When I joined Twitter in July 2006 I was the 3,365th person to sign up for the 140-character message streaming social network. Now, with more than 190 million users having taken the plunge, I guess you could call me an early adopter of sorts.
See, I've always believed that the Internet -- and by extension new online tools like Twitter -- have the ability to create change because it levels the political playing field tearing down walls that have traditionally separated the powerless and the powerful.
It turns out I may have been wrong -- at least when it comes to a certain half-termer from Alaska.
This week in a San Francisco Federal District Court, a legal odd couple will be on display. Attorney David Boies, who represented Al Gore before the U.S. Supreme Court in the infamous 2000 case ofBush v. Gore, and conservative attorney Ted Olson, who represented George W. Bush, are joining forces to overturn California's Proposition 8. It will be their contention that the initiative passed by voters in 2008 banning same-sex marriage in the Golden State violates the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses of the U.S. Constitution, singles out gays and lesbians for a disfavored legal status, and discriminates on the basis of gender and sexual orientation.
Regardless of which side prevails, experts agree the case is likely to be appealed all the way to the highest court in the land.
It's that time of year again. Some have vowed to hit the gym more often. Others are swearing off cigarettes. For some, coffee has been replaced with copious amounts of socialist green tea. Still others are signing up for community service projects to help improve the world around them.
Yes, many Americans have made their New Year's resolutions. Perhaps the conservative media establishment should do the same.
Try as they will, Conservatives have not really been able to make a good argument that Obama, by moving away from the failed foreign policies of the Bush Administration, has in reality made America less safe. Instead they have responded with a series of knee jerk reactions aimed at the obstruction and rejection of anything and everything that Obama has either done or proposed. Conservatives have fallen back on the now hackneyed idea that they alone are the ones who can keep America safe and that the Democrats in general and liberals in particular will, or deliberately want to, weaken America. In his last book "A Time to Fight" James Webb, decorated Vietnam veteran; former Reagan era SECNAV; Republican turned Democrat; and now Senator from Virginia, devoted an entire chapter to explaining how such an argument by Republicans was no longer tenable or one that they can legitimately promote. Obama has in reality kept in place much of the prior Administration's policies and procedures that are embodied in the Patriot Act, the wiretapping law and the continued operation of Guantanamo. To date the Obama Administration has recaptured an American merchant ship from Somali Pirates and, in concert with federal and local authorities, uncovered a possible terror ring based in New York and Denver.
Anyone who has followed closely the events surrounding the War in Iraq knows that it is not, and was not, the central front in the Global War on Terror (GWOT). Rather, it is the trans Afghanistan-Pakistan border where the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks are and it is here that they continue to operate putting together attacks on London, Madrid, etc. It is from this region that they continue to attack our troops in Afghanistan and beyond that have destabilized large parts of Pakistan. Thus the point has already been proven. The central front in the G.W.O.T. is where the enemy is and not where Bush, Cheney, Coulter, Limbaugh, Malkin, O'Reilly or any other Conservative defines it to be. The ironic thing is that Bush's invasion of Afghanistan was the only brilliant move of his eight years in office. He then went on to drop the ball by invading Iraq and leaving the enemy alone, allowing Al Qaeda to regroup and become as dangerous as they were on 9/10/01. There have been volumes written to the point that the invasion of Iraq did nothing to make America safer. The conclusion of the 9/11 Commission Report states that Iraq had played no part in the attacks of 9/11 and Bush himself would later admit so publicly and on national television. Seeing as it is generally agreed that Iraq was never a factor in the 9/11 attacks, and that Al Qaeda remains open for business on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, there is not much more to say in disproving Conservative claims that the actions of the present Administration, as currently carried out in Iraq, will necessarily jeopardize American security interests. If America is attacked by a resurgent Al Qaeda would that be the fault of the Obama Administration or a result of George Bush's failure to consolidate his initial victory in Afghanistan? Had we spent 800 billion dollars in Afghanistan instead of Iraq what threat if any would we now face? While it is true that Obama has taken ownership of the trans AFPAK conflict, its also true that he inherited from the Bush Administration a set of circumstances there, which are fraught with difficult and dangerous choices, none of which are clear-cut or that guarantee American success.
Many Conservatives will go to the grave insisting that invading Iraq was the right thing to do because they fail to see that their ideas as to what makes America either safe or a great nation may not in fact be always and everywhere valid. There are those on the right who continue to try to make the case that we could have eventually won in Vietnam because we never lost a major combat action against the Communists. They will insist on this very narrow historical fact while at the same time being blind to, or ignoring the reality that Communism in Indochina, at that time, was a vehicle for the achievement of nationalist aims. In their myopic focus on combat capabilities they will continue to ignore the fact that successive South Vietnamese governments were too corrupt to act as a foundation for democracy. They will insist that "American Exceptionalism" would triumph over a people that first took up arms against a foreign invader a thousand years before William the Conqueror left Normandy to invade England in 1066.
