Biblical literalists

EPIC FAIL.

girls!

Many Sarah Palins at this week's high heel race.

voter suppression guide

TPM roundup of current status, state-by-state.

More American terrorists

Missed this originally from Neiwert.

Memo to Palin: Here are some other domestic terrorists.

Oy.

Skinheads arrested in murder spree plot. AP:

The ATF says it has broken up a plot to assassinate Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and shoot or decapitate 102 black people in a Tennessee murder spree. In court records unsealed Monday, agents said they disrupted plans to rob a gun store and target an unnamed but predominantly African-American high school by two neo-Nazi skinheads.

That's all they have, but look for more developments over the next few days. Further reports relayed by TPM say that the 102 number comes from 88 + 14. They were going to shoot 88 blacks and decapitate 14. Christ.

So, as we asked last time skinheads on meth were arrested with an anti-Obama plot: Were they just hopped up on drug-inflated plans, or actually serious? Well, so far it seems like they seriously planned to kill 100 people; they didn't think they could get Obama but planned to die trying.

And of course nobody could have anticipated that the Republicans' rhetoric of anti-americanism and racial agitation would have potential violent consequences.

UPDATE: More details from AP. ("Feds disrupt alleged skinhead plot to kill Obama")

eager to incite

TPM has been all over the Todd hoax and the McCain campaign's role in spreading it (which they of course deny, lying about this as they have everything else in this cycle). Oh, and Todd herself is upset with the media for "blowing it out of proportion." Wow.

Now some may to treat this as No Big Deal: Unbalanced girl gins up hoax on her own, without the campaign directing it. But the point of radical right politics is and always has been to set the tone and let the most extreme supporters draw their own conclusions. They then act to make real what the propaganda has told them already is real, but is not being paid attention to because of the biased media.

And as Eugene Robinson said on the Countdown coverage (paraphrase of around 3:40 in):

If the McCain communications director got out ahead of the police in spreading this story to the press, as it appears he did, it indicates not only a willingness to believe it, but an eagerness to incite racial backlash against the Obama campaign in a part of PA where race can be a very raw and divisive issue to this day.

He properly contextualizes it as the age-old "blood libel" of black predators against "the flower of white womanhood." It's sick, as is the camp's eagerness to spread the hoax.

Update: Perp walk!

Update 2: Youtube guy - "What Ashley Todd did wrong". Funny and understated ;)

McCain, Pinochet, and torture

Digby relays complaints by anti-torture blog After Downing Street, that the liberal blogosphere is giving McCain a pass on torture. (As Digby points out, its more properly the traditional media that has given the pass. The bloggers have been all over it.)

HoffPost has discovered that McCain met with Pinochet. PINOCHET.

recanted

Ashley Todd recants. Blames media. CBS:

Ashley Todd, 20-year-old college student from College Station, Texas, admitted Friday that the story was false, police said.

Maurita Bryant, the assistant chief of the police department's investigations division, said Todd is being charged with making a false police report.

Police doubted her story from the start, Bryant said.

"She just opened up and said she wanted to tell the truth," Bryant said, according to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. "She was upset with the media for blowing this into a political firestorm."

Waah waah. Seems like she might have some mental issues though. Hope she gets help.

As the police say, this wasted a lot of time on their real cases, but it's good that they got to the bottom of it before it turned into a national incident. Meanwhile, the campaign can continue. Too bad the McCain campaign and Palin herself jumped on this one. Nothing like overreacting to poorly sourced intelligence about a pseudo-threat. Pittsburgh will greet us as liberators!!

poor persecuted conservatives

This story looks fishy. Even Malkin is calling bullshit.

Take a look at the B supposedly cut - with a knife! - into her cheek. That's no knife wound. That's a fingernail scratch. And it's backwards.... like somebody did it in a mirror! LOLZ.

Now, of course somebody did give her that shiner, so that's worth sympathy. But there's no reason to falsely politicize the way she seems to. After all, it's not like young republicans haven't tried this before.

McCain's many narratives

NYT reports on the McCain camp's inability to come up with a sustained narrative for their candidate. ("The Making (And Remaking) of McCain" by Robert Draper, author of Dead Certain.)

I'm kind of pissed that 'narrative' has become the buzzword this campaign, yet nobody ever talks with historians. Waah. Let's have some Hayden White!!

torture comes home

Pat Fitzgerald continues his reign of righteousness, this time taking down a cop who'd gone on a 20+ year torture tour through the CPD. FDL:

That's right, you read it correctly, torturing suspects while they were in custody. Twenty years of torturing suspects. The statute of limitations had run out on the physical assaults on the victims and the city of Chicago had not tried to rescind his pension. U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald had retired Chicago police commander Jon Burge arrested this Tuesday morning.

TAPPED notes that he got these ideas from his military career:

Wilson said Burge wired him up to a black box and turned a crank that generated an electric shock. This technique bore a striking resemblance to what American troops in Vietnam called "the Bell telephone hour"--shocking prisoners by means of a hand-cranked army field phone. In defending himself against Wilson's suit he said he'd never seen a black box, and though he'd served as a military policeman in the Mekong delta in 1968 and '69 had never heard of field phone interrogations. He bristled at the suggestion that Americans in Vietnam had conducted them.

Burge's peers from the Ninth Military Police Company, however, remember such torture in considerable detail.

See The Chicago Reader's story "Torture Tools" for the full deal.

And see also this interview with Darius Rejali, author of Torture and Democracy.

We're gonna have some big problem in the future, Freikorps-style.

another one bites the dust...

Jorg Haider. GAY. Turns out that the drunk part of his drunk-driving crash was acquired at a gay bar. And that the young hottie he turned the party over to was his lover. According to The Guardian ("Leader says Haider was his lover"):

The successor to the Austrian rightwing populist Jörg Haider, Stefan Petzner, has shocked the staunchly conservative country by revealing in a tearful interview that they shared a "special relationship".

Petzner, 27, who was confirmed yesterday as the leader of the Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZO) after Haider's death in a car crash two weeks ago, made the admission on Austrian radio, effectively confirming long-standing rumours that he and Haider were lovers.

Attempts by the party to stop repeats of the broadcast failed after the state broadcaster ORF insisted it would not be gagged.

See the Guardian for more details on their relationship. Why do the closet cases always act out so hatefully? It's sad.

generations

Yglesias is trying to form a "Generation Oregon Trail," which is a good idea but makes the crucial Gen-Y error of thinking they are the first to discover something. (Comment 81: "Maybe we could call Gen Y the hey-check-out-this-cool-thing-I-just-discovered-that-nobody-else-has ever-seen-it’s-called-Star-Wars Generation.")

Other links he serves up:

Boston.com - Brainiac's Guide to generations. His system is idiosyncratic and arrogant (see comment on this post for the latter). Here's his replacement for X.

tires slashed at Obama rally

It's hard to make too much of single incidents, but they do bear recording to see if there is really a change in political extremism this cycle. According to the Fayetteville Observer:

Someone slashed the tires of at least 30 vehicles parked outside the Crown Coliseum on Sunday during a rally for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, authorities said.

Sheriff’s deputies are investigating.

Hope so.

image and reality

More on the Atlantic cover controversy, plus Newsweek's horrible evil non-retouching of Sarah Palin on their cover. "Politics of the Retouched Headshot" in The Atlantic.

Consider a recent political controversy involuntarily involving this magazine. After taking a series of shots for a conventional cover portrait of John McCain, Jill Greenberg tricked the candidate into having a picture taken in which she lit him from below, a classic technique to make the subject look evil. Neither the candidate nor his staff noticed that the photographer had literally cast McCain in a bad light. “I guess they’re not very sophisticated,” she told the online magazine PDN, boasting further that she hadn’t retouched the neutral shot she sold The Atlantic. “I left his eyes red and his skin looking bad,” she said.

As this story illustrates, having a portrait taken for publication demands a great deal of trust in the competence and good will of the photographer and photo editor. Greenberg deceived not only McCain but The Atlantic, which objected strenuously to the abuse of trust. But suppose the magazine had been in on the ruse. Does a portrait subject have a reasonable expectation of normal lighting?

Maybe. What's funny is when Fox starts to whine about things NOT being retouched. So honesty is now dishonesty - the epitome of Bush-Rove!! Woo!

Proconsul Petraeus

We might want to re-think our org chart here... looks like Petraeus is our chief diplomat too now. (WaPo: Petraeus Mounts Strategy Review)

hey, go smack around a reporter

Report from a recent Palin rally. Get those reporters!!

There are certain things that get me really concerned when I hear them from someone I'm working with. Joe Killian (who blogs for the paper here and on his own time here) added a new one to my list:

Joe was working with me on a package for tomorrow's newspaper covering Gov. Sarah Palin's visit to Elon and Greensboro.

"Dude," he says when I called to check on him. "Some guy just kicked me in the back of the leg."

And it goes downhill from there. Sieg Heil!!

Whose empire?

