How nature engineers a suicidal rat

From NPR's All Things Considered

When you see a cat pounce on a rat, it seems like a classic story about a predator and prey.

But scientists have recently discovered that sometimes the main actor is actually a tiny parasite in the rat's brain that makes the normally fearful rat think "oh how nice" when it smells a cat.

The parasite wants the rat to be caught by the cat because it needs to be in the cat's stomach to reproduce. New research sheds light on how this surprising little organism can manipulate a rodent to do its will.

The link above has a brief 4 minute, 41 second audio discussion of this research from Ajai Vyas and Robert Sapolsky. National Geographic also summarizes the research, here.

Trivia of the day

Question: What is the average temperature of the universe?

Answer: 2.73 degrees Kelvin. (-454.5 degrees Fahrenheit)

See here for an explanation.

Quote of the day

"[I]t would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights: that confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism." - Thomas Jefferson, Draft of the "Kentucky Resolutions" (1798)

What he said

Glenn Greenwald on Obama's support of the Democrats' latest efforts to give the worst president in American history (and future presidents) more of our civil liberty.

The excuse that Obama's support for this bill is politically shrewd is -- even if accurate -- neither a defense of what he did nor a reason to refrain from loudly criticizing him for it. Actually, it's the opposite. It's precisely because Obama is calculating that he can -- without real consequence -- trample upon the political values of those who believe in the Constitution and the rule of law that it's necessary to do what one can to change that calculus. Telling Obama that you'll cheer for him no matter what he does, that you'll vest in him Blind Faith that anything he does is done with the purest of motives, ensures that he will continue to ignore you and your political interests.

Beyond that, this attitude that we should uncritically support Obama in everything he does and refrain from criticizing him is unhealthy in the extreme. No political leader merits uncritical devotion -- neither when they are running for office nor when they occupy it -- and there are few things more dangerous than announcing that you so deeply believe in the Core Goodness of a political leader, or that we face such extreme political crises that you trust and support whatever your Leader does, even when you don't understand it or think that it's wrong. That's precisely the warped authoritarian mindset that defined the Bush Movement and led to the insanity of the post-9/11 Era, and that uncritical reverence is no more attractive or healthy when it's shifted to a new Leader.

What Barack Obama did here was wrong and destructive. He's supporting a bill that is a full-scale assault on our Constitution and an endorsement of the premise that our laws can be broken by the political and corporate elite whenever the scary specter of The Terrorists can be invoked to justify it. What's more, as a Constitutional Law Professor, he knows full well what a radical perversion of our Constitution this bill is, and yet he's supporting it anyway. Anyone who sugarcoats or justifies that is doing a real disservice to their claimed political values and to the truth.

The excuse that we must sit by quietly and allow him to do these things with no opposition so that he can win is itself a corrupted and self-destructive mentality. That mindset has no end. Once he's elected, it will transform into: "It's vital that Obama keeps his majority in Congress so you have to keep quiet until after the 2010 midterms," after which it will be: "It's vital that Obama is re-elected so you have to keep quiet until after 2012," at which point the process will repeat itself from the first step. Quite plainly, those are excuses to justify mindless devotion, not genuine political strategies.

More at the link.

Edit- And let's put this in perspective:

We have a president with extremely low popularity levels. He is arguably the worst president in American history. His party suffered an historic defeat in the last election. He has broken law after law, promise after promise, told lie after lie. His presidency is a disaster and a disgrace. As he approaches the lameduck stage of his presidency, it can honestly be said that the world is a worse place as a consequence of his presidency. And yet a Democratic majority Congress - a Congress which was voted in because the public was sick of the inability of Republicans loyalists to do anything other than defer to the will of their Leader - is about to give this President (and future presidents) more of our liberty. They are about to set into precedent that lawbreaking deserves immunity if the president ordered it - a principle rejected by the United States at Nuremberg. They are about to give the president telecom amnesty even though he could not get that from a Republican Congress two years ago ... and the Democratic candidate for president who has campaigned on a promise to restore our Constitutional order is going to vote for it!

This is exactly what I was talking about with ideologues being rewarded for being as fiercely ideological and partisan as they like. Can anyone possible imagine the opposite scenario taking place, with a Republican Congress capitulating to the lawbreaking of a Democratic president?

James Madison, in "Memorial and Remonstrance" (1785), argued that

[I]t is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of citizens, and one of [the] noblest characteristics of the late Revolution.

Ok, what about the 1000th experiment on our liberties?* When will these Democrats in Congress think its time to take alarm? 1004? I'm tired of waiting, and I'm tired of hearing their excuses. In a previous comment I said that:

I don't expect that much from Obama ... I'm not looking for a silver bullet or anything. My hope for the presidential race was for someone who wouldn't continue to shred the Constitution and start more endless wars. I think the real battle is at the Congressional level where we need to get enough reformers elected to where we can turn American back into meritocratic democracy rather than a plutocracy.

And that's still what I think. Obama is the best option in the presidential race. But this Congress which has given us this latest disgrace has got to go. And we should continue to hold Obama's feet to the fire when he does things like this.

*I mean this literally. I'm counting signing statements.

That didn't take long

Mr. Obama supports the "compromise" bill granting amnesty to telecoms for helping the government spy on US citizens illegally for profit. He says he will work in the Senate to remove the amnesty provision, but given that it is unlikely the provision will be removed it seems a given that he has effectively announced his endorsement of "legalizing" lawlessness when it profits politicians and large corporations.

Which means taxpayers paid telecoms via their government to spy on them.

What happened to all the campaign rhetoric about protecting civil liberties, eh?

Update: I found this at Think Progress

Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) has consistently spoken out and voted against granting retroactive immunity for telecoms that participated with the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. This stance was part of the reason he won the support of Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), a leader on civil liberties issues.

One of Obama’s advisers on intelligence and foreign policy advisers, however, is someone who “strongly” supports telecomm immunity. John Brennan is a former CIA official and the current chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance. In a new National Journal interview, Brennan makes it clear that he agrees with the Bush administration on the issue of immunity.

And the ACLU on this "compromise"

"No matter how often the opposition calls this bill a ‘compromise,’ it is not a meaningful compromise, except of our constitutional rights. The bill allows for mass, untargeted and unwarranted surveillance of all communications coming in to and out of the United States. The courts’ role is superficial at best, as the government can continue spying on our communications even after the FISA court has objected. Democratic leaders turned what should have been an easy FISA fix into the wholesale giveaway of our Fourth Amendment rights.

