GW Bush
The Washington MonthlyPEOPLE ARE WATCHING THIS LUNATIC.... Glenn Beck, Fox News' deranged media personality, has been telling a national television audience that the Obama administration might be setting up secret "concentration camps" to lock up conservatives. The president, Beck believes, may be using FEMA in this conspiratorial drive towards "a totalitarian state."
Beck, who has already voiced his affinity for the John Birch Society, is also distributing Birchers' literature to his audiences.
If he were just some random right-wing blogger, it would be easier to laugh this off. If he were just some strange man screaming on a street corner, social service agencies might be called in to help the guy out. But instead, people are listening to this nut.
In fact, Beck has been dominating cable news recently. According to TVNewser's charts of Nielsen ratings, out of all the cable news networks, his Fox show has consistently placed second in the key demographic of viewers aged 25 to 54 over the past couple weeks, beating even Sean Hannity's and trailing only "The O'Reilly Factor." When it comes to total viewers, too, Beck's been cleaning up, generally placing third, just behind Hannity.
But Beck got his biggest audience numbers yet for a special he hosted on Friday, a special so ludicrous and over-hyped that Fox's own Shep Smith couldn't help but have a little fun at his colleague's expense.
But it paid off: That one episode of Beck's program got the highest ratings in the key demographic for the entire month of March so far. In total, TVNewser reports, "There were more viewers watching Beck's 5pm show than watched the entire prime time (8-11pm) lineups on CNN and MSNBC."
Kevin Drum argued the other day, "It's more and more obvious that Glenn Beck has decided that becoming a male Ann Coulter is good for his ratings. So his show is now dedicated to saying increasingly outrageous things solely in an attempt to get liberals to denounce him and drive his ratings yet higher. Conclusion: it's time to start ignoring him, right?"
Maybe, but I'm not sure. Beck, far more than Coulter, seems to believe what he's saying. Coulter craves controversy -- she's a clown pretending to be a provocateur -- but Beck literally seems mad. He sees bizarre and elaborate conspiracies, and worse, seems to perceive himself as the leader of an unstable movement.
Coulter is harmless. Is Beck?
Glenn "McCarthy" Beck tries to link Communists to Obama, but they don't cooperate | Crooks and LiarsTOPICS
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Glenn "McCarthy" Beck tries to link Communists to Obama, but they don't cooperate
By David Neiwert Thursday Mar 05, 2009 4:10pm
Beck-ComradeUpdate
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Glenn Beck's getting increasingly strident and desperate in his attempt to portray the Obama White House as a den of Communism. Yesterday he opened up with yet another "Comrade Update" that actually depicted visiting British Prime Minister Gordon Brown as a totalitarian simply for having extolled "cooperation."
By that standard, I guess, Sesame Street is a Commie Indoctrination Program. And at this point, I honestly wouldn't be surprised to find out the Beck indeed believes that to be the case.
In any event, he followed this smear by immediately having on Sam Webb of the Communist Party USA, claiming that Webb had declared Barack Obama a Communist ally:
Beck-Communists
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Beck: You said that he was not only a friend, but an ally.
Webb: I don't think I said that. I only said that he is a people's advocate.
Beck: No, you said an ally.
Webb: No, I don't think I did. I made the speech, you didn't.
Actually, if you peruse the speech in question, you'll see that Beck is wrong. Maybe this is the part he's thinking of:
In the meantime, we have some immediate struggles on our hands But the good news is that the broad movement that elected President Obama and larger majorities in the Congress is up and running.
This movement, or if you like, this loose coalition in which labor plays a larger and larger leadership role, can exercise an enormous influence on the political process. Never before has a coalition with such breadth walked on the political stage of our country. It is far larger than the coalition that entered the election process a year ago; it is larger still than the coalition that came out of the Democratic Party convention in August.
The task of labor and its allies is to provide energy and leadership to this wide-ranging coalition. Yes, we can bring issues and positions into the political process that go beyond the initiatives of the Obama administration. But we should do this within the framework of the main task of supporting Obama’s program of action.
