MotherJones.com | MoJoBlog - Social Issues and Political Commentary: April 20, 2008

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April 25, 2008

Congressman Hodes Calls for Investigation of "Independent" Military Analysts

As Jonathan Stein reported on Wednesday, Sen. Carl Levin has begun putting pressure on Defense Secretary Robert Gates to investigate allegations made in last Sunday's New York Times report regarding the Pentagon's use of "ex"-military officials to shape public perception of the Iraq War.

Yesterday Congressman Paul Hodes of New Hampshire joined in by officially requesting Chairman John Tierney of the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs to hold a hearing on the matter. Hodes asserts that "the Department of Defense used these analysts to manipulate public opinion toward supporting the Administration’s policy in the War in Iraq."

From Congressman Hodes' letter:

Dear Chairman Tierney:

I respectfully request that the Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs hold a hearing on the information contained in an article in the New York Times published on Sunday, April 20, alleging that the Pentagon used undue influence with former military officers serving as "independent" military analysts commenting on developments on the war in Iraq for network news stations.

The report detailed a concerted effort by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield and Department of Defense officials to manipulate network news military analysts to promote Bush administration spin on the war in Iraq, even though many analysts knew the information not to be accurate. In fact, one analyst referred to the efforts by the Pentagon as "brainwashing."

It's important to criticize the Pentagon for this, and I applaud both Levin and Hodes for speaking out. But I've come to expect, as I think many Americans have, a certain amount of military meddling in public discourse—it's naive to think otherwise.

What I'd really like to see is some pressure put on the media networks that gratuitously supplied the national platform for the Pentagon. What is their responsibility to ensure their "independent" analysts are legit? After all, they're using public airwaves.

—Jesse Finfrock

Voters Without Borders

Neat.

From Open Left, via Yglesias.

Obama to Finally Do Fox News... Why?

News is out that Barack Obama will finally end his boycott of Fox News and sit down with "Fox News Sunday" for a pre-taped interview on Saturday. "They realized they've got a problem after Pennsylvania," [Fox host Chris] Wallace told the Hollywood Reporter. "In the end, they do it for their own reasons, not ours. But they realized he needs to be able to reach out to working-class, blue-collar Democrats, moderate to conservative, and that's our target audience."

Fox News has been slamming Obama non-stop, to such a degree that members of the Fox team have objected on-air and Brave New Films has released a much-watched film on YouTube documenting the phenomenon:

Obama's boycott of Fox was a good thing for the progressive movement. If he had taken the White House without appearing on the network, it would have proven that Democrats could win without dipping into Fox's toxic waters, and it would have raised awareness of Fox's nasty habits. Obama's campaign is saying he's going on to "take Fox on."

The one thing we know for sure: Fox will spend the entire time focusing on the "manufactured issues" of the campaign — flag pins, "bitter"-gate, Weathermen, etc. Obama's going to get punched. If he punches back, he comes off as confrontational in front of Fox's blue-collar, moderate and conservatives viewers (who probably aren't inclined to vote for him anyway, right?). If he doesn't punch back, he disappoints progressives and the blogosphere, who see a blown opportunity to ostracize a pernicious network.

So tell me. What's the upside, here?

Update: Brave New Films has more excellence on Obama and Fox News here.

Misconduct in Louisiana Special Election? No One Home at FEC to Investigate

The DCCC is arguing that the conservative group Freedom's Watch has unlawfully coordinated with the NRCC on political advertisements in the LA-6 special election. This is how they make their case:

LA-6 should be a comfortable win for the GOP. Bush won there by 19 points in 2004 and the district hasn't sent a Democrat to Congress in 32 years. But the Democrat in the race, Don Cazayoux, is up in the polls and nonpartisan election watcher Charlie Cook has rated the race as "lean Democratic."

So Republican-leaning outside groups are throwing tons of cash at the race. If they coordinated with the Republican Party in order to plan how that cash is spent, they broke the law. The regulatory body in charge of investigating such cases? The FEC, currently out of commission.

Some Early Thoughts on Indiana and North Carolina and Their Impact on the Race

The next battlegrounds in the Democratic primary race are Indiana and North Carolina, where there are 72 and 115 pledged delegates up for grabs, respectively. Combined, the two states are worth more than vaunted Pennsylvania, and they have the ability to end the race or change its direction, depending on the results.

North Carolina favors Obama demographically. It is 22 percent black, and has a number of large colleges (UNC, NC State, Duke, Wake Forest, to name a few). It also has a number of white-collar professionals in the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area known as the Research Triangle, where the information technology and biotech industries are thriving. It has a hefty 115 pledged delegates on offer because it is a top ten population state, with over nine million residents.

Current polling in North Carolina usually shows Obama up by nine to 15 points.

Indiana, on the other hand, favors Clinton demographically. A solid red state in general elections, Indiana is 90 percent white and has an economy heavily reliant on manufacturing. (Despite those Clinton-friendly facts, it is also home to John Mellencamp, who recently performed on Obama's behalf.) It has 72 pledged delegates as the fifteenth largest state in the country, by population.

Current polling in Indiana shows Obama up one to three points. Many political observers are surprised that Indiana's numbers don't more closely resemble those from Ohio and Pennsylvania, two states directly to Indiana's east. In those states, Clinton was up 15 to 20 two weeks out from election day, and eventually won both by roughly 10.

The reason why IN and NC have the ability to end the race is this. Every time Obama wins a state demographically favorable to him, the victory is written off by the pundits, the superdelegates, and the Clinton campaign. When Clinton wins a state demographically favorable to her, the victory isn't necessarily written off, because Obama usually does a fairly good job of making every state competitive, but it isn't seen as a resounding victory. With this pair of states, Obama has the opportunity to win both a state that favors him and one that favors his opponent. That may be enough of a knockout blow — especially if the Clinton camp expends all their cash in IN and NC, as they did in Pennsylvania — for the superdelegates to step in and hand the race to him.

Clinton also has an opportunity. If she wins both a state that favors her and one that favors him, it legitimizes completely her campaign's new rhetoric that the "tide is turning." It will be hard for the Obama to argue that Democratic voters haven't lost faith in him in the second half of this campaign if he loses a state like North Carolina.

If they split the two states — NC for Obama and IN for Clinton — then we will likely have to wait until June, when all the primaries are over, for the superdelegates to finally step in and decide this thing.

So stay tuned. Pennsylvania didn't change all that much in the presidential race; the primaries on May 6 just might.

Memo to PMCs: Dodge the Tax Man, Answer to Waxman

Henry Waxman's Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, a persistent thorn in the side of private military and security firms, has zeroed in on a new target: the use of foreign tax havens by government contractors operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. The investigation follows recent reports that KBR has used an offshore subsidiary to avoid paying hundreds of millions of dollars in payroll taxes, as well as MoJo's reporting on Blackwater's Barbados-based sister company, Greystone, whose local address and telephone number in Bridgetown trace back to a firm that specializes in shielding corporate revenues from U.S. tax authorities.

This week, Waxman's committee fired off letters to 15 companies, including KBR, Triple Canopy, DynCorp, CACI, Science Applications International Corporation, EOD Technology, and the Prince Group (the holding company that owns Blackwater and Erik Prince's other business ventures), asking whether these contractors have any "subsidiaries or other affiliated entities that were incorporated in any of the 39 foreign jurisdictions designated as tax havens by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development"—and demanding detailed information on their foreign subsidiaries and affiliates if the answer to that question is yes.

Among the information Waxman is seeking:

1. A description of which persons or entities hold ownership interests in the entity;

2. A list of contracts under which the entity provided goods or services to any agency of the United States government between January 1, 2002, and the present, whether directly or indirectly;

3. Copies of contracts, subcontracts, memoranda of understanding, or other agreements between the entity and your company or any of its affiliates;

4. A description of the gross profits the entity earned between January 1, 2002, and the present, through the performance of the contracts responsive to question 2 above, and the percentage of these profits that was allocated to the foreign jurisdiction in which it was incorporated;

5. A description o f the number o f U.S. and foreign nationals paid by the entity between January 1, 2002, and the present, to perform services pursuant to the contracts responsive to question 2 above; the location where the workers performed the work; the categories of jobs these workers performed; the number of U.S. national personnel who worked within each job category; and the average compensation (in U.S. dollars) paid to U.S. national personnel working within each job category;

These customarily secretive companies will likely be reticent to divulge this type of information—and it remains to be seen how forthcoming the targets of Waxman's investigation will be with committee investigators. Prince, for his part, responded icily when asked how much Blackwater earns in profits during an oversight hearing last October. "We're a private company, and there's a key word there—private," he said. (Prince's refusal to disclose his company's profits so infuriated committee member Chris Murphy, a freshman Democrat from Connecticut, that he introduced a bill, which passed the House on Wednesday, requiring companies that derive more than 80 percent of their revenues from government contracts, totaling more than $25 million, to make their profits public.)

Given Prince's past reluctance to divulge financial information in particular, I asked an oversight source about the level of cooperation the committee expects from the companies it's investigating. "We expect them to comply," the source replied confidently. The source also said that it was too soon to tell whether the investigation would lead to a hearing.

If the Prince Group and the other companies that received inquiries from Waxman do indeed provide the committee with the requested information, it will open a window not only on how much profit these firms clear on their government contracts (and how much of those profits have been shielded from U.S. taxes), but on who these companies employ. Increasingly, military contractors have turned to so-called third country nationals—workers who hail from the developing world and earn far less than their American or European counterparts—to staff their contracts. In Blackwater's case, it has subcontracted with its Prince Group affiliate, Greystone, to provide third world recruits to work static security gigs, guarding a variety of military installations in Iraq. (These foreign personnel, in turn, are typically contracted to Greystone through third party companies, among them Bogota-based ID Systems.)

Greystone, though, is not the only company Prince has established offshore. He has based at least two other companies in a country that is a well-known tax haven. According to records maintained by the North Carolina Secretary of State, Neptune Solutions LLC [PDF] and Neptune Holdings 1 LLC [PDF], both of which list mailing addresses at Blackwater's Moyock, North Carolina headquarters and Blackwater president Gary Jackson as their manager, were incorporated in the Marshall Islands, located in the southwest Pacific, in July 2006. A little over a year later and weeks after Prince testified before the oversight committee, the Blackwater CEO filed applications to withdraw the companies' LLC status in North Carolina. It remains unclear whether these companies are still operating, or what role they play, or were intended to, within Prince's private security empire. Perhaps, thanks to Waxman, this is something we'll soon find out.

(Photo used under a Creative Commons license from James Gordon.)

John McCain's Miserable Record on Hurricane Katrina

John McCain's Time for Action tour arrived in New Orleans Thursday, where McCain toured the hurricane-damaged 9th Ward and criticized both the Bush Administration and Congress for its handling of the disaster. Lamenting the pace of recovery, McCain said, "I want to assure you it will never happen again in this country. You have my commitment and my promise."

But McCain's record on Hurricane Katrina suggests that he was part of the problem, not the solution. McCain was on Face the Nation on August 28, 2005, as Katrina gathered in the Gulf Coast. He said nothing about it. One day later, when Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, McCain was on a tarmac at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, greeting President Bush with a cake in celebration of McCain's 69th birthday. Three days later, with the levees already breached and New Orleans filling with water, McCain's office released a three-sentence statement urging Americans to support the victims of the hurricane.

Though McCain issued a statement the next week calling on Congress to make sacrifices in order to fund recovery efforts, he was quoted in The New Leader on September 1 cautioning against over-spending in support of Katrina's victims. "We also have to be concerned about future generations of Americans," he said. "We're going to end up with the highest deficit, probably, in the history of this country."

That attitude was borne out in McCain's actions and votes. Forty Senators and 100 members of Congress visited New Orleans before he did; he finally got there in March 2006. He voted against establishing a Congressional commission to examine the Federal, State, and local responses to Katrina in med-September 2005. He repeated that vote in 2006. He voted against allowing up to 52 weeks of unemployment benefits to people affected by the hurricane, and in 2006 voted against appropriating $109 billion in supplemental emergency funding, including $28 billion for hurricane relief.

Shortly after the disaster in New Orleans, McCain did introduce a bill that sought to improve communications mechanisms for first-responders and authorities. The bill failed to go anywhere, and McCain later voted against other bills that had similar provisions.

McCain may talk sympathetically about New Orleans' recovery this week, but the record shows that when it mattered most, McCain failed to act. His passion for fiscal conservatism blinded him to a city and a region in need, and his Time for Action is simply too late.

April 24, 2008

Disneyland-Style Theme Park Set for Baghdad. Honest to God

Satire becomes reality. In the preview for "War, Inc." that Bruce posted below, private contractor John Cusack executes a war for the American government and then watches bewilderedly as a hip-hop star and her entourage invade the country right behind him. Soon English-language billboards and bumper stickers are everywhere.

That's ridiculous, right? An over-the-top display of how the encroachment of American culture and capitalism works. Leftist Hollywood hysteria.

Guess again, sucker:

[Llewellyn] Werner, chairman of C3, a Los Angeles-based holding company for private equity firms, is pouring millions of dollars into developing the Baghdad Zoo and Entertainment Experience, a massive American-style amusement park that will feature a skateboard park, rides, a concert theatre and a museum. It is being designed by the firm that developed Disneyland. "The people need this kind of positive influence. It’s going to have a huge psychological impact," Mr Werner said.

The 50-acre (20 hectare) swath of land sits adjacent to the Green Zone and encompasses Baghdad's existing zoo, which was looted, left without power and abandoned after the American-led invasion in 2003...

Success seems improbable at best. Resentment is sure to be created. How about some of the naivete and over-confidence that got us into so much trouble with this war in the first place? Do you have any of that for us, Mr. Werner?

Mr Werner, who has been sold a 50-year lease on the site by the Mayor of Baghdad for an undisclosed sum, says that the time is ripe for the amusement park. "I think people will embrace it. They'll see it as an opportunity for their children regardless if they’re Shia or Sunni. They'll say their kids deserve a place to play and they’ll leave it alone."

Sure. A massive Disneyland-style amusement park, operated for American profit, plunked in the middle of Baghdad — that won't be a target for hostilities. Not at all.

The project will cost $500 million (£250 million) and will be managed by Iraqis. Under the terms of the lease, Mr Werner will retain exclusive rights to housing and hotel developments, which he says will be both culturally sensitive and enormously profitable. "I wouldn’t be doing this if I wasn't making money," he said. "I also have this wonderful sense that we're doing the right thing – we're going to employ thousands of Iraqis. But mostly everything here is for profit."

A $1 million skateboard park, the first phase of the development, will open in July.

I love the bolded quote. Am I being too cynical if I note that this is the logical conclusion of any American occupation? For all of my harrumphing, this was essentially inevitable.

Holy Wars: Evangelicals Attempt to Exclude Non-Christians From National Day of Prayer

In 1952, when Harry Truman called for a National Day of Prayer, now celebrated annually on the first Thursday of May, it was meant to encourage Americans of all faiths to pray with one another in whatever way felt best to them. It would be an ecumenical celebration of faith that would draw people together in common religious and spiritual contemplation. One can only imagine what Truman would think of this year's event, the planning for which has been marred by bitter squabbling over who should be allowed to participate.

Shirley Dobson, wife of James Dobson, the conservative founder of Focus on the Family, is this year's chairperson of the National Day of Prayer Task Force, a non-governmental organization based in Focus on the Family's offices in Colorado Springs and charged with organizing various events. According to Jay Keller, national field director of the Interfaith Alliance, Dobson has made a point of "excluding Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Buddhists, and even mainline Christians" from the National Day of Prayer.

Thanks to Dobson, this year's task force volunteers are required to sign pledges, stating: "I commit that NDP activities I serve with will be conducted solely by Christians while those of differing beliefs are welcome to attend." Volunteers must also affirm that they "believe that the Holy Bible is the inerrant Word of The Living God" and that "Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the only One by which I can obtain salvation and have an ongoing relationship with God." Such oaths violate the non-sectarian nature of the National Day of Prayer and clearly align "a government-sponsored event with a particular Christian denomination, in violation of the basic provisions of the First Amendment to the Constitution," says Keller.