"More than two years after the president’s domestic spying was revealed in the pages of the New York Times, Congress’ fury and shock has dissipated to an obedient whimper. After scrambling for years to cover their tracks, the phone companies and the administration are almost there. This immunity provision will effectively destroy Americans’ chance to have their deserved day in court and will kill any possibility of learning the extent of the administration’s lawless actions. The House should be ashamed of itself. The fate of the Fourth Amendment is now in the Senate’s hands. We can only hope senators will show more courage than their colleagues in the House.

Update II: I would suggest that if you're bothered by this, you contact Senator Obama's campaign and express your (if you feel like me) utter dissapointment at his running away from the premise of his own promised campaign. Hopefully, a deluge of complaints about him betraying his own campaign rhetoric might change his mind over the course of the next week.

As I hinted at above, it seems like Obama is trying to have his cake and eat it too with his "I'll try to remove telecom but..." passive voice response. Glenn Greenwald explains this further in one of his updates

Nobody should be fooled by Obama's vow to work to remove telecom amnesty from this bill. Harry Reid is already acknowledging that this "effort" is likely to fail and is just pure political theater: Reid said: "Probably we can't take that out of the bill, but I'm going to try." The article continued: "Reid said the vote would allow those opposed to the liability protection to 'express their views.'"

We should continue to demand that amnesty is removed from the bill -- and fight it to the bitter end -- but this whole separate vote they'll have in the Senate on whether to remove amnesty is principally designed to enable Obama, once he votes to enact this bill, to say: "Well, I tried to get immunity out, and when I couldn't, I decided to support the compromise." It's almost certainly the case that Hoyer secured Obama's support for the bill before unveiling it.

Either way, Obama -- if amnesty isn't removed -- is going to vote for warrantless eavesdropping and telecom amnesty, and his statement today all but sealed the fate of this bill. There is no point in sugarcoating that, though we ought to continue to fight its enactment with a focus on removing amnesty in the Senate. Greg Sargent makes several good points about Obama's statement.

And let's take a look at the response of Obama again

It is not all that I would want. But given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as President, I will carefully monitor the program, review the report by the Inspectors General, and work with the Congress to take any additional steps I deem necessary to protect the lives -– and the liberty –- of the American people.

In other words: trust me with these powers, I'll use them responsibly. No. No, I will not trust you, Senator Obama. I trust no one with such powers. I trust the law. The (D) after your name is not some kind of magic charm that means you or your administration is to be trusted with the Ring of Gyges.

As Thomas Jefferson put it:

[F]ree government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence; it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power: that our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no further, our confidence may go ... In questions of powers, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.

And as John Adams said

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

And choosing this key issue to do what Democrats love to do - cave on the issue - so that you can try to say you're for civil liberty while also saying you're "strong" on national security (i.e. voted with Republicans to erode civil liberties) doesn't do a lot in the way of earning my trust, anyways.

It is with actions like these that the tide inches closer in, with each approach taking back a little bit more of our liberty as it dissappears like a castle made of sand.

Update III: I noticed this comment/reply comment at Balkinization

At what point do you think that the Republicans in Congress are going to wake up in a cold sweat about the vast surveillance powers they've just handed to a liberal black Democratic president?

January 21, 2009.

Spot on, I say. And this is going to stress our constitutional order. When a Republican is president, movement conservatives are comfortable granting him virtually unlimited powers to do what he says need be done in the name of national security. When a Democrat becomes president they then panic that they are living under totalitarian tyrrany irrespective of whether or not they actually are (case in point).

Heads or tails, it won't really matter. It wil be either Democrats are not protecting us from terrorists and we're going to die (John Bolton already expressed this view) or Democrats are not protecting us from terrorists and they're Liberal Fascists (Jonah Goldberg, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, et al.)

The Pledge Project

My attention has been elsewhere, but Alonzo Fyfe has been devoting his blog for the last month to explaining why "under God" has no business being in the Pledge of Allegiance. He has now compiled a table of contents post which links to all 33 essays in the series. This might be the sort of thing you want to e-mail to friends and family who don't consider the inclusion of "God" in the Pledge and on our money to be a big deal.

This Pledge Project is about creating a nation where rationalists can have a chance of winning public office and positions of public trust.

This is about creating a nation where the government is not teaching its citizens from the youngest age that their government looks on people who do not support 'one nation under God' the same way it looks on people who do not support 'liberty and justice for all'.

It is about creating a nation where the government does not put up signs in every government building and child's classroom that state, "Only a person who trusts in God can be one of us. And if you want to be one of us yourself, then you must also trust in God."

Baleful quote of the day

"I'm not here to say that the government is always right, but when the government tells you to do something, I'm sure you would all agree that I think you all recognize that is something you need to do." - Senator Kit Bond, explaining why telecoms should given retroactive immunity for helping the government illegaly spy on American citizens

Heck, makes sense to me. Republicans keep saying the Constitution establishes a Christian nation based on "Christian principles."

Bond is just expressing the Abraham view of authority. Sure, it might sound wrong to murder your son, but you recognize that when God tells you to do something you need to do it.

Now they're the "far left"

Simon Owens has written up a summary of the Strange Bedfellows coalition of right/left* civil libertarians that has formed to fight telecom amnesty and other Constitutional violations that are taking place in a "bipartisan" manner (i.e. Republicans break the law and then Democrats capitulate and legalize the law-breaking.)

In the comment section of this post today by Glenn Greenwald exploring how key Democratic leaders define "bipartisan" as capitulating to Republican lawlessness I noted that the center of American political discourse is continually redefined as the halfway point between movement conservative ideologues and non-ideologues.** It in this manner that opposing the give-away of our Bill of Rights protections for the sake of granting legal imunity to the telecoms that have purchased such a give-away from members of Congress by throwing money at them becomes a "far left" position.

*I hate using left/right convention but for the sake of expediancy I'm using it to convey the point.
**In this instance, the new "center" consists of agreeing to legislate the President's lawlessness rather than just letting him do it without approval.

Quote of the day

"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account." - Army Major General Antonio Taguba

Obviously, Taguba is a left-wing far lefty communist Marxist Dhimicrat liberal fascist S-P who hates America and is infected with Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Obama endorses Bush enabling Democrat

Glenn Greenwald has the details of Obama having cut an ad supporting the reelection of John Barrow in Georgia despite the fact that it is difficult to distinguish Barrow from a Bush supporting Republican and that his Democratic primary challenger has policy positions which match the stated positions of the Obama campaign.

I have to say that this is incredibly frustrating. Why are Democrats so determined to shoot themselves in the foot? You would have thought that Obama would have learned his lesson: he previously endorsed Joe Lieberman over his Democratic primary challenger Ned Lamont and now Obama is going to be rewarded for that choice by having Lieberman speak at the Republican National Convention about how Obama is a Marxist extremist and what not.

