As NewsBusters reported Tuesday, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee was lambasted by numerous liberal media outlets for comments he made to conservative radio host Steve Malzberg regarding President Obama's past. Surprisingly joining in the harsh criticism was George Will whose column to be published in Sunday's Washington Post also excoriated former House Speaker Newt Gingrich as well as Malzberg: If pessimism is not creeping on little cat's feet into Republicans' thinking about their 2012 presidential prospects, that is another reason for pessimism. This is because it indicates they do not understand that sensible Americans, who pay scant attention to presidential politics at this point in the electoral cycle, must nevertheless be detecting vibrations of weirdness emanating from people associated with the party. Will then quoted one of Malzberg's many questions to Huckabee during his Febuary 28 interview, and actually said the former governor's answer should have been, “I've seen paranoia, goodbye.” After noting some of Huckabee's actual answer, Will continued: Republicans should understand that when self-described conservatives such as Malzberg voice question-rants like the one above and Republicans do not recoil from them, the conservative party is indirectly injured. As it is directly when Newt Gingrich , who seems to be theatrically tiptoeing toward a presidential candidacy, speculates about Obama having a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” mentality. After indirectly referring to Dinesh D'Souza's Forbes piece from last year involving Obama's Kenyan anti-colonial worldview, and how Gingrich spoke of it to National Review's Robert Costa, Will concluded: To the notion that Obama has a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview, the sensible response is: If only. Obama's natural habitat is as American as the nearest faculty club; he is a distillation of America's academic mentality; he is as American as the other professor-president, Woodrow Wilson. A question for former history professor Gingrich: Why implicate Kenya? Let us not mince words. There are at most five plausible Republican presidents on the horizon – Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former Utah governor and departing ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, former Massachusetts governor Romney and former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty. So the Republican winnowing process is far advanced. But the nominee may emerge much diminished by involvement in a process cluttered with careless, delusional, egomaniacal, spotlight-chasing candidates to whom the sensible American majority would never entrust a lemonade stand, much less nuclear weapons. What is one to make of Will going after two prominent Republicans this way, especially as Huckabee is currently leading the possible GOP candidate field according to a just-released NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll ? After a snippet of Will's piece was published by Politico early Friday morning, it was all the rage at MSNBC getting covered by Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow on their respective programs. One can only imagine how much play this will get in the next 48 hours, as liberal media members love quoting conservative commentators when they go after folks on the right. Will, of
Continue reading …The Villagers are Giddy Over the Possibility of Some Grand Bargain With John Boehner on Social Security
March 5, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media As Digby pointed out today , Mrs. Greenspan and John Heilemann were all aflutter over the possibility of some grand bargain being struck between John Boehner and the Obama administration on “reforming” Social Security. Go read the whole post at Hullabaloo, but I’ll just add that if the administration is actually buying the fact that John Boehner can be trusted to control his TeaBircher caucus or the outside groups that will attack the administration if they make cuts to Social Security, they’re living in la la land. And if they think this is a good move politically when the public is overwhelmingly against making cuts to Social Security, they’re living in some sort of alternative universe as well. Raise the income cap on the tax and long-term shortfall is solved. All the bipartisan fetishism in the world from the Villagers isn’t going to bring the public around to believing that ordinary people are ever going to warm up to the idea that most of us should have to work until we’re dead so that millionaires and billionaires don’t have to make any “shared sacrifice” and be asked to pay more in taxes to solve our deficit problems — and that it should instead be solved by refusing to put the money borrowed against it back into the trust fund. Transcript via Digby . Andrea Mitchell: Washington may be closer than we thought to doing something real about the long term budget deficit. House speaker John Boehner has reportedly given President his word that he will not exploit the politically charged issue of entitlements if Obama takes the lead. New York Magazine national political columnist John Heilman joins me. This could be a whole new era! Entitlement reform, on the table, in this coming budget year? What are the chances? Heilman: I think the chances are pretty good although I don’t think it’s going to happen the way that Speaker Boehner would like it to happen. I don’t see a whole lot of pressure on the president to do what Speaker Boehner would like to do which is to say, go first. You know, we saw in the Wall Street Journal poll in the last couple of days there’s not a lot of public pressure to take on these entitlement programs and to the extent there is public pressure it’s coming from the Republican base. So I think the White House taken the attitude that they are ready to address these issues, but the Republican party is the party that’s going to have to go first and I think Speaker Boehner is going to have to do that if they are going to make this progress. I think he’s going to feel forced to by his constituents in the Republican party who want to see this happen. Mitchell: Of course, the alternative is that both the White House and the Speaker stand off and play a game of “after you Alphonse” and nobody does anything and we reach a critical point here. Heilman: Well, that’s certainly possible and you know look, as I say, the White House is comfortable politically with waiting. And look, I think the truth is that I think the president actually believes that something has to happen on this and the question of sequencing is a political question. I think it’s a matter of long term policy and in fact is a matter of long term politics. It’s in the interest of both the White House and the Republican Party to eventually figure out a way as they skirmish around and figure out who’s going to go first and who’s going to go second and who’s going to have whose back. Eventually it’s in all their interest to walk off this cliff together, so to speak, although that metaphor suggests that it’s in no one’s interest. Mitchell: laughter… Heilman: I think it is in their interest to get this off the table politically. The White House would love to have deficit reduction off the table politically in 2012 because that’s the only thing Republicans have to run against President Obama on.
