Screaming headlines

I've sounded off before about sensational headlines -- and not just in the tabloids or FoxNews. The Huffington Post contributes its share of whipping up unjustified fervor.

The latest was just now. Their home page headline screams in large type, bright red in color:

"Police Fatalities Jump 37% in 2010."

The article tells of the really awful statistic that 160 law enforcement officers were killed in the line of duty in 2010 (and a few days to go). As you read, your mind starts trying to relate it to . . . . . what?

Easy availability of guns? It did say there was also an increase of shootings. Or the economy? The writer favored this explanation -- in that police forces have been cut back in some places due to budget shortages, and officers are being asked to do more with less.

Not until the 7th paragraph, however, does this interesting fact come out: The reason there was a 37% jump in 2010 is that last year's total of 117 was a 50 year low. It was 2009 that was the anomaly, not 2010. Nor does 160 represent a real long-range increase -- It has topped 160 five times in the past ten years, including 240 in 2001. It routinely topped 200 in the 1970s.

To be perfectly clear: I am not condoning police deaths. Even one is too many.

That headline was not wrong: it did rise 37% over 2009. But that's not the real story and it creates a false sense of fear and despair. The real story is that there has been a long-range decline in police deaths, with a sudden drop in 2009 that has now returned to the more expected rate.

Why wasn't the article written from that angle? Obviously, this is a more attention-grabbing headline. And it's all about competition for readers, I guess. Didn't journalism used to be about reporting the news honestly?

Again, I'll plug Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot's book, The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News, in Politics, and in Life." It's all about exposing just such misleading use of numbers and statistics. And highly readable.

Ralph

Obama and 2012

Huffington Post's Sam Stein examines the prospects for a primary challenger to President Obama in 2012. He finds it highly unlikely. Even in the nadir of the post-2010 election, when talk of a challenger was highest, there were no obvious takers who hadn't already said they would not.

Now that his star is rising again, it seems even less likely. Comparing Clinton's prospects at the same point: 78% of Democrats say they want Obama to be the nominee in 2012, compared to Clinton's 57% in 1994.

What would be the prospects of winning from a position to the left of Obama, given that the winner will face a conservative GOP opponent? And would there be any viability to a third party candidacy?

Of course, I'm talking about political realities and winning the presidency, not what progressive policies I would like for a president to be able to get for us. The reality is that, for the foreseeable future, a centrist or slightly left of center position is the most we can hope to elect.

That doesn't mean I'm completely against someone running to keep the progressive message out there and possibly force the nominee to adopt a more liberal stance -- just not so much that it would cost us the election.

In an interview with The Valley Advocate earlier this year, Rachel Maddow defined her political position as "I'm undoubtedly a liberal, which means that I'm in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican party platform."

Such are the times we live in. I would like to change it. Obama would like to change it. It ain't gonna happen over night.

Ralph

The outrage of " balanced"

Stung by charges that much of television reporting lacks any semblance of professional journalistic standards, some producers started touting "balance" in their reporting. FoxNews even made it the slogan of their ultra-biased news reporting.

Catching the words but missing the tune, they made it even worse by simply interviewing someone from both sides of a controversy, but still without any attempt to analyze the differences or challenge the obvious distortions.

Now, in an exit interview as he's giving up his long career as TV interviewer, Larry King has done just the same thing, criticizing Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow equally for "preaching" their points of view; whereas he, Larry, praises his own style, saying he never learned anything while he was talking, so he tried to just listen to his interviewees.

So: Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow are just alike, huh, only mirror images in their political views?

Bullshit. Hannity does exactly what King says. He preaches his own views, distorting what he needs to in order to sell those views.

Rachel Maddow, on the other hand, clearly has views; and she is not shy about letting them be known. But hers is one of the most honest news analysis shows, because she let's the other person present his views and she listens carefully, very carefully -- and then she challenges the logic, the facts, the conclusions. She also tells them where she does agree. In other words, she actually does journalism -- she subjects the report to analysis based on knowing her facts and using her skill in logical challenges. But first she gives the other side a fair hearing.

To equate the two as two opposite peas in a mirror-image pod is just what's wrong with TV news reporting and analysis today. Rachel is the one who does it right. Hannity is an echo-machine, preaching to the gullible and those who want to hear only the lies they already believe.

Here's what I really admire: instead of dumbing down and paranoia-ing up the show for popular appeal, as FoxNews does, Rachel and her producers depend on the appeal of truth, of hard-hitting but straight logical thinking and well-informed questioning. It's encouraging that there really is an audience for that -- and growing.

And, yes, I am biased. Rachel is the kind of person I admire: super-bright, articulate 37 year old, the first openly gay American to win a Rhodes Scholarship. She is candid about being lesbian, but she doesn't flaunt it or trade on it. It's just who she is. She's a graduate of Stanford University and went on to get her PhD in politics from Oxford University. Hers was the only cable news show to be nominated for the 2009 Television Critics Association Award. The interview when she recently had Jon Stewart on her show was a delight -- one to watch over and over. The two brightest people in TV news, albeit Stewart's official status is comedian.

And, yes, my beliefs also happen to agree with Rachel's positions, almost always. But it's not just bias; it all stands the test of logic and scrutiny for truth.

Ralph

Conservative praise for Obama

Charles Krauthammer, the conservative pundit, writes in today's AJC: "Obama achieved what seemed impossible 2 months ago."

Not that he likes the results, of course, but his praise for Obama's accomplishment shines through.

Riding the lamest of ducks, President Barack Obama just won the Triple Crown. He fulfilled (1) his most important economic priority, passage of Stimulus II, aka the tax cut deal . . . (2) his most important social policy objective, repeal of "don't ask, don't tell"; and (3) his most cherished (achievable) foreign policy goal, ratification of the New START treaty with Russia.

Politically these are all synergistic. The bipartisan nature of the tax deal instantly repositioned OBama back to the center, and just when conventional wisdom decided the deal had caused irreparable alienation from his liberal base, Obama almost immediately won it back -- by delivering one of the gay rights movement's most elusive and coveted breakthroughs. . . .

Then came START, which was important for Obama . . . because treaties . . . carry the aura of presidential authority and diplomatic mastery.

Krauthammer goes on to detail what's wrong, from his perspective, with these actual pieces of legislation, but he then concludes:

The great liberal ascendancy of 2008, destined to last 40 years (predicted by James Carville), lasted less than two. Yet, the great Republican ascendancy of 2010 lasted less than two months. Republicans will enter the 112th Congress with larger numbers but no longer with the wind -- the overwhelming Nov. 2 repudiation of Obama's social-democratic agenda -- at their backs.

"Harry Reid has eaten our lunch," said Senator Lindsey Graham . . . . Yes, but it was less Harry than Barry. Obama came back with a vengeance. His string of lame-duck successes is a singular political achievement. Because of it, the epic battles of the 112th Congress begin on what would have seemed impossible just one month ago -- a level playing field.

And that is a conservative Republican speaking.

Disappointed progressives will not be assuaged, probably. Their retort is likely to be: why hasn't he done that sooner on other issues, or why hasn't he used that political power and skill to get better deals on these pieces of legislation?

Good questions. It may just be that Obama is smarter than us all and knows that you have to pick your times and your battles. It's pretty hard to argue with the overall achievement in 2010, especially given the crowd he had to deal with.

Ralph

Obama the Un-wimp

Obama has been criticized, particularly by disappointed and angry progressives, for not fighting for some of the issues he promised to get passed. At times, I have felt the same wish for him to make it happen and to not cave in so easily in compromise.

It was Keith Olbermann who put it so pithily in his scathing critique of Obama for agreeing to tax cuts for the wealthy: "This President negotiates down from a position of strength better than any politician in our recent history."

But along comes the New Start nuclear disarmament treaty, and we see a different kind of Obama performance. What makes the difference is hard to say: the issue? the way he's feeling that week? a vast complex array of other things being considered? I don't presume to know.

Here's what the New York Times' Peter Baker said in an article on 12-23-10:

Some aides counseled Mr. Obama to stand down. Losing a treaty vote, as one put it, would be “a huge loss.” But Mr. Obama decided that afternoon to make one of the biggest gambles of his presidency and demand that the Senate approve the treaty by the year’s end. . . .

Along the way, he had to confront his own reluctant party leadership and circumvent the other party’s leadership. He mounted a five-week campaign that married public pressure and private suasion. He enlisted the likes of Henry A. Kissinger, asked Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to help and sent a team of officials to set up a war room of sorts on Capitol Hill. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had at least 50 meetings or phone calls with senators. . . .

Even in the final 10 days, the effort appeared in danger of collapsing. The insistence of Democrats on passing unrelated legislation allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military upset the Republican conference and may have cost the White House five or more votes on the arms treaty. Administration officials worried last week that they did not have the required two-thirds majority in the Senate, and as late as Sunday, the president’s aides wondered whether to call off the vote. . . .

“The president made a gutsy decision that he was willing to lose it, and that was a gutsy decision,” said Senator John Kerry. . . . “Everybody said it wasn’t going to happen. Even colleagues on our side said it wasn’t going to happen.”. . .

[When key Republican senator on arms control, John Kyl, signaled that he wasn't going to support it after all] “There were people here who thought that was it, we were going to call it a day,” recalled one White House official. There was no Plan B. But Mr. Obama, who often disappoints supporters by not responding to Republicans more aggressively, decided this was a moment to fight. “He decided that he would settle on nothing short of full Senate ratification,” said another official.

Starting in that meeting, they laid out a strategy. Mr. Biden was supposed to meet two days later with several Republican luminaries. Instead, Mr. Obama would host the meeting and make a public pitch for the treaty. The White House ripped up plans for the weekly radio and Internet address to make it about New Start. Then Mr. Obama flew to Lisbon for a NATO meeting, where he encouraged European leaders to speak out for the treaty. . .

[Instead of continuing to press Mr. Kyl, they went after other Republicans.]

“It was very tricky, and it almost broke it apart,” Mr. Kerry said. “That was part of the overall high-stakes poker. A lot was hanging on different things.”

In the end, the gamble paid off on Wednesday with a 71-to-26 vote in the Senate to approve the treaty, called New Start, with Russia, culminating what turned out to be the biggest battle over arms control in Washington in more than a decade.

Some will give the credit to Joe Biden, scoffing at the idea that Obama fights for anything. Biden was a key player in persuading reluctant Republicansl but, if Baker is telling the truth, it was Obama who made the decision to fight for it out and out, and it was Obama who kept them to the task when nearly everyone else was ready to give it up.

So, why not do it more often? I don't know.

Ralph

Barney Frank

Barney Frank has the distinction (some say) of being the brightest person in Congress. He's also the funniest. Today there is a clip of a reporter interviewing him about how the repeal of DADT is going to impact the troops -- asking what about straight soldiers having to shower with homosexuals?

How shocking, Barney mocked. "What do you think happens in gyms all over the United States. In the Congress? In colleges? People shower with homosexuals everyday. . . We don't get ourselves dry cleaned; we tend to take showers when we go to the gym, when we play sports."

"The idea that there's something new about showering with homosexuals . . . remember, under Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the policy was that you would be showering with homosexuals. You just weren't supposed to know which was which. So there was no change in that. The notion that knowing that someone is gay, as opposed to knowing that there are gay and lesbian people, you just aren't supposed to know who they are, that somehow that makes a difference, is a bit silly."

The reporter persisted, and Barney finally retorted: "Do you think that gyms should have separate showers for gay and straight people?"

Good point. Game. Set. Match.

Ralph

Irresponsible

Funny how conservative people want to denounce something and profit from it at the same time.

There have been numerous examples of governors who denounced the stimulus bill -- and turned around and took the stimulus money for their states.

Also there are many stories of Republicans' new-found outrage at earmarks, who vowed to get rid of the practice -- even while sneaking their earmark requests into the tax cut bill.

Now comes along She Who Shall Not Be Named. On Nov. 29th she denounced the Obama administration for laxity that led to the WikiLeaks release of all those tapes. Just awful, how they let all that secret information get out there !!

But she's not opposed to using that secret information (most of which wasn't really all that secret). Today, she has an op-ed in USA Today in which she criticizes the Obama administration for not being tougher with Iran and its nuclear ambitions.

And what source does she use to back up her claims about Iran's plans? Why, the leaked diplomatic cables: "We suspected this before, but now we know for sure because of leaked diplomatic cables."

Ah, well, if you're a quitter and finish only half of your elected term as governor, you can sit back and criticize your opponents without having to be held responsible for anything yourself.

But it does seem a bit gratuitous to denounce the means through which you obtained the information you're so happy to use.

Ralph

Take that !!!, Sen. McNothing

Senator McNothing looked like nothing so much as a petulant child having a temper tantrum when, having delivered his last angry tirade against it, he stormed out of the Senate chamber when he saw that DADT repeal was going to pass. He called it a sad day and predicted serious trouble that could put soldiers lives at risk.

It seems in the end he had little influence; the vote was 2 to 1 for repeal. His sometimes buddy, Lindsey Graham, and others joined him in vocal opposition. Graham, himself the subject of persistent rumors that he is gay, seems to be treading on risky waters there; although there's really no need to out him now that repeal has passed.

But the real blow to this pair, whom one blogger refers to as "the mean girls" of the senate, must have come on the day Obama signed repeal into law, when the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine service chiefs all have said that they are ready to move forward on implementing the change -- and they will do so expeditiously. Even those who opposed the change.

In his press conference, President Obama addressed this. He had talked with each of them separately, and he reported "all said that we are going to implement this smartly and swiftly, and they are confident that it will not have an effect on our military effectiveness."

Let me suggest that McNothing and Graham, both of them ex-military men, exert a little of this same military discipline and start respecting the orders of the commander in chief. A little more inflammatory prediction of disorder and risk to the troops -- and they could be accused of inciting rebellion and helping to bring about the trouble they're warning against.

Think about it, you "mean girls."

Ralph

This lame duck is a pretty good duck

This has been a very good week for President Obama and the Democrats in Congress.

Once the logjam was broken with the compromised (and to many, odious) tax bill that extended obscene tax cuts to the wealthy, but also extended unemployment benefits and other measures that benefit middle class Americans, it seems Obama had a charmed touch on getting his bills passed.

Howard Fineman (Huffington Post) wrote:

But through dogged patience, and adaptable style and a refusal to panic, the president has piled up the longest list of new laws, treaties and administrative actions anyone has seen here in decades.

Fineman's new-found respect for the president is evident between the lines of the article.

Obama lost on the immigration reform bill but then went on to pass: food-safety and child nutrition bills, a Korean trade bill, repeal of DADT, the New Start nuclear arms treaty, and aid (albeit reduced in amount) for first responders.

These wins are doubly significant, because they do not represent the GOP leadership having a change of heart. Except for the tax cut compromise, the leaders still opposed most of these bills. It was that Obama and the Senate Democrats were able to get an increasing number of moderate Republicans to break with their leaders and vote for sensible legislation. That bodes well for the future. Some of them will not be back, of course, like Voinovich of Ohio and Bennet of Utah. But it did show a new willingness to break ranks with the GOP leadership and party line that began to have a feeling of momentum toward sanity.

Add these to the health care reform and the tax cut/unemployment benefits bills -- and this has been quite a year for the president and the democrats in Congress.

Now, here's my question: if he had not compromised as he did on the tax cut/unemployment bill -- would these other bills have gotten passed?

This is what I argue with Richard about: if you hold out for what really ought to be, do you not sometimes evoke a backlash in your opponents that keeps you from getting other things as well? I think the past few weeks in the Senate suggest we would have not gotten all these things this week had we held out for letting the tax cuts expire for the wealthy. And I don't like that any better than anyone else does -- but I do like what was accomplished.

Ralph

Pontifical incoherence

Maybe it's time for Pope Benedict XVI to retire. He is becoming incoherent -- or at least his conflicting statements and retractions and "clarifications" add up to . . . well, incoherence.

Take the now-fatigued issue of what he said about male prostitutes using a condom -- maybe, sort of, might not be so bad -- or, rather, it might be a step in the direction of taking moral responsibility, or something like that. That doesn't make it right -- just sort of, maybe, all right as the lesser of two evils.

Of course, that is, as long as the reason for using it was to prevent the spread of HIV -- not to prevent pregnancy, heaven forbid. I guess the trick is, as you unroll the condom over you-know-what, you must repeat: this is to prevent HIV, not babies; this is to prevent HIV, not babies. That's why he used the example of male prostitutes (apparently not realizing that women also employ male prostitutes and, ahem, women do get pregnant. Hadn't you heard, Sir?

As an example of how committed the pope and the Vatican are to the non-prevention of pregnancy, they won't even address this in the light of an HIV + man and his wife -- can he use a condom to prevent infecting her? They won't say, except to repeat that the position has not changed. Using any form of birth control is evil. Evil, do you hear?

Seems that the Vatican has a commission studying the question of married couples where one is HIV+. But suddenly their work has been suspended, indefinitely. It's really hard, you know, trying to make sense out of nonsense.

Well, now, months later, the issue still seems unclear -- er, incoherent? So the Vatican released yet another statement to clarify that, of course, the pope did not "recommend the use of condoms under any circumstances." So, what did he say then?

"An action which is objectively evil, even if a lesser evil, can never be licitly willed," the Vatican said. Silly me. That makes it entirely clear. How did I ever misunderstand something so simple?

