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November 10, 2007

Jefferson-Jackson Liveblog Hits the Home Stretch — Clinton and Obama

Here's what's happened so far; here's an explanation of the JJ. Hillary Clinton has taken the stage.

10:49 - Smack down of Obama! Here's Clinton: "Change is just a word if you don't have the strength and experience to make it happen. We must chose a nominee who has been tested and elect a president who is ready to lead on day one."

10:51 - Clinton is emphasizing her experience in the White House. "As First Lady, I fought my heart out for health care." She might not have won, she says, but she laid the ground work for the progress universal health care is making now. The Clinton crowd here is huge, and going absolutely bananas.

10:52 - "We love you, Hillary!!!!" shouts a girl behind me. The Clinton people have rally sticks, made popular at baseball games. They are very loud and very annoying.

More Clinton after the jump. Also, Obama. This is going to be good.

10:53 - This election, says Clinton, is about people who "feel invisible in their own country." Clinton promises to wake up every single day and care about "every single one of us." Behind Clinton, people are shining flashlights at a sign that says, "2013? 2013?" That's a reference to the fact that Clinton said in a debate that she wouldn't commit to having all troops home from Iraq by 2013.

10:55 - "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen," Clinton says, in reference to the partisanship in Washington and the bitterness of presidential elections. "I feel really comfortable in the kitchen." Huh.

10:57 - So the kitchen analogy is the explanation for the "TURN UP THE HEAT" slogan. Democrats are going to turn up the heat on Republicans on a number of issues. You see, Hillary has been through the fire. She doesn't mind the high temperature of presidential spats. She can take the heat. In fact, she is going to TURN UP THE HEAT.

11:04 - Funny enough, Barack and Michelle Obama give Hillary Clinton's "F*ck Bipartisanship" message a standing ovation.

11:08 - Barack Obama just took the stage and some dude screamed, "I LOVE YOU!" Obama responded, "And I love you back." Huge cheers. People like love, it appears.

11:10 - "The same old Washington textbook campaigns just won't do in this election," says Obama. "Triangulating and poll-driven positions because we're worried about what Mitt or Rudy might say about us, just won't do." Obama is finally breaking out the criticisms of Clinton that his campaign has been promising for so long.

11:16 - "A party that doesn't offer just change as a slogan, but real, meaningful change. Change that America can believe in... That's why I'm running for president of the United States of America! To offer change we can believe in!" Long, long standing ovation from the Obama folks. The crowd has ratcheted up the emotion in this speech to such a high degree that Obama has to shout his lines.

11:20 - Yikes. Obama just likened Hillary Clinton's foreign policy to Bush and Cheney. Twice. The gloves are off. The gloves are officially off.

11:23 - An echo of the 2004 convention speech! "I don't want to pit Blue America against Red America, I want to lead the United States of America."

11:24 - Obama says that he is not in the election to "fulfill long-held ambitions." Did I mention the gloves are off?

11:28 - The roof is on fire.

11:29 - Obama wraps up and the crowd, predictably, goes crazy. But for all the enthusiasm in the room—and there was A TON of enthusiasm—I'm not sure the speech actually earned it. It wasn't his best. But that old 2004 convention speech set the bar pretty high...

11:140 - It's over. Other than a handful of Edwards supporters who are still shouting, "Go, John, go!" everyone has left. Good night, loyal readers. All eight of you...

Jefferson-Jackson Liveblog Continues

Explanation of the JJ Dinner here; part one of the liveblog here.

9:09 - Bill Richardson is speaking, and appears to be wearing heels. On second thought, they may be cowboy boots. Richardson is having trouble getting any verbal momentum going. He is jumping from "restoring the American Dream," to following the Constitution on the matter of torture (does the Constitution mention torture?), to his plan on the war in Iraq. His whole campaign may come down to that war — he is the only candidate who will commit to having all troops out by the end of 2009.

9:15 - Now health care, now education reform, now greenhouse gases. This is what Richardson does. He jumps from policy to policy to policy without an over-arching narrative.

9:19 - "I've heard one thing that I like about Iowa," says Bill. "Iowa likes underdogs!" You better hope so.

9:20 - Richardson urges Democrats not to "tear each other down." Suggests criticism only on policy grounds. Problem is, the Dems are all pretty much the same on policy. Oh, and I've seen some advance copy from the Obama speech, and it's got some sharp but coded words about Hillary.

Biden after the jump.

9:27 - This is "a moment in American history," says Joe Biden, in which we are "either going to get this world back on track" or let it descend into chaos. There's not hyperbole; that's the nature of Biden's rhetoric. He needs to paint the world as a scary place because, in his words, scary times demand a president with a "depth and breadth of knowledge in international affairs and national security" that is completely unsurpassed. Such a person would be Biden, of course. The threats to America demand Biden! According to Biden!

9:34 - Biden mentions the Republican "Values" conference from a few weeks back. I was there! Biden points out that if Republicans lived their values, the budgets they propose would look very different. More kids could afford college. More people would have health care.

9:36 - Biden is play-acting what he would have said to the country after 9/11 if he was president. One gets the sense he's talked this through in his head many times. For the record, he would have (1) proposed a meeting of the world's leaders in which they collectively plotted the demise of radical Islam, and (2) proposed an energy bill that ended our dependence of foreign oil.

9:38 - Edwards was good tonight, but nobody has done anything that will change this race. USC 17, Cal 10.

9:40 - Oh, Biden opened with a pretty good line I didn't mention. "I should start with an apology to Rudy Giuliani," he said. "I said his campaign was a noun, a verb and 9/11...I was wrong. He called me to tell me that after Pat Robertson's endorsement, there's an 'Amen' in there."

