Who steals my purse steals trash

Now that the world can no longer deny America's willingness to blow off our debts, who'll put money in our purse?

Of course, [China's moves into the euro, South Korea's into the renminbi and gold, and other nations' into gold] are all minor moves in a currency market still dominated by U.S. dollars. That's good news for the U.S. economy in the short-term, because it lessens the threat of a massive sell-off and keeps borrowing rates relatively cheap. But the recent pileup of central banks and sovereign wealth funds into gold (according to the FT, central banks are on their biggest bullion buying spree in 40 years) is a warning signal that global esteem the almighty dollar (and the U.S. economy's strength) is already eroding.

There's a huge and growing overhang of dollar positions that other countries want to unwind. Whenever the race for the exit starts, it's going to get ugly for us. Uglier.

Wearing Daddy's shoes

Neil Swidey makes an even-handed point about Scott Brown (R-Cosmo):

Will Scott Brown go on to become a transformative political figure like Ted Kennedy, a senator whose name keeps company with the likes of Webster and Clay? Before you dismiss the idea, consider how outlandish it might have seemed had the same question been posed about the youngest Kennedy after his first year in office.

One state legislator I know said, "If Scott Brown can be Senator, ..." and trailed off into stunned amazement.

At the same time, it's hard to see how anyone expected much more out of Teddy Kennedy than a reliable vote for JFK, yet he grew into so much more.  At times, of course, that growth was an ugly and halting process to watch.  Even in the 1990s, ardent liberals such as I knew that Ted's strength was not his character or his intellect; it was his staff.

His office truly served his Massachusetts constituents, and we loved him for it and forgave his many personal sins.  His office also brought forward careful, well-crafted proposals and compromises that made him a brilliant legislator.

Could Scott Brown grow in a similar way?  Only time will tell.

I suspect that Brown won't have the chance.  I suspect that he will never win a full six-year term in the Senate.  The Massachusetts Democratic Party proved its strength in 2010, and we will be out in force for the 2012 Presidential election, striving to win back the sporadic voters who don't always turn out in mid-terms.

Brown has serious problems walking the fine line between his teabagger base and a liberal electorate. Conservatives dominate the Republican Party in Massachusetts.  They haven't always, but for the past twenty years, they have only paused occasionally to nominate moderates.  Mostly, they have chosen again and again to be satisfied with staying pure and getting whipped. 

Many Massachusans would like to have more partisan balance, but they're not willing to mimic the national picture, which requires so-called balance by going halvesies with batshit insane Confederate conservatism.  The marketplace of political ideas has spoken here, and Republicans, failing to listen, have steadily gone bust.

Not that Massachusetts doesn't have checks and balances still in place.  There are persistent factions within the Democratic Party.  It's just that the dividing lines are much more blurry between the Dukakis-heritage good government liberals, the urban coalition Dems, and the shrinking traditional conservative faction who are only Dems because the Republican Party is so hostile to both the center of the political spectrum and the center of the class spectrum.

Swidey talks about the strengths that may continue to help Brown - and they are practically all superficial.  Brown's handsome.  His family is attractive.  His daughter can sing.  (And that helps us how?)  His image has a pickup truck and a barn coat Photoshopped into it for our media narrative.

Swidey's not the first reporter to dwell on the surface.  In the modern hopeless political media, it would be exceptional if he didn't.

I would at least hope that Swidey would get the surface right.  He calls Brown pleasant and affable.  Not my experience.  I tried to be friendly, though I was obviously not a supporter, and Brown went off on me.  I wouldn't want to have a beer with the guy - not that that matters one whit.

Led by the media and our own laziness, we Americans have become more and more vacuous in our politics.  You think Christine O'Donnell would have gone beyond Bill Maher's show if she weren't cute?  You think Nikki Haley would be governor of South Carolina if she weren't pretty?  You think the nude pose in Cosmo hurt Scott Brown?  If only Joe Miller had had one of those!

Michael Deaver knew in the early 1980s that pictures are more important to politicians than words - and especially more important than thoughts.  All those happy pictures of Scott Brown are his greatest hope for re-election.

You do know what that means for Sarah Palin, don't you?

No lie too base or too obvious

For three decades or more, Republicans have needed to whitewash the racism of their Southern base, and they appeared to have settled on how to do that. Their hands were clean. It was segregationist Southern Democrats who passed and defended Jim Crow, not Republicans.

