Month: September 2012

Why Is Adelson Not An Issue?

Blake Zeff wonders why Sheldon Adelson hasn’t become more of an attack point for Obama’s campaign, despite that he’s “the very picture of influence-buying.” One theory:

Sometimes, when you’re running a campaign, you find it difficult to define your opponent negatively. In these instances, you begin to dissect his associations to see if there’s someone with whom he’s affiliated that might suggest vulnerability. This is when donors and surrogates like Soros or the Koch brothers attract notoriety.

But Mitt Romney has made such bank-shot strategies unnecessary. The Obama campaign has already succeeded in painting him as a greedy, secretive, out-of-touch, Gordon Gecko-like outsourcer who likes to fire people.

Another answer is obvious, as Zeff also acknowledges: if anyone connected to Obama made a big thing out of Adelson, the usual suspects would trot out the anti-Semitism canard. Doesn’t Blake Zeff realize he is an anti-Semite – or “something much darker” – simply by applying the words “influence-buying” to anyone Jewish? Remember: the truth doesn’t matter. Tropes always defeat truth in the dying world of guilt-by-association neoconservatism.

Desperation, The Ad Strategy

Karl Rove's dark-money group Crossroads GPS is putting at least $1.4 million behind this new ad attacking Obama in Nevada:

There will also be a Spanish version of the ad, which is a textbook example of how to be deceptive. Here's the original context of Obama's quote, which he gave at a 2010 town hall in New Hampshire:

"You don't go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage," Obama said. "You don't blow a bunch of cash in Vegas when you're trying to save for college. You prioritize. You make tough choices. And it's time your government did the same."

But of course if you are Rove and Crossroads GPS you just edit that down, like Romney and his allies have done time and time again in this campaign, and you end up with "Don't blow a bunch of cash in Vegas", thus a shocking attack on the tourism-dependent voters in Nevada – where Obama is currently leading but unemployment is among the highest in the nation.

The word "shameless" doesn't quite capture Rove's ad. But we have a chance in this election, if we choose, to destroy the politics of Rove in the only language they understand: an Obama landslide.

Bernanke Goes Big

The Fed just announced a sizable "open-ended" quantative easing program, citing concerns that, without policy action, the economy might be too weak to "generate sustained improvement in labor market conditions." It also said it would keep interest rates low through 2015. For context, Tim Duy set the Fed's bar yesterday:

[T]he Fed needs to link open-ended policy explicitly to the economy, thereby removing the uncertainty associated with the previous arbitrary programs.  I think anything less should be viewed as a dissappointment.

Weisenthal explains how today's Fed plan achieved this:

The Federal Reserve decision is out, and it's a biggie…. Whereas in the past the Fed always announced a specific amount of QE, this time there will be no stop until the Fed is happy with the pace of recovery.

Yglesias zeroes in on the guidance (i.e. the explicit plan to keep rates low):

But there's something much much much more important here than the numbers. It's the guidance…. The key thing is that they're no longer saying that accommodative monetary policy is conditional on the recovery being weak. Instead, interest rates will stay low for a while even after the economy recovers. In other words build that apartment building right now.

Eyder Peralta translates the Fed's rationale:

Remember the Fed has a dual mandate from Congress: Keep inflation and the unemployment rate in check. This is also an open-ended commitment on the part of the Federal Reserve, which said it was not concerned about inflation.

Brad Plumer, meanwhile, reviews the track record of the QE1 and QE2, giving the theoretical context of the "open-ended asset purchase" tack:

Instead of saying “we’re going to buy up $600 billion in assets and hope that works,” the Fed could say something like, “we’re going to keep buying up assets, and we’re not going to stop until either inflation hits 3 percent or unemployment sinks below 7 percent.” The idea is that this would shift expectations and bolster confidence about the future course of the economy — much as Bernanke did back in the dark days of 2008 — and economic growth would leap as a result.

Previous Dish coverage here, here and here.

