Friday, November 05, 2004
From Aberration to Era (?)
We’re still recovering, from the notion that Michael Moore didn’t make the difference, that the non-empathic frat boy was seen as a “leader”, that all the policy failures didn’t matter, that dishonesty was ignored. I’ve long said that most appalling for me was that the lies were so ‘out there’, so documented, and yet a majority didn’t care. What does that say about the country’s mental health? Anyway…
The consensus- which too often is a summary of Right-leaning media- is that it was a comprehensive victory for Bush, that ‘Bush received more votes than anyone in U.S. history (guess who’s received the second most- Kerry!- the population and the percentage were higher), the U.S. is ”moving steadily and solidly to the right.” Yet, Kerry won 49%. Bush won New Mexico, Iowa, Nevada(!) and Ohio by narrow margins. It’s no time to fold the tent. Paul Krugman, about to begin a long vacation, urges “Democrats” to show backbone:
Democrats shouldn't cave in to Mr. Bush when he tries to appoint highly partisan judges - even when the effort to block a bad appointment fails, it will show supporters that the party stands for something. They should gear up for a bid to retake the Senate or at least make a major dent in the Republican lead. They should keep the pressure on Mr. Bush when he makes terrible policy decisions, which he will.
It's all right to take a few weeks to think it over. (Heads up to readers: I'll be starting a long-planned break next week, to work on a economics textbook. I'll be back in January.) But Democrats mustn't give up the fight. What's at stake isn't just the fate of their party, but the fate of America as we know it. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/05/opinion/05krugman.html?hp
Bush Press conference note: ”Now that I've got the will of the people at my back, I'm going to start enforcing the one-question rule.”
Foreign Reaction: They’re struggling. The not-exactly left-wing Daily Mirror observed “How can 59,054,087 be so dumb!”
2nd Term: Moderation or Radical Right Keeping in mind that the economy http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26581-2004Nov4?language=printer , Iraq and more are in sorry shape, bad news will be out there. The question is whether opposition will scream enough for the sluggish Media to note it, and whether the Faithful will care, or whether “faith” will be enough.
Those that still can’t quite believe that the Bush regime has governed from the Right are again assuming that they will moderate themselves in the second term. Juan Williams, the rarely acute NPR commentator, epitomized this hopefulness in his commentaries. Pepe Escobar, much more conflict-oriented, smells radical right and “blowback.”
The United States may have gone to the polls as a divided, uncertain, paralyzed-by-fear nation. Today it's still a divided, uncertain, paralyzed-by-fear nation, but now with a clear mandate for the state really to rock the geopolitical boat. The "most important election of a lifetime" has sent a clear message to the whole world: the face of America in the next four years - barring a Richard Nixon-style impeachment - will be of unilateralism, the "war on terror" possibly progressively escalating into a clash of civilizations. And pay attention to the "axis of evil" hit list - the official and the bootleg. Bush II will attack what it defines as "state terrorism" - Iran, Syria - instead of the global jihadi network. It will continue to rely on Pakistan to "decapitate" the odd "high-value al-Qaeda". It won't engage in diplomacy to address the political causes of terrorism. It won't engage in a cultural and ideological effort to try to counteract the global jihad - especially now that Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri have changed the rules of the asymmetrical game from a religious clash to a political struggle against imperialism. Total concentration of right-wing power - legitimized by the popular vote: this is the new neo-conservative dream turned reality. So the road ahead is to flatten the Sunni stronghold of Fallujah in Iraq, bomb Iran because of its supposed nuclear aspirations, depose President Hafez Assad in Syria, crush the Palestinian resistance, and remodel the Middle East by "precision strike" democracy. There will be serious blowback. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FK04Aa02.html
But, they sound serious about social security.
President Bush said on Thursday he planned to start work immediately on reforming America's ailing Social Security retirement system and predicted a long slog ahead.
"We will start on Social Security now. We will start bringing together those in Congress who agree with my assessment that we need to work together," he said in his first news conference after the bitterly contested presidential election.
