Cracks in the Facade

How It Ends... Begin the Begin

2008-11-07T09:23:00.000-08:00

This blog started in 2004 with my motivation to inform friends and family about news of the election in an effort to bring down the reign of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Didn't work out so well. With help from my Mother-in-Law (blogger code name Old Fogey), Cracks continued to stay vigilant for a couple of years after that defeat. But soon, the various and sundry twists and turns of life took our attentions to other focuses (namely, for me, the birth of my son and becoming the sole breadwinner of the family). And thusly, Cracks publishing came to a halt (though occasional bouts of anger at the latest antics of the Bush/Cheney administration would elicit a post from time to time).

So, in the aftermath of this week's historic election outcome, I'm now making it official: Cracks in the Facade is retired.

No doubt there will be shenanigans from the Right Wing Noise Machine that will need to be beat down, and President Obama (god, I love saying that) and Vice President Biden (that too!) and their administration will make mistakes from time to time that will need progressive voices to help remind them of their course. But the hardcore political blogging life is behind me now, and I will find other avenues to add my voice when and where it is needed.

If you're a Facebook user, you can be my friend and follow me there. (I haven't totally gotten the blogging bug out of my system, and I occasionally add links to interesting and relevant news bits.) I'm also an occasional Twitter user, and you can follow my tweets here.

Now, time to begin the begin...

Amen, Brother Cafferty

2008-08-19T14:48:00.000-07:00

CNN's Jack Cafferty on John McCain (via AmericaBlog):

John McCain graduated 894th in a class of 899 at the Naval Academy at Annapolis. His father and grandfather were four star admirals in the Navy. Some have suggested that might have played a role in McCain being admitted. His academic record was awful. And it shows over and over again whenever McCain is called upon to think on his feet.

He no longer allows reporters unfettered access to him aboard the "Straight Talk Express" for a reason. He simply makes too many mistakes. Unless he's reciting talking points or reading from notes or a TelePrompTer, John McCain is lost. He can drop bon mots at a bowling alley or diner -- short glib responses that get a chuckle, but beyond that McCain gets in over his head very quickly.

I am sick and tired of the president of the United States embarrassing me. The world we live in is too complex to entrust it to someone else whose idea of intellectual curiosity and grasp of foreign policy issues is to tell us he can look into Vladimir Putin's eyes and see into his soul.

George Bush's record as a student, military man, businessman and leader of the free world is one of constant failure. And the part that troubles me most is he seems content with himself.

He will leave office with the country $10 trillion in debt, fighting two wars, our international reputation in shambles, our government cloaked in secrecy and suspicion that his entire presidency has been a litany of broken laws and promises, our citizens' faith in our own country ripped to shreds. Yet Bush goes bumbling along, grinning and spewing moronic one-liners, as though nobody understands what a colossal failure he has been.

I fear to the depth of my being that John McCain is just like him.

The Visual Highlight of My Week

2008-07-25T09:24:00.001-07:00

Sure, Obama had the world at his feet this week and there are loads of pictures you can choose from that to treasure, but I love the fact that John McCain had to make an impromptu stop at a grocery store in Pennsylvania to hold a press briefing in front of the cheese aisle to quell the questions about his view of the surge.

Obama Boyz

2008-07-23T09:28:00.000-07:00

Lil' F and I are modeling Mrs. F's Obama t-shirt, which is available in lots of colors.

Screw the Bowling

2008-07-23T09:14:00.001-07:00

Barack's got game where it counts -- on the court!

Mrs. F's Obama Shirt

2008-07-01T21:09:00.000-07:00

Mrs. F got inspired recently to upload a T-shirt design to Zazzle based on the iconographic imagery created by Shepard Fairey earlier this year, and she presented it to me as a Father's Day gift. I dig it a lot in part because of the Fairey image, but also the way that Mrs. F was able to distill it down into a simple woodblock-like image in black against a white shirt (or, in my case, an orange shirt -- Zazzle gives you loads of options, and it's a pretty sweet site).

Initially, she was just going to keep the design private, but I exhorted her to spread it to the masses (with a little help from me). She gets some green back from Zazzle for every shirt purchased, and if you follow this link I'll also get some money via an associates account. Everything that we make (I'm sure it will be a pittance) will be donated to the Obama campaign.

Consider this an open thread till late October... (or until I feel like getting bloggy again)

The Truth About Barack Obama

2008-05-28T12:35:00.001-07:00

After reading this from Steve Benen over at Crooks & Liars, which found that 11 percent of respondents in a poll still think Barack Obama is a Muslim (which, it should be said, is nothing to be ashamed of, but it's wrong), I was a little disheartened that our Idiocracy is still misundereducated (Benen also points to a Ben Smith post over at Politico that notes this is actually a smaller percentage than the 18 percent who believe that the earth revolves around the sun). Sigh.

But there's a new video over at YouTube that breaks down the falsehoods that have been swirling around Senator Obama into very easily digestible, lowest common denominator rebuttals (with a few sassy anti-Clinstone jibes to boot) that should be understood by most viewers (I don't have much hope for the Earth Revolvers):

Amen, Brother Leonard

2008-05-28T12:24:00.000-07:00

Commenting on news that former Senator Phil Gramm has continued working as a lobbyist for the Swiss bank UBS up until mid-April while at the same time advising John McCain on economic matters, Andrew Leonard at Salon's How the World Works blog writes:

Maybe I've just been paying attention to this particular thread of the American narrative of politics and the economy for too long, but it still strikes me as shocking that the same man who spearheaded legislation deregulating energy futures trading (which facilitated Enron's misdeeds), and the repeal of e Glass-Steagal's separation of investment and commercial banking, is a major influence on John McCain's economic agenda, and has simultaneously been working for the banking industry to prevent Congress from passing legislation that would give ordinary Americans a leg up in dealing with the mess that Wall Street has caused.

In a campaign where we have been endlessly obsessed by such trivia as what John Hagee or Jeremiah Wright might think about Jews or AIDS when neither man is going to have any influence at all on how McCain or Obama would govern, Phil Gramm's opposition to allowing judges to rewrite mortgage terms for Americans facing foreclosure seems far more relevant to the real lives of Americans than just about anything else the candidates are saying or doing. I don't care whether Obama's grand-uncle really helped to liberate Buchenwald instead of Auschwitz or whether Hillary Clinton's reference to Bobby Kennedy's assassination was pure evil or just dumb. But I do care about evidence that demolishes the fantasy that John McCain is some kind of maverick independent who might represent a change in direction from the economic policies pursued by Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes. In an election year where everyone is putting "the economy" at the top of the priority list, the employment priorities of McCain's longtime buddy and top advisor could hardly be more relevant.

More of Hillary's Base

2008-05-22T14:30:00.001-07:00

From Kentucky, via Al Jazeera:

There's been a fantasy out in the Pacific Northwest of Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia seceding from their respective unions and creating a nation called Cascadia. I'm wondering if creating a nation of Appalachia and appointing Hillary as its leader might not be such a bad idea -- she'd be able to spend all her time shooting shotguns, downing shots whiskey, and pacifying the folks who really care for her.

Hillary's Base

2008-05-20T21:17:00.000-07:00

(hat tip to John Cole at Balloon Juice)

But it doesn't matter any more. Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee for all intents and purposes.

And the Winner Is...

2008-05-09T10:06:00.001-07:00

The Bitter End

2008-05-08T12:31:00.000-07:00

From a USA Today article with the dogged but deluded also-ran (those are the AP's words), Hillary Clinton:

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

As Kos says:

How is that not race-baiting?

Are African Americans not hard working? Are Americans with college degrees not hard working? And this obsession with race!

Kos also has two posts that dispute that notion quite well, here and here.

Mrs. F just stated for the record that she's lost all respect for Senator Clinton. It's sad for me to say it, but she and her husband, a man who I vociferously defended for the larger part of a decade, are now dead to me.

[ADDENDUM] Even Joe Conason, another staunch defender of the Clintons, has had enough in his weekly Salon column:

Citing an Associated Press analysis "that found how Senator Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me," she went on to say: "There's a pattern emerging here."

There is indeed a pattern emerging -- and it is a pattern that must dismay everyone who admires the Clintons and has defended them against the charge that they are exploiting racial divisions.

As Sean Wilentz and others have argued, there was no ugly subtext to her innocuous remark about the different roles of Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Baines Johnson in the civil rights crusade, although several prominent Obama supporters promoted that smear. And if Bill Clinton's comparison of Obama and Jesse Jackson was badly timed and clumsy, that too fell within the bounds of acceptable commentary. Indeed, the discussion of ethnic and racial voting preferences is not only fair but unavoidable and utterly mundane in American politics.

But this time she violated the rhetorical rules, no doubt by mistake. It was her offhand reference to "working, hard-working Americans, white Americans" that raises the specter of old Dixie demagogues like Wallace and Lester Maddox. Was she dog-whistling to the voters of Kentucky and West Virginia?

While I still cannot believe she actually intended any such nefarious meaning, she seemed to be equating "hard-working Americans" with "white Americans." Which is precisely what Wallace and his cohort used to do with their drawling refrain about welfare and affirmative action. This is the grating sound of Richard Nixon's Southern strategy, even though Tricky Dick would never quite stoop to saying such things in public.

Amen, Brother Schieffer

2008-04-20T20:42:00.000-07:00

Finally, today, I watched the ABC debate the other night when that question came up again about why Senator Obama doesn’t wear a flag pin in his lapel. Since no one asked me, here is my thought on all that. I think it’s a nice thing if people want to wear a flag on their lapel. But I believe it more important to keep the flag behind our lapel in our hearts. I feel the same way about wearing my religion on my sleeve. It just fits me better on the inside. When I go to see our local baseball team, I do wear my Washington Nationals baseball cap. But am I less a fan if don’t wear it to work? The truth is I have been known to wear a red, white and blue stars and stripes tie on the Fourth of July. But am I less patriotic when I trade it for my Santa Claus tie at Christmas? Patriotism is no more about signs or pins than religion is about reminding others how pious we think we are. No, the proof in these puddings is not the signs that we wear, but how we act. Wouldn’t that also be a better way to judge our presidential candidates than by the jewelry they wear?

How 'Bout Them Apples?

2008-04-20T20:41:00.001-07:00

What's Missing?

2008-04-20T09:25:00.000-07:00

Images from George Snuffleupagus' interview with John McCain on ABC's This Week:

Via Crooks and Liars. Here's a clue if you're scratching your head.

Here's one thing that isn't missing: hypocrisy.

[PS] Oh, by the by, it seems Hillary wasn't showing her patriotism the other night during the debate.

Our Idiocracy

2008-04-18T15:51:00.000-07:00

From Dan Froomkin:

The latest data points include a poll that shows the public is profoundly unhappy about the economy and continued U.S. involvement in Iraq, a study from the Pentagon's premier military educational institute that describes the Iraq war as "a major debacle" whose outcome "is in doubt," and a government audit disclosing that the Bush administration lacks a comprehensive plan to combat terrorism in the parts of Pakistan where al-Qaeda is regenerating its ability to attack the United States.

As usual, of course, none of this permeates the Bush Bubble. When asked yesterday whether he saw any end in sight in Iraq, he responded: "So long as I'm the president, my measure of success is victory -- and success."

How True

2008-04-18T09:25:00.000-07:00

And from a recent ABC/WaPo poll:

Nine in 10 Americans now give the economy a negative rating, with a majority saying it is in "poor" shape, the most to say so in more than 15 years. And the sense that things are bad has spread swiftly. The percentage who hold a negative view of the economy is up 33 points over the past year, and the percentage who rate the economy "poor" has increased 13 points in the past two months. That is the quickest 60-day decline since The Post and ABC started asking the question, in 1985.
[...]
Two-thirds of Democrats call the economy downright "poor," as do a majority of independents. But while a wide majority of Republicans rate the economy negatively, only about three in 10 describe conditions as that dire, and most have a positive take on the future. Most Democrats and independents, however, hold pessimistic views about the next 12 months.

Economic ratings are flagging across partisan lines, and overall optimism is at a new low among all Americans: Nearly six in 10 said they feel pessimistic about the economy for the coming year, a seven-point increase since early February. And those who think the situation is already in poor shape do not have high hopes for recovery anytime soon; nearly three-quarters of them have a negative view about the next 12 months.

How to Get Elected: Make Shit Up

2008-04-14T16:28:00.000-07:00

Hey, it worked for George W., it might just work for Hillary. From a campaign stop in Indiana today, as covered by ABC News:

President Clinton, Hillary's number one surrogate, then used O'Bannon's remarks as a springboard to share his own experiences of reactions to Obama's comments at a recent San Francisco fundraiser where he said small town voters were "bitter" and "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Over seven stops in North Carolina, Clinton said "Everywhere I go there are all these people with signs, saying I'm not bitter - I'm not bitter."

[...]

The strong sentiments were appreciated by the crowd, but were not entirely accurate. During Clinton's seven stops in North Carolina on Saturday there were no "I'm not bitter" signs. There was a small assortment of people at his later events wearing stickers with the slogan, but many of those sporting the stickers weren't even sure what they meant. Clinton also was a bit confused about his encounter in Pennsylvania. The conversation actually took place at an earlier event in Bloomsburg, PA - or so Clinton told the crowd in Bloomsburg.

Despite the evolving anecdotes, the fact that the Clinton campaign needs this story to stay alive in Indiana and other rural states was crystal clear.

I Misspoke, But Wait... Isn't That a Scary Black Preacher Over There?!?!