Continue reading …Overwrought Rosie O’Donnell Thinks Wisconsin Battle’s ‘The Most Important Issue’ in America Since 1950
March 5, 2011 No Comment
The Radio Equalizer blog found an amazing statement from Rosie O'Donnell on her satellite radio show: the
Continue reading …Internet Traffic In And Out Of Libya Drops To Almost Zero. What’s Going On?
March 5, 2011 No Comment
enlarge Arms depot in Benghazi, blown up last night by government forces in Libya. Last night, we got the news that the Benghazi arms depot that was arming the Libyans fighting against the government was blown up , with 37 reported deaths so far and countless injuries. Coupled with this news, I’d say that things for the people of Libya are getting much, much worse: At about 7 a.m. Eastern Time on Thursday Internet traffic coming in and out of Libya dropped to nearly zero, where it remains, according to Google’s Transparency Report. Libya had previously lost much of its connectivity on Feb. 18. The country’s Internet activity returned at about 1 a.m. Eastern time after being out for about seven hours. Initially some analyst s thought it might be the Libyan government attempting a “dry run” of cutting off the Internet and other communications the way the Egyptian government did in January. But James Cowie, chief technology officer of Renesys, an information technology consultancy, said this time it is different from the case in Egypt, or even the previous service outages. “It’s like a post-apocalyptic scenario where the roads are there, there just isn’t any traffic,” he said. In Egypt, the government simply told the Internet service providers to shut the servers down. Technically, it was not very sophisticated. If a computer from another country tried to “ping” a server in Egypt, there was simply no answer. This time, the servers in Libya are answering, in the sense that the route is clear and open. But there is no traffic. If one were to try and send a data packet from Libya to the U.S., for example, the server in Libya would send it to a “black hole route,” Cowie said. That means it would be held in place. The sender might never know what happened. Users of services such as YouTube and Twitter would see a problem because neither is hosted in Libya, so the moment one required a response from the site it would be clear that something was amiss. In one sense, what the Libyan telecoms operator is doing is not dissimilar to the “throttling” of traffic that happens on any network when users exceed their data limits. The data is either slowed down or the subscriber gets charged more money. In this case the throttling was simply set at zero.
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Dan Gilgoff played up the Islamic community's concerns over upcoming congressional hearings on “the radicalization of American Muslims” in a Friday article on CNN.com. Gilgoff quoted Muslims 12 times in his article, versus only 3 times for Rep. Peter King, who will be convening the hearings, and omitted mentioning actual terrorist incidents from recent years that involved native-born or naturalized Muslims. The co-editor for CNN's “Belief Blog” led his article, ” Muslims anxious, active ahead of radicalization hearings ,” by highlighting the efforts of American University Professor Akbar Ahmed, who stated, ” There is a generalized sense of Islamophobia floating around, and the hearings are not doing anything to assuage Muslim fears .” Of course, this line helps revisit the network's charge from last summer that Islamophobia is now “mainstream in America” (his colleague Don Lemon did this on Monday with a segment about a new film hoping to “clear up some of this ignorance” about Islam). Gilgoff used the “Islamophobia” term himself four paragraphs later: …King's hearings have also galvanized American Muslims, perhaps as never before, in an attempt to counter what they call a rising tide of Islamophobia , to lobby Washington about their concerns and to help shape the national narrative about their community. The efforts come a little more than six months after many Muslims were blindsided by a wave of national opposition to a proposed Islamic cultural center near New York’s ground zero last summer . The CNN writer spent the next several paragraphs lining up quote after quote from those who are spearheading these efforts: ” There was this sense that after last summer's events of needing to be more proactive in stemming this activity that stokes anti-Muslim hate ,” says Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates, a national legal advocacy group. “That's why, as soon as we heard Rep. King say he planned to hold these hearings, we started coming forward to express our concerns,” Khera says…. The Council on American-Islamic Relations,
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Click here to view this media A Wisconsin lawmaker who was tackled by police while trying to get into the Capitol Thursday says the blame lies squarely with Gov. Scott Walker (R). Wisconsin state Rep. Nick Milroy (D) said that while police “overstepped” by tackling him, ultimately Walker was to blame for creating “chaos in the state.” A judge had ruled Thursday that the Capitol must be cleared for 48 hours while it was cleaned. Protesters had been occupying the building for weeks, demanding Walker drop his effort to bust union bargaining rights. Milroy told Raw Story that he was merely returning from dinner when officers had set about clearing the building of protesters. “Upon returning to the Capitol, I was initially told by an officer that I was not going to be allowed entry into the building,” he said. “I walked past her and up to the door and flashed my ID and another officer opened the door to allow me in.” “As I was entering the building, the first officer yelled that I wasn’t going