Catching Up On DIGBY

Thursday, June 08, 2006

The Theme

by digby

I cannot say that I'm entirely surprised by the Busby results in CA-50 on Tuesday. The minute I heard her gaffe, I knew it would become an iconic symbol of the Republican's meme for this mid-term --- Democrats are stealing elections by having illegal aliens vote. They can piggyback on the Democratic drumbeat of the last few years about stolen elections and rile up their racist base all at the same time. It's tailor made for them.

Blogging from Hell

by digby

No, I'm not in Las Vegas. I was actually hoping to be the official "not at Yearly Kos" liberal blogger. (Think of me as that one member of the cabinet who doesn't attend the State of The Union in case somebody bombs the Capitol.) I figured there needed to be at least one of us out here who is not hungover, busy being feted by the Democratic party poohbahs or making time with some previously unknown blog-hottie and so would have the time to do serious blogging about serious things while everyone else was having too much fun to document the ongoing atrocities. Alas, I began to suspect last night that all the coolest bloggers in the world gathered in Vegas and conspired with BlogSpot to make me entirely irrelevant.

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Job Description

by digby

Oh for Christ's sake. Via Americablog I see the WaPo published this ridiculous nonsense from George Will:

By 1987, when President Ronald Reagan gave his first speech on the subject, 20,798 Americans had died, and his speech, not surprisingly, did not mention any connection to the gay community. No president considers it part of his job description to tell the country that the human rectum, with its delicate and absorptive lining, makes anal-receptive sexual intercourse dangerous when HIV is prevalent.

I don't know why. The whole country discussed the president's own personal rectum for weeks, in great detail, two years before. People couldn't stop talking about it. I don't know why he needed to be so polite about it when it came to AIDS.

Monday, June 05, 2006

The Vessel Intuition

by digby

Taking a trip through neglected posts from last week when my blog imploded, I find (via Yglesias) that the Wall Street Journal has finally reviewed Ramesh Ponnuru's pathetic flop "The Party Of Death" and surprisingly wrote this:

"It doesn't matter to Mr. Ponnuru that this argument flies in the face of a complex intuition that seems to underlie the American ambivalence: Invisible to the naked eye, lacking body or brain, feeling neither pleasure nor pain, radically dependent for life support, the early embryo, though surely part of the human family, is distant and different enough from a flesh-and-blood newborn that when the early embryo's life comes into conflict with other precious human goods or claims, the embryo's life may need to give way."

Whoa. That, like, makes sense and everything. Yglesias adds:

Ponnuru responds with what amounts to an effort at burden shifting, pointing out that this kind of vague appeal to intuition isn't an argument per se. This is a point I'm sympathetic to as a general matter. But to the best of my knowledge, though abortion rules have varied widely no society has actually considered the deliberate destruction of an early-stage embryo as on a par with deliberate murder of a human being, nor the accidental death of such an embryo (which is very common) as on a par with the accidental death of a human being. Thus, it seems reasonable to me to say that the burden here lies with Ponnuru, and that Berkowitz is merely observing that Ponnuru's argument seemed unpersuasive in light of its wildly counterintuitive consequences.

Bought And Paid For

by digby

Sebastian Mallaby and Paul Krugman both have columns today excoriating the Senate for what it's about to do on behalf of useless parasites like Paris Hilton and Brandon Davis. It is infuriating that some Democrats are signing on to this bullshit.

Mallaby:

For most of the past century, the case for the estate tax was regarded as self-evident. People understood that government has to be paid for, and that it makes sense to raise part of the money from a tax on "fortunes swollen beyond all healthy limits," as Theodore Roosevelt put it. The United States is supposed to be a country that values individuals for their inherent worth, not for their inherited worth. The estate tax, like a cigarette tax or a carbon tax, is a tool for reducing a socially damaging phenomenon -- the emergence of a hereditary upper class -- as well as a way of raising money.

But now the House has voted to repeal the estate tax, and the Senate may do the same this week. Republicans are picking up support from renegade Democrats, such as Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Bill Nelson of Florida, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Max Baucus of Montana. Several more may go over to the dark side if a "compromise" bill, which would achieve nearly everything that abolitionists dream of, is introduced in the Senate. President Bush, who has already muscled a temporary repeal of the estate tax into law, would be delighted to sign a bill making abolition permanent.

So much for the "populism" of these Red State hypocrites. There can be no reason for doing this other than to pay off contributors. If a Democrat from Nebraska can't make the argument that he or she refuses to give tax breaks to movie stars then he or she needs to get into another line of business.

Krugman writes:

The campaign for estate tax repeal has largely been financed by just 18 powerful business dynasties, including the family that owns Wal-Mart.

You may have heard tales of family farms and small businesses broken up to pay taxes, but those stories are pure propaganda without any basis in fact. In particular, advocates of estate tax repeal have never been able to provide a single real example of a family farm sold to pay estate taxes.

Nonetheless, the estate tax is up for a vote this week. First, Republicans will try to repeal the estate tax altogether. If that fails, they'll offer a compromise that isn't really a compromise, like a plan suggested by Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, that would cost almost as much as full repeal, or a plan suggested by Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, that is only slightly cheaper.

In each case, the crucial vote will be procedural: if 60 senators vote to close off debate, estate tax repeal or something close to it will surely pass. Any senator who votes for cloture but against estate tax repeal — which I'm told is what John McCain may do — is simply a hypocrite, trying to have it both ways.

But will the Senate vote for cloture? The answer depends on two groups of senators: Democrats like Mr. Baucus who habitually stake out "centrist" positions that give Republicans almost everything they want, and moderate Republicans like Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island who consistently cave in to their party's right wing. Will these senators show more spine than they have in the past?

In the interest of stiffening those spines, let me remind senators that this isn't just a fiscal issue, it's also a moral issue. Congress has already declared that the budget deficit is serious enough to warrant depriving children of health care; how can it now say that it's worth enlarging the deficit to give Paris Hilton a tax break?

I also think it's important to not that an active duty Army captain with two years experience makes $38,656 a year.

Did They?

by digby

Atrios links to this from Evan Bayh:

Bayh calmly answered that “I wouldn’t cast the same vote today as I did then.” He noted that “the French believed that (there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq), the Germans believed that, the Russians believed that, everybody believed he [Saddam Hussein] had weapons of mass destruction.”

Yes, we've heard that. Apparently, it's supposed to excuse the fact that the administration ignored its own government, but whatever. This trope about France, Russia and Germany is dragged out with such frequency it's become a matter of faith. But is it true?

Punked

by digby

The excellent Steve Benen, pinch hitting over at Washington Monthly, highlights this rather stunning story from the LA Times in which we learn that the Army is eliminating the prohibition against "humiliating and degrading" treatment from the new edition of the field manual:

The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans "humiliating and degrading treatment," according to knowledgeable military officials, a step that would mark a further, potentially permanent, shift away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.

The decision could culminate a lengthy debate within the Defense Department but will not become final until the Pentagon makes new guidelines public, a step that has been delayed. However, the State Department fiercely opposes the military's decision to exclude Geneva Convention protections and has been pushing for the Pentagon and White House to reconsider, the Defense Department officials acknowledged.

Sunday, June 04, 2006

Laughin' With Yo Homies

by digby

I write a lot about tribal identity, specifically conservative tribal identity, and I think it's an issue we need to think about in order to understand how our politics really work. Mostly, I have felt throughout my adult life, since Reagan anyway, that I didn't have much of a tribe, certainly not a political tribe. The left has been defined for so many years by the exaggerated cartoon image created by the wingnuts that it's often been difficult to even admit you are a liberal, much less publicly identify and congregate with others explicitly on that basis. You'd pick an issue or a candidate, maybe. You'd speak in a sort of code. But you rarely gathered in one place as liberals or revel joyously in calling yourself one.

Saturday, June 03, 2006

Puppies

by digby

There are a bunch of posts today on the subject of media narrative that are very much worth reading as a series. I'm going to link them all below.

This discussion about media narratives is incredibly important. We must not forget that a great many people are infected with these media storylines (although according to this fascinating analysis by Stirling Newberry, they are less infected than we think.) But there is one group that is almost completely controlled by it and that's the political establishment. The blogosphere and other forms of alternative media provide some other voices, but in the main, the beltway's relationship to the people is almost entirely constructed by the media narrative. And it's killing Democrats.

The Mood of The Country

by digby

I read this series of posts over on TPM and got really depressed. A number of readers wrote in to either agree with or criticize Josh for taking the New Yorker to task for perpetuating the same old creaky political narrative that we've been hearing for the last 25 years.

This one, in particular, made me feel very, very tired:

I was holding back, but dude?!?

"The vast majority of Democrats totally understand that Dems running in reddish states can't have stereotypically liberal positions on hot-button social and cultural issues. I think everybody gets that."