Now Haley Barbour (R-wherever bullshit is lily white) goes even further. He blames all Democrats now for the acts of long-dead Southern Democrats. His rationale is this:

• The transformation of the solid Democratic South into the mostly Republican South roughly coincided (very roughly) with the rise of civil rights for African Americans.
• Therefore, it was a new generation of Southern Republicans who brought about desegregation in their triumph over those eeevil Democrats.
  

Ne'mine' all that stuff about Nixon's Southern strategy offering a home to Southern racists who fled the Democratic Party because they didn't want to be desegregated. Definitely don't pay any attention to who it was who called out the National Guard in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Alabama to integrate schools, who presided over passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, who sent the FBI into Mississippi to break the Ku Klux Klan. (Democrats!)

Don't believe that even a Republican would try such a big-balled, outright lie? Here's a direct quote from the vidlet (about 4:00 in):

My generation, who went to integrated schools - I went to integrated college - never thought twice about it. And it was the old Democrats who had fought for segregation so hard. By my time, people realized that was the past, it was indefensible, wadn't gone be that way any more. And so the people who really changed the South from Democrat to Republican was a different generation from those who fought integration.

Barbour went to Ole Miss starting in 1965 at a time when, it's true, James Meredith had graduated, though his mere matriculation had led to a white race riot that left two dead and dozens injured. What stopped the violence? Thirty-one thousand federal troops sent by Democrat John F. Kennedy.

When Barbour arrived two (loooong!) years after Meredith graduated in 1963, I'm sure there were a handful of black students amidst a hostile white student body. In Barbour's three years in Oxford, did he attend even a single class that included a black man?

Of course, Barbour's claim that he and his generation never thought twice about integration is patent bullshit. The civil rights movement and the white racist backlash were in full swing all around him.

Trent Lott (R-Dixiecrat-lover), who would later be a high-ranking Republican Senator, had been busy in 1962 defending his all-white fraternity against membership for African-Americans. Even now, a few years after Lott resigned for lauding Strom Thurmond's openly racist 1948 campaign for President, Barbour still praises him!

Medgar Evers had been assassinated in 1963 in Jackson, 50 miles from Yazoo City, where Barbour was going to high school.

Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman had been murdered in 1964 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, about 90 miles from Yazoo City and 125 miles from Oxford.

James Meredith was shot in 1966, while Barbour and his generation had supposedly put segregation behind them. Did one more in a long succession of white race crimes make racial integration seem fully settled in Mississippi?

Barbour was a junior at Ole Miss that April day in 1968 when Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in Memphis. Didn't he think about that? In his past carefully built out of bullshit, how did that even happen after his generation had determined that its heritage of white supremacy was "indefensible"?

Even now, African-Americans are about 13% of the student population at Ole Miss, while they're 37% of the population at large. How successful is desegregation even now if Brown v. Board of Education still hasn't provided a more even preparation of high schools students?

These Republicans were the successors of the Southern Democrats. Trent Lott was endorsed for Congress by his nominally Democratic predecessor. These Republicans played no role whatsoever is the overthrow of segregation, such as it has even happened in Mississippi. They weren't even mere spectators. They played to the same racist white voters as the Dixiecrats had for generations. Only the label had changed.

Trying to pass the lie that Southern Republicans are liberals on race disqualifies Barbour for any office in the United States.

Reliquary of a saint

Joe Klein is out of his depth when he attacks Glenn Greenwald. He shouldn't pick a fight with someone who buys pixels by the megaton. Between all the exclusive parties and the exhausting difficulty of maintaining his access to power, Klein doesn't have the stamina for it.

Greenwald's a big boy, though, and doesn't need my puny defense. Nor does aimai. I've noticed that she can handle herself.

Still, my fellow travellers in the left blogosphere annoy me in one way when they back aimai. She's I.F. Stone's granddaughter! they protest. As if that mattered a whit. As if she had touched the hem of his shroud and was therefore gifted with sacred powers to see through the ever-present bullshit of the big media.

I realize that many are using this identification simply to extend her handle. Others, though, imply that she deserves admission to the conversation because of it. Identity is not central to this dust-up at all. Quite the contrary in fact.

Aimai's commentary has always stood as her own, not that of the priestess of a dead saint. I found it trenchant and incisive and insightful enough long before I knew her pedigree. I remembered her handle and knew when I happened upon her commentary that she would be worth reading.

This is an earned reputation, not the fruit of admission to an elite. Aimai didn't get her credibility through Washington nepotism. Unlike Joe Klein, she hasn't relied on obeisant touches of reliquaries. She has done her homework instead.

Don't forget that that's the path to real credibility.

CIA/media follies

This Time report is what is technically known as wild-ass guessing. The program Darth Cheney reportedly protected was either assassination or it was domestic surveillance. Or it was unworkable and cancelled in 2008, I mean 2004, no biggie, move along, nothing to see.

Anyone can guess: How about enough resolution in satellite imagery to do facial recognition? (Why look straight down? Enemy of the State showed the problems with that.)

C'mon, give it a try! It's fun and easy, and there's no accountability for being wrong.

Enough bullshit! What we need from the media is not to print every goddamned unverified superficial rumor they hear. What we need is research, reporting, sourcing, and truth.

A bit of memory wouldn't hurt either. Could this "new" story relate to the unpursued Bob Woodward rhetorical bombshell of September 2008? Yes, at the time, I leaned to technology, too, since Woodward likened it to the Manhattan Project.

In any case, we still don't know.

No suspense

Time has named Barack Obama Person of the Year. Yawn. They don't even try to explain why. They don't have to.

Obama's not just head and shoulders above the competition. He's legs, torso, head, and shoulders higher. They're all ankle-biters compared to him and his epoch-making impact. Henry Paulson? Seriously?

Some years you just have to go with the story that's a two-by-four between the eyes. To do otherwise would identify you as a perverse dolt.

Dollars and makeovers

Coming soon, the Sarah Palin reality show, complete with conspicuous consumption!

The big media should be excellent at covering this sort of frippery. It combines their favorite subjects: money and stuff any middle schooler can understand.

Problem is, the New York Times is having trouble matching up amounts in campaign finance reports to actual expenditures. Ah, if only the world were so simple (ha) in the post-reform world of McCain-Feingold.

Here's a slightly educated guess: I think the Republicans may be allocating expenditures into multiple accounts. Until you have all the reports, you won't be able to match individual expenses. The McCain campaign not only took public financing. It's also raising piles of money under other guises. For example, the reporters should take a look into the John McCain General Election Compliance Fund, which sends out little notes like this:

What is the John McCain General Election Compliance Fund
Contributions to the John McCain 2008 General Election Compliance Fund will be used solely for legal and accounting services to ensure compliance with federal law and not for campaign activities. Compliance Fund contributions may be used to pay for:

• Broadcast advertising (up to 5 percent);
• National and State office "overhead" expenses (payroll, utilities, etc.);
• Computer/website equipment and maintenance;
• Voting recounts; and
• Other federal election law legal and accounting services

If these costs were not paid form the Compliance Fund, John McCain 2008 must use limited funds from the general-election campaign account for all of these expenses. Compliance Fund contributions are useful because they preserve 100% of campaign funds for media, mail, phones, and get-out-the-vote programs.

In other words, anything we can slip onto this budget we won't have to pay out of our $85 million budget. Maybe they're not stretching to rationalize Palin's wardrobe as a compliance expense, but I'm sure there are other specialized funds (the McCain Leadership Committee or the RNC Major Donor Leadership Program) that they can tap for Caribou Barbie's Washington makeover.

So maybe they've spent even more than $150,000. Or maybe their shoppers are adding a percentage to pay for their wasted time.

Update (10/25): More speculation - with some sourcing - about untraceable campaign money.

Some pigs more equal than others

The Republican Party is the party of peace. The Republican Party is the bipartisan party. The Republican Party is the party of the middle class. The Republican Party is the party opposed to elitism. The Republican Party is the party of women.

I mean, really, who knew pigs could shit so much bullshit?

They really do think we're blind, deaf, and stupid. And can't remember anything from five minutes ago.

I have to hope they're wrong, but after the last ten years I'm not sure of it.

Counting on gullible fools

Only a gullible fool would be convinced by McCain photo ops of anything, much less that the Republican attitude toward competent federal disaster assistance is anything more than a PR problem. Unfortunately for America, our citizenry has proven again and again to be heavily leavened with gullible fools. We did after all re-elect Duhbya.

Time is on board though with warmed over Republican bullshit. Oh, sure, there are some obligatory slaps at McCain, but on the key point, setting a low bar for McCain, Michael Scherer is front and center.

Scherer has no sense that this contradicts itself:

[John McCain's] campaign is determined to make the most of [Gustav] by using it to rebrand a new generation of Republicans as leaders who govern effectively and rise above partisanship.

This exercise in rebranding is itself a craven political act of desperation, about which there is nothing "above partisanship." Yet, here's the standard:

Whatever happens to the Gulf, however, there is no doubt that the McCain campaign will continue to use the aftermath as a way to demonstrate the candidate's superior leadership qualities. From the early primaries, McCain has run as a candidate best able to deal with a crisis, though the focus has mostly been on national security challenges. Now, in a circumstance at home he would never have chosen, he has a chance to deliver on that promise.