to be allowed access, and that’s when an altercation broke out.” A WISH-TV video shows a gang of Capitol police tackling the state legislator. “I don’t blame the officer. I think he probably did overstep his bounds but I think there was a miscommunication,” Milroy added. “These are the sort of things that happen when you have a leader that creates chaos in the state.” “I put all the blame on Scott Walker for all of the ridiculous things that have been happening in Wisconsin, and this is just another example of poor leadership by Scott Walker, you know, shutting down the Capitol to the public, denying legislators the right to enter the building to collect their personal belongings.” “I’m a veteran. I’ve had many veterans come up to me. I had a veteran come up to me the other day and tell me how disgusted he was that the building was not open to the people of Wisconsin. I mean, people have fought and died for their freedoms. And one of those freedoms is that the state Capitol has always been open for business during business hours,” the South Range Democrat said. “It’s very disturbing that Scott Walker thinks that the Capitol is some sort of palace and he has his own palace guards guarding every entrance.”
Continue reading …CNN tries to tackle white anxiety — by treating white nationalists as credible sources
March 5, 2011 No Comment
Click here to view this media [Louis C.K.answers CNN preemptively. Warning: NSFW.] This was the headline yesterday at CNN: Are whites racially oppressed? “We went from being a privileged group to all of a sudden becoming whites, the new victims,” says Charles Gallagher, a sociologist at La Salle University in Pennsylvania who researches white racial attitudes and was baffled to find that whites see themselves as a minority. “You have this perception out there that whites are no longer in control or the majority. Whites are the new minority group.” Call it racial jujitsu: A growing number of white Americans are acting like a racially oppressed majority. They are adopting the language and protest tactics of an embattled minority group, scholars and commentators say. Considering the racial angst that underlies so much of the Tea Party movement, this actually might have been an interesting and worthwhile subject to tackle. And it starts out promisingly, with quotes from smart people like Tim Wise, discussing the role of economic insecurity in these fears. But then it devotes a great deal of space to the views of people like the Political Cesspool’s James Edwards and VDare’s Peter Brimelow — hate-group leaders who are allowed to basically spew their venom as though their ideas were worth considering in the first place. And there’s not a word devoted to discussing the hatefulness As Todd Gregory at Media Matters notes: The most glaring problem with CNN’s treatment of Brimelow and Edwards is that it presents the nature of their views as a he said/she said matter — i.e., the Southern Poverty Law Center says they run hate groups, but they deny that. Any fair-minded look at their public statements would show that they espouse the view that minorities are inferior to white people. Another important point about this treatment of white racial anxiety: It is completely unfair to white people who don’t hold hateful views of minorities. If you are seeking perspective on “what white people think about race,” you have committed journalistic malpractice by quoting people like Brimelow and Edwards. They can’t be said to be in any way representative of what white people think. Treating Brimelow and Edwards this way has the same effect as treating the New Black Panther Party as representative of black people. They’re not. Plain and simple. It’s one thing to lend space to the views of racial hatemongers. It’s quite another to do so without any kind of countering opinion. Yet the closes the CNN piece comes to doing that is to simply mention that the SPLC considers the subjects to be extremists — as if that bit of proxy is all that’s needed to explain to readers that no, really, white people are the opposite of being oppressed. As Gregory notes: Even if your goal is to accurately report on the views of people who hold “pro-White” views or sympathize with “white nationalists,” setting up interviews with them and disseminating their message to a wider audience is the wrong way to go about it. People who are openly bigoted make plenty of statements about what they think, which could easily be quoted. Allowing them to offer fresh thoughts through your reporting presents them an opportunity to promote their views. This is, of course, always a danger when it comes time to report on white supremacists of various stripes: In order for your readers to understand them, you have to present their views. But to do so without explaining to those same readers why these views are misbegotten and grounded in misconceptions, lies and pure bigotry is, in fact, profoundly irresponsible.
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As NewsBusters previously reported, Bill Maher on Friday, during a joke about Sarah Palin, bashed Charlie Sheen's “childish” behavior. Moments later in his “Real Time” monologue, the host, while defending actress Natalie Portman, immaturely attacked former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee's family for being overweight (video follows with transcript and commentary): BILL MAHER: Oh, yes, Mike Huckabee. Throw up that picture of Mike and his family. MAHER: That's right, a grossly distended belly should only be achieved through marriage or bacon. Is this really the kind of low-brow humor the folks at HBO think is entertaining? Aren't candidate's families supposedly off-limits? Oh, that's right. We learned during the 2008 campaign that nothing is forbidden if the target is conservative.
