Gregarius » Crooks and Liars » November 17, 2008

Crooks and Liars (11 unread)

Open Thread

Posted: November 17th, 2008, 11:30pm EST by bluegal

"Secretary Henry Paulson" from The Guys from Area 51.

...and Happy Birthday, Howard Dean!

Open thread below...
Late Night Music Club welcomes Chrissie Hynde and Willie Nelson

Posted: November 17th, 2008, 11:00pm EST by Howie Klein

Break Up The Concrete is the new album-- the first since Artemis released the mostly unheraldedLoose Screw six years ago-- from The Pretenders. I love it. So many great references to Dylan! And, like most Pretenders' albums I love it because of Chrissie's songwriting. And yet, tonight we're listening to one of the two songs on the album, the other being "Rosalee," not written by Chrissie. Actually this isn't even officially on the regular album. It's a bonus track offered by a certain unnamed big box retailer for CDs sold in their store. And, fittingly, it's a song, "Both Sides Of Goodbye," by Hank Williams, Jr. Fortunately Chrissie chose Willie Nelson to sing it with her.
Palin to Join Huckabee in Right-Wing Book Club

Posted: November 17th, 2008, 10:00pm EST by Jon Perr

In this the season of their discontent, Republican leaders are pointing the finger of blame, all the while positioning themselves to take over their battered and bruised party in 2012. So it is with Mike Huckabee. In his new book, the former Arkansas Governor, Baptist minister and Fox News host skewers presidential rival Mitt Romney and castigates leaders of the religious right who cast their lot with someone else. But while Huckabee looks forward to the future battle for the soul of the Republican Party in his latest book, it is worth remembering the culture war he advocated in past ones. And apparently, he will have soon have company in author Sarah Palin.

As Time describes, Huckabee's tome (Do The Right Thing: Inside the Movement That's Bringing Common Sense Back to America) is part political memoir, part policy prescription - and part payback. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, his rival in courting the GOP's religious right base during the primaries, is mocked as "anything but conservative until he changed the light bulbs in his chandelier in time to run for president." Aggravating matters still, Huckabee "took as a sign of total disrespect" Mitt's refusal to call and congratulate him on his victory in the Iowa caucus which ultimately derailed Romney's campaign.

According to Time, much of Huckabee's venom is directed at his ersatz Christian conservative allies who backed other candidates during the Republican primaries. He blasts Pat Robertson and Bob Jones for backing Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, respectively. Huckabee pans Gary Bauer for his "ever-changing reason to deny me his support." Lamenting "that so many people of faith had moved from being prophetic voices," Governor Huckabee unleashed his fury at the End Times Pastor John Hagee who ultimately backed McCain:

"I asked if he had prayed about this and believed this was what the Lord wanted him to do," Huckabee writes of his conversation with Hagee. "I didn't get a straight answer."

Huckabee's evident feelings of betrayal towards his fellow culture warriors on display in this new book are understandable. After all, among the first of his six books was everything they could have asked for.

In advance of a White House run, most would-be presidential candidates author the obligatory book featuring a heroic biography and bland policy prescriptions. But as David Corn reported, in 1998 Mike Huckabee instead penned a declaration of culture war in his vituperative tome, Kids Who Kill: Confronting Our Culture of Violence.

While Huckabee during the 2008 primaries claimed to be a "uniter" ("We've got to be the united people of the United States"), in 1998 he was anything but. Written the wake of a Jonesboro, Arkansas school shooting, Huckabee laid virtually of all of America's ills at the feet of everyone - and everything - he hates:

"Despite all our prosperity, pomp, and power, the vaunted American experiment in liberty seems to be disintegrating before our very eyes."

"Abortion, environmentalism, AIDS, pornography, drug abuse, and homosexual activism have fragmented and polarized our communities."

"It is now difficult to keep track of the vast array of publicly endorsed and institutionally supported aberrations - from homosexuality and pedophilia to sadomasochism and necrophilia."

Of course, Mike Huckabee's extremism hardly ends there. As I documented here, here and here, Huckabee called for the quarantine of AIDS victims, advocated a faith-based U.S. Constitution, predicted victory over Islam at the End of Times, declared wives should graciously submit to their husbands, credited God for his rise in the polls, undermined the teaching of evolution, offered faith-based pardons for prisoners, called on Americans to be "soldiers for Christ" in "God's army," equated homosexuality with bestiality, and so much more that the chattering classes reviewing Do the Right Thing will conveniently forget.

As it turns out, with his draconian social agenda, Mike Huckabee isn't alone in staking a claim to lead the Republican Party. With today's news from MSNBC of a possible $7 million deal, Huckabee is going to have some competition on the bookshelves - from Sarah Palin.

UPDATE: The Romney camp responds, calling "this type of pettiness is beneath Mike Huckabee."

(This piece is also crossposted at Perrspectives.)
Sen. Kennedy returns to work in the Senate

Posted: November 17th, 2008, 9:00pm EST by David

Enclosure: [download]

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Sen. Ted Kennedy returned to Senate today after spending the past few months recovering from surgery for a brain tumor. Kennedy suffered a seizure six months ago today.

In a statement, Kennedy thanked supporters. "I am grateful for the prayers and good wishes I've received over the past several months."

The Senator took several questions on healthcare reform. "I'm very hopeful that this will be a prime item on the agenda. Barack has indicated this will be prime issue and I believe that it will be," said Kennedy.
Ron Paul decries looming New World Order dictatorship under Obama

Posted: November 17th, 2008, 8:00pm EST by David Neiwert

Enclosure: [download]

[Video: Ron Paul decries "New World Order" at Nashville rally, Oct. 2007]

Ron Paul already has a considerable track record of actively promoting Patriot-movement "New World Order" conspiracy theories. In recent years, he's even been joined by mainstream right-wing pundits like Glenn Beck.

And while you didn't hear Paul spouting much of this nonsense during his presidential campaign, now that the election is over, he's back to business as usual -- and predictably, he's casting Barack Obama as the new embodiment of the conspiracy.

Paul recently gave an interview to a conspiracy-theory radio program in which he warned against "a cataclysmic shift toward a new world order":

Commenting on the much touted “International crisis” that luminaries such as Colin Powell, Joe Biden and Zbigniew Brzezinski have all guaranteed will occur within weeks of Obama entering the White House, the Congressman stated that he believes it may be a catalyst for a shift toward world government:

“I think it’s going to be an announcement of a new monetary order, and they’ll probably make it sound very limited, they’re not going to say this is world government, even though it is if you control the world’s money and you control the military, which they do indirectly.”

“A world central bank, worldwide regulation and world control of the whole system, of all the commodities and all the natural resources, what else can you call it other than world government?”

“Obama wouldn’t be there if he didn’t toe the line, and when the meeting starts on November 15th for the new monetary system, this could be the beginning of the end of what’s left of our national sovereignty.” Paul said, also warning that the global media are already hailing Obama as the world’s leader.

It has been clear for awhile now that the far right would see an Obama presidency as a pretext for reviving its 1990s-style conspiracy-mongering and scapegoating on a broad scale, and so far that's clearly the case. We saw signs of this before the election with the resurrection of zombie 1990s-style black-helicopter smears of Obama.

And now Ron Paul, who successfully presented himself as a mainstream "libertarian" throughout the campaign -- when the reality is that he is a classic Bircherite -- is advancing "New World Order v.2" for mass consumption.

Boy, we can hardly wait to see what this produces. [/snark] If the 1990s -- when last we endured a wave of paranoid fearmongering like this -- were anything to judge by, it won't be pretty. The next four years or more are as fraught with rightist peril as they are with promise for progressives.
Iraq Cabinet Approves SOFA

Posted: November 17th, 2008, 7:00pm EST by Cernig

Here's a historic picture from AFP, via the NY Times - The Iraqi cabinet has approved the current wording of the so-called Status of Forces Agreement between the US and Iraq, which will replace the UN mandate at the end of the year, with only one dissenting voice.

