The Belle Brigade – "Belt of Orion"

With the vocal blend on those harmonies, you might guess that the singers are related, and you'd be right. The core of The Belle Brigade is Barbara and Ethan Gruska, who come from a musical family (their grandfather is composer John Williams). Here's a live version.

Talk Like a Pirate Day 2012

In honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day, I thought I'd use the English-to-Pirate translator on an scurvy dog bent on pillaging Americans, Mitt Romney. Here's some of his recent scurrilous remarks, rendered into pirate via one of the English-to-pirate translators:

There be forty-seven percent o' t' people who will vote for t' president no matter what. All starboard, thar be forty-seven percent who be with him, who be dependent upon government, who believe that they be victims, who believe t' government has a responsibility t' care for them, who believe that they be entitled t' health care, t' food, t' housin', t' you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And t' government should give it t' them. And they will vote for this president no matter what...

Me job be not t' worry about those people. I'll never convince 'em they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. Let 'em rot! Gimme some more tax cuts! Arr, ha-harr!

 

Update: The Onion has a good related piece.

C&L Fundraiser 2012

Crooks and Liars, one of the coolest big blogs, is holding a donation drive. I imagine most readers here are familiar with Crooks and Liars, but if not, it's a great place to catch up on political video clips. I periodically guest post over at C&L as part of the Mike's Blog Roundup crew, and C&L is really unique among bigger blogs in consciously, deliberately trying to spread the love and link smaller blogs. It's one of the blogs I give to every year, and if you've got the means, it's worth considering a donation, however modest. Funds have gotten tighter, as founder John Amato writes:

As C&L continues its donation drive I thought I'd clear something up. Yes, we do have ads on all of our pages. It's because of the way tags and html work that they show up on every page, but not all ads are equal. First party ads are buys that give bloggers a great CPM ratio, but now they are disappearing in favor of cheap Google ads which pay pennies to the blogs on which they appear.

It used to be that progressive groups, presidential and congressional campaigns, think tanks and the like would buy first party ads on all of our sites. That funding stream is crucial to our survival, but in the last two years many have switched their buys, including prominent groups that claim to support progressive media. It's frustrating on many levels, but the simplest reason they should buy first party ads again is because we are the only sites that carry a distinct progressive message. Also, we reach vast audiences on a daily basis that these groups need to support them in these troubled times. We often promote progressive causes of these groups when possible, but nowadays it's not reciprocated. I hope that changes.

You've seen the amount of money flowing into the market during this election season. There's no reason for them to shortchange some of the people most responsible for turning the tide against conservative rule. Do we have work to do? Absolutely, but a movement takes time to build. It took conservatives many decades to achieve what they had hoped. The blogosphere has given us a vehicle to express our ideas to a vast audience like never before. The progressive movement will grow too, but we can't get discouraged by short-term setbacks.

Here at C&L we will continue to cover the news and also support progressive groups and media. Please donate what you can. It is very appreciated. The monies collected will support our staff and our ongoing web improvements.

RIP Buck

I was shocked and saddened to learn that a former co-blogger, Buck, had died. (He was relatively young; it was due to natural causes; I'm omitting other details for privacy's sake.)

Buck was very good with computers, and that's how he earned his living. He also did all the web design over at Blue Herald, which he revamped several times (the site's mostly dormant now, and has one of his simpler designs up currently, but you can see his old posts). He came up with some really cool custom coding behind the scenes to make all the bloggers' lives easier. I'd occasionally ask him questions about how to do some coding trick. (He showed me how to do the custom blockquotes here at VS, and how to design this post. He was also a big help for managing Right-Wing Cartoon Watch over at BH.) Sometimes he'd pass on a few links for me to read, sometimes he'd just code it himself and pass it on. Buck was generous to a fault, and you quickly learned that if you asked him for assistance, you had to preface it with something like, Hey Buck, this is really minor and please don't kill yourself, but I was wondering about… because he was liable to drop everything to help. Buck was always helping his fellow bloggers, or neighbors, or members of his large, extended family. He was wired that way.

He had an interesting perspective, being a liberal in the Bible Belt, owning guns but for reasonable gun laws, live-and-let-live at heart, but irked by the political insanity of the day, and intolerance especially. Most of all, he was a nice guy. I'll miss his presence in comment threads and e-mail exchanges, his silly, goofy and sometimes raunchy sense of humor, teasing him about his affection for 80s hair bands, his passionate and principled outbursts, and most of all his essential, irrepressible decency. He was just a really good guy. He deserved a longer life. Condolences to all his family and friends who knew him in real life. Those of us fortunate to get to know him online are grateful we did. He will be missed.