Bush said reforming Social Security would be a priority during his second term and he predicted it would be very tough and costly.http://reuters.myway.com/article/20041104/2004-11-04T171703Z_01_N041922_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-BUSH-SOCIAL-SECURITY-DC.html
And this bears watching:
"As it stands today [Democrats] can block [a nominee]," said C. Boyden Gray, former legal counsel to President George H.W. Bush. But I also believe that the president and majority leader may well decide to change the rules given the elections ... The president has a very strong political support, potential support, for asking for and getting this change." http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,137648,00.html
Winning an election means you can change the senate rules?…like changing the rules re filibustering? …as in no longer needing 60 votes to halt such when opposing radical right judges?
And will we finally learn more about what was delayed by the election-
the CIA report Porter Goss successfully hid, the one that "names names”; the Valerie Plame indictments; the Senate Intelligence Committee's second report, the one about ‘political responsibility’ for prewar intelligence failures… Or, is our secret government…
David Cole has a smart essay on ‘Uncle Sam’ is Watching You’
So the first problem with the administration's claim that there have been no abuses under the Patriot Act is that it is simply false. There have been plenty of abuses.
The second problem is more insidious. Many of the Patriot Act's most controversial provisions involve investigative powers that are by definition secret, making it literally impossible for abuses to be uncovered. For example, the act expanded the authority to conduct wiretaps and searches under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) without having to show probable cause of criminal activity. We know from a government report that the number of FISA searches has dramatically increased since the Patriot Act was passed, and for the first time now exceeds the number of conventional wiretaps authorized in criminal cases. Yet that's all we know, because everything else about FISA searches and wiretaps is secret. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17568
Exit Polls
How off were they? The general tenor of the discussion has been to merely shrug off or ponder their inaccuracies, either ‘Well so much for the trustworthiness of exit polls.’ or,
In some cases, the report said, survey takers could not get close enough to the polls to collect adequate samples of voters opinion. They were often stopped by legal barriers devised to keep people electioneering - not necessarily bona fide poll canvassers - away from voters.
The report also theorized that the poll results more frequently overstated support for Mr. Kerry than for President Bush because the Democratic nominee's supporters were more open to pollsters. Whatever the case, according to the report, the surveys had the biggest partisan skew since at least 1988, the earliest election the report tracked. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/05/politics/campaign/05poll.html?pagewanted=print&position
But, it seemed like the ‘problem’ was principally in Ohio and Florida. In fact, Kerry was found by exit polls to have a narrow lead with both women and men as well as with independents. What does this mean? Some remain suspicious that the expected multi-pronged efforts to cheat in this election did happen, but that the size of the Bush win meant those efforts probably weren’t consequential. Others are prone to cite Greg Palast’s report that the theft/fraud was substantial, that Kerry was the probable winner.
I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad. But I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.
Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.
So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know.
Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See TomPaine.com, "An Election Spoiled Rotten," November 1.]
Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new. http://www.tompaine.com/print/kerry_won_.php
But, Palast is a lone wolf; he thoroughly analyzed- and screamed about- Florida 4 years ago, and has less company/support this time.
Values: It’s The word of the post-mortems, that the Dems don’t speak to American values, especially gay marriage and abortion. Clever Rove strategy of forcing a vote in Congress on “partial birth” abortion and to put gay marriage on the ballots so as to mobilize the faithful. But, to say Bush-Cheney were the ticket of “values”, that they “value life”? Please. Let’s keep in mind the judeo-christian notion of judging a society by how well it takes care of those in need, the “moral values” of (un)just war, caring for the earth, providing adequate housing, of truthfulness.
As to the latter, Kerry could have, of course, done a better job by tackling the dishonesty, the lies which resulted in so many deaths. His not attacking- even the surrogates held off using the ‘L word’ until the last week- led to exit polls that found "Voters who cited honesty as the most important quality in a candidate broke 2 to 1 in Mr. Bush's favor..."
Thomas Frank:
The culture wars, in other words, are a way of framing the ever-powerful subject of social class. They are a way for Republicans to speak on behalf of the forgotten man without causing any problems for their core big-business constituency.
Against this militant, aggrieved, full-throated philosophy the Democrats chose to go with ... what? Their usual soft centrism, creating space for this constituency and that, taking care to antagonize no one, declining even to criticize the president, really, at their convention. And despite huge get-out-the-vote efforts and an enormous treasury, Democrats lost the battle of voter motivation before it started.
