Over Labor Day weekend, Sarah Palin gave a speech in Iowa with some formidable pieces in it. I’m a bit late to the game on cmmenting about it. She’s a bit late to the game on giving it. If she had given this speech eight months ago, I might be a bit afraid. I want to highlight two quotes below that were in a little piece in the Atlantic a week ago. They’re exactly the same type of thing that made me so afraid of a potential Mike Huckabee candidacy. Though I think it’s too late for her to change her image much for the 2012 campaign season and too late for her to have a shot at the nomination right now, this could be her way of starting to re-position herself for 2016. Palin doesn’t quite have Huckabee’s knack for populist economics or anything approaching his authenticity as someone who lives and serves the doctrines of the religious right. She doesn’t have his charm or affable manner. She does have 100 times his charisma, though, and an army of adoring fans. Based on the two quotes that follow, she’s got someone very savvy working for her. This is the kind of fake populism that could sell. I mean, hell, I have trouble arguing with most of what she says as a block. You really have to start picking apart individual words and phrases to unravel it. It’s not something that’s just flat out wrong on its face. There’s definitely something about Palin’s appeal and her ability to change and mutate while claiming absolute, immutable truth that also ties in well with Andrew Sullivan’s piece today in The Daily Beast.

“The President’s big campaign donors got nice returns for their ‘investments’ in him to the tune of billions of your tax dollars in the form of ‘green energy’ stimulus funds. The technical term for this is ‘pay-to-play.’ Between bailouts for Wall Street cronies and stimulus projects for union bosses’ security and “green energy” giveaways, he took care of his friends. And now they’re on course to raise a billion dollars for his re-election bid so that they can do it all over again.”

“Some GOP candidates also raised mammoth amounts of cash, and we need to ask them, too: What, if anything, do their donors expect in return for their ‘investments’? We need to know this because our country can’t afford more trillion-dollar “thank you” notes to campaign backers. It is an important question, and it cuts to the heart of our problem. And I speak from experience in confronting the corruption and the crony capitalism since starting out in public office 20 years ago. I’ve been out-spent in my campaigns two to one, three to one, five to one… But the reason is simple: It’s because like you, I’m not for sale.”

Joan Walsh has a decent piece in Salon today entitled Mistakes of the 2008 Democratic Primary. I agree with a lot of what she says. I don’t think you can know whether Clinton would have been more progressive than Obama. I don’t think she would have. On policy, they were damned near identical. Neither one was a progressive. The progressives in the race were Kucinich and Edwards. One thing you can’t do, though, is look back in hindsight and say that we should have chosen Edwards. Obviously, that would have been a total disaster. No one takes Kucinich seriously as potential president outside of his own fans. That leaves you Obama or Clinton. I think a lot of progressives were willing to sort of graft a projection of progressivism on to Clinton or Obama that never existed because of the tendency to accept identity politics in the Democratic Party. In fact, I think a lot of Obama supporters did just that. If you were going to graft progressivism onto a candidate, he was the easier choice even without the identity politics. He quite intentionally used soaring, hopeful, progressive rhetoric. That was the real genius of his campaign and of his public persona as a national figure before he got in the campaign. Clinton chose to center her campaign image around being the solid, reliable establishment candidate, the steady hand, etc. She left the aspirations of people to see a woman president as a background theme, one that was only emphasized for specific audiences.

In point of fact, there really wasn’t a viable progressive choice in the 2008 primary in hindsight because of what a total piece of shit John Edwards turned out to be. So even though I currently have no intention of supporting Barack Obama’s re-election efforts and I may even vote for a 3rd party candidate, I think the idea of setting up a primary challenger for him is folly. If you’re a democrat, a well funded challenge just guarantees that he loses if the GOP manages to nominate anyone but the worst of the slavering mouth breathers. I’ll close with the final paragraph of Walsh’s piece. I think it is pretty much politics 101 for anyone who cares about the electoral world, but it’s something that damn few people in the mainstream media are willing to engage with. Only some progressive activists and bloggers had taken this on as gospel until pretty recently:

I think many on the left anointed Obama the only progressive in the race out of a rescue fantasy. But it’s possible people who want to see Obama face a primary — and I do not, as I’ve said too many times to count — have the same fantasy with a different, as yet unnamed savior. It gives progressives a sense of control: It’s not that Republicans are better organized than we are, or that they’ll fight Democrats by any means necessary; it’s our fault that we somehow chose the wrong candidate. At least we might have it in our power to make better choices. But I think it’s time to reckon with the fact that no matter whom we choose, Rush Limbaugh and his Republican Party will do whatever it takes to see them fail.

