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Put Up or Shut Up, Wingnut Haters

By Steve Hynd

Regular readers know I love to read a righteous rant. And they don't come any more righteous than this from my pal Sara Robinson - Memo to the Right Wing: Put Up or Shut Up. A big blockquote is very definitely in order, but go read the whole thing.

Dear Conservatives:

Your fellow Americans demand an answer -- and we want it now. Just one simple question:

Are you deliberately trying to start a civil war?

Just answer the question. Yes or no. Don't insult us with elisions, evasions, dithering, qualifications, or conditional answers. We need to know what your intentions are -- and we need to know NOW. People are being shot dead in the streets of America at the rate of several per month now. You may not want responsibility for this -- but the whackadoodles pulling the triggers make no bones about who put them up to this.

You did.

The assassins themselves are ratting you out. They're telling us, straight up, that they were inspired to act by the hate radio talkers that you empowered -- one of whom is now the de facto head of the Republican party. They got it from media outlets owned by your biggest donors. They got it from bloggers who receive daily talking points faxed in from the GOP. They got it from activists representing causes that would have never become causes in the first place if the issues hadn't been politically expedient for you.

...We are demanding an accounting from you. We are demanding that you take responsibility for the situation you've created. We are looking you straight in the eyes and demanding a straight answer:

Are you deliberately trying to start a civil war?

If your answer is yes, then stop this cowardly half-assed screwing around. You speak the language of war and honor; but the honor code of the warriors you pretend to revere demands that you declare your intentions. If you really believe that the only way to get the America you want is to negate a fair election, shred the Constitution, and violently cleanse the country of everyone who doesn't agree with you, then man up and get on with it. If it's a shooting war you want, do not doubt that there are plenty of progressives who will oblige you. If this goal is so important that you're really willing to kill for it, please don't forget that you will also need to be willing to die for it. Because, like martyrs Greg McKendry and Steven Johns proved, we are willing to do whatever is necessary to stop you.

If your answer is no, then you have just one other choice. Knock off the tantrums, grow up, rebuild your party, come back to the table, and sit down and govern with us. (We know this will be a stretch, but we think some of you are capable of it.) You will need to learn, many of you for the first time, to get your way as adults do -- without fear-based politics, polarizing rhetoric, on-air threats against those who disagree with you, and repeating outrageous lies in the face of stone facts and irrefutable evidence.

And most of all: you need to stop feeding the crazies. You need to disavow them in every way possible -- sincerely, emphatically, and with full awareness that every time one of these people acts, it destroys the credibility of "conservatives," "Republicans," and "the right wing" in the eyes of the country.

It will, of course, fall on mostly deaf ears. Even though they've been actively talking about violence and even a civil war for a long time now, the wingnuts have already exonerated themselves. They know who to blame.

Political Hackery

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Oregon's only Republican congressman, Greg Walden, has said that he thinks Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner should resign.

Walden says he first called for a new Treasury secretary earlier this week. Here he is on Fox News, talking about Geithner.

Rep. Greg Walden: “I’ve lost confidence in him, I think America has lost confidence in him, and many in the Congress have. And you’re hearing more and more members of Congress, House and Senate, coming forward and joining in this call for him to go.”

As Karla at Blue Oregon points out coming from Walden this is pure political hackery. Never once in eight years did he call for the resignation of any Bush official in spite of the fact that 42 Bush Administration officials were forced to resign in disgrace.

Kanjorski's fiscal anthrax scare

By Fester:

During the 2001 anthrax scar,  I wrote at the time (paraphrasing) that the Bush Administration would gain more trust and a more trusting public if they made statements to the effect: "We don't know exactly what this white powder is; we are sending samples to multiple labs for testing and we'll know more and release that information on Monday." Instead we got warnings about duct tape and plastic sheets amidst a generalized sense of panic.

Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) is making those same type of panic driven statements and they have been getting wide play on YouTube. He is also engaged in sensationalism and disinformation to support a crisis politics:

"On Thursday Sept 15, 2008 at roughly 11 AM The Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous draw down of money market accounts in the USA to the tune of $550 Billion dollars in a matter of an hour or two. 

Money was being removed electronically. The treasury tried to help with $150 Billion. But could not stem the tide. It was an electronic run on the banks

The treasury intervened but had they not closed down the accounts they estimated that by 2 PM that afternoon. Within 3 hours. $5.5 Trillion would have been withdrawned and collapsed and within 24 hours the world economy."