The last campaign of Barrow was truly sickening. He was running ads talking about how opposed to the "death tax" he is. How many of his constituents are actually effected by the estate tax? Given that "the wealthiest 0.27% of Americans are the only ones who pay estate taxes" I'm guessing not many. Barrow supports an endless trillion dollar war in Iraq but the richest of the rich Americans need to be able to maker sure their grandkids can inherit a Renoir or a second yacht tax free? And who is going to make up that revenue difference? Barrow's constituents.

Shame on Obama for supporting Barrow.

First they're wrong, then they don't exist

From Wonk Room

The extreme storms and record-breaking floods that have devastated the Midwest, killing dozens, disrupting the nation’s infrastructure, causing billions of dollars in damage, and sending food prices skyrocketing, are consistent with the effects of global warming on the region predicted eight years ago.

But whenever scientists worn of such possibilities they are attacked as alarmists and what not. This is part of a larger pattern: experts who worn of unpleasant or ideologically uncomfortable possibilites are first dismissed as being wrong. Then, after what they predicted happens, they cease to exist:

A week ago, Gov. Chet Culver (D-IA) told reporters:

Very few people could anticipate or prepare for that type of event.

Unfortunately, just as with the Iraq debacle, Katrina, housing bubble, and September 11 attacks, experts warned against this type of disaster — but they have been ignored by the press and blackballed by this administration.

Government is the problem

"For more than a quarter century now our government has been adopting rules that tilt the playing field in favor of the rich, the powerful, and the politically connected. These rules accomplish this by taking from the uninformed, handcuffing law enforcement, squelching whistle-blowers, and making it even harder for those who were wronged to get redress. The new rules have taken special aim at those supposed economic criminals, the regulators." - David Cay Johnston, Free Lunch

It is standard dogma of Reagan acolytes that "government is the problem." That begs the question: what's the problem?

If you are former Halliburton subsidiary KBR, your problem would be that your army overseer will not approve $1 billion dollars in charges because "[t]hey had a gigantic amount of costs they couldn’t justify" and "the money that was going to KBR was money being taken away from the troops, and I wasn’t going to do that."

The solution would be for the army to remove that overseer, then out-source review of KBR charges to another contractor at an additional cost to the tax-payer, then approve the charges because "We could not let operational support suffer because of some other things.” Or in other words: we were afraid that if we asked KBR to account for their costs they wouldn't do their job.

Or in other words: KBR profits from gouging the tax-payer because they aren't held accountable for their actions. And the taxpayer had to foot the bill of finding a private auditor who would Enron KBR's books to justify the charges (which, not incidentally, are also paid by the taxpayer.)

For KBR, a government of civic minded individuals dedicated to serving the public good rather than private interest is the problem.

An answer for Hannity

As I mentioned several days ago, I made a mistake in my first response to Sean Hannity's question about we can expect universal healthcare to work. A mistake in the sense that I underestimated how stupid Hannity is.

Hannity had asked what happened to the Social Security "lockbox" that Democrats had promised. My answer basically went about explaining how regressive taxes meant to pay for Social Security were used in the 80s to fund tax cuts for the rich and could not be blamed exclusively on Democrats. If I had remembered this passage from Perfectly Legal, however, it would have demonstrated that Hannity's question is dumber than it already appears.

Fear that the excess Social Security taxes would be used to finance the tax cuts on which George W. Bush campaigned in 2000 prompted him to promise again and again on the campaign trail he would not touch that money. “In my economic plan, more than $2 trillion of the federal surplus is locked away for Social Security,” Bush said. “For years, politicians in both parties have dipped into the Trust Fund to pay for more spending. And I will stop it.” Two months after he was sworn in, Bush said that “another priority is retirement systems of Americans. And so the budget I set up says that payroll taxes are only going to be spent on one thing, and that’s Social Security. But the Congress won’t be using the payroll taxes for other programs. Lockbox, I think, is the terminology they like to use up here.”

By then the Wall Street Journal had already concluded that Bush intended to pick the lock on the Social Security box. Bush’s economic plan, the Journal reported, uses “all the Social Security surpluses … to fund the government for the next two years, and to spend well over $100 billion of Social Security funds in each of the following three years.

That's what happened to the lockbox. George W. Bush cracked it open to pay for tax cuts for the rich. So did Democrats in the 1980s ... to pay for Ronald Reagan's tax cuts for the rich. And funds from Social Security were used in the 90s to pay for the budget. Funny how Hannity forgets the part of the equation that has Republicans in it.

This is an outrage and needs to be stopped. It needs to be stopped because it is a form of subterfuge that amounts to backdoor regressive taxation where the middle class is taxed to subsidize tax cuts for the rich. Despite this, however, it still doesn't make the point Hannity intended it to make.

Recall again what Hannity asked. How can the government that bankrupted Social Security be expected to get a Universal Healthcare progam to work. Two loaded problems in Hannity's framing of the question.

1. Social Security is not bankrupt.
2. The problems with Social Security, to the extent that they exist, are a matter of policy, not of necessity.

It's important to consider what Hannity means by "bankrupt." He means that at some point 3o to 40 years from now there might be a shortfall in Social Security, depending on the projections that you look at. Even then Social Security would be able to pay out most of its benefits, so bankrupt is an odd way to describe the program.

As Paul Krugman has pointed out, the Social Security "crisis" is invented and we can choose to fix Social Security with relatively little difficulty if we choose to do so. In this regard, Hannity is correct: if we choose to elect a goverment of plutocrats that is determined to cut taxes for the rich and shift the tax burden while cutting spending that doesn't directly enrich corporations and the megawealthy then we will not be able to afford a universal health care program.

This is why (I surmise) folks like Hannity see Social Security in crisis. They do so for the same reason they see WMDs in Iraq or don't see global warming. Social Security - one of the most succesful and popular programs in U.S. history - is a living anti-proof of movement conservative ideology. They need for it to be a failure.* Which might explain some of the comical mental gymnastics that Hannity and others engage in to arrive at the conclusion that Social Security is in crisis which can only be solved by privatization.

Al Franken explored these cognitive contortions at length in The Truth (with jokes). The most humorous example offered by Franken being George W. Bush after visiting the Office of Public Debt Accounting declaring that "there is no 'trust fund' - just IOUs that I saw firsthand, that future generations will pay either in higher taxes, or reduced benefits, or cuts to other critical government programs." Three weeks later during a prime time press conference on Social Security Bush said that "Social Security will be bankrupt" several decades from now and that the trust fund is just "file cabinets full of IOUs." Bush offered a privatization solution: "I propose that one investment option consist entirely of treasury bonds, which are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government."

Ok, can anyone guess what those IOUs Bush looked at were? That's right! U.S. treasury bonds.