2008-03-25T12:23:00.000-07:00

Hillary Clinton has been taking some deserved lumps for misspeaking (aka, lying) about her national security cred the last couple of days. Rather than ducking sniper fire on the airport tarmac in Bosnia, video evidence suggests that she was welcomed instead by an 8-year-old bearing a poem (which can sometimes be just as dangerous). Here's Olbermann on the charade:

She says she only misspoke the one time, but AmericaBlog has found that she's been using this sniper-fire line for several months. And in explaining her misstatement, she noted this:

I was also told that the greeting ceremony had been moved away from the tarmac but there was this 8 year old girl and I can't rush by her, I have to at least greet her, so I took her stuff and then I left.

The First Lady took this 8-year-old's stuff and then ran for safety, leaving the girl helpless out on the tarmac?

So, with all the rather damning video evidence to the contrary floating about the YouTube-osphere, there's only one way for the Clinton campaignhttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif to respond: remind everyone how the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is an awful, unpatriotic, angry black man who preached to Barrack Obama. The TPM omnibus has a couple of examples--one from a surrogate and another from Clinton herself in an interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

"He would not have been my pastor," Clinton said. "You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend."

I'm sure we'll be dredging this back up again and again this week.

As an aside, I was listening to , where Steve Scher invites several local columnists to chat about the week that was, as well as take a few calls. One call came in from a United Church of Christ (UCC) pastor (the same denomination as Obama's church, as well as the church that I not-so-regularly attend of late), and he had a very interesting take on why Obama was "hanging around with this guy:"

What Obama is really doing is expressing what is the heart of who we are as the United Church of Christ. We're based on a covenantal policy, which means you hang in there with one another because you may possibly not have all the truth yet, that God is bigger than all of us. And I can illustrate that by saying that in Washington, most of the UCC church members belong to churches who are open and affirming to the gay and lesbian community, and we have ordained clergy and so forth. About 75 percent of our members belong to congregations which do that. In the rest of the country, it's about 12 percent. The difference is, the good news is, we don't split over that. We have sharp disagreements, but for about 40 years we've been getting along even though we disagree on a subject where people have very, very strong feelings. Obama's doing exactly the same thing. He belongs to a United Church of Christ (church) and he will stay in covenant with that pastor even though he sharply disagrees. It's a little like a marriage.

Numbers

2008-03-24T08:58:00.000-07:00

Round numbers make news, there's no getting around it. But just because we've now reached the newest magic round number of 4,000 American military casualties in Iraq should not take away from the daily tragedies that have brought us to this point. And today's commemoration of this number shouldn't be the last time we revisit the subject of death and mayhem in Iraq for months to come. There are a lot of pressing worries on the American public's mind these days, foremost the economy (but don't forget angry African American preachers, too), but in order to address our down-spiraling economy we're going to need to extricate ourselves from Iraq sooner than later. Which will also, thankfully, bring an end to the numbers game.

As a reminder of the toll of 4,000 (as well as a reminder of who got us here and who will continue the carnage), here's a photo mosaic created by Nico Pitney over at the HuffPo (click through for a much larger canvas):

John McCain: The Fogey of War

2008-03-22T10:13:00.000-07:00

From Bill Maher's New Rules:

This. Is. Awwwwwwesssssome!

2008-03-14T09:08:00.000-07:00

I've been chatting with several folks the last couple of days about how Barack Obama can counter-punch the Clinton Kitchen Sink attack of the last couple of weeks (with its mix of racial overtones, hubristic yet nonsensical claims, and flat-out falsehoods). Well, here's one way to do it: Snarked Up! Ready to Go!

In a response to a press release by the Clinton team, the Obama communications team took the missive verbatim and added its own commentary to pierce the gently floating balloon of Clinton's last hopes for the nomination (via Ben Smith at Politico):

From: Bill Burton
Sent: Wed 3/12/2008 6:36 PM
To: Bill Burton
Subject: FW: The Clinton Memo... as annotated by the Obama communicationsdepartment

To: Interested Parties
From: Clinton Campaign
Date: Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Re: Keystone Test: Obama Losing Ground [Get ready for a good one.]

The path to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue goes through Pennsylvania so if Barack Obama can't win there, how will he win the general election?

[Answer: I suppose by holding obviously Democratic states like California and New York, and beating McCain in swing states like Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Virginia and Wisconsin where Clinton lost to Obama by mostly crushing margins. But good question.]

After setbacks in Ohio and Texas, Barack Obama needs to demonstrate that he can win the state of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is the last state with more than 15 electoral votes on the primary calendar and Barack Obama has lost six of the seven other largest states so far - every state except his home state of Illinois.

[If you define "setback" as netting enough delegates out of our 20-plus-point wins in Mississippi and Wyoming to completely erase any delegate advantage the Clinton campaign earned out of March 4th, then yeah, we feel pretty setback.]

Pennsylvania is of particular importance, along with Ohio, Florida and Michigan, because it is dominated by the swing voters who are critical to a Democratic victory in November. No Democrat has won the presidency without winning Pennsylvania since 1948. And no candidate has won the Democratic nomination without winning Pennsylvania since 1972.

[What the Clinton campaign secretly means: PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE FACT THAT WE'VE LOST 14 OF THE LAST 17 CONTESTS AND SAID THAT MICHIGAN AND FLORIDA WOULDN'T COUNT FOR ANYTHING. Also, we're still trying to wrap our minds around the amazing coincidence that the only "important" states in the nominating process are the ones that Clinton won.]

But the Obama campaign has just announced that it is turning its attention away from Pennsylvania.

[Huh?]

This is not a strategy that can beat John McCain in November.

[I don't think Clinton's strategy of losing in state after state after promising more of the same politics is working all that well either.]

In the last two weeks, Barack Obama has lost ground among men, women, Democrats, independents and Republicans - all of which point to a candidacy past its prime.

["A candidacy past its prime." These guys kill me.]

For example, just a few weeks ago, Barack Obama won 68% of men in Virginia, 67% in Wisconsin and 62% in Maryland. He won 60% of Virginia women and 55% of Maryland women. He won 62% of independents in Maryland, 64% in Wisconsin and 69% in Virginia. Obama won 59% of Democrats in Maryland, 53% in Wisconsin and 62% in Virginia. And among Republicans, Obama won 72% in both Virginia and Wisconsin.

But now Obama's support has dropped among all these groups.

[That's true, if you don't count all the winning we've been up to. As it turns out, it's difficult to maintain 40-point demographic advantages, even over Clinton]

In Mississippi, he won only 25% of Republicans and barely half of independents. In Ohio, he won only 48% of men, 41% of women and 42% of Democrats. In Texas, he won only 49% of independents and 46% of Democrats. And in Rhode Island, Obama won just 33% of women and 37% of Democrats.

[I'm sympathetic to their attempt to parse crushing defeats. And I'm sure Rush Limbaugh's full-throated endorsement of Clinton didn't make any difference. Right]

Why are so many voters turning away from Barack Obama in state after state?

[You mean besides the fact that we're ahead in votes, states won and delegates?]

In the last few weeks, questions have arisen about Obama's readiness to be president. In Virginia, 56% of Democratic primary voters said Obama was most qualified to be commander-in-chief. That number fell to 37% in Ohio, 35% in Rhode Island and 39% in Texas.

[Only the Clinton campaign could cherry pick states like this. But in contrast to their logic, in the most recent contest of Mississippi, voters said that Obama was more qualified to be commander in chief than Clinton by a margin of 55-42.]

So the late deciders - those making up their minds in the last days before the election - have been shifting to Hillary Clinton. Among those who made their decision in the last three days, Obama won 55% in Virginia and 53% in Wisconsin, but only 43% in Mississippi, 40% in Ohio, 39% in Texas and 37% in Rhode Island.

[If only there were enough late deciders for the Clinton campaign to actually be ahead, they would really be on to something.]

If Barack Obama cannot reverse his downward spiral with a big win in Pennsylvania, he cannot possibly be competitive against John McCain in November.

[If they are defining downward spiral as a series of events in which the Clinton campaign has lost more votes, lost more contests and lost more delegates to us - I guess we will have to suffer this horribly painful slide all the way to the nomination and then on to the White House.]

[Thanks for the laughs guys. This was great.]

Amen, Sister Collins

2008-03-09T14:38:00.000-07:00

Mrs. F and I subscribe to both the Saturday and Sunday editions of the NYTimes, and I've been enjoying the return of columnist Gail Collins to the Saturday edition (as well as a revitalized-of-late Bob Herbert). In this weekend's column, Collins provides a snarky take on where we're at with the process for selecting our Democratic nominee, and I love her final line of the column:

So what about the voters? In Florida, although none of the candidates campaigned and there were no delegates at stake, 1.7 million Democrats still turned out for the primary, which Clinton won. We will refrain from making obvious references to Florida, disenfranchisement, presidential elections, etc. In Michigan, where Obama wasn’t even on the ballot, Clinton beat her only major opposition, the fearsome Uncommitted, by an underwhelming 55-40 percent.

Michigan and Florida say they’ll only accept a do-over if somebody else pays for it — to the tune of around $28 million. We will refrain from making the obvious references to Iraq, purple fingers, several trillion dollars, etc., etc.

Some people are proposing a compromise in the form of cost-cutting caucuses. Do not let them have any caucuses! Retirees will topple off the cafeteria chairs if you have caucuses in Florida.

Clinton says the party should just forgive and forget, and hand over her delegates.

The good news is: While Barack may understand the audacity of hope, only Hillary really gets the audacity of audacity.

Stumping for Obama

2008-03-01T16:49:00.000-08:00

A fave of mine, Kal Penn (aka, Kumar from the dopey road movies and now Kutner on House); from an NYTimes article about the importance of Rhode Island in next Tuesday's primaries.

A Pox Upon Your Caucus

2008-02-10T15:19:00.000-08:00

The Seattle Times' Danny Westneat on Washington's caucus system:

In the media coverage of the caucuses, it will be said there was "record turnout" and "lines around the block." Someone will say they've never seen such robust civic participation.

All that is true — for a caucus. But the reality is the percentage of voters who weighed in Saturday to pick a president was far lower than is typical even for off-year votes for things like school levies.

An estimated 10 percent of registered voters took part — obliterating the old record for a caucus. Still, that is about a million fewer voters than cast ballots in the 2000 presidential primary (which was a normal election, not a gathering in school gyms and churches).

[...]

Clinton backer and first-time caucuser Ivan Vulovic, 22, said the entire caucus system should be scrapped.

"This is horrible," he said. "It's not democratic. I think we should hold a regular election instead of this."

Well, we tried. But the parties — especially the Democratic Party — didn't like it. When choosing their nominees, they want to limit who participates — no independents or crossover voters — as well as get your names and addresses so they can telemarket you and grow their organizations.

While my chest swelled to see this outpouring of democracy from my neighbors, it's definitely not convenient and thus shuts out many who either couldn't make it because of scheduling or just didn't have the time to spend 2 to 3 hours devoted to the process due to things like physical ailments, child care, etc.

Democracy Is Messy and Tiring

2008-02-09T15:48:00.001-08:00

Well, I finished my stint as a Precinct Caucus Chair (PCC) in the Washington state Democratic caucus, and man am I tired. (It didn't help that I was up since 5:30 this morn with a feverish Lil' F.) The turnout was huuuuuge -- for our precinct alone, we got 86 people, which if memory serves me is at about double the amount that turned up for the 2004 caucus. In the end, Obama won 67 votes (for 6 delegates to the next level, the district caucuses) and Clinton won 15 votes (for 2 delegates); 3 people remained uncommitted and one lone person stayed committed to Dennis Kucinich.

I was kinda nervous going into this, but happily my extroverted side came out and I was able to command my part of the room (we had three other precincts in this midsized elementary school auditorium -- really an extra-large playroom).

The way the caucus works is when you sign in, you write down your preference for President, which is essentially your vote in the caucus. However, there's time for speechifying and trying to convince your neighbors to come to your side, and then you can make a change if you wish (there's no threshold level where, say, a candidate who doesn't get 15 percent has to move to supporting another candidate; however, if you don't move, you won't have any delegates and thus no say in the process).

And that actually went fairly smoothly. However, the somewhat vague instructions for selecting delegates who would attend the next stage (the district caucus) was a bit confusing and I nearly melted down trying to explain things. I finally streamlined the process (aka, slightly subverted the official rules to wrangle the 86 people there to agreeing on how to select the delegates) and we got it done.

And after all that, I'm still a little on the fence about caucusing. On one hand, it was pretty darn exciting to see all our neighbors come out and it was fun to mingle and meet some of them that I hadn't met before. On the other hand, there were certainly some moments of chaos that could have been avoided with just a straight primary style vote. And it took time. People from our precinct were there for about 90 minutes to 2 hours.

Then again, democracy is not something that's free. We have to work for it. And to be reminded of that from time to time is a good thing.

I dunno. I need some espresso -- I'm wasted tired right now.

Go Obama!

PS - I got to lead the entire mini auditorium in the Pledge of Allegiance. I don't think I've done that since my junior high years.

Obama Day at Washington Caucuses

2008-02-09T08:58:00.000-08:00

I thought this was a pretty interesting tidbit from The Slog (the blog of The Stranger, Seattle's local alternative weekly) culled from the reporter's experiences at the Clinton and Obama rallies held on Thursday and Friday:

Obama doesn't do very well on the exit poll question about whether a given candidate "cares about people like me," also known as the empathy score. HRC does much better. I was expecting to feel that empathy gap at their ralliesand I did, but it was reversed. Obama is much, much more skilled at responding to a crowd. HRC had a long list of local green companies (prepared by Jay Inslee) and did her conscientious nods to unions supposedly in attendance, but she studiously ignored shouts from the audience (including "I love you!") and didn't seem to notice as an old lady fainted and was wheeled out of the hall in a stretcher (right in front of the press risers). When Obama gets the "I love you!", he immediately responds, "I love you back!" When a girl almost fainted in the crowd immediately in front of the stage, he interrupted his speech for a good minute or so to get her a bottle of water and and ask people to clear a path so she could sit down.

BTW, Clinton got over 5,000 to her rally, while Obama filled the Key Arena (where the basketball Sonics play for the time being) with over 17,000 fans (and turned away well over 3,000 more).

Here are a couple of pics from the Seattle P-I:

And I'm sorry if I'm falling into some kind of anti-HRC meme by posting these photos, but what's the deal with the crazy eyes?

Seriously. Alright. Here's a better shot to end this cavalcade.

Obama's in Seattle Today

2008-02-08T07:05:00.001-08:00

He's playing at the Key Arena at 11am (the same place the basketball Sonics play), but I'm not gonna be able to make it. Happily, I saw him back in January, so I don't feel like I'm missing out too much.

Speaking of (hopefully) our next President, I would have loved to been able to get my hands on this limited edition print (which is gone, baby, gone):

Also, I'm going to be the precinct caucus chair for neighborhood in this weekend's Washington state Democratic caucus. Should be interesting (and a little nervewracking, as it's expected to have a huge attendance). I'll be writing about the experience later in the weekend.

Today's Civics Lesson: Super Delegates

2008-02-06T12:52:00.001-08:00

As explained by TPM's Josh Marshall:

More on Delegates and Obama's Mo

2008-02-06T11:12:00.000-08:00

From John Cole at Balloon Juice:

Obama won more states, won more delegates, improved his numbers with key groups, widened his lead among minority voters, and over-all, outperformed Hillary. Period. The fact that the Clinton established machine has not been able to pull ahead should be a real clear sign of how much trouble they are in right now. This race was Hillary’s to lose, and last night she may have started doing just that. You will hear the Clinton camp talking repeatedly about winning the big prize- California. Winning California is irrelevant, as a Democrat is going to win Cali in the general regardless who it is.

Obama now has a clear financial lead, momentum, and the delegate lead, and we are heading in to a number of states where he can compete. I am not drinking the kool-aid, folks, I think I have a pretty clear grasp of where we are right now. Obama is surging and the Hillary camp is worried. You will be able to see it in their faces over the next few days.

Is the Race for the Democratic Nominee Out of the People's Hands?

2008-02-06T10:07:00.000-08:00

With the large number of so-called Super Delegates, it may very well be. Here's John Aravosis over at AmericaBlog:

Obama has the most delegates by virtue of your votes, our citizens. But Hillary has the lead in total delegates, 783-709. How is that possible? Because of a bunch of Democratic party officials got together and decided that they prefer Hillary, so they gave her the lead in spite of the fact that you, the voters, gave Obama the lead.

For a bit more of an explanation of the history of Super Delegates, check out this bit from Matt Bai's piece on generational incursions into back-room politics from this last Sunday's NYTimes Magazine:

These are the roughly 800 Democratic Party insiders — elected officials, state chairmen, national committee members — who will make up about a fifth of the total delegate count at the convention and who can vote for any candidate they want, regardless of what the voters in primaries and caucuses have said. Superdelegates were invented by the Democrats after the 1980 election in the expectation that in any future close nomination race, they would line up behind the establishment candidate and head off the possibility of a ruinous floor fight at the convention.

I recently got a short history lesson about this from Gary Hart, who pointed out what he called “eerie parallels” between his near-upset of Walter Mondale in 1984 and Obama’s campaign against Clinton. Not least among them was that Clinton had actually gone back and unearthed Mondale’s signature line: “Where’s the beef?” (It came from a Wendy’s commercial that was all the rage at the time, but it’s doubtful that anyone under 30 had any idea what she was talking about.) Hart reminded me that by beating Mondale in the California primary, just weeks before the convention, he denied the former vice president the delegates he needed for the nomination. Had it not been for the existence of the superdelegates, who lined up behind Mondale, Hart could actually have swiped the nomination.

Obama's Got Mo

2008-02-06T06:48:00.000-08:00

That's momentum. Also Missouri. He just squeaked by with a win in the Show Me state after it had been called early for Clinton. Things are going to be tied delegate-wise coming out of last night's contests, but Joe Sudbay at AmericaBlog sees the advantage of the contests spread over the next week (including Washington state's caucus on Saturday) going to Obama:

Obama has the momentum, and has for some time. Stretching out the calendar only helps Obama. He has been steadily catching up to Hillary in state after state, poll after poll -- that's why so many of today's states were actually in play tonight, when most weren't just a couple weeks ago. He has more money than Hillary. And after tonight, even more money will pour into the Obama campaign. Obama outraised Clinton by almost 3 to 1 in January. And the upcoming election calendar favors Obama. There are several caucuses this weekend, including Washington and Maine. Next week is the so-called Chesapeake primary (DC, MD and VA). Obama is expected to do well in all of them. Hillary Clinton had some big wins tonight to be sure -- but they were in states she was always expected to win. As Markos noted tonight: "She didn't exceed expectations anywhere. She lost states she led big in just a few weeks ago." (Hillary was recently ahead in Connecticut, Missouri, Georgia, Alabama and Minnesota, and then lost them all today. And she won California and Massachusetts, but she was always ahead in those states (see CA and MA).) And in any case, she failed to deal Obama a knock-out blow. Even worse, she lost to him in terms of the number of states won, and it looks like she may lose to him in terms of total delegates won.

Michael Chabon on His Support for Obama

2008-02-04T12:14:00.001-08:00

From the Washington Post, an essay by author Michael Chabon (Yiddish Policemen's Union):

In a better world, if there were such a thing (and so far there never has been), we would not need a president like Obama as badly as we do. If there were less at stake, if our democracy had not been permitted, indeed encouraged, to sink to its present degraded and embattled condition not only by the present administration but by a fair number of those people now seeking to head up the next one, perhaps then we could afford to waste our votes on the candidate who knows best how to jigger, to manipulate and to conform to the vapid specifications of the debased electoral process it has been our unhappy fate to construct for ourselves.

Because ultimately, that is the point of Obama's candidacy -- of the hope, enthusiasm and sense of purpose it inspires, yes, but more crucially, of the very doubts and reservations expressed by those who pronounce, whether in tones of regret, certainty or skepticism, that America is not ready for Obama, or that Obama is not ready for the job, or that nobody of any worth or decency -- supposing there even to be such a person left on the American political scene -- can be expected to survive for a moment with his idealism and principle intact.

The point of Obama's candidacy is that the damaged state of American democracy is not the fault of George W. Bush and his minions, the corporate-controlled media, the insurance industry, the oil industry, lobbyists, terrorists, illegal immigrants or Satan. The point is that this mess is our fault. We let in the serpents and liars, we exchanged shining ideals for a handful of nails and some two-by-fours, and we did it by resorting to the simplest, deepest-seated and readiest method we possess as human beings for trying to make sense of the world: through our fear. America has become a phobocracy.

[...]

But the most pitiable fear of all is the fear of disappointment, of having our hearts broken and our hopes dashed by this radiant, humane politician who seems not just with his words but with every step he takes, simply by the fact of his running at all, to promise so much for our country, for our future and for the eventual state of our national soul. I say "pitiable" because this fear of disappointment, which I hear underlying so many of the doubts that people express to me, is ultimately a fear of finding out the truth about ourselves and the extent of the mess that we have gotten ourselves into. If we do fight for Obama, work for him, believe in him, vote for him, and the man goes down to defeat by the big-money machines and the merchants of fear, then what hope will we have left to hold on to?

Thus in the name of preserving hope do we disdain it. That is how a phobocracy maintains its grip on power.

To support Obama, we must permit ourselves to feel hope, to acknowledge the possibility that we can aspire as a nation to be more than merely secure or predominant. We must allow ourselves to believe in Obama, not blindly or unquestioningly as we might believe in some demagogue or figurehead but as we believe in the comfort we take in our families, in the pleasure of good company, in the blessings of peace and liberty, in any thing that requires us to put our trust in the best part of ourselves and others. That kind of belief is a revolutionary act. It holds the power, in time, to overturn and repair all the damage that our fear has driven us to inflict on ourselves and the world.

Obama's a Mac, and Clinton's a PC

2008-02-04T10:49:00.000-08:00

From the NYTimes:

That is, Mr. Obama’s site is more harmonious, with plenty of white space and a soft blue palette. Its task bar is reminiscent of the one used at Apple’s iTunes site. It signals in myriad ways that it was designed with a younger, more tech-savvy audience in mind — using branding techniques similar to the ones that have made the iPod so popular.

“With Obama’s site, all the features and elements are seamlessly integrated, just like the experience of using a program on a Macintosh computer,” said Alice Twemlow, chairwoman of the M.F.A. program in design criticism at the School of Visual Arts (who is a Mac user).

[...]

In contrast to barackobama.com, Mrs. Clinton’s site uses a more traditional color scheme of dark blue, has sharper lines dividing content and employs cookie-cutter icons next to its buttons for volunteering, and the like.

“Hillary’s is way more hectic, it’s got all these, what look like parody ads,” said Ms. Twemlow, who is not a citizen and cannot vote in the election.

Jason Santa Maria, creative director of Happy Cog Studios, which designs Web sites, detected a basic breach of netiquette. “Hillary’s text is all caps, like shouting,” he said. There are “many messages vying for attention,” he said, adding, “Candidates are building a brand and it should be consistent.”

But Emily Chang, the cofounder of Ideacodes, a Web designing and consulting firm, detected consistent messages, and summed them up: “His site is more youthful and hers more regal.”

For your comparison (click through to see larger sizes):

The World As It Is Is Not The World As It Has To Be

2008-02-04T09:19:00.001-08:00

Obama's Super Bowl Ad:

The Chills

2008-02-04T08:12:00.000-08:00

That's what I got when I first saw this Obama tribute video that's been making the viral rounds before Tuesday's super voting:

Here's a little bit more about it.

And here's some good polling news going into Tsunami Tuesday.

Amen Brother Cole

2008-02-01T11:51:00.000-08:00

From blogger John Cole (a former Republican who has seen the light), responding to the visceral hatred of John McCain within the circles of right-wing punditry and wingnut netizens:

For as long as I can remember, McCain has been anti-abortion, for fiscal conservatism and balanced budgets and against wasteful spending, and an avowed and committed hawk and ardent military supporter. By my count, that is, or at least used to be, the trinity for the modern GOP. Those were the issues that, at a glance, defined conservatism, and McCain was on the “right” side of every one of them. Mitt Romney, not so much.

So how is it that these lunatics have so completely convinced themselves that Romney, who will say ANYTHING to get elected, is the actual conservative? It is becoming clearer and clearer that Mitt Romney is little more than the Manchurian Candidate for the oligarchy, and the notion of their puppet figure losing to someone who will occasionally tell them to go fuck themselves has them in a real tizzy.

Hell, even The Wicked Witch of Wingnuttia would vote for Hillary over McCain:

What Is Up...

2008-01-23T09:13:00.000-08:00

...with the porn soundtrack that's playing underneath this RudyG campaign commercial about a national catastrophe fund (hat tip to TPM)?

Helicopter Ben

2008-01-22T09:39:00.000-08:00

Ben Bernanke and the Fed is playing catch-up to the global financial tanking with a 3/4-point drop in the prime interest rate, which will in theory keep spurring movement of money into and through the economy. Which is what you'd expect from a man who is nicknamed Helicopter Ben (with explanation from Wikipedia):

In 2002, when the word "deflation" began appearing in the business news, Bernanke gave a speech about deflation.[10] In that speech, he mentioned that the government in a fiat money system owns the physical means of creating money. Control of the means of production for money implies that the government can always avoid deflation by simply issuing more money. (He referred to a statement made by Milton Friedman about using a "helicopter drop" of money into the economy to fight deflation.) Bernanke's critics have since referred to him as "Helicopter Ben" or to his "helicopter printing press".

Responding to today's rate cut, John Aravosis at AmericaBlog has a couple of good pointers, first to the Washington Post

It is the largest single rate cut since 1984, beyond even the initial half-point reduction that the Fed made following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.... The global sell-off has involved some of the worst market declines since Sept. 11, 2001, and has erased more than $5 trillion in value from stock markets this year....
[...]
"This is an expression of panic -- really nothing less than panic about prospects for the U.S. economy," said Stephen Green, senior economist with Standard Chartered Bank.

And from CNNMoney/Fortune:

But Bernanke is setting the stage for an even bigger recession down the road. Just as the ultra-low rates of the early 2000s created many of the problems we're experiencing today, pumping money into the system would probably stoke inflation, forcing the Fed to hike rates sharply in the near future. "It's better to take a small recession and kill inflation immediately instead of facing high inflation and a really big recession later," says Carnegie Mellon economist Allan Meltzer.
[...]
Indeed, while the economy is sending mixed messages about growth, the signs of increasing inflation are flashing bright red. For 2007 the consumer price index rose 4.1%, the biggest annual increase in 17 years. Gold, historically a reliable harbinger of inflation, set an all-time high of more than $900 an ounce. The dollar is languishing at a record low against the euro and a weighted basket of international currencies. "Flooding the market with liquidity is a disaster for the purchasing power of the dollar," says David Gitlitz, chief economist for Trend Macrolytics.

I Had No Idea...

2008-01-11T08:29:00.000-08:00

...that the legacy of Ronald Reagan was such an issue in the campaign for the presidency in 2008. Why aren't the Democrats talking about him and bowing to his memory like the lapdogs in the Republican three-ring circus?!?!?!

Via Talking Points Memo.

Huckenfreude

2008-01-05T13:10:00.000-08:00

I loved that headline over at Atrios the other day, and just had to recycle it with this video of Keith Olbermann discussing the Republican melt-down over Huckabee's ascent -- despite the fact that they've been cultivating the God Squad for so many years.

Another Reason to Like Obama

2008-01-05T11:17:00.000-08:00

His favorite TV viewing choices are well rounded (from MediaBistro):

Barack Obama tells TV Guide that his favorite TV character of all time is "SpongeBob SquarePants, because SpongeBob is the show I watch with my daughters." His favorite TV shows of all time are M*A*S*H and The Wire.