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Think Progress has an interview with the conservative Ohio State Senator who was kicked out of his committee assignment in order to makes sure they had the votes to pass a union-busting bill. Can you imagine Democrats doing the same thing? On Wednesday, just moments before a key committee in the Ohio State Senate was to vote on a GOP bill that would effectively dismantle public employees’ right to collectively bargain, the Senate’s Republican leader replaced a GOP committee member who opposed the bill with someone who supported it to ensure the measure passed . It was a brazen and nearly unprecedented move, and even more so considering that State Sen. Bill Seitz (R) told ThinkProgress that he is good friends with, and has been roommates for ten years with State Senate President Tom Niehaus, who yanked Seitz off the committee. Indeed, they were sworn in to the state House on the same day and eventually followed each other to the Senate, sharing an apartment in the capital throughout. In a telephone interview with ThinkProgress yesterday afternoon, Seitz recounted how he was informed of the move by his good friend Niehaus just a half hour before the vote. Seitz, a conservative Republican who proudly noted that he works for a “management-side” law firm founded by the namesake of the very pro-management Taft-Hartley Act, said he supports “85 percent” of Senate Bill 5, but ultimately opposed it because it “goes to far.” Asked about his abrupt removal from the committee, Seitz said it was “not unheard of, but not commonplace.” He couldn’t recall a time when something similar had occurred in the Senate. Moreover, he noted that his abrupt removal sends a bad signal to Ohio workers concerned about their own future: SEITZ: [I told Niehaus] I’m not sure it looks real good, particularly in the context of a management rights bill, to have you exercise management rights over your own roommate, friend, and fellow party member. Because if that’s what can happen to a sitting state senator, what’s going to happen to you if you’re a nervous firefighter, teacher, or policeman — what’s going to happen to you if this bill passes? Asked whether Niehaus’s move may have violated Senate rules because the president failed to officially declare the committee change before it went into effect, Seitz said that while he has “not independently researched it,” he was “of the opinion” that an official declaration was required. Seitz said he raised the concern with Niehaus, who “said that he had been advised by his legal counsel…that he had the legal authority to do it whenever he wanted to.” “I didn’t feel like arguing about it,” Seitz added.
Continue reading …For anyone who might need a little reminder of what types of battles unions fought to bring us things like a 40-hour work week, no child labor, vacation days, decent wages, and not basically being slaves living in company housing owned by the corporations that employed them — watch this movie if you get a chance. I watched this film years ago and sadly this history is not taught in our classrooms in the United States of America. It’s a fictional depiction of what went on during the labor unrest in West Virginia in the 1920s, but it’s based on a real events and a reminder of just how violent things ended up being in West Virginia and across the country before working people in the United States finally were able to gain a lot of the rights that way too many of us take for granted right now. When you forget what it took to get so many of the rights we have in the first place, sadly it’s way too easy to give them back again without a fight. That’s what the politicians, Fox “News” and these astroturf teabaggers who are attacking unions as evil, greedy thugs are all counting on. From IMDb: Matewan (1987) : Mingo County, West Virginia, 1920. Coal miners, struggling to form a union, are up against company operators and gun thugs; Black and Italian miners, brought in by the company to break the strike, are caught between the two forces. Union activist and ex-Wobbly Joe Kenehan, sent to help organize the union, determines to bring the local, Black, and Italian groups together. Matewan (1987) – The Union Shootout in Matewan, West Virginia, May 19, 1920 And here’s more from one of Amazon’s reviews on the film : A little-known chapter of American labor history is brought vividly to life in this period drama from writer-director John Sayles. It’s a fictional story about labor wars among West Virginia coal miners during the 1920′s, but every detail is so right that the film has the unmistakable ring of truth. The tension begins when the Stone Mountain Coal Company of Matewan, West Virginia, announces a lower pay rate for miners, who respond by calling a strike under the leadership of a United Mine Workers representative (Chris Cooper). Proving strength in numbers, the miners are joined by black and Italian miners who initially resist the strike, and a fateful battle ensues when detectives hired by the coal company attempt to evict miners from company housing. Violence erupts in a sequence of astonishing, cathartic intensity, and Matewan achieves a rare degree of moral complexity combined with gut-wrenching tragedy. The film salutes a pacifist ideal while recognizing that personal and political convictions often must be defended with violence. To illustrate this point, Sayles enlisted master cinematographer Haskell Wexler, who creates the film’s authentic visual texture–a triumph of artistry over limited resources. The result is a milestone of independent filmmaking, and Matewan remains one of Sayles’s finest achievements. –Jeff Shannon
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