Mark Mazower's book Hitler's Empire gets reviewed in the Washington Post. ("Axis of Incompetence") Sounds like a good book, but the review itself is noteworthy because of how popularity-seeking it is. Mazower gives it a snappy title, the Post puts a snappy headline, and the body reads like the Nazis wore blue suits and red ties.

The reason: Nazi articles of faith amounted to grotesque fantasies about how the New Order would function, and they couldn't possibly survive prolonged, or even relatively short, clashes with reality.

An interesting fixation on photography and humiliation, meant to evoke Abu Ghraib.

In the midst of a widening conflict, German officials methodically photographed and examined Polish families, discriminating in favor of those who appeared to have "the soundest German blood." All of which was guaranteed to stir resentment. Even Colonel-General Johannes von Blaskowitz, one of the German commanders in Poland, noted: "The idea that one can intimidate the Polish population by terrorism and rub their noses in the dirt will certainly prove false."

Will have to check out the incidents that the review describes. Have never really encountered foced pseudo-medical photography before (but of course it makes total sense if they did).

Possible assignment in combination with book-review paper, or for own paper about historicity.

Millenial YouTube

"Citizen's Cry" - An Internet Video Produced to Inspire the Youth of Today to Vote.

Image of an old woman sitting in a crappy shack, who turns out to be a Millenial regretting her generation's failure to prevent America's decline - because they didn't vote! O NOES!

realignment myth?

Another from Yglesias, who relays:

Via Henry Farrell, a provocative argument from Larry Bartels that the FDR realignment was basically just a coincidence.

From the original article:

The 1936 election has become the most celebrated textbook case of ideological realignment of the American electorate. However, a careful look at state-by-state voting patterns suggests that this resounding ratification of Roosevelt’s policies was strongly concentrated in the states that happened to enjoy robust income growth in the months leading up to the vote. (As usual, voters seem to have been quite myopic—huge variations in income growth in 1934 and 1935 had no discernible effect on 1936 voting patterns.) Indeed, the apparent impact of short-term economic conditions was so powerful that, if the recession of 1938 had occurred in 1936, Roosevelt would probably have been a one-term president.

Basically every party in power when the Depression lifted then dominated for a decade, and it was just luck, and any patterns are our human need for pattern recognition acting up. So goes the theory.

culture (war) and economics

From Yglesias, a George Packer story in the New Yorker on the disaffected Ohio working class ("The Hardest Vote"). Short story, they're pissed because they can't afford to get married and raise a traditional family.

The American Prospect ("Remapping the Culture Debate") describes how this anxiety does not lead voters to Democratic economic policies, which they see as alien to their concerns, but rather to cultural issues as markers for who cares more about their problems and thus, presumably, will solve them:

When it came to defining themselves in the nation's ongoing cultural battles -- such as the battle over “family values” -- Democrats had virtually ceded the field to Republicans, presenting an uncertain face to the public. Voters, the research showed, were looking to cultural and lifestyle markers to determine whether or not a candidate was, in fact, going to do right by the economy, the Democrats' one persistently strong area. The Democracy Corps pollsters concluded that voters saw traditional Democratic economic concerns as having little to do with them, being mainly “manifested in costly government social programs or political alliances with labor unions and minorities.” The party's inattentiveness to cultural matters had, paradoxically, left these voters with “absolutely no sense that Democrats have a viable alternative vision that would truly promote broad economic growth or increased prosperity for working Americans.”

But it looks like that may be turning around... now that things are going in the shitter. Prospect:

The new Puritanism and cultural conservatism Frank described can also been seen as symptoms of how, in today’s society, traditional values have become aspirational. Lower-income individuals simply live in a much more disrupted society, with higher divorce rates, more single moms, more abortions, and more interpersonal and interfamily strife, than do the middle- and upper-middle class people they want to be like. It should come as no surprise that the politics of reaction is strongest where there is most to react to.

Sound like any dissertations you've read recently? Heee...

political violence 2008

Welcome to 1932 -- oh wait, 2008. The GOP returns to its "ugly roots" (Salon: Gary Kamia) in racist paranoia and violence against elites and urban faggotry.

Palin supporter yells out "KILL HIM!!" at rally. Others racially taunt a media sound man.

McCain supporter responds to his question "Who is Barack Obama?" with answer, "A terrorist!"

Looks like it's spreading to Canada too: Cars in front of houses with liberal yard signs have their brakes cut in St Paul. (Digby)

Meanwhile, a porn producer is sentenced to 4 YEARS PRISON for filming consensual activities... while the Abu Ghraib perpetrators in the White House walk free.

Make-believe Maverick

From Rolling Stone, a fairly complete and thoroughly devastating history of John McCain:

In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.

In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.

All in all, "a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty."