The Raven' s Blog, Web Log of Eric Ferguson: Second Half of October Archive

Reactions from tonight's Democratic debate
October 30

Tonight MSNBC presented maybe the worst moderated debate of this campaign. The only one that sticks out as competing was also moderated by Tim Russert, which I doubt is a coincidence. Tonight Russert was helped by Brian Williams, but that didn't help. Their questions managed to combine a focus on the horse race with attempts to provoke personal conflict between the candidates. Especially early, the questions were along the lines of "tell us about the hypocrisy of the person next to you", though really what they were after was prompting the others to go after Clinton. They would have done it anyway, and it's not the moderators' job to provoke them to it. It's like they're more interested in the show than the debate. It might explain why when Tony Snow quit as the acting president's press secretary, his constant sparring with reporters instead of just answering questions was considered praiseworthy.

Russert especially is fond of "gotcha" questions. If someone's caught in a lie then OK, but he searches for ways to embarrass the candidates instead of digging up something important. In an earlier debate he gave Clinton one of her better moments when he tried to pin on her something Bill once said, and she deftly pointed out that she was the candidate. Russert didn't learn and tried again tonight. The subject was Social Security but that's beside the point, it was a dumb question referring to something Bill said in 1998. Russert tried it with Kucinich too, asking about the report that Shirley MacClaine said in her book that Kucinich saw a UFO, which is a necessary question for Kucinich to answer, but he got it in the "lightning round", which meant just seconds to answer it. It's amazing Kucinich got any time, since about half the time outside the lightning round went to Clinton, Obama got a lot, Edwards some, and the other four were set decoration. It's like they appropriated time according to poll standing, but I hasten to point out that press preference preceded any polling.

A few other interesting bits:

The other candidates seem to be getting irritated with Richardson claiming to have the best resume. He has a point, but he doesn't have an agenda, just a resume. My observation is such candidates are less likely to win than someone who wants the office in order to accomplish something specific, not just accomplish something.
Several things bug me about Clinton, but one was in clear display tonight: she can't give a straight answer.
Obama's best moment was when Clinton did her usual talking around a question about releasing some documents and he seized on the lack of secretiveness of Bush, and the crying need for transparency, not just more of the same.
Dodd is impressing me more and more. I still agree most with Kucinich, but I have to admit that Dodd seems to do better at getting others to follow. He showed guts by threatening a filibuster of the FISA bill for granting immunity to telecom companies, and he was the first to oppose Michael Mukasey's nomination as AG, and in both others have joined him. Tonight he combined a resume, good specific ideas, and a clear agenda. He's in a clear second place in my personal poll, and gaining on Kucinich.
To give Kucinich his due, he has started seeking impeachment of Bush. Regardless of whether he gets anywhere with it, it's the right thing to do. He's still the only one seeking a single-payer medical system.
To give Dodd some due, a couple specific things he mentioned was the carbon tax being more realistic than waiting for alternative fuels, and that a bigger concern than Iran is China. It was Biden however who mentioned Pakistan first, and he and Dodd are right that it's a bigger concern for us than Iran. Hey, Clinton never would have thought of that stuff until it came up in poll questions. Is it really so bad to have an original thinker as president? We have several, so why is Clinton leading?
Though I'm not fond of the moderators' "let's you and him fight" manner of running the debate, I admit it's possible having the frontal attacks on Clinton for refusing to give straight answers might have been necessary to get more viewers to notice it. Maybe it will get them past the "she looks so presidential" crap. Any answer serves as an example but to pick one, look at her answer on Social Security and tell me she addressed it all. So she's in favor of "fiscal responsibility", whoopee, and she wants yet another commission, but she wouldn't say what she would do.
Social Security reminds me: while the moderators asked a lot about it, giving validity to Clinton's claim they were using Republican talking points, they never asked about Medicare which is funded the same way but faces a real crisis, not a long term problem. I also can't recall that they asked a medical insurance question. It was mentioned a lot, but that was the candidates finding a way to work it in.
I have grown more sympathetic to candidates who go off-topic. Sometimes they're dodging, but sometimes the questions are lousy and they have to ignore them to talk about anything important.