If that isn't enough to make Truman roll over in his grave, try this: Dr. Ravi Zacharias, the honorary chairman of this year's event, has refused to invoke the name of Jesus Christ in his official prayer, so as not to offend the faithful of other religions. (Read the text of his prayer here.) This has sparked outrage among Evangelicals, such as those at the Christian Newswire, which issued a press release—titled, "Ashamed of Jesus at the National Day of Prayer"—which attacks Zacharias and, if you can believe it, takes aim at Dobson for not doing enough to uphold Jesus' name in the upcoming events.

An excerpt from the release:

According to the truth of God's Word, the entire counsel of God, we do not pray in "God's Holy Name" to God the Father. We pray to God the Father in the name of His only Son, Jesus Christ, who alone provides us access to the Father. It is appalling that Dr. Zacharias is willing to capitulate to the un- Scriptural, interfaith ecumenism and discard the name of Jesus. NDP Chairwoman, Shirley Dobson, owes a biblical explanation to Christians around the nation as to why the name of Jesus is absent from the official prayer. We are not here as Christians to appease those of other world religions. We cannot come to God except through His Son's righteous merits. To pray as "Christians" in any other way is both a farce and a mockery. While other believers around the world are dying for that name, in America, Dr. Zacharias will not even breathe that name in his official public prayer because it might "offend".

If evangelical leaders want God's help in the midst of America's deepening national crisis, we must come to Him on His stated terms, not ours. Either God's Word is truth, or it is not. There is no middle ground. There are no special interfaith prayer models in Scripture for evangelical activists hoping to maintain conservative political coalitions. Such tacit denial of Jesus Christ will court God's righteous wrath, not His blessing. Dr. Zacharias owes an apology to those throughout history who have paid the ultimate price for their fealty to King Jesus. May God grant repentance to those pragmatic evangelicals who place cultural concerns before Scriptural truth.

Photo used under a Creative Commons license from Wyscan.

John McCain Officially Most Absent Member of the Senate

We've written before about the fact that John McCain has more or less abdicated all of his responsibilities in the Senate while running for president. The man almost never votes anymore: he once went five consecutive weeks without voting. Now we learn that he's the Senate's top absentee, passing Democratic Senator Tim Johnson of North Dakota, who suffered a brain hemorrhage in December 2006 and was unable to return to the Senate until last fall, in terms of votes missed. I guess it takes time to suggest doing nothing about America's economic crisis.

Mr. Prince Goes to Hollywood (aka "War, Inc.")

Opening in a few short days at the Tribeca Film Festival—War, Inc., the first Hollywood comedy about private military contracting.

Banks Give New Meaning to Protection Racket

Payday loans have gotten a lot of bad press lately as state governments attempt to crack down on the "legal loansharking" outfits that make very short term loans with interest rates going as high as 500 percent. But a new study by Marc Anthony Fusaro, a professor of economics at East Carolina University, found that the overdraft loans given by banks these days make payday lenders look like a bargain. In their "bounce protection" programs, banks will cover checks and ATM withdrawals that exceed customers' balances so they don't incur fees from merchants for bounced checks. This "courtesy" service, which most customers never ask for, comes at a huge cost.

Insufficient fund fees have become a major cash cow for banks, particularly during the latest credit crisis. The Center for Responsible Lending has found that with an average fee of $34, overdraft protection loans generate more than $17 billion a year for banks. About half the fees are triggered when people use debt cards for a small purchase, which the bank allows even though they have no money in their account.

Fusaro looked at overdraft protection as a form of a short-term loan and found that people who occasionally bounce checks (between 1 and 10 times a year) pay interest rates exceeding 6,000 percent. Chronic bouncers in the study, who make up a small percentage of bank customers, paid more than $3,000 in fees annually for the privilege. The average size of the overdraft was pretty small, between $90 and $300. The most extreme case in the study was one poor soul who had a $3 overdraft outstanding for one day, which resulted in an intereste rate of 260,245 percent, a hefty surcharge for using a debt card for a latte.

While these small fees don't translate into a ton of money for most consumers, they add up mightily for the banks, and over time, can help trap people in debt that's hard to escape. The banks don't make it easy, as they intentionally manipulate check-clearing to encourage people to bounce a lot of checks. (CRL says the software vendors who sell these systems to banks promise to increase revenue from overdraft fees by as much as 400 percent.)

Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) introduced legislation last year that would put a halt to some of this by barring banks from manipulating check-clearing to increase fees and requiring banks to get written authorization from customers before enrolling them in the courtesy "protection" programs. The bill would also have required the banks to warn customers using debt cards that a purchase would trigger an overdraft fee, allowing them to cancel the purchase. Not surprisingly, the bill was shot down last fall by heavy lobbying from community bankers and appears to be going nowhere. Note to self: pay cash!

April 23, 2008

Sex-Ed Hearing: Not So Sexy

It's hard to believe a hearing on sex could be so dull. This morning, the vaunted Henry Waxman convened a marathon hearing before his House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to "assess" the evidence on abstinence-only sex education, on which the federal government has spent more than $1.3 billion in recent years. The program requires states that take the money to refrain from teaching about contraception in school unless it's to talk about scary STDs and condom failure rates, while encouraging young people to avoid sex until marriage, an expectation that 95 percent of Americans fail to meet.

As oversight hearings go, this one turned out to be a snoozer, in large part because there's not much news here. About a bazillion studies have all found that not only does abstinence-only education not work to reduce unwed pregnancy or STDs, but that it perpetuates false information about the reliability of the things that do work, disparages gays and lesbians, promotes religion in public schools, and demeans women.

The federal program has produced one major success: giving life to a bunch of loony fringe religious groups that wouldn’t exist but for those federal funds. Many of these groups got their start as "crisis pregnancy centers" that used dubious tactics to dissuade young women from having abortions. But their views were largely left off the panel, a fact that irked Republicans who accused Waxman of stacking the hearing solely with critics. Indiana Rep. Mark Souder complained that Waxman had failed to invite such witnesses as the doctors who treat girls infected with STDs "while using condoms." He fumed about liberals who are promoting a "radical sexual economy" as part of their attack on abstinence programs, and suggested that teaching kids about birth control and condoms was part of that depraved agenda.

Despite a heavy line of up of public health officials on the schedule, Waxman kicked off the "oversight" hearing with testimony from two of his own colleagues, Rep. Lois Capps, a former school nurse from California who once taught sex ed, and Sen. Sam Brownback, whose only credentials on the issue seemed to be his parenting of five children. (Waxman even swore them in.) Nonetheless, a surprising number of members showed up to pelt questions at the pair, including our own DC Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who wasted most of her time talking about how nice it was to work with Brownback on some previous marriage issues. (True to form, though, she also razzed Brownback for failing to vote for D.C. statehood.) Souter managed to make Brownback look like a moderate after asking if it would be appropriate to ask 9-year-olds whether such things as masturbation, oral sex and naked cuddling qualified as abstinence, which he claimed was common in traditional sex ed classes. Of course, Capps and Brownback said no.

Despite attempts by Democrats to get Brownback to concede that federal dollars might be better spent, it was clear that Brownback and the other Republicans in the room weren't going to be swayed by anything resembling science, or even their traditional opposition to federal spending. They stayed on message, which seemed to be that abstinence-only funding ought to continue because regular sex ed doesn't work either. "The parents of this country want their children to be abstinent," Brownback insisted.

I confess to hearing the call of the "asparagus festival" going on in the Rayburn building cafeteria and leaving before the meatier part of the hearing began, as it took more than an hour and a half just to finish up with Brownback. The administration witness wasn't slated to go on until the very end, which was hours away. But it was clear from the get-go that the hearing would change few minds and produce few new pieces of information. (A webcast of the hearing is available here.) Democrats don't seem ready or able to put an end to the boondoggle on this one, despite the consensus that it is, in fact, an ideologically driven waste of money. Instead, they have introduced legislation in both the House and Senate to provide federal funding for comprehensive sex-ed that would actually give kids something besides a virginity pledge to help them avoid early pregnancy and pernicious diseases.

Levin Rachets Up Pressure on the Pentagon Puppets

Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) has asked Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to investigate the claims of a recent New York Times report that found retired military officers have been used as Pentagon puppets in the media.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as "military analysts" whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

In a letter to Gates, Levin wrote, "While the media clearly have their own shortfalls for paying people to provide 'independent' analysis when they have such real and apparent conflicts, that doesn't excuse the Department’s behavior in giving both special treatment and valuable access to analysts who provide commentary in favor of DoD’s strategy, while not offering similar access to some other analysts and cutting off access to others who didn’t deliver as expected."

How WWII Trivia Applies to the Pennsylvania Primary

In 1944, the Japanese army sent a man named Hiroo Onoda to the small Philippine island of Lubang with orders to guard the island until the army sent for him. Shortly after Onoda landed Allied forces took the island, killing or capturing all of the Japanese soldiers save for Onoda and three comrades. Onoda took the men into the jungle and hid there.

The Japanese surrendered in August 1945, but no one in the Japanese military got word to Onoda and his men. As time went by, locals tried to convince them that the war was over but the soldiers believed that every note left and every leaflet dropped was a trick of the enemy. The emotional and physical strain growing, the four soldiers started to fired on the locals. One of the four was eventually killed in a skirmish. Another walked away.

Onoda and his single remaining comrade, Kinshichi Kozuka, lived together in the jungles of Lubang until 1972, when Kozuka was shot by Filipino police. News of Kozuka's death alerted Japan to the possiblity that Onoda, who had been declared legally dead years earlier, was still alive. Eventually, he was found by a traveling student, who arranged a meeting between Onoda and his one-time superior officer. In 1974, they met on Lubang and Onoda's superior officer told him that the war was over. In 29 years of hiding, Onoda and his men had killed a reported 30 people and injured over 100 more. Nevertheless, Onoda was pardoned by Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and given a hero's welcome in Japan.

I mention this only because Ron Paul received 16 percent of the vote in yesterday's Republican primary in Pennsylvania.

Petraeus To Lead Central Command

For those serving at the pleasure of the president, it's never been a good idea to speak out against his policies—a lesson Centcom commander Admiral William Fallon learned recently when Esquire magazine, as part of a lengthy profile, described him as the only thing standing between Bush and war with Iran. Fallon tendered his resignation (read: was fired) shortly after the article's publication. The news today is that General David Petraeus, one of Fallon's primary opponents in intra-Pentagon squabbles and a practiced public supporter of the Bush administration's Iraq strategy, will be taking over the job of his former nemesis. Read the AP story here, which reports that Bush plans to nominate Petraeus as the next commander of U.S. Central Command.