Why Romney Became The Story

The right has decided – surprise! – that the whole Romney mess over Libya and Egypt is a function entirely of media bias. Eric Erickson complains that “the media wanted to focus on Mitt Romney” yesterday. Scott Galupo makes the obvious point:

The media focused on Mitt Romney yesterday because Mitt Romney asked them to. If he had merely issued a formal statement expressing outrage at the mobs in Cairo and Benghazi, the media would have focused on the aspects of this ongoing story that Erickson finds so interesting — effectively, as Daniel Larison observed via Twitter, it would have done Romney’s work for him.

Fred Kaplan spells out what Romney should have done:

Imagine if Romney had called President Obama, asked how he could be of assistance in this time of crisis, offered to appear at his side at a press conference to demonstrate that, when American lives are at risk, politics stop at the water’s edge—and then had his staff put out the word that he’d done these things, which would have made him look noble and might have made Obama look like the petty one if he’d waved away these offers. But none of this is in Romney. He imagined a chink in Obama’s armor, an opening for a political assault on the president’s strength and leadership, and so he dashed to the barricades without a moment of reflection, a nod to propriety, or a smidgen of good strategy.

Romney has all the affect of a traditional, patriotic, mild-mannered Republican, like Reagan or the first Bush. But he isn’t. He’s just Cheney with better hair and even fewer scruples.

By the way, to read all Dish coverage of this week’s big political story in one convenient place, go to the “Embassy Attacks In Libya and Egypt” thread page. (To jump to today’s coverage, click here.)

Now Yemen

Today, anti-film protesters attacked the US embassy in Yemen as well:

The protesters breached the usually tight security around the embassy and reached the compound grounds but did not enter the main building housing the offices. Once inside the compound, they brought down the US flag, burned it and replaced it with a black banner bearing Islam’s declaration of faith: “There is no God but Allah.” Before storming the grounds, demonstrators removed the embassy’s sign on the outer wall, set tires ablaze and pelted the compound with rocks.

Yemeni security forces who rushed to the scene fired in the air and used tear gas to disperse the demonstrators and were eventually able to drive them out of the compound. It was not immediately clear whether anyone was inside the embassy at the time of the attack.

Buzzfeed compiles “19 frightening photos”. Unlike his Egyptian counterpart, Yemen’s president apologizes to the US and calls for an investigation. For a full roundup of Dish coverage, go to the “Embassy Attacks In Libya and Egypt” thread page. (To jump to today’s coverage, click here.)

Is Sam Bacile Even A Real Person? Ctd

John Herman tracks down the latest on the apparent Keyser Soze of blasphemous film. There is reason to believe that "Sam Bacile" is an alias for one Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a Coptic Christian:

In [Jimmy] Israel's telling, it was Sam Bacile — a man he met a number of times, and who insisted that was his real name — who turned the film into a piece of religious incitement. "Sam portrayed [Muhammed] as being a sex addict and killing people left and right and having henchmen kill people and so forth," he says, "I don't know about Muhammed at all." The reason for his initial participation was money: "It was really just for hire, I'm not a wealthy man."

In my discussion with Israel, which ended when his phone apparently died, he provided a bizarre sketch of Sam Bacile, who it seems very likely is, in fact, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. (While Israel said he had never met anyone by that name, the name Bacile gave to Israel for the SAG registration was Abnob Nakoula Basseley, and Israel describes him as about the same age as that given in the AP report.)

The actors had no idea what they were filming. The whole thing is like a plot from a Mel Brooks movie. Many readers have made this point:

Say Sam Bacile out loud. From the first time I saw it I thought it sounds like "some imbecile." My guess is that it's a made-up name like Ben Dover, Amanda Huggenkiss, etc.

Another:

Not to go down the conspiracy rabbit hole, but it strikes me that the word "Islam" would be part of any anagram for Sam Bacile. Dropping the remaining letters into google translate from Latin, "Ceba
Islam" translates into "… said Islam." Could this be the author reinforcing his sour message about Islam?  Or perhaps the movie was secretly produced by Islamists to stir up protests and undercut the Arab Spring. I'm not sure, but maybe your readers can flesh out possible translations of the various combinations of the letters C B E A.

For a full roundup of Dish coverage, go to the "Embassy Attacks In Libya and Egypt" thread page. (To jump to today's coverage, click here.)