Assorted pieces
October 22

While I've found little time to blog, I've still been stacking up a backlog of items I consider interesting, worthwhile, or even important, so even if I can't expound at length, I can direct readers where to find this stuff themselves, plus maybe some thoughts that may pr may not deserve lengthy explanations.

Has anyone else noticed that since the GOP Petraeus in September campaign kept the surge going, we haven't heard squat about Petraeus? Maybe he fulfilled his political sales role, so good enough. Or maybe as happens, the news cycle moved on to the new outrage of the week. From the controversy over the MoveOne "Betray Us" ad, we had the Limbaugh "phony soldiers" controversy, partly, I freely admit, to show conservative sthat wo can play that game if that's all they think our political discourse has to be. On the substance of the "phony soldeiers" remark, once you hear it in context without Limbaugh's editing, it's clear that Limbaugh refused to be leive an anti-war caller who claimed to be a veteran and Republican. Limbaugh called him a liar regarding being a Republican. The next caller, also claiming to be a veteran (without challenge from Limbaugh since he claimed to be backing the war) was the one who said veterans who oppsoed the war were "phony soldiers", and Limbaugh parroted the phrase. So whatever spin you've heard, hear it for yourself, and you'll hear the Limbaugh was reacting to the prior caller and meant it to refer to veterans who oppose staying in Iraq.

Speaking of Limbaugh, he was part of the smear campaign against the family of Graeme Frost, the 12-year-old who had brain surgery paid for by S-CHIP, and told his story on the Democrats' Saturday radio broadcast. I thought again of this controversy after Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) called for Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) to resign for saying the killing in Iraq is partly for Bush's amusement. Did he or anyone among Republicans call for Sen. Mitch McConnell to resign after he was caught lying about the smear campaign against the Frosts? It turned out ThinkProgress got it right in the report linked above, where they said McConnell staffer Don Stewart was partly behind it, having sent an e-mail with the "facts" about the Frosts to the conservative blogs and media. It turns out McConnell was told his staff was behind the smear, and then --- after he already knew --- denied his office was involved. That's a flat out lie. Should he resign too, GOP? For the record, Stark did go over the top. I say that as someone who has called Bush a war criminal, still hopes to see the law catch up to him, and refers to Bush as "the acting president" because he stole both elecitons and has no right to occupy the White House; therefore, he merely occupies it until there's a real president. Yet even I don't say Bush is amused. I think he's callous, oblivious, uninterested in the harm he's causing, but not amused.

This story is almost two months old, but received too-little attention. Someone handed out memos describing a couple Democratic representatives in ways one of them described thus: "This is beyond parsing. This is being slimed in the Green Zone." Reps. James P. Moran Jr. of Virginia and Ellen O. Tauscher of California discovered that eveywhere they went in the Green Zone, people had these pieces of paper. They turned out to be biographies of the Moran and Tauscher describing them in unflattering terms. It's an example of the blatant propagandizing of our soldiers by our government. When you look at incidents like this, the Petraeus controversy, the preponderence of conservative talk radio on Armed Forces Radio, it looks like the Defense Department has been politicized like a US Attorney's office. At least, that would be a fair description had it not been apparent a long time before the DOJ was politicized, when the DOD was so involved in selling the invasion of Iraq. But could they at least spare the soldiers in the field having to listen to the propaganda? What, they don't have enough to deal with?

When it comes to religion, is Hillary just W with brains? This article from Mother Jones indicates that it isn't only in the realm of wealth that Clinton hangs out with people liberals would rather she didn't associate with. She participates in religious activities with some of the nutcase right. I hope she isn't as delusional as Bush about God having picked him for great things so he can do no wrong, but with a bunch of candidates about whom we need not have this concern, someone please tell me why she's leading the polls?