In my first response I observed that Hannity would offer you Republican governance as a solution to problems that would in reality increase under (more or greater) Republican rule. I also offered the qualification that Democrats are not free from the sin of acting as plutocrats rather than democrats. Which is why it is important to counter the cynicism that is so vital to the cause of Hannity and the conservative movement. We can do this by being aware of what has happened to this country and by remembering that We the People have a say in the fate of the nation. It may take some time and effort, but we can vote out the goverment that has been killing the American dream for 3 decades now.

David Cay Johnston, in Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill), suggests a question we might ask as we head into the election.

Since 1980 it has become official policy to ensure that the rich receive the benefits of government. This is a shift from government policy in the years after World War II to grow the middle class, remaking America into a land of better-educated and healthier people, a land of suburbs and single-family homes where opportunity was based less on status and wealth than on hard work and merit.

So who is better off today than they were 30 years ago? [An allusion to Reagan famously asking in 1980 if you’re better off today than four years ago.] The middle-aged factory worker whose plant closed even though it earned a healthy profit or the Wall Street investment banker who brokered the deal to ship the machine tools overseas, where pay is three or four dollars per day? The billionaire CEO or the middle manager whose company health insurance has been cut yet again? The war contractor or the brain-injured veteran?

*President Bush planned on "saving" Social Security with a plan that would speed up the appearance of deficits while increasing their size; it would also have benefited money managers charging administrative fees.

Paul Krugman saves me the trouble

In my notebook I have an entry that reads simply "tax relief for the middle class." I jotted that down after hearing Obama say that during a speech. I was going to write something about how the adoption of Bush's language for describing tax cuts represented Obama "thinking like an elephant" by putting a Democratic spin on a Republican frame (think about that one for a second.) I was also going to try and buttress that point by saying something about how the Tax Policy Center's analysis showed that Obama's plan will lose 7% of expected revenue under current law over the next 10 years but will raise revenue by 2% if you take Bush's tax cuts as a baseline demonstrates the way that the Republican Party is rewarded by acting ever more ideologically by dragging the American center "right."

I would have had some difficulty articulating that point to my satisfaction*. Thankfully, however, I won't have to try since Paul Krugman has written an op-ed which sort of says that same thing.

*My frustration at not being able to articulate to my satisfaction my response to Sean Hannity is the reason I was experiencing difficulty with that post despite having the content of the post done for days now. I stepped away from it for a day or so to clear my head and will just suck it up and post it tomorrow.

Surprise! Pseudo-doubters backed by conservative think-tanks

From Framing Science

A new study by a team of political scientists and sociologists at the journal Environmental Politics concludes that 9 out of 10 books published since 1972 that have disputed the seriousness of environmental problems and mainstream science can be linked to a conservative think tank (CTT). Following on earlier work by co-author Riley Dunlap and colleagues, the study examines the ability of conservative think tanks to use the media and other communication strategies to successfully challenge mainstream expert agreement on environmental problems.

The study's conclusion

Our analyses of the sceptical literature and CTTs indicate an unambiguous linkage between the two. Over 92 per cent of environmentally sceptical books are linked to conservative think tanks, and 90 per cent of conservative think tanks interested in environmental issues espouse scepticism. Environmental scepticism began in the US, is strongest in the US, and exploded after the end of the Cold War and the emergence of global environmental concern stimulated by the 1992 Earth Summit. Environmental scepticism is an elite-driven reaction to global environmentalism, organised by core actors within the conservative movement. Promoting scepticism is a key tactic of the anti-environmental counter-movement coordinated by CTTs, designed specifically to undermine the environmental movement's efforts to legitimise its claims via science. Thus, the notion that environmental sceptics are unbiased analysts exposing the myths and scare tactics employed by those they label as practitioners of 'junk science' lacks credibility. Similarly, the self-portrayal of sceptics as marginalised 'Davids' battling the powerful 'Goliath' of environmentalists and environmental scientists is a charade, as sceptics are supported by politically powerful CTTs funded by wealthy foundations and corporations.

Now recall Molly Ivins saying that "the American press has always had a tendency to assume that the truth must lie exactly halfway between any two opposing points of view" and it is easy to see how effective the tactic of funding books, pundits, and experts (or "experts" if you prefer) that dispute the scientific consenus on global warming is at shaping the public's understanding of the issue (remember the image from An Inconvenient Truth of a media sampling of reports on global warming showing 53% to cast doubt on AGW despite a similar sample finding 0% dispute in the scientific literature.)

Moyers on class warfare

From Bill Moyers Journal

Here we go again. No sooner does Barack Obama challenge John McCain on extending George Bush's expensive tax cuts for people at the top than cries go up of "Class War! Class War!" Look at this essay posted on the website of capitalism's op-ed page in the WALL STREET JOURNAL. It accuses Obama of a "class-warfare tirade" for a speech he made critical of "tax breaks for big corporations and wealthy CEOs."

Now, Obama's economic policies should get a full critique. As should McCain's. But, please, can we put aside that old canard spouted by Wall Street apologists every time someone calls for greater equity between working people and the rich? Truth is, there's been a class war waged in America for thirty years now from the top down, and the rich have won.

Here's the latest dispatch from the front page - this story, in the news section of the WALL STREET JOURNAL, about how some corporate executives have finagled lush payouts to their heirs if they die in office:

If Eugene Isenberg dies while still heading up Nabors Industries, his estate would get an additional $288 million dollars - that's more than the company's first-quarter earnings.

But it's less than the $298 million Brian Roberts would get from Comcast if the Grim Reaper comes calling on his watch.

Pity poor Ray Irani: His golden coffin wouldn't be quite as glittering. Occidental Petroleum would top off his estate's tank with a measly $115 million dollars.

Class war? Well, you don't see those fellows or their heirs adding an extra cup of water to their soup, diluting their kids' milk, and giving them carbonated soda because it's cheaper than milk. You can bet your Gucci slippers they're not lining up on the main street of a small town to get bread they can't afford to buy because the rise in gasoline prices forces a choice between food and fuel. And you won't find them borrowing money from their bosses just to buy gas to get to work, or abandoning their cars on the side of the road and walking away when the tank runs out.

What's happening to American workers is not the result of natural forces alone. No, it's happened because corporate and political powers connived to keep wages down while shredding their workers' safety nets. For some time now the Great American Wealth Machine has been cranking out jackpots for the people at the top and pushing working people further down the ladder. The growing divide - that roaring inequality - is the subject of this broadcast.

The rest is worth watching/reading.

Another consideration for the '08 election

Do you want a Supreme Court that upholds our form of constitutional republic, which makes us a law based nation; or do you want a Supreme Court that turns the U.S. into some sort of national security state in which the will of the President is the "law."

If the latter sounds vaguely familiar it should. As Scott Horton reminds, it was the reasoning used by Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt to justify the end of the Weimar Republic.