Now, if that weren't incoherent enough, Pope B. told Vatican officials in his traditional end-of-year speech on Monday that the church needs to look at its own culpability in the child sex-abuse scandal. OK, good start -- but, he hastened to add, he also blamed a secular society in which child pornography "is seemingly considered normal by society."

Say what ???? Which planet are you inhabiting, Benedict?

Never have laws against child pornography been as stringent as they are, at least in the U.S., where it is a felony simply to possess child pornography. A man who has never even touched a child may go to prison for years and years because he downloaded some videos.

I'm not saying it's wrong to go after child pornographers so aggressively. But simple viewers, curiosity seekers? The reasoning, of course, is that any video depicting sex between adults and children means that a child was actually sexually abused in making the video. And possession of the video is aiding and abetting the crime.

What I am saying is that the pope is wrong. It isn't in secular society where child abuse is condoned. It is -- or was -- in the back rooms of the churches and the rectories -- and in the Vatican itself -- where abusive priests were "forgiven," quietly transferred to other parishes where they might work with children again, and their records sealed to protect the priests, not the children.

So, please, Mr. Pope. Don't blame the church's failures on a secular society. Clean your own house; admit your own laxity and culpability. Sir.

Ralph

The census

Preliminary reports from the release of the 2010 national census today suggest a big shift in population (and thus representation in the House) toward the more conservative Southern and Western states.

Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Washington will gain at least one seat each, with Texas the big winner, adding four.

Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania will each lose at least one.

Definitely an overall blue to red shift -- at least it seems on the surface. And that will probably be the effect overall.

However, it won't necessarily mean that all those individual seats will shift from blue to red. First, some of the losers have conservative reps already.

Second, we shouldn't assume that people moving from Massachusetts to Texas suddenly become conservative. So the effect may be mitigated a little by a few seats here and there shifting from red to blue within a red state.

Also some of the buildup in population of the southern and western states is a growing Hispanic population. They tend to vote more liberal.

Wishful thinking? Sure. But there's some truth, too.

Probably the biggest effect is going to be felt, not in the actual population shifts, but in the fact that the governors and legislatures in those states gaining will be in charge of redrawing the district lines -- and they will magnify the effect by creating districts that favor their own party. Most of the gainers have Republican governors, probably legislatures too.

Ralph

Here, here !!

Joel Klein used his space as Time magazine political columnist to say what he thinks about John McNothing.

I used to know a different John McCain, the guy who proposed comprehensive immigration reform with Ted Kennedy, the guy--a conservative, to be sure, but an honorable one--who refused to indulge in the hateful strictures of his party's extremists. His public fall has been spectacular, a consequence of politics--he "needed" to be reelected--and personal pique. He's a bitter man now, who can barely tolerate the fact that he lost to Barack Obama. But he lost for an obvious reason: his campaign proved him to be puerile and feckless, a politician who panicked when the heat was on during the financial collapse, a trigger-happy gambler who chose an incompetent for his vice president. He has made quite a show ever since of demonstrating his petulance and lack of grace.

I disagree with one thing. I'm not sure he was ever an honorable man. Perhaps when he was being the independent maverick, that was also a calculated image that he thought, at that time, would gain him the most traction. How does someone with real integrity lose it so completely?

Ralph

Lie of the Year

PolitiFact.com, which monitors the factual truth of public statements, has selected for its "Lie of the Year" designation the Republican mantra that brands Obama's health care reform plan as "government takeover of health care."

And who deserves the dishonor for coining and selling that phrase as the Republican talking point? None other than Frank Luntz, the word-smith darling of conservatives. His self-described specialty is “testing language and finding words that will help his clients sell their product or turn public opinion on an issue or a candidate.”

Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with that. Our friend and colleague Drew Westin does the same thing. It's how you use it. Drew, I'm convinced, tries to help Democrats get across their positive programs in a way that people will get the truth. Luntz and his clients seem to me to use language to obscure the truth, misrepresent the facts, and fool the voters.

What a difference.

Quoting from PolitiFact:

PolitiFact editors and reporters have chosen "government takeover of health care" as the 2010 Lie of the Year. Uttered by dozens of politicians and pundits, it played an important role in shaping public opinion about the health care plan and was a significant factor in the Democrats' shellacking in the November elections. . . .

By selecting "government takeover" as Lie of the Year, PolitiFact is not making a judgment on whether the health care law is good policy.

The phrase is simply not true. . . .

PolitiFact reporters have studied the 906-page bill and interviewed independent health care experts. We have concluded it is inaccurate to call the plan a government takeover because it relies largely on the existing system of health coverage provided by employers.

It's true that the law does significantly increase government regulation of health insurers. But it is, at its heart, a system that relies on private companies and the free market.

OK. But let's go a step further. What is so wrong with government run health care? I, for one, would welcome it in some form, because we could have a better health care system at lower costs -- just like in France, which is considered in most cases to be the best in the world.

In fact, I do have it now, in the form of Medicare. Along with my AARP supplement, I am totally satisfied with it, as a patient. As a physician, I would have complaints because they reimburse too little, often not even meeting actual expenses of the doctor's office, and maybe require too much paperwork.

Sure, for the wealthy, the U.S. probably offers the best health care. But if you look at a system and at the overall health of a nation, we are way way down the list. At a much higher cost than anywhere else.

So -- "government takeover of health care"? Bring it on.

But then I am not your average Joe six-pack who just wants to prove his masculinity and protect his insecure sense of autonomy -- and is easily manipulated with clever word-smithing by the likes of Frank Luntz and his Republican clients.

Ralph

Congress seems to be working again

After two years of frustrating gridlock, as the losing Republicans "just said no" about everything, it seems like maybe Congress is working again. I don't mean working, as in putting in the hours. I mean doing effective legislative work. Passing DADT repeal is an example.

As much as I am ecstatic about what this means for the gay community -- to say nothing of thousands of military gays and for the military itself -- I am almost as excited by the fact that the administration and congress did something together that worked.

Even on the tax/spending bill -- as much as we hate the tax cuts for the wealthy and the too-low estate tax -- look at it in a broader perspective. The more conservative groups hate it, the more progressive groups hate it, but those near the middle think it's great. So maybe that's where it needs to be in a congress that's almost equally divided. Both sides got some of what they wanted; both sides gave in and accepted some of what they hated.

It feels like maybe the system has been restored. There's now even talk of growing bipartisan support for changing the senate rules -- at least on the anonymous "holds" and perhaps some changes in the filibuster rule as well.

My message to the progressives whose disappointment turns them against Obama: elect him a congress that agrees with you. I'm all for that -- but until we have that, let's take the best deal we can get with what we've got.

And give him some credit for leadership too. Leadership is not just getting up on a soapbox and yelling, or twisting arms in back rooms like LBJ. Leadership also is carefully laying the groundwork, bringing people together, getting them talking, empowering others to do their jobs, giving them the opportunity, and then helping apply pressure to close the deal.

Mickey Nardo says Obama is essentially a congressman. His failing may be that he sometimes should be a president instead. But there are times -- like this -- when what the president needs to do is facilitate the restoration of a functioning congress. I think that is what is happening now. And that in itself is a remarkable achievement, given that his party just lost control of the House and now has only a marginal majority in the Senate.

Ralph

DADT IS REALLY, REALLY DEAD

FINAL VOTE TO REPEAL

DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL

65 to 31

**********

That is better than a 2 to 1 majority. WOW !!! What an amazing turn-around.

Yes, it does not go into effect immediately. First, both Secretary Gates and President Obama have to certify that the military is ready for the change. Then Congress has 60 days to . . . what?

I'm not quite sure what they have the power to do at that point. It's probably primarily a face-saving strategy, as is the certification. Nevertheless, it means that gay and lesbian service persons need to stay closeted for a little while longer. Although I seriously doubt there will be any discharges processed from now on.

Now, what about Obama's strategy? He could have ended it by executive order, or at least ended enforcement of it, from day one of his presidency. He chose not to, and I have come to agree that this was the wisest course.

Here's what happened instead. He ordered the extensive survey, which showed that the majority of the military and their spouses say that letting gays serve openly will cause little or no problem. A large majority in another poll said that they had knowingly served with a gay person at some point in the past -- and the majority of them found no problem with that.

Consider what a difference this made in the deliberations, particularly in the Senate, which held hearings and its vote after the report came out. Also consider that Obama had the support of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Secretary of Defense, Gen. Petraeus, Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Colin Powell. Would they have all been as actively supportive if Obama had ended it with an executive order?

Waiting for the December 1st report also gave more time for getting politicians used to the idea that it might not hurt them with voters. As more and more individual congressmen began to express support, it encouraged others to do so.