If America is attacked again, it won't automatically be the fault of the Barack Obama. What if the attacker was motivated to strike because of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo or the loss of a family member during the occupation of Iraq? What if that attacker was moved to action as a result of the policies of the Bush Administration rather than Barack Obama's decision to reduce troop levels in Iraq? Would that attack be attributed to the current administration or the last? Conservatives have made a big deal about saying that during the Bush years we were not attacked again, but as Richard Wolfe of Newsweek pointed out, terror attacks skyrocketed worldwide after we invaded Iraq. What about those American service personnel that were killed or wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan at the hands of those motivated to action by the invasion of Iraq, don't they count as Americans that have been attacked? More to the point, this country was attacked when the Republicans controlled the Presidency, Congress, and the majority of statehouses. As David Sanger points out in his latest book, "The Inheritance": "The plan for dealing with al Qaeda had been sitting on Condoleezza Rice's desk on the morning of September 11, waiting for discussion." In the final analysis it is almost impossible for Conservatives to make the argument that their policies have made us safer seeing as, according to the Center for International and Strategic Studies, the number of people recruited into Islamic terror organizations soared exponentially after the invasion of Iraq thereby dramatically increasing the number of our potential enemies. Conservatives like Ann Coulter would claim that Bush created "a flytrap for Islamic crazies in Iraq", whereby they could be dispatched with by American forces. It would be more accurate to say that we created a trap of our own within which our troops were needlessly put in harms way for the sake of some misconceived NeoConservative pipe dream. Is it cheaper for a radicalized Muslim to scrape together the cost of a one way ticket to the United States, procure a passport and visa and then forage about this country in search of a terror cell or is it economically and in practical terms more effective to come up with bus fare to Syria and then walk across the border and join in an ongoing insurgency where one could even be paid to carry out attacks against Americans?
We were susceptible to an attack on 9/11 because, among other things, we never thought this sort of thing could happen. We became infinitely safer just by paying attention to security threats thereafter. If we get hit again it may very well be the case that we did so because we did not take the time and spend the money to "harden" critical strategic components of our infrastructure like rail systems, water and power supplies, ports and most importantly chemical plants. Have the failed policies of the Bush era created an opportunity for someone radicalized and now prone to action as a result of those policies to actually carry out an attack on America? If, in the words of Homeland Security expert Stephen Flynn, had we spent billions on infrastructure defense instead of wasting those resources in the Iraq misadventure, we would be infinitely safer. Who then would we legitimately blame for another attack on America, Barack Obama or George Bush and the NeoConservative claque that led us into the Iraq misadventure in the first place?
O'Reilly kicked off the segment with this statement:
I'm a big boy with a big megaphone, and I can defend myself. But many of you can't. If you're labeled a bigot, or punished in the marketplace for holding holding a non-liberal opinion, you can't right that wrong.
And this far-left fascism is very wrong. It must be called out. Fair-minded Americans can disagree on issues, but our freedoms must be protected.
To which I retorted:
So, it's wrong to be labeled "a bigot", even if you are one, but it's fine to accuse people of "far-left fascism". Good to know!
Media Matters highlighted this without comment, under the headline, "Lawyers try to explain to O'Reilly that his 'rights' aren't violated by private criticism":
Biil-O kicks things off with this statement (onscreen wording varies slightly), under the banner "Civil Rights Watch":
I'm a big boy with a big megaphone, and I can defend myself. But many of you can't. If you're labeled a bigot, or punished in the marketplace for holding holding a non-liberal opinion, you can't right that wrong.
And this far-left fascism is very wrong. It must be called out. Fair-minded Americans can disagree on issues, but our freedoms must be protected.
So, it's wrong to be labeled "a bigot", even if you are one, but it's fine to accuse people of "far-left fascism". Good to know!
And this is vital to protecting "our freedoms", which of course, do not include the freedom to marry, if you happen to be gay or lesbian. This is all par for the course, of course. And there's nothing terribly new about it. After all, the slaveholders of Virginia were fierce defenders of "liberty" and "freedom". So we should be used to this by now, right?
Well, not so much, actually. The two lawyers in this clip try ro set O'Reilly straight on the fact that he doesn't have a constitutional right to be free from criticism, but what's going on here is really much deeper than that, and cuts right to the core of the movement conservative mindset, which is basically not just that they have a constitutional right to be free from criticism, but a God-given right to do whatever the hell they want to do without any opposition whatsoever. This is, in short, the rationale of theocracy--but they conceive of it, and try to express it in the language of American secular democracy.
Their goal here is quite Orwellian, to make it impossible to express--much less defend--the actual meaning of free speech for all, and to rewire that language to instead mean the right of conservatives alone to speak without contradiction. And anything short of this total domination means that they are victims.
