Thirty years ago today:
Q: So what in a sense you’re saying is that there are certain situations…where the president can decide that it’s in the best interests of the nation or something, and do something illegal.
NIXON: Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.
Q: By definition.
NIXON: Exactly, exactly.
Yup. Another "What Digby Said" moment:
The Bush administration and its neocon muses have long said that the most dangerous thing the US could do would be to give the terrorists a victory by "proving" that we don’t have the ballocks to stand and fight. They firmly believe that a failure to kick ass and take names, going all the way back to Reagan and the bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut, is what caused the Islamofascists to think they could attack us. They know this because bin Laden has trash talked this line on various tapes and missives over the years so it must be true. (He wouldn’t lie, would he?)
And when they hear him saying "bring it" like big dumb bulls they see red and immediately start snorting and stomping the ground and rush headlong into some half baked scheme designed to prove that we can’t be intimidated. But what if the Islamoboogeymen are actually waving their capes in front of the big, dumb United States in order to get them to do exactly that?
A major CIA effort launched last year to hunt down Osama bin Laden has produced no significant leads on his whereabouts, but has helped track an alarming increase in the movement of Al Qaeda operatives and money into Pakistan’s tribal territories, according to senior U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the operation.
In one of the most troubling trends, U.S. officials said that Al Qaeda’s command base in Pakistan is increasingly being funded by cash coming out of Iraq, where the terrorist network’s operatives are raising substantial sums from donations to the anti-American insurgency as well as kidnappings of wealthy Iraqis and other criminal activity.
The influx of money has bolstered Al Qaeda’s leadership ranks at a time when the core command is regrouping and reasserting influence over its far-flung network. The trend also signals a reversal in the traditional flow of Al Qaeda funds, with the network’s leadership surviving to a large extent on money coming in from its most profitable franchise, rather than distributing funds from headquarters to distant cells.
Al Qaeda’s efforts were aided, intelligence officials said, by Pakistan’s withdrawal in September of tens of thousands of troops from the tribal areas along the Afghanistan border where Bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, are believed to be hiding.
Little more than a year ago, Al Qaeda’s core command was thought to be in a financial crunch. But U.S. officials said cash shipped from Iraq has eased those troubles.
"Iraq is a big moneymaker for them," said a senior U.S. counter-terrorism official.
Basing your decisions upon your stated enemy’s threats and taunts and holding fast so they can’t yell "psych!" is not a foreign policy — it’s a WWF advertising campaign. It isn’t real and it doesn’t address any real problem. The US is the most powerful country on earth and the Islamoboogeymen are not going to take over our government and make us all wear burkas and pray to mecca. Really. Sophisticated thinkers would find solutions to the real problems of islamic fundamentalism and energy dependence and Israel and all the rest rather than launch invasions as PR exercises, but this is what we are dealing with. Marketing is the only thing the Mayberry Machiavellis know.
This isn’t some scripted TV "throw-down." It’s a serious and complicated challenge and we desperately need to get some people in power who don’t depend on "Jack Baur" for their policy prescriptions. Every single day these jokers continue with their little playground game, they make things worse.
It’s interesting, by the way, that after five or six months of wasting time — an more importantly, American lives — with this "surge" bullshit, it looks like the Bush administration may be reconsidering the Iraq Study Group recommendations that were handed down lat last year.
Rising from the dust of the city’s Green Zone it is destined, at $592m (£300m), to become the biggest and most expensive US embassy on earth when it opens in September.
It will cover 104 acres (42 hectares) of land, about the size of the Vatican. It will include 27 separate buildings and house about 615 people behind bomb-proof walls. Most of the embassy staff will live in simple, if not quite monastic, accommodation in one-bedroom apartments.
The US ambassador, however, will enjoy a little more elbow room in a high-security home on the compound reported to fill 16,000 square feet (1,500 sq metres). His deputy will have to make do with a more modest 9,500 sq ft.
They will have a pool, gym and communal living areas, and the embassy will have its own power and water supplies.
What better way to give the impression that we came as conquerors, not "liberators"?
An interesting eulogy of Jerry Falwell …by his nemesis, pornographer Larry Flynt:
To my amazement, we won. It wasn’t until after I won the case and read the justices’ unanimous decision in my favor that I realized fully the significance of what had happened. The justices held that a parody of a public figure was protected under the 1st Amendment even if it was outrageous, even if it was "doubtless gross and repugnant," as they put it, and even if it was designed to inflict emotional distress. In a unanimous decision — written by, of all people, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist — the court reasoned that if it supported Falwell’s lower-court victory, no one would ever have to prove something was false and libelous to win a judgment. All anyone would have to prove is that "he upset me" or "she made me feel bad." The lawsuits would be endless, and that would be the end of free speech.
