if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend checking it out. It's a collection of "remixed" war propaganda posters from WWII; a "hilarious" collection of biting commentary on the media and the Iraq war. I put quotes around "hilarious" because it's one of those "Ha! *sob* Ha!" things. Former Army Ranger turned antiwar comic book artist Wright had what he calls a moment of clarity after participating in the U.S.'s 1989 invasion of Panama. Feeling that media coverage was blatantly pro-war, but that the post-invasion results for Panama were far from positive, he offers this as a (belated) warning against war on Iraq. Reworking American propaganda posters from WWI and WWII, Wright reveals his satiric take on current events: one poster reads, "Millions of troops are on the move...All To Protect Your Oil Supply! Is your SUV really worth their lives?" In another, a girl sitting in her father's lap asks, "Daddy, why don't YOU or any of your friends from ENRON have to go to war?" And many are messages from the Orwellian-sounding "Ministry of Homeland Security": The Statue of Liberty points to the onlooker and commands, "You! Stop Asking Questions! You're Either With U.S. or You're With The TERRORISTS!" The antiwar contingent will read these and weep, rather than laugh. (Publisher's Weekly)
Well more like laugh through the tears, actually. The sequel, recently released, has a title that seems more and more appropriate as time goes on:
In a classic example of completely missing the point (and, not to mention, completely ripping the authors off), Michelle Malkin and her howling pack of winged monkeys have taken this idea and beaten it into the ground with their own versions of "remixed" propaganda posters. However, their "posters" are aimed at the New York Times, and those damned liberals that can't keep their mouths shut! (Not to mention conveniently ignoring the fact that Prezint Leaky McDribblelips spilled the "we're checkin' BANKS!" tidbit a good long while ago.)
Now, I don't recommend looking at Malkin's site. I'll show you a few examples below. But if you must, they're here. I will say this:
Here's my favorite:
Yeah! If you nasty libruls don't shut up, we'll all wind up in the ocean somewhere!
Of course, the President and his little war had nothing to do with that. But that New York Times story... man... they're dropping like flies.
Wait! Cue heartstring plucking!
Sorry, my eyeballs just fell out from all that rolling. How about, "Don't Kill Her Daddy with Pointless Wars Based on Lies?" Or how about "Don't Kill Her Daddy by Sending Him into Battle With No Body Armor?"
And the winner of the Photoshop award:
Scary!
Bravo. Excellent work. You can barely see the seams. *Snicker* Uh... did it occur to you that you were casting Rove in the role of a Nazi when you burped this one up?
Look, you morons. If you don't like the press keeping tabs on the government like they're supposed to do, then stop sending our fucking soldiers to bogus wars to "defend democracy." They are supposedly over there fighting for things like... freedom of the press, remember?
Oh, and here. I think you can use this. Don't say I never gave you anything.
(Tip 'o the Energy Dome to Grumpy Old Man.)
(It's a long way... to cross-posts...)
A Terrifying Message from Al Gore
I’m sure a lot of people have seen this already, but I figured I'd post it for anyone who hasn't. Tres funny.
Caption This Photo
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is pictured before President Bush addresses
the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a think tank, regarding the
line item veto Tuesday, June 27, 2006 in Washington.
(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
“War Cries” from the Unhinged Right
Powerline’s Scott Johnson, ratcheting up the rightwing rhetoric about the NY Times:
If America is going to wage a war against terrorism, it must indeed act on all fronts. In 2006, it needs to act on the home front and direct its attention to those whose war on the administration is unconstrained by the espionage laws of the United States.Conservatives like Johnson would have us believe that the Times has subverted a key tool to fighting terror by revealing that the Bush administration has “gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States.” But as Glenn Greenwald points out, Bush himself spoke of how the Patriot Act made it easier to “catch terrorists” by chasing money trails, in a campaign speech, so all the hyperbole about how the Times tipped off terrorists that their financial transactions might be monitored is complete hooey. What Bush supporters are really getting so exercised about is the dissemination of information that undermines the administration’s ability to do whatever they want without oversight or accountability. That’s what the “war on the administration” actually is—any attempt to hold them to account.
So they’ve decided that “America” must, as part of the war on terrorism, “direct its attention” toward anyone who wages the war of casting sunlight on the administration’s policies. In other words, they’re casting the criticism, analysis, and freedom of information that has been a normal—and important—part of the American political process for over 200 years as a war, so they can declare war right back.