The O'Reilly Harassment Machine keeps spinning. Last night on The Factor, O'Reilly called Think Progress "insects," said Center for American Progress CEO John Podesta was "driving the hate industry," and that blogger Amanda Terkel was "harming a rape victim and her family." Let's deconstruct these idiotic insults.
For starters, Think Progress clearly aren't powerless insects, but they have gotten under O'Reilly's skin. They have launched a campaign to compel O'Reilly's leading corporate sponsors (including AT&T, Johnson&Johnson, Capital One, UPS, Audi, Sharp, Hyundai, P&G, Chrysler, Mercedes Benz, Ford, and Bayer) to end his ambush journalism. And as I wrote yesterday, they've got a list chronicling 40 instances of this deplorable practice. This campaign has already been effective; a Ford spokesman agreed with the criticism of O'Reilly, whom he called "hopelessly pig-headed," and Capital One also expressed regret and claimed they don't endorse O'Reilly's views. This is fantastic pressure that hopefully will curb O'Reilly's "gotcha" journalism that he plays off as accurate investigative reporting.
Ready to shut down Bill O'Reilly's Harassment Machine? Think Progress has responded to O'Reilly's ambush of blogger Amanda Terkel by launching a campaign demanding accountability from O'Reilly's corporate advertisers. This certainly wasn't O'Reilly's first journalistic ambush; in fact, Think Progress counts 40 instances in which O'Reilly has used his henchmen producers to go after everyone from Barack Obama to Bill Moyers to our own Robert Greenwald.
Going after O'Reilly through his corporate sponsors seems like a fitting punitive measure, considering O'Reilly's manic obsession with his imaginary enemy NBC and their parent company GE. O'Reilly even managed to use the Terkel ambush to continue his assault on his network nemesis, which was particularly strange since Terkel has nothing to do with NBC whatsoever. (In fact, as Terkel told Keith Olbermann, she derived her initial report from a News Hounds post on O'Reilly's despicable comments regarding the rape of Jennifer Moore.) It was even odder when O'Reilly tried desperately to make the connection between Terkel, NBC, GE, and Iran in less than one minute!
The bottom line is O'Reilly's thuggish brand of gotcha journalism has got to end, and you can hold O'Reilly to a higher standard by dropping his corporate sponsors a quick note telling them to shut down the O'Reilly Harassment Machine.
Bill O'Reilly took his history of harassment to a deplorable new low last weekend. He sent FOX producer Jesse Waters to ambush Think Progress' Amanda Terkel for highlighting O'Reilly's outrageous comments about the rape and murder of Jennifer Moore in the context of his recent appearance at the Alexa Foundation for rape victims. O'Reilly clearly said--and there's audio proof--that Moore and women who dress in a certain way and consume too much alcohol basically bring rape upon themselves. But did O'Reilly bring up those atrocious comments on last night's show? Hell no!
According to Terkel, "Here are the two things that O'Reilly conveniently left out of his segment:"
- His Original Comments. O'Reilly said that he posted the full Aug. 2 interview about Moore on his website. (It's here.) But he did not repeat his comments on air, nor did he try to defend them - perhaps recognizing that they are indefensible. These comments elicited outrage from more than 900 signatories to a petition by the Concerned Citizens Against Sexual Violence.
- His Harassment. O'Reilly never mentioned to his viewers how he scored that interview with me. He never contacted me for a statement or the chance to appear on his show before deploying his harassment machine. Instead, he sent his producers to stake out my apartment, follow me for two hours, and accost me while I was on vacation in Virginia (and the least prepared to recall a post I had written three weeks earlier).
So O'Reilly had Waters stalk and harass Terkel while on vacation; accuse her of dishonesty for not recalling there and then an unrelated part of that radio segment regarding Mel Gibson's drunken anti-semitic comments (which O'Reilly actually compared to Moore's rape!); and then used this video to continue his delusional beef with NBC. O'Reilly even managed to include GE and Iran in the same conspiratorial breath. Now you tell me who's in dire need of a "Reality Check?"
He's done it again. Bill O'Reilly's stalker-producer Jesse Watters conducted another stalking-ambush, this time of Think Progress's Amanda Terkel. She describes the setup.
- The Stalking: Watters and his camera man accosted me at approximately 3:45 p.m. on Saturday, March 21, in Winchester, VA, which is a two-hour drive from Washington, DC. My friend and I were in this small town for a short weekend vacation and had told no one about where we were going. I can only infer that the two men staked out my apartment and then followed me for two hours. Looking back, my friend and I remember seeing their tan SUV following us for much of the trip.