What exactly did Kennedy mean by referring to a Constitution that can be “switched on and off at will”? In presenting the opposing viewpoint this way he was taking dead aim at the notion of a state of exception which underlies the whole architecture of Bush war on terror policies. Simply put, these policies argue that while the Executive is limited by the checks and balances of the American constitution during peacetime and at home, all those shackles fall away when war erupts and when he acts outside the nation’s territory. This viewpoint has limited historical precedents, but no Administration has pressed it quite so fiercely as that of George W. Bush.

Moreover the true roots of this notion lie in the thinking of a troubling figure, Carl Schmitt. The most important conservative legal thinker on the European continent between the wars, Schmitt felt that modern liberal democracy crafted on the Anglo-American model was too weak to cope with the social and political shockwaves that racked Europe between the wars. He suggested that these liberal democratic constitutions all had an “escape hatch,” namely a clause which would allow the Executive to set aside the array of civil liberties which formed the constitution’s foundation whenever the state found itself engulfed in an existential threat. Exactly what this “state of exception” was and how it could be triggered would depend on the peculiarities of each constitution.

For the past seven years, Americans have witnessed an effort to engineer a “state of exception” to the American constitution. Its key element has been a new definition of war—the “war on terror”–which has neither territorial nor temporal boundaries ....

... It was designed to bolster an assertion of unprecedented executive power, a reshuffling of the political cards at home. The executive was to emerge as the paramount power in the nation’s government, relegating the other branches to the status of constitutional hood ornaments. The Republican Party was to be anchored in to a generation of rule.

Here comes the crazy

As the prospect of a Democrat becoming president continues to loom, the authoritarians within the conservative movement are starting to slide deeper into Manichean paranoia. If Obama wins, the floodgates will open and we will hear all kind of insane conspiracy about how Obama wants to create a one world government, how people have mysteriously died around him, about invented scandals of some sort or another, he wants to outlaw guns, etc.

Tom DeLay, a man who supposedly lives by the standard of "Thou shall not bear false witness", offers us a sampling.

On The Sean Hannity Show, Tom DeLay falsely claimed that Sen. Barack Obama is "in favor of a bill to fingerprint every American in this country and have a national fingerprint database."

And of course, there is the far "far right" who already want to kill and maim in the name of defending America from a Democrat. Mainstream figures like Hannity and Limbaugh who promote these sorts of conspiracies and describe Democrats as a threat to America just add fuel to the extremist fire.

"Conservatism" at its finest

"Take em out and shoot em. . . . They are traitors to this country, and shoot them. . . . Anybody who would do that doesn't deserve to live. You shoot them. You call them traitors. That's what they are. And you shoot em dead. I'll pay for the bullets." - totalitarian madman Michael Reagan, on 9/11 conspiracists who send letters to U.S. soldiers

Yep, summarily executing people who hold unpopular views is as American as apple pie.

Hey, America. Do you really want to vote in the 2008 election to empower lunatics like this who make up the heart and soul of the conservative movement?

(via Glenn Greenwald)

Quote of the day

"The power of the Executive to cast a man in prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government, whether Nazi or Communist. " -Winston Churchill, in a telegram to Herbert Morrison November 21, 1943

I've quoted this before, but amidst all the hysterics of "radical activism" from the Supreme Court for upholding the nearly 800 year old foundation of western democracy - habeus corpus - I thought it might be fitting to recall what conservative icon Winston Churchill had to say in the middle of World War II about habeus corpus.

For more on the Supreme Court's ruling, see Balkinization which has been running a series of informative posts on the subject.

"The Habeas Corpus secures every man here, alien or citizen, against everything which is not law, whatever shape it may assume." -Thomas Jefferson to A. H. Rowan, 1798

Welcome to the Jungle

From Paul Krugman

How did America find itself back in The Jungle?

It started with ideology. Hard-core American conservatives have long idealized the Gilded Age, regarding everything that followed — not just the New Deal, but even the Progressive Era — as a great diversion from the true path of capitalism.

Thus, when Grover Norquist, the anti-tax advocate, was asked about his ultimate goal, he replied that he wanted a restoration of the way America was “up until Teddy Roosevelt, when the socialists took over. The income tax, the death tax, regulation, all that.”

Teddy Roosevelt, Socialist. Everytime I read something like that I can't help remembering this quote. I guess the Roaring Twenties were the highpoint of unchecked socialism?

McCain as Bizarro Robin Hood

The above is Kevin Drum's slightly edited version of a graphic from the Tax Policy Center's analysis of the tax policy of McCain and Obama.* As you can see, McCain's plan is regressive, with the largest cut going to the richest .1% of tax payers. A vote for McCain is a vote to burden the children and grand-children of the vast majority of working Americans (around 90-ish%) with the cost of creating a neo-feudalist aristocracy.

There is no way that McCain can sell his Bizarro Robin Hood economics to the American people honestly. Which is why he'll have to lie as sytematically as Bush did in regards to his economic policy.

Update: Case in point of the necessity of lying.

*Drum removed the bar of the overall % change for spacing reasons.

Posts ... almost ... finished

I'm finishing up the posts I keep saying I'll put up but for some reason am experiencing anxiety while trying to do so (the first time in months that I've had this problem.) I will have them up as soon as possible, but in the meanwhile below is the Fora.tv talk with David Cay Johnston. The subject of Johnston's talk is related to the posts I'm working on.

"Afro-Leninist"

Michael Savage, following up on his idea of putting homeless Americans in "work camps" and "round[ing] up every member of the ACLU" and sending them to prison at Guantanamo has now taken to calling Barack Obama a "Afro-Leninist."

I can't quite express how appalled I am that there are approximately 8.25 weekly fans of a man whom can fairly be described as fascist. It also doesn't reflect well for the state of the media that this was who was chosen to replace Phil Donahue when he was fired from MSNBC for not being a supporter of the invasion of Iraq (nevermind MSNBC having to subsequently fire Savage for being - big surprise - an extremist on air.)

Thank you, Mr. Kucinich

At least we'll have record for posterity that there were some in Congress who recognized that President Bush should have been impeached.

More to come on Hannity's brilliant stupidity

I posted my response about Hannity's question regarding how we can expect universal healthcare to work off the top of my head and now see that I failed to mention a few other points (for example, that the increase in Social Security taxes on the working class was used to help pay for tax cuts for the rich) and did not actually answer the question. Also, when I got home and was able to check my books I noticed that I was wrong (sort of) about one point (I'm always dumber when I don't have access to my bookshelf and/or notebooks). So I'll post pt. 2 of my response to Hannity tomorrow (I could do it now but I'm again without my books and notes.)

That response should serve as a good lead-in to the review of The Big Con that I promised a while back, which I hope to post the next day.