9:41 - Found a neat photo.

9:51 - Cal ties the game on a Nate Longshore touchdown pass! 17-17. Nice.

9:54 - An Iowa congressman just took the stage to auction off a stuffed donkey. A totally nondescript stuffed donkey. Nothing special about it. Guess how much it went for. Ready? $1,900. I think Paul Pelosi, the Speaker's husband, bought it.

9:57 - The same guy just auctioned off Nancy Pelosi's scarf. $6,000. Not. Kidding.

10:08 - It's Dodd time! He calls tonight "candidates on a stick."

10:11 - Dodd says that he will restore the Constitution on the very first hour of his presidency. No more Abu Ghraib, no more Guantanamo, no more rendering, no more waterboarding, no more suspending habeas corpus. Civil liberties are Dodd's big thing. He makes a good point—embracing civil liberties to the fullest would restore America's moral authority in the world.

10:14 - Dodd's father was a prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials. Dodd speaks at length about the fact that America submitted men who had committed the murders of million of people to the rule of law, when they did not in fact have to. Compare that to Abu Ghraib, Dodd says, and see how far we have fallen.

For the last two speakers, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, we'll go a new post.

Oh, and PS - Cal loses 24-17. Forth loss of the season for the once-promising Golden Bears. Senator Tom Harkin has been speaking for a while, mostly about his legislative accomplishments (did you know he is responsible for closed captioning on American TV shows? Now you know), so I went to get a Diet Coke*.

* This post has been corrected to capitalize Diet Coke.

Jefferson-Jackson Dinner — Most Exciting Live Blog Ever!

Okay, let's get it on.

8:13 - Nancy Pelosi takes the stage, which is in the shape of a square and surrounded on all sides. Pelosi, like all speakers today, will have to speak while walking in a circle.

8:14 - Pelosi says "all the eyes of the world are on this dinner tonight." The disproportionate amount of power that Iowa has in American presidential elections really is ridiculous.

8:15 - Peeking at Marc Ambinder's blog, I see John McCain had a kind of insane day today, filled with bucketloads of attack politics.

8:20 - The Hillary Clinton supporters here are wearing shirts that read, "TURN UP THE HEAT. TURN AMERICA AROUND." New slogan?

More after the jump, including the Edwards speech.

8:25 - Pelosi is introducing the lieutenant governor of Iowa. Time to check in on the USC-Cal game on ESPN.com.

8:26 - USC's leading, 14-10. Dang. Go Bears.

8:34 - Iowa Governor Chet Culver is speaking. I'm skipping some stuff. Some of this is too boring even for a Mother Jones liveblog. Try CSPAN.

8:39 - Ann Friedman answers an interesting question over at TAPPED. Who has the whitest campaign staff?

So there you have it: Giuliani has an all-white campaign staff. He also has an all-goombah security staff. I've seen it myself. That's not a comment on Italians. It's a comment on guys who look like they are straight out of the Sopranos.

8:48 - Here comes Edwards. "We believe in the promise of America, for every single American," he says. People go nuts. This is an easy crowd right now — they've been waiting two hours for the presidentials to start speaking. Obama goes last. He might have a very tired group on his hands.

8:51 - Edwards, for the record, isn't saying anything new right now. You can see my web piece on Edwards from earlier this week for a pretty good summary of his current message.

8:53 - "It is not enough" to change parties, says Edwards. "We need to change this system." He tells a story of a man who was unable to speak for 50 years because he didn't have the health insurance he needed for a simple surgery on his cleft pallet. "We are better than this!" says Edwards.

9:00 - Edwards says "the cause of my life... is speaking for the voiceless in this country." He is going over how, as a trial lawyer, he fought powerful interests on behalf of ordinary Americans and won. This makes him uniquely suited, he argues, to fight the interests that corrupt Washington.

We'll keep this going on a new post.

Iowa's Most Important Dinner — Happening NOW

I'm in the Veterans Auditorium in Des Moines for the Iowa Democratic Party's annual Jefferson-Jackson Dinner. For voters nationwide, the JJ, as it's called, is a blip on the radar. But here in Iowa it's huge, particularly in the year before an election. One Obama supporter described it to me thusly: "If the Iowa Caucuses are the Super Bowl, this is the halftime show."

Six presidential candidates will be speaking to 9,000 of Iowa's most prominent (and richest) Democrats. Also on hand are assorted politicos from the Midwest. Former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack and current Ohio governor Ted Strickland wandered by when I was waiting in the consession line, for example. Nancy Pelosi is the master of ceremonies.

This is an only-in-Iowa event. A rambunctious crowd of young supporters for every candidate have packed the balcony level and are shouting slogans and chants at an ear-rattling volume. They also have coordinated sign gimmicks, like at halftime of a college football game. The youngsters spent all day putting thousands and thousands of signs up inside this auditorium and on the streets surrounding it. Media from all over the world is here.

The JJ can make or break a candidate in this state. Iowans credit the 2003 JJ with making John Kerry's Iowa victory. Before the event, Kerry was down in the polls, looking up at frontrunner Howard Dean. But Kerry unveiled a new stump speech and a new slogan, as many candidates do here, and it propelled him to a caucus win, and eventually the nomination.

I'll be liveblogging things as they happen. If you've got nothing better to do on a Saturday evening, I invite you to follow along.

November 9, 2007

If Grover Norquist Speaks, Does Anyone Still Listen?