Spencer Ackerman writes:

The Bush administration intended the SOFA process to entrench the occupation. Instead it gave the Iraqi government the means to end it. And that's the best-possible way for the war to end: with the Iraqi government -- the one we've disingenuously told the world we're in Iraq to support -- showing its political maturation to get us out the day after tomorrow. And out actually means out. The SOFA demands that every last U.S. serviceman is on a plane by December 31, 2011. Obama's plan for a 30,000-troop residual force? Officially overtaken by events. As I say, the impact of this appears not to have sunken in. The Iraqis have forced an end to the war.

But the neocons are determined to get every last day out of their war. At Commentary, Abe Greenwald spins the cabinet's vote as favorably as he can:

What happens to the claim that Barack Obama’s drawdown plan was consonant with the hopes of the Iraqi leadership? The agreement calls for American troops to be in Iraq for three more years. That’s 36 months - more than twice the length of time Obama has proposed troops stay in the country.

Nevertheless, President Obama will heed the new reality.

There is far too much resting on the successful fulfillment of this agreement for Obama to defy it. For starters, it is a watershed moment for American-Iraqi relations and Iraqi sovereignty... Tearing up a cooperative agreement so delicately arrived at would go down as a diplomatic and geopolitical travesty for the Obama administration — proving, as it would, that America’s talk of freedom and democracy is piffle.

I'm not sure that Obama couldn't stick to his 16 month deadline, if he wanted to, without contravening the agreement. As far as I'm aware (and I only have leaks to work with - no-one's seen the final wording in public yet), the agreement only says US troops must withdraw no later than Dec. 31, 2011, and makes no mention of prohibiting an earlier withdrawal.

Spencer, who has really been on the ball covering this agreement's development, wrote back on 23 Oct that:

Instead of entrenching the occupation, a draft of the accord, dated Oct. 13 and currently being circulated by members of the U.S. House of Representatives, insists on a 2011 pullout date, with Washington “recogniz[ing] the Iraqi government’s sovereign right” to demand an earlier withdrawal.

...Rather than establish an open-ended presence, Article 25 of the Oct. 13 draft states, “the U.S. forces shall withdraw from Iraqi territories no later than Dec. 31, 2011.” U.S. combat forces must also pull back “from all cities, towns and villages” long before that — “no later than June 30, 2009.”

More than that, the text states that the Iraqis reserve “the sovereign right to request a withdrawal of U.S. forces at any time.”

Still, Kevin Drum argues that sticking to the deal would be good for Obama:

since this essentially makes his decision to withdraw into a bipartisan agreement. After all, conservatives can hardly complain about Obama following a timetable that was negotiated and approved by Bush. Obama has enough on his plate already, and taking this issue off the table ought to be a considerable relief to him.

Hmmm, maybe. But it wouldn't go down well with many progressives who expect Obama to stick to his promises to America before he sticks to Bush's promises to Iraq.

Crossposted from Newshoggers
Paul Krugman takes George Will to the woodshed over FDR's Big FIX

Posted: November 17th, 2008, 6:00pm EST by Heather

Enclosure: [download]

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From the man who called the union benefits at automotive companies a "welfare state," we have George Will on This Week showing his compassionate conservative side yet again. I would like to see George Will working on an assembly line until the age of 65 and then let him speak out about someone retiring before that age or receiving benefits that they somehow don't deserve. Working for thirty years at a company while giving your blood in the process is not enough for these people.

John Amato:

Conservatives love to rewrite history so they can trumpet their own philosophy. Paul Krugman explains to George Will how FDR got America out of the Depression. Conservatives have been trying to unravel the New Deal ever since.

Krugman: There was a collapse of the financial system which was not restored for a long time. There was a deep slump in consumer demand and therefore no investment demand so we were stuck in this trap.

Update: The video links with the correct video should be working now.
Gingrich: There is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us"

Posted: November 17th, 2008, 5:00pm EST by John Amato

Enclosure: [download]

Download | play QT only

My friends at MM made me this clip. I didn't have a chance to make it, but it's shocking. And Newt Gingrich wants to run for president ladies and gentlemen. This is an issue that America isknown for. It's called "FREEDOM." And it should be fought vigorously. Freedoms have never come easy in America. Women couldn't even vote until the 1920's and we all know about the civil rights movement.