“War cries” have been the modus operandi for many years now. According to conservatives, the media and/or liberals have declared a War on Christmas, a War on Easter, a War on Christians, a War on the Family, a War on Marriage, and now a War on the Administration. In each case, trumping up the existence of an alleged “war” is subsequently used as a rationalization for all manner of lunacy. They flatly refuse to see that expressing a difference of opinion—say, for example, that legalizing gay marriage expands the notion of family, rather than decimating it—is not the same as declaring war. Any challenge to their beliefs is a war, and it demands a war in return.
There are two possible options here. One theory is that conservatives are simply too stupid to discern the difference between a policy disagreement and a war. The other is that conservatives find it useful to deliberately mischaracterize policy disagreements as war in order to justify behaving like unhinged authoritarian cultists.
Gee, I can’t imagine which it might be.
(Crossposted at AlterNet PEEK.)
News from Shakes Manor
Last night, Mr. Shakes and I went over to my parents’ for dinner, and my mom remembered a story from a trip we took to New York to visit her parents when I was a wee thing that prompted her to drag out an old photo album. I’m sure Mr. Shakes has seen these photos no fewer than a thousand times, but in the way one is always fascinated from any slice of a loved one’s life that took place before a fateful meeting, he looked at them once again.
As he and my mom flipped through the pages, he gave a running commentary on my “wee baw heed, perfectly roond” and my “cheeky face, exactly the same; ye canny have changed a bit!” as my mom peppered his monologue with, “Look how cute she was!” And then Mr. Shakes burst out in laughter.
Shakes: What?
Mr. Shakes: Look at this one!
Shakes: What?
Mama Shakes: Ohmigod, hahahaha. What a face!
Mr. Shakes: What a face!
Shakes: Let me see it.
Mr. Shakes: How oold was she here?
Mama Shakes: Two years. She always sat in that booster chair on the floor, like it was her own little chair. So serious.
Shakes: Come on!
Mr. Shakes: That expression! Hahahaha.
Mama Shakes: I know, hahahaha.
Mr. Shakes: Lookit, she’s making the same face right noo! Hahahaha.
I finally grabbed the book and looked at the picture. And yes, I was indeed making precisely the same face.
Fire in the mind
The political concept of "the silly season" is darned near universal, though where it falls in the calendar varies across cultures. In Britain, it marks that period when Parliament is in recess and the news-starved press goes berserk with trivia. Here in the colonies, the season was traditionally understood to begin with the presidential primaries - but maybe that changed with 9/11. As the Decider-in-Chief never tires of reminding us, 9/11 changed everything. We live in an age of always-on politics, and so it's all silly, all the time. The danger, of course, is when important matters - like the Constitution of the United States - become targets for trivial thinking.
Cue the proposed flag burning amendment, aka the "Torch the First Amendment" amendment. Unlike the recent attempt to embed unvarnished gay-hating prejudice into our dear old document, the flag fetish referendum stands a very good chance of passing this time around. The most interesting take on the perennial impulse to shout "Fire!" in a crowded politic comes from novelist John Scalzi at Whatever. Eight years ago - hard to believe this silliness has been going this long - Scalzi took a hard look at the burning hole in the center of the flag protection argument: the inefficacy of compulsory reverence. Fetishizing a symbol won't keep people from protesting by destroying a substitute very much like that symbol - and yet that substitute would still be protected by whatever rights to free speech we still have lying around. The effect is still the same, and an amendment is futile.
Last year, Scalzi decided that visual aids were needed, and added the clarifying concept of the VFW test. Take a flag-like object, one identical to Old Glory except that it has dots instead of stars, say, or perhaps has an image of the Hamburgler embedded in the corner, and set it aflame at your local VFW hall. The ass-kicking that would inevitably ensue demonstrates that the symbolism of the flag, and of flag burning, would still be obvious to all in spite of the fact that burning something that's merely flag-like is still protected expression.
So where does it stop, this fetishizing? Where can it stop? How many constitutional amendments are required to kill an idea?
All that the Senate will accomplish in passing a flag burning amendment is to create an burgeoning market for constitutionally-protected protest "flags." It certainly won't put an end to protest itself. Symbols - their meaning, their power, the values they represent - exist only in the mind. Just try putting a fire out there.
Like I said: it's silly.
(Run it up the cross-post and see who salutes...)
Gay-friendly cars defaced in Des Moines
Retrofuck jackholes on the rampage:
Des Moines police are searching for the person or persons behind homophobic vandalism attacks on eight cars in the city over the weekend.The cars were targeted because they bore rainbow stickers.
In three of the instances pictures of naked men were glued to the vehicles and they were sprayed with shaving cream. Five other cars had images of male sex organs and homophobic and racial slurs scratched into them, the Des Moines Register reports.