Well, it seems the Republicans have decided their electoral troubles all came down to that "macaca" video of George Allen. McClatchy is reporting that the NRCC has dispatched numerous Republican operatives to begin tracking key Democratic congressional targets:
The National Republican Congressional Committee is sending out video "trackers" to ask provocative questions of Democratic members of Congress. The trackers, who are congressional committee staffers, were earlier reported by Congress Daily, a specialty publication distributed largely on Capitol Hill.
Bill O'Reilly's attack on homeless veterans was arguably one of the nastiest, most noxious news stories FOX News spewed during the Presidential election cycle, which is saying a lot. In January 2008, O'Reilly went after John Edwards for calling attention to the 200,000 homeless veterans sleeping under bridges and on the streets. It was a figure substantiated by the Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Alliance to End Homelessness, but O'Reilly didn't let a little thing like the facts prevent him from saying there weren't homeless vets out there. When O'Reilly eventually back-tracked, it was only so far as to state that if there were homeless vets, there weren't many of them. What's more, he said their homelessness was due to their own addictions and mental illnesses, not our economy.
Brave New Films and groups like Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America immediately fought back. We released FOX Attacks "Non-Existent" Veterans" along with a petition demanding O'Reilly apologize to homeless vets, which over 17,000 people signed. Of course, when homeless vets attempted to deliver the petition to the FOX building in New York, they were denied entrance and ambushed by an O'Reilly camera crew--one of FOX's favorite faux journalistic practices.
Flash forward to last night, when O'Reilly continued to blame everything from homeless vets to Rush Limbaugh's incendiary comments on the "Far-Left Smear Machine," as he likes to call us. O'Reilly even used a handy little Far-Left Smear Chart to illustrate exactly how the machine works.
Our contributor Lee Camp is sometimes pigeon-holed as a comedian, but there's more to him than that - for instance, this week he unearthed a 20-year old memo by the producer of Inside Edition, apologizing for Bill O'Reilly's on-set meltdown:
Manchester - The New Hampshire Republican Party has quit "with regret" as a co-sponsor of tomorrow night's nationally televised GOP forum on FOX News.
The 8 p.m. event at Saint Anselm College -- the last debate before Tuesday's primary -- became controversial when FOX refused to include Ron Paul.
In a press release, state Republican Party chairman Fergus Cullen said, "We believe all recognized major candidates should have an equal opportunity to participate in pre-primary debates and forums. This principle applies to tonight's debates on ABC as well as Sunday's planned forum on FOX. The New Hampshire Republican Party believes Congressmen Ron Paul and Duncan Hunter should be included in the FOX forum on Sunday evening. Our mutual efforts to resolve this difference have failed."
FOX News issued a one-sentence statement this afternoon from its vice president of news, David Rhodes: "We look forward to presenting a substantive forum which will serve as the first program of its kind this election season."
Given that it's Fox, probably the only program of its kind this election season.
In other Fox News News, Bill O'Reilly had another meltdown, this one notable for the fact that it happened off-air, and within striking distance of a presidential candidate--Barack Obama, no less. The Secret Service was not amused:
Fox News host Bill O'Reilly got into a confrontation with an Obama aide after O'Reilly started screaming at him as he tried to get Barack Obama's attention following a rally here. O'Reilly eventually did chat briefly with Obama and asked him to be a guest on his show....
The incident was triggered when O'Reilly--with a Fox News crew shooting--was screaming at Obama National Trip Director Marvin Nicholson "Move" so he could get Obama's attention, according to several eyewitnesses....
O'Reilly grabbed Nicholson's arm and shoved him, another eyewitness said. Nicholson, who is 6'8, said O'Reilly called him "low class."
....Secret Service agents who were nearby flanked O 'Reilly after he pushed Nicholson. They told O'Reilly he needed to calm down and get behind the fence-like barricade that contained the press.
Is this all part of a larger rightwing meltdown??? Consider Glenn Greenwald's look at Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Reynolds getting all hepped up about "social unraveling" if Obama should lose...
Bill O'Reilly claims he has beaten back the dark forces that declared war on Christmas. Despite his best efforts, he may be surprised to find what a pack of proven progressives are saying about "his" holiday.
Witness the gathering of Crafting Liberally that took place last Sunday in New York. Far from the heathen celebration you might imagine among self-identified liberals getting in touch with their handiwork, these quilters, jewelers and assorted other crafters were looking forward to Christmas. Lisa, teaching the art of folding an origami crane, even suggested using her creations as tree ornaments.
Is it any surprise that liberals enjoy the Christmas season? Giving, sharing...changing course (Scrooge), finding one's heart (the Grinch) -- lessons Bush and Cheney would benefit from.
And after all, what neocon ever gave a damn for a Middle Eastern boy born to a poor unwed mother?
Liberals should never run from Christmas just because O'Reilly wants to claim it. This season is too full of strong symbols to cede to the other side.
But we don't need to out-argue him...we just need to out-craft him.
On this last night of Channukah, and in the full swing of the seasonal spirit, Happy Holidays.
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