The first one is The National Review. Not writing about them to encourage anyone to give to them, but more to ask a question: How is it there is a high profile and very well established (founded by Buckley after all) right wing publication that actually needs to beg for donations from ordinary readers? No doubt their likely pitiful subscriber base and meagre online advertising doesn't cover their expenses, but there's just no way that there isn't a rich GOP daddy Koch/Murdoch/Scaife/Coors/Devos/Hedgefund rentsucker/etc willing to fund them as a loss leader for more wars and tax cuts. So why the begging? Do America's owners just enjoy making middle class conservatives pay for a propaganda outlet to advocate for policies which actually hurt the middle class? Is it just a good way to keep the wingnut readership emotionally invested? No way Jonah, Lopez et al like doing the begging. What's the point?
Atrios is the second one, and worth giving if you can spare it. When I first started reading blogs, I really didn't get the fuss about Atrios, those odd short posts and a lingo you need to learn, but over time his ability to sift out reams of material and find items worth more attention becomes impressive. He's also pretty good at explaining economics in very short spaces. Finally, he's an under-credited wit in coining or popularizing humourous terms. I spent about 20 minutes and came up with (in no particular order):
Earlier this week, I cheered Paul Krugman for a trio of direct and confrontational posts. As we're watching Republicans and Democrats lining up to gut Social Security, and the gelling of elite opinion to repeat the mistakes of the Great Depression, I want to quote a few pieces from one of the Depression's best economic histories, J.K. Galbraith's recounting of the period, The Great Crash 1929. As the elites seem determined to create a third depression, it is instructive how familiar Galbraith's recountings are (all added emphasis mine).
Then as now, there was the crushing weight of an orthodoxy of inaction: (pp185-6)
The rejection of both fiscal (tax and expenditure) and monetary policy amounted precisely to a rejection of all affirmative government economic policy. The economic advisers of the day had both the unanimity and the authority to force the leaders of both parties to disavow all the available steps to check deflation and depression. In its own way this was a marked achievement -- a triumph of dogma over thought. The consequences were profound.
Glenn Greenwald has recently posted a very abstract jeremiad about our corrupt "establishment," with multiple concurring citations from Atrios,Paul Krugman,Matt Taibbi,Armando, (Big Tent Democrat on TalkLeft), and even Eliot Spitzer, recently returned from the dead by a collective realization that he was right about everything.
Our "establishment" is corrupt, and public outrage about the AIG bonuses is a very good thing, because it scares the corrupt "elite," and fear is the only force that can control those monsters.
This is only half right, as far as it goes, but it doesn't go quite far enough, and stops at a politically safe distance from the Oval Office, which is exactly where the buck is supposed to stop, and where Barack Obama continues to enable and support the most corrupt financial "establishment" since exactly the same corrupt "establishment" produced the Great Depression.
The whole chorus is singing in unison about the corruption of Henry Paulson and Tim Geithner, and somehow forgetting that Mr. Obama was already supporting humongous give-aways to corrupt banks in their most blatant conceivable manifestation, during his last debate with John McCain, when he endorsed Paulson's grab at an absolutely unrestricted mountain of money, $700 billion, and it wasn't just a blank check that Obama wanted Congress to sign over to Paulson... it even included pre-emptive immunity from prosecution!
Last September, Treasury Secretary Paulson, from Goldman Sachs, drew up a terse 3-page memo outlining his bailout proposal. The plan specified that whatever he and other Treasury officials did (thus including his subordinates, also from Goldman Sachs), could not be challenged legally or undone, much less prosecuted. This condition enraged Congress, which rejected the bailout in its first incarnation.
It now looks as if Paulson had good reason to put in a fatal legal clause blocking any clawback of funds given by the Treasury to AIG's counterparties. This is where public outrage should be focused.
Instead, the leading Congressional shepherds of the bailout legislation - along with Obama, who came out in his final, Friday night presidential debate with McCain strongly in favor of the bailout in Paulson's awful "short" version - have been highlighting the AIG executives receiving bonuses, not the company's counterparties.
So Obama was already on board the gravy train for Goldman Sachs and AIG on October 15, 2008, and celebrating "the financial rescue plan that Senator McCain and I supported," with zero accountabilty, and not even the foggiest idea where the money would go, except wherever Henry Paulson wanted to put it.
And now that Mr. Obama is driving that gravy train, instead of just tooting its whistle in Congress and Presidential debates, it just keeps rolling faster and faster, with yet another trillion dollars on track for "quantitative easing," yet another exotic financial device that almost none of us had ever heard of, only a few weeks ago.
I'm glad that the AIG bonuses have finally waked up a little outrage in the slumbering public, and I'm glad that Krugman and James Galbraith and Glenn Greenwald and Atrios are denouncing the corruption of our governing "elite," or "establishment," or whatever they choose to call it, but it's absurd to denounce so many soldiers and under-bosses of our homegrown financial mafia, and yet leave out the kingpin of the whole operation, the capo di tutti i capi, Barack Obama, the infinitely generous godfather of the most blatantly corrupt mob of financiers since an almost identical gang of thieves produced the Great Depression.
In 2008, one first-time progressive candidate in a key congressional district went through four campaign managers before losing.
Another spent $47,000 to retain a media firm that never produced a single TV ad. Another spent $40,000 on field consultants -- enough to pay 10 field staffers for two months, but which only bought a few hand-holding consultant calls. And others wasted thousands of dollars and weeks of staff time designing C-rate websites.
Every election cycle, inexperienced candidates who run on bold progressive ideas -- candidates who political insiders predict "can't win" -- come within a few points of victory. But too many lose winnable races due to the mistakes and inefficiencies of their campaigns.
Who is getting the backs of these progressive candidates? Who is helping them run competent, efficient campaigns so they can win? Right now, nobody.
...The Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) will fill this void - providing needed infrastructure and strategic advice to progressive candidates so they can run first-class campaigns and win.
One thing I realized at MoveOn -- and that many folks across the blogosphere have written about in recent election cycles -- is that it makes no sense for the progressive community to raise tons of money for candidates who then spend it inefficiently, including on bloated consultant costs. We need to step up and help progressive candidates not just raise money, but run effective campaigns and win.
Why won't what Atrios calls the zombie lie (that Bob Casey Sr was supposedly denied a 1992 speaking slot for being pro-life) go away and die?
Probably because Bob Casey Jr. continues to spread it.
Today, at "God-o-Meter" (a joint Beliefnet.org/Time project), Dan Gilgoff posts this interview with Senator Casey, where the lie is given fresh life:
[Gilgoff:] Many pro-life Democrats were pushing for the opportunity for you to speak at the convention because of what it would represent symbolically, since your father was famously denied a speaking role at the 1992 convention over his pro-life views. Were you pushing for a speaking slot for that same reason?
[Casey:] We were invited to speak by Senator Obama's campaign and were grateful for the opportunity. But when you're in your first 18 months in the Senate, you shouldn't expect it. So I didn't ask.
Well, I'm working hard for the collective up here in Soviet Canuckistan since we had our holiday last week. Naturally, as you'd guess it was for Queen Victoria's birthday. Don't ask me, I'm no monarchist, I'd rather have a Tommy Douglas day since he is the Greatest Canadian as the founder of UHC up here.
Anyway, came across two great posts to send echoing through the chamber. In addition to GlennWSmith's comment on elitism, Atrios seperately had some thoughts:
I try not to engage in mindreading, but I've spent a lot of time trying to diagnose the underlying causes and symptoms of Broderitis. The only consistent thing I've been able to come up with is that such people are incredibly elitist. When they speak of a "national consensus" they speak only of an imagined elite consensus which just happens to align with their own political preferences. The nation is "divided" when it disagrees with them, and "united" when it agrees. Democracy is distasteful to them, as they "know" that the rubes must not really be able to have their say in how their country is run.
The weird state of affairs which this country experienced for much of the 20th century, with a substantial number of moderate Republicans and a Democratic party filled with conservative Dixiecrats, gave an immense amount of power to unelected Washington elites who set about always trying to define this mythical "center." The lack of clear difference between the parties elevated pesonality above policy, and left the dirty details of such things to technocrats.
Hopefully those days are over, no matter how much wankers like Broder and Rodriguez squeal about how awful it is that educated voters get to have their say.
Movement conservatism started off as a racket. Movement conservatism has always been about exacerbating and then profiting from existing cultural, social, and economic resentments. There was never any fall from an original ideological Eden. The corruption was there from the start. Packer is quite right to emphasize how the political and popular success of movement conservatism owes everything to its legitimization of a politics of resentment that arose in the 1960s. Movement conservatism has nothing without Hatred of the Liberal, a point reinforced not least by the image with which Joyner chooses to adorn his post.
It's quite nice that Joyner deplores Coulter-level books and says their crudity is part of the reason the GOP is in trouble. However, this class of stuff is just a less sophisticated version of commonplace rhetoric you see emanating from everywhere else on the right these days. And if Joyner wants to dump it, fine, but the brute fact is that without accusations like, say, that Barack Obama is an un-American socialist, well, the GOP might as well just concede the election immediately. And everyone knows it. The right just cannot win if it renounces the politics of resentment, and that's all there is to it. You can't scrub ugly. You can't reboot Soviet Communism without perpetrating once more its rottenness, and you can't retool movement conservatism without it eventually fucking up royally.
Which is why I see no reason to believe that invocations of a "pure, timeless" conservatism are anything more than so much self-serving horseshit. If there were any substance or value to it as an intellectual concept, first of all, it would sound a lot less vapid. Sorry, "a belief in free markets, free people, and in the greatness of the American people and the American nation" is sonorous doxa, pure and simple. None of these terms means anything as far as policy goes and in the real world can be used to justify pretty much any absurdity, like, say, an immensely disastrous, ill-conceived invasion and occupation of a foreign nation justified by utterly disingenuous bullcrap.
Down in the updates to both his pieces, Greenwald praises Tim Noah and John Cole for publishing meaningful apologies and rejections of their earlier viewpoints which led them to support the invasion. What's missing, and what I'd like to do is take a moment to remember some people who got it right. The world had gone mad in 2002-2003, so it is all the more important to look back and note who managed to keep their heads and call things accurately 5 years ago.
These are the people we need to commend and look to for guidance come the next purported existential threat to our safety. I wish I could say I was one of them. I wish I could say I marched against the war here in Toronto (yes, there was a protest here). I wish I could say I wasn't beguiled by the belief that no one could tell lies this preposterous without getting called out by the press, that maybe it was just a good bluff to get Saddam to disarm without firing a shot, or that maybe they really knew what they were doing and it could work out well. I'm happy to say I wasn't for the war, but I wasn't opposed to it like I should have been, watching the evidence and spotting the tricks the way the people below did. So my hat is off to them, and here is my homage:
It'd be nice if our senators would stop wasting time debating which citizens they should be condemning.
Meanwhile, showing that as usual they understand this game much better, the Republicans have introduced a measure in the House to *commend* Rush Limbaugh.
There are things the Senate could actually do to deal with Rush Limbaugh. One, cut funding for his radio stream to go out through armed forces radio. Two, push for localized ownership of radio stations.
A few months ago, Democratic Senators tried to resurrect the Fairness Doctrine, which was ridiculous. There's no public support for content regulations, nor should there be. Now, of course Democrats should break up the media conglomerates that profit from hate speech. Limbaugh has a right to shout from a park bench, start a blog, or run a radio show like anyone else; the media structure that allows him a mega-sized megaphone on thousands of stations around the country is purely a result of regulatory capture of the FCC by corporate interests. Incidentally, this structure is what encourages violence and sexual prurient rap and rock lyrics, crappy news, drive time right-wing shock jocks, and trash culture in general.