What McCain is doing for the cameras and their reporters is pure theater. It has nothing to do with leadership, superior or otherwise, and it's a mark of the corruption of our media that they think it is.

Outrageous when a Democrat fights back

McCain's been playing middle school bully for weeks now, and Michael Scherer is offended by the fact that Obama is now fighting back. Some liberal media!

Likability

Joe Klein actually owns up to this voluntarily:

I never much liked John Edwards as a politician...and I guess we now know that he's a heel as a human being, too.

This is the quality of our political press. Who they like is what's important.

Hey, what do we need the pundits for? We can all tell who we like.

Downside of Joe Klein

Of course, there's a downside to match the rare upside of Joe Klein, but for a change he seems merely mistaken, rather than captured by the narrative of the media herd. And that in itself is a silver lining.

The sheer, slimy audacity of the McCain ads has given him a nice midsummer run. The polling numbers haven't changed all that much, but Obama has been on the defensive since he returned from his overseas trip.

Here, Joe misses the timing and the complicity of the media in printing every stinking McCain press release while Obama was overseas. Obama was already on the defensive long before returning home. Minor, of course, but I wish pundits who get paid for watching paid as much attention to the big picture as a part-time blogger reading and writing from his study or office.

The best way to do that is through a major, narrative-changing event.

Here's another head-scratcher: Klein is asking for political theater, not reality. And he completely fails to notice the obvious fact that the Obama trip overseas was exactly "a major, narrative-changing event" that didn't work because the press corps was so obsessed with McCain's slimy audacity (good phrase, Joe!).

Last, Klein's thesis is that Obama should sign up for more debates in the late summer. Here's the obvious reason he won't: He prefers to play a few big hands and win the killer pots instead of penny ante town halls that slide into boring frequency. Who remembers anything from the zillion Democratic primary debates?

Yes, a dozen debates would give Klein and his cohorts more to write gaffe-watch pieces about - and snark about even if there are no gaffes - but they are unlikely to give the voters more useful information about what the two candidates believe and what each would do as President.

Upside of Joe Klein

I have to give Joe Klein credit for his first three paragraphs today:

Over the past month, a foolish narrative has been abroad in the land: that this election is going to be a "referendum" on Barack Obama. ...

Quite often, ... the referendum gambit is a rationale for mudslinging. This year we have John McCain's attempt to paint Obama as aloof, messianic ... a celebrity, like Paris or Britney.

I may be missing something, but snark isn't a quality often associated with the presidency. "It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant," Obama said, laughing at the McCain campaign's crash-and-burn fighter-jock puerility.

There are points to critique, too:

• Klein's careful failure to notice that Republicans always sling more mud than Democrats
• His repetition of McCain's low points, though I suppose that's necessary for readers who just woke up from a 20-year nap or from Alzheimer's

But he's willing to say that the McCain campaign is trying to compensate for the weakness of its candidate, and that's something you don't hear from a mainstream pundit every day, even though it's as plain as the pallor on McCain's face.

Of course, I do critique, not so much compliments, so there's a downside, too, which I'll get into for my next item.

The problem with fact-checking

Factcheck.org is useful. Not perfect, but useful. The problem with it, as seen in previous similar efforts - Spinsanity was worse - is that it has a hard time with judgements about interpretation. This piece about one of Obama's ads, which I found via Swampland, makes some fair critiques that add to factual conversation about how much money oil and gas executives have donated to John McCain's campaign.

Obama's campaign says $2 million. Factcheck.org says $1.3 million. It's a significant difference, and describing how each arrived at its total is helpful, both to understand the point Obama's ad makes and to show the byzantine nature of campaign finance.

Still, to call Obama's ad a factual "overstatement" is itself a factual overstatement. I offer these pieces of information from Factcheck itself:

• Much of the money given in June went to a joint fundraising venture of the McCain campaign, the Republican National Committee and several state GOP committees, an unknown portion of which was passed through to the McCain campaign itself.
  
• David Donnelly, the national campaigns director of the Public Campaign Action Fund, defended the Obama campaign's ad: "There's a strong case to be made that more than $2 million was given by the oil and gas industry to advance John McCain's campaign."
• The report does not say how much actually ended up in McCain's own campaign coffers and how much went to other Republican candidates and committees.
  

Factcheck chooses the numbers provided by the Center for Responsive Politics. It's true that they are easy to interpret, but it's also clear that they don't tell the whole story. Factcheck acknowledges that it doesn't know where all the money ended up, and there's no way they can know how much expenditures will be coordinated, whether illegally or nudge-nudge-wink-wink.

Obama's campaign also chooses figures best suited to make its point, and they don't tell the whole story either. That would be hard to expect in 30 seconds.

Update: Obama's Overstatement (so-called) in Newsweek, too.

Invade Kappa Kappa Gamma!

If this tissue of bullshit is any indication of the strength of the government's evidence against Bruce Ivins, then we better invade some unrelated place looking for WMD. Think about this - it's what they're leading with:

The mailbox just off the campus of Princeton University where the letters were mailed sits about 100 yards away from where the college's Kappa Kappa Gamma chapter stores its rush materials, initiation robes and other property. Sorority members do not live there...

Somewhere roughly on the edge of this picture there's a mailbox, and it obviously picks out Kappa Kappa Gamma (marked 'A').


This is a link? If so, maybe the FBI can connect Ivins to the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. Or maybe he has a link to the grassy knoll. Think of all the things you come within a hundred yards of in the course of a year. How many could be connected less tenuously than this with a crime? Further:

[A]uthorities acknowledge they cannot place Ivins in Princeton the day the anthrax was mailed.

If they don't have anything better than this, they hounded an innocent man into killing himself. On the up side, they're having an easy time making him sound like a weirdo, so there is that.

Update: Where I have snark, Glenn Greenwald has some serious smackdown.

Update (8/8): Newsweek thrusts the propaganda with hardly any skepticism. What would you expect from Spiky Isikoff? He and his coauthor say that the mailbox was only 60 feet from KKG's storage room, which is a new factoid.

Filler

If you're going to write for the public, shouldn't you at least believe what you write?

Joe Biden? What tactical need would he fill?

He would make Beltway journalists like Joe Klein happy - no new personality to learn.

Of course, after the zillion veep stories from McCain, at least this puts Obama's name into pixels.

No mention of continuous filibuster

Time lays the failures of this Congress on the Democrats with nary a mention of the stonewalling of Republican Senators.

Just because their approval ratings are at all-time lows and they are dismissed as a do-nothing Congress doesn't mean Democrats on Capitol Hill aren't keeping busy.

Given the logjam that has built up since Democrats took control of Congress in 2006, there's a lot to get through.

Of course, the media have never held the Republicans to account for their caucus-wide abuse of the filibuster. They don't like to beat up Republicans.

But Harry Reid gave his so-called colleagues from the other side of the aisle a pass, too. He should have been holding the Senate in session to make the Republicans filibuster every goddamn thing on television, instead of letting them filibuster by remote control.

Whoever is the next Majority Leader, pay attention. The Republicans are a highly disciplined, power-first enterprise. They don't care about traditions of comity unless they can use them against you. Think about that when you change the Senate rules.

To survive in politics

You have to know this stuff or politics will break your heart (and it may anyway):

I don’t have advice for Prime Minister Brown, I will tell you that you’re always more popular before you’re actually in charge of things (laughter) and then, and once you’re responsible, then you’re gonna make some people unhappy, and that’s just the nature of politics and, these things go in cycles. Even during the course of this campaign, there have been months where I’m a genius and there are months when I am an idiot, at least if you read the newspapers. It seems like I’m pretty much the same guy throughout this process but, you know, my actions and the results are gonna be perceived differently at any given time.

(Emphasis added.)

Obama knows he's not going to be the second coming.

Pretty good timetable, uh, horizon

McCain's "straight" talk is predicated on your inability to form new memories. Thursday, leaving Iraq over 16 months was choosing to lose (h/t Joe Klein, credit where due). Yesterday, 16 months sounds like a pretty good date, uh, timetable, uh, horizon, uh, thingumabob. Tomorrow, who the hell knows? McCain shows no sign of knowing what his message is.

What the press likes about McCain: He improvises all the time. Problem for the rest of us is that he doesn't do it well.

Update: Atrios nails it.

McCain press release mashup

If McCain were really a tough guy, he'd promise to wait until he's President (never!) to meet with the Dalai Lama and really piss off the Chinese.

(Is there any doubt at all that the McCain campaign piled up a ton of press releases about mostly inconsequential things to compete with Obama's trip? And, of course, McCNN printed every damn one of them. Hey, an easy day at work!)

Update: Joe Klein, true to form, is oblivious to the obvious fact that Tucker Bounds is playing him.