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Louisiana Governor Jindal Unaware Katrina Caused ‘Major’ Oil Spills In His Own StateJindal is clueless about the reality in his own state. As noted in the Wonk Room, the Hurricanes caused offshore oil spills so large that they could be seen from space (check out a picture here.) The Minerals Management Service reported that 113 oil platforms were “totally destroyed” — a total of 124 offshore spills.
In fact, oil seeped onshore into southeast Louisiana, which saw 44 onshore and offshore oil spills. The EPA called the spills “worse than the worst-case scenario.” Even oil industry representatives admitted: “nature can always topple you.”
Dobson falsely suggested Obama accused Dobson of "want[ing] to expel people who are not Christians" from the U.S. During the June 24 broadcast of his radio show, Focus on the Family founder and chairman James C. Dobson falsely suggested that Sen. Barack Obama claimed Dobson "wants to expel people who are not Christians" from the United States. Dobson was referring to a speech Obama gave in 2006 in which Obama actually asked: "And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would it be James Dobson's, or Al Sharpton's?" After airing that statement, Dobson responded: "I don't want to be defensive here. Obviously, that is offensive to me. I mean, who wants to expel people who are not Christians? Expel them from what? From the country? Deprive them of constitutional rights? Is that what he thinks I want to do? Why'd this man jump on me? I haven't said anything anywhere near that."
From Obama's June 28, 2006, speech before the Call to Renewal organization:
OBAMA: And moreover, given the increasing diversity of America's populations, the dangers of sectarianism are greater than ever. Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation. At least not just. We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, and a Buddhist nation, and a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.
And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would it be James Dobson's, or Al Sharpton's? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is OK and that eating shellfish is an abomination? Or we could go with Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith. Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount -- a passage that is so radical that it's doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? We -- so, before we get carried away, let's read our Bibles now. Folks haven't been reading their Bible.
Feminists for McCain? Not So MuchAre there feminist Hillary supporters who hate Obama so much they'll vote for McCain just to show the Democratic Party how ticked off they are? Yes, and I get e-mails from all five of them. Seriously, I'm sure there are female Hillary Clinton voters who will go for John McCain in the general election, but I don't think too many of them will be feminists. Because to vote for McCain, a feminist would have to be insane. Let me rephrase that: she would have to believe that the chief--indeed the only--goal of the women's movement is to elect Clinton, not to promote women's rights. A vote for McCain would be the ultimate face-spiting nose-cutoff. Take that, women's equality!
- His record on contraception and sex education is just as bad. He voted against a 2005 budget amendment, sponsored by Senator Hillary Clinton, that would have allotted $100 million to reduce teen pregnancy by means of education and birth control. He voted to require parental consent for birth control for teenage girls and to abolish Title X, which funds birth control and gynecological care for the poor. He voted against requiring insurance companies to pay for prescription contraception, when they pay for other prescription drugs--like, um, Viagra. The beat goes on, and on. With a handful of minor exceptions (he voted to confirm prochoice Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher after voting against prochoice Dr. Joycelyn Elders), he has a just about perfect antichoice record, including votes to confirm the Supreme Court nominations of Thomas, Roberts and Alito.
Administration 'Has Chosen to Conceal' TruthSpeaking of Libby, who in 2007 was convicted of perjury, lying to federal investigators and obstruction of justice with regard to his involvement with the plot to out Plame Wilson, McClellan said: "He assured me in unequivocal terms that he was not (involved), meaning the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity to any reporters, and then I contacted reporters to let them know about that information."
"But," the former spokesman continued, "it was Andy Card that had directed me to do that, at the request of the president and vice president."
If that sounds like a contradiction -- McClellan first suggests Bush had no knowledge of the initiative and then says that he peddled false information at the behest of the President -- it may be. Then again, it is possible that Bush was lied to, as well.