Speaking of The Wire (the best show on television, period), check out my recent post over at my more media-centric blog, One Egg, Any Style.

The Ron Paul Phenomenon

2008-01-05T09:42:00.000-08:00

I love that Ron Paul beat out Rudy Ghouliani in the Iowa primaries by a pretty handy margin, as well as the fact that Fox News didn't invite him to its New Hampshire debate tomorrow because he's not polling as well as the other "major" candidates. But I'm not a Ron Paul fan. I fully agree on his position with regards to getting us out of Iraq. But that's it. A relative of mine (who occasionally checks in at this site) has started supporting him, and I've got no bones about that -- he has some definite appeal to Republicans with severe Bush fatigue. But I'm genetically disposed to vote liberal/progressive/Democratic, so that's where it ends for me. This Salon article from back in December sums up the differences in our outlooks quite succinctly (Salon, as always, requires a subscription or a few moments of your time watching a web ad):

Paul, a lifelong libertarian who has often been treated in Congress as a dotty old outcast with strange ideas. Throughout his political career he has argued for legalizing gold and silver as legal tender, ending most foreign aid, abolishing the income tax, eliminating the Department of Education, and ending the federal war on drugs, among other things.

Still, I've been trying to read about what is driving the popularity of his campaign (he raised about $20 million in the last quarter -- about equal to what Obama and Clinton raised and far more than any of the Republican candidates). The Salon article talks with a number of supporters in an attempt to get to the heart of the matter, and it ends with this:

But perhaps the best explanation of the Paul phenomenon came from Rammelkamp, the young man from Long Island who had taken on significant credit card debt for the Paul campaign. He told me that to understand Paul, I had to think of the American people as a baby elephant, chained to a tree. "It realizes that it can only walk 5 feet in each direction. It realizes that it is a slave. When it grows old enough, it is strong enough to break away from the tree. But it doesn't know." He pauses, to let this sink in -- the American people are a captive animal unaware of its own power to claim liberty. "When was the last time you tried it?" he asks me of breaking free. "Maybe you are strong enough."

And so for thousands of his supporters, Paul has begun to symbolize freedom itself. He is the baby elephant who broke his chains, the Guy Fawkes for a new millennium. And with his candidacy, his supporters believe he shows a way out of the morass in Iraq, a way away from the burden of taxation and the fear of economic insecurity, a way to strike back against the creeping power of the federal government and the free-spending culture of Washington. He is a political savior for people who feel trapped by two political parties that have failed to solve the nation's problems, by a political dialogue that often skirts the real issues, and by a federal government that expands its power by marketing fear. Ron Paul, they hope, is the way out. "It's like do or die," says Linda Hannan, a 35-year-old paralegal from Staten Island, N.Y., as the Murphy's celebrations continue. "Liberty and freedom are our future."

Experience

2008-01-05T09:39:00.000-08:00

From the Seattle P-I's David Horsey:

Why We Fight

2008-01-04T17:50:00.000-08:00

A good reminder from the late great blogger Steve Gilliard (who was eulogized by Matt Bai in the annual NYTimes Magazine tribute to those who passed away during the previous year) via Crooks and Liars. As we head into a year of hot air, dirty tricks, and endless recycled stump speeches, it's a good reminder about why I'm a Democrat. This was written back in December, 2003, but it's just as relevant now.

You know, I've studied history, I've read about America and you know something, if it weren't for liberals, we'd be living in a dark, evil country, far worse than anything Bush could conjure up. A world where children were told to piss on the side of the road because they weren't fit to pee in a white outhouse, where women had to get back alley abortions and where rape was a joke, unless the alleged criminal was black, whereupon he was hung from a tree and castrated.

What has conservatism given America? A stable social order? A peaceful homelife? Respect for law and order? No. Hell, no. It hasn't given us anything we didn't have and it wants to take away our freedoms.

The Founding Fathers, as flawed as they were, slaveowners and pornographers, smugglers and terrorists, understood one thing, a man's path to God needed no help from the state. Is the religion of these conservatives so fragile that they need the state to prop it up, to tell us how to pray and think? Is that what they stand for? Is that their America?

Conservatism plays on fear and thrives on lies and dishonesty. I grew up with honest, decent conservatives and those people have been replaced by the party of greed. It is one thing to want less government interference and smaller, fiscally responsible government. It is another thing entirely to be a corporate whore, selling out to the highest bidder because the CEO fattens your campaign chest. They are building an America which cannot be sustained. One based on the benefit of the few at the cost of the many. The indifferent boss who hires too few people and works them to death or until they break down sick. Cheap labor capitalism has replaced common sense. "Globalism" which is really guise for exploitation, replaced fair trade, which is nothing like fair for the trapped semi-slaves of the maquliadoras. In the Texas border towns, hundreds of these women have been used as sex slaves and then apparently killed,the FBI powerless to do anything as the criminals sit in Mexico untouched by law.

For the better part of a decade, the conservatives made liberal a dirty word. Well, it isn't. It represents the best and most noble nature of what America stands for: equitable government services, old age pensions, health care, education, fair trials and humane imprisonment. It is the heart and soul of what made American different and better than other countries. Not only an escape from oppression, but the opportunity to thrive in land free of tradition and the repression that can bring. We offered a democracy which didn't enshrine the rich and made them feel they had an obligation to their workers.

Bush and the people around him disdain that. They think, by accident of birth and circumstance, they were meant to rule the world and those who did not agree would suffer.

Liberal does not and has not meant weak until the conservatives said it did. Was Martin Luther King weak? Bobby Kennedy? Gene McCarthy? It was the liberals who remade this country and ended legal segregation and legal sexism. Not the conservatives, who wanted to hold on to the old ways.

It's time to regain the sprit of FDR and Truman and the people around them. People who believed in the public good over private gain. It is time to stop apologizing for being a liberal and be proud to fight for your beliefs. No more shying away or being defined by other people. Liberals believe in a strong defense and punishment for crime. But not preemption and pointless jail sentences. We believe no American should be turned away from a hospital because they are too poor or lack a proper legal defense. We believe that people should make enough from one job to live on, to spend time on raising their family. We believe that individuals and not the state should dictate who gets married and why. The best way to defend marriage is to expand, not restrict it.

It was the liberals who opposed the Nazis while the conservatives were plotting to get their brown shirts or fund Hitler. It was the liberals who warned about Spain and fought there, who joined the RAF to fight the Germans, who brought democracy to Germany and Japan. Let us not forget it was the conservatives who opposed defending America until the Germans sank our ships. They would have done nothing as Britain came under Nazi control. It was they who supported Joe McCarthy and his baseless, drink fueled claims.

Without liberals, there would be no modern America, just a Nazi sattlelite state. Liberals weak on defense? Liberals created America's defense. The conservatives only need vets at election time.

It is time to stop looking for an accomodation with the right. They want none for us. They want to win, at any price. So, you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?

First Win Goes to Obama

2008-01-04T16:03:00.000-08:00

I was frankly quite surprised in the definitive win in Iowa by Barack Obama (and even more surprised with Clinton coming in third, but really only by a few tenths of a percent behind Edwards). And according to this analysis over at TPM's Election Central, it wasn't due to Obama being the second choice from caucus goers who were finding their candidates not viable.

According to the entrance poll, which only measured first preferences of the participants going in, the numbers were: Obama 35%, Hillary 27%, Edwards 23%.

Here's Obama's victory speech from last night, and damn, was it ever presidential sounding.

This is the kind of rhetorical flourish that brought him to the center stage back at the Democratic convention of 2004, and it can help to cement the conventional wisdom that he is the real deal.

But rhetoric shouldn't replace real policy change, as Erica Barnett reminds us in this post over at The Stranger's Slog blog -- Why I’m Not For Obama. Here are her main points (expanded at the Slog post):

1) His energy plan is the least progressive and most status quo of the three. The plan, released last October, includes every pale-green, fake-environmentalist scheme you can imagine: Expanded nuclear, doubling or tripling of corn production for ethanol, a carbon sequestration scheme that relies on technologies that don’t yet exist, and so-called “clean coal,” which isn’t really clean at all.

2) Politically, he’s an appeaser. He issued a convoluted response when news broke that he was touring with Donnie McClurkin, an “ex-gay” homophobe, then allowed McClurkin to use his campaign as a platform to spread his homophobic message to thousands of African-Americans.

3) And speaking of parroting Republicans (and their talking points) … He’s bought into the false idea that Social Security is in a “crisis,” going so far as to use that word.

4) His health care plan, unlike his opponents’, wouldn’t cover everyone. Unlike Edwards’ and Clinton’s plans, Obama’s would not include a mandate that every American participate (it contains a mandate for children, but not adults); without a mandate, the plan would not qualify as universal health care.

Very valid points. Hat tip to Jeff Carlson for the Slog link.

Wonkette Makes an Endorsement for Pres

2008-01-03T11:56:00.000-08:00

It's Ron Paul!?!?!?!

In an election year that could provide such boring figures as Mitt Romney or John McCain, America demands a Republican that will most singlehandedly destroy that party, destroy it again, bury it, spit on its grave, dig it up, then maybe destroy it a few more times and a few more times again until no word in the English language can quite possibly describe how destroyed the Republican party is. Ron Paul -- because of his various racisms, batshit CRAZY policy stances and, ya know, retarded supporters -- is this man for the Republican party.

Get Outta Our Town

2007-12-31T12:29:00.000-08:00

The Iowa Caucuses are finally going to happen in just a few days, which sounds like it'll be just fine with a number of Iowans:

From the YouTube page:

This tongue-in-cheek tune was written as an alternate take on the current climate of caucus frenzy in Iowa - a satirical anthem of sorts. The process: Munson was seeking a local musician to produce such an anthem. Walsmith of Des Moines rock band the Nadas was game and suggested a title and melody. The pair hashed out the lyrics. Singer-guitarist Walsmith performed the song in the middle of the Des Moines Register newsroom/info center.

As heard on NPR's Day to Day today.

HercuBush!

2007-12-24T09:28:00.001-08:00

Stolen from AmericaBlog:

Cutting the Carbon for Christmas

2007-12-24T09:05:00.000-08:00

Yes, rather than buying a Wii or other plastic imported goodies, you can give the gift of experiences and such to friends and family. But the New Economics Foundation has another suggestion in their The Carbon Cost of Christmas: and How to Beat It paper (downloadable in PDF format):

Don’t like Brussels sprouts? Don’t eat them – and here’s the ethical excuse. Part of the Brassica family, Brussel Sprouts as the name suggests are thought to have come to the UK from their native Belgium in the sixteenth century. Unfortunately, the Sprout is high in what nutritionists call 'fermentable substrates' much loved by methane generating bacteria and leading to flatus, or flatulence. Not only is this anti-social, but methane as a greenhouse gas is 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. [Editors note: We have nothing against Brussel Sprouts per se and happily acknowledge to the Sprout Marketing Board that they are both seasonal and can form part of a healthy diet.]

More Background on the Snap

2007-12-22T22:29:00.000-08:00

Here's a little bit more background on the snappy response to Hillary by Barack Obama at the final Democratic debate before the Iowa caucuses (seen in this video previously posted), via Frank Rich at the NYTimes (who's no longer behind a firewall - and yes, that's old news by now, but I'm just getting back to the blog).

Whatever Mrs. Clinton’s experience as first lady or senator, what matters most in any case is not its sheer volume, that 35 years she keeps citing. It’s what she did or did not learn along the way that counts. That’s why one of the most revealing debate passages so far came in an exchange that earned much laughter but scant scrutiny this month in Des Moines.

This was the moment when Mr. Obama was asked how he could deliver a clean break from the past while relying on “so many Clinton advisers.” Mrs. Clinton jokingly called out, “I want to hear that,” prompting Mr. Obama to one-up her by responding, “Well, Hillary, I’m looking forward to you advising me, as well.”

Well, touché. But what was left unexamined beneath the levity was a revealing distinction between these two candidates. The questioner was right: Mr. Obama, like Mrs. Clinton, has indeed turned to former Clintonites for foreign-policy advice. But the Clinton players were not homogeneous, and who ended up with which ’08 candidate is instructive.

The principal foreign-policy Clinton alumni in Mr. Obama’s campaign include Susan Rice, a former assistant secretary of state, and Tony Lake, the former national security adviser and a prewar skeptic who said publicly in February 2003 that the Bush administration had not made the case that Saddam was an “imminent threat.” Ms. Rice, in an eloquent speech in November 2002, said that the Bush administration was “trying to change the subject to Iraq” from the war against Al Qaeda and warned that if it tried to fight both wars at once, “one, if not both, will suffer.” Her text now reads as a bookend to Mr. Obama’s senatorial campaign speech challenging the wisdom of the war only weeks earlier that same fall.

Mrs. Clinton’s current team was less prescient. Though it includes one of the earlier military critics of Bush policy, Gen. Wesley Clark, he is balanced by Gen. Jack Keane, an author of the Bush “surge.” The Clinton campaign’s foreign policy and national security director is a former Madeleine Albright aide, Lee Feinstein, who in November 2002 was gullible enough to say on CNBC that “we should take the president at his word, which is that he sees war as a last resort” — an argument anticipating the one Mrs. Clinton still uses to defend her vote on the Iraq war authorization.

In late April 2003, a week before “Mission Accomplished,” Mr. Feinstein could be found on CNN saying that he was “fairly confident” that W.M.D. would turn up in Iraq. Asked if the war would be a failure if no weapons were found, he said, “I don’t think that that’s a situation we’ll confront.” Forced to confront exactly that situation over the next year, he dug in deeper, co-writing an essay for Foreign Affairs (available on its Web site) arguing that “the biggest problem with the Bush pre-emption strategy may be that it does not go far enough.”