Worse: While conservatives were sharpening their sense of class victimization, Democrats had all but abandoned the field. For some time, the centrist Democratic establishment in Washington has been enamored of the notion that, since the industrial age is ending, the party must forget about blue-collar workers and their issues and embrace the "professional" class. During the 2004 campaign these new, business-friendly Democrats received high-profile assistance from idealistic tycoons and openly embraced trendy management theory. They imagined themselves the "metro" party of cool billionaires engaged in some kind of cosmic combat with the square billionaires of the "retro" Republican Party. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/05/opinion/05frank.html
What’s Happening, Iraq: The bombing goes on, (3) British soldiers killed,…and whatever else, but we know much less because the public is tired and in denial and most of the reporters have left. The attack on Fallujah seems imminent. The BBC filmed military chaplains telling marines that they are ‘agents of God's wrath’ and the Times headlines that the “G.I.’s Itch to Prove Their Mettle in Fallujah.” http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/05/international/middleeast/05training.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3983443.stm
Further ‘Proof’ re Those Weapons
In the weeks after the fall of Baghdad, Iraqi looters loaded powerful explosives into pickup trucks and drove the material off the Al Qaqaa ammunition site, according to a group of U.S. Army reservists and National Guardsmen who said they witnessed the looting.
The soldiers said about a dozen U.S. troops guarding the sprawling facility could not prevent the theft of the explosives because they were outnumbered by looters. Soldiers from one unit -- the 317th Support Center based in Wiesbaden, Germany -- said they had asked commanders in Baghdad for help to secure the site but received no reply.
The witnesses' accounts of the looting are the first provided by U.S. soldiers, and support claims that the American military failed to safeguard the powerful munitions. Last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the interim Iraqi government reported that approximately 380 tons of high- grade explosives had been taken from Al Qaqaa after the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003. The explosives are powerful enough to detonate a nuclear weapon. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/11/04/MNG9Q9LLI41.DTL
The New Daschle: Harry Reid
Me thinks he has some problematic positions, particularly on abortion. http://www.issues2000.org/social/Harry_Reid_Principles_+_Values.htm
-R
We’re still recovering, from the notion that Michael Moore didn’t make the difference, that the non-empathic frat boy was seen as a “leader”, that all the policy failures didn’t matter, that dishonesty was ignored. I’ve long said that most appalling for me was that the lies were so ‘out there’, so documented, and yet a majority didn’t care. What does that say about the country’s mental health? Anyway…
The consensus- which too often is a summary of Right-leaning media- is that it was a comprehensive victory for Bush, that ‘Bush received more votes than anyone in U.S. history (guess who’s received the second most- Kerry!- the population and the percentage were higher), the U.S. is ”moving steadily and solidly to the right.” Yet, Kerry won 49%. Bush won New Mexico, Iowa, Nevada(!) and Ohio by narrow margins. It’s no time to fold the tent. Paul Krugman, about to begin a long vacation, urges “Democrats” to show backbone:
Democrats shouldn't cave in to Mr. Bush when he tries to appoint highly partisan judges - even when the effort to block a bad appointment fails, it will show supporters that the party stands for something. They should gear up for a bid to retake the Senate or at least make a major dent in the Republican lead. They should keep the pressure on Mr. Bush when he makes terrible policy decisions, which he will.
It's all right to take a few weeks to think it over. (Heads up to readers: I'll be starting a long-planned break next week, to work on a economics textbook. I'll be back in January.) But Democrats mustn't give up the fight. What's at stake isn't just the fate of their party, but the fate of America as we know it. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/05/opinion/05krugman.html?hp
Bush Press conference note: ”Now that I've got the will of the people at my back, I'm going to start enforcing the one-question rule.”
Foreign Reaction: They’re struggling. The not-exactly left-wing Daily Mirror observed “How can 59,054,087 be so dumb!”
2nd Term: Moderation or Radical Right Keeping in mind that the economy http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26581-2004Nov4?language=printer , Iraq and more are in sorry shape, bad news will be out there. The question is whether opposition will scream enough for the sluggish Media to note it, and whether the Faithful will care, or whether “faith” will be enough.