McCain on Offshore Drilling — a Sad (and Costly?) SagaThe easiest point to make about John McCain's recently declared support for offshore drilling is that it is a flip-flop. When McCain ran for president in 1999, he supported the current moratorium on offshore drilling, slated to last until 2012. But speaking in the Washington area on Monday, McCain said, "There are areas off our coasts that should be open to exploration and exploitation, and I hope we can take the first step by lifting the moratoria." McCain added that drilling "would be very helpful in the short term in resolving our energy crisis."
It's hard to blame anyone for changing his or her positions on energy issues over the past eight years — markets have changed, America's energy needs have changed, and prices have certainly changed. Even many Democrats have altered their positions on energy; most are much more supportive of climate change legislation than they once were.
You can blame McCain, however, for switching to the wrong position. Controversy over offshore drilling originated in the United States in 1969, when a cracked sea floor created a huge oil spill near Santa Barbara, California. The danger of a reoccurrence still exists, as do risks associated with having oil tankers routinely servicing offshore rigs. More important, offshore drilling is a band-aid. According to the federal Energy Information Administration, lifting the offshore drilling moratorium would have a minor impact on production and prices:
Mean estimates from the [Minerals Management Service] indicate that technically recoverable resources currently off limits in the lower 48 OCS (Outer Continental Shelf) total 18 billion barrels of crude oil and 77 trillion cubic feet of natural gas....
The projections in the OCS access case indicate that access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030. Leasing would begin no sooner than 2012, and production would not be expected to start before 2017. Total domestic production of crude oil from 2012 through 2030 in the OCS access case is projected to be 1.6 percent higher than in the reference case, and 3 percent higher in 2030 alone, at 5.6 million barrels per day. For the lower 48 OCS, annual crude oil production in 2030 is projected to be 7 percent higher—2.4 million barrels per day in the OCS access case compared with 2.2 million barrels per day in the reference case (Figure 20). Because oil prices are determined on the international market, however, any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant.
At America's current consumption rates (20.8 million barrels of oil per day), the oil resources made available from lifting the moratorium would last this country less than two and a half years.
John McCain Makes Stuff UpFor years now, the U.S. political press corps has traveled with John McCain on his “Straight Talk Express,” buying into his image as a paragon of truth-telling. But the real truth is that McCain routinely makes stuff up, as he did on June 11 in lying about Barack Obama’s “bitter” comment.
During a political talk in Philadelphia, McCain claimed that Obama had described “bitter” small-town voters as clinging to religion or “the Constitution” – when the second item in Obama’s comment actually was “guns.”
But the Arizona senator didn’t stop with a simple word substitution. He added that he will tell these voters that “they have trust and support the Constitution of the United States because they have optimism and hope. … That’s what America’s all about.”
In other words, McCain didn’t just make a slip of the tongue. He willfully accused Obama of disparaging the U.S. Constitution, a very serious point that, if true, might cause millions of Americans to reject Obama’s candidacy.
Still, when some of the U.S. broadcast networks – including NBC evening news – played the clip of McCain lashing out at Obama’s purported dissing of the Constitution, they didn’t correct McCain's falsehood.
That fits with a long-standing pattern of the political press corps giving McCain a break when he makes statements at variance with the truth. Even in the rare moments when he is caught in an inaccuracy – such as accusing Shiite-ruled Iran of training Sunni extremists in al-Qaeda – the falsehood is minimized as an unintentional gaffe.
However, McCain actually seems to be following a trail blazed by George W. Bush, saying what’s useful at the time even if it’s not true and then counting on the U.S. press corps to timidly look the other way.
Through all his misstatements, McCain’s “straight-talk” reputation survives.
Sweeping Denials
In another instructive case, McCain got away with sweeping denials in his reaction to a New York Times article on Feb. 21. The story led with unsubstantiated suspicions among some McCain staffers that their boss had gotten too cozy with female lobbyist Vicky Iseman, but McCain went beyond simply denying any sexual improprieties.
He put out a statement declaring that in his quarter-century congressional career, he “has never violated the public trust, never done favors for special interests or lobbyists.” But that simply isn’t true.
As the Times story already had recalled, McCain helped one of his early financial backers, wheeler-dealer Charles Keating, frustrate oversight from federal banking regulators who were examining Keating’s Lincoln Savings and Loan Association.
At Keating's urging, McCain wrote letters, introduced bills and pushed a Keating associate for a job on a banking regulatory board. In 1987, McCain joined several other senators in two private meetings with federal banking regulators on Keating’s behalf.
Two years later, Lincoln collapsed, costing the U.S. taxpayers $3.4 billion. Keating eventually went to prison and three other senators from the so-called Keating Five saw their political careers ruined.
McCain drew a Senate reprimand for his involvement and later lamented his faulty judgment. “Why didn’t I fully grasp the unusual appearance of such a meeting?” he wrote in his 2002 memoir, Worth the Fighting For.
But some people close to the case thought McCain got off too easy.
Not only was McCain taking donations from Keating and his business circle, getting free rides on Keating’s corporate jet and enjoying joint vacations in the Bahamas – McCain’s second wife, the beer fortune heiress Cindy Hensley, had invested with Keating in an Arizona shopping mall.
In the years that followed, however, McCain not only got out from under the shadow of the Keating Five scandal but found a silver lining in the cloud, transforming the case into a lessons-learned chapter of his personal narrative.
Obama rebuts rumors on new Web site After trying for months to bat down a swirl of wild rumors in more conventional ways, the presidential campaign of Barack Obama started a Web site Thursday intended to quash such reports - though by doing so it might have given the rumors even broader exposure.
Obama, the presumptive Democratic candidate, reportedly took the politically risky step after growing increasingly angry about reports that his wife, Michelle, had used the racial epithet "whitey" in what was described as a "rant" in Trinity United Church of Christ, the Obamas' former place of worship in Chicago.
"The Obama campaign isn't going to let dishonest smears spread across the Internet unanswered," Tommy Vietor, a campaign spokesman, said in a statement. "Whenever challenged with these lies, we will aggressively push back with the truth."
The unusual move underscores the incendiary way in which rumors borne by the Internet, cable television or broadcast talk shows can throw even a well-run campaign off balance. The matter is particularly sensitive for Obama as he seeks to become the first nonwhite U.S. president: Most of the attacks seem designed to portray him as less than a full American, of questionable national origin, of divided loyalties and radical beliefs.
"There is a line between scurrilous nonsense and serious discussion, that laps over, especially in this day and age, when you've got all this electronic media and these blogs and this kind of fanatical impulse to bring down the opposing candidate," said Robert Dallek, a presidential historian.
But while the political impulse was once to ignore the more extravagant rumors, candidates may no longer have that luxury.
"You never know what's going to take hold," Dallek said.
The site, FightTheSmears.com, lists - and seeks to explode - these rumors:
That Obama is a Muslim, along with the assertions that he attended a madrasa in Indonesia and used a Koran when taking the oath of office in Chicago. The site responds: "Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim and is a committed Christian." It provides a link to a CNN report showing the ordinary-looking elementary school he attended.
That Obama's two books contain racially incendiary remarks. The site says that quotes being circulated were altered, manipulated or even fabricated.
That Obama refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance or place his hand over his heart when the national anthem is played. The site responds with a video from June 21, 2007, that shows Obama leading the U.S. Senate in the pledge, his hand clearly over his heart.
The rumor about Michelle Obama was that she had used the word "whitey" sometime in mid-2004 at a conference at Trinity of the civil rights coalition RainbowPUSH. The site says the report was advanced by the conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh and the "proven GOP sleazemeister Roger Stone."
The site calls the report a lie, noting that "Michelle Obama was not on a panel, and the RainbowPUSH conference was at the Sheraton." No videotape has surfaced, and Time magazine reported in breaking the story that Michelle Obama had repeatedly denied that she would use such language.
The Obamas quit Trinity this year, partly because of controversy over comments by its pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.
Dallek, the historian, said it was not surprising to see the latest swirl of political rumor and innuendo.
"There have always been rumors," he said: "That Andrew Jackson was a polygamist, that Grover Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate child, that James G. Blaine was a corruptionist."
Some claims - such as those in 1960 that John F. Kennedy was a womanizer - were even true, he added.