Everyone was shocked at our victory — and no one more so than Falwell, who on the day of the decision called me a "sleaze merchant" hiding behind the 1st Amendment. Still, over time, Falwell was forced to publicly come to grips with the reality that this is America, where you can make fun of anyone you want. That hadn’t been absolutely clear before our case, but now it’s being taught in law schools all over the country, and our case is being hailed as one of the most important free-speech cases of the 20th century.
***
My mother always told me that no matter how repugnant you find a person, when you meet them face to face you will always find something about them to like. The more I got to know Falwell, the more I began to see that his public portrayals were caricatures of himself. There was a dichotomy between the real Falwell and the one he showed the public.
He was definitely selling brimstone religion and would do anything to add another member to his mailing list. But in the end, I knew what he was selling, and he knew what I was selling, and we found a way to communicate.
I always kicked his ass about his crazy ideas and the things he said. Every time I’d call him, I’d get put right through, and he’d let me berate him about his views. When he was getting blasted for his ridiculous homophobic comments after he wrote his "Tinky Winky" article cautioning parents that the purple Teletubby character was in fact gay, I called him in Florida and yelled at him to "leave the Tinky Winkies alone."
When he referred to Ellen Degeneres in print as Ellen "Degenerate," I called him and said, "What are you doing? You don’t need to poison the whole lake with your venom." I could hear him mumbling out of the side of his mouth, "These lesbians just drive me crazy." I’m sure I never changed his mind about anything, just as he never changed mine.
I’ll never admire him for his views or his opinions. To this day, I’m not sure if his television embrace was meant to mend fences, to show himself to the public as a generous and forgiving preacher or merely to make me uneasy, but the ultimate result was one I never expected and was just as shocking a turn to me as was winning that famous Supreme Court case: We became friends.
A classic (click the icon in the upper right corner if you have trouble viewing):
A senior lobbyist at the National Association of Manufacturers nominated by President Bush to lead the Consumer Product Safety Commission will receive a $150,000 departing payment from the association when he takes his new government job, which involves enforcing consumer laws against members of the association.
What’s next? The head of the NRA to head the Commission on Gun Control?
Via Ezra Klein, a look out how Americans stack up with other industrialized nations, when it comes to legislated paid vacations and paid holidays:
Ezra: "It took me a moment to figure out this graph, as the final two values are a bit confusing. That last line, the one marked 10? That’s Japan. There’s no line for the United States because we don’t legislate any vacation. That’s our country. Aren’t you proud?"
Gasoline prices hit a record high for the fourth straight day Wednesday, according to the daily reading on gas prices from AAA, and more records could be on the way.
The motorist group says the average price for a gallon of self-serve unleaded gasoline was $3.103 in its latest reading, which is based on a daily survey of purchases at up to 85,000 gas stations. That’s up from Tuesday’s record of $3.087 a gallon, and up 2.3 percent in just the last week and 8.6 percent over the last month.
Before Sunday’s record, the highest price ever recorded in the survey was $3.057, which was set Sept. 4 and Sept. 5, 2005, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which disrupted refinery operations and pipelines and caused a temporary spike in prices. But on Sunday prices topped that mark for the first time, hitting $3.064, followed by $3.073 on Monday.
The post-mortem deification begins. So, in the interest of equal time, let’s also remember some of Falwell’s greatest hits, courtesy of the Carpetbagger:
March 1980: Falwell tells an Anchorage rally about a conversation with President Carter at the White House. Commenting on a January breakfast meeting, Falwell claimed to have asked Carter why he had “practicing homosexuals” on the senior staff at the White House. According to Falwell, Carter replied, “Well, I am president of all the American people, and I believe I should represent everyone.” When others who attended the White House event insisted that the exchange never happened, Falwell responded that his account “was not intended to be a verbatim report,” but rather an “honest portrayal” of Carter’s position.
August 1980: After Southern Baptist Convention President Bailey Smith tells a Dallas Religious Right gathering that “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew,” Falwell gives a similar view. “I do not believe,” he told reporters, “that God answers the prayer of any unredeemed Gentile or Jew.” After a meeting with an American Jewish Committee rabbi, he changed course, telling an interviewer on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “God hears the prayers of all persons…. God hears everything.”