In the end, it was clear that there was a consensus building that this was the right thing to do, and that it can be done. This is an example of the approach Obama brought to the office and what he has been trying to do in other areas as well. It hasn't always worked, often has not; and there are some issues he would have done well not even to try it. But this time, it worked.

What would likely have happened if he had "fought harder for it" with Congress is that it would have hardened resistance. It would have been defeated. And then we would have a court decision that would have imposed the change on an unprepared military instead of giving the military time to decide it was the right thing to do, with all the rancor of "activist judges" and claims that civilians just don't understand what it's like on the battlefield, etc. Much better to have the main meme be that the rank and file troops support it, and even those who don't will adapt -- or they can just leave, according to Gen. Petraeus.

Here is one time, at least, when I am convinced that Obama's way was the right way.

Ralph

PS: A few days ago, a headline framed the Senate vote as a replay of Obama vs McNothing. We know how that turned out. McNothing's opposition was about as effective as a wet noodle before the invention of Viagra.

I think I'll have to change my most-favorite headline to "John McNothing is dead."

DADT *** IS *** DEAD

Just five minutes ago around 11:45am, the Senate took a cloture vote to move the repeal of DADT to debate and final vote. The vote to invoke cloture was:

63 for, 33 against

Debate and final vote will likely be this afternoon. This procedural vote almost certainly indicates that repeal will pass.

Stay tuned.

Ralph

DADT is dead #16

The Senate will vote tomorrow. This letter from an anonymous gay soldier about to deploy to Iran was posted on Huffington Post today, having been previously posted on Jezebel.com.

If there is any debate before the vote tomorrow, I wish someone would read this poignant letter and then let John McNothing and his ilk cast their repugnant votes against repeal.

I don't know if this was actually written by a soldier or perhaps by a good writer who used the opportunity to make a point. It doesn't matter. The letter speaks truth, whoever wrote it.

Maybe tonight is the last night anyone will have to endure the silence. Let us hope so.

I'm writing letters to my loved ones in case I don't return from Afghanistan. I hope my partner never has to open his. If he does, it will ask him to tell who I was, because I couldn't.

I was a teenager when my brother came home with an American flag draped over his coffin, so I understand the fragility of life and the dangers of serving. And the additional burden of Don't Ask, Don't Tell is one I choose to carry. I volunteered for deployment, and I continue to serve. It's my deepest core value, whatever the cost.

The silence is the hardest part. I listen intently as my fellow soldiers talk about facing the reality of leaving their loved ones for a year and all the life events that will be missed. I don't talk about my own experience at all, because it's easier to come across as cold and removed than to risk slipping and mentioning that my loved one is of the same gender. For all I know, there are other gay soldiers in my unit, ones who understand what I'm going through. My gay friends in civilian life are supportive, but they don't often understand the military or soldiering. That camouflage is another burden I carry as I prepare to leave.

It's also difficult knowing that this policy is nothing more than politics. I try not to think too much about DADT and how destructive it is to peoples' lives, to military units, readiness, and to the progression of our country to a better place. But when I do let myself think about these things, I seethe with anger.

I am angry at the politicians who have for several years talked the talk on the policy, heightening the awareness of homosexuality among military personnel, and then done little to nothing to actually change it. We gay soldiers are the ones who suffer but can't openly participate in the debate.

I am angry at certain senators -- John McCain comes to mind -- who have obviously lost touch with any understanding of the current generation of service men and women, who, as we all know, support repeal at overwhelming numbers. They hide behind a vitriolic rhetoric fraught with illogical arguments and innuendo, smothered by their obvious fear.

And so we wait to see what the Senate will do. In the meantime, I have to remind myself to look elsewhere for comfort, to remember the courage of people like Dan Choi and his consistent devotion to changing this policy, at a very personal cost. Or Katie Miller, who made public at West Point who she really is, but would seek return the moment the policy is overturned. I also remind myself of the moral courage of Secretary Gates and Admiral Mullen, thankful that some at the highest level of military leadership get it even as others call our plight a "distraction."

And I'm reminded of the moral courage of my partner, who encourages me everyday to continue to put on that uniform; who believes that some things are worthy of our energies; who quietly plods along and prepares for my deployment as I do the same. I know as a soldier, it is the people we leave behind who bear the real brunt of deployment, who hold it all together, who send the care packages and pray for our returns. He'll have to do it on his own though. There are no support groups for the gay partners left back home.

In the meantime, gay soldiers who are still serving in silence will continue to put on our rucksacks and do what our country asks of us -- and wait.

Amen.

Ralph

Proof of the obvious

A study done at the University of Maryland has shown that viewers of Fox News are significantly more likely to believe misinformation about current issues.

Compared with viewers/readers of other news outlets, FoxNews vieweres were:

12% more likely to believe that the stimulus caused job losses.

31% more likely to believe that the health care law will worsen the deficit.

26% more likely to believe the economy is getting worse.

30% more likely to believe that most scientists deny that climate change is occurring.

14% more likely to believe the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts.

14% more likely to believe their own income taxes have gone up.

And, of course, it's what people believe, not the actual facts, that influence how they feel about the ones they think caused it -- usually the same ones that should be getting credit for the actual, opposite, true situation.

I would put this -- deliberate misinformation being sold to/bought by the American people -- alongside the influence of money in our governance as the two biggest obstacles to bringing about progressive change in this country.

Ralph

Truman/Dewey deja vu

Remember the big newspaper headlines "Dewey Wins !!!" which the next morning had to be changed to "Truman Pulls Surprise Upset"?

This morning conflicting headlines on Huffington Post are still posted as of noon:

12/16/10 9:53 pm. "Tea Party Win: A New Era Begins as Conservatives Help Kill Major Bill." The article details how the GOP congressional leaders bowed to the pressure from the new insurgent group, led by Sen. Jim DeMint, and refused to allow debate on the appropriations bill.

12/17/10 4:03 am. "Tax Cut Passage Passed by Congress." The bill is now on its way for President Obama's signature. There must have been some intense negotiating in the dead of night. Obama was directly involved, making phone calls to key senators.

Aside from the off-again, on-again status of the bill, leading to conflicting headlines; and as much as we hate the gratuitous give-away to the wealthiest Americans -- the bill contains much that the Democrats wanted as well.

My guess is that this will prove to be the pivotal point in Obama's presidency and will ensure his re-election in 2012. You may disagree with him, but I think he no longer looks weak and ineffective. I predict that this is the first step in some real cooperation from the new GOP leadership in the House. We may actually begin to see some bipartisan success.

We would all like to see more forceful leadership from Obama on getting progressive legislation passed. But the fact is that we have nearly equally divided congressional houses -- and I'm willing to give Obama credit for playing his hand the way he thinks is going to be most productive in the long run -- at least, I'm willing to give him some more time in this new climate to prove himself.

As Charles Krauthammer pointed out in his AJC column today, Obama has recovered from his mid-term shellacking a full year sooner than Bill Clinton did in a comparable situation. And we call Clinton "the comeback kid."

Ralph

DADT is dead #15

My silence lately has been mostly due to the worst cold I've had in a decade, and I just couldn't get motivated to write something -- plus, the awful idea of extending tax cuts for the very rich just added to my feeling dispirited.

So, I'm going back to the topic that may, just may, turn out to be -- at long last -- a happy success. And, Richard, please, this time . . . don't rain on the parade by greeting my happy report by asking: don't I fault Obama for not fighting harder for it? Let one happy occasion go by without your obligatory trashing him who has disappointed you. If this moment of success comes, let's just savor it. It has been a long, hard process -- and DADT is only a small part of a much longer and harder road for gay people.

And, of course, the homophobic old men in the Republican party could pull defeat out of the jaws of victory here. Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert said in the House debate that letting gays serve openly would be a threat to the existence of America. "He Who Shall Not Be Named" doestn't go quite that far -- just that we shouldn't introduce such big changes in a time of war.

Why does anyone pay any attention to him anymore? On this issue, look who disagrees with him: Commander in Chief Obama and VP Biden, Sec. of Defense Gates, Chm of the Joint Chiefs Mullen, top general in Afghanistan Petraeus, Chm of Joint Chiefs and President when DADT was instituted, Gen. Colin Powell, and Pres. Bill Clinton.

Poor shrinking McNobody; he is so small compared to them-- no integrity and no credibility left.

Consider this, in addition to the simple fact that repealing DADT is the RIGHT thing to do:

1. All those top military leaders think it should be repealed, now.

2. Even the head of the Marines, who is himself opposed, said that if it is repealed the Marines will adapt and, in their characteristic fashion, do the best job of all in doing so. No defiant, undermining spirit there.

3. Something like 77% of Americans now believe it should be repealed.

4. Something like 70% of those 140,000 who responded to a poll of military and their families said it would pose little or no problem.

5. On Wednesday, the House passed repeal by 250-175.

6. Steney Hoyer, the #2 Dem in the House, has said that his counterparts in the Senate say that they now have sufficient votes to pass it there.

So: This would be a very significant, historic milestone in gay rights -- to have Congress voluntarily -- without court order (although there are signs that would be coming soon), they will have voted in favor of letting gay men and lesbians serve openly in our military organizations.

That is HUGE.

Ralph

DADT us dead #14

**** NOW HEAR THIS ****

"THE TIMES, THEY ARE A-CHANGING"

Command Sergeant Major Marvin Hill, a senior aide to General David Petraeus, said in an interview that will be aired on Washington Watch tomorrow that he believes the troops are ready for the change [repeal of DADT]. And he added:

"If there are people who cannot deal with the change, then they're going to have to do what's best for their troops and best for the organization and best for the military service and exit the military service, so that we can move forward -- if that's the way that we have to go."

Just pause and think what a profound change that is. For the very first time, someone in an official capacity is saying that maybe it is not the gay young men and women who would "upset unit cohesion." Rather, it is the homophobes who cause the problem. If they don't like it, they can leave.

Petraeus himself told Congress last March that he believed the time had come to repeal DADT. And about his personal experience of serving with openly gay CIA officers: "after the 10 seconds of awareness wore off, the focus was on the professional attributes of these individuals."

Now this is the kind of leadership that is needed. The incredibly shrinking John McCain has now become almost too small to be seen.

Ralph

The Republican worldview

This from Robert Reich on Huffington Post is succinct, clear -- worth reading it all.

Apart from its extraordinary cost and regressive tilt, the tax deal negotiated between the president and the Republicans has another fatal flaw.

It confirms the Republican worldview.

Americans want to know what happened to the economy and how to fix it. At least Republicans have a story -- the same one they've been flogging for thirty years. The bad economy is big government's fault and the solution is to shrink government.

Here's the real story. For three decades, an increasing share of the benefits of economic growth have gone to the top 1 percent. Thirty years ago, the top got 9 percent of total income. Now they take in almost a quarter. Meanwhile, the earnings of the typical worker have barely budged.

The vast middle class no longer has the purchasing power to keep the economy going. (The rich spend a much lower portion of their incomes.) The crisis was averted before now only because middle-class families found ways to keep spending more than they took in -- by women going into paid work, by working longer hours, and finally by using their homes as collateral to borrow. But when the housing bubble burst, the game was up.

The solution is to reorganize the economy so the benefits of growth are more widely shared. Exempt the first $20,000 of income from payroll taxes, and apply payroll taxes to incomes over $250,000. Extend Medicare to all. Extend the Earned Income Tax Credit all the way up through families earning $50,000. Make higher education free to families that now can't afford it. Rehire teachers. Repair and rebuild our infrastructure. Create a new WPA to put the unemployed back to work.

Pay for this by raising marginal income taxes on millionaires (under Eisenhower, the highest marginal rate was 91 percent, and the economy flourished). A millionaire marginal tax of 70 percent would eliminate the nation's future budget deficit. In addition, impose a small tax on all financial transactions (even a tiny one -- one half of one percent -- would bring in $200 billion a year, enough to rehire every teacher who's been laid off as well as provide universal preschool for all toddlers). Promote unions for low-wage workers.

But here's the obstacle. As income and wealth have risen to the top, so has political power. Money is being used to bribe politicians and fill the airwaves with misleading ads that block all of this.

The midterm elections offered dramatic evidence. NBC news reported shortly after Election Day, for example, that Crossroads GPS, one of the biggest Republican secret-money organizations, got "a substantial portion" of its loot from a group of extremely wealthy Wall Street hedge fund and private equity managers. Why would they sink so much money into the midterms? Because they've been so strongly opposed to a proposal by congressional Democrats to treat the earnings of hedge fund and private equity managers as ordinary income rather than capital gains (subject to only a 15 percent rate).

In other words, the problem isn't big government. It's power and privilege at the top.

So another part of the solution is to limit the impact of big money on politics. This requires, for example, publicly-financed campaigns, disclosure of all sources of political spending, and resurrection of the fairness doctrine for broadcasters.

It's the same power and privilege that got the Bush tax cuts in the first place, and claimed the lion's share of its benefits. The same power and privilege that got the estate tax phased out.

Get it? By agreeing to another round of massive tax cuts for the wealthy, the president confirms the Republican story. Cutting taxes on the rich while freezing discretionary spending (which he's also agreed to do) affirms that the underlying problem is big government, and the solution is to shrink government and expect the extra wealth at the top to trickle down to everyone else.

Obama's new tax compromise is not only bad economics; it's also disastrous from the standpoint of educating the public about what has happened and what needs to happen in the future. It reinforces the Republican story and makes mincemeat out of the truthful one Democrats should be telling.

Those who wrote our Constitution left us a near-perfect blueprint for a deliberative democracy. We have screwed it up so that it is barely recognizable and barely functional. Is it too late to get out of this mess? Is it even possible, given who has the power now?

Ralph

Olbermann skewers Obama

This is worth watching: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/08/olbermann-tax-cut-obama-special-comment_n_793565.html

It is painful for me to watch, because I have stuck with my belief in and hope for Obama to provide the needed leadership. But that belief and hope are just about gone, and Olbermann's angry articulateness rings so true.

Two memorable lines:

He calls the compromise "a searing and transcendent capitulation."

And this:

"This President negotiates down from a position of strength
better than any politician in our recent history."

Ralph

Obama's bad decision?

I have to say that my thoughts are deeply divided about Obama's compromise deal with the GOP leaders to extend all the Bush tax cuts for 2 years in exchange for a 13 month extension of unemployment benefits, plus some other goodies (like a 2% one-year cut in social security tax and some more tax incentives to encourage job creation).

The deciding factor for me would have to be knowing whether he could have gotten a better deal. Like all my progressive friends, I would like to think that he could by being a bold leader and using his bully pulpit to denounce Republican greed for what it is. But no one knows that for sure.

The other side is that middle class taxes would go up and there would be no jobless benefits -- and then we'd be into January and Republican control of the House and virtual control of the Senate on anything that matters.

Then it would at least be very clear who were the villains. Now, it puts Obama in that role with not just progressive Democrats but, for example, conservative Democrat Mary Landrieu as well, who called it "almost morally corrupt."

What I need Obama to explain is why it is that he always has to be the one to give in to their key issues in order to get something. Why can't he play his cards so that they have to give in once in a while? His defense is to lash out at "hostage-taking Republicans." Steney Hoyer says we had "to pay the ransom."

But if "tax cuts for billionaires" doesn't have any traction with the American people (and we know it does) -- then you're just conceding that Repubs play the game better than we do.

I don't like it. I agree that it seems morally corrupt.

But what would have been the alternative? I just don't know.

Ralph

[This is Richard's cue to come in and tell us for certain that he knows Obama could have gotten a better deal -- or at least someone, if not Obama, could have. And maybe he's right]

Nice folks

Those nice folks who want to protect the "institution of marriage" have taken to being not so nice in their tactics to try to stop the courts from overturning laws that ban same-sex marriage.

The National Organization for Marriage -- now doesn't that sound nice? -- has become vicious, and they're going after the judges who decide these cases. That almost seems un-American -- except I guess they're just exercising their all-American right to free speech.

Here's what they've done:

1. They attacked the sexual orientation of the judge who ruled that California's Proposition 8 was unconstitutional because it denied equal rights to a group of citizens. They wanted to have him declared disqualified and invalidate his judicial judgment based on his perceived (not acknowledged) identity as a gay man. This was not a surreptitious whisper campaign; it was an out and out frontal attack.

2. Although not located in Iowa, NOM organized and funded a campaign to unseat three judges who were part of the unanimous decision that allows same-sex marriage in Iowa. Judges are not elected in Iowa, but at the end of an appointed term, they are up for a "retention vote" -- a sort of vote of confidence/no confidence. Almost unprecedented, these three judges lost the vote for being retained for another term. And the only, only issue that was even mentioned was the vote on the same-sex marriage issue. Sounds Mafia-like in its vindictiveness. And it wasn't even Iowans themselves who organized this; it came from out of state NOM.

3. Now they have organized a campaign trying to disqualify one of the three federal appeals court judges hearing the appeal of the Prop8 issue today -- on the basis that the judge's wife works for an organization that opposes Prop8. If that disqualifies a judge, then Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is in deep trouble.

Where does this lead? Directly away from "an independent judiciary," that's for sure, if judges have to think about losing their jobs because of a specific vote on a specific case. And now that political money can flow unimpeded wherever it will, we're at risk for having a Judiciary that's bought and paid for, just like Congress.

Now who is un-American? NOM is the one with the wrong values.

Ralph

PS: Any organization that has Maggie Gallagher as a spokesperson can't be much good. She is a silly, stupid woman who used to write a column in the AJC. She is an anti-gay fanatic.

To tell the truth . . . #2

The Atlantic magazine's David Samuels' article "The Shameful Attacks on Julian Assange" takes a similar position as did Matthew Dowd:

Julian Assange and Pfc Bradley Manning have done a huge public service by making hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents available on Wikileaks -- and, predictably, no one is grateful. Manning, a former army intelligence analyst in Iraq, faces up to 52 years in prison. He is currently being held in solitary confinement at a military base in Quantico, Virginia, where he is not allowed to see his parents or other outside visitors.

Assange, the organizing brain of Wikileaks, enjoys a higher degree of freedom living as a hunted man in England under the close surveillance of domestic and foreign intelligence agencies -- but probably not for long. Not since President Richard Nixon directed his minions to go after Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg and New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan . . . has a working journalist and his source been subjected to the kind of official intimidation and threats that have been directed at Assange and Manning by high-ranking members of the Obama Administration. . . .

But the truly scandalous and shocking response to the Wikileaks documents has been that of other journalists, who make the Obama Administration sound like the ACLU. In a recent article in The New Yorker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Steve Coll . . . labeled Wikileaks' activities - formerly known as journalism - by his newly preferred terms of "vandalism" and "First Amendment-inspired subversion." . . .

Coll's invective is hardly unique, In fact, it was only a pale echo of the language used earlier this year by a columnist at his former employer, The Washington Post. In a column titled "WikiLeaks Must Be Stopped," Mark Thiessen wrote that "WikiLeaks is not a news organization; it is a criminal enterprise," and urged that the site should be shut down "and its leadership brought to justice." . . . The Times' normally mild-mannered David Brooks asserted in his column this week that "Assange seems to be an old-fashioned anarchist" and worried that Wikileaks will "damage the global conversation." . . .

The true importance of Wikileaks -- and the key to understanding the motivations and behavior of its founder -- lies not in the contents of the latest document dump but in the technology that made it possible, which has already shown itself to be a potent weapon to undermine official lies and defend human rights. . . . The importance of Assange's efforts to human rights workers in the field were recognized last year by Amnesty International, which gave him its Media Award . . . .

Wikileaks is a powerful new way for reporters and human rights advocates to leverage global information technology systems to break the heavy veil of government and corporate secrecy that is slowly suffocating the American press. . . .

In a memorandum entitled "Transparency and Open Government" addressed to the heads of Federal departments and agencies and posted on WhiteHouse.gov, President Obama instructed that "Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing." The Administration would be wise to heed his words -- and to remember how badly the vindictive prosecution of Daniel Ellsberg ended for the Nixon Administration. And American reporters, Pulitzer Prizes and all, should be ashamed for joining in the outraged chorus that defends a burgeoning secret world whose existence is a threat to democracy.

". . . And then they came after me, and there was no one left to defend me."

Ralph

And now for the good news

The board of the International Atomic Energy Agency voted on Friday to set up a global nuclear fuel bank. The Agency is an arm of the United Nations, and its board is made up of representatives of 35 nations.

The purpose is to provide a means of obtaining nuclear fuel for peaceful purposes by smaller nations that might otherwise be tempted to produce their own nuclear material, some of which could then be diverted to make nuclear weapons or possibly fall into terrorists' hands. The bank would provide nuclear fuel in the form of fuel rods, which are much more difficult to reprocess into weapons-grade material.

Sam Nunn's Nuclear Threat Initiative has worked for years to establish the bank and had secured a pledge from Warren Buffett in 2006 to give $50 million, provided that the atomic agency established the bank and that other nations contributed as much as $100 million or the equivalent in nuclear fuel. Contributors thus far include Kuwait, the European Union, Norway, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States.

Now that these conditions have been met, the project can move forward. Nunn hailed the IAEA vote to create the bank as a breakthrough in international cooperation. It will "enable peaceful uses of nuclear energy while reducing the risks of proliferation and catastrophic terrorism."

This is good news without any down side to it. How refreshing !

Ralph

To tell the truth . . .

Matthew Dowd, who served as chief strategist in the re-election campaign of George W. Bush in 2004 and who now is an ABC News political analyst, raises some important questions concerning the uproar of the WikiLeaks release of U.S. diplomatic documents:

He quotes his Iraq war veteran son as having asked, in a post-Thanksgiving dinner conversation:

“When as a country did we become a place where the government gets upset when its secrets are revealed but has no problem knowing all our secrets and invading our privacy?”

Citing Republican outrage over Hillary Clinton's "secret" meetings on health care planning back in the early 1990's -- and the Democratic outrage over Cheney's "secret" meetings on energy policy in 2000 -- Dowd observes:

Now both sides have gotten together to attack WikiLeaks over the opposite situation: They are criticizing the Internet watchdog for openly releasing information related to how our government conducts foreign policy. . . .

Some would contend that secrecy in domestic policy is a very different matter from secrecy concerning our relations with other nations and their leaders, especially in a time of war. I would agree, up to a certain point. But "secrecy" and "classified documents" offer up an all too convenient cover for mistakes and mendacity, whether it's simple embarrassment or criminal acts, including lies to get us into an illegal war and the war crime of torturing prisoners of war.

Where is the "free press" in this? Dowd asks. The New York Times has defended its right to publish selected portions of the leaked documents (edited to remove some sensitive information). But publishing documents that were supplied to you by another party is viewed differently from the criminal offense of the one who secretly copied the memos and gave them to WikiLeaks. The suspected copier seems clearly to have committed a crime -- he was authorized to work with the documents but his revealing them to others is a serious criminal offense.

But what of the middleman, WikiLeaks, who received the documents and passed them on to the media and tried to make them available online? Is that a crime? This is what the media seems to be avoiding commenting on. When is the whistleblower a hero and when a villain?

Dowd, again:

When did we decide that we trust the government more than its citizens? And that revealing the truth about the government is wrong? And why is the media complicit in this? Did we not learn anything from the run-up to the Iraq war when no one asked hard questions about the justifications for the war and when we accepted statements from government officials without proper pushback?

My own sense is that we should err on the side of telling the truth, even when it’s inconvenient or when it makes our lives—or the business of government—more complicated. And that people who tell the truth should at the very least not be denigrated. . . .

And shouldn’t news organizations be defending WikiLeaks and doing some soul-searching of their own about why they aren’t devoting more resources to the search for the truth? Why is it that the National Enquirer and Internet blogs sometimes seem better than they are at finding out what’s really going on?

The decline of journalistism's "watchdog" function has long been a growing concern of mine. Where are the Edward R. Murrows and the Walter Kronkites? Perhaps it is the Jon Stewarts and the Rachel Maddows -- and the new technology and internet bloggers who will take up that role. WikiLeaks played an important role in this. But there are powerful forces out there, including our own government, trying to crush them. They have already gotten Amazon.com to deny them access to its web spaces.

Where is the outrage?

Ralph

What happens when conservatives actually think ?

Respected political analyst/blogger Dan Froomkin has an interesting article on Huffington Post, titled "An Example of How Civil Political Discouse Threatens Modern Conservatism."

Conventional wisdom says that, if liberals and conservatives would just sit down together in civil discourse, they would find common ground for solving the nation's problems. The implication is that this common ground would be somewhere in the middle of the divisive public posturing of our politicians.

And that is the rhetoric put out by AmericaSpeaks to describe what happened last June when this supposedly non-partisan, non-political foundation organized 57 local meetings across the nation, involving some 3,500 ordinary Americans, to discuss ways of handling the federal deficit.

The foundation is organized and funded by conservative deficit hawk Pete Peterson, and the framing of the questions had a definite hawkish slant (i.e., initially participants were asked to discuss options for controlling health care costs, but single payer was not one of the options.) A press release yesterday, along with the foundation's report from the meetings, declares "Liberals and Conservatives Find Common Ground About How to Resolve National Debt."

According to Froomkin, however, the common ground was not in the middle but definitely toward the liberal/progressive position. Participants rebelled against the hawkish, conservative framing and came up with their own solutions. Citing numerous statistics on individual issues, Froomkin shows, for example, that 39% of conservatives became more supportive of cutting defense spending, with only 12% less supportive; and 24% became more supportive of raising taxes on the wealthy, with 12% less supportive.

On the other hand, examples of liberals shifting to a more conservative position were statistically negligible.

Froomkin concludes, despite the final report from the foundation that blurred all this and tried to paint a picture of "finding common ground" that implied "meeting in the middle:"

So the real lesson there would appear to be that if liberals and conservatives actually sat down and listened to each other, the result would be widespread agreement on what are traditionally called liberal positions on the issues -- but which perhaps should be renamed simply common sense.

That, I guess, is what happens when one side of the political debate has departed so far from reality that its arguments don't easily survive genuine contact with the enemy.

Hear !! Hear !! So that's what the Republican noise machine and the blustering are all about: Don't let your base have a chance to really think about the issues. Flood them with distortions, slogans, smears, and trivia. Because actual contemplation of the truth means they lose.

And winning is everything, isn't it?

Ralph

Couldn't happen to a more deserving cad

Nigerian government officials plan to charge Dick Cheney in a bribery case involving Halliburton in the years that Cheney was CEO. It involves an alleged $180 million bribe to secure a $6 billion natural gas contract in Nigeria. Twelve Halliburton employees in Lagos were arrested but later released.

This case, of course, will never come close to the X-VP himself. But any reminder of his association with that firm keeps his shady legacy alive.

Ralph

DADT is dead #13

Maybe more than you wanted to read about DADT. Obviously, it's a major issue for me.

Now comes the drama of senate hearings. Testimony from DoD Secretary Gates, Adm. Mullen, and the authors of the survey report -- all making an almost unarguable case for repeal. But that didn't stop John McCain's shameless demagoguery and reducing his credibility to zero.

Here's a news flash from Huffington Post, quoting the executive director of the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, about McCain:

John McCain's demeanor throughout the testimony of Secretary Gates, Admiral Mullen, General Ham and Mr. Johnson, was entirely dismissive bordering on disrespect. In the testimony, no one made a more powerful argument for repeal today than Admiral Mullen. In a measured, methodical fashion, Admiral Mullen addressed and destroyed each one of McCain's irrational fears about open service. McCain continues to ignore the findings of the report that showed 92% of troops are fine working with gay service members.

In contrast, McCain's buddy Joe Lieberman, for whom I have no great affection, broke with his buddy and strongly endorsed repeal of DADT, a policy which he essentially called "un-American." And Republican senator Susan Collins is a strong supporter of repeal, suggesting that she would even break ranks with the GOP's threat to block cloture on anything until tax cuts are settled.

Joint Chief of Statt Adm. Mullin's opening statement was an eloquent endorsement of repeal:

There are some for whom this debate is all about gray areas. There is no gray area here. We treat each other with respect, or we find another place to work. Period. That’s why I also believe leadership will prove vital. . . .

My belief is, if and when the law changes, our people will lead that change in a manner consistent with the oath they took. As one Marine officer put it, “If that’s what the president orders, I can tell you by God we’re going to excel above and beyond the other services to make it happen.”

And frankly, that’s why I believe that in the long run, repeal of this law makes us a stronger military and improves readiness. It will make us more representative of the country we serve. It will restore to the institution the energy it must now expend in pursuing those who violate the policy. And it will better align those organizational values we claim with those we practice.

As I said back in February, this is about integrity. Our people sacrifice a lot for their country, including their lives. None of them should have to sacrifice their integrity as well.

How in hell can John McCain still try to block this, substituting his own pitiful poor judgment for this unprecedented support from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a veteran of 40 years of military leadership who has risen to the very top military rank?

This should be the final nail in this pipsqueek little man's political coffin. Mullen speaks about integrity. John McCain has no clue what that means. He sold out any he ever had long, long ago.

Ralph

Plain talk

Democratic governor of Ohio, Ted Strickland, was narrowly defeated for re-election. He has some harsh words for the Democratic leadership in Washington. Though he praises Obama for several legislative accomplishments, each of which should be historic in its own right, he says that the Democrats in general suffer from "intellectual elitism" and seem to be averse to populist rhetoric that would more likely resonate with the people.

This is nothing new. Democrats, and progressives particularly, have been bemoaning the lack of a clear message that can counter the Republican's message control. We have the better case to make; but we can't seem to make it.

A case in point, in Strickland's own words, quoted on HP:

But his frustration was evident as the discussion progressed. Talking, unprompted, about the debate over the expiring Bush tax cuts, Strickland said he was dumbfounded at the party's inability to sell the idea that the rates for the wealthy should be allowed to expire.

"I mean, if we can't win that argument we might as well just fold up," he said. "These people are saying we are going to insist on tax cuts for the richest people in the country and we don't care if they are paid for, and we don't think it is a problem if it contributes to the deficit, but we are not going to vote to extend unemployment benefits to working people if they aren't paid for because they contribute to the deficit. I mean, what is wrong with that? How can it be more clear?"

I totally agree.

Ralph

DADT is dead #12

It's official now. The Pentagon's massive survey of military personnel and their families about the effects of repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell is even more supportive of change than leaks had suggested.

We already knew that 70% of the 115,000 responders say, essentially, that it would be no big deal. Only in the Marines was there a significant negative response.

But, even there, 84% of Marines from combat corps units said that they thought they had worked with homosexual service members in the past and found the experience either "good," "very good," or neutral." This undercuts that last-ditch claim that it would be disruptive of the vaunted Marine macho culture.

One of the co-authors of the study, Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson, said this:

"The reality is that there are gay men and lesbians already serving in today's U.S. military, and most Service members recognize this. . . . Further, in the course of our assessment, it became apparent to us that, aside from the moral and religious objections to homosexuality, much of the concern about 'openly' gay Service members is driven by misperceptions and stereotypes."

The report's executive summary includes this:

". . . in recent times a number of other countries have transitioned to policies that permit open military service by gay men and lesbians. These include the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, Italy, and Israel. Significantly, prior to change, surveys of the militaries in Canada and the U.K. indicated much higher levels of resistance than our own survey results -- as high as 65% for some areas -- but the actual implementation of change in those countries went much more smoothly than expected, with little or no disruption."

I really don't know how John McCain can continue to demagogue this. He's already spun all the way around several times and made a fool of himself. This leaves him little room -- even for him, but he'll find a way, you can be sure.

If this doesn't tip the scale of wavering senators, then there's just no redeeming feature left in them. That's all.

Ralph

GOP outrage about the leaks

Julian Assange, the Australian native and founder of Wikileaks, told the Sydney Morning Herald on May 22, 2010 (well before this latest document dump) that Wikileaks has released more classified documents than the rest of the world press combined:

"That's not something I say as a way of saying how successful we are – rather, that shows you the parlous state of the rest of the media. How is it that a team of five people has managed to release to the public more suppressed information, at that level, than the rest of the world press combined? It's disgraceful."

Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsburg said that Assange "is serving our [American] democracy and serving our rule of law precisely by challenging the secrecy regulations." Amnesty International gave him its International Media Award for 2009, and he received the Sam Adams Award for integrity in intelligence. The New York Times editor in chief Bill Keller justified publishing excerpts as in the best interest of the American people.

Not everyone agrees that this is a good thing. The Obama administration has condemned the leaks and may pursue legal action.

She Who Shall Not Be Named used it as another chance to condemn Obama for failing to protect the lives of Americans. She twittered on her Tweety Bird that Assange:

". . . is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands. His past posting of classified documents reveal the identity of more than 100 Arghan sources to the Taliban. Why was he not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders?"

The GOP scourge Rep. Peter King (R-NY) who is ranking minority member on the Homeland Security Committee and presumably is in line to become Chairman in January, said that

". . . if the lives of some Americans are endagnered by the illegal release of classified information by the Likileaks website, then the government should "go after" the people who control Wikileaks for violating the espionage act."

My, my, my. Such high dudgeon. Where was this outrage when officials in the Bush administration intentionally and deliberately leaked the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame to hack journalist Robert Novak -- thus ending a distinguished career and endangering numerous lives of those she had worked with as secret sources and undercover operations.

At least Assange has an ideology that the government's business needs more transparency, and he sees his action as civil disobedience in the service of a good cause.

In contrast, the Plame coverup was all in the interest of protecting the administration's lies about why we were about to invade Iraq in an illegal act of war against a nation that posed no immediate threat to the United States. That is what needed to be exposed, which is what Plame's husband Joe Wilson was doing -- which is why they destroyed Valeria Plame, even if it meant doing it to their very own CIA.

At least one of those leakers has never been identified and brought to justice -- but enjoys his post-White House career as the mastermind of the conservative resurgence and retaking of the House majority. None other than Karl Rove himself, FOX News commentator.

Why, She Who Shall Not Be Named and Rep. King, was KR not pursued -- nay, why was he not waterboarded --and forced to confess and spill all he knew about the president's role in "fixing the evidence" to make the case for invasion?

I'll bet that fat little Rovian pig would have squealed with the first sprinkle of water over his nose. My cup of contempt runneth over.

On a lighter note: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been busy talking to her diplomatic counterparts among our allies to patch up the damage done by these revelations. She reported that some have made light of it, one saying, "Don't worry about it. You should see what we say about you in our dispatches."

Ralph

And now for something different

Finally, a slow news day. Even the Huffington Post's home page is running the same days-old stories, including Obama's 12-stitch, elbow-to-lip cut in a pickup basketball game with friends. And including what has now seemingly become obligatory: the 6 -- count them every day -- always 6 and sometimes even 7 or 8 -- blurb stories with pictures of She Who Shall Not Be Named. It's really tiresome, and she doesn't deserve that much coverage. We can only hope the excess will hasten the burn-out of public fascination.

Anyway, I've been saving this up for just such a slow-news day. One of my hobby-horse complaints is how poorly journalists understand statistics and how they can be manipulated to show almost anything you want. The public is often misled by well-meaning news reporters who simply don't understand the basics. And then there's the whole other realm of the partisan cherry-picking numbers game of junk science and political lying.

Now comes news of a book, The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News, in Politics, and in Life, by Brits Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot, who base it on a popular BBC radio show.

A NYT review begins by debunking, and explaining, some headline grabbers:

"Most people have more than the average number of feet." How's that? Simple. Because of amputations and birth defects, some people have only one foot; and almost no one has more than two. Therefore, the average is somewhat less than two. Therefore, the vase majority of people, having two feet, actually do have more than the average. Get this picture?

Another: "Republicans enjoy sex more than Democrats." Facts: more men than women vote Republican, and men tend to report enjoying sex more than women do. Therefore, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to report enjoying sex.

And a common one from the daily news: "Poll shows majority favor X." Read further, and the numbers show 45% favor X, 43% favor Y, and 12% are undecided. A majority? No, that could at best be called a plurality; but even that is misleading, because the reliability will likely be something like + or - 4%. So it's really a statistical tie. Or sometimes, even correctly calling something a majority, can be very misleading: 51% to 49% is indeed a majority, but the implication of "most people favor" is anything but true. "Majority" is not equivalent to "Most People."

But then you get into reported results of actual or so-called "studies" with real "results" in numbers that can still be very misleading. A lot depends on how representative the sample, on how the questions are asked, and on the what and how of data collection. Some of my favorite examples stem from my long-running battles with anti-gay rhetoric and even in my battle against the pope and his position on condoms last spring.

One of the "studies" that religious conservatives love to quote comes from multiply discredited psychologist Paul Cameron, who claimed that gay men should not be allowed to adopt children because they have a shortened life span. What did he base this on? A "study" in which he recorded the age at death of noted men who had died from AIDS and were listed in the obituary column of a popular gay magazine. Then he compared the age at death of this highly selective sample of gay men with the national average of life expectancy of all men. Ergo, these men died at a younger age; ergo no gay man should be entrusted with responsibility for a child because he will die young.

What is obviously wrong with this? The sample. This is not a random sample of equal numbers of gay men and straight men and comparing the age at which they died. This is a highly skewed sample of gay men taken from a list of those who had died young because of one specific cause and comparing it with the general population of men. The result that Cameron claims would have to assume that all gay men are infected with HIV and that all straight men are not.

If you actually did an honest, age-of-death comparison, there would be many factors besides HIV that would affect the results, some of which might favor gay men and some straight men. Such things as the incidence of engaging in high risk sports, violent crime, being soldiers in combat, tendency toward traffic accidents, suicide rates, as well as the incidence of drug-related HIV spread in straight men. Complicated? You betcha.

Another example: In response to my op-ed piece in the AJC in which I was scathingly critical of the pope's statement that relying on condoms actually increases the spread of HIV, a letter from the head of Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights of NY, stated as fact that "the promiscuous distribution of condoms has coincided with a precipitous increase in infections." He doesn't, of course, claim causation; but he ends with: "The holy father can connect the dots; why can't Roughton?" It was clearly meant to imply causation, and the average reader will assume that is what is claimed.

The is the simplest form of mistaking coexistence with causation. It's true, back in the 80's when the rise of HIV infections was rampant and rising rapidly, there was a lag in any effective measure showing up in reduced new cases -- simply because there is often a long period between contracting the virus and diagnosis. This year's "new cases" may have become infected two years ago. However, at this same time there was a concerted effort to distribute free condoms on a wide spread basis to help stem the spread. So the number of "new cases" may actually have gone up during the first year or so of free condom distribution.

So, yes, the rising curve of delayed-reporting of new cases coincided with the institution of free condom distribution. But, rather than the cause of the spread, it was a belated effort to stem the spread. And any positive effect of condom use may not show up in the new-case statistics for a year or two. And now, longer-range statistics, especially in Africa, have shown a direct, robust correlation of condom use and reduction of the spread of HIV, just as I stated and as the pope and his minions contradicted. Public health authorities now confidently assert that condom use is the most effective single factor in reducing the spread of HIV.

I believe it was Harry Truman who coined the phrase: "Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics."

This book should be interesting reading, even for those who don't need to be taught about the numbers game.

Ralph

DADT is dead #11

This will be brief -- for all those who are tired of my DADT rants. But I want to respond to the story they're trying to make about the Marines being the branch that's different in opposing the repeal of DADT.

The very wide survey of 400,000 service men and women and their families reveals a pretty surprising result: a large majority (about 70%) says there will be little or no problem with the repeal.

Except for the Marines, where the majority oppose the repeal. Seems they think their vaunted macho reputation will be diluted by allowing gays to serve openly (as opposed to allowing them to continue to serve as long as they don't reveal it) - and they also trot out the line about the intimacy of the battlefield, sleeping next to each other, etc. etc.

The other big factor is that the top Marine generals also oppose it and have done so vocally. So leadership and sensitivity training might take care of a lot of this.

But here is the little-remarked thing at the end that we should put up there is bold type.

Marines also pride themselves on discipline, on following orders, and on excelling at whatever they do. Marine Lt. Col. Hackett is quoted as saying that "every good Marine follows orders, and if that's what the president orders, I can tell you by God we're going to excel above and beyond the other services to make it happen and be damn good at it."

So there you have it: just issue the orders, and the Marines can be counted on to hop to and have the best record on integrating their gay brothers.

Tell that to John McCain -- see if he spins around once again.

Ralph

Stupid people

Why are there so many stupid people in high places?

No, I'm not talking about She Who Shall Remain Nameless. Or Dick Cheney. Not the obviously partisan crowd.

I'm talking about people whom you expect would be relatively balanced in their views and put the interest of the nation and its people first, ahead of politics. People like Alan Greenspan, who should have known better but who used his (unjustified) oracular mantle to make things go in the wrong direction.

Today, although he's not in the same league, I'm thinking of journalist/columnist/author Joe Klein. To many, he's something of a joke rather than a serious pundit. But Time Magazine has him as a commentator on national and international affairs.

I find this astonishing -- that someone who is not blinded by strong partisan allegiance but just got it so wrong anyway. But at least he is now saying that he was wrong. Here's what Klein wrote today in Time:

Columnists are paid to have opinions. Sometimes those opinions are wrong. Those two sentences are as obvious as a sunrise, but usually unspoken by my fellow opinionmongers. I can point you to many weeks of prescience and sheer genius in my work since I arrived at TIME in January 2003. But I think we'd learn more if we took a look at one of my goofs: I supported George W. Bush's idea of partially privatizing Social Security, which he tried to enact after he was re-elected in 2004. This was a close call for me at the time; it seems positively idiotic now that we've experienced the Great Recession — and the idea of private investment has finally regained proper perspective.

Investment is about risk; Social Security is about certainty.

A fair amount of certainty is crucial when it comes to retirement. Why, you might ask, was I blind to this simple proposition at the time?

He then explains that he had been highly critical of the "bloody futility of Bush's war in Iraq," and he was definitely opposed to his "demonstrably foolish supply-side philosophy that spawned his tax cuts."

Still, he was going to be my President for the next four years; my fellow citizens, and many of my readers, had voted him in. The partial privatization of Social Security was, he said, the top domestic priority for his second term. This seemed bold and politically risky. Scaring the elderly about cuts in their retirement benefits is one of the oldest tricks in the book, but Bush truly believed that if people could invest retirement savings in the market, they would end up with larger pensions. . . .And so did I, albeit with a truckload of caveats.

I never thought it was a good idea and never understood how thinking people could think it was a good idea. And my reasoning was exactly what Klein says now: "Investment is about risk; Social Security is about certainty."

Why didn't everybody see that? I'm no economist. It's just plain, simple, kitchen table common sense. Seems like the only people who talk about common sense are those like She Who Shall Remain Nameless who try to make education and expertise the villain and substitute "the will of the people" and "common sense," instead of elite, liberal academics.

What we need are experts who know all they need to know and ALSO use common sense.

Ralph