The Obama site encourages supporters to help it police the rumor mill and e-mail the site's rebuttals to friends.
Relax, liberals. You've already won
For 40 years, the radical right tried to destroy the domestic and international order that American liberals created in the central decades of the 20th century. The people who are known today as "conservatives" are better described as "counterrevolutionaries." The goal of Barry Goldwater and the intellectuals clustered around William F. Buckley Jr.'s National Review was not a slightly more conservative version of the New Deal or the U.N. system. They were reactionary radicals who dreamed of a counterrevolution. They didn't just want to stop the clock. They wanted to turn it back.
Three great accomplishments defined midcentury American liberalism: liberal internationalism, middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, and liberal individualism in civil rights and the culture at large. For four decades, from 1968 to 2008, the counterrevolutionaries of the right waged war against the New Deal, liberal internationalism, and moral and cultural liberalism. They sought to abolish middle-class entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, to replace treaties and collective security with scorn for international law and U.S. global hegemony, and to reverse the trends toward individualism, secularism and pluralism in American culture.
And they failed. On every front conservatives have failed, completely, undeniably and irreversibly. The failure of the right has left the structure of 20th-century American liberalism standing, battered and cratered but still intact.
The counterrevolutionary right failed first in the "culture war." From the '60s onward, conservatives lost every major battle. Conservative Republicans paid lip service to opposition to abortion and appointed strict constructionists to the federal bench. But the Supreme Court has not repealed Roe v. Wade and, because of its allergy to repudiating precedent, is not likely to do so. (Yes, even if John McCain appoints the next justice or two.) Nor has it restored prayer in public schools. What is more, in 2003 the Supreme Court struck down anti-gay sodomy laws nationwide. Conservatives responded by successfully supporting many state laws or state constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage, in addition to the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) enacted in the Clinton years. The recent state Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage in California may yet be overturned by a popular initiative. But many of the goals of the gay rights movement have been achieved far sooner than anyone could have imagined as recently as the 1990s. Meanwhile, conservative campaigns to censor movies and TV and music were doomed first by cable TV and then by the Internet.
While it serves the purposes of single-issue groups on the left to claim that the threat of the socially conservative right is growing, the leaders of the right themselves know better. In the 1990s, Jerry Falwell shut down the Moral Majority and Pat Robertson dissolved the Christian Coalition, whose membership numbers turned out to have been grossly inflated.
In 1999, Paul Weyrich, president of the Free Congress Foundation, wrote in a public letter to his fellow social conservatives: "I believe that we probably have lost the culture war ... [I]n terms of society, we have lost. This is why, even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kinds of policies we believe are important." According to Weyrich, conservatives should admit that they are a moral minority in America and form their own counterculture, like "a band of hardy monks who preserved the culture while the surrounding society disintegrated." If Weyrich is right, instead of taking back America, traditionalists should ask only for their own reservation, like the Amish or the Navajos. What started as a counterrevolution has ended as a counterculture.
Having lost the culture wars by 2000, the counterrevolutionaries of the right persisted in their radical efforts to repeal the New Deal. The control of both the White House and Congress by Republicans from January 2001 to January 2007 (excepting the brief respite provided by Jim Jeffords) gave conservatives an even better chance to achieve their economic goals than they had experienced during the Reagan era of divided government. Buoyed by War on Terror hubris, aided by inflated Congressional majorities and a distracted public, the Republicans were able to get their counterrevolutionary anti-entitlement agenda on the docket at last -- and it died a miserable death.
Beginning in the 1970s, conservative and libertarian think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute devised "free market" alternatives to the American welfare state established by New Deal and Great Society liberals. These schemes were worthy of Rube Goldberg in their insane complexity. Social Security would be abolished and replaced by private savings accounts. Medicare would be abolished and replaced by health savings accounts. Unemployment insurance would be abolished and replaced by ... you guessed it, savings accounts. Rejecting the systems of social insurance that all modern countries employ, the reactionary radicals proposed to force Americans to hoard money for every possible contingency.
This is why the destruction of Social Security -- the crown jewel of the New Deal welfare state -- was of such symbolic importance to the right. If Social Security could be whittled away by partial privatization and ultimately destroyed, then abolishing the rest of the modern liberal state would be a mere mopping-up operation.
Ronald Reagan shrank from attacking Social Security. But George W. Bush, far more of a counterrevolutionary than Reagan, aggressively pushed for partial Social Security privatization. The resulting public backlash in 2004 and 2005 was fierce, with liberal activists threatening to target vulnerable GOP House members with a barrage of television ads. Poll numbers were so negative as details of "privatization" leaked out that the Republicans quickly got cold feet. Republicans in Congress did not even allow a vote on Bush's proposal. It seems that most Republican voters, like most Democrats, like their Social Security.
Americans of both parties like their Medicare, too. In 2003, public opinion forced a Republican president and a Republican Congress to enact the Medicare prescription drug benefit. For all its concessions to the pharmaceutical companies, this was the biggest expansion in socialized medicine since Medicare was signed into law by Lyndon Johnson in 1965. That Bush had expanded entitlement became part of the conservative complaint that Bush wasn't a true conservative. Some of that complaining was a simple desire to back away from an unpopular president who had tarnished two brands, "conservative" and "Republican." But it was also true that the GOP expansion of Medicare was a major ideological capitulation.
The Department of Justice as Apologist
As a former career Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the Justice Department, I read with dismay Attorney General Michael Mukasey's recent speech at Boston College Law School's graduation. The speech is essentially a defense of John Yoo (and David Addington, etc.) without naming names. At its core, I think it signifies what many of us knew before the Senate confirmed Judge Mukasey to replace Alberto Gonzales: first, that the administration would brook no break in its defense of its terrorism policies; and second, that being a judge before becoming Attorney General does not make you any less partisan or ideological.
As to the administration’s defense of its terrorism policies, Attorney General Mukasey has carried forward the same substantive policies as Attorney General Gonzales. Despite all the handwringing in the Senate in its hope that Mukasey would bring some independent legal judgment to the post, his continued refusal to articulate the truth that waterboarding is legally torture — and has been considered as such from the Spanish Inquisition to US prosecution of Japanese imperial soldiers — is the clearest evidence that Mukasey as attorney general is more of the same. It is a travesty that the nation's top law enforcement official cannot say that X constitutes torture when the Justice Department is literally in the business of saying Y constitutes a crime.
Regarding the attorney general’s partisan bona fides, although the departures of the Monica Goodlings and Kyle Sampsons is worth applauding, their departure was not ushered in by Mukasey's arrival but rather as a consequence of Gonzales's departure and months of investigations by a reinvigorated Congress shocked by the blatant politicization of the Department. So it might be fair to say that the Justice Department is less politicized, but by no means is it unpoliticized. In fact, Mukasey's appointment is a commitment to continue the administration's partisan approach to national security issues until the clock chimes noon on January 20, 2009. Mukasey's status as a former federal judge who handled some terrorism cases is being used to maximum effect to pressure Congress in ways that Gonzales, despite his best efforts, could not.
CNN's Lou Dobbs expressed incredulity that Pelosi would "give the Iranians the credit," but her comments echoed CNN's own reporting On Lou Dobbs Tonight, Lou Dobbs and Michael Goodwin cited House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's comments about Iran negotiating an end to fighting in Basra, Iraq, to accuse her of being unwilling to give credit to U.S. troops and being "invested in failure" when, in fact, CNN itself reported that Iran had played an integral role in brokering a cease-fire in Basra, as did numerous other media outlets.
[ ]...Notwithstanding Dobbs' and Goodwin's incredulity that Pelosi would "giv[e] the Iranians the credit," during the March 31 edition of CNN Newsroom, senior international correspondent Nic Robertson reported, "Well, it does appear as if a huge amount of pressure was put on the Shia cleric Moktada al-Sadr to get his militia, the Mehdi Militia, to stand down and cooperate with government forces." Robertson continued:
A group of Iraqi politicians from the Shia United Iraqi Alliance -- that is the bloc of the main Shia political parties here, the prime minister's political party, his allies, Moktada al-Sadr's political party -- all went to Iran over the weekend, with the help of Iranian officials negotiated an end to the fighting.