In a two-page handwritten letter in response to a recent column of mine criticizing Mrs. Clinton’s Senate votes on Iraq and Iran, Bill Clinton made a serious and impassioned defense of her foreign-policy record. On the subject of her support for the so-called Kyl-Lieberman amendment on Iran this fall, Mr. Clinton wrote: “If Senator Obama, for example, had really believed it was an indirect authorization to attack Iran, he would not have stayed away on the campaign trail, but would have come back to vote against it.” That’s a fair point — and a fair criticism of Mr. Obama as he continues to vilify this particular Hillary Clinton vote. If voting for Kyl-Lieberman was as grave a step toward war as Mr. Obama claims, there’s no excuse for his absence.

Mr. Clinton’s narrow defense of his wife’s Iraq vote in 2002 — it was not “a blanket authorization to go to war,” he wrote — doesn’t persuade me. But even if it did, her choice for foreign-policy director in 2008 makes me question her ability to profit from experience and make a clean break with the establishment thinking in both parties that enabled the Iraq fiasco. Judgment calls like this rather than failures of the press may answer her husband’s question as to why the public finds her experience “irrelevant.”

Question for Mr. Obama

2007-12-18T10:51:00.000-08:00

The comedy stylings of Lee Stranahan (which will now be brought to you via the TPM media omnibus), in which he asks the question Mr. Obama won't answer:

Here's another viral vid that Mr. Stranahan did about Mike Huckabee from a couple weeks ago:

Goodbye Poop Pail, Hello Biodiesel

2007-12-15T20:02:00.000-08:00

Here at Cracks Centraal, we do cloth diapers for Lil' F, and the soiled ones are stored in a "wet bucket" (water that's been treated with Borax) that we lovingly refer to as the Poop Pail. But future generations of Uptight Seattleites like ourselves might be able to content themselves with disposable diapers, happy with the knowledge that they'll be turned into fuel. Well, at least it's a possibility according to this story in the Toronto Star:

If a Quebec company has its way, dirty diapers normally destined for landfills will soon be transformed into a cost-effective, synthetic diesel fuel.

It's not such a stretch, says engineering and project management company AMEC, which is working on behalf of an as yet unnamed client to build a facility in the Montreal area that would use a process known as pyrolysis to convert diapers to diesel.
[...]
The initial plan is to convert about 30,000 diapers, about one-quarter of the diapers that end up in landfills in Quebec yearly. Piciacchia says that number of diapers will translate into about 11,000 tonnes of diesel fuel. The preliminary economic analysis pegs the cost of the fuel at 50 cents per litre.

Pyrolysis, also known as thermal cracking, involves heating up the diapers up in a closed, controlled environment at temperatures of up to 600C without air, essentially breaking them down thermally.

Des Moines Registry Endorses Clinton

2007-12-15T19:14:00.000-08:00

The big endorsement in Iowa (from the newspaper with the largest circulation in the state) came out this evening, and I was a little surprised that they went with Clinton:

From working for children’s rights as a young lawyer, to meeting with leaders around the world as first lady, to emerging as an effective legislator in her service as a senator, every stage of her life has prepared her for the presidency.

That readiness to lead sets her apart from a constellation of possible stars in her party, particularly Barack Obama, who also demonstrates the potential to be a fine president. When Obama speaks before a crowd, he can be more inspirational than Clinton. Yet, with his relative inexperience, it’s hard to feel as confident he could accomplish the daunting agenda that lies ahead.

[PS] On the other hand, the Boston Globe goes for Obama:

The most sobering challenges that face this country — terrorism, climate change, disease pandemics — are global. America needs a president with an intuitive sense of the wider world, with all its perils and opportunities. Barack Obama has this understanding at his core. The Globe endorses his candidacy in New Hampshire’s Democratic presidential primary Jan. 8.

Oh, Snap!

2007-12-14T14:37:00.001-08:00

Barack Obama in Seattle

2007-12-14T12:07:00.000-08:00

Here's his full time on stage, broken into three parts. Unfortunately, the lighting makes his face just a shiny blob, but the audio is pretty good.

Seattle Obama Rally - 11 Dec 07 (Part 1)

Seattle Obama Rally - 11 Dec 07 (Part 2)

Seattle Obama Rally - 11 Dec 07 (Part 3)

My Date with Barack Obama

2007-12-12T11:21:00.000-08:00

Mr. Obama was in Seattle on Tuesday and I got to go see him (along with one of the other parents from our PEPS Group). Mrs. F and I have been fans of his for awhile, but I haven't been fully ready to commit. But after seeing him, I'm leaning further and further toward making that commitment. I'm going to try to post the video of his entire time on stage later, but first here's a wrap-up of the event from our local Fox news channel -- which includes someone you might recognize at the 1:01 point in the video.

This Sounds Familiar

2007-11-05T08:49:00.000-08:00

From Jonathan Landay, who was part of the Knight Ridder team of reporters who got a lot right in their skepticism about BushCo's WMD claims in the run-up to the Iraq war, comes this article that sounds eerily familiar to his previous reportings/warnings:

Despite President Bush's claims that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons that could trigger "World War III," experts in and out of government say there's no conclusive evidence that Tehran has an active nuclear-weapons program.

Even his own administration appears divided about the immediacy of the threat. While Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney speak of an Iranian weapons program as a fact, Bush's point man on Iran, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, has attempted to ratchet down the rhetoric.

[...]

Bush and Cheney's allegations are under especially close scrutiny because their similar allegations about an Iraqi nuclear program proved to be wrong. Nevertheless, there are many reasons to be skeptical of Iran's claims that its nuclear program is intended exclusively for peaceful purposes, including the country's vast petroleum reserves, its dealings with a Pakistani dealer in black-market nuclear technology and the fact that it concealed its uranium-enrichment program from a U.N. watchdog agency for 18 years.

"Many aspects of Iran's past nuclear program and behavior make more sense if this program was set up for military rather than civilian purposes," Pierre Goldschmidt, a former U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency deputy director general, said in a speech Oct. 30 at Harvard University.

If conclusive proof exists, however, Bush hasn't revealed it. Nor have four years of IAEA inspections.

"I have not received any information that there is a concrete active nuclear-weapons program going on right now," IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei asserted in an interview Oct. 31 with CNN.

Here's a clip with Landay from Bill Moyers' excellent special, Buying the War, that goes through how BushCo went about marketing the Iraq War:

The Dismantling of the American Economy

2007-11-01T15:26:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I've been gone awhile (my life has been turned upside down the last few months with taking care of a newborn a couple of days a week while balancing a freelance work schedule), but I'm gonna try to get back into blogging shape, bit by bit, in time for the primary push starting in January.

For a taste treat (or, really, a foul tasting trick), here's a quick summary pulled together by AmericaBlog's Chris in Paris of Bush and the GOP's greatest hits in destroying our economy since they took over:

- Largest decline in housing prices since 1991.
- Crumbling US dollar, weakest showing against leading five currencies since early 1970s. This includes 37 year low against Canadian dollar. Against the UK pound, it's over $2 to buy only one.
- Skyrocketing and "out of control" oil prices, record highs at the pump.
- Billions of US taxpayer dollars lost, missing, and who knows what from Iraq. Costs for war to drag out for decades.
- Record high budget deficit, compounded by GOP spending boondoggles.

And we just thought they'd only be destroying the environment back in 2001. How wrong we were.

A Message to Alberto Gonzales from Lil' F

2007-08-27T09:18:00.000-07:00

Don't let the door hit you on the ass as you head back to Texas.

(PS - I've been waiting for this since March 17th -- it's taken over 5 months to get you outta there.)

(PS+ - My papa warns me against using such blue language -- he's trying to teach both himself and me to use fanoozle as the F-word -- but I heartily agree with Uncle El Jefe. Dems, don't fanoozle this up!)

Learned a Couple of Things Tonight

2007-08-20T21:40:00.000-07:00

First, that our nation's Secretary of Transportation is Mary Peters. I honestly had no friggin' idea.

Secondly, bikes are not transportation. That's what Secretary Peters says. I'll remember that as I'm commuting to my office via pedal power this week (as I do every week).

Finally, I guess there's a reason why BushCo tends to keep the lower echelon cabinet officials out of the limelight.

The Powell Doctrine Returns

2007-08-06T09:07:00.000-07:00

With the Blue Angels bearing down on this little seagull (culled from the Seattle P-I's pictorial coverage of this weekend's Seafair here in Seattle), it looks like the military is returning to the Powell Doctrine's basic tenet of using overwhelming force after realizing the folly of Rummy's Military Lite doctrine:

President Cheney: He Makes Baby Unicorns Bleed

2007-07-30T20:47:00.000-07:00

A humorous take on Vice President Dick Cheney's two-hour ascendancy to the Presidency, from Mark Morford at the SFChronic:

While most Americans were completely unaware that the temporary transfer had taken place, the response from the collective body was nevertheless nearly instantaneous, as millions across the nation reported feeling some sort of unnerving wave of dread, something dark and ominous and stifling, like a collective shudder, a giant musty pillow jammed over the mouth of life itself, a great, low moan of deep, chthonic pain.

"What the hell is going on?" cried Jane Klowster of Oklahoma City, echoing the sentiments of millions as she called in to a local talk-radio program early Saturday morning, just after making a pot of coffee so bitter as to be undrinkable and noticing the flowers on her patio had suddenly wilted for no apparent reason, and also that her parakeet was dead.

[...]

Doctors, scientists, healers, middle managers, astrologists and even auto mechanics nationwide were, at least initially, equally confounded by the bizarre outbreak of widespread malaise, which seemed to impact nearly every aspect of the animate and inanimate world, and even caused automobile clutches to suddenly seize, light bulbs to dim, shiny things to tarnish and electric components to flicker and spark and, often, spontaneously combust.

Finally, one scientist actually read a newspaper, and it all came clear in an instant.

"Two little words," said Dr. Alan Lenner of the Phenomenology Research Institute in Bethesda, MD, glancing around nervously as if his next utterance would cause lightning to strike him dead. 'President Cheney,'" he whispered. At that exact moment, a woman's terrible scream could be heard in the distance, a pack of wolves howled, and once again that long, low moan reverberated throughout the land. No, seriously, it totally did.

[...]

"I never ever in a million years thought I'd say this, but oh my God am I grateful that Bush got back into the president's seat almost immediately," sighed much of the nation, collectively, as it slammed another triple vodka and waited for the residual nausea to pass. "I mean, he's by far the worst president the United States has ever known and he's done more to set this nation back and embarrass us and create more terrorism and repress science and women and love and hope for all mankind everywhere. But oh my God, he's still no Dick Cheney. That guy makes baby unicorns bleed."

By the by, Dick still won't admit that the Office of the Vice President is in the executive branch, calling himself a "unique creature."

A Question from Lil' F

2007-07-26T15:10:00.000-07:00

As posed by the Daily Show, in its telenovela format of covering the Alberto "Gonzo" Gonzales tragicomedy:

And for your enjoyment, here's the priceless segment in whole (also downloadable in QuickTime format via Crooks & Liars)

America's Tokyo Rose

2007-07-26T08:33:00.000-07:00

The Fox News Channel gets a lot of nicknames from the lefty blogosphere (Faux News, FOX Nutwork), but Kagro X over at Daily Kos offers up perhaps the most delicious naming metaphor yet for the Republican party's national cable propaganda channel: America's Tokyo Rose. He and Crooks and Liars recently posted one of ATR's "little mistakes," in which they labeled a Republican who was going against the grain of the party (in this case, Arlen Specter grilling Alberto "Gonzo" Gonzales) as a Democrat.

But it gets better, as Kagro X notes that Brit Hume introduced a story on how poor Gonzo was called "untrustworthy and a liar by Senate Democrats." Turns out, though, it was that darn Democrat wannabe Specter who was making that insinuation.

Unfireable

2007-07-25T12:28:00.000-07:00

That's the conclusion that Josh Marshall over at TPM has come to as to why-on-earth Alberto Gonzalez is still the Attorney General of this country, largely because Bush wouldn't be able to get anyone else through a confirmation hearing. Check out TPM's video lowlights from yesterday's hearing.

Impeach Gonzo!

This Man Shouldn't Frighten the Democrats

2007-07-25T09:41:00.000-07:00

The new WaPo/ABC News poll puts President Bush's approval rating at 33 percent, certainly not as low as some other polls that have come out recently (which has him in the mid-20s). But what's most interesting is that Dear Leader is approaching near historic numbers for disapproval -- 65%! Check out the graphic:

Included in that number is 52% who strongly disapprove of the President of the United States.

The Slippery Slope

2007-07-23T06:35:00.000-07:00

Longtime FotF The Velvet Bulldog alerted us to this executive order issued last week by Dear Leader, which (as noted by TPM Muckraker):

...directed the Treasury Department to block the U.S.-based financial assets of anyone deemed to have threatened "the peace or stability of Iraq or the Government of Iraq" or who "undermin(e) efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq."

Walter Pincus at the WaPo has some more today:

In the extreme, it could be interpreted as targeting the financial assets of any American who directly or indirectly aids someone who has committed or "poses a significant risk of committing" violent acts "threatening the peace or stability of Iraq" or who undermines "efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform" in the war-torn country.
[...]
White House press secretary Tony Snow offered further clarification at a briefing on Tuesday: "What this is really aimed at is insurgents and those who come across the border . . . or anybody who is caught providing support or poses a significant risk of providing support to those who may come across the border."

However, the text of the order, if interpreted broadly, could cast a far bigger net to include not just those who commit violent acts or pose the risk of doing so in Iraq, but also third parties -- such as U.S. citizens in this country -- who knowingly or unknowingly aid or encourage such people.

Under the order, the Treasury secretary -- in consultation with the secretaries of defense and state -- creates the list of those whose assets are to be frozen. However, the targeting of not just those who support perpetrators of violence but also those who support individuals who "pose a significant risk" of committing violence goes far beyond normal legal language related to intent and could be applied in a highly arbitrary manner, said Bruce Fein, a senior Justice Department official in the Reagan administration and a frequent Bush administration critic.

We'll keep tracking this one to try to get a better handle on it, but it plainly seems like yet another assault on our civil liberties by the power hungry, authoritarian-loving BushCo administration.

Greenhouse Gas, Made Palpable

2007-07-22T13:26:00.000-07:00

Via The Stranger's Slog comes this ad from Australia's Victoria state government:

And wouldn't it be cool if we had a show like Carbon Cops on the telly here in the States?

Progress

2007-07-14T06:28:00.001-07:00

Talk About UnChristian

2007-07-12T14:12:00.000-07:00

Via the newly redesigned TPM: "In a historic moment, a Hindu cleric gave the morning invocation in the Senate chamber — only to be booed by right-wing Christian activists."

Here's more from TPM Election Central. What a bunch of shameful idiots.

40

2007-07-10T00:01:00.000-07:00

Yes, today is the day that I officially become a grumpy old man (though I've been working up to it of late). I'm not having a big celebration for this occasion, as I did on my 30th birthday (when the police came to shut down the karaoke party after some loud, after-hours singing of Bread songs). I'm not depressed about this turning into a new decade, but I'm frankly just more focused on this little side project that Mrs. F and I have been managing these past (almost) 4 months:

Plus, I had a great surprise party out on Sinclair Island with some of my closest friends just last week (complete with gnome candles, whole wheat shortbread cookies full of buttery deliciousness, and some of my favorite Belgian beer), so I feel satisfied on the party front.

At the suggestion of our pal The Velvet Bulldog, I've been trying to put together a list of 40 songs that have been either influential during my life or just constant favorites. I've got a fairly late stage draft, but it's not ready (that's what happens when you've got the aforementioned little project to deal with). I'll be working on wrapping that up and figuring out the best way to publish that here. But until then, here's a tune that's become one of my theme songs in life -- "I've Got a Plan" from the Aussie band My Friend the Chocolate Cake:

I also want to note some special people in my life to whom I'm very thankful for:

Mrs. F, the love of my life. I would be lost in a dreary, dreary haze without her. I truly am the luckiest man I know (and she would agree).
Lil' F, the new light to my life; here's to another 40 years learning how he ticks.
Harry & Doris (aka, Babe), my paternal grandparents, who rescued me at a low point in my life and helped me to blossom by sending me to St. Olaf College. I also want to especially acknowledge Harry, the sole surviving grandparent, who turns 85 tomorrow. As I move forward through life, I find that I'm applying more and more of the lessons he doled out over the years. My grandmother would always say, "My Harry can do anything." I aspire to that for my own family.
Charles & Ruth, my maternal grandparents, who were equally helpful in getting me grounded in high school and sending me off to college. My grandmother always worried that I'd never marry anyone because I was a rather picky eater as a youngin'. I just wish shee could see all the food I eat today, and be amazed by my lovely wife.
Mom, the Reverend Dr. Ann E.P. McElligott -- a phoenix who rose to heights I'm sure she never thought she'd attain along with her husband Tom, one of the wittiest gentlemen I know. She's also one of my best friends.
Dad, Jhanos of Arabia -- the wanderer who laid the groundwork for my roots; I'll take the best that I learned from him and impart it to Lil' F.
Old Fogey (aka, my step-mother, Mrs. F's Mom) -- a good friend with a tireless energy to try to make the world a better place for all.
Jeff and Judy -- my uncle and aunt, who truly are my siblings; they keep the Schmitz family glued together and I'm very thankful for that.
The Canon Valley Guys, my roommates from later in college and great friends ever since:

Wardo -- a traveling companion, fellow music lover, and a man who reminds me to be passionate about the important things in life (politics, art, The Police)
DGA -- despite his Brussels address, it's like we still live down the hall from each other
DC -- I think I still owe Pastor Dave some money from backgammon; I'll always be thankful for his introduction of Bruce Cockburn to my life
Lapp (aka, Mean Old Uncle Louvis) -- everyone needs an arch-nemesis in life, and Kevin does a great job at it; the only man who could convince me to willingly fold myself into a sofa bed

Sue -- with the smash of an alarm clock, she taught me that I'm not bound by time (thought I still have to occasionally re-learn that).
Scratch & EO -- constant companions through my many ups and downs during my 15 years in Seattle; happily, they're very understanding when I get too hot and have to strip down to my boxers.
Tina & Ryan -- the two of them have been a welcoming presence in my life for a good long while; DJing their wedding was a high point of my life.
Our community of friends in Seattle: Keri (The Velvet Bulldog); Babu & Jeannette; Hammen & Forse; Jon & Becca; Megan & Lindsay; Tobin & Becca; Kat; Eric & Scott & Isaac; Mike & Richard
Our community of Seattleite friends who are no longer in Seattle: Adam & Korey; Adam & Jessica (RovCo); Kari; Brad & Sarah
Linda Strohmier -- a colleague of my Mom, she became a friend of mine while here in Seattle at St. Mark's Cathedral. Linda was instrumental in starting me down the road toward recovery from depression. She's now passed on, and both my Mom and I miss her much.
Toby Malina -- she took a chance on me for a job (Thunder Lizard Productions), and it changed my life and fortunes in many ways.
Jeff Carlson and Glenn Fleishman -- my freelance officemates (previously in the physical sense; now virtually through chat software), who have invited me along for work projects and helped me to become a better writer/editor/freelancer.
The Thunder Lizard Gang, where it all started -- Steve Broback, Steve Roth, Brett Baker, Michelle Dionne, David Blatner, Ole Kvern, Dom & Suzanne, Marcy... heck, even Artis and Pearcy (wonder how long he had my old car)
The Amazon Gang (some of whom were coworkers, and now they employ me) -- Cara (with whom I worked on many CTSU projects; aka, Clean This Shit Up), Hammen, O'Neil(!), Alexis, AraJane, Shane, Mikesell, Patricia, Mr. Brown, Jill, Molly, Riani, Creighton, McFadden, Trinen, Groebner, Brucia, Aric
Burl Gilyard and Tony Dodge -- my musical mentors from high school; I'd love to find you guys again and talk tunes
And finally, Craig D. Rice -- my freshman college roommate, without whom I would not have my name today

Thoughts for This 4th of July

2007-07-04T08:33:00.000-07:00

I wholly concur with this holiday message from Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall:

Yes, Another Iraq War Documentary

2007-06-22T17:12:00.000-07:00

But No End in Sight, which deals with the lack of planning and the chaotic aftermath of the war, looks like a good one (it also won a special jury prize at this year's Sundance festival).

Here's some more on the doc from PBS' Now program:

With additional parts here and here. If you're in need of some more mindless entertainment, be sure to check out my more pop-tastic blog.

The Black Hole

2007-06-22T08:41:00.000-07:00

President Bush is down to a 26% approval rating in the latest Newsweek poll:

The new numbers—a 2 point drop from the last NEWSWEEK Poll at the beginning of May—are statistically unchanged, given the poll’s 4 point margin of error. But the 26 percent rating puts Bush lower than Jimmy Carter, who sunk to his nadir of 28 percent in a Gallup poll in June 1979. In fact, the only president in the last 35 years to score lower than Bush is Richard Nixon. Nixon’s approval rating tumbled to 23 percent in January 1974, seven months before his resignation over the botched Watergate break-in.

When will the Dems realize this guy has no sway over anyone any more?

Turn It Up

2007-06-21T13:24:00.000-07:00

Sounds like Freedom Rock to me...

Via The Young Turks. (If you don't get the reference above, check out this commercial for the original Freedom Rock.)

Snapshot of the Republican Party

2007-06-20T06:31:00.000-07:00

From John Cole over at Balloon Juice:

The Republican Party is now split between several warring factions- the bible thumping God squad whose chief issues are gay bashing, your sex life, and abortion; the monied Corporoate interests who care only about tax cuts and cheap labor; and the redneck wing whose only concerns are a bellicose foreign policy and keeping brown people out of the country. All the sane people have left or refuse to publicly acknowledge they are Republican.

Picture of the Week

2007-06-17T20:40:00.000-07:00

From our friend Jeff Carlson, who snapped this at the Fremont Solstice Parade on Saturday:

Our Church

2007-06-14T15:09:00.000-07:00

This week, The Stranger sends 31 writers out to 31 different churches in godless Seattle, and first up is the church that Mrs. F and I call home (it's where we got married, and where Lil' F will be having a naming ceremony later this summer):

Why does God hate Saturday nights? Can I take my coffee into church? Do church people care that I didn't brush my teeth, and that I'm still a little drunk? What if I fart?

These questions are on my mind as I enter All Pilgrims Church on East Republican Street and Broadway East, aka "the Big Gay Church." As a Jew, I had entered this church only once before—to go to a yard sale, where I bought five signed portraits of winners of Miss Drag Queen America. They were $2.50 for the set.

The pastor introduces himself as Mark. Just Mark. He's not wearing shoes and pads around the chapel in socks, which poke out from under his floor-length pastor's gown. He's very animated and excitable, and I swear to God Mark can sense my intestinal distress with his wide-open blue eyes. I decide God is less scary than Pastor Mark, and sit quietly at the back through all the singing and praying and whatnot.

The service emphasizes Positivity and Inclusiveness, which are pronounced as if they're spelled with Capital Letters. You are Included and Loved and Forgiven—and so are You, and You, and You. We all are! This gets Obnoxious. At the end, everyone takes Communion, which I am scared to do because I don't want to accidentally turn Christian, so I wander out of the room for a moment. When I return, the entire congregation is Singing in a Circle. Thank God they weren't Holding Hands—I would have Thrown Up.

Yes, its inclusiveness is very inclusive--heck, they even take a heathenistically agnostic like myself. But that's one of the things we really like about the community.

And since we're on that subject, here's a video of Iris Dement's "Let The Mystery Be'--one of the theme songs at Cracks Centraal:

A Grammar Lesson from Congress

2007-06-13T16:29:00.000-07:00

This is just delicious. Clueless General Services Administration head honcho Lurita Doan tries to backtrack from some previous statements, saying that she'd used the wrong verb tense. Luckily, one of the members of the House Committee on Oversight and Governmehttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifnt Reform was ready to respond (via TPM Muckraker):

Son of a Latin teacher, Rep. John Sarbanes (D-MD) disagreed. He called her statement the common "future" tense. He also spotted a connection between her grammatical defense and an accusation that she encouraged her employees to help out Republican Congressional races. At a presentation given by Karl Roves' deputy she asked her GSA employess: “How can we help our candidates?”

Chairman Henry Waxman later raked her over the coals and called on her to resign (I think you can hear her giggle at this suggestion around the 2:31 mark of the video included at this link).

Knives Out

2007-06-13T11:57:00.000-07:00

First it was McCain who suggested we bomb Iran to the tune of a Beach Boys song. Now former Democrat Joe "Joementum" Lieberman suggests that we need to be "prepared to take aggressive military action" against Iran:

(CBS Face the Nation host) Bob Schieffer followed-up: “Let’s just stop right there. Because I think you probably made some news here, Senator Lieberman. You’re saying that if the Iranians don’t let up, that the United States should take military action?” “I am,” Lieberman responded.

Which elicited this response from The Onion:

Larry Higgins, Masseur
"Wow, my uneducated 12-year-old son said the same thing!"

Wendy Scanlon, Furniture Salesperson
"Lieberman should stop going on that show. Bob Schieffer must antagonize the hell out of him during commercial breaks, and that leads to dumbshit comments like this."

And this response from Robert Scheer in the SF Chronic:

Having fallen for the Iranian plot to gain control over Iraq, Lieberman now seeks to undo the damage by invading Iran. He is apparently unaware of public warnings that key Shiite leaders in Iraq would take up arms again in support of their co-religionists across the border. Indeed, the Iranian arms being smuggled into Iraq that Lieberman complains about are going to the Shiite militias dominating America's surrogate government in Baghdad.

Bush seems to grasp this reality, which is why the United States is now negotiating with the Iranian ambassador in Baghdad, leaving Lieberman to play the role of a hawkish critic of an administration he apparently feels has lost its enthusiasm for yet another disastrous invasion. This is a man whom leading Democrats, including Bill Clinton, supported in his primary campaign against an intelligent Democrat who sought to end the Iraq nightmare.

Which brings me to this op-ed by one of my favorite commentators these days, Reza Aslan (author of No God But God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam), from two weekends ago in the LATimes:

FINALLY, AFTER three decades of mutual animosity, outright threats and puerile name-calling, the United States and Iran this week engaged in a constructive dialogue about their common concerns in the Middle East. Already the optimism that followed those talks has given way to the usual tit-for-tat accusations. Still, one can't help but wonder: After all these years, could the U.S. and Iran slowly be moving toward a more diplomatic relationship or even — dare I say it — rapprochement?

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. For that to happen, Iran will have to meet certain conditions. It must stop sending arms to Hezbollah. It must cease meddling in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And it must pursue a more constructive role in stabilizing Iraq.

But the U.S. has conditions of its own to meet before it too can be considered a reliable negotiating partner. Most important, it must once and for all abandon its policy of actively pursuing regime change in Iran.

[...]

Unlike most other countries in the Middle East, Iran has a long and deeply embedded democratic tradition that goes back more than a century. The country boasts what is arguably the most robust political culture in the Muslim world. Since 1980, Iran has held more than 20 elections — all of them freer and fairer than those of any of America's Arab allies — that have drawn 60% to 80% of the electorate to the polls. Despite harsh restrictions on who may run for office, Iran's elections offer lively political campaigns and raucous debates between contrasting candidates who do not shy away from any topic of concern.