Kanjorski does not provide further details.
A Google search to verify this produces zero results.

Felix Salmon has administered a well deserve beating of Rep. Kanjorski with the fact-stick:

This is not the first time that Kanjorski has made these allegations. But first, it's worth going through the timeline. 

On September 15, Lehman Brothers failed. The Reserve fund -- which was $64 billion that morning, and which had a substantial investment in Lehman debt -- saw $10 billion of withdrawals that day. The following day, September 16, it saw another $10 billion of withdrawals; on September 17, when withdrawals had reached a total of about $40 billion, it announced that redemptions would take "as long as seven days"; as we all know, that was massively overoptimistic.

The news from The Reserve was gruesome, and total withdrawals from money-market funds reached $104 billion that day, according to Crane Data. Another data provider, ICI, says that as of the close of business on the 17th, money-market funds had a total of $3,549.3 billion, which was a fall of just $30.3 billion from their level a week previously.

The following day, September 18, was bad but not quite as bad, with withdrawals of $57 billion, according to Crane Data. By the 24th, according to ICI, the total was $3,456.2 billion -- a drop of another $93.1 billion from the 17th.

On September 19, worried about outflows from money-market funds, the Treasury announced that, for a fee, it would guarantee -- not freeze -- eligible money-market mutual funds. But the details of the plan still weren't clear as of September 21, when Treasury said it was "continuing to develop the specific details surrounding the temporary guaranty program".

Substantially all of the outflows came from institutional accounts: retail investors never panicked. If you look at the weekly data for bank savings deposits, including money market deposit accounts, they stood at $3,167.4 billion on the 15th, and rose to $3,191.4 billion on the 22nd.

Kanjorski's false meme is utterly irresponsible and an illumination of the failure of elite credibility. The scare and shock for an immediate bail-out of the financial system was predicated on a Just Trust Us assumption. However that trust has been severely damaged.

The basic argument for the bail-out bill has been 'OOOHHH, SCARY... MUST GRANT UNLIMITED POWERS NOW! (maybe with window dressing.) And yes, the TED spread and other credit market measures have been extremely scary, but this is not just an economics question, it is a political question. And the failure of the bail-out package to get out of the House is a massive failure and decrease in elite legitimacy....

So the elite argument has been "Trust Us". That argument failed and failed miserably because the political and financial elite have not earned that trust from the public for a complex, expensive with highly probable upside cost overruns, difficult to understand, mystical program.

We tried that with Iraq and whoops -- $650 billion dollars, 4,000+ US lives, 500,000 to 1,000,000 Iraqi lives, 4 million refugees, and $60 more per barrel of oil later, that has not worked out. We tried that with deregulation and we saw the California electricity manipulation crisis. We almost tried it with Social Security privatization. We tried that with killing Glass-Steagall and gutting the regulatory capacity of the Federal Government and we are now talking about a three quarter of a trillion dollar bail-out.

Finally, the trust reserves in the political-economic elite has been exhausted. Just Trust Us does not work becuase there is a proven history of failure. It was not well explained, it was not transparent, and the concessions to make it better were a farce. It looked and felt like a handout to the well connected while everyone else gets screwed. (Ben Bernacke will ensure that everyone else gets screwed with the inflation tax with today's actions)

Making demonstrably false statements is a great way to gut credibility and systemic trust. I'll fully support a primary challenge against Rep. Kanjorski as his behavior on the financial crisis is no different than the behavior of the Bush Administration in September 2001 and during the false 'weaponization' reporting by ABC News in October 2001.

Lying is a great way to shoot oneself in the foot.  We don't need liars, and we don't need idiots in Washington. 

Media races towards irrelevancy

By Libby

For crying out loud, even Dana Millbank is losing his grip on reality. In a sneering piece on Obama's "failure to be interesting," he falls into the same self-absorbed fixation on what 'teh media' believes are the most urgent issues on the public mind. Meaning ginned-up scandals like the non-existent Obama-Blago connection and the equally imaginary tension between Clinton and our President elect.

As I said in a post at DetNews, the big reason the elite media is failing is because the headlines more and more resemble standing in line at the grocery store and scanning the tabloids that line the aisle. If we want meaningless gossip, we'll read the tabloids. If the journalists want to save their industry I suggest they start committing some actual journalism.

Dana snarks about needing No-Doz at Obama press avails. I might remind Mr. Millbank that they had to invent Ambien once the media finally ran out of Whitewater stories to put America to sleep. The only reason they got away with it then, is there was no alternative. Now we have the intertubes and if we want to read idiotic speculation about fake outrages, we have wingnut blogs for that. If they want to keep their market share, they might consider delivering a product that rises above that niche, rather than trying to wallow on the 'polite' fringe edges of that low rent, muck-slinging district.

False moral equivalencies

By Libby

Somewhat shorter Glennzilla:

Bang a prostitute using your own bucks = moral turptitude so heinous that it can only be cured by crawling over glass, wearing only a hair shirt for the foreseeable future.

Screw the entire world up the keister, breaking every law of common decency and violating every last vestige of human rights, while bleeding the national treasury dry to do it = revered statesman.

He's talking about Eliot Spitzer and Dick Cheney. Why the difference? Because in the latter case, admitting that the morally bereft crime boss should be standing in front of the bench at the Hague instead of lolling in a comfy chair at ABC News, would require accepting responsibility for their own moral failings in not only aiding and abetting the crime spree, but also profiting from it.

Delusions are fun

By BJ

Well, fun to mock anyway.  You do have to feel somewhat sorry for the poor buggers who believe in them.  First up is Michael Graham at the Boston Herald, who asks some very important questions:

Did you see that amazing video obtained by the Los Angeles Times of Sen. Barack Obama toasting a prominent former PLO member at an Arab American Action Network meeting in 2003? The video in which Obama gives Yasser Arafat’s frontman a warm embrace, as Bill Ayers look on?

Um, no, not that I recall.  How about you?

You haven’t seen it? Me, neither. The Los Angeles Times refuses to release it

Those bastards!  How dare they hold on to what apparently is the only extant copy of a clearly damaging videotape instead of providing it to the McCain campaign to turn into negative ads?  I bet they’re behind the inexplicable failure of Scott Johnson to produce the “Whitey” tape, too!  And while we’re at it, where is that tape of Obama sacrificing his grandfather’s goats to Allah when he returned to his birthplace in Kenya?  We demand that the media stop withholding these tapes and show Obama for the Islamofascist, terror-loving, anti-non-American pacifist commie we believe him to be!

He blathers on for a time about how much he loves journalists, even as he acknowledges he isn’t one of them, and points to a couple other conservative opinion columnists who agree with him that the media hasn’t been pushing their storyline vetting Obama as much as they think they should, he brings up the recent Pew study that Republicans are grasping at like drowning men at straws.

At the risk of violating union rules, allow me to do a bit of reporting: A new study by the Pew Research Center found that, while 71 percent of Obama’s recent media coverage has been “positive” or “neutral,” almost 60 percent of McCain’s coverage over the same period has been “decidedly negative.”

And how much positive coverage did the media give McCain? Fourteen percent.

Note how he cleverly adds the neutral coverage to Obama’s positive coverage while ignoring it with McCain to make the gap seem even larger than it is.  The actual number of positive coverage for Obama was 36%, which, to be fair, is more positive coverage for Obama than McCain, but as the guys at Politico put it when confronted with the very same data,

There have been moments in the general election when the one-sidedness of our site — when nearly every story was some variation on how poorly McCain was doing or how well Barack Obama was faring — has made us cringe.

As it happens, McCain’s campaign is going quite poorly and Obama’s is going well. Imposing artificial balance on this reality would be a bias of its own.

Or as Campbell Brown roughly said last night on The Daily Show, “When one side says its raining and the other says it’s sunny, I should be able to open the door and when I see it’s sunny, saying so isn’t bias.”

Of course, back when Obama was getting harsher treatment from the media back when the Jeremiah Wright story blew up, the Republican complaint was that he was getting more coverage than McCain, it’s negativity notwithstanding.  Spin doesn’t have to be consistent, just consistently tilted in your favour.

In that I suppose calling Graham delusional is a bit harsh.  He just has his ideological blinders on, and there is at least the suspicion that he knows it.

No, for sheer delicious delusional thinking, one has to go to the folks over at Hillbuzz, who have this to say about Pennsylvania.

On November 4th, the news networks are going to be spinning and sputtering and playing catchup, but everything we see on the ground in PA is what we saw during the primaries: Obama has no shot of winning the Keystone State.

Here is specifically what we talked about tonight: never in any of our careers have any of us ever seen members of one party switching sides and voting for the other party as we see in this election with Democrats for McCain. There has never been anything like it.  Not even the “Reagan Democrats” who voted for Reagan over Carter, for the simple fact that these “Reagan Democrats” weren’t identified and labeled until AFTER the election.

No, Democrats for McCain are real, are voting for McCain right now, and are open and organized, as well as self-identifying.  Lynn Rothschild might be our poster gal, as one of the most prominent of our ranks, but it’s telling that everyone from Team Hillary that we know now works for McCain.  ALL OF US. Whether they are open about it, like we are, or are working quietly behind the scenes, we can’t think of a single person we worked with on a daily basis for Hillary who is now working on behalf of Obama.

Now, I’m sure some of you naysayers out there may feel inclined to point out that whatever their labeling, the “Reagan Democrats” were actually noted in the polling swinging towards Reagan before the election, and that for all their self-identifying and organization, no such phenomena seems to apparent in the polling this time around.  Well you of little faith, the folks at Hillbuzz have news for you!

Union members repeatedly tell all of us that they are lying to pollsters because the unions have been polling these people — and the unions will threaten people’s jobs if they don’t tow the union line. So, the people lie when asked whom they are supporting. But, the unions can’t control who they vote for on Election Day. And that’s when things are going to get interesting.

See!  Nothing to worry about.  All those polls showing McCain getting his ass handed to him are just because the union members are lying to the union pollsters!  (Since when are the polling companies run by the unions?)  Shut up inner troll!

Now, of course some of you out there might be wondering just why all of these DEMOCRATS, particularly of the unionized variety, are rushing to support a man on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum from them and promises to continue the ruinous policies of the last eight years that haven’t been very kind to them, all in direct contradiction to the stated preference of the woman they claim to be the die-hard supporters of.  Well, they provide the answer:

There are two things Hillary Clinton and John McCain have in common that we’re thinking about right now: (1) both love America more than anything and truly want what’s best for the country, and not themselves and (2) Clinton has a framed photo of McCain in her office, while McCain has a similar photo of Clinton in his.

Oh.

Well.

Framed photos of each other.

Well.

How can you argue with framed photos?

I was push-polled!

By Libby

Well I was just push polled by some apparent Liz Dole operatives. This was their second try. Yesterday they called looking for the youngest voting age male in the house. Since there are none here, the woman hung up yesterday but today the guy who called said he wanted to poll me anyway. The questions were pretty weird. He asked about my opinion of Chuck Schumer ( Chuck Schumer of NY?) and a few about the presidential race but mostly about the Dole and Hagan Senate race.

Most of the questions were pretty benign. What have I seen about the candidates; how it affects my vote; who do I think is more negative. The question on my most important issue was a little weird. He read off a long list starting with illegal immigration and running through the Wall St crisis all the way to healthcare and Iraq. My stand on pro-choice was a specific question that stood out in its emphasis.

But the real tell came at the end. He asked how it would affect my vote if I knew that Dole, as a member of the banking committee was working so very hard against corruption, greed and deregulation of Wall St. It was a much longer narrative but that's the gist of it. I laughed of course and asked if they had a box to check for I think that's total BS. Then he asked if it would affect my vote to know that Hagan sat on a similar state committee and while she was in office the unemployment rate here rose considerably. The wording was carefully couched to imply it was Hagan's fault without actually saying so, since of course it's not her fault the GOP's policies have ruined the economy in general.

Even more interesting, he asked for my name and if my phone number was listed but when I asked him what agency he was calling from he said he couldn't tell me. Well, he had already told me at the beginning of the call, so I asked him to confirm he was indeed calling from the Tarrance Research group. When I asked him to spell it, he hung up in mid-sentence. Or was cut off by his supervisor. I assume it was this Tarrance Group. Very creepy.

Hey Big Media -- here's an idea

By Libby

The McCain's campaign strategy is pretty clear. Ask McCain and Palin no questions so they won't have to explain their lies. It's been 40 days since McCain has had a press avail and it's been 24 days since he unveiled his wind-up Palin VP doll and she has still not answered a single question in an open format. They weren't even going to let the national media into her drive-by photo op tour of NY today.

Big media is not happy. I don't blame them. They look like idiots chasing after their former hero while he completely blows them off after he got what he wanted from them. A big glam photo-op for his plastic fantastic running mate to build her phony metaphorical foreign policy creds, in trade for 30 seconds of eavesdropping time on those really excellent meet and greets.

So here's my idea Big Media. How about standing them down instead of letting you play you like a rube at at a Three Monte card game for the free air time? Call their bluff. It's so simple really. No press avail, no free press. Don't cover events where there isn't a press avail at the end, for any candidate. If it leaves you with air time to fill, well you could always do a historic retrospective of Keating Five or ask for McCain's health records. And while you're waiting for those you could convene panels of very serious pundits on the survivability rates of melanoma victims and the real life consequences of relying on metaphorical experience in crisis situations.

Just a thought. It's not like civilization as we know it depends on it or anything.

Competence, people!

By Fester:

Via Steve Benen at Political Animal, I saw this poll done for Yahoo News:

People would rather watch a football game with Barack Obama than with John McCain — but by barely the length of a football.

Obama was the pick over McCain by a narrow 50 percent to 47 percent, according to an Associated Press-Yahoo News poll released Friday that generally mirrored each presidential candidate's strengths and weaknesses with voters. Women, minorities, younger and unmarried people were likelier to prefer catching a game with Obama while men, whites, older and married people would rather watch with McCain.

"I think he'd be fun to sit back with and hear his experiences, all his stories....."

Great, this is the way to choose a President --- who would be better to have a couple of beers with and discuss the intricacies of the Cover-2 or the variations of the 3-4 0 technique.  That has worked out so well in the past eight years.  And I am sure that I can get better football coverage at Football Outsiders. 

That same poll asked who would be the better teacher; again Obama won.

Even better, I'm not voting for an elementary school teacher.  My school district has a solid early education system and the research shows home environment is key.  I'm hoping a president is capable of dealing with crisis and responding to events in a productive and coherent manner.  I'm looking for basic competence.

So when I see this type of 'journalism' juxtaposed with the following blurb via Calculated Risk

From the NY Times: Congressional Leaders Stunned by Warnings

[A]s the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, laid out the potentially devastating ramifications of the financial crisis before congressional leaders on Thursday night, there was a stunned silence at first.
...
Senator Christopher J. Dodd [said] the congressional leaders were told “that we’re literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system, with all the implications here at home and globally.”

Whoopsie --- Congress did not know that the entire goddamn credit market was screwed up, that there was a housing bubble, massive loss of trust, massive loss of cash, and there might be a couple of problems. 

This is bipartisan stupidity, ignorance and incompetence as plenty of bloggers on the left, right, anarcho-socialist, liberertian and dirty fucking hippy persuasions among other have been keeping track of this damn problem for anywhere from one to five years now. 

And we get reports telling us which candidate would be more fun to watch a football game with.  I'm glad that I'm going to a bachelor party tomorrow night as I'll be able to drawn the pain in whiskey. 

Drill baby, drill

By Libby

That's become the mantra of the McCain-Palin ticket and after having cruised some right wing and some truly wingnut blogs in the last 24 hours, it seems an apt one. The Bush - neocon loyalists have been depressed for months. Their former hero became a laughingstock that even they could no longer excuse. They had a standard banner in McCain that they didn't like in the first place and bored them besides. Enter Sarah Palin. Whoppee. They have a a new hero. Fresh face on the same old lies and I'm not talking about the stupid bridge to nowhere; I'm talking about the failed conservative agenda.

Palin drilled into their disturbed psyches and struck the mother lode of cognitive dissonance again. These people have never admitted it was the agenda that failed. It was always that the agenda of hate, fear and shortsightedness is great, but it just needed the right person to execute it. So in skates the hockey mom to save the day. And all the same old illogical excuses come gushing out again to pollute the discourse.

So she fires competent administrators and stacks the bureaucracy with incompetent cronies? No problem. Holds grudges and uses the power of her office for revenge against her enemies? What's the big deal? Illegally uses private email accounts to conduct state business and refuses to disclose them? So what? Wants to ban books about homosexuals? Who doesn't? Ran her tiny little city into a deep financial hole they're still digging out of? Oh, look at that shiny thing over there. She doesn't know Shia from shinola about foreign policy, has no grasp on domestic policy, makes snap decisions and refuses to back down if she's wrong? No problem. Competency is elitist. Knowledge is for losers. She's "one of us" and get this -- the exact opposite of Bush.

You can't cap that poisonous well of dissonance with reasoning and facts. All you can do is try to contain the toxic spill into the smallest area possible.