Rage on the Radio

On this week's broadcast of Bill Moyers' Journal, correspondent Rick Karr examines some of the consequences of the hate speech used by right-wing radio talk show hosts.

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Georgia On My Mind

If your only source of news is the mainstream corporate American media, you might very well be under the impression that recent fighting in the Georgian province of South Ossetia is nothing more than a cynical, belligerent attempt by Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to rebuild a Soviet-style empire by invading a peaceful, harmless neighbor.

The mainstream media rarely mentions that South Ossetia fought a battle of independence from Georgia beginning in 1989. In 1992 a cease fire was negotiated in which South Ossetia was officially recognized as semi-autonomous from Georgia. The agreement stipulated that several hundred Russian peacekeeping soldiers would occupy South Ossetia to protect against Georgian military incursion.

Things were fairly peaceful in the region until 2004, when tensions between South Ossetians and Georgians began to rise again. In 2006 a referendum was conducted in South Ossetia to determine whether it would remain independent. The result was almost 99% in favor of independence, with about a 95% turnout of eligible voters.

On August 8, 2008, while most of the world was distracted by the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, Georgia launched a large-scale military incursion into South Ossetia. The town of Tskhinvali was shelled by a sustained artillery bombardment. Twelve Russian soldiers were killed and over 100 injured. It is estimated that about 1500 civilians were killed. Most of the remaining 30,000 inhabitants of Tskhinvali fled across the border into the Russian province of North Ossetia. The Georgian military moved into the town and occupied it.

Two days later, heavily-armed Russian military units crossed the border into South Ossetia and drove the Georgian troops out of Tskhinvali after bloody fighting. Both sides have accused each other of human rights atrocities, including rape, murder, and ethnic cleansing. A fragile cease fire is currently in place.

The Real News Network has produced a 3-part series on the politics of Georgia and South Ossetia:

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Parts 2 and 3 are available here:
Part 2
Part 3

Followup (8/15/2008): In a press conference at the State Department yesterday, Condoleeza Rice said:

This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, where Russia can threaten its neighbors, occupy a capital, overthrow a government, and get away with it.

Apparently, it's not the 2003 invasion of Iraq, either, where the United States did all of the above. Oh, wait, Iraq wasn't our neighbor. I guess that makes all the difference.

In the same spirit of revisionism, John McCain said yesterday:

In the twenty-first century, nations don't invade other nations.

Followup (8/16/2008): The Real News Network posted an interview with Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive. He says:

It's hard to find anyone who's behaved well in this whole event. . . . If you examine the arguments on every side, everyone is being hypocritical, especially the Russians and the United States. . . . The Russians didn't want Chechnya to be autonomous. . . . The United States supported the efforts of Kosovo to secede. . . . There are no good guys here.

Followup (8/17/2008): As a great example of how the mainstream media gets nervous when anyone counters official propaganda, check out this video of Fox News anchor Shepard Smith interviewing two Americans who escaped the fighting in Georgia. Ironically, less-biased coverage of this story is provided by Russia Today.

Followup (8/17/2008): Today on NBC's Meet the Press, Condoleeza Rice said:

We need to keep the focus on the culprit here. The culprit is that Russia overreached, used disproportionate force against a small neighbor, and is now paying the price for that because Russia's reputation as a potential partner in international institutions . . . is, frankly, in tatters. . . . Georgia will rebuild. Russia's reputation, on the other hand, may not be rebuilt.

As we all know, Ms. Rice is one of the world's leading experts on the subject of military overreaching against small countries leading to ruined international reputations. The host of Meet the Press, Dick Gregory, never pointed out the irony of her comments. Nor did he question her version of events or provide airtime for a dissenting point of view.

The Way of the World

On today's broadcast of Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman interviewed Ron Suskind about the controversial allegations in his new book The Way of the World.

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The video is in 6 parts due to YouTube's 10-minute limit. Parts 2 through 6 are available here:
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

A transcript is available here.

Generalissimo McCain

Film student Aaron Hodgins Davis recently posted a five-minute video on YouTube, composed mostly of news clips, showing what a warmonger John McCain might be as president.