I’m pondering whether or not Stuart Green from Rutgers Law is a moron, a liar, or a hack. It may not be possible for me to know which category he falls into. His opinion piece at the Monitor is so full of errors and distortions that it certainly seems as if it could have been his intent to be dishonest. Though the simpler answer is that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Based on the accounts that I’ve read Brian Hogan went above and beyond the call of duty in trying to return that iPhone prototype. He had absolutely no way of knowing who the person who left the phone at the bar is. It’s pretty damn reasonable to assume that a person who leaves the phone they’ve been using at a bar is the owner of that phone. It’s not so reasonable to assume that the owner is the firm that manufactured the device. Mr. Hogan originally believed the device was an iPhone 3GS. The device had been disguised to give that appearance. When Mr. Hogan later examined the phone closely and found that it wasn’t a standard 3GS, he took the step of contacting Apple and telling them what he’d found. How much struggling to notify someone at an enormous multinational corporation do you have to do to have satisfied Stuart Green’s standards?

Mr. Green’s assertion that this is a clear case of theft couldn’t be more wrong. I see neither an intent to steal nor an act of theft. I see a young man who made reasonable attempts and then some to notify the owner of this property that he possessed it. If Mr. Hogan isn’t guilty of theft, then the entire “case” that Stuart Green makes against Gizmodo and Jason Chen falls apart. The California shield law should have applied to Mr. Chen’s home. He should not have had his home searched by the police. The judge who issued the warrant to do so and the police who served it, after being informed of the shield law’s validity in this case should be disciplined.

http://rebelreports.com/post/103831597/al-jazeera-strikes-back-at-pentagon-releases-unedited

I have seen consistent reports of this kind of stuff in Iraq and Afghanistan since we first went in there. The hunting people for Jesus stuff is just weird and sick, but the distribution of bibles in the Dari and Pashto languages should be criminal.

I think the entire military chaplaincy needs to be pulled out by the roots and replaced.

In the last week, I’ve really been bothered by something. Arlen Specter has said that his vote on EFCA is a sign that he’s not going to be an automatic 60th vote for the Democrats. He’s cited that has a sign of his independence, said it’s a bad bill, and used the GOP talking point/lie about how it takes away the right to have a secret ballot election.

Two sessions ago, Specter was a sponsor of EFCA. In the last session, he voted for cloture on the bill. It’s quite obvious that he only came out against EFCA because he hoped doing so would help him against Toomey in the GOP primary. I’ve seen various reporters and talking heads mention this disparity. I’ve never seen a single one of them challenge him directly on it when they’ve interviewed him. Maybe someone has, but in multiple interviews I’ve seen on CBS, MSNBC, and CNN, it hasn’t been brought up. I might be willing to let it go if Specter didn’t so consistently cite this one vote in interviews. The hypocrisy is galling, but the media complicity is more so.

Specter may well be an important vote on getting good health care reform through the senate this year. I’ll take it if it comes, but if Joe Sestak ends up challenging Specter in the primary I’ll donate money to Sestak’s campaign.

David and Amy Goodman are on Forum right now. Amy said something today that really irked me. I can’t tell if she’s intentionally being oversimplistic for propaganda purposes or if she has a fundamental blind spot in how the media functions. She said that politicians need reporters more than reporters need politicians. This is only true in the aggregate. Things don’t actually work in the aggregate. Let me explain. If you put all reporters in a bucket and all politicians in another bucket, what she said would be true. The reporters have a platform and the politicians would need to access that platform. If all of the reporters chose to act in unison, they could make or break anyone or everyone in that bucket of politicians. While it is true that often, especially if we limit our survey to the so-called mainstream media, a really large majority of the reporters end up acting in unison, it’s not because they conspired to do so at the beginning of any particular story. As is achingly true all too often with theories that evolve from the conventional left mindset of the 70s and earlier, this theory of media operation ignores individual agency. In a system where ratings and advertising dollars drive the media, individual reporters’ success or failure depends on their ability to bring in eyeballs. When you pull your media figures and your politicians out of the buckets that we put them into, individual reporters need access to individual politicians more than is the true of the reverse. Way more. I hate the neo-liberal tendency to put all things into market terminology, but I think this is a simple case of supply and demand. There are way more media figures than there are politicians. There is a scarcity of politicians relative to the abundance of reporters.