Jihadists "Branding" Internet Propaganda to Control Message

Daniel Kimmage, a senior analyst at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, is the author of a new study called "The Al Qaeda Media Nexus" (.pdf) about recent developments in jihadist Internet activities. The study finds that Al Qaeda and related groups "are moving toward a more structured approach based on consistent branding and quasi-official media entities. Their reasons for doing so appear to be a desire to boost the credibility of their products and ensure message control." In essence, Al Qaeda is seeking to emulate the "brick and mortar" structure of mainstream Western media with the creation of elite news brands—a select group of fundamentalist CNNs, if you will, complete with "jihad correspondents"—that can manipulate and control the virtual discussion among terrorist groups. Online propaganda operations like the Global Islamic Media Front, the Al-Sahab Institute for Media Production, and the Al-Fajr Media Center typically receive content, in the form of ideological screeds or videos of bombings or beheadings, from an array of terrorist groups in various conflict zones around the world, to which they afix a logo, suggesting to jihadist readers that the message has received "official" approval from a larger, global movement.

The trend runs counter to Al Qaeda's operational modus operandi, which emphasizes small cells working in isolation with minimal oversight from Al Qaeda central—a fact that could open Al Qaeda's media arm to new vulnerabilities if intelligence agencies can figure a way to disrupt key online hubs for the distribution of propaganda. But the larger threat may come from within, suggests Kimmage. Al Qaeda has long been ahead of the curve in terms of using the Internet to spread its message, but has so far refused to incorporate new technologies focusing on user-generated content... a decision that has the potential to backfire.

According to Kimmage:

In 2006, Al Qaeda released a big position paper and they warned their supporters against creating their own content. They said this was 'media exuberance' and that their supporters should let the official distribution and production groups handle this. Even when Al Qaeda has tried to be interactive, it is quite old-fashioned. So the question that we end up with is: Al Qaeda—which had done so well using the Internet to spread its message over the last few years—are they now doomed to fade with this new more interactive and user-generated network? And will they be replaced by a much larger, much more integrated, much freer, much more empowered world in which it is very difficult to control messages and in which no one has a monopoly on information?

Freer and more empowered networks, in the end, will do more to undermine Al Qaeda's message than the actions of any government. In the end, an idea that takes root in the political sphere—an idea that encourages people and inspires them to commit violence—it only fades and dies when the idea itself is discredited. The discrediting of this idea, of this ideology, will happen online through a large conversation that takes places mainly without governments.

Clinton Ducks the Weathermen Question

The Hillary Clinton campaign keeps ducking on the Weathermen issue that it tried to use against Barack Obama. First, campaign communications director Howard Wolfson broke a promise to tell reporters what Clinton thought of her husband's 2001 pardon of two Weather Underground radicals who had gone to jail for involvement in violent crimes. Then, yesterday, Clinton herself played dumb when asked about those pardons:

I didn't know anything about it? At what point? The question, though, is, what do you think of those pardons? In this interview, Clinton said, "When you run for president...you know that everything is going to be fair game." So if you're going to blast an opponent for having once held a fundraiser at the apartment of William Ayers, a former Weather Underground radical, you ought to be willing to handle questions regarding your closest campaign adviser's decision to pardon two Weather Underground veterans. That's certainly fair game.

Clarification: Clinton did not issue pardons to the two radicals; he commuted their prison sentences. Media accounts often conflate the two different actions. These two commutations were announced by the White House on January 20, 2001, as part of a long list of almost 140 pardons and commutations, which included the infamous pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich--which was a pardon.

In PA, Clinton Wins by Holding Her Ohio Base

Six weeks ago, Hillary Clinton won Ohio by ten percentage points. Tuesday night, she won Ohio's equally bitter neighbor to the east by ten percentage points. The voting blocks she relied upon to win the two states are the same: Hillary Clinton was twice carried to victory by white voters, female voters, and voters lacking a college education. Barack Obama made headway with older voters, but saw young voter turnout drop. He also gained among independents, but fewer of them turned out to the polls. Hillary Clinton won Pennsylvania because she successfully defended her base for the six weeks between the Ohio and Texas primaries on March 4 and the PA primary Tuesday.

According to CNN exit polls, women were huge for Clinton in both contests. They were 59 percent of Democratic voters in both Ohio and Pennsylvania, and she won 57 percent of female voters in both contests. White women were particularly important for Clinton. In both states, two-thirds of white women voted for her.

Obama could point to a modest five point jump among white men and four point jump among whites overall. It did not help Obama that the white vote in Pennsylvania was slightly larger than it was in Ohio (80 percent to 76 percent), and the black vote slightly smaller.

In Ohio, those lacking a college education went 58-40 for Clinton. In Pennsylvania, the numbers were a nearly identical 58-42. It's hard to then point to correlations in under $50,000/over $50,000 voting groups (often, voters lacking a college degree and voters making less than $50,000 show identical trends, indicating that they are in fact the same voters), because Clinton won both income groups Pennsylvania, as she did in Ohio. White collar Pennsylvanians were no more receptive to Obama than their blue collar counterparts.

In Ohio, independent voters nearly split down the middle, going 50-48 for Obama. In Pennsylvania, indies were more completely in Obama's camp, going 55-45 for the Illinois Senator. The problem? Independent turnout dropped eight percent. Both Ohio and Pennsylvania were closed primaries, meaning independents were able to vote in the Democratic race only if they were registered as Democrats.