So Grover Norquist thinks that Fred Thompson is the "worst" GOP candidate out there. His major sin? He has refused to sign a pledge from Norquist's group, Americans for Tax Reform, refusing to ever raise taxes. Also, he has said that rich people might have to pay higher premiums for Medicare and is opposed to federal tort reform.

Norquist's remarks apparently came during his regular Wednesday off-the-record meeting in D.C. with the grand poobahs of the GOP, which used to be the place to be in D.C. if you wanted to know what was going on in politics. In the old days, such a pronouncement would leave a candidate shaking in his boots. But ever since the news broke that Norquist had been deeply involved in some of disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff's Indian tribe schemes, and Democrats took over Congress, he seems to have been relegated to the sidelines, at least publicly. It will be interesting to see how much his attacks on Thompson will really matter. After all, Thompson's positions are pretty fiscally responsible, something Republicans used to care about...

Columbia Dating Scientists Up the Heeby-Jeeby Factor

Number one on Slate's "most read" list at the moment is "An Economist Goes to a Bar and Solves the Mysteries of Dating." The name pretty much says it all: A bunch of researchers from the economics department at Columbia ran a speed-dating service for students at a favorite campus watering hole. After each mini-date, participants were asked to rate their partners on variables such as attractiveness, intelligence, and ambition. Their findings were a cliché come true: Men "did put significantly more weight on their assessment of a partner's beauty, when choosing, than women did," and "intelligence ratings were more than twice as important in predicting women's choices as men's." As for ambition, men "avoided women whom they perceived to be smarter than themselves. The same held true for measures of career ambition—a woman could be ambitious, just not more ambitious than the man considering her for a date."

What does it all mean? Simply refer to this neat little paragraph that sums up the researchers' findings:

So, yes, the stereotypes appear to be true: We males are a gender of fragile egos in search of a pretty face and are threatened by brains or success that exceeds our own. Women, on the other hand, care more about how men think and perform, and they don't mind being outdone on those scores.

Never mind the depressing fact that these unimpressive, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus-ish attitudes are present at Columbia, where your typical student is supposed to be busy learning how to "work across disciplines, embrace complexity, and become a fluid, fearless, forward-looking global citizen and scholar." Far more unsettling is the fact that a key point seems to have evaded both the researchers and Slate: Complex and fluid though it may be, Columbia University is most certainly not a microcosm of the larger world. Just because 400 Columbia students (who most likely have a slightly different relationship with the terms "ambition" and "intelligence" from the rest of the population) embraced these unfortunate stereotypes doesn't mean everyone else does.

The researchers' creepiest conclusion by far, though, was that "women got more dates when they won high marks for looks." From whom did the women win these high marks? Not their speed dating partners, but "research assistants, who were hired for the much sought-after position of hanging out in a bar to rate the dater's level of attractiveness on a scale of one to 10." File under: Ewwww!

This all brings us to the ultimate question: Don't Columbia economists have better things to do than scope out co-eds at a campus bar?

Beating Up On Barney Frank

One of the GOP's most reliable fundraising pitches in the run-up to the 2006 mid-term elections was a vision of Democrat Barney Frank as the chair of the House Financial Services Committee. The gay congressman from Massachusetts was supposed to be the devil incarnate for the credit card and banking industry. Now that Frank has actually taken over the committee, though, one group he really seems to have pissed off is a bunch of liberal consumer advocates unhappy with his efforts to address the meltdown of the subprime lending industry.

Frank spoke this morning to lawyers gathered at the National Consumer Law Center's annual convention. These are the folks who are on the front lines, in Legal Aid offices and elsewhere, trying to help people save their homes and fend off bankruptcy brought on by predatory lending. For 12 years, Republicans in Congress basically ignored them, so you'd think they'd be thrilled with the new chairman, who at least takes their calls. Instead, many of the lawyers are furious with Frank because they think his new mortgage bill threatens to make some matters worse for individual consumers.

Frank is putting the finishing touches on a bill designed to rein in abusive lending, but the consumer lawyers think it's simply window dressing that won't solve the problem. They're primarily concerned that it would even make it harder for consumers to get relief when a lender breaks the proposed new law. That's because the bill would invalidate many of the state consumer protection acts the lawyers rely on to help clients and hold big finance firms accountable for making predatory lending so profitable. Not only that, but the bill would actually defang some new lending rules coming down the pike from the Federal Reserve and provide aggrieved consumers with fewer remedies than they had before. (Read here for a more thorough discussion of the law's shortcomings.)

The lawyers heaped criticism on one of Frank's staffers, who appeared later in the morning with a counterpart from the Senate to brief the group on consumer issues in the new Congress. While the staffers' remarks were off the record, they took the licking in stride. Without openly advocating lobbying, they essentially told the lawyers that if they wanted a better bill, they'd better get on the horn and call their respective members of Congress and yell at them about it. "It's all about the votes," one said. Afterwards, a prominent California attorney declared ruefully, "We'd be better off if the Republicans had stayed in."

Andrew Sullivan Ruminates on the Power of Obama's Face

Many people on the blogosphere have taken note of Andrew Sullivan's ode to Barack Obama in the Atlantic. Sullivan argues that Obama is the only candidate who can break America out of the pro-Vietnam/anti-Vietnam culture war that has gripped America for forty years. The frontrunners, Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton, whether they like it or not, "are conscripts in their generation’s war. To their respective sides, they are war heroes."

I'm not sure I agree with Sullivan's central premise, did I find this supporting argument about Obama interesting:

What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it's central to an effective war strategy...

Consider this hypothetical. It's November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America's soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama's face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

This is an argument that Obama himself doesn't make. Perhaps it's because we're in highly homogeneous Iowa (read: 96 percent white), but Obama didn't mention his race once in the time I spent with him. By comparison, Hillary Clinton mentioned her gender on multiple occasions in the time I spent with her. The speakers that introduced her often highlighted it.

The closest Obama came to mentioning his race was in response to a question after the third event he did on the day I followed his campaign. He said that he would be uniquely qualified to resurrect America's standing the world because he would "put a new face" on American leadership. He has a grandmother who lives in a small village in Kenya. He lived in Indonesia. He can listen to the rest of the world in a way no other politician can, and he can get the rest of the world to listen back.

But never once was the word "black" mentioned, nor "African-American." Maybe Obama is as "post-race" as some claim, and maybe that's why he does as well as he does.

Utah To Offer Cops "Sweat Your Meth" Treatments

The Scientologists are an enterprising bunch, aren't they? The latest:

The state of Utah is paying $50,000 to the Bio Cleansing Centers of America to treat eight current and retired police officers allegedly sickened from busting up meth labs. The center's detoxification treatment, which seems to consist mostly of sending the overweight cops to the sauna for hours on end, is based on the teachings of Scientology. It's similar to a controversial clinic in New York, set up with a huge donation from the nation's most famous Scientologist Tom Cruise, to treat 9/11 rescue workers. Scientology's late founder L. Ron Hubbard claimed that toxins could be flushed from the body through sweating and taking megadoses of vitamins, among other things, hence the sauna treatments.

Normally state attorneys general get called in to scrutinize such programs for peddling unproven therapies to gullible customers, but in Utah, it's actually the state AG who got the whole thing going. Not only that, but Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff wants the state to throw another $140,000 at the program to expand the treatment to more officers, despite a dearth of evidence showing that it actually works.

Utah residents seem to have an affinity for dubious health care practitioners. The state is home to "celluloid valley," the dietary supplement industry, which has made billions selling bogus natural therapies to unsuspecting consumers. The Scientologists and their sauna should feel right at home there.

Do You Speak Urdu?

Mother Jones is pursuing an investigative project that requires the services of an Urdu speaker. You give us about 20 minutes of your time, and we'll give you a free subscription to the magazine. If that's not enough, you'll also get the satisfaction of helping us to break a big story. Those who are interested may write to tocotronicrocks@yahoo.com. Many thanks...

November 8, 2007

Obama Gets "Vision," Richardson Doesn't

In my recent article on Bill Richardson, I wrote, "Richardson articulates a platform, not a vision." The New Mexico governor has a habit of listing policy proposals—including incredibly obscure and tiny policy proposals—without explaining how they fit into a narrative or theme that makes the case for his presidency.

I want to provide an example of a campaign that avoids this mistake, to better illustrate what I'm saying. At a event in Bettendorf, Iowa, yesterday, Barack Obama proposed the following things:

A middle class tax cut of up to $1,000 for working families.
Elimination of income tax on retirees making less than $50,000 per year.
Guaranteeing paid sick days and family leave days.
Doubling funding for after-school programs and giving a $4,000 tax credit to college students.
Cracking down on mortage fraud and predatory credit card policies, ending abusive payday lending practices, and reforming bankruptcy laws.
In all of these areas, Obama matched concrete policy proposals with an explanation of how they will make the lives of everyday Americans more stable and more prosperous. He discussed taxes, retirement, family issues, education, college affordability, and housing, all within the context of what Obama called a "plan to reclaim the American dream." The whole speech was about the American dream, and about how, under Obama's leadership, it will get easier, not harder, to achieve.

That's policy matched with vision. And that's what Richardson lacks.

Posted by Jonathan Stein on 11/08/07 at 10:18 PM | | Comments (1) | E-mail | Print | Digg | Del.icio.us | Reddit | Yahoo MyWeb | StumbleUpon | Newsvine | Netscape | Google |

Rudy Giuliani Tells Those Darn Kids If You Don't Vote, "It's Your Fault"

At a Rudy Giuliani event at University of Northern Iowa this afternoon, a public speaking instructor asked Giuliani what he would say to young people who are disillusioned by politics.

"I'll tell you what I'd say," Giuliani said. He clapped his hands fiercely. CLAP! CLAP! CLAP! CLAP! "Wake up! Look at America!" he said. "You are so lucky. You live in the best country in the world." He explained that America offers opportunity that no other country does, and that if young people are not so excited about America, they should try traveling abroad, because they'd return relieved to live in the old U.S.A. He repeated over and over some version of the line, "Just take a look at what you have around you, look at what you can do. You are very, very lucky."

Sometimes, Giuliani said, you need to "move your perspective around."

Giuliani didn't deny that there are imperfections in American politics that turn young people off, but claimed that young people could change what they didn't like. "You get a chance to vote. And if you pass it up," he said, "it's your fault."

Afterwards, students I asked about Giuliani's response were a little stunned. "Umm, I guess there's not a whole lot I can say about it," said Justin Brinker, a 22-year-old junior.

"Uhhh... I though it was all right," said Dane Embury, a 22-year-old senior. "But I still think it's going to be an issue." He shrugged his shoulders. "I dunno."

The lack of policy proposals that might appeal to young voters, or resurrect their faith in the system, wasn't missed. Jess Paulsen, a 20-year-old junior said, "I don't know. I think it might have been better to add in how he's going to, kinda, do something about student loans. And bring up education in general. Because this is a university and that's why people are here."

John Edwards has a whole agenda for college affordability, which includes a national initiative that pays for one year of public-college tuition, fees, and books for more than 2 million students. It also includes an overhaul of the student loan system and a simplification of the financial aid application process. Barack Obama just proposed a tax credit worth $4,000 for tuition and fees every year. He wants greater support for the American community college system.

Point is, the Democrats have proposals that illustrate (1) an awareness that political disillusionment occurs in part because college-age voters don't believe Washington cares about the squeeze that is being put on them, and (2) a willingness to address the problems of youth voters, even though youth voters don't organize and fight for their needs, and often don't even vote.

But that's not what you get from Rudy Giuliani. Rudy Giuliani is the daddiest member of the daddy party. You kids don't get no stinkin' Pell Grants. You get tough love.

Posted by Jonathan Stein on 11/08/07 at 9:29 PM | | Comments (25) | E-mail | Print | Digg | Del.icio.us | Reddit | Yahoo MyWeb | StumbleUpon | Newsvine | Netscape | Google |

Surge of Homeless Vets

For those looking into the real costs of the war in Iraq, as Mother Jones did in our Iraq 101 package, it's been evident for some time that as soldiers returned from war, rates of homelessness would spike.
The New York Times reports:
"We’re beginning to see, across the country, the first trickle of this generation of warriors in homeless shelters," said Phil Landis, chairman of Veterans Village of San Diego, a residence and counseling center. "But we anticipate that it’s going to be a tsunami."

In fact, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are turning heroes into homeless people faster and more efficiently than Vietnam did.

Special traits of the current wars may contribute to homelessness, including high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and traumatic brain injury, which can cause unstable behavior and substance abuse, and the long and repeated tours of duty, which can make the reintegration into families and work all the harder.

If that weren't depressing enough, because women are seeing far more combat in 21st century wars, more of them are turning up homeless, too. One major risk factor is sexual abuse: 40 percent of homeless female vets report being raped by other American soldiers while on active duty.
And in case you weren't thinking it already, all this for what, exactly?

Posted by Cameron Scott on 11/08/07 at 2:02 PM | | Comments (10) | E-mail | Print | Digg | Del.icio.us | Reddit | Yahoo MyWeb | StumbleUpon | Newsvine | Netscape | Google |

Huckabee Fever Hits Iowa, Sorta

Mike Huckabee spoke to a crowd of about 100 people in Cedar Rapids this morning. I hate to confirm all the cliches about the Arkansas Governor, but his campaign appeal really does rest on his folksy, down-to-earth charm and his good humor. People at the event said they were considering supporting Huckabee (there were precious few true believers) because he is "genuine," "honest," and/or "charming."

To wit. He opened his speech with a fictional story that made no point about his campaign or his personal history—it was simply a longish joke about a condemned man who would rather hang than listen to a politician campaign. Ba dum.

And from that, Huckabee moved to another story, this time a true one about a woman at a gala dinner in Arkansas who confused Huckabee with a different politician and was unapologetic about it afterwards. "You politicians all look the same to me," she told Huckabee. It's a head-scratcher why he chose to tell us.

As for the body of the speech, Huckabee spoke at length about how abortion is a moral issue that cannot, like Fred Thompson argues, be decided at the state level. That's Huckabee's bread and butter—as a former Baptist minister, he has unique appeal amongst the Christian Right. He took a hard-line approach on illegal immigration, pimped his fair tax idea that scraps the IRS and the income tax in favor of a "consumption tax," and emphasized that the American health care system needs to focus on prevention. It's time we started "killing snakes instead of treating snake bites," he said.

At one point, when an audience member was asking a question, one of the "Mike Huckabee for President" signs taped behind the Governor fell off the wall. Huckabee turned around while the person was still talking, picked the sign up, and smacked it back on. "I don't want anyone saying Huckabee's campaign is falling in Iowa," he said.

After the event, Huckabee's national field director, who also happens to be his daughter, said that Huckabee has to place in the top three in Iowa to stay in the race.

Oh, and after the event, I asked Huckabee if he was disappointed and/or suprised by social conservative Sam Brownback's endorsement of John McCain.

"I would be dishonest to say I wasn't disappointed, but I wasn't that surprised," he said. "I knew that Sam and John McCain were good friends from the Senate. For me, what's more important than just having the Senator's support is having his supporters' support." Huckabee smiled and said, "John McCain can take Sam, I'll take the supporters."

Posted by Jonathan Stein on 11/08/07 at 11:56 AM | | Comments (5) | E-mail | Print | Digg | Del.icio.us | Reddit | Yahoo MyWeb | StumbleUpon | Newsvine | Netscape | Google |

Bob Novak Sees Everything Through a Political Lens

Bob Novak is claiming that social conservatives have had just about enough of Fred Thompson and his moderate views. On a recent Meet the Press appearance, Thompson opposed a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, opposed the congressional intervention in the Terri Schiavo case, and opposed a constitutional amendment to ban abortions (though such an amendment has been part of the Republican Party platform since 1980).

And it's this last that is really getting people. On abortion, Thompson said, "You can't have a [federal] law" that "would take young, young girls... and say, basically, we're going to put them in jail." Despite his 100 percent pro-life voting record, Thompson is clearly just not avid enough. Here's Novak:

Thompson's comments revealed an astounding lack of sensitivity about abortion. He surely anticipated that Russert would cite his record favoring states' rights on abortion. Whether the candidate just blurted out his statement or had planned it, it suggested a failure to realize how much his chances for the Republican nomination depend on social conservatives.

Here's what I want to point out. As should be obvious, Thompson's comments revealed a lack of sensitivity about politics; they showed a high level of integrity about abortion. Novak can't distinguish between the two. For him, evaluating a stand or a position on principle is a non-starter, a moot point. A position can only be evaluated based on politics, and how it will help election chances. Blergh.