The Media is still corporate and still biasedThat's just some of the good news at a time when the media policy debate has been redefined by the emergence of a muscular grassroots reform movement. Bush Administration schemes to use federal dollars to subsidize friendly journalists and illegally push its propaganda as legitimate news have been exposed and halted, with the House approving a defense appropriations amendment that outlaws any "concerted effort to propagandize" by the Pentagon. Public broadcasting, community broadcasting and cable access channels have withstood assault from corporate interlopers, fundamentalist censors and the GOP Congressional allies they share in common. And against a full-frontal attack from two industries, telephone and cable--whose entire business model is based on lobbying Congress and regulators to get monopoly privileges--a grassroots movement has preserved network neutrality, the first amendment of the digital epoch, which holds that Internet service providers shall not censor or discriminate against particular websites or services. So successful has this challenge to the telecom lobbies been that the House may soon endorse the Internet Freedom Preservation Act.
But while the picture has improved, especially compared with just a few years ago, the news is not nearly good enough. The Senate's resolution of disapproval did not reverse the FCC's cross-ownership rule change. It merely began a pushback that still requires a House vote--and even if it passes Congress, it will then encounter a veto by George W. Bush. Likewise, while public and community media have been spared from the executioner, they still face deep-seated funding and competitive disadvantages that require structural reforms, not Band-Aids.
The media reform movement must prepare now to promote a wide range of structural reforms--to talk of changing media for the better rather than merely preventing it from getting worse. "Media reform" has become a catch-all phrase to describe the broad goals of a movement that says consolidated ownership of broadcast and cable media, chain ownership of newspapers, and telephone and cable-company colonization of the Internet pose a threat not just to the culture of the Republic but to democracy itself. The movement that became a force to be reckoned with during the Bush years had to fight defensive actions with the purpose of preventing more consolidation, more homogenization and more manipulation of information by elites. Now, however, we must require corporations that reap immense profits from the people's airwaves to meet high public-service standards, dust off rusty but still functional antitrust laws to break up TV and radio conglomerates, address over-the-top commercialization of our culture and establish a heterogeneous and accountable noncommercial media sector. In sum, we need to establish rules and structures designed to create a cultural environment that will enlighten, empower and energize citizens so they can realize the full promise of an American experiment that has, since its founding, relied on freedom of the press to rest authority in the people.
Despite all the revelations exposing government assaults on a free press, too many media outlets continue to tell the politically and economically powerful, "Lie to me!" Five years into a war made possible by the persistent refusal of the major media to distinguish fact from Bush Administration spin, we learned this spring about the Pentagon's PR machine's multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign that seeded willing broadcast and cable news programs with "expert" generals who parroted the White House line right up to the point at which the fraud was exposed. Even after the New York Times broke the story, the networks still chose to cover their shame rather than expose a war that has gone far worse than most Americans know.
Recently we have seen an acceleration of the collapse of journalistic standards. Veteran reporters like Walter Cronkite are appalled by the mergermania that has swept the industry, diluting standards, dumbing down the news and gutting newsrooms. Rapid consolidation, evidenced most recently by the breakup of the once-venerable Knight-Ridder newspapers, the sale of the Tribune Company and its media properties and the swallowing of the Wall Street Journal by Murdoch's News Corp continues the steady replacement of civic and democratic values by commercial and entertainment priorities. But responsible journalists have less and less to say about newsroom agendas these days. The calls are being made by consultants and bean counters, who increasingly rely on official sources and talking-head pundits rather than newsgathering or serious debate.
The crisis is widespread, and it affects not just our policies but the politics that might improve them. There are two critical issues on which a free press must be skeptical of official statements, challenging to the powerful and rigorous in the search for truth. One of them is war--and in the case of the post-9/11 wars, our media have failed us miserably. (Even former White House press secretary Scott McClellan now acknowledges that the media were "complicit enablers" in the run-up to the Iraq invasion).