“There's no doubt John McCain is going to be a war president.... He'll make Cheney look like Gandhi.”
— Pat Buchanan

“The truth is that, in national security terms, he's largely untested and untried. He's never been responsible for policy formulation. He's never had leadership in a crisis, or in anything larger than his own element on an aircraft carrier or his own Congressional staff.... McCain's weakness is that he's always been for the use of force, force, and more force.”
—Gen. Wesley Clark

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The Real News

Paul Jay, CEO of The Real News Network, was interviewed by Daljit Dhaliwalon on the PBS show Foreign Exchange.

Dhaliwalon: “What's wrong with the news that we have?”

Jay: “Most of television news in the United States, but also in much of the rest of the world, [has] become kind of an echo chamber for propaganda.”

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Ich bin ein Berliner

Barack Obama spoke today to a crowd of more than 200,000 at Tiergarten Park in Berlin, Germany.

Some excerpts:
“People of the world, look at Berlin.... The greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another. The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.... People of Berlin, people of the world, this is our moment, this is our time.... A new generation - our generation - must make our mark on history.... We are heirs to a struggle for freedom. We are a people of improbable hope. Let us build on our common history, and seize our common destiny, and once again engage in that noble struggle to bring justice and peace to our world.”

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The video is in three parts due to YouTube's 10-minute limit.
Parts 2 and 3 are available here:
youtube.com/watch?v=oTIwA8Vs7Lg
youtube.com/watch?v=yTu0TDPusqM

It's the Oil, Stupid

Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow discuss John McCain's controversial statement yesterday about war and oil:

“My friends, I will have an energy policy that we will be talking about, which will eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East, that will then prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East.”

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“A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.” — Michael Kinsley.

Looking for the Mouse

I just read an interesting essay on the history of leisure time and how the Web is affecting it.

The author points out that we're rapidly changing from losers who passively watch Gilligan's Island to losers who actively play World of Warcraft: “Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves.”

But he also examines more productive things we're now doing, like the approximately 100 million hours spent so far constructing Wikipedia, and speculates on where things may be heading: “Four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.”

Sick Around the World

This week on Frontline:

“Can the U.S. learn anything from the rest of the world about how to run a health care system?”

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Lala

If you're a fan of Tiki Bar TV, check out this erotic video of Lala in the shower:

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Confused? You've just been Rickrolled.

A lot of bloggers seem to think it's funny to trick people into watching a "Never Gonna Give You Up" video.

Isn't that childish and annoying?

Fortunately, it's easy to avoid being a victim of Rickrolls. There's even a fantastic video tutorial explaining how.

(The shower photo of Lala — aka Lara Doucette — was posted by Jeff Macpherson — aka Doctor Tiki — on his flickr page)

Bush's War

This week's Frontline broadcast is part one of the two-part series Bush's War, billed as "The definitive documentary analysis of one of the most challenging periods in the nation's history."

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Economic Deja Vu

“We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.” — George Bernard Shaw

The New York Times published an op-ed piece by Paul Krugman today in which he argues that we are repeating the economic mistakes which led to the Great Depression. Some excerpts:

We chose to forget what happened in the 1930s — and having refused to learn from history, we’re repeating it. Contrary to popular belief, the stock market crash of 1929 wasn’t the defining moment of the Great Depression. What turned an ordinary recession into a civilization-threatening slump was the wave of bank runs that swept across America in 1930 and 1931. This banking crisis of the 1930s showed that unregulated, unsupervised financial markets can all too easily suffer catastrophic failure. As the decades passed, however, that lesson was forgotten — and now we’re relearning it, the hard way. . . .

Wall Street chafed at regulations that limited risk, but also limited potential profits. And little by little it wriggled free — partly by persuading politicians to relax the rules, but mainly by creating a “shadow banking system” that relied on complex financial arrangements to bypass regulations designed to ensure that banking was safe. . . .

As the years went by, the shadow banking system took over more and more of the banking business, because the unregulated players in this system seemed to offer better deals than conventional banks. Meanwhile, those who worried about the fact that this brave new world of finance lacked a safety net were dismissed as hopelessly old-fashioned.

The financial crisis currently under way is basically an updated version of the wave of bank runs that swept the nation three generations ago. People aren’t pulling cash out of banks to put it in their mattresses — but they’re doing the modern equivalent, pulling their money out of the shadow banking system and putting it into Treasury bills. And the result, now as then, is a vicious circle of financial contraction.

A More Perfect Union

Barack Obama addresses racism in general, and Jeremiah Wright in particular:

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News Flash

This just in...