How bad is the corruption in Iraq --- not just the Iraqi corruption, but American too? It can be summed up by the final paragraph in this expose in Vanity Fair by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele: "The simple truth about the missing money is the same one that applies to so much else about the American occupation of Iraq. The U.S. government never did care about accounting for those Iraqi billions and it doesn't care now. It cares only about ensuring that an accounting does not occur."

Speaking of how bad the corruption has gotten in Iraq, the Iraqi government official whose job was investigating corruption has been kicked out of the country, apparently for trying to do his job. Radhi al-Radhi is stranded in the US, and the Bush administration won't help. Is it really a surprise Iraq has gotten so corrupt when its government was established by a US government that is safely described as a Culture of Corruption earned that name by invading on false pretenses, lying continually since then, and letting those with connections steal everything in sight? A really sad thing about all this corruption: John Nichols, author of The Genius of Impeachment was interviewed on Rachel Maddow on Friday, and mentioned that while we in the grassroots have strong support for impeachment, it isn't even being talked about inside the beltway.

The irony of smearing
October 18

Something struck me about the smear campaign conservatives, including allegedly the leader of Senate Republicans, have run against the Frost family. Isn't it ironic that the whole reason they want to destroy this family is to refute the notion they're mean-spirited?

Don't get too giddy
October 17

It's been a while again. I do this in my spare time, the quantities of which can vary. If someone wanted to hire me to blog for living... Anyway...

Some Democrats are getting too optimistic about the elections a year from now. Mark Green, for example, posting on Air America's blog, about all the trends going the Democrats' way. I'm not saying he's wrong, and I don't see some counter-trend no one else sees. It's just that the elections a year from now are, well, a year from now. That's a long time, lots of things could happen, such as Democrats thinking this thing is in the bag. Warning against taking your opponent lightly sounds like a sports metaphor, but I don't need it in this case, because I need only think of other elections that were won well before election day, like Paul Wellstone's upset in against a safe incumbent in 1990. I guess "safe" should have been in quotes in that one. I'm also thinking of the veto-proof majority congressional Republican won in 1998. Oops, I mean the veto-proof majority they were going to win, before they defied history and lost seats in the second midterm election of a president of the opposing party.

OK, I concede I was more pessimistic than was justified last year. I saw the polls too, knew Karl Rove wasn't as smart as he was made out to be, hoped Democrats finally had caught on to the election fraud Republicans were pulling in the last few elections, but I still kept thinking the Republicans would still steal it again and get away with it. I kept thinking something big would go wrong, which isn't unreasonable since something big DID go wrong on 2004, and 2002, and 2000. Nothing big went wrong, at least not from a Democratic point of view (though I will say it took a perfect storm against Mike Hatch for Tim Pawlenty to squeak out his reelection, but that's just one office) and we did much better at stopping fraud. But it's not like they didn't try.

So a year is plenty of time for something big to go wrong and no, I don't know what that would be. It's plenty of time for the Republicans to seek new ways of stealing elections, not to mention at least one more election DREs. A year before last year's blowout, the blowout was unexpected. Republicans called 2005 "the year from hell" apparently thinking the worst was past. Democrats too, if we're honest, would have to admit we feared Katrina, as much as it showed Bush's gutting of the federal government, would be forgotten or chalked up as a one-off. No one knew if a big terrorist attack would send scared people running back to Big Tough Daddy GOP.

So you'll excuse me if I don't let myself get too excited. I'd rather go hard at it like the election is in doubt, which I hope Democratic/liberal/progressive leaning readers do too (Conservatives, you've got it in the bag, sit home). Please, Democratic elected officials, if you have any scandals, quit to spend more time with family RIGHT NOW. Maybe you think it's hidden, but could it be the reason the acting president wants no records of his surveillance is he's been spying on domestic political opponents, including elected Democrats? Maybe he's just that secretive, but do you want to count on that?