Posted by Jonathan Stein on 11/08/07 at 9:03 AM | | Comments (3) | E-mail | Print | Digg | Del.icio.us | Reddit | Yahoo MyWeb | StumbleUpon | Newsvine | Netscape | Google |

Blackwater Implicated in More Killings

Add another series of killings to our Blackwater timeline. Steve Fainuru reports in this morning's Washington Post that a Blackwater sniper killed three Iraqi security guards employed by Iraq's national television station. The incident, which appears to have been inadequately investigated, occurred a full seven months prior to the most recent spate of killings in a Baghdad traffic circle on September 16. According to Fainuru:

Last Feb. 7, a sniper employed by Blackwater USA, the private security company, opened fire from the roof of the Iraqi Justice Ministry. The bullet tore through the head of a 23-year-old guard for the state-funded Iraqi Media Network, who was standing on a balcony across an open traffic circle. Another guard rushed to his colleague's side and was fatally shot in the neck. A third guard was found dead more than an hour later on the same balcony.

Eight people who responded to the shootings -- including media network and Justice Ministry guards and an Iraqi army commander -- and five network officials in the compound said none of the slain guards had fired on the Justice Ministry, where a U.S. diplomat was in a meeting. An Iraqi police report described the shootings as "an act of terrorism" and said Blackwater "caused the incident." The media network concluded that the guards were killed "without any provocation."

The U.S. government reached a different conclusion. Based on information from the Blackwater guards, who said they were fired upon, the State Department determined that the security team's actions "fell within approved rules governing the use of force," according to an official from the department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Neither U.S. Embassy officials nor Blackwater representatives interviewed witnesses or returned to the network, less than a quarter-mile from Baghdad's Green Zone, to investigate.

The incident shows how American officials responsible for overseeing the security company conducted only a cursory investigation when Blackwater guards opened fire.

So, maybe you didn't know that Blackwater had snipers in Iraq? Well, they do. You can even watch them work on YouTube. This footage was taken in 2004. It shows a Blackwater sniper cooly picking off insurgents attacking the Coalition Provisional Headquarters in Najaf.

Posted by Bruce Falconer on 11/08/07 at 6:50 AM | | Comments (8) | E-mail | Print | Digg | Del.icio.us | Reddit | Yahoo MyWeb | StumbleUpon | Newsvine | Netscape | Google |

Homeland Insanity

USA Today: "John William Anderson, who was born on July 4, 2001, is on TSA's watch list. He was first stopped in 2004 when his mother and grandmother took him on his first plane ride to Disney World." Anderson's mom Christine tells the paper, "No one can give any answers to why my son is on the list or really how to get him off." More than 15,000 want to get off U.S. terror list, USA Today reports. With the recent trial and conviction on 13 counts of bribery related charges of U.S. government security contractor Brent Wilkes, his Congressional benefactor/bribee Congressman Duke Cunningham serving eight years in jail, and the endless Orwellian insanities of the post-9/11 system as described above, anyone else get the sense that the whole homeland security project is more about enriching contractors and filling congressmen's ATMs rather than anything to do with security? Then again, just what is under young John Anderson's hat?

Posted by Laura Rozen on 11/08/07 at 6:31 AM | | Comments (1) | E-mail | Print | Digg | Del.icio.us | Reddit | Yahoo MyWeb | StumbleUpon | Newsvine | Netscape | Google |

November 7, 2007

House of Representatives Passes ENDA

Today marks the first time in U.S. history that either body of Congress has passed employment protections that cover lesbian, gay and bisexual citizens. Unfortunately, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, as it is currently written, does not include gender identity, which made it difficult for supporting organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign, to continue to support it. However, a decision was made by all involved that it would be better to support the current version of the bill than to let it be defeated.

Posted by Diane E. Dees on 11/07/07 at 3:36 PM | | Comments (15) | E-mail | Print | Digg | Del.icio.us | Reddit | Yahoo MyWeb | StumbleUpon | Newsvine | Netscape | Google |

Bush Still Peddling Progress in Iraq. Sigh.

I'm not sure why it never gets old to bring attention to Bush's constant reiteration that we are freedom fighters and that Iraq is making progress. Maybe because the further along we get in this quagmire, the more absurd these comments become. This from a press conference with French president Nicholas Sarkozy held this afternoon:
If you lived in Iraq and had lived under a tyranny, you'd be saying: God, I love freedom, because that's what's happened...we're making progress.
Well, according to our figures, more than 4 million of these thankful Iraqis have fled this newfound freedom.

Posted by Leigh Ferrara on 11/07/07 at 2:25 PM | | Comments (9) | E-mail | Print | Digg | Del.icio.us | Reddit | Yahoo MyWeb | StumbleUpon | Newsvine | Netscape | Google |

Alabama Ends Most Discrimination Against HIV-Positive Prisoners

Thanks to several years of work by the American Civil Liberties Union, AIDS Alabama and several state legislators, HIV-positive prisoners in Alabama will now get what other prisoners get: access to visitation, educational programs, substance abuse treatment, and religious services. Though it may seem hard to believe in the 21st Century, HIV-positive individuals incarcerated in Alabama prisons have been kept segregated to the point that they have been denied help taken for granted by other prisoners.

Alabama is the only state in the U.S. that segregates HIV-positive prisoners from the general prison population. At the women's prison in Wetumpka, HIV-positive prisoners have been maintained in total isolation behind barbed wire. Excluding prisoners fom community-based corrections programs, in addition to being a violaton of their rights, has also cost the state of Alabama as much as $7,000 per prisoner.