Giant Whale Beached on United States

The Big States

Markos Moulitsas posted an article today examining the argument that Hillary should be the Democratic nominee because she has won "all the big states" in the primaries. Some excerpts:

The 10 biggest states by population [are] California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, and North Carolina. ... Of the states that will be competitive, Obama has clear advantages in Texas and North Carolina, while Clinton has clear advantages in Pennsylvania and Florida. In the electoral math, that is 49 EVs for Obama, 48 for Clinton. Yup, Obama has a one electoral vote advantage from the top 10 "big states" that Clinton can't stop yammering about.

But more important than the biggest states should be the closest states in 2004. ... If you were to make the moronic assumption that only the winner of the primary could win those states, that would add up to 74 electoral votes for Obama, 49 for Clinton.

But better yet, let's look at SUSA's 50 state poll and see how the candidates fared in these states against McCain. ... In terms of electoral votes, that's an advantage of 101 for Obama, 74 for Clinton.

No matter how you parse it, the data is clear that Obama is the more competitive November candidate for the Democratic Party.

Crazy Like a Fox?

At first glance, it might seem that Geraldine Ferraro, a longtime Hillary Clinton supporter and a member of her campaign finance committee, has gone mad. Yesterday she said:

If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.

Coming from anyone but Bill O'Reilly, one would naturally expect a statement like that to be followed by an apology within 24 hours. But today, Ferraro stubbornly refused to back down, responding to her critics with the following:

Any time anybody does anything that in any way pulls this campaign down and says let's address reality and the problems we're facing in this world, you're accused of being racist, so you have to shut up. Racism works in two different directions. I really think they're attacking me because I'm white. How's that?

What the heck is going on here? Is Ferraro nuts? Are these the initial symptoms of encroaching senility?

Some have suggested this is actually part of a cynical strategy.

The next Democratic primary is in Pennsylvania on April 22nd. James Carville once quipped that Pennsylvania is Pittsburgh on the west, Philadelphia on the east, and Alabama in the middle. Unfortunately for Democrats, the Alabama in the middle is white, redneck, racist Alabama.

It may seem absurd to many Americans, but a common refrain among rednecks is that minorities get all the breaks in this country. That the system is biased against whites. That a black man is "very lucky to be who he is," to quote Ferraro. A considerable number of whites really believe this. Mind-boggling perhaps to anyone who knows anything about black history, but true nonetheless. Many whites sincerely believe they are the persecuted minority.

Does anyone still remember the South Carolina primary? It was six weeks ago. Yes, I realize that time in the Democratic primaries is now measured in dog years. Six weeks seems like a lifetime ago. A lot has changed since then. For starters, we don't see much of Bill Clinton any more. Does anyone remember why that is? Does anyone remember the embarrassing racist comments he made during the South Carolina primary?

Is it hopelessly cynical of me to wonder if Ferraro is deliberately playing a similar race card now? That her comments are carefully chosen to resonate with Pennsylvania's "Alabama in the middle?" That the timing is suspiciously coincident with Obama's big win in Mississippi, where he garnered 90% among blacks but only 30% among whites? Am I seeing racist conspiracies where none exist?

Time will tell. April 22nd is six weeks away, another lifetime in dog years. No doubt a lot will happen before then. We'll have a much clearer picture of the Clinton strategy for Pennsylvania.

And perhaps we'll know whether Geraldine Ferraro is crazy or cunning.

Update (3/11/2008): Maybe Ferraro is just a bigot, pure and simple. During the presidential primaries in 1988 she said, "If Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn't be in the race."

Update (3/11/2008): Here's more evidence that Ferraro's remarks were not just extemporaneous misstatements. Almost two weeks ago, on February 26, 2008, Ferraro gave an interview to conservative talk show host John Gibson. Gibson posed the scenario of Barack Obama arriving at the Democratic convention with more pledged delegates, but Hillary Clinton receiving the nomination because of super-delegate votes. He asked if that would cause a civil war within the Democratic party. Her reply included the following:

If Barack Obama were a white man, would we be talking about this as a potential real problem for Hillary? If he were a woman of any color, would he be in this position? Absolutely not.

Update (3/12/2008): In a post today, blogger dnA writes:

The aim here is to evoke racial resentment on the part of white voters over issues like Affirmative Action, and cast Obama as a talentless hack who excels only because our country is held victim by political correctness. The hope is that this will drive a permanent wedge between Obama and white voters that will sway Superdelegates to ultimately go with Hillary at the convention. At worst, Obama will be so damaged in the general that he can never be a threat to their ambitions again.