Fuck these people. Seriously, fuck them. And fuck the stupid fucking homo-hating party that runs all three branches of government and has turned hostility toward the LGBT community into a legitimate political position. FUCK THEM.
you called me strong, you called me weak
Forget being the most hetero of heteros and the Lamb of Steel--we now know who/what Superman really is:
That's right. Superman is an enemy of "family values". Says who? Why that self-appointed Family Values Expert, Katharine DeBrecht. You know, she of "Help, Mom! There are Liberals Under My Bed" . According to the press release emailed out by her publisher (titled: "Superman Becomes an Enemy of Family Values"), World Ahead Publishing, Ms. DeBrecht tries vainly to be as histrionic and ridiculous as possible to hawk some more of her books:
“Liberals in the media and classrooms are already making it hard for parents who believe in traditional values to pass on those morals to their kids. Now it looks like Superman will also be working against us. Reports indicate that not only does the movie imply that Superman and Lois Lane had a child together, but it also has Lois engaged to another man, causing Superman to compete for her affection.”
“Portraying Superman with an out-of-wedlock child and potentially breaking up a family is completely unnecessary. Warner Brothers is marketing this movie to children. It has dozens of toy, clothing, cereal, and fast-food tie-ins. But parents taking their children to see this movie need to be ready to talk with them about it, because Lex Luthor is not the only bad guy in this script.”
No, you what what's unnecessary? You. You are unnecessary. Your vile, hate-marketed-at-children bullshit does nothing to improve the world, Katharine. Un.Nec.Es.Sary.
The press release goes on to speculate the maybe the Man o' Steel will be showing up in future "Help Mom" books because he is: "fathering kids and trying to break up engagements". Oh yes. He's such a bastard, that Superman.
The press release closes with (emphasis mine):
“Superman used to stand for truth, justice, and the American way,” adds DeBrecht. “But parents need to beware because evidently director Bryan Singer has turned the Man of Steal into a deadbeat dad.”
So he's not the Manliest Manly Man, he's not Jesus--he's a Deadbeat Dad and an Enemy of Family Values!
Yeah.
Sure.
Bitches be crazy.
(but your cross-post I will keep)
DC drops opposition to Ten Commandments display
Thou shalt not require rule-following in the display of garish religious sculptures:
More than three weeks after District officials warned an evangelical Christian group about displaying a sculpture of the Ten Commandments on property across the street from the U.S. Supreme Court, they said yesterday that the 850-pound granite monument doesn't need a permit after all.What happened in the interim? Faith and Action's president, the Rev. Robert Schenck claimed they were being “singled out because of the display's religious nature,” launched a petition drive (not mentioned in the article, but found at their website) which gathered thousands of signatures, and assembled a legal team including Judge Roy Moore (who was removed from office in 2003 after refusing to remove a Ten Commandments Monument from the Alabama Judicial Building) and the Alliance Defense Fund, which was founded by Dr. James Dobson.
Officials with the D.C. Department of Transportation had said in a June 2 letter that Faith and Action lacked permission to erect the waist-high sculpture, which sits on the front lawn of the Capitol Hill rowhouse that holds the group's national offices. The officials threatened the group with $300-a-day fines, saying it needed permits from both the Transportation Department and the city's office of historic preservation because the rowhouse is in a part of the city deemed "public" and in a historic district.
…Yesterday, Lars Etzkorn, associate director of the office of public space management administration at the Transportation Department, sent a letter to the group rescinding the earlier warning.
To be clear, the Dept. of Transportation and the Office of Historic Preservation were not seeking to prohibit Faith and Action from erecting the sculpture, but to make sure they secured the proper authorization to do so. But instead of just following the law like everyone else, Faith and Action and their legal team of professional Dominionist bullies made a bunch of noise about being treated unfairly, so it was game over. They don’t have to play by the rules, because expecting the Dominionists to follow them undermines their right to religious freedom.
(Hat tip to Holly.)
File Under: Things You Wouldn’t Have Believed Would Be Happening in America Six Years Ago
The scene: Hardball.
The topic: Should the NY Times staff be charged with treason?
Yes, you read that right. On a show whose host and many of its guests ostensibly do journalism, they chose to discuss whether journalists should be charged with treason.
Video and transcript at the link.
Flag Hags
This picture does not offend me.
It doesn’t offend me any more than pictures of people protesting the war, or protesting soldiers’ funerals with “God Hates Fags” signs. The latter may offend my political sensibilities, sense of propriety, and capacity for logic, but none of those trumps my belief in free speech.
This is one of many things I do not share in common with many members of our Senate, who are, as we speak, one vote shy of passing an amendment to the Constitution which would ban the desecration of the American flag.