July 1984: Falwell is forced to pay gay activist Jerry Sloan $5,000 after losing a court battle. During a TV debate in Sacramento, Falwell denied calling the gay-oriented Metropolitan Community Churches “brute beasts” and “a vile and Satanic system” that will “one day be utterly annihilated and there will be a celebration in heaven.” When Sloan insisted he had a tape, Falwell promised $5,000 if he could produce it. Sloan did so, Falwell refused to pay and Sloan successfully sued. Falwell appealed, with his attorney charging that the Jewish judge in the case was prejudiced. He lost again and was forced to pay an additional $2,875 in sanctions and court fees.
October 1987: The Federal Election Commission fines Falwell for transferring $6.7 million in funds intended for his ministry to political committees.
February 1988: The U.S. Supreme Court strikes down a $200,000 jury award to Falwell for “emotional distress” he suffered because of a Hustler magazine parody. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, usually a Falwell favorite, wrote the unanimous opinion in Hustler v. Falwell, ruling that the First Amendment protects free speech.
February 1993: The Internal Revenue Service determines that funds from Falwell’s Old Time Gospel Hour program were illegally funneled to a political action committee. The IRS forced Falwell to pay $50,000 and retroactively revoked the Old Time Gospel Hour’s tax-exempt status for 1986-87.
March 1993: Despite his promise to Jewish groups to stop referring to America as a “Christian nation,” Falwell gives a sermon saying, “We must never allow our children to forget that this is a Christian nation. We must take back what is rightfully ours.”
1994-1995: Falwell is criticized for using his “Old Time Gospel Hour” to hawk a scurrilous video called “The Clinton Chronicles” that makes a number of unsubstantiated charges against President Bill Clinton — among them that he is a drug addict and that he arranged the murders of political enemies in Arkansas. Despite claims he had no ties to the project, evidence surfaced that Falwell helped bankroll the venture with $200,000 paid to a group called Citizens for Honest Government (CHG). CHG’s Pat Matrisciana later admitted that Falwell and he staged an infomercial interview promoting the video in which a silhouetted reporter said his life was in danger for investigating Clinton. (Matrisciana himself posed as the reporter.) “That was Jerry’s idea to do that,” Matrisciana recalled. “He thought that would be dramatic.”
November 1997: Falwell accepts $3.5 million from a front group representing controversial Korean evangelist Sun Myung Moon to ease Liberty University’s financial woes.
April 1998: Confronted on national television with a controversial quote from America Can Be Saved!, a published collection of his sermons, Falwell denies having written the book or had anything to do with it. In the 1979 work, Falwell wrote, “I hope to live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!” Despite Falwell’s denial, Sword of the Lord Publishing, which produced the book, confirms that Falwell wrote it.
January 1999: Falwell tells a pastors’ conference in Kingsport, Tenn., that the Antichrist prophesied in the Bible is alive today and “of course he’ll be Jewish.”
February 1999: Falwell becomes the object of nationwide ridicule after his National Liberty Journal newspaper issues a “parents alert” warning that Tinky Winky, a character on the popular PBS children’s show “Teletubbies,” might be gay.
September 2001: Falwell blames Americans for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the Pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”
November 2005: Falwell spearheads campaign to resist “war on Christmas.”
February 2007: Falwell describes global warming as a conspiracy orchestrated by Satan, liberals, and The Weather Channel.
Sadly, hatred remains a key compenent of Falwell’s legacy. In my view, he subverted religion and sullied it by mixing it with the worst elements of politics. Jesus Christ agrees. The folks at Salon also agree:
He founded the Moral Majority. In so doing, Falwell managed to take something holy — one does not have to be a Christian to admire the life and teachings of Jesus Christ — and turned it into something partisan and divisive. Falwell, the quintessential conservative Christian, was always more conservative than Christian. To the extent that history will remember him, it will be as a politician, not as a preacher.
***
Jerry Falwell expressed great hate for a lot of his fellow Americans. It is no wonder that so many of them will greet his death with something less than love.
Can I get an amen?
Both former mayor Rudy Giuliani and Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) suggested they would support using the [waterboarding] technique. Specifically asked about waterboarding, Giuliani said he would allow “every method [interrogators] could think of and I would support them in doing it.” Tancredo later added, “I’m looking for Jack Bauer,” referencing the television character who has used torture techniques such as suffocation and electrocution on prisoners.