Update (3/12/2008): Ferraro just resigned from Clinton's campaign finance committee. Clinton spokesperson Howard Wolfson said:

We were completely unaware of Mrs. Ferraro's remarks before she made them. We did not in any way enourage them.

Apparently, they were also completely unaware that she had made essentially the same remarks two weeks ago and twenty years ago.

Update (3/12/2008): On tonight's broadcast of Countdown, Keith Olbermann made some scathing comments on this whole affair that are well worth watching.

1627

This post has nothing to do with the Puritans in Massachussetts or the first European sighting of Australia or anything else that happened in the year 1627.

The number 1627 is a critical threshold in the Democratic primary race. It is 50% + 1 of the 3252 pledged delegates. The candidate who reaches that number will have the strongest legitimate claim to the party's nomination in August. It's hard to imagine the majority of super-delegates voting for the other person; to do so would risk an ugly civil war among Democrats.

Currently, just after the polls have closed in the Mississippi primary, realclearpolitics.com shows Obama with 1395 pledged delegates, Clinton with 1237. Several pundits are estimating that Obama will reach the 1627 threshold on May 20th during the Oregon and Kentucky primaries.

It remains to be seen whether some lucky Oregon or Kentucky Democrat will be awarded a prize for casting the vote that put one of the candidates over the top. But one can only hope that the other candidate will acknowledge defeat and bow out gracefully.

Another Lie Exposed

In October 2002, President Bush delivered a speech which included the following:

We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al Qaeda leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks. ...

Confronting the threat posed by Iraq is crucial to winning the war on terror. ... Saddam Hussein is harboring terrorists and the instruments of terror, the instruments of mass death and destruction.

During the months preceding the March 2003 Iraq invasion, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Condoleeza Rice also gave several speeches citing "bulletproof evidence" of Saddam Hussein's al Qaeda connections.

McClatchy Newspapers today published a story which begins:

An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network.

Update (3/12/2008): ABC News has a story today that the Pentagon is trying to bury the study:

The Bush Administration apparently does not want a U.S. military study that found no direct connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda to get any attention. This morning, the Pentagon canceled plans to send out a press release announcing the report's release and will no longer make the report available online. ... The report will be made available only to those who ask for it, and it will be sent via U.S. mail from Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia. ... [A] Pentagon official said initial press reports on the study made it "too politically sensitive."

ABC News is providing the executive summary of the report in PDF format.

Pandering Hypocrite

"Neither [political] party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right."
— John McCain, 2000.

"All hurricanes are acts of God, because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they were recipients of the judgment of God for that."
— John Hagee, 2007.

"I am very proud to have pastor John Hagee's support. He has been the staunchest leader of our Christian evangelical movement in many areas."
— John McCain, 2008.

Bad Week?

Everyone in the press is saying that Barack Obama had a bad week last week, that Hillary Clinton staged a comeback. But if you sit down and do the delegate arithmetic, you might reach a different conclusion.

On Tuesday, Obama had a net loss of 6 delegates in the four primaries.*

On Thursday, the final California primary results showed that Obama gained 8 delegates over previous estimates.**

On Saturday, Obama won Wyoming, with a net gain of 2 delegates.

And finally, throughout the week, Obama picked up a net gain of 9 super-delegate endorsements.***

The final tally from Obama's bad week? He netted 4 pledged delegates and 9 super-delegates, increasing his lead by 13.

At this point, Hillary must surely be thinking the words of Pyrrhus: "One more such victory will undo me."

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* He lost 9 in Ohio, lost 5 in Rhode Island, gained 5 in Texas, and gained 3 in Vermont.

** He won 4 more than expected, she won 4 fewer than expected.

*** Obama got 13: Carol Fowler, Mary Long, and Roy LaVerne Brooks on 3/4; Rhine McLin and Jane Kidd on 3/5; Connie Thurman, Nick Rahall, and Teresa Benitez-Thompson on 3/6; Alexandra Gallardo-Rooker on 3/7; Bill Foster, Mary Jo Neville, and Joyce Brayboy on 3/9. Clinton got 4: Barbara Boxer and Mona Mohib on 3/6; Aleita Huguenin on 3/7; Mary Lou Winters on 3/8.