Edgewise

Thank heaven for Orcinus

If Orcinus had a syndicated (RSS) feed, I'd put his headlines write on the main Mediajunkie page. By catching up with him today, I learned that someone actually is now transcribing Rush Limbaugh, got frightened by signs of the demonization of dissent, read about a Karl Rove lie on the record, got caught up on the right-wing hate movement's terroristic strategies as well as a creepy rapprochement with the equally antisemitic Islamist movement, heard about the latest Republican Trent-style bigot eruption.

Best of all was his reply to CPO Sharkey over at Sgt. Stryker (no relation to Jeff Stryker). I gather that reading about this debate must be some sort of political Rorschack test. Neiwert's analysis and documentation convince me utterly, aside from the occasional rhetorical fillip, while Sharkey's retorts brings to mind nothing so much as Usenet newsgroups, in which self-congratulatory told-ya's and asides to an insular supportive audience substitute for reasoned debate. I have no doubt that to regular readers of Stryker's page, the opposite it is true. Unfortunately, I suspect there's a "classwarfare" issue at play here. Perhaps Neiwert's educated prose and logic read as elitist to the more one-of-the-guys Sharkey? (Speaking of class warfare, howzabout we call Bush's tax plan, "a tax cut for Barbra Streisand"?)

I believe Instapundit has pointed to the exchange, which could even the playing field a bit, implicitly lending credibility to Sharkey's thin bluster. I noticed that Stryker categorized his triumphant rebuttal under "Anti-idiotarian," a good way of signalling to his cohorts that Neiwert is one-a them kooky America-hating lefties will probably oppose doing the right thing when push comes to shove. The backslapping comments to the post show the flavor of the discourse among Stryker's readership.

UPDATE: I shouldn't have tortured myself, but naturally htere is yet another followup by the main host of the Sgt. Stryker site, but by this time the entire range of discussion has veered off into namecalling and trivia. It's a pretty funny case of "panties in a bunch," naturally followed by a chorus of hooting support in the comments. The list of invective (one of the worst pejoratives apparently being "journalist") amounts to a series of sputters. I don't imagine any of Stryker's readers will follow the entire sequence or wonder in fact why only one of Dave's points was ever addressed before the theatrical washing of hands and "farting in your direction" kicked in.

It's nothing personal, just business

The Bush Crime Family meme I've seen bandied about on the Well and elsewhere has spawned a comic at the Village Voice, The Bushopranos.

Where are those humorless lefties when you need them? This cartoon fights the Bush restoration/rematch narrative that put their team within striking distance of the prize with a psychoanalytical reprise of the one-term Bush "not getting it" syndrome.

This morning I woke up in a curfew...

First-hand reports from Miguel Octavio of The Devil's Excrement indicate that Hugo Chavez has jailed opposition leaders in Venezuala:

Woke up in a Dictatorship today
Today I woke up in a Dictatorship. Up to now Hugo Chavez and his hoodlums had been using the law to "hide" the repressive and intolerant nature of this Government. Last night they detained one of the two most important leaders of the opposition and an order is out to capture the Head of the Federation of Unions (CTV) the other visible leader of the opposition. The charge: treason and inciting rebellion. This is political, this is repressive and coupled with assasinations last Monday indicates to me that Chavez has decided to step out of Democracy. The charges against the two most important leaders of the opposition are just an excuse to neutralize them and silence others. The Government quickly charges two political opponents on these charges, but assasins from April are still free or not charged, no investigation has been made of other gunmen on Dec. 6th. and many other political and violent crimes have yet to be investigated. But this one has, with efficiency. Maybe the world will now understand what is going on here in Venezuela.

Get your war on early and often

My favorite pundit for these extreme times has gotten Get Your War On No. 19 out:

Lucky Ducky strikes again

Tom the Dancing Bug has been having a great old time lampooning the Wall Street Journal's Lucky Duckies trial balloon that complained about the unfair and progressive U.S. federal income tax.

Guardian takes on "appeasers" meme

The Guardian deconstructs the "Saddam = Hitler" argument (without invoking Godwin's Law!), and turns the table on the question of who is appeasing whom. We'll leave deconstructing the specious "Bush = Hitler" protest signs as an exercise for the class.

Hyperventilating about Flapdoodle

On today's New York Times op-ed pages, Bill Safire applauds the bipartisan shackling of the proposed TIA and gives cover to libertarian-inclined right-wingers waiting for a signal on Patriot II: the wrath of Ascroft. Over on the opposite side of the page Bob Herbert notes the stealthy way the Bushies are defunding "compassionate" priorities while presiding over a larger budget build-up than we ever saw under Clinton:

The day after Mr. Bush's upbeat speech to the religious broadcasters, The Times's Robert Pear revealed that the administration was proposing a change in federal law that would result in rent increases for thousands of poor people receiving housing aid.

The administration has proposed a restructuring of Medicare that would curtail, rather than enhance, delivery of health services to the elderly.

In the $2.2 trillion budget that Mr. Bush sent to Congress last week was an unconscionable proposal that would eliminate after-school programs for 500,000 children. In the arena of bad ideas, that one's a champion.

Michael Lerner reconsidered

OK, so wait a minute, is Michael Lerner (of Tikkun) "deeply silly" or not?

More on closed-source voting machines

Every warblogger's favorite idiotarian rag, The Guardian, has a little article today on voting-machine paranoia:

One is Georgia, where all the votes in 2002 were cast on Diebold screens. The sitting Democratic senator and (to general astonishment) governor were both defeated in the election. Nine of Diebold's 12 directors are listed as Republican donors. The other case is Nebraska, where more than 80% of the votes last November were counted on machines produced by the leader in the field: ES & S. Nebraska handily re-elected its Republican senator, Chuck Hagel, who just happens to be the company's former chief executive and remains a major shareholder. I do not remotely suggest either election was rigged, though Charlie Matulka, Hagel's beaten Democratic opponent, has protested in a manner somewhat unusual for a candidate who only got 15%. This is probably all just paranoia, but the Paranoid party has as much right to participate in elections as anyone else - and to know how and why they have lost.

Parsing Osama

Speaking of jumping to conclusion, MSNBC has retracted its original interpretation of the Osama tape as saying that bin Laden encouraged the overthrow of Saddam. Apparently, while Ba'ath socialists are infidels, it's OK to stand with them to fight against the U.S.

Meanwhile, the invaluable Mark Kleiman tries to sort out the layers of meaning betwen what maybe-Osama, maybe-Powell, and maybe-Reynolds have said.

Jumping the gun

Looks like I jumped to conclusions. The news appears to be that Kerry will have surgery for prostate cancer, not that he will be dropping out of the race. When TPM posted that this news would "shake up" the race, I mistakenly assumed this meant a reshuffling of the candiates. My bad. Best wishes to Kerry in undergoing this becoming-more-routine medical treatment.

Which Dem is about to drop out?

TPM hints that a prospective Democratic presidential candidate is about to drop out of the race for health reasons.

Rushkoff worries democracy may be expiring

With the demise of the nonpartisan exit-polling service and the news of uncheckable voting machines owned by Republican politicians, Douglas Rushkoff has concluded that voting rights in the U.S. are in even worse shape than some of the dirty tricks in the last two election cycles may have indicated:

My farewell is also a sad farewell to democracy—at least in America. Why write about politics if I don't believe in it, anymore?

As is becoming increasingly clear, the system through which we are supposed to elect our government has been subverted. I'm not just talking about black people in Florida being taken off the voting rolls, or poor people in Maryland being handed flyers that tell them the wrong day to vote or that they'll have to pay traffic tickets before voting. True enough, machines at which black people were likely to register their votes were set differently than in white, Republican districts. (In white areas, ballots with errors were re-read; in black areas, they were destroyed.) But that's not the kind of subversion of democracy I'm concerned about right now.

As is now being reported widely in the 'alternative' press, in the last midterm election, the computers responsible for exit polling—an unofficial but telling check on the official vote count—were suspended without adequate explanation. Shortly later, the exit polling company went out of business. Meanwhile, an increasing number of districts came under the control of a private vote-counting company owned and, sometimes, operated—surprise—by Republican Chuck Hagel. His polling machines may or may not be responsible for his and other recent Republican electoral victories that confounded pollsters and analysts in the United States and abroad. (Republicans won by landslides in largely black districts that had never voted Republican, before. And then there is the question of memos with the subject line "how we stole the election".) But they sure don't inspire confidence. (For more, see the links at SeetheForest.)

Bloggers fact-check Howard Coble's ass

Check out the excellent work at Is That Legal? covering the Howard Coble story. Coble, who you may recall was opposed for reelection by blogger Tara Sue Grubb recently stated that the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II was done for their own good. This is the man in charge of Homeland Security in the House. He is dead wrong and Is That Legal? (among others) has him dead to rights.

They doctor recordings, don't they?

If you didn't find Bush's state of the union message convincing, maybe you need to read between the lines, as in this remixed version of the SOTU speech.

Like father, like son

This graphic published in Yahoo! News - Politics yesterday speaks volumes: