Month: September 2010

Yesterday on his show, Glenn Beck sourced some anti-Fed comments to a dubious historian. No surprise there. But Graeme Wood helps explain just how abhorrent the source is:

Mullins was an open purveyor of blood libel: he claimed that Jews kidnap Christian children, ritually puncture their veins, and drink their blood as a restorative for their own degenerate bodies. During Pound's involuntary commitment in St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington in the Fifties, Mullins visited him frequently, and under his direction, Mullins authored foundational texts in Federal Reserve conspiracy theory. Those theories have proved impressively durable. In addition to Glenn Beck's citation yesterday, Pat Robertson's books peddled variations on them in the 1980s, and elements of the Tea Party echo them now. (Short version: the Federal Reserve controls the world, and the UN is taking over the US via the New World Order.)

Mullins died in February at 86, and when I visited him in Staunton, Virginia, six years ago on assignment for The Jewish Daily Forward, he was already slowed by age, living in a creepy, dark rat-trap filled with religious icons, votive candles, and old newspapers. The wallpaper curled down off the wall in two-foot sections, and the chairs coughed up decades' worth of dust when we sat down.

The point isn't that Beck is an anti-Semite. There's no evidence for that charge whatsoever. It's that, whether he is a liar or a huckster or an earnest idiot, he regularly feeds his audience indefensibly dubious information (and never corrects it). But he's good for Hayek sales, so the conservative movement makes itself complicit in lending him legitimacy.

When I see disgusting ads like the GOP one in New York here; or when I hear some of the rhetoric coming from a Newt Gingrich, demonizing Islam in broad brush strokes as somehow evil or inherently violent or indistinguishable from al Qaeda, my mind returns to those days not so long ago when the Muslim chant "Allah-O-Akbar" rang from the rooftops in Tehran. I think of a day like this one. Or nights like the one captured below.

Yes, Mr Gingrich, Mrs Palin, Mr Giuliani, this too is Islam:

A reader writes:

You've pointed out twice now that "[n]ot a single prosecution of an anti-gay hate crime has occurred under the law in the year since it [the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009] was passed."  May I point out that, as a criminal statute, the Act can only operate prospectively, under the Ex Post Facto Clause of the Constitution?  As a former public defender, I'm aware that judging a statute by the number of prosecutions within a year of its enactment is a pretty bizarre metric, since only acts committed after passage are even arguably subject to prosecution under the Act.  Since you earlier noted that there are investigations pending of criminal acts which might result in charges under the Act, I think the ill-founded nature of this contention is self-evident.

By contrast, I think your complaint that "it took Obama over a year to begin a year-long Pentagon review. If he had acted sooner, the review would have been done in time for the vote" is not entirely divorced from reality, but is a bit naive.  Doesn't it make sense that President Obama would have wanted to forge relationships with the military brass prior to starting the review, in order to avoid the blatant, insubordinate–and successful!–sabotage that Bill Clinton was subject to?

You know, I admire the lucidity of "The Conservative Soul,"  the passion you've brought to your anti-torture campaign, and much you've written about Palin.   But I think that you're projecting responsibility for the villainy (no other word fits) of the GOP and its demonization of GLBTs onto a single man who is trying to coax a fractious party that has been in a defeatist crouch for decades into strong action.  He's not a god-king.  And your reaction is, I'm sorry to say, both over the top and helpful to the Party of No.

I will gladly report any prosecutions that occur in the future that clearly would not have occurred without the Hate Crimes Act. As my reader noted, there are several investigations in process and some may get somewhere. But this act was sold as a vital defense against gay-bashing. I call bullshit on that now as I did then. It was a fundraising tool for HRC primarily and a way for the Democrats to do nothing substantive for gay equality, except treating us as victims in need of their protection. Nonetheless, I promise to provide an annual update on prosecutions to measure its impact, along with data on anti-gay hate crimes, to see if it has any effect whatever on their incidence. As to the final point, where is there evidence that the president has done a single thing to "to coax a fractious party that has been in a defeatist crouch for decades into strong action"? I see none. No speeches defending gay equality, except to the pathetic tool of the Democrats, the Human Rights Campaign. No public support on marriage equality, which he formally opposes, even as a majority of the public backs it. He even prevented anyone in the administration from celebrating the end of the HIV travel ban before it was passed, so scared was he of Republican bigots. I know. I tried to report on the record about progress but was told shhhh – we might alert the right.

I don't think anyone can possibly accuse me or the Dish of excusing or ignoring the virulent and disgusting homophobia of the Christianist GOP. There is no comparison on the merits between their hate and contempt and the president's indifference and cowardice. But I refuse to have their bile held over my head as a reason to shut up about the Democrats' uselessness and this president's betrayal of almost every single promise he made about gay equality in the campaign.

A photo essay.

A reminder of the vast financial risks they take to save and improve lives – risks which so many refuse to acknowledge or credit.

Bryan Curtis's excellent review of Woodward's book is disturbing in its portrayal of how out of control David Petraeus is getting:

[Woodward] demonstrates convincingly that the men in uniform—that would be David Petraeus, Stanley McChrystal, and Mike Mullen, along with Bob Gates—dangled very few battle plans in front of Obama, and used bureaucratic jujitsu to make sure he didn’t see others. For example, Obama never had a fully fleshed-out proposal for sending fewer than 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan. And even the final proposal he crafted himself, lowering the military’s demands a tad. As Petraeus says, after being informed of a slight from Pennsylvania Avenue, “They’re fucking with the wrong guy.”

Jason Mazzone goes after the military, for its refusal simply to accept the end of DADT as something the broader public wants and the president has favored:

The President should not need to win “the support” of military personnel. And military officers should not be contradicting the President’s decision that repeal of DADT will not undermine the effectiveness of troops. Civilian control of the military means that the military doesn’t get to weigh in separately on issues of policy.

The canonization of Petraeus has got to stop. He follows in the footsteps of Colin Powell who mastered the art of Beltway schmoozing and press management. But at least Powell won a war where Petraeus has so far lost two (can anyone now believe, as Iraq descends into political chaos and increasing violence, that the surge was simply a face-saver to get most, but not all, of the US troops out, after failing to achieve the original war goals?).  

And the Palin meme – that somehow members of the military have some kind of special status in a civilian republic and their political views demand more respect than those of others – is just as repugnant.

We owe servicemembers immense respect and gratitude for their courage and service – but we also owe them – to honor the civilian democracy they serve – no more influence or status in the political arena than anyone else. The idea that the military is given an effective veto over a Congressional and presidential decision is a dangerous precedent. Truman would not have stood for it, and didn't. Neither did Eisenhower.

The left is just as guilty, with the whole, cheap "chicken-hawk" theme, as if a record of military service (or lack of it) is somehow in any way relevant to the merits or misjudgments of a politician's decisions on war and peace.

It is utterly irrelevant. This is a country run by civilians, whose elected offices are as valid regardless of their military experience, and the military's job is to take orders, to offer private and confidential military – not political – advice to their commander-in-chief. Their role after that in public is quite simple: to shut the fuck up.

The way in which Petraeus is leveraging his Iraq experience – an experience which, as every day reveals, ended in total failure except as a temporary face-saver for partial withdrawal – and his media clout to force an elected president into an open-ended commitment in Afghanistan is deeply disturbing. It's long since time we put these commanders and their enablers in their place.

(Photo: Majid Saeedi/Getty.)

Felix Salmon sees the "tension, in this film, between relatively serious bike commuters, on the one hand, and slow hobbyists, on the other":

There’s safety in numbers, when it comes to cycling, and a similar phenomenon is likely to happen with regard to pedestrians and car drivers being increasingly conscious of bicyclists in their midst. Already, the First Avenue bike lane has reportedly cut injuries to all street users by 50%. But as the number of cyclists rises, the average speed of cyclists necessarily falls. Everybody thinks of northern European cities like Copenhagen as bicycling paradises — and they are. But if you’re biking around Copenhagen, you’re going to go a lot more slowly than if you’re biking the same distance in NYC.

A must-read from Clive. Money quote:

On taxes, it promises to "stop all job-killing tax hikes" — that is, to retain all of the Bush tax cuts– but says nothing about the comprehensive tax reform that will be needed to raise new revenues and balance the budget without avoidable damage to growth. The Pledge maintains the pretence that spending cuts can do all the necessary fiscal lifting — and even here it is slippery. It promises to "roll back government spending to pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels", which seems fair enough. But it also promises "common-sense" exceptions for "seniors, veterans, and our troops". Those common-sense exceptions are the whole ball of wax. The idea that you can control public borrowing without higher taxes and by squeezing only non-defense discretionary spending is, I'm afraid, delusional.

Not delusional, I fear. Cynical. No one who cares about the debt should treat this document with anything but contempt. And, yes, Krugman is dead-on. The Republican party's current incarnation is a threat to fiscal sanity, to national security and to civil peace. It is unhinged. When Crook and Krugman and Libertarian David Boaz agree, take notice. David:

“They are continuing the problem that I think everybody in Washington, including Democrats, understands."

Robert Bixby of the Concord Coalition:

“It’s a net increase in the deficit, because extending all of the tax cuts is a huge hit on the deficit, and they are not making anywhere near the magnitude of the spending cuts you would need to justify extending those tax cuts on a permanent basis.”

Dan Savage updates us:

Where was the President when the Senate was debating DADT on Tuesday? AWOL. He made no public statements, he couldn’t be bothered to pick up the phone and call a single wavering Senator to ask for their vote. But he did have time to make at least one call on Tuesday: “Earlier today, President Obama called members of the Seattle Storm organization, to congratulate them on winning the WNBA Finals for the second time …”

Words fail.