We can disagree with the Obama administration without being disagreeable. Our tone should be respectful. We now have not simply a friend, but a people's advocate in the White House.
What is in fact most remarkable about Webb's speech is that, unlike conservatives, Communists -- who have clear philosophical differences with Obama and could similarly wish for him to fail -- are more concerned that Obama's plan succeed because it's better for the country.
In other words: A bunch of Commies are more concerned about the nation's economic well-being than Conservatives are.
Beck in any event tries, McCarthylike, to bait Webb into casting Obama in the line of Communist thinkers, like Marx or Lenin -- and Webb refuses.
Webb: He's not a Socialist, he's not a Marxist.
Beck: Why do you push yourself away from Lenin and Marx?
Webb: I don't, myself, but Barack Obama does. He's not a Socialist, he's not a Communist. You know, you bandied that about during the campaign, and now people are bandying it about town, and the answer is no.
Beck at this point interrupts Webb, and spends the next three minutes talking over him and badgering him. At one point he asks: "Why can't you have a real conversation?"
Answer should have been: "Because you keep interrupting, you moron!"
But there you have it, folks. Glenn Beck: A New McCarthy for a New Century!
Daily Kos: Glenn Beck is like a drug dealer of hateGlenn Beck is like a drug dealer of hate
by Benintn
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Tue Apr 07, 2009 at 04:54:59 AM PDT
The thought hit me after once again reviewing the Anti-Defamation League's dossier on Richard Poplawski, the Pittsburgh-area cop killer with ties to extreme right-wing groups like Stormfront.
After watching Glenn Beck yesterday, I was absolutely appalled. It wasn't just because Beck is an irresponsible wingnut. There was something else - something I couldn't quite put my finger on.
And then, as I was getting ready for work, it hit me.
Glenn Beck is using drug dealer arguments.
Update: Important article from Media Matters detailing Beck and Fox News attempts to rally the wingnuts.
* Benintn's diary :: ::
*
To be specific, Beck is trying to exonerate himself from blame by avoiding any responsibility for his own actions or words. For months, we've seen Beck working as the fearmonger-in-chief, making Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh look like mere entertainers. Beck's "9/12 project" is, in one way, a call to action. But in another way, it's a call to arrogant self-pity (poor, pitiful me, no one could understand because I'm uniquely patriotic and "I just love my country.") and the worst kind of sarcasm.
Let's briefly outline Beck's argument:
1. Blaming anyone other than Poplawski is crazy.
2. I can't be responsible for other people's actions.
3. All I'm doing is providing a public service.
4. The fact that so many people share my concerns is proof that what I'm saying is very important.
5. Poplawski would have acted that way "no matter what."
6. Anyone who doesn't think the way I do is "irrational."
I think part of the reason I got upset was Beck's protests of innocence. He was like the guy who claims that he was just "holding the drugs for a friend" or the guy who says "I just gave the guy what he wanted. He would have gotten it from someone else if not from me."
Glenn Beck is talking, thinking, and acting like a drug dealer. The mind-altering substances he's dealing are his words, which are designed to skew people's sense of reality, make them delusional, and incite fear and anger. Beck might not "try from his own supply", but he knows exactly how to pull on the heartstrings and he's zeroing in on disgruntled working-class Americans who have given up hope that democracy can work for them.
Words can hurt. Words can heal. Words can medicate. Words can literally change your mind. Combine those words with some visual imagery and you've got a powerful cocktail of mind-altering medicine capable of turning ordinary 23-year-old citizens into cop-killing madmen.
If Beck fails to understand this, then he's an idiot.
MichaelMoore.com : Are Republicans Blackmailing Obama?April 6th, 2009 6:36 pm
Are Republicans Blackmailing Obama?
If the president releases the Bush torture memos, Republicans are promising to "go nuclear" and filibuster his legal appointments. Scott Horton reports on a serious threat to Obama's transparency.
By Scott Horton / Daily Beast
Senate Republicans are now privately threatening to derail the confirmation of key Obama administration nominees for top legal positions by linking the votes to suppressing critical torture memos from the Bush era. A reliable Justice Department source advises me that Senate Republicans are planning to "go nuclear" over the nominations of Dawn Johnsen as chief of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice and Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh as State Department legal counsel if the torture documents are made public. The source says these threats are the principal reason for the Obama administration's abrupt pullback last week from a commitment to release some of the documents. A Republican Senate source confirms the strategy. It now appears that Republicans are seeking an Obama commitment to safeguard the Bush administration's darkest secrets in exchange for letting these nominations go forward.
Barack Obama entered Washington with a promise of transparency. One of his first acts was a presidential directive requiring that the Freedom of Information Act, a near dead letter during the Bush years, was to be enforced according to its terms. He specifically criticized the Bush administration's practice of preparing secret memos that determined legal policy and promised to review and publish them after taking office.
But in the past week, questions about Obama's commitment to transparency have mounted. On April 2, the Justice Department was expected to make public a set of four memoranda prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel, long sought by the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy organizations in a pending FOIA litigation. The memos, authored by then-administration officials and now University of California law professor John Yoo, federal appellate judge Jay Bybee and former Justice Department lawyer Stephen Bradbury, apparently grant authority for the brutal treatment of prisoners, including waterboarding, isolated confinement in coffin-like containers, and "head smacking." The stakes over release of the papers are increasingly high. Yoo and Bybee are both targets of a criminal investigation in a Spanish court probing the torture of five Spanish citizens formerly held in Guantánamo; also named in the Spanish case are former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and three other Bush lawyers. Legal observers in Spain consider the Bush administration lawyers at serious risk of indictment, and the memos, once released, could be entered as evidence in connection with their prosecution. Unlike the torture memos that are already public, these memos directly approve specific torture techniques and therefore present a far graver problem for their authors.
The release of the memos that the Senate Republicans want to suppress was cleared by Attorney General Eric Holder and White House counsel Greg Craig, and then was stopped when "all hell broke loose" inside the Obama administration, according to an article by Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff. Newsweek attributes internal opposition to disclosure of the Bush-era torture memos to White House counterterrorism adviser and former CIA official John O. Brennan, who has raised arguments that exposure of the memoranda would run afoul of policies protecting the secrecy of agency techniques and has also argued that the memos would embarrass nations like Morocco, Jordan, Pakistan, Tunisia and Egypt, which have cooperated closely with the CIA in its extraordinary renditions program. Few informed independent observers, however, find much to credit in the Brennan objections because the techniques are now well-known, as is the role of the cooperating foreign intelligence services—any references to which would in any event likely be redacted before the memoranda are released. Moreover, the argument that the confidence of those engaged in torture—serious criminal conduct under international and domestic law—should be kept because they would be "embarrassed" if it were to come out borders on comic.
The Justice Department source confirms to me that Brennan has consistently opposed making public the torture memos—and any other details about the operations of the extraordinary renditions program—but this source suggests that concern about the G.O.P.'s roadblock in the confirmation process is the principle reason that the memos were not released. Republican senators have expressed strong reservations about their promised exposure, expressing alarm that a critique of the memos by Justice's ethics office (Office of Professional Responsibility) will also be released. "There was no 'direct' threat," said the source, "but the message was communicated clearly—if the OLC and OPR memoranda are released to the public, there will be war." This is understood as a threat to filibuster the nominations of Johnsen and Koh. Not only are they among the most prominent academic critics of the torture memoranda, but are also viewed as the strongest advocates for release of the torture memos on Obama's legal policy team.
A Republican Senate staffer further has confirmed to me that the Johnsen nomination was discussed at the last G.O.P. caucus meeting. Not a single Republican indicated an intention to vote for Dawn Johnsen, while Senator John Cornyn of Texas was described as "gunning for her," specifically noting publication of the torture memos.