Those that still can’t quite believe that the Bush regime has governed from the Right are again assuming that they will moderate themselves in the second term. Juan Williams, the rarely acute NPR commentator, epitomized this hopefulness in his commentaries. Pepe Escobar, much more conflict-oriented, smells radical right and “blowback.”
The United States may have gone to the polls as a divided, uncertain, paralyzed-by-fear nation. Today it's still a divided, uncertain, paralyzed-by-fear nation, but now with a clear mandate for the state really to rock the geopolitical boat. The "most important election of a lifetime" has sent a clear message to the whole world: the face of America in the next four years - barring a Richard Nixon-style impeachment - will be of unilateralism, the "war on terror" possibly progressively escalating into a clash of civilizations. And pay attention to the "axis of evil" hit list - the official and the bootleg. Bush II will attack what it defines as "state terrorism" - Iran, Syria - instead of the global jihadi network. It will continue to rely on Pakistan to "decapitate" the odd "high-value al-Qaeda". It won't engage in diplomacy to address the political causes of terrorism. It won't engage in a cultural and ideological effort to try to counteract the global jihad - especially now that Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri have changed the rules of the asymmetrical game from a religious clash to a political struggle against imperialism. Total concentration of right-wing power - legitimized by the popular vote: this is the new neo-conservative dream turned reality. So the road ahead is to flatten the Sunni stronghold of Fallujah in Iraq, bomb Iran because of its supposed nuclear aspirations, depose President Hafez Assad in Syria, crush the Palestinian resistance, and remodel the Middle East by "precision strike" democracy. There will be serious blowback. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FK04Aa02.html
But, they sound serious about social security.
President Bush said on Thursday he planned to start work immediately on reforming America's ailing Social Security retirement system and predicted a long slog ahead.
"We will start on Social Security now. We will start bringing together those in Congress who agree with my assessment that we need to work together," he said in his first news conference after the bitterly contested presidential election.
Bush said reforming Social Security would be a priority during his second term and he predicted it would be very tough and costly.http://reuters.myway.com/article/20041104/2004-11-04T171703Z_01_N041922_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-BUSH-SOCIAL-SECURITY-DC.html
And this bears watching:
"As it stands today [Democrats] can block [a nominee]," said C. Boyden Gray, former legal counsel to President George H.W. Bush. But I also believe that the president and majority leader may well decide to change the rules given the elections ... The president has a very strong political support, potential support, for asking for and getting this change." http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,137648,00.html
Winning an election means you can change the senate rules?…like changing the rules re filibustering? …as in no longer needing 60 votes to halt such when opposing radical right judges?
And will we finally learn more about what was delayed by the election-
the CIA report Porter Goss successfully hid, the one that "names names”; the Valerie Plame indictments; the Senate Intelligence Committee's second report, the one about ‘political responsibility’ for prewar intelligence failures… Or, is our secret government…
David Cole has a smart essay on ‘Uncle Sam’ is Watching You’
So the first problem with the administration's claim that there have been no abuses under the Patriot Act is that it is simply false. There have been plenty of abuses.
The second problem is more insidious. Many of the Patriot Act's most controversial provisions involve investigative powers that are by definition secret, making it literally impossible for abuses to be uncovered. For example, the act expanded the authority to conduct wiretaps and searches under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) without having to show probable cause of criminal activity. We know from a government report that the number of FISA searches has dramatically increased since the Patriot Act was passed, and for the first time now exceeds the number of conventional wiretaps authorized in criminal cases. Yet that's all we know, because everything else about FISA searches and wiretaps is secret. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17568
Exit Polls
How off were they? The general tenor of the discussion has been to merely shrug off or ponder their inaccuracies, either ‘Well so much for the trustworthiness of exit polls.’ or,
In some cases, the report said, survey takers could not get close enough to the polls to collect adequate samples of voters opinion. They were often stopped by legal barriers devised to keep people electioneering - not necessarily bona fide poll canvassers - away from voters.
The report also theorized that the poll results more frequently overstated support for Mr. Kerry than for President Bush because the Democratic nominee's supporters were more open to pollsters. Whatever the case, according to the report, the surveys had the biggest partisan skew since at least 1988, the earliest election the report tracked. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/05/politics/campaign/05poll.html?pagewanted=print&position
But, it seemed like the ‘problem’ was principally in Ohio and Florida. In fact, Kerry was found by exit polls to have a narrow lead with both women and men as well as with independents. What does this mean? Some remain suspicious that the expected multi-pronged efforts to cheat in this election did happen, but that the size of the Bush win meant those efforts probably weren’t consequential. Others are prone to cite Greg Palast’s report that the theft/fraud was substantial, that Kerry was the probable winner.
I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad. But I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.
Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.
So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know.
Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See TomPaine.com, "An Election Spoiled Rotten," November 1.]
Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new. http://www.tompaine.com/print/kerry_won_.php
But, Palast is a lone wolf; he thoroughly analyzed- and screamed about- Florida 4 years ago, and has less company/support this time.
Values: It’s The word of the post-mortems, that the Dems don’t speak to American values, especially gay marriage and abortion. Clever Rove strategy of forcing a vote in Congress on “partial birth” abortion and to put gay marriage on the ballots so as to mobilize the faithful. But, to say Bush-Cheney were the ticket of “values”, that they “value life”? Please. Let’s keep in mind the judeo-christian notion of judging a society by how well it takes care of those in need, the “moral values” of (un)just war, caring for the earth, providing adequate housing, of truthfulness.
As to the latter, Kerry could have, of course, done a better job by tackling the dishonesty, the lies which resulted in so many deaths. His not attacking- even the surrogates held off using the ‘L word’ until the last week- led to exit polls that found "Voters who cited honesty as the most important quality in a candidate broke 2 to 1 in Mr. Bush's favor..."
Thomas Frank:
The culture wars, in other words, are a way of framing the ever-powerful subject of social class. They are a way for Republicans to speak on behalf of the forgotten man without causing any problems for their core big-business constituency.
Against this militant, aggrieved, full-throated philosophy the Democrats chose to go with ... what? Their usual soft centrism, creating space for this constituency and that, taking care to antagonize no one, declining even to criticize the president, really, at their convention. And despite huge get-out-the-vote efforts and an enormous treasury, Democrats lost the battle of voter motivation before it started.
Worse: While conservatives were sharpening their sense of class victimization, Democrats had all but abandoned the field. For some time, the centrist Democratic establishment in Washington has been enamored of the notion that, since the industrial age is ending, the party must forget about blue-collar workers and their issues and embrace the "professional" class. During the 2004 campaign these new, business-friendly Democrats received high-profile assistance from idealistic tycoons and openly embraced trendy management theory. They imagined themselves the "metro" party of cool billionaires engaged in some kind of cosmic combat with the square billionaires of the "retro" Republican Party. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/05/opinion/05frank.html
What’s Happening, Iraq: The bombing goes on, (3) British soldiers killed,…and whatever else, but we know much less because the public is tired and in denial and most of the reporters have left. The attack on Fallujah seems imminent. The BBC filmed military chaplains telling marines that they are ‘agents of God's wrath’ and the Times headlines that the “G.I.’s Itch to Prove Their Mettle in Fallujah.” http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/05/international/middleeast/05training.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3983443.stm
Further ‘Proof’ re Those Weapons
In the weeks after the fall of Baghdad, Iraqi looters loaded powerful explosives into pickup trucks and drove the material off the Al Qaqaa ammunition site, according to a group of U.S. Army reservists and National Guardsmen who said they witnessed the looting.
The soldiers said about a dozen U.S. troops guarding the sprawling facility could not prevent the theft of the explosives because they were outnumbered by looters. Soldiers from one unit -- the 317th Support Center based in Wiesbaden, Germany -- said they had asked commanders in Baghdad for help to secure the site but received no reply.
The witnesses' accounts of the looting are the first provided by U.S. soldiers, and support claims that the American military failed to safeguard the powerful munitions. Last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the interim Iraqi government reported that approximately 380 tons of high- grade explosives had been taken from Al Qaqaa after the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003. The explosives are powerful enough to detonate a nuclear weapon. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/11/04/MNG9Q9LLI41.DTL
The New Daschle: Harry Reid
Me thinks he has some problematic positions, particularly on abortion. http://www.issues2000.org/social/Harry_Reid_Principles_+_Values.htm
-R