Today is the last day for Denver’s Rocky Mountain News. The paper won four Pulitzers in the last eight years. The paper would have celebrated its 150th anniversary in April. It was the oldest continually run business in the state. This is its own self obituary. Who knows how long that’ll remain online, though.

I expect I’ll make a bunch of posts like this in the next year or two. The owners of 33 different daily papers have gone into Chapter 11 since December. This is a big deal, people. Daily newspapers have been the only real brake on corruption in huge chunks of this country for much of its existence. A good newspaper is beating heart of its local community. It’s true that the same economics that are closing newspapers right now have forced a decline in their quality over the last decade. Newspapers are not what they once were, but they’re still important.

Denver still has The Post. The two papers have been running under a joint operating agreement for a while. Many of the cities that will lose their newspapers in the next year or two won’t have another daily. We may soon see major cities without a daily newspaper. That is sad and frightening.

I just saw a commercial during Countdown with Keith Olbermann for a global warming denier business group. In plain text on the screen, one part of their message was “Global warming is the hoax”. This group’s ad was every radical fringe of the chamber of commerce cliche you’ve ever heard: the only green in green energy is the money Washington is taking from us, etc. Their goal appeared to be trying to stop the stimulus bill. It’s far from a perfect bill. Hell, I’m not sure it’s a good bill, but the arguments they were trying to use are not going to get much traction with Olbermann’s audience.

The media and, seemingly, much of the country has been having a good laugh at the Bush-Cheney legacy tour. At a certain level, it is laughable. Few people who have lived as conscious adults or adolescents through the last eight years, let along the better ones before them, would think this has been a good time in America or that Bush has been a good leader. Don’t count on that sentiment to hold over time. It might. The last eight years might turn out for many Americans to be an even worse time than we think it was and Bush may be widely vilified.

My favorite column from Paul Krugman starts out like this: “Historical narratives matter.That’s why conservatives are still writing books denouncing F.D.R. and the New Deal;they understand that the way Americans perceive bygone eras, even eras from the seemingly distant past, affects politics today.”

The Bush-Cheney legacy tour may be a ham-fisted start to the project of rehabilitating their legacies, but it won’t be the end of that project. Once the GOP has done whatever self examination it’s going to do, it will find ways to claim successes over the last few years. It will spin some of the things that we find most objectionable as being among those successes. You can be damn sure that they’re not going to give up on their “regulation is bad” philosophy even if they have to tone down the rhetoric for a while.

I ask this favor of anyone reading this. For the rest of your life, if you hear any mention of anything positive that came out of the Bush presidency and/or Republican control of congress during much of it, you jump on that. Be clear that these are lies. Point out just how bad the Bush presidency was for the world and for most Americans. The GOP already has a set of lying talking points that are meant to distort the achievements of FDR and keep us from ever going down the path of creating an even halfway equitable society. We’ve seen those trudged out during the current economic crisis. These guys play the long game. We need to, too. If not, you may live long enough to someday find yourself flying into George W. Bush airport in New York or celebrating George W. Bush’s birthday as holiday.

It’s weird to see a sports columnist for a national newspaper like the Washington Post who is completely out of touch with the sports she covers. An article today by Sally Jenkins demonstrates that this particular columnist has missed the entire evolution of employment at the top ranks of college sports over the last couple of DECADES. Boston College fired their head football coach because he interviewed for a job with the NFL’s NY Jets. This is complicated a bit by the fact that the Athletic Director who fired the coach is a longtime personal friend. The coach’s contract did not forbid him from interviewing for other jobs. It didn’t even state that other organizations would have to notify the school or seek permission to interview him. Boston College admits they fired the coach without cause. If the coach had accepted another job, he would have violated the contract and would have been forced to pay the university some money. If he had not taken the job, he would have continued to coach a program that has won two consecutive Atlantic Division titles under his watch.

College coaches interview or have informal discussions about other jobs all the time. Sometimes they take them, sometimes they don’t. Employment contracts at that level are financial arrangements. Period. There’s nothing ethical or moral about them. They just guarantee that if one party breaks the contract, the other gets compensation. On the other side of the coin, universities with big time sports programs fire coaches every year and have to pay out all or part of the remainder of their contract.

If this were the moral or ethical issue that BC’s athletic director of WaPo columnist Sally Jenkins were trying to make it out to be, BC wouldn’t be engaged in exactly the same behavior. Yeah, the AD who is all upset over this has done the same thing to, at least, one other university. The head coach of the women’s basketball team was the head coach at and under contract to Ohio University when he hired her away from that institution..