And for crying out loud grassroots Democrats, don't pick Republican-lite Clinton for the top of the ballot.

"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who successfully prosecuted Nazis at Nuremberg for the crime of aggressive war, thereby establishing the precedent that starting a war is, in and of itself, a war crime.

"A refusal to look back inevitably means moving forward in blindness."
Philip Alston, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, on the resistance of the Obama administration to investigating human rights abuses by the Bush administration.

"Why is it that strong women are so often called bullies and ballbreakers, while strong, opinionated men are often called, simply, Justice Scalia."
Salon editor Joan Walsh, on the bigoted attacks on Sonia Sotomayor already on the day of her announcement.

"In Minnesota, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie has made military ballot protection a key priority of his Department. The result is that twice as many military ballots are actually cast, and half as many are rejected, as the national average in 2006."
The National Defense Committee, in an article on their web site praising Minnesota's efforts to encourage absentee voting by military personnel stationed overseas.

"We're seeing massive resistance to the cramdown proposal. That's a proposal to allow bankruptcy judges to reschedule a mortgage on a primary residence. They're fighting this thing tooth and nail. Now the fact is, the people fighting it are the last people who should get the ear of anyone. And it goes to show me they haven't really learned any lessons. A lot of these folks--large banks, Wall Street firms--they have the attitude that "Heads I win, tails you lose." No matter what happens, we always get ours."
Rep. Keith Ellison, on how the bailed out banks are fighting against bankruptcy reform.

''Scores of banks failed in the Great Depression as a result of unsound banking practices, and their failure only deepened the crisis,. Glass-Steagall was intended to protect our financial system by insulating commercial banking from other forms of risk. It was one of several stabilizers designed to keep a similar tragedy from recurring. Now Congress is about to repeal that economic stabilizer without putting any comparable safeguard in its place.''
The late --- and correct --- Paul Wellstone, expressing opposition to repealing the law that prevented financial corporations from entering other types of financial business, like preventing commercial banks from becoming investment banks. This repeal was a large part of making the (collapsing) conglomerates possible.

"The facts revealed reflect the way the U.S. government has consistently tried to cover up the truth of Binyam Mohamed's torture. He was being told he would never leave Guant�namo Bay unless he promised never to discuss his torture, and never sue either the Americans or the British to force disclosure of his mistreatment."
Reprieve Director Clive Stafford Smith, speaking about a British court's ruling that the Bush administration tried to get Mohamed to plead guilty to something, anything, and keep quiet about his treatment as a condition of release.

"We spend hours and hours and hours arguing over $10 million amendments on the floor of the Senate, but there has been no discussion about who has been receiving this $3 trillion."
Sen. Bernie Sanders. I-VT, on the mostly unreported spending by the Federal Reserve to prop up the big financial corporations.

"The AIG scandal is significant and has resonated so powerfully because it is a microscope that enables the public to see what and who has wreaked the destruction that threatens their security and future and, most important of all, to realize that these practices haven't ended and the perpetrators haven't been punished. The opposite is true: those who caused the crisis continue to exert control over what happens and continue to have huge amounts of public money transferred in order to enrich them."
Glenn Greenwald, explaining why the AIG bonus scandal is both symbolic and important.

"Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."
Attorney General John Ashcroft, during a principals meeting about torture methods.

"There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.

A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales." Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center, who surveyed scientific research from 1965-1979 and showed that contrary to what climate change deniers keep asserting, there was no consensus on global cooling. That means the point that climate scientists must be wrong now because they were wrong then is itself based on a false assumption.

"We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts."
statement on the web site of University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, responding to an assertion by global warming denier George Will that they said sea ice area is the same as 1979.

"It has often and confidently been asserted, that man's origin can never be known. But ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science."
Charles Darwin, whose 200th birthday is coming up on February 12.

"The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events. That's just what creationists say can't happen."
evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, commenting on an experiment that was able to observe a mutation that changed one species into another.

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