Quote of the day

"Military necessity does not admit of cruelty--that is, the infliction of suffering for the sake of suffering or for revenge, nor of maiming or wounding except in fight, nor of torture to extort confessions.” - The Lieber code, approved by Abraham Lincoln April 24, 1863

The accidental brilliance of Sean Hannity's lack of a brain

On Hannity's Sunday program he asked Kirsten Powers how the government that bankrupted Social Security could be expected to manage a universal health care program. What happened to the "lock box" Democrats promised, Hannity wondered.

Ok, let's walk through this, Mr. Hannity. Al Gore campaigned on putting the budget surplus in a "lock box." He did not become president, making it fairly difficult for him to follow through on that promise. The guy who did become president, George W. Bush, took the budget surplus and gave it back to the megawealthy while creating a budget deficit despite the protestations of both Alan Greenspan and his Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neal who wanted to use that money for future social security payments.

What's more, during the 1980s taxes were raised on the working classes to pay for the future projected social security deficit. Those taxes were then taken and used to mask the deficit created by increased spending under Ronald Reagan's administrations. To reiterate: the working class was taxed to pay for social security and then that tax revenue was then used to pay off a deficit created (in an admittedly bi-partisan manner) under a Republican president.*

This is how Sean Hannity being one of the stupidest political pundits in the country makes him so much money. He takes problems that have developed out of conservative governance and Democratic compliance and blames them exclusively on Democrats while suggesting Republicans are an alternative to the consequences of problems generated by Republicans. It's a scam that has worked for too long.

*Social Security surplus has been used since the Lyndon Johnson administration to help mask the federal deficit but what made this particularly egregious under Reagan was the covert regressive rigging of the tax system whereby the burden of paying off the deficit was shifted onto the middle class while using the resulting fiscal consequances as an argument for eliminating the social security safety net from these very same people.

Guardian interview with Philippe Sands

Philippe Sands was interviewed by the Guardian about his new book Torture Team:Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values which details how counter-productive American interrogation abuses resulted from top-down policy decisions. I've nearly finished the book and can say that Sands has done an excellent job of placing responsibility for interrogation abuses in the proper place.

Sands' appearance on Bill Moyers Journal is also highly informative.

A case in point of why I absolutely abhor Fox News

From Media Matters

Summary: Teasing a segment on the "gesture everyone seems to interpret differently," Fox News' E.D. Hill said: "A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab? ... We'll show you some interesting body communication and find out what it really says." In the ensuing discussion with a "body language expert," Hill referred to the "Michelle and Barack Obama fist bump or fist pound," but at no point did she explain her earlier reference to "a terrorist fist jab."

Ha ha. Nothing funnier than subtle racism and slimy innuendo that the Democratic presidential candidate is a terrorist.

Update: Jake Tapper on Hill's statement:

Truly unbelievable. Sen. Barack Obama and his wife Michelle do a fist bump-- or as Ta-Nahisi Coates explains, what's actually called “giving a person a dap,” a greeting that you can see Howie Mandell do with contestants on Deal or No Deal -- and Fox News Channel asks if it was a “terrorist fist jab.” But for Fox, the fear factor overrides all others and the fear of brown people and fear of Muslims are the top vote getters – so with Obama, you score a double play. I realize that Hill’s piece was playing to the demographic – but a fist bump ( the newest incarnation of the high-five) as “terrorist?” Have you no shame, Ms. Hill?

John McCain thinks (or is willing to say) that the U.S. Constition established a theocracy

It's just sad. Sad that the Republican Party has been taken over by the pseudo-conservative Christian right which engages in ruthless proto-totalitarian reality revision in order to lay the ideological groundwork for the sectarian America they wish to create.

My favorite part of the footage is McCain saying the phrase "in God we trust" is evidence that the Constitution is founded on "Christian principles." Uh, Mr. McCain, that phrase didn't appear on coins until the Civil War and didn't become a national motto until 1956.

Via Jim Lippard

In case you missed it

Rick Perlstein has now written two posts (here and here) on Box 722 - the archive of letters Senator Paul Douglas recieved in 1966 in regards to open housing and Martin Luther King - that I would suggest are highly worthy of perusal.

And, as always, the most glaring example of how perverse and bizarre American political discourse has become remains the fact that Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about a consensual sexual affair with another adult yet the current president will not be impeached for lying the country into a war that has resulted in death and ruin. Glenn Greenwald makes this point concisely by noting that the so-called "Dean" of the Liberal Media thinks that Iraq war lies are merely "policy dispute" but found Clinton's affair to be intolerable.

No matter how many times one sees it, it will never cease to amaze that the exact same media mavens who righteously strutted around demanding that Bill Clinton be impeached or forced to resign because the "honor" of our political system demanded that, continue casually to dismiss every crime of the last seven years as nothing more than a garden-variety, good faith "policy dispute" which only shrill rabble want to see "turned into a criminal or impeachable affair." So the Senate issues a report documenting that the President and Vice President repeatedly made false statements to induce the citizenry to support a war against another country that has left hundreds of thousands of people dead for no reason -- added on to the piles of outright lawbreaking under this administration -- and to David Broder, those are just mere "policy disputes" which (unlike Bill Clinton's grave crimes) merit no punishment.

I didn't make the connection

Color me ignorant, but I never realized that the Will Smith golf film "The Legend of Bagger Vance" was an interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita until I heard Robert Price mention it during his Point of Inquiry podcast.

Getting creative

At Scientific American, experts discuss ways to increase your creative ouput.

It works on tv

The following is a passage from Torture Team by Philippe Sands in which he is recounting his discussion with former Staff Judge Advocate at Guantanamo Diane Beaver about brainstorming sessions that took place in Sept. 2002 to come up with new interrogation techniques after President Bush decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply there. Besides having ideas come from people's personal experiences with interrogations and reverse engineering of SERE training, there was one particularly odd source of inspiration for how to interrogate prisoners

Ideas also came from other sources and Beaver mentioned one that surprised me. I noted the words "24 - Jack Bauer," but didn't immediately follow this up with her. It was only when I got home that I realized she was referring to the main character of Fox Channel's popular series 24, which everyone watched. Jack Bauer is a fictitious member of the counter-terrorism unit in L.A. who helped prevent many terror attacks on the United States; for him torture and even killing are justifiable means to achieve the desired result. "Rules don't apply to Jack Bauer," another character says in one episode, "he does what he wants, when he wants, and he doesn't care whose life it affects." Bauer had many friends at Guantanamo Bay, Beaver said, "he gave people lots of ideas." Later on I watched the second season of 24, that started broadcasting in October 2002, with my son. The first episode opened with a scene of a man being tortured, apparently with chemicals. The information he divulged - that a nuclear device was to be exploded in Los Angeles within the next twenty-four hours - was the basis for the series. The message was clear: torture works. I raised this with Beaver when I next saw her. "We saw it on cable," Beaver explained, "people had already seen the first series, it was hugely popular." She believes the scene contributed to an environment in which those at Guantanamo were encouraged to see themselves as being on the frontline - and to go further than they otherwise might. Nowadays she can't watch 24 anymore.