The Alabama Department of Corrections has agreed to provide HIV-positive prisoners access to visitation, education, substance abuse treatment and other rehabilitation services, and religious services, but not to provide them with any access to work release programs. The ACLU and its allies will continue to work to try to end this last vestige of discrimination against those who are HIV-positive.

Posted by Diane E. Dees on 11/07/07 at 2:07 PM | | Comments (3) | E-mail | Print | Digg | Del.icio.us | Reddit | Yahoo MyWeb | StumbleUpon | Newsvine | Netscape | Google |

Mitt Romney's Gay.com Snafu

The newly homophobic Mr. Fantastic is claiming that he advertised on gay.com by accident. I think he's just trying to make nice with these folks.

Posted by Jonathan Stein on 11/07/07 at 2:02 PM | | Comments (0) | E-mail | Print | Digg | Del.icio.us | Reddit | Yahoo MyWeb | StumbleUpon | Newsvine | Netscape | Google |

Pat Robertson is to Giuliani as Cindy Sheehan is to...

One final thought on the Giuliani endorsement made by Pat Robertson today. I find it completely wacky that Robertson, who made his career speaking out on social issues like abortion and gay marriage, chose to ignore those issues when making his choice. Here's how Ed Kilgore put it over at Democratic Strategist:

I've tried to think of a Democratic analog for the unlikeliness of this particular endorsement, and the best I can come up with is Cindy Sheehan joining Hillary Clnton's campaign out of admiration for her energy proposals.

Spot on.

Posted by Jonathan Stein on 11/07/07 at 1:25 PM | | Comments (1) | E-mail | Print | Digg | Del.icio.us | Reddit | Yahoo MyWeb | StumbleUpon | Newsvine | Netscape | Google |

MoveOn Takes On Fox. . .With a Little Help From the Wingers

A little more than six months ago, a vast right-and-left-wing conspiracy launched a campaign to make the footage of the Republican and Democratic presidential debates free. Not free of advertising, that is, but free in the sense that anyone could take the footage and use it as they wished—to criticize, to mock, to celebrate. Most of the networks, surprisingly, agreed, although many people didn't get the point of asking for "free debates" in the first place. "Oh come on. Do you really think a network is going to threaten a presidential candidate over a copyright claim?", a friend wrote to intellectual property guru and internet Thomas Jefferson Lawrence Lessig.

Turns out, of course, that a network really is threatening a presidential candidate over a copyright claim. The candidate is John McCain, who used a clip from a debate in one of his ads, and the network, of course, if Fox. As TPM reported, MoveOn.org Civic Action and a coalition of right-wing bloggers (including the inimitable Michelle Malkin) are taking on Fox for their uniquely silly and counterproductive position. Lessig elaborates:

It is time that the presidential candidates from both parties stand with Senator McCain and defend his right to use this clip to advance his presidential campaign. Not because it is "fair use" (whether or not it is), but because presidential debates are precisely the sort of things that ought to be free of the insanely complex regulation of speech we call copyright law.

Indeed, as the target of the attack, and as one who has been totally AWOL on this issue from the start, it would be most appropriate if this demand were to begin with Senator Clinton. Let her defend her colleague's right to criticize her, by demanding that her party at least condition any presidential debate upon the freedom of candidates and citizens to speak.

Indeed. And if you don't think this is a key moment for "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," you should really watch that McCain ad again.

Posted by Nick Baumann on 11/07/07 at 1:06 PM | | Comments (0) | E-mail | Print | Digg | Del.icio.us | Reddit | Yahoo MyWeb | StumbleUpon | Newsvine | Netscape | Google |

Chalabi's What? An Unexpected Tidbit at the End of a Story about a British Murder Investigation

Check out the penultimate graph from this excerpt of a British Press Association report today on a shooting in Iraq:

Five Iraqi police officers were identified as murderers by the only surviving witness of a massacre in which a British security worker was shot dead, an inquest heard today.

Former Royal Marine Brian Tilley, 47, was killed when up to six gunmen walked into his girlfriend's house in the lawless al-Dawrah district of Baghdad and opened fire on May 14 2004.

The only surviving witness was a 15-year-old Iraqi girl known as Sarah, who told American military police the gunmen were wearing Iraqi police uniforms. ...

Mr Tilley was dragged into the kitchen where he was beaten and then shot three times in the back and once in the stomach, Bournemouth, Poole and East Dorset Coroner's Court heard.

>The gunmen then shot the rest of the occupants, who included Sarah, her mother and her mother's boyfriend, her aunt, and two female friends, one of whom was Tilley's girlfriend Iman.

Despite being shot in the head, the teenager survived the ordeal, the inquest sitting in Bournemouth heard. [...]

Sarah told American military police they were still in their nightclothes when they were woken by the gunmen. ...

The teenager gave evidence in a Baghdad court on June 22 2004 before an Iraqi judge, who issued an arrest warrant.[...]

Mr Tilley, from Heckford Road, Poole, was employed by a security company which was working for an Egyptian telecoms firm setting up a mobile phone network across Iraq at the time.

... The inquest heard he had been dating Iman for around three months. She had previously been in a relationship with the Iraqi opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi.

A post mortem showed he died from gunshot wounds caused by a high velocity rifle. Mr Morrissey recorded a verdict of unlawful killing.

Gruesome, and curious about Chalabi as well.

Posted by Laura Rozen on 11/07/07 at 11:46 AM | | Comments (1) | E-mail | Print | Digg | Del.icio.us | Reddit | Yahoo MyWeb | StumbleUpon | Newsvine | Netscape | Google |

Sam Brownback Endorses John McCain

As you can tell, lots of activity amongst the Religious Right today. Just got an email from the McCain campaign confirming the Brownback endorsement. Here's some of the text from the Kansas Senator and leading social conservative.

[John McCain] is the only candidate who can rally the Reagan coalition of conservatives, Independents, and conservative Democrats needed to defeat Hillary Clinton or any other Democrat in the general election next year... While I respect all of the Republicans running for president this year, John McCain is the only choice to lead our country in the global fight against Islamic fundamentalism...John McCain also represents the values that are the core of our Republican party. He has spent a lifetime standing up for human rights around the world, including a consistent 24 year pro-life record of protecting the rights of the unborn.

This is surprising. McCain has little to no support amongst Brownback's base, Christian evangelicals. He took 1.4 percent of the vote in a straw poll of that subgroup in October. Will Brownback's endorsement boost that number? I'm skeptical.

If McCain is the winner here, Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney are the losers. I said when Brownback dropped out of the presidential race that the biggest beneficiary was Huckabee, the Arkansas Governor, because Brownback's departure made Huckabee the only remaining social conservative in the race. I guess that didn't matter to Brownback. Nor did the fact that Mitt Romney is all about family. Who knows with the Republicans this year?

Posted by Jonathan Stein on 11/07/07 at 10:04 AM | | Comments (1) | E-mail | Print | Digg | Del.icio.us | Reddit | Yahoo MyWeb | StumbleUpon | Newsvine | Netscape | Google |

With Robertson, Giuliani Wins the Nutcase Primary?

What a day for Rudy Giuliani. After Mitt Romney was recently endorsed by Paul Weyrich, a founding father of the religious right (and the Heritage Foundation) and John McCain got the thumbs up from Senator Sam Brownback, a social conservative champion, Giuliani nabbed one of the biggest fish in the Christian right ocean: Pat Robertson. And unlike Brownback or Weyrich, Robertson has a television network.

By accepting Robertson's big wet kiss, Giuliani is excusing (or tolerating) Robertson's long record of religious bigotry. As I wrote back in 2000 when Robertson endorsed George W. Bush, Robertson once

said Episcopalians, Presbyterians and Methodists represent "the spirit of the Antichrist." He also maintained that "liberal Jews" were mounting "an ongoing attempt to undermine the public strength of Christianity." He has repeatedly called Hinduism "devil worship."

Media Matters also has kept track of Robertson's rhetoric of bigotry.

But there's something else about Robertson: He is nutty. I'm not merely referring to his belief that God sent a hurricane toward Disney World because the theme park had held a Gay Day. His conspiratorial view of global politics is--how to put it?--insane. He once claimed that President George H.W. Bush was doing the bidding of Satan. Literally. Here's how I described it years ago:

In 1992, Robertson published a bizarre book called "The New World Order." In this barely coherent tract, Robertson claimed there was a global (if elusive) conspiracy involving the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, other policy elites, secret societies and New Agers.

The goal of this nefarious coalition was to impose a new world order that would wipe out national sovereignty, foment a "complete redistribution of wealth," and bring about the "elimination of Christianity." The key to penetrating the plot, Robertson argued, was to see that the Gulf War [of 1991] that had been waged and won by President Bush was, in fact, "a setup."

This was Robertson's reasoning (using the word loosely): "Powerful people of the world wanted a situation that was so obviously dangerous to the entire world that all nations would join together to deal with it...[a situation] that would cause the nations of the world to forget for a time their own claims of sovereignty in order to submerge their interests into that of a worldwide authority such as the United Nations."

See what was going on? The conspirators cleverly and covertly had orchestrated the origins of the Persian Gulf crisis and then used Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait as a pretense for the first step toward a world government that would eventually obliterate Christianity and bring about all the other horrors Robertson feared.

Robertson revealed that the term "new world order," which Bush used to justify the Gulf War, has been for the past 200 years "the code phrase of those who desired to destroy the Christian faith ... They wish to replace it with an occult-inspired world socialist dictatorship."

Robertson based his unorthodox insights on his reading of the Bible. The anti-Saddam coalition, he observed, "was the first time since Babel that all of the nations of the earth acted in concert with one another." And as God showed with the Tower of Babel, he is not fond of nations toiling together...

And who did Robertson peg as the primary force behind this dangerous, anti-Christian new world order? The devil himself!

According to Robertson, President Bush was, wittingly or not, "carrying out the mission and mouthing the phrases of a tightly knit cabal whose goal is nothing less than a new order for the human race under the domination of Lucifer and his followers."

So Robertson called Daddy Bush a tool of Satan--a pawn for some dark, ultra-secret conspiracy. And he meant it.

Today, Giuliani said of Robertson:

Having him aboard gives us a great deal of confidence because he has a tremendous amount of insight into what the main issues are and how they should be dealt with. His advice is invaluable and his friendship is even more invaluable."

Well, I can just imagine those conversations during which Robertson shares all his insights about global affairs with Giuliani--particularly when he tries to clue in Giuliani about the netherworld-born plot of secret elites that makes the DaVinci Code conspiracy look like a Sunday school picnic. By the way, does Robertson know that Giuliani's chief foreign policy adviser is Charles Hill, who once was an aide to U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali? Could Hill be the hidden hand of Satan infiltrating the Giuliani campaign? Watch out, Pat!

Posted by David Corn o

November 10, 2007

November 9, 2007

November 8, 2007

November 7, 2007