The Citizens Flag Alliance, a group pushing for the Senate this week to pass a flag-burning amendment to the Constitution, just reported an alarming, 33 percent increase in the number of flag-desecration incidents this year.The flag hags are still looking for the last vote they need. It won’t be Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid; he’s already announced his intention to vote for the amendment.
The number has increased to four, from three.
…The chamber has scheduled up to four days of debate on the flag-burning amendment this week. If that formula -- one day of Senate debate for each incident of flag burning this year -- were to be applied to other matters, the Senate would need to schedule 12 days of debate to contemplate the number of years before Medicare goes broke, 335 days of debate for each service member killed in Iraq this year and 11 million days of debate on the estimated number of illegal immigrants in the country.
My own private vetoes
Back in April, the Boston Globe had a huge story about the 750 laws enacted since Bush took office that he claimed the right to ignore or break based on executive privilege or signing statements, "official documents in which a president lays out his legal interpretation of a bill for the federal bureaucracy to follow when implementing the new law."
In his signing statements, Bush has repeatedly asserted that the Constitution gives him the right to ignore numerous sections of the bills -- sometimes including provisions that were the subject of negotiations with Congress in order to get lawmakers to pass the bill. He has appended such statements to more than one of every 10 bills he has signed.Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and inveterate party hack Arlen Specter promised to hold hearings on the signing statements at the time, but, after he dragged his feet, earlier this month, the American Bar Association's board of governors unanimously voted to proceed with an investigation, led by a bipartisan "all-star legal panel," which would seek to determine whether Bush's signing statements violate Constitutional law.
''He agrees to a compromise with members of Congress, and all of them are there for a public bill-signing ceremony, but then he takes back those compromises -- and more often than not, without the Congress or the press or the public knowing what has happened," said Christopher Kelley, a Miami University of Ohio political science professor who studies executive power.
Now Specter has demanded an investigation, at which a representative of the Bush administration is scheduled to testify today.
Specter's hearing is about more than the statements. He's been compiling a list of White House practices he bluntly says could amount to abuse of executive power -- from warrantless domestic wiretapping program to sending officials to hearings who refuse to answer lawmakers' questions.Specter says he is "interested to hear from the administration just what research they've done to lead them to the conclusion that they can cherry-pick," but also notes he isn't sure what Congress can do to limit the practice, saying, "We may figure out a way to tie it to the confirmation process or budgetary matters."
Specter and his allies maintain that Bush is doing an end-run around the veto process. In his presidency's sixth year, Bush has yet to issue a single veto that could be overridden with a two-thirds majority in each house.
Instead, he has issued hundreds of signing statements invoking his right to interpret or ignore laws on everything from whistleblower protections to how Congress oversees the Patriot Act.
Shayera, who gets the hat tip, suggests that perhaps Congress would do well to remember that they're meant to be an equal branch of government. "If they really were interested in doing anything, they have subpoena power. It's too bad they've been so busy abrogating their power."
Indeed. Gee, if only there were something Congress could do to get rid of a wantonly law-breaking president. Sigh.
(Crossposted at AlterNet PEEK.)
Clinton Hires Daou
Interesting. I can't quite remember the last time I thought Hillary had such a good idea.
(Pam's got some thoughts.)
Sometimes...
...I can't even manage some snark about supporting the troops. Sometimes, I'm just too sad.
Three words you never want to see in the same story...usually
But if Limbaugh is found to have violated his plea agreement by smuggling illegal prescription drugs into the country, the appalling mental image currently in your head will have been worth it. Almost.
(Cross-posted. Now I gotta go watch a Disney film to get that image out of my mind...)
Question of the Day
What's your favorite movie soundtrack or score?
I'll have to think about this one for a bit, but I've always loved the soundtracks John Hughes put together in his heyday. Mr. Shakes mentions Pulp Fiction as a particular favorite.
My favorite score is probably Michael Nyman's for The Piano. Mr. Shakes says his is The Lord of the Rings. That is a good one. I'm also a fan of nearly any score by Danny Elfman or Thomas Newman.
Oh, Warren…
…how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
(This pretty much makes up for that Schwarzenegger thing.)
Get Your Barf Bags Ready
Washington Whispers: "OK, so Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has made it clear that he doesn't want to run for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008, but that hasn't stopped friends from talking him up for vice president. In fact, allies are pushing him as the perfect match for several Republicans already running for president, including Virginia Sen. George Allen, Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani."How about not?
Says a Bush friend: "I wouldn't be surprised if he becomes vice president."
And, btw, there’s no way Jebbie would be a second on Rudy’s ticket, because Rudy’s only campaigning for the #2 spot at best, anyway. No chance he gets the GOP nom.