Country Fair:

On the November 14 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, in reference to actions by individual protesters of Proposition 8, the recently passed California ballot initiative amending the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage, Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich stated

O'REILLY: OK, now, the culture war. I know you've been flying around the country, and you're doing stuff. In the last three or four days, this is really nasty stuff. I mean, you know, hyper -- we're gonna show you some of the video. A woman getting a cross smashed out of her hand. We had a church in Michigan invaded by gay activists. We're gonna show you the video on Monday of that -- we have exclusively. We had a guy in Sacramento fired from his job. We had boycotts called on restaurants.

I mean, it is getting out of control, very few days after the election. How do you assess that?

GINGRICH: Look, I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion. And I think if you believe in historic Christianity, you have to confront the fact. And, frank -- for that matter, if you believe in the historic version of Islam or the historic version of Judaism, you have to confront the reality that these secular extremists are determined to impose on you acceptance of a series of values that are antithetical, they're the opposite, of what you're taught in Sunday school.

Gingrich thinks gay marriage is a very dangerous threat to traditional religion. Can he tell me how they are dangerous? Just because he doesn't believe in it doesn't mean it will hurt anyone. This is ignorance. The right needs an issue to motivate their base, but this lack of freedom for the gay community actually hurts their lives on a daily basis where as in the religious community it hurts no one. Are they honestly afraid that their kids will go gay or something? I know what James Dobson thinks:

They want to destroy the institution of marriage. It will destroy marriage. It will destroy the Earth."

That is pure lunacy as we know. All gays want to do is part of that institution and have the same rights as all Americans do.
Pawlenty: No evidence of wrongdoing in MN election

Posted: November 17th, 2008, 4:02pm EST by David

Enclosure: [download]

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Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty told Fox's Chris Wallace that there was no truth to the rumor that ballots were found in the trunk of an election officials car. The Minnesota Governor said that he knew of no suspicious activity in the tight race between Sen. Norm Coleman and Al Franken. "As of this moment we know of no actual evidence of wrongdoing or fraud in the process," Said Pawlenty.

Earlier this week, Pawlenty told Fox's Megyn Kelly that he found suspicion in the story of the found ballots. Pawlenty said, "There has not been a good explanation for that, Kelly. That's a very good question, but they've been included in the count pile which is concerning."

Coleman's lawyer Fritz Knack had originally pushed the story of the found ballots. David Brauer of the Minnesota Post debunked the idea of ballot tampering. Nevertheless, pundits and reporters have continued to cite the story.

Sen. Coleman currently has a slim lead over Franken and a recount is expected.

John Amato:

The right wingers and the RNC are trying to push the meme that Democrats are trying to steal the election, They are watering the seeds that they have planted to try and turn public opinion against Franken. You can expect all kinds of stunts by Coleman's team.

Franken should know what to expect since he covered so much of the shenanigan's that went on in Florida, back in 2000. There's no reason why they should get "played" by Coleman or the RNC

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The racist backlash to Obama's presidency

Posted: November 17th, 2008, 3:03pm EST by David Neiwert

[From Creative Loafing.]

As we predicted before the election, Barack Obama's victory has loosed a flood of hatefulness from the racist right in America. Digby yesterday had a detailed post laying out some of the cases that have erupted so far. From an AP report:

Threats against a new president historically spike right after an election, but from Maine to Idaho law enforcement officials are seeing more against Barack Obama than ever before. The Secret Service would not comment or provide the number of cases they are investigating. But since the Nov. 4 election, law enforcement officials have seen more potentially threatening writings, Internet postings and other activity directed at Obama than has been seen with any past president-elect, said officials aware of the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity because the issue of a president's security is so sensitive.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

In rural Georgia, a group of high-schoolers gets a visit from the Secret Service after posting "inappropriate" comments about President-elect Barack Obama on the Web. In Raleigh, N.C., four college students admit to spraying race-tinged graffiti in a pedestrian tunnel after the election. On Nov. 6, a cross burns on the lawn of a biracial couple in Apolacon Township, Pa.

The election of America's first black president has triggered more than 200 hate-related incidents, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center – a record in modern presidential elections. Moreover, the white nationalist movement, bemoaning an election that confirmed voters' comfort with a multiracial demography, expects Mr. Obama's election to be a potent recruiting tool – one that watchdog groups warn could give new impetus to a mostly defanged fringe element.

I talked to the SPLC's Mark Potok this morning, and here are his observations:

I think there's something remarkable happening out there. I think we really are beginning to see a white backlash that may grow fairly large. The situation's worrying.

Not only do we have continuing nonwhite immigration, not only is the economy in the tank and very likely to get worse, but we have a black man in the White House. That is driving a kind of rage in a certain sector of the white population that is very, very worrying to me.

We are seeing literally hundreds of incidents around the country -- from cross-burnings to death threats to effigies hanging to confrontations in schoolyards, and it's quite remarkable.

I think that there are political leaders out there who are saying incredibly irresponsible things that could have the effect of undamming a real flood of hate. That includes media figures. On immigration, they have been some of the worst.

There's a lot going on, and it's very likely to lead to scapegoating. And in the end, scapegoating leaves corpses in the street.

According to that AP piece, neo-Nazi Web entities like Stormfront have seen a serious spike in business:

One of the most popular white supremacist Web sites got more than 2,000 new members the day after the election, compared with 91 new members on Election Day, according to an AP count. The site, stormfront.org, was temporarily off-line Nov. 5 because of the overwhelming amount of activity it received after Election Day. On Saturday, one Stormfront poster, identified as Dalderian Germanicus, of North Las Vegas, said, "I want the SOB laid out in a box to see how 'messiahs' come to rest. God has abandoned us, this country is doomed."

That theme comes popping up a lot:

Grant Griffin, a 46-year-old Georgia native who is white, expressed similar sentiments. "I believe our nation is ruined and has been for several decades, and the election of Obama is merely the culmination of the change," Griffin said.

Last week Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass created a bit of a stir by relaying the story of a Chicago teen who decided to try an experiment in tolerance by wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words "McCain Girl" to her high school, where Barack Obama was widely favored as a hometown hero. She got something of an ugly reception -- mostly she was told she was stupid, while some fellow students went so far as to tell her she should die.

While it's not terribly surprising -- passions often run high during political campaigns, and people say and do stupid things in the process, on both sides of the aisle -- it should go without saying that this kind of ugliness does not reflect well on the supposed liberals venting it. If nothing else, it makes them look decidedly illiberal in their intolerance.

However, the flip side -- the violence-laced, vile hatred emanating from Obama haters around the country -- is already dwarfing this intolerance. Yet you have to wonder if Kass and the right-wing pundits who made the teen's story a cause celebre will even bother taking a look.
Iran-made Weapons Less Than 1% Of All Iraq Caches Found

Posted: November 17th, 2008, 2:00pm EST by Cernig

Enclosure: [download]

Periodically over the last year and a half, the Bush administration and the US military have promised to provide proof of Iranian meddling in Iraq in the form of Iranian-provided weaponry in the hands of terrorists insurgents special groups criminals. Their first effort to do so, the infamous Baghdad Briefing, fell flat on its face when even Bob Gates and then Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Pace admitted that the incredibly weak evidence it presented proved nothing of the sort. Since then, various promised "smoking gun" briefings have been announced, postponed and then cancelled. Even the previously stenographic mainstream press finally noticed there was a lot of smoke and no fire.

That seems to be because, according to a task force of investigators advising the US military in Iraq - known as Task Force Troy - the narrative of Iranian weapons flooding across the border is only hype after all. Gareth Porter writes:

According to the data compiled by the task force, and made available to an academic research project last July, only 70 weapons believed to have been manufactured in Iran had been found in post-invasion weapons caches between mid-February and the second week in April. And those weapons represented only 17 percent of the weapons found in caches that had any Iranian weapons in them during that period.

The actual proportion of Iranian-made weapons to total weapons found, however, was significantly lower than that, because the task force was finding many more weapons caches in Shi'a areas that did not have any Iranian weapons in them.

The task force database identified 98 caches over the five-month period with at least one Iranian weapon, excluding caches believed to have been hidden prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion.

But according to an e-mail from the MNFI press desk this week, the task force found and analysed a total of roughly 4,600 weapons caches during that same period.

The caches that included Iranian weapons thus represented just 2 percent of all caches found. That means Iranian-made weapons were a fraction of one percent of the total weapons found in Shi'a militia caches during that period.

The extremely small proportion of Iranian arms in Shi'a militia weapons caches further suggests that Shi'a militia fighters in Iraq had been getting weapons from local and international arms markets rather than from an official Iranian-sponsored smuggling network.

Left out of the list of Iranian-made weaponry were 350 armour-piercing explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) found in Iraqi weapons caches. Despite the lurid claims of US officials, the task group couldn't ascribe an Iranian origin to a single one. Which along with press reports about finding EFP manufactories inside Iraq explains why, since mid-Summer, we've heard nothing about Iranian-made EFPs whereas before official reports and statements were full of them.

The academic research paper in which this revelatory data finally became public, by Joseph Felter and Brian Fishman of the West Point military academy, was finally published last month for the first time by West Point's Counter-Terrorism Centre.

Felter and Fishman do not analyse the task force data in their paper, but they criticise official U.S. statements on Iranian weapons in Iraq. "Some reports erroneously attribute munitions similar to those produced in Iran as Iranian," they write, "while other Iranian munitions found in Iraq were likely purchased on the open market."

The co-authors note that Iranian arms can be purchased directly from the website of the Defence Industries of Iran with a credit card.

Given that ease of purchase, a shared porous border and ubiquitous smuggling, the percentage of Iranian made arms is very low. But there are clear reasons Iran isn't doing so well in the Iraqi arms market.

Iranian equipment is less reliable and more expensive than Eastern Block materiel that flooded the region after the 2003 invasion -something which a certain imprisoned international arms dealer, ex-CIA and ex-US military contractor and supplier to despots and terrorists, Viktor
Bout, may well know a fair bit about. It's a buyer's market and the Iranians are seeing market forces exclude their produce, with the exception of simple artillery rockets. They're more expensive than the Pakistani arms bazaar's copies coming down the old Silk Road routes and far less effective than easily available and comparitively-priced black market US weapons too.

Over 190,000 US-provided guns found their way onto the black market in Iraq, simply disappearing from inventory after lax US and Iraqi accounting. Some even found their way to Turkey, into the hands of PKK terrorists. And to this day, no-one has held Gen Petreaus accountable for those 190,000 guns - weighing in excess of 475 tons* and worth over $50 million at non-black market prices or about twice that on the street - that he says were "kicked out of helicopters" or misplaced by clerical errors on his watch, despite one of his closest aides pleading guilty to corruption and bribery charges in relation to procurement contracts by a company involved in illegal arms dealing of US-provided weapons. He's apparently never been asked what he knew and when he knew it, reporting simply says there's no indication Gen. Petreaus was involved or aware of any wrongdoing - but he's never been subjected to a formal enquiry on the matter. And a GAO investigation begun back in August last year seems to have gone very silent.

So now we have a deafening silence - both on earlier accusations of Iranian arms running and meddling, which will just be allowed to sit their in the public mind, and on the very real high-level incompetence and corruption which led to so many US-provided weapons being lost without trace. That's just part of the Bush administration's gag order on the largest war profiteering adventure in history.

Add yet another couple of items to the very long list of hard questions the Obama administration should be asking about its predecessor and its doings.

Video above: Gareth Porter discussed the false narrative of Iranian weapons in Iraq with AntiWar.Com back in May.

(* 110,000 assault rifles @ 4kg per = 440 tons (plus about 80,000 pistols)
110,000 AK-47's, at the usual nation-to-nation arms deal price of @ $380 each, works out to @ $42 million, plus the pistols.)

Crossposted from Newshoggers