Splendid. America abandons the principles of human rights that it itself had championed into becoming enshrined in Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" - and which has since become customary international law, and it does so partly because the people tasked with coming up with new guidelines for interrogation at the legal blackhole site created by the White House were persuaded by seeing torture work on a fictional tv show.

Cool site of the day

The Buying of the President

The above site from the Center for Public Integrity is a great resource for understanding the ways that money shapes our elections.

Proof positive that Hate + religious dogma makes you stupid

The Deputy Minister of Religious Endowment for Hamas thinks that "Darwinism" (I'm assuming he means evolutionary theory) is really part of the Jewish plot for world domination which was outlined in The Protocols of Zion.

I almost agree with Ed Brayton that this is comical, except that this kind of immeasurably ignorant idiocy contributes to acts of barbarism and anti-science sentiment in a part of the world that desperately needs more scientific thinking rather than this sort of faith-based lunacy.

Manufacturing psuedo-doubt

(Via Deltoid)

Chris Mooney - author of The Republican War on Science - reviews Doubt Is Their Product and finds that the undermining of science is even worse than he already thought it is

Tobacco companies perfected the ruse, which was later copycatted by other polluting or health-endangering industries. One tobacco executive was even dumb enough to write it down in 1969. "Doubt is our product," reads the infamous memo, "since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy."

In his important new book, David Michaels calls the strategy "manufacturing uncertainty." A former Clinton administration Energy Department official and now associate chair of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at George Washington University, Michaels is a comprehensive and thorough chronicler -- indeed, almost too thorough a chronicler, at times overwhelming the reader with information.

But there's a lot to be learned here. Even most of us who have gone swimming in the litigation-generated stew of tobacco documents (you can never get the stink off of you again) don't have a clue about the extent of the abuses. For the war on science described in Doubt is Their Product is so sweeping and fundamental as to make you question why we ever had the Enlightenment. There aren't just a few scientists for hire -- there are law firms, public-relations firms, think tanks, and entire product-defense companies that specialize in rejiggering epidemiological studies to make findings of endangerment to human health disappear.

Quote of the day

"The current U.S. presidential campaign has already featured the bizarre spectacle of President Bush, in a speech to the Knesset, drawing an analogy between Obama's desire for diplomacy with our enemies and Neville Chamberlain's abandonment of the Sudetenland. That sort of campaign by false historical analogy misuses history. Now we see the Republican campaign stoop to distortion and innuendo utterly misusing history again. I say to the Republicans look at the true history of the liberation of the camps in which Uncle Charlie took part and soberly reflect on the humanity involved. Anything less would be a disservice to those who suffered in the camps and to the troops who liberated them." - Adam Holland (h/t Deborah Lipstadt)

Update for the New American Newspeak Dictionary

Today's update for the New American Newspeak Dictionary is:

Left-wing hater: Any individual, regardless of where their views fall across the political spectrum, who (in many cases) accurately criticizes the policies of a Republican president.

See here for the explanation.

About that imagining ...

"If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.” — Bertrand Russell, Proposed Roads to Freedom

In a post a while back I quoted an excerpt from Tom Fenton's Bad News in which he recounts the testimony of Florida Dept. of Agriculture loan officer Johnell Bryant claiming to have been visited by Mohammed Atta in May 2001. Fenton had used this as an example of how better and more substantial news can contribute to American security.

Yesterday I mentioned this story in a comment at Glenn Greenwald's blog and someone expressed skepticism of the story. After looking into it, I see that Fenton apparently got his dates wrong. The transcript of the interview conducted by ABC with Bryant shows Bryant claiming to have met with Atta between April and May of 2000.

That would be at odds with the timeline established by the 9/11 Commission Report which has Atta out of the United States at the time Bryant claims to have met with him (although Atta was in Florida in May 2001.) The Bryant/Atta incident is also absent from the report.

I wish I could sort the story out definitively one way or the other but I can't seem to find confirmation or retraction or much commentary on it what so ever other than people pointing out that Bryant's story doesn't match the timeline.*

Fenton's over-all point about the need for real news instead of sensational junk news is still valid, but the Bryant/Atta example appears to be dubious. I'll see if I can track down contact info for Fenton so that I might query him about this ...

If my prejudice against the mainstream media hadn't over-rided by skepticism I might have avoided this error in the first place.

*One might suggest that this in itself is a reflection of the quality of our news and the lack of significant journalism being done. When it comes to the death of Anna Nicole Smith and her son the media left no stone unturned.

Quote of the day

"Those who view history as an all-encompassing struggle between God and the Devil may find it natural to regard political opponents as agents of Lucifer." - Joe Conason & Gene Lyson, The Hunting of the President

Which is why Manicheans like Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin think "liberals" are Evil that Americans need to be delivered by God (or his emmissary) from. History tends to show us that people looking to be "delivered" from an intrasociety out-group defined as Evil is a dangerous road to head down.

"Left-wing haters"

Via Glenn Greenwald, we see that "left-wing haters" is now the label that is used to describe critics of the Bush administration who "have been proven empirically in many cases." Hats off to Mike Allen, for a rhetorical sleight-of-hand that would impress even Bill O'Reilly if he had the capacity to acknowledge there being such a thing as an accurate Bush critic.

Speaking of which, why is it that NBC is a "radical far left" organization - which is owned by the anti-capitalist Marxists at GE who build weapons for the US government and who ordered their employees to report uncritically of the Bush administration's push for war with Iraq (and fired those that didn't inspite of whatever rating success they had) and which still has not acknowledged any wrongdoing in participating in a Pentagon propaganda program and who's lead anchor thinks Rush Limbaugh is great and that Peggy Noonan should get a Pulitzer - when it has on someone who criticizes the White House for proven deception regarding Iraq and the outing of Valerie Plame, but it isn't a "right-wing" network when it has on Ann Coulter 195 times to promote her books in which she tells us stuff like the "governing principle" of liberals "is to always kill human life (unless the human life being killed is likely to fly a plane into American skyscrapers, in which case, it is wrong to kill it.)"?

Why is that? Because Fox News has unleashed - as it promised MSNBC executives it would - O'Reilly on NBC so that he can engage in a massive campaign of ego-justification. If he can convince himself and his audience that there is a "vast left-wing conspiracy" with MSNBC at the center then maybe he won't have to think about all the criticism and ridicule he keeps getting from Olbermann and everyone else.