The audience applauded loudly after both statements.
That last point shouldn’t go by unnoticed. These candidates not only endorsed torture in a high-profile, nationally-televised forum, but the crowd loved it.
Digby, as usual, nails it:
It was quite interesting watching the Republicans debate down in South Carolina tonight. I think it’s clear that this group has come to fully understand that winning the GOP nomination is all about the codpiece. These guys have just spent the last fifteen minutes of the debate trying to top each other on just how much torture they are willing to inflict. They sound like a bunch of psychotic 12 year olds, although considering the puerile nature of the "24" question it’s not entirely their fault.
This debate is a window into what really drives the GOP id. The biggest applause lines were for faux tough guy Giuliani demanding Ron Paul take back his assertion that the terrorists don’t hate us for our freedom, macho man Huckabee talking about Edwards in a beauty parlor and the manly hunk Romney saying that he wants to double the number of prisoners in Guantanamo "where they can’t get lawyers." There’s very little energy for that girly talk about Jesus or "the culture of life" or any of that BS that the pansy Bush ran on. (Brownback’s position, forcing 14 year old girls who’ve been raped by their fathers to bear their own sibling, will have to suffice for the compassionate "life" crowd tonight.)
Mindless machismo is what got us into Iraq, ruined are international prestige, and set this country back. Real life politics is not a TV show or an action movie. When will the GOP learn?
Very bizarre testimony yesterday from James Comey, the deputy attorney general when Ashcroft was the AG.
The Washington Post calls it ""an account of Bush administration lawlessness so shocking it would have been unbelievable coming from a less reputable source."
In March 2004, a paper needed to be signed by AG Ashcroft to continue the controversial warrentless eavesdropping program. By that time, however, the Office of the Solicitor General had concluded that the program did not comply with the law and the Constitution.
The job of signing that paper fell to Comey, who was acting attorney general, because Ashcroft was in intensive care in the hospital. Comey refused. What happened next, according to the transcript, is bizarre:
Think about that. The President’s Chief of Staff and top legal advisor are rushing to jawbone the sedated attorney general who’s recovering from surgery into signing an important document allowing warrentless eavesdropping.
WaPo again:
Mr. Comey’s vivid depiction, worthy of a Hollywood script, showed the lengths to which the administration and the man who is now attorney general were willing to go to pursue the surveillance program. First, they tried to coerce a man in intensive care — a man so sick he had transferred the reins of power to Mr. Comey — to grant them legal approval. Having failed, they were willing to defy the conclusions of the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and pursue the surveillance without Justice’s authorization.
The dramatic details should not obscure the bottom line: the administration’s alarming willingness, championed by, among others, Vice President Cheney and his counsel, David Addington, to ignore its own lawyers. Remember, this was a Justice Department that had embraced an expansive view of the president’s inherent constitutional powers, allowing the administration to dispense with following the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Justice’s conclusions are supposed to be the final word in the executive branch about what is lawful or not, and the administration has emphasized since the warrantless wiretapping story broke that it was being done under the department’s supervision.
Now, it emerges, they were willing to override Justice if need be. That Mr. Gonzales is now in charge of the department he tried to steamroll may be most disturbing of all.
Of course, the ending we all know: Ashcroft resigned, Gonzales became AG, and the program went ahead full steam. (As The New York Times explains, Comey eventually signed the authorization, after having a frank 15 minute closed-door discussion with President Bush, where certain adjustments to the program were made).
One would hope that national policy would not be conducted in this way, where a small cabal of people could exercise such enormous influence over the state of the country. Strange and shameful.
ABC is developing a comedy based on the cavemen from the Geico commercials
Can anyone else think of a situation where a campaign spokescharacter proved so wildly popular that they a TV show was created for them?
Not Clara Pell, Not Joe Izuzu…
UPDATE: Max Headroom — there’s one. And Ernest (Jim Varney) went from commercials to movies.
Obviously, I’m no fan, but it’s always momentous when an influential man passes. His zenith was in the Reagan era, when he set this country on a path which dictates much of the social and political landscape today.
UPDATE: Retrospective from the Carpetbagger.
Also, the GOP ’08ers are having a debate tonight. Look for lots of lavish praise heaped on Falwell in order to woo the conservative right (just as they did on Reagan in the last debate).