Should the Democratic House and Senate actually come out and start making noise about media conglomerates profiting from Rush Limbaugh-like hate speech, you can bet he'll clean up his act. Meanwhile, stop the condemning of speech. It's silly.
The great Carl Levin-authored Democratic plan to own the war is on schedule, as now Norm Coleman wants a withdrawal, the same withdrawal that bipartisan groups are going to endorse because it's not actually, you know, a withdrawal.
Republican Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota says he now supports withdrawing 5,000 troops from Iraq before the end of the year, a plan proposed by Sen. John Warner of Virginia.
5000 troops, wow. That's amazing. So we'll only have 35,000 more troops in Iraq than we had just after the public voted to end the war in November, 2006. Awesome. How bipartisan.
Seriously, the John Warner retirement festivities a few days ago were just nauseating. Warner's a vain Republican that sends other people to die for his ego. I just don't get the 'he was so wonderful and oh check out his marriage to Elizabeth Taylor and also what a smart wise man he knew a lot about missiles' line that came from every news outlet all at once. Warner voted for Bush's war and kept voting for it for five years. That's a very bad, not a very good, thing. And it's not bipartisanship or independence of mind. It's just being manipulated by a stupid, craven greedy, and bloodthirsty spoiled brat, at best.
Honestly, this doesn't seem like brain surgery to me -- the chance-taking, things-shaking-upping position to take would be to join Bill Richardson in calling for a real withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. The fact that none of the main three candidates have engaged with each other on the Iraq issue and, instead, all seem to have combined to prevent efforts by Biden (from the right) and Richardson (from the left) to make this a big deal seems pretty weird to me.
I know lots of people want the grand netroots to make our grand endorsement of the one true Presidential candidate and thereby rock the foundations of the universe, but, um, speaking only for every person who has ever blogged, ever, anywhere, I'll point out that by and large I don't want to endorse someone who wants to keep troops in Iraq. And I certainly can't get excited or advocate for someone who thinks that we should continue our merry adventure abroad, regardless of how much I dislike Clinton, because as far as I can tell Edwama have the exact same position as Clinton. I'm not going to be intellectually dishonest that way and pretend there are distinctions so that I can advocate for a non-Clinton named candidate, but even if I were to throw away my credibility that way you wouldn't believe me and I wouldn't change one person's mind.
Also, while I'm doing a bit of ranting, stupid articles on what the 'netroots' does or does not do, such as this one, or this one, to take but two examples, that ignore the fact that no top-tier Democrat differs from Clinton on Iraq, are really really stupid. They are much stupider than articles (like this one by Art Levine or this one by the usually-very-good Kevin Drum) that just whine inaccurately about what 'the blogosphere' should have done as if the blogosphere is some top-down organization with centralized management that controls the Democratic party leadership rather than a network of people with somewhat highly trafficked websites held in mild disdain by most Democrats on the Hill with any decision-making authority or useful information. Although to be fair to the previous two really stupid articles, the latter two stupid articles were pretty stupid.
I've been looking forward to reading Matt Bai's book, The Argument, for months now. In the circles I run- which include Democracy Alliance donors, netroots activists, and Clinton administration folks, all of which are central characters in the book- everybody was buzzing about it, and more than a few people were more than a little nervous about what he would have to say.
I have to say, from a pure reading pleasure point of view, it was worth the wait. I feared that it would be one of those books that, since I already knew most of the stories told in it, that it would be pretty boring- one of those books that I had to read to know what nasty thing he said about whom, but not something I would enjoy slogging through. I turned out to be wrong, because Bai is an engaging writer who can be very funny in his writing a lot of the time.
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