The Shins – "No Way Down"

9/11/12

Kurt Eichenwald has a piece in The New York Times titled "The Deafness Before the Storm" that adds details to what's known about 9/11:

On Aug. 6, 2001, President George W. Bush received a classified review of the threats posed by Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, Al Qaeda. That morning’s “presidential daily brief” — the top-secret document prepared by America’s intelligence agencies — featured the now-infamous heading: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” A few weeks later, on 9/11, Al Qaeda accomplished that goal.

On April 10, 2004, the Bush White House declassified that daily brief — and only that daily brief — in response to pressure from the 9/11 Commission, which was investigating the events leading to the attack. Administration officials dismissed the document’s significance, saying that, despite the jaw-dropping headline, it was only an assessment of Al Qaeda’s history, not a warning of the impending attack. While some critics considered that claim absurd, a close reading of the brief showed that the argument had some validity.

That is, unless it was read in conjunction with the daily briefs preceding Aug. 6, the ones the Bush administration would not release. While those documents are still not public, I have read excerpts from many of them, along with other recently declassified records, and come to an inescapable conclusion: the administration’s reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed. In other words, the Aug. 6 document, for all of the controversy it provoked, is not nearly as shocking as the briefs that came before it.

The direct warnings to Mr. Bush about the possibility of a Qaeda attack began in the spring of 2001. By May 1, the Central Intelligence Agency told the White House of a report that “a group presently in the United States” was planning a terrorist operation. Weeks later, on June 22, the daily brief reported that Qaeda strikes could be “imminent,” although intelligence suggested the time frame was flexible.

Head over to read the rest. You'll be absolutely shocked to discover that the neocons were complete idiots, even beyond their saber-rattling about Iraq and Saddam Hussein.

Many Americans were stunned by 9/11. While some were bent on vengeance, many showed a generous outlook – at least toward their fellow Americans, as well as government officials. Few people, if any, wanted a witch hunt. (Surely the Bush administration did all it could!)

I suspect, knowing right-wingers, that had Al Gore been president, there would have been far less forgiveness, and they would have been calling for his head. Of course, it's quite possible a Gore administration would have prevented 9/11 in the first place, given the much stronger focus the Clinton/Gore White House gave Al Qaeda. But it's impossible to know for sure.

Regardless, the Bush administration showed deadly incompetence in allowing 9/11 to occur, and its subsequent exploitation of 9/11 to wage an unnecessary war remains one of the most shameful episodes in our nation's history. It's also shameful that Bush officials have faced so few repercussions for it (in part because some many members of the press were culpable in selling the war, too).

I definitely don't begrudge anyone who still remembers 9/11 with grief, especially anyone who lost someone. The days after, and the first anniversary, were days of reflection for many people, and certainly were for me. But for the past few years, I've found it's been the exploitation that stands out – the still largely-unaddressed and certainly unpunished exploitation (the latter being less important than the former). Unfortunately, for America as a whole, that seems to be 9/11's enduring legacy. "Never Forget" only extends so far.

In related news, Human Rights Watch has a new report out, Delivered Into Enemy Hands, that "meticulously documents a George W. Bush–era CIA program of torture, including waterboarding, in careful collaboration with former Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi."

Meanwhile, The New York Times reports:

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced Thursday that no one would be prosecuted for the deaths of a prisoner in Afghanistan in 2002 and another in Iraq in 2003, eliminating the last possibility that any criminal charges will be brought as a result of the brutal interrogations carried out by the C.I.A.

Mr. Holder had already ruled out any charges related to the use of waterboarding and other methods that most human rights experts consider to be torture. His announcement closes a contentious three-year investigation by the Justice Department and brings to an end years of dispute over whether line intelligence or military personnel or their superiors would be held accountable for the abuse of prisoners in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The closing of the two cases means that the Obama administration’s limited effort to scrutinize the counterterrorism programs carried out under President George W. Bush has come to an end.

This comes via Scott Horton, who has more, as do emptywheel and Brad DeLong.