Iran also boasts one of the most energetic civil societies in the region, with diverse political action groups, a fearless press and dozens of active student organizations that repeatedly stage strikes and sit-ins in defiance of the government. Thousands of Iranian nongovernmental organizations work to foster ethnic, legal and, most especially, women's rights. Iranian women now hold 60% of the college degrees in the country and enjoy literacy rates approaching 90%.

True, all of these civil organizations and democratic movements labor under the autocratic rule of an unelected shadow government. But when I talk to Iranians about their problems, few cite the restrictions on their freedom posed by the Islamic republic. Rather, their primary complaint is the country's stagnant economy. Nearly a third of the population is unemployed, almost 40% live in poverty and the annual rate of inflation is 24%, so few Iranians have the means to translate their sophisticated political activism into meaningful democratic reform.

If the U.S. engaged Iran the way it engages other "autocratic democracies" in Latin America, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet bloc, that would do far more to encourage democratic change than anything tried so far. The lesson to be learned from America's misadventure in Iraq is that democracy cannot be promoted from the top down; it must be reared from within.

[...]

Taking regime change off the table also would allow the U.S. to deal more effectively with Iran's nuclear program. It is likely that Iran's leaders do not want nuclear weapons, because of their prohibitive cost and significant security risk. But they would like to have the option of developing them fairly quickly if necessary. And why not? Iran has learned a valuable lesson from its fellow "axis of evil" nations: one did not have nukes and it was obliterated by the U.S. military; the other has nukes and it is being plied with money to relinquish them.

New Venue for All Things Poppy

2007-06-12T14:26:00.000-07:00

In an effort not to bore Mrs. F with my pop culture predilections, I'm going to be posting my discoveries and musings on tunes, movies, and soccer over this new blog arena (some of you might recognize the title).

Quick Hits

2007-06-12T10:17:00.000-07:00

Why was General Peter Pace really pushed out as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Will Bunch at Attytood believes the administration's cover that they're a bunch of wilting flowers in the face of Congressional questioning is less than genuine:
It's getting harder to believe that Pace's dismissal was about anything else other than the Cheney administration's agenda for war with Iran. It's been increasingly acknowledged that the Joint Chiefs, with Pace at the helm, had been a leader in steering Bush away from half-baked Iran attack schemes.
Don't forget Albania:
(There) was a wonderful reverse-Borat moment Sunday, with the joyous townspeople of Fushe Kruje yelling "Bushie! Bushie!" and Albania's prime minister gushing over the "greatest and most distinguished guest we have ever had in all times." The crowd pressed in for autographs, photographs, a presidential peck on the cheek. Years from now, in his dotage, Bushie will feel warm all over when he recalls those magical hours in Albania. How they adored him!

Outside of greater Tirana, however, the president's stock as an apostle of freedom continues to fall -- and rightly so. Even as Albania swooned, the rest of Europe was digesting a blue-ribbon report issued Friday about the abduction, secret detention and abusive interrogation of suspects in Bush's "war on terror."

Picture of the Week

2007-06-09T08:24:00.000-07:00

From our good pal (and budding pro photographer) El Jeffe:

I really am considering getting a print of this for Cracks Centraal, and Jeff happily has included a way to buy a professionally printed version (as well as a custom frame).

Gay Marriage = Greenbacks

2007-06-06T15:51:00.000-07:00

Now here's a novel argument for legalizing gay marriage--it will bring in the bucks! From NPR/APM's Marketplace business radio program (which includes audio as well as text of the story):

New York City's Comptroller has released a report that says the Big Apple would net $142 million during the first three years of legalized gay marriage. New York State overall would get $184 million, mainly from the uptick in visitors attending the nuptials.

That's Gonna Leave a Mark (I Hope)

2007-06-06T15:29:00.000-07:00

If you haven't seen it, check out Matt Taibbi's profanity-laden takedown of the Rudy Giuliani myth in Rolling Stone:

Rudy Giuliani is a true American hero, and we know this because he does all the things we expect of heroes these days -- like make $16 million a year, and lobby for Hugo Chávez and Rupert Murdoch, and promote wars without ever having served in the military, and hire a lawyer to call his second wife a "stuck pig," and organize absurd, grandstanding pogroms against minor foreign artists, and generally drift through life being a shameless opportunist with an outsize ego who doesn't even bother to conceal the fact that he's had a hard-on for the presidency since he was in diapers. In the media age, we can't have a hero humble enough to actually be one; what is needed is a tireless scoundrel, a cad willing to pose all day long for photos, who'll accept $100,000 to talk about heroism for an hour, who has the balls to take a $2.7 million advance to write a book about himself called Leadership. That's Rudy Giuliani. Our hero. And a perfect choice to uphold the legacy of George W. Bush.

Yes, Rudy is smarter than Bush. But his political strength -- and he knows it -- comes from America's unrelenting passion for never bothering to take that extra step to figure shit out. If you think you know it all already, Rudy agrees with you. And if anyone tries to tell you differently, they're probably traitors, and Rudy, well, he'll keep an eye on 'em for you. Just like Bush, Rudy appeals to the couch-bound bully in all of us, and part of the allure of his campaign is the promise to put the Pentagon and the power of the White House at that bully's disposal.

The Vision of the Gore (The Hidden Herbert)

2007-06-05T09:19:00.000-07:00

I'm still fixated on my starry-eyed daydreaming of an Al Gore presidential run (with Barack Obama as Veep), and Bob Herbert's column from today's NYTimes isn't helping (The Passion of Al Gore is fully available to Times Select subscribers):

You look at him and you can’t help thinking how bizarre it is that this particular political figure, perhaps the most qualified person in the country to be president, is sitting in a wing chair in a hotel room in Manhattan rather than in the White House.
He’s pushing his book “The Assault on Reason.” I find myself speculating on what might have been if the man who got the most votes in 2000 had actually become president. It’s like imagining an alternate universe.
The war in Iraq would never have occurred. Support and respect for the U.S. around the globe would not have plummeted to levels that are both embarrassing and dangerous. The surpluses of the Clinton years would not have been squandered like casino chips in the hands of a compulsive gambler on a monumental losing streak.
Mr. Gore takes a blowtorch to the Bush administration in his book. He argues that the free and open democratic processes that have made the United States such a special place have been undermined by the administration’s cynicism and excessive secrecy, and by its shameless and relentless exploitation of the public’s fear of terror.
The Bush crowd, he said, has jettisoned logic, reason and reflective thought in favor of wishful thinking in the service of an extreme political ideology. It has turned its back on reality, with tragic results.
So where does that leave Mr. Gore? If the republic is in such deep trouble and the former vice president knows what to do about it, why doesn’t he have an obligation to run for president? I asked him if he didn’t owe that to his fellow citizens.
If the country needs you, how can you not answer the call?
He seemed taken aback. “Well, I respect the logic behind that question,” he said. “I also am under no illusion that there is any position that even approaches that of president in terms of an inherent ability to affect the course of events.”
[...]
Mr. Gore is passionate about the issues he is focused on — global warming, the decline of rational discourse in American public life, the damage done to the nation over the past several years. And he has contempt for the notion that such important and complex matters can be seriously addressed in sound-bite sentences or 30-second television ads, which is how presidential campaigns are conducted.
He pressed this point when he talked about Iraq.
“One of the hallmarks of a strategic catastrophe,” he said, “is that it creates a cul-de-sac from which there are no good avenues of easy departure. Taking charge of the war policy and extricating our troops as quickly as possible without making a horrible situation even worse is a little like grabbing a steering wheel in the middle of a skid.”
There is no quick and easy formula, he said. A new leader implementing a new policy on Iraq would have to get a feel for the overall situation. The objective, however, should be clear: “To get our troops out of there as soon as possible while simultaneously observing the moral duty that all of us share — including those of us who opposed this war in the first instance — to remove our troops in a way that doesn’t do further avoidable damage to the people who live there.”
I asked if he meant that all U.S. troops should ultimately be removed from Iraq.
“Yes,” he said.

Looking forward to getting the book. Maybe as an early birthday present before an upcoming trip to the San Juan Islands. Hint, hint, hint...

GO-Team, Getting the Buzz

2007-06-04T13:48:00.000-07:00

Here's a snippet from John Aravosis' take on the Democratic debate from last night:

Obama. He was good. I thought he was better than last time. He seemed awfully young in the last debate. In this one, I thought he was smart, mature, and very "vice presidential" if not presidential. I'm hearing from more and more people that they'd like to see a Gore-Obama ticket in 2008.

Um, hello. I've been itching for this duet get together since April, 2006. Check out the grassroots organization that's dedicated to bringing these crazy cats together:

Permanent Vacation (at Least for Now...)

2007-05-04T11:29:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed, well, not much of anything going on here at Cracks in the Facade. That's because I'm in the midst of coping with a collicky baby and figuring out how to balance priorities in life (with Mrs. F and Lil' F being at the top of the list). I'd been thinking that I'd get back to some occasional postings here at Cracks after awhile, but the more I look at my priority and task list, the lower Cracks gets demoted.

So, for an as-yet-to-be-determined time (possibly forever, but hopefully not), Cracks is going on vacation. I'm finding I just don't have the time or focus to put together interesting progressive/climate change news items that aren't just adding noise to the echo chamber. Maybe I'll be back once the race for 2008 really and truly hots up. But I just don't know.

This doesn't mean I'm putting a stop to blogging altogether. I have my gig over at the Amazon Electronics blog (with another Amazon blog destination potentially in the works). And I'm working on a little blog outlet for the little tidbits (music, films, pictures of my kid) that I find need to be blogged. (Speaking of The Kid, I'm also blogging about life with him, but it's a password-protected blog for just friends and family.)

And so, with that, I'll leave you with a photo of me and Lil' F enjoying a recent Chelsea game (yes, that's a little teddy bear with a blue Chelsea jumper):

cheers.ags

[UPDATE 01 June] OK, so maybe not so permanent. Things certainly won't be so regular going forward, but I find that I need an outlet now that I've got my feet under me again.

And here's a recent photo of me and the lad:

Sutton Impact Finale

2007-04-17T09:16:00.000-07:00

Sad news from longtime Friend of the Facade Ward Sutton -- he's retiring his weekly Sutton Impact comic that's been featured in the Village Voice for the last 9 years. Here's a bit from an email he sent to me and other friends:

Many factors led to the decision, not the least of which was the weekly deadline stress every Friday. Getting my Fridays back means 52 more work days a year to devote to new projects and branching out artistically in new directions.

Check out his farewell strip.

Interesting Counterpoint to Hilary 1984 Ad

2007-03-25T11:13:00.000-07:00

From Mother Jones:

Yep, it's brilliant. And lefty bloggers are cheering it as the advent of "open-source politics" because it's on YouTube. What none of them have mentioned is the reason why it's so effective: It exploits subconscious bigotry, just like the ad for now-U.S. Senator Bob Corker in October. Since blacks weren't recognized as fully human, this country used to have special laws for them. Black men could not sleep with white women, but it was fine the other way around (even the president did). Black men with white women is still taboo—that's why broadcasting a blonde actress crooning, "I met Harold at the Playboy party…. Harry [wink], call me!!" was enough to derail Harold Ford, Jr.'s, campaign. The racism operated subtly and subconsciously enough to change the minds of people who would never admit to being racist. Lefties pointed that out, but not as loudly as they should have. Ford lost.

Likewise, women weren't recognized as fully human in this country until recently, and modern society still has a taboo against women holding power. Lefty bloggers who don't think Hillary has the charisma to win the general election may be happy that this ad will derail her in the primary. But they look like hypocrites unless they stop cheering for a moment to mention that the ad exploits subconscious fears. That goes for you too, Arianna Huffington—author of On Becoming Fearless. "Hillary 1984" is as un-Democratic as the ad against Harold Ford was.

And here's the ad, if you haven't seen it.

[UPDATE] Whoops - Agen's More Conservative Brother pointed out that I was showing the wrong YouTube video. This should fix things.

Back to the '70s (The Hidden Rich)

2007-03-24T17:01:00.001-07:00

Frank Rich pulls out echoes of The Godfather and All The President's Men in his Sunday column, When Will Fredo Get Whacked? (fully available to Times Select subscribers), covering the Zelig-like figure of Alberto "Gonzo" Gonzales in the legal life of George W. Bush:

Mr. Gonzales may be a nonentity, but he’s a nonentity like Zelig. He’s been present at every dubious legal crossroads in Mr. Bush’s career. That conjoined history began in 1996, when Mr. Bush, then governor of Texas, was summoned for jury duty in Austin. To popular acclaim, he announced he was glad to lend his “average guy” perspective to a drunken driving trial. But there was one hitch. On the juror questionnaire, he left blank a required section asking, “Have you ever been accused, or a complainant, or a witness in a criminal case?”
A likely explanation for that omission, unknown to the public at the time, was that Mr. Bush had been charged with disorderly conduct in 1968 and drunken driving in 1976. Enter Mr. Gonzales. As the story is told in “The President’s Counselor,” a nonpartisan biography by the Texas journalist Bill Minutaglio, Mr. Gonzales met with the judge presiding over the trial in his chambers (a meeting Mr. Gonzales would years later claim to have “no recollection” of requesting) and saved his client from jury duty. Mr. Minutaglio likens the scene to “The Godfather” — casting Mr. Gonzales not as the feckless Fredo, however, but as the “discreet ‘fixer’ attorney,” Robert Duvall’s Tom Hagen.
Mr. Gonzales’s career has been laced with such narrow escapes for both him and Mr. Bush. As a partner at the Houston law firm of Vinson & Elkins, Mr. Gonzales had worked for Enron until 1994. After Enron imploded in 2001, reporters wanted to know whether Ken Lay’s pals in the Bush hierarchy had received a heads up about the company’s pending demise before its unfortunate shareholders were left holding the bag. The White House said that Mr. Gonzales had been out of the Enron loop “to the best of his recollection.” This month Murray Waas of The National Journal uncovered a more recent close shave: Just as Justice Department investigators were about to examine “documents that might have shed light on Gonzales’s role” in the administration’s extralegal domestic wiretapping program last year, Mr. Bush shut down the investigation.
It was Mr. Gonzales as well who threw up roadblocks when the 9/11 Commission sought documents and testimony from the White House about the fateful summer of 2001. Less widely known is Mr. Gonzales’s curious behavior in the C.I.A. leak case while he was still White House counsel. When the Justice Department officially notified him on the evening of Sept. 29, 2003, that it was opening an investigation into the outing of Valerie Wilson, he immediately informed Andrew Card, Mr. Bush’s chief of staff. But Mr. Gonzales waited another 12 hours to officially notify the president and inform White House employees to preserve all materials relevant to the investigation. As Chuck Schumer said after this maneuver became known, “Every good prosecutor knows that any delay could give a culprit time to destroy the evidence.”
Now that 12-hour delay has been matched by the 18-day gap in the Justice Department e-mails turned over to Congress in the dispute over the attorney purge. And we’re being told by Tony Snow that Mr. Bush has “no recollection” of hearing anything about the firings. But even these literal echoes of Watergate cannot obliterate the contours of the story this White House wants to hide.
Do not be distracted by the apples and oranges among the fired attorneys. Perhaps a couple of their forced resignations were routine. But in other instances, incriminating evidence coalesces around a familiar administration motive: its desperate desire to cover up the corruption that soiled what was supposed to be this White House’s greatest asset, its protection of the nation’s security. This was the motive that drove the White House to vilify Joseph Wilson when he challenged fraudulent prewar intelligence about Saddam’s W.M.D. The e-mails in the attorney flap released so far suggest that this same motive may have driven the Justice Department to try mounting a similar strike at Patrick Fitzgerald, the United States attorney charged with investigating the Wilson leak.
In March 2005, while preparing for the firings, Mr. Gonzales’s now-jettisoned chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, produced a chart rating all 93 United States attorneys nationwide. Mr. Fitzgerald, widely admired as one of the nation’s best prosecutors (most famously of terrorists), was somehow slapped with the designation “not distinguished.” Two others given that same rating were fired. You have to wonder if Mr. Fitzgerald was spared because someone in a high place belatedly calculated the political firestorm that would engulf the White House had this prosecutor been part of a Saturday night massacre in the middle of the Wilson inquiry.
Another canned attorney to track because of her scrutiny of Bush administration national security scandals is Carol Lam. She was fired from her post in San Diego after her successful prosecution of Representative Duke Cunningham, the California Republican who took $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors. Mr. Rove has publicly suggested that Ms. Lam got the ax because “she would not commit resources to prosecute immigration offenses.” That’s false. Last August an assistant attorney general praised her for doubling her immigration prosecutions; last week USA Today crunched the statistics and found that she ranked seventh among her 93 peers in successful prosecutions for 2006, with immigration violations accounting for the largest single crime category prosecuted during her tenure.
To see what Mr. Rove might be trying to cover up, look instead at what Ms. Lam was up to in May, just as the Justice Department e-mails indicate she was being earmarked for removal. Building on the Cunningham case, she was closing in on Dusty Foggo, the C.I.A.’s No. 3 official and the director of its daily operations. Mr. Foggo had been installed in this high intelligence position by Mr. Bush’s handpicked successor to George Tenet as C.I.A. director, Porter Goss.
Ms. Lam’s pursuit sped Mr. Foggo’s abrupt resignation; Mr. Goss was out too after serving less than two years. Nine months later — just as Ms. Lam stepped down from her job in February — Mr. Foggo and a defense contractor who raised more than $100,000 for the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign were indicted by a grand jury on 11 counts of conspiracy and money laundering in what The Washington Post called “one of the first criminal cases to reach into the C.I.A.’s clandestine operations in Europe and the Middle East.” Because the allegations include the compromising of classified information that remains classified, we don’t know the full extent of the damage to an agency and a nation at war.

Amen, Brother Maher

2007-03-24T10:04:00.000-07:00

A Message to BushCo

2007-03-22T18:21:00.000-07:00

Regarding your offer to have Karl and Harriet and the other loyal Bushies interviewed without a transcript about the prosecutor purge:

And Lil' F fully agrees with this NYTimes editorial:

Congress has the right and the duty to fully investigate the firings, which may have been illegal, and Justice Department officials’ statements to Congress, which may have been untrue. It needs to question Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s chief political adviser, Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel, and other top officials.
It is hard to imagine what, besides evading responsibility, the White House had in mind. Why would anyone refuse to take an oath on a matter like this, unless he were not fully committed to telling the truth? And why would Congress accept that idea, especially in an investigation that has already been marked by repeated false and misleading statements from administration officials?
The White House notes that making misrepresentations to Congress is illegal, even if no oath is taken. But that seems to be where the lack of a transcript comes in. It would be hard to prove what Mr. Rove and others said if no official record existed.
[...]
It is no great surprise that top officials of this administration believe they do not need to testify before Congress. This is an administration that has shown over and over that it does not believe that the laws apply to it, and that it does not respect its co-equal branches of government. Congress should subpoena Mr. Rove and the others, and question them under oath, in public. If Congress has more questions, they should be recalled.
That would not be “partisanship,” as Mr. Bush wants Americans to believe. It would be Congress doing its job by holding the president and his team accountable — a rare thing in the last six years.

Amen, Josh

2007-03-21T21:03:00.000-07:00

Take a full read of this post by Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo, in which he cogently breaks down the motives of BushCo in their machinations over Attorney Gate (or whatever Gate it's being called -- I've been a little out of this week). At its center is the fraud of voter fraud, which BushCo and the GOP have trotted out as a way to suppress voting (see more about this from Josh here and here). Here's his summary from today's post:

Back up a bit from the sparks flying over executive privilege and congressional testimony and you realize that these are textbook cases of the party in power interfering or obstructing the administration of justice for narrowly partisan purposes. It's a direct attack on the rule of law.

This much is already clear in the record. And we're now having a big public debate about the politics for each side if the president tries to obstruct the investigation and keep the truth from coming out. The contours and scope of executive privilege is one issue, and certainly an important one. But in this case it is being used as no more than a shield to keep the full extent of the president's perversion of the rule of law from becoming known.

It's yet another example of how far this White House has gone in normalizing behavior that we've been raised to associate with third-world countries where democracy has never successfully taken root and the rule of law is unknown. At most points in our history the idea that an Attorney General could stay in office after having overseen such an effort would be unthinkable. The most telling part of this episode is that they're not even really denying the wrongdoing. They're ignoring the point or at least pleading 'no contest' and saying it's okay.

Lil' F

2007-03-18T17:51:00.000-07:00

Mrs. F gave birth to Lil' F on his due date, 17 March (St. Patrick's Day). Here I am bringing him to see his grandmother waiting in the birthing room after Mrs. F's C-section.

And here he is helping his papa out with the blogging chores:

I believe I heard him exclaim, "Impeach Gonzales!" during one of his crying jags.

Gnomes

2007-03-16T18:12:00.000-07:00

As you may have seen previously on cracks (such as this post), I have an odd predilection for gnomes. And thankfully, Mrs. F is understanding of this affliction and allows me to add one gnome per year to our home or yard. I'm tempted to go with the latest version of the Bush Gnome, which now comes with the addition of a felled tree.

The Wire and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

2007-03-15T22:02:00.000-07:00

Mrs. F and I just finished watching the second season of HBO's cop drama, The Wire, and the show has become a big fave around Cracks Centraal. Each of the two seasons that we've seen covers one specific case, giving the particulars of the plot added nuance. It also gives fairly equal footing to telling the stories of both sides -- the hunt for bad guys on the cop side as well as the motivation and business intrigue on the perp side. Excellent stuff, and highly recommended (especially the second season, which balances a new case involving working class dock workers with the leftovers of the previous season's drug case).

Which brings me to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (of course, you say). When I started seeing the story of his long list of confessions, something in the back of my head starting thinking about a character on The Wire that did the same thing. But it flew out of my head and I didn't think about it again until I saw this post over at Foreign Policy's Passport:

Being a Wire freak, the first thing that popped into my head when I read Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession was: This guy is full of it.

Why? In Season One of The Wire, Roland "Wee-Bay" Brice, a top hitman for the Barksdale drug organization, gets fingered for shooting a police officer. He then cops to multiple murders, including several that he didn't commit, in order to protect the gang.

Might Mohammed be doing the same thing? I don't doubt that he was deeply involved in numerous al Qaeda operations, including 9/11, of course. The man is a mass murderer. But it's deeply suspicious that he's confessing to so many plots—at least 31.

Wired's Danger Room blog also had the same notion, but has updated with numerous folks rebutting this theory. Yes, Mohammed was an evil bastard who deserves the justice that he gets. But thanks to the always lowering limbo bar of credibility that the BushCo Administration offers, I just can't take this at face value. And The Economist is having the same problem:

The headline story is that Mr Mohammed, who did not have a lawyer present, has confessed to being an al-Qaeda leader, a friend of Osama bin Laden, and to planning the September 11th attacks on New York and Washington, DC—things that were already widely held to be true. But it is hard to know what to make of the appearance, now, of these or his other statements. He claims credit for a bafflingly large number of incidents and murders, including the 1993 attack on the World Trade Centre in New York, the nightclub bombing in Bali in 2002, terrorist attacks on Israelis and Kenyans in Kenya in 2002, and the failed “shoe bomber” attack of 2001.

He also describes a tremendous number of other acts of aggression that were apparently planned—though it is unclear whether this means merely thought about, or actually prepared for—but never carried out: assassinations of “several” former American presidents, including Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton; the destruction of skyscrapers in New York, Chicago, Seattle and Los Angeles; bombings of London, of the Panama Canal, of Israeli embassies and much more. In all he confesses to at least 30 assorted attacks or planned attacks.

It is probably true that Mr Mohammed has been ill-treated, possibly even tortured, by his American captors. Parts of his testimony were redacted, including details of the CIA prison where it is assumed he was kept. But some of his claims on torture are not censored: “I know American people are torturing us from seventies. [REDACTED] I know they talking about human rights. And I know it is against American constitution, against American laws.”

But he also appears to make clear, in the transcript, that he is not speaking under duress. The picture that emerges is not unlike the portrait painted by America’s official report on September 11th: that of a grandiloquent, boastful, egotist, “the self-cast star, the superterrorist”. There may be much in that: Mr Mohammed is reckoned by American intelligence agencies to have been extraordinarily active in terrorism, in many parts of the world. Although, by laying claim to any terrorist attack he could remember or dream up, he may perhaps cast doubt on the reliability of the admissions he offered.

Anyhoo, back to The Wire. Damn good show. Crackerjack acting and writing throughout. Check out this scene with Detectives McNulty (one of the central characters, played by Dominic West) and the cigar-chompin' Bunk Moreland (played by Wendell Pierce), who visit the scene of an old murder case and compare notes with just the simplest of dialogue (which is not safe for the workplace):

Gonzo to Hold Presser Today

2007-03-13T10:32:00.000-07:00

And Tim Grieve from Salon's War Room has a couple of questions for reporters to start with, courtesy of Sen. Chuck Schumer:

Chuck Schumer has already drawn the outlines of the first two questions that ought to be asked of him: Did you know that your chief of staff had worked with the White House to come up with a list of U.S. attorneys to be fired? And if you didn't know what your own chief of staff was doing with the White House, are you really qualified to be attorney general?

Don't Believe the Hype

2007-03-13T09:50:00.000-07:00

Josh Marshall and his Talking Points Memo empire have been tracking the Purged Prosecutor story with rabid fervor (as per usual), and Josh has a good reminder about the meme that's been floated by Republican operatives (and picked up by TV news journos) saying that Clinton replaced the whole lot of US attorneys after he was elected. Here's Josh:

And Clinton? Every new president appoints new US Attorneys. That always happens. Always. In early 1993, since the Republicans had held the White House for 12 years a few US Attorneys signalled that they might not be tendering their resignations and the new Clinton Justice Department asked for and received the resignations of all 93 US Attorneys. Eager to whip up scandal, Republicans at the time tried to make this into something untoward. Claiming this is a big deal is like grandstanding with the claim that President Bush 'fired' Clinton's cabinet secretaries when he came into office in 2001. At worst, it's the difference between giving them all several weeks to resign and just asking for their resignations on day one.

The whole thing is silly. But a lot of reporters on the news are already falling for it. The issue here is why these US Attorneys were fired -- a) because they weren't pursuing a GOP agenda of indicting Democrats, that's a miscarriage of justice, and b) because they lied to Congress about why it happened.

Josh also gets to the heart of why these prosecutors may have been purged in the first place:

The story emerging is that at least some of these US Attorneys were fired because they weren't aggressive enough in investigating Democratic 'voter fraud'. Like I said last night, I've been reporting on this stuff for years. And this is a horse that shouldn't even be let out of the gate. It's become standard operating procedure for Republican operatives to whip up charges of 'voter fraud'. And some of them even believe it. But the claims are almost universally bogus. And the real intent in most cases is to stymie get out the vote efforts or shut down voter registration drives -- mainly, though not exclusively, in minority voting precincts. Here you can see a list of TPM posts from the 2002 and 2004 cycles on bogus 'voter fraud' stories, mainly from South Dakota. These are made up stories, the main aim of which is to keep real voters from getting to vote. There's no mystery why McKay and Iglesias wouldn't bite: the stories were bogus hash-ups from Republican political operatives and as McKay said this morning, he wasn't going to "drag innocent people in front of a grand jury."