Obama's only substantial gain was among older voters. In Ohio, he took a meager 28 percent of voters over 60 years of age. In Pennsylvania, he added 10 additional percent to that figure. The fact that Clinton still won the elderly vote, which comprised one-third of all voters, by a margin of 62-38 meant that Obama was going to have a hard time winning the primary, but an Obama camp desperate for positive indicators can look at the success of their elderly outreach.

But they have to be disappointed by their youth outreach. Voters under 24 years of age, which includes the vast majority of the college demographic, were just six percent of the vote last night. Pennsylvania is one of the nation's older states, but that's no excuse. In Ohio, voters under 29 were 16 percent of the electorate. In Pennsylvania, they were just 12 percent.

A note on how Clinton won. In Ohio, just over half of voters thought Clinton had attacked unfairly. But six weeks later, after Jeremiah Wright and "bitter"-gate had hit the headlines, that number had jumped to over two-thirds. But the negative attacks didn't hurt the most important numbers — she still won the state by 10 points, and the same number of voters, 26 percent, say they would be disgruntled if she took the Democratic nomination.

While the Obama campaign tried to point to a largely unchanged delegate count and look ahead to the next primaries ("The bottom line is that the Pennsylvania outcome does not change dynamic of this lengthy primary. While there were 158 delegates at stake there, there are fully 157 up for grabs in the Indiana and North Carolina primaries on May 6."), the Clinton campaign was jubilant in Philadelphia last night, and they were pushing the never-say-die storyline. Speaking before Clinton, Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter pressed the point in excitedly incoherent fashion, saying Clinton was the "the comeback kid, come-from-behind, every-day-and-in-every-way Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is back." Governor Ed Rendell said Clinton's victory was so shocking that it was "an earthquake so large it's going to shake up American politics." He said that every time the media tries to write Clinton's "political obituary," she comes back from the dead.

Clinton herself embraced the storyline of the evening, saying "the tide is turning." "You know," she said, "the pundits question whether Pennsylvanians would trust me with this charge and tonight you showed you do. You know you can count on me to stand up strong for you every single day in the White House."

What's funny about the Clinton campaign's message is that Clinton never trailed in Pennsylvania. One month ago, she was leading in the state by 15 percent, and she won Tuesday by 10 percent, hardly what practitioners of math would call a comeback. But the wielders of spin are not the same as the wielders of calculators. With the delegate math pointing to a foregone conclusion in the Democratic primary race for weeks, even months, it's clear who holds more sway.

April 22, 2008

Pennsylvania: Clinton Is Alive and Kicking—And Threatening To Tear the Party Apart?

The Democratic contest has been a 50-50 proposition for months now--more precisely, a 51-49 percent endeavor or maybe a 52-48-percent face-off in Barack Obama's favor, according to the pledged delegate count and the popular vote. Hillary Clinton's 9-point win in the Keystone State (which apparently did not net her a significant pickup in pledged delegates) does not change this. In fact, her Pennsylvania triumph does not change the fundamentals of the race. Obama is still on track to end the primaries with a slight edge in pledged delegates. And Clinton is still in the race, clinging tightly to her candidacy and reiterating rationales to stay in the hunt: I have more experience; I'm better prepared to be commander-in-chief; I've withstood the worst of the GOP attack machine; I've won the big states.

Bottom line: It's not over, and the contest is not likely to end anytime soon. At HRC HQ in Philadelphia on Tuesday night, Terry McAuliffe, Clinton's campaign manager, ebulliently declared, "She is taking this all the way to Denver." But many Democratic superdelegates and insiders are hardly enthusiastic about a bitterly fought campaign that trudges through the next nine primaries (which conclude in early June) and then continues, as a media-driven contest of Democrat-on-Democrat sniping, for three months until the convention in Denver at the end of August. The question is, will these Democrats be able to do anything about it?

If Clinton is committed to going the distance, she cannot be stopped. No one--not even those mighty superdelegates--can literally force her out. She cannot win the final primaries by margins large enough to erase Obama's lead in voter-determined delegates. Everyone knows that. But she can keep on challenging Obama, doing well enough--winning some contests or placing a strong second--to justify, at least to herself and her supporters, her continued presence in the race. During that time, she can hope something happens that does alter the landscape (look, evidence that Obama is indeed a secret Muslim!), and she can also lay the groundwork for a post-primaries effort to persuade superdelegates to overturn Obama's narrow victory among pledged delegates. Yet that project can only succeed with successful assaults on Obama. Her path to the nomination depends on one fuel: fierce attacks. She can win the nomination only by tearing down Obama after the voting is done and by threatening party unity.

Clinton is obviously fine with that--at this stage. But how far is she willing to go? Her shots at Obama may have helped her win in Pennsylvania. But they were not cost-free. According to the exit polls, 42 percent of the Pennsylvania Democratic voters consider Clinton untrustworthy. (Thirty percent said the same about Obama.) Sixty-seven percent said they believed she had attacked Obama unfairly. Only 49 percent said Obama had thrown low-blows. And Clinton did not redefine her standing among Democrats. Two-thirds of Pennsylvania's Democratic voters said Clinton was "in touch with people" like them. Yet two-thirds had the same assessment of Obama. Despite all the fuss about Obama's "bitter" remark, Clinton had no edge in the candidate-of-the-people category. And 51 percent of the voters said the candidate quality they consider most important was the ability to implement change. Among these voters, Obama attracted 70 percent.

With her Pennsylvania win, Clinton can raise funds--her campaign claimed millions of dollars poured in on Tuesday night--and she can proceed to Indiana and North Carolina (which hold primaries on May 6), staying alive because she insists she is alive. Remember the Monty Python "dead parrot" bit? As long as Clinton refuses to concede she cannot win, she remains a contender--or at least a force Obama and the Democratic Party must contend with. After all, the party has no official coroner who can pronounce her gone. And--no small matter--Democratic voters do keep turning out for her. In her victory speech in Philadelphia, she depicted herself as a politician who fights damn hard on the campaign trail for you and who will fight damn hard in the White House for you. Clearly, she was trying to turn what some superdelegates might perceive as an irritant or problem--her stubborn determination--into a reason why superdelegates ought to dump Obama for her.

During the Monica Lewinsky scandal--when many pundits and Clinton foes predicted Bill Clinton's demise--the Clintons learned a valuable lesson: sometimes you just have to put one foot in front of the other and keep moving ahead, paying no heed to those who say you have no choice but to quit. They had their party--most of it--behind them during those days. And now Hillary Clinton, with significant voter support, is plodding ahead, stuck with a strategy that at this point leaves her only the nuclear option of nullifying Obama's primary and caucus victories. But, she can reason, if I am not dead, then I'm still alive--and still have a chance. Politically speaking, she is somewhere between dead and alive. The undead? The next primaries may nudge her closer to one of those poles. And, once again, they may not be decisive. But as of now, amid the glow of her Pennsylvania victory, it's up to Hillary Clinton to decide at what point might rest the bitter end.

(Photo of Senator Clinton by flickr user alexanderwrege used under a Creative Commons license.)

Clinton Fundraising in Overdrive

The Clinton campaign is claiming that it has raised nearly $2.5 million since Pennsylvania was declared a Clinton victory earlier tonight. Eighty percent of the donations are from first-time donors. Those are some pretty astonishing numbers.

For all the talk of Obamamania, there is a real excitement behind the Clinton campaign, too. Where were these candidates in 2004?

Exit Polling from Pennsylvania Shows Victory for Clinton

PHILADELPHIA, PA — I'm at the Park Hyatt in downtown Philadelphia, the location of Hillary Clinton's speech tonight. The networks have the race too close to call, so it will probably be a while before Clinton takes the stage here, or Obama takes the stage in Indiana, where he is spending the night. [Update: Networks call it for Clinton. Margin of victory remains to be seen.]

While we're waiting, let's take a look at some exit polling, shall we? Note that if these are the early exit polls, many voters who headed to their polling places after they got off work are not represented here. For more accurate numbers, wait until the real results roll in. Duh.

As David notes below, women were a stunning 58 percent of all Democratic voters and went for Clinton. Men were just 42 percent of voters and went for Obama. David crunches the numbers and says the final result should be a Clinton win by three points. The spinsters in both campaigns and the talking heads will expend much energy telling us which candidate gets to call that a victory.

Looking at some demographics....

Voters under 40 went for Obama. Voters over went for Clinton. Voters between 18 and 24 (i.e. college students) went almost 70-30 for Obama, but they were a scant six percent of the voters today. Among white voters, those under 30 years of age split evenly for Obama and Clinton. All white voters over 30 went for Clinton, with the margins increasing as age increases. Two-thirds of white voters over 60 years of age went for Clinton.

All told, whites were 80 percent of voters and went for Clinton 60-40. Blacks were 14 percent of voters and went 92-8 for Obama. White women, Clinton's best demographic sub-slice, made up a whopping 47 percent of all voters.

Just over half of voters said the economy is the most important issue in the election. Clinton won those voters. Just over one-quarter said the war is the most important issue. Obama won those voters. The remaining voters said health care was the most important issue, and went for Clinton.

Clinton won those without college degrees and those making less than $50,000. Obama won their more educated, richer counterparts. Combine those facts with the age numbers above and it's clear: Clinton's 50/50 voters delivered again!

Geographically, Obama killed in Philly and its suburbs, but lost in Pittsburgh and the middle of the state.

Only 54 percent of voters said Clinton is "honest and trustworthy." Sixty-seven percent of voters think that of Obama.

Interestingly, 10 percent of voters think neither Clinton or Obama is trustworthy. Those voters went 77-22 for Clinton — perhaps a sign of Rush Limbaugh's Operation Chaos. Counterargument: 11 percent of respondents identified as conservatives, and they split pretty evenly between the two candidates. Keep in mind, if trying to draw any conclusions here, that any Republicans sneaky enough to change their party affiliations in order to screw with the Democratic race probably aren't going to be honest with exit pollsters.

Pennsylvania: Too Close To Call Early--Or Not?

The polls in Pennsylvania closed a few minutes ago, and CNN and others are reporting that the Obama-Clinton race, according to exit polls, is competitive--that is, too close to call.

But the exit polling, if accurate, indicates a Clinton win--because of the women. The polls show that the electorate was 58 percent female and that the gals voted for Clinton over Obama, 55 to 44 percent. The men--making up a measly 42 percent of the voters--went for Obama over Clinton, 53 to 47 percent, according to the exit polls. If these numbers reflect the real voting, that would mean a narrow Clinton victory, by 3 points.

Already, the Clinton camp is dismissing any interpretation of the margin of victory. A win is a win, Terry McAuliffe, Clinton's campaign manager, said moments ago. Maybe he has that win.