Sorry, this post has been awfully bleak; it's just that I don't think anything dismays me more as an American than the Bush-era torture program. The subsequent decisions not to prosecute, or even really to investigate, are hardly surprising at this point, but remain discouraging. But contrary to my pessimism about "Never Forget" above, DeLong passes on a sage comment from a reader:

I would urge people to think of accountability as a generational project – this is how it has worked out in Chile, Argentina, South Africa... the thing that can be done now is create opportunities for more participants to tell their stories, put on record what was done and who did it and how, so that the record gets fuller rather than thinner over time.

Amen. Well said. Many people (including me) have mentioned South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a possible model for dealing with America's torture programs. But since the government won't do it, it's up to the citizenry. Where the Justice Department was gutless and corrupt, the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and other organizations and individuals can document, serve as witnesses, and remember.

Family Of The Year – "Hero"

This is a local L.A. band. I've had this song stuck in my head for the past week, so I decided to learn it (the chords are pretty easy). You can also hear the studio version or this stripped down one.

Happy Labor Day 2012

Happy Labor Day, brought to us by the labor movement, the same folks who brought us the weekend. I wrote more about this last year. Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns & Money has been running a fantastic ongoing series, This Day in Labor History. Jon Perr has another one of his superb posts on economic/fiscal matters, "15 Things the GOP Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes and the Debt." Meanwhile, Yale professor Jacob Hacker, one of the sharper political scientists out there, has co-authored a report called "Prosperity Economics: Building an Economy for All." Here's a short video introduction, an op-ed explaining more, and the website, which features the full report and more. Many of its ideas fit nicely with the People's Budget, which I've featured before.

Here are two renditions of Woody Guthrie's song, "Union Maid," the first by Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie:



This one is from Pete Seeger's 90th Birthday Concert, and features "Billy Bragg, Mike & Ruthy Merenda, Dar Williams, [and the] New York City Labor Chorus":



Happy Labor Day! If you post anything for the occasion, feel free to link it in comments, and I'll try to update this piece later.

Grizzly Bear – "Two Weeks"

But Paul Ryan Seems Like Such a Nice Fellow

The big political news today is, of course, Mitt Romney naming Paul Ryan as his running mate. It's hard to keep up with all the coverage on Vice Presidential candidate Ryan, but Balloon Juice has been blogging up a storm today, providing some excellent links. Ezra Klein and Nate Silver provide good background on what it means, Charles Pierce weighs in, and Paul Krugman briefly left his vacation to post.

Paul Ryan was the key figure in the Stealthy Extremist section of my recent looong post, "The Four Types of Conservatives." Ryan's radicalism has been dissected very well many times, and in that post, I linked the archives of several writers and outlets that have done so. Their budget analysis is damning, and it speaks volumes about Ryan's (lack of) integrity.

I wanted to link Jonathan Chait's piece "The Legendary Paul Ryan" again, because it's one of the best introductions to Ryan, especially for people who aren't political junkies. I wanted to feature a different section, though:

How has Ryan managed to occupy these two roles in our national life—Fiscy award-winning spokesman for those Americans demanding a bipartisan agreement to reduce the deficit, and slayer of bipartisan deficit agreements—simultaneously? Here is where, in the place of any credible programmatic commitment, he substitutes his remarkable talent for radiating good intentions. New York Times business columnist James Stewart, for instance, recently opined that Ryan’s plan would usher in an overhaul of the tax code that would raise taxes on the rich, by eliminating special treatment for capital-gains income.

It is certainly true, as Stewart argues, that one could reduce tax rates to the levels advocated by Ryan without shifting the burden onto the poor and middle class if you eliminated the lower rate enjoyed by capital-gains income. But Ryan has been crystal clear throughout his career in his opposition to raising capital-gains taxes. An earlier, more explicit version of his tax plan eliminated any tax at all on capital gains. The current version, while refraining from specifics, insists, “Raising taxes on capital is another idea that purports to affect the wealthy but actually hurts all participants in the economy.” I asked Stewart why he believed so strongly that Ryan actually supported such a reform, despite the explicit opposition of his budget. “Maybe he’s being boxed in” by right-wing colleagues, Stewart suggested.

After Obama assailed Ryan’s budget, Stewart wrote a second column insisting that Ryan’s plans were just the sort of goals liberals shared. He quoted Ryan as writing, in his manifesto, “The social safety net is failing society’s most vulnerable citizens.” Stewart is flabbergasted that Democrats could be so partisan as to attack a figure who believes something so uncontroversial. “Does anyone,” Stewart wrote in his follow-up, “Democrat or Republican, seriously disagree?”

The disagreement, I suggested to Stewart, is that Ryan believes the social safety net is failing society’s most vulnerable citizens by spending too much money on them. As Ryan has said, “We don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency”—which is to say, plying the poor with such inducements as food stamps and health insurance for their children has sapped their desire to achieve, a problem Ryan proposes to solve by targeting them for the lion’s share of deficit reduction. Stewart waves away the distinction. “I was pointing out that, at least rhetorically, you can find some common ground,” he says. Stewart, explaining his evaluation of Ryan to me, repeatedly cited the missing details in his plan as a hopeful sign of Ryan’s accommodating aims. “He seems very straightforward,” he tells me. “He doesn’t seem cunning. He seems very genuine.”

Seeming genuine is something Ryan does extraordinarily well. And here is where something deeper is at play, more than Ryan’s charm and winning personality, something that gets at the intellectual bankruptcy of contemporary Washington. The Ryan brand is rooted in his ostentatious wonkery. Because, unlike the Bushes and the Palins, he grounds his position in facts and figures, he seems like an encouraging candidate to strike a bargain. But the thing to keep in mind about Ryan is that he was trained in the world of Washington Republican think tanks. These were created out of a belief that mainstream economists were hopelessly biased to the left, and crafted an alternative intellectual ecosystem in which conservative beliefs—the planet is not getting warmer, the economy is not growing more unequal—can flourish, undisturbed by skepticism. Ryan is intimately versed in the blend of fact, pseudo-fact, and pure imagination inhabiting this realm.

This dynamic is absolutely maddening – the constant impulse of mainstream media figures to ignore the evidence and anoint even extremists as sensible and responsible. In the terminology of the "four types" post, Paul Ryan is a stealthy extremist, but Stewart is insisting that Ryan is a sober adult. Okay, most of us have been taken in by a politician from time to time. (Although most of us haven't been paid to cover politics, either.) What's most frustrating is that Chait even points out to Stewart that his perception of Ryan is inaccurate – and Stewart replies, “I was pointing out that, at least rhetorically, you can find some common ground,” and that Ryan "seems very genuine.”

This is what sends my blood pressure soaring. Who gives a shit about common ground in rhetoric?!? Politicians lie all the time. They all love America and babies and whatever plays well in the region they're campaigning in that day. It's really not a big challenge to find "common ground" in rhetoric. The question is how much basis Ryan's proposals have in reality. As Greg Sargent likes to say, politics is supposed to be a clash of visions (and his example involves Paul Ryan). If there's no common ground to be found in the actual policies being discussed, and the values underneath them, well then, another speech won't help much – especially if it's bullshit from a charlatan.

One of the benefits of doing at least basic policy analysis – and one of the reasons it's so necessary – is that it helps one evaluate where a political figure is lying, and how badly, and to what consequence. Policy analysis is both a practical matter and a character assessment. Come election-time, voters can pick the candidate that lies less frequently and about less important things, and has higher credibility on delivering the good things and preventing the bad things, and so on. Making such decisions is essential to the whole democracy thing.

In Chait's account, Stewart doesn't care about the reality of Ryan's proposals. He's only valuing appearance. He is only judging by cosmetics. Maybe he's a fine reporter otherwise, and a nice guy in person, but it's appalling... if all too common among mainstream political reporters (the subject of another recent post). Perhaps, like many Americans, Stewart is so desperate to find common ground and get along and see responsible governance that he’ll seize upon any huckster than comes along who says a few nice things. But this is journalistic malpractice, not to mention bad citizenship. Policies should succeed or fail on their merits, and political figures should pay a cost for lying.

For the addled Sensible Centrists that dominate political reporting, "compromise" always seems to entail that liberals should capitulate to the center-left contingent of the Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party should always capitulate to the (mostly) far-right Republican Party. (But somehow, the Republican Party is supposed to heed their rabid base, and never move to the left in the name of compromise. Hmm.) Actually, the true solution is exposing bad ideas and calling bullshit. And in that vein, may the accurate examinations of the Romney-Ryan plans continue!

Update: Greg Sargent, Scott Lemieux and Think Progress weigh in. (More updates to come, perhaps.)