The ACLU hates Christians

Which is obviously why it files lawsuits to protect the rights of Christians.

Buried in books

"This book is donated in recognition of the First Amendment rights of all Americans." - Anonymous

That is the dedication written in the copy of The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie that I bought the other day at the sale at the local Communist re-education center (aka the public library.) For a grand total of ten dollars I was able to get ten hardcovers:

Empire by Gore Vidal

Creation by Gore Vidal

The Hunting of the President by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons

State of War by James Risen

Armed Madhouse by Greg Palast

Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe

Disarming Iraq by Hans Blix

The Cousin's War by Kevin Phillips

Diderot's Selected Writings edited by Lester Crocker

I've already read State of War but I couldn't resist having a copy on hand, as I think it's an example of excellent journalism. I was particularly pleased to have the opportunity to rescue Disarming Iraq - the book was published in '04 and it has been in the library for at least two years but it has the appearance of being brand new (complete with new book smell and stiff binding.) I would be surprised to hear that it had ever been checked out.

Besides being busy flipping through these new aquisitions, I've been trying to finish off several other books that I'm nearly finished reading which has pushed back the book reviews I'd been working on for a few days or so.

Update: Make that 12 books for a total of $11.50. I went back yesterday and picked up a hardcover copy of Tempting Faith by David Kuo and a paperback edition of Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain.

What he said

John Cole on the RNC trying to depict Obama as unfit for president because of his having confused Buchenwald with Auschwitz.

Michelle Malkin is not a fascist

Last night, Keith Olbermann named Dunkin Donuts Worst Person for having pulled its Rachel Ray ad after it received criticism from the likes of Malkin and Little Green Footballs, and he criticized DD for bowing to pressure from "fascists" like Malkin. This is wrong and counterproductive.

Olbermann was using fascist as an epithet. Michelle Malkin is a fairly despicable person, but she is not a fascist. To call her so clouds the meaning of the word and turns it into a cheap insult.

Olbermann should have simply said what he meant: Malkin is an intolerant authoritarian (and/or a pseudo-fascist.)

On message

You gotta give it to them, the folks at Fox News sure do no how to smear someone on message. If I believed in such a thing I would say this is karma for McClellan having been part of that smear machine for 3 years. See here, for instance

Well, why, all of a sudden, if he had all these grave concerns, did he not raise these sooner? This is one-and-a-half years after he left the administration. And now, all of a sudden, he's raising these grave concerns that he claims he had. And I think you have to look at some of the facts. One, he is bringing this up in the heat of a presidential campaign. He has written a book and he certainly wants to go out there and promote that book. Certainly let's look at the politics of it.

That's McClellan on Richard Clarke's book that revealed that the White House team had been focusing - at the expense of not focusing on terrorism - on how to remove Saddam from day 1 in office.

McClellan has hinted that it's difficult for loyalists like himself to see reality when they're in the administration. That's why I'm not surprised the White House (and its extension at Fox News) is "puzzled" by McClellan's book. Of course they are. They live in an epistemic fun house of mirrors where all they see is their own views and opinions reflected back at them over and over again.

This process is best described by Nazi Albert Speer who experienced it in its most extreme manifestation

In normal circumstances people who turn their backs on reality are soon set straight by the mockery and criticism of those around them, which makes them aware they have lost credibility. In the Third Reich there were no such correctives, especially for those who belonged to the upper stratum. On the contrary, every self-deception was multiplied as in a hall of distorting mirrors, becoming a repeatedly confirmed picture of a fanstastical dream world which no longer bore any relationship to the grim outside world. In these mirrors I could see nothing but my own face reproduced many times over.

Bill O'Reilly has become completely untethered from reality

I guess between being mocked regularly in prime time by Keith Olberman and being mocked for his insane explosion behind the scenes at Inside Edition O'Reilly has completely lost it. Just listen to this ridiculous rant

All right. Be that as it may, the really interesting part of this story is the vast left-wing conspiracy in the media. Scott McClellan knows he's going to find plenty of sympathetic ears in the press. There's no doubt about it.

Since Iraq went south, a number of media vehicles have turned sharply left. We know about NBC News. And now we're seeing Newsweek magazine go crazy. Since John Meacham took over as editor, Newsweek has trashed Mother Teresa, hired the hateful founder of the Daily Kos, provided a cadre of far-left commentators to NBC, and generally lost all journalistic credibility. The result is that Newsweek's circulation is collapsing, down 11 percent in less than a year.

But — and this is important — there's no media counter for NBC News, Newsweek, The New York Times and dozens of other committed-left media. There's no right-wing media conspiracy. Conservatives generally aren't crazy about John McCain.

Says the guy who works for Fox News, a network run by a Republican political operative and former producer of Rush Limbaugh's tv show. A network that has hired Karl Rove* to offer "analysis" on a regular (indeed, nightly) basis. And yep, no counter to the "left-media" (aka media that isn't an arm of the GOP like Fox). Certainly not on the AM radio, you won't find any right-wing media there. And not at the Washington Times ... Also, nevermind establishment "Liberal Media" figures Mark Halperin and John Harris writing that "Matt Drudge rules our world."

Where do you even start to respond to someone this detached from reality as we know it - what he refers to as "the far left." He actually called MSNBC a "radical far left" organization last night.

Let's think about this for a second. The New York Times has William Kristol working for it. CNN HN has Glenn Beck. MSNBC hired Michael Savage after it fired Phil Donahue. Is there anything equivalent to this going on at Fox News or any of the other Murdoch owned media? Hell no. They'd have to hire Howard Zinn; or fire Hannity and replace him with Randi Rhodes. This is just pure lunancy on O'Reilly's part: does he not remember the ABC News debate where Obama had to answer questions fed to the moderator by Sean Hannity? Who in there right mind expects Fox News to host a debate and have one of the moderators ask a question fed to them by - hell, I don't even know who a left-wing equivalent in the media to Sean Hannity would be ... heck, let's say - Randi Rhodes?

And how stupid is this guy? "Conservatives" aren't crazy about John McCain because they are right-wing extremists who think he's TOO LIBERAL.

*Karl Rove being hired by Newsweek is also part of its left-wing tilt, apparently.

What he said

'How much longer can this preposterous myth be sustained when even the [former] White House Spokesman not only mocks the phrase [liberal media] but derides the media for being "too deferential" to the right-wing Government "in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during [his] years in Washington"?' - Glenn Greenwald (also see this post for more on the "liberal media")

The instant I heard of McClellan's book I new what the scripted response would be from Bush loyalists who reiterate the same rationalization everytime someone leaves the Bush administration and then says something critical of it. Think Progress confirms that it is indeed the same as always for Bush loyalists.