No decision was taken at that Republican caucus meeting whether to filibuster or not, though Cornyn was generally believed to support filibustering Johnsen and potentially other nominees. Johnsen has met recently with moderate Republican Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, both of whom are being lobbied heavily by colleagues and religious right groups to oppose her nomination.
Both Koh and Johnsen are targets of sustained attacks coming from right-wing lobbying groups. The Daily Beast previously reviewed the attacks on Johnsen, while Slate's Dahlia Lithwick has catalogued the recent attacks on Koh. Former Bush administration Solicitor General Ted Olson recently endorsed the Koh nomination, calling the Yale dean "a man of great integrity." But connecting the Obama nominations to the Bush torture memos escalates the conflict toward a thermonuclear level.
MichaelMoore.com : The Bush SixApril 7th, 2009 7:50 pm
The Bush Six
By Jane Mayer / New Yorker
About a year ago, a book came out in England that made a fascinating prediction: at some point in the future, the author wrote, six top officials in the Bush Administration would get a tap on the shoulder announcing that they were being arrested on international charges of torture.
If the prediction seemed improbable, the background of the book's author was even more so. Philippe Sands is neither a journalist nor an American but a law professor and a certified Queen's Counsel (the kind of barrister who on occasion wears a powdered horsehair wig) who works at the same law practice as Cherie Blair. Sands's book, "Torture Team," offers a scathing critique of officials in the Bush Administration, accusing them of complicity in acts of torture. When the book appeared, some scoffed. Douglas Feith, a former Pentagon official, dismissed Sands as "a British lawyer" who "wrote an extremely dishonest book."
Last week, Sands's accusations suddenly did not seem so outlandish. A Spanish court took the first steps toward starting a criminal investigation of the same six former Bush Administration officials he had named, weighing charges that they had enabled and abetted torture by justifying the abuse of terrorism suspects. Among those whom the court singled out was Feith, the former Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, along with former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; John Yoo, a former Justice Department lawyer; and David Addington, the chief of staff and the principal legal adviser to Vice-President Dick Cheney.
In Washington the other night, over a cup of camomile tea, Sands described the behind-the-scenes role he played in spurring the Spanish court to action. He paced his hotel room, seeming by turns proud and stunned at what he had done. "This is the end of these people's professional reputations!" he said. "This is no joke. We're talking about the serious potential deprivation of liberty."
Sands said that he had "no personal vendetta" against the Bush Administration, but he does see a link between his family history and his chosen profession. His mother and her parents were Viennese Jews who barely survived the Holocaust; his mother spent the first seven years of her life in hiding, away from her family. "It inculcated a burning sense of being aggrieved at wrongdoing, and at the failure of people to take responsibility for their actions," Sands said.
Sands got his first chance to demonstrate his convictions professionally in 1998. He was in Paris, for the unveiling of his grandfather's gravestone, when he received a call asking him to represent Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator. He told his wife, Natalia Schiffrin, about the offer. "Philippe, if you do," Sands recalls her saying, "I will divorce you!" (She is American, and the daughter of the book publisher André Schiffrin, a founder of Students for a Democratic Society.) Sands declined the case. Instead, he signed on to represent the other side, and helped pursue Pinochet for violations of international law. The case became a turning point in international law, establishing the principle that there is no immunity even for the highest-ranking former government officials when they are accused of torture. Pinochet spent some sixteen months under house arrest. A decade later, the same Spanish judge who initiated the legal proceedings against Pinochet, Baltasar Garzón, has been assigned to the case against the Bush Administration officials.
The current torture case began in the spring of 2004, when photographs of abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib surfaced. Sands said that he read the protestations of innocence from Bush Administration officials, who blamed a few "bad apples" for the incidents, with the eye of a barrister. He recalled, "I could spot right away that they were speaking as advocates of a cause. So I decided to find out what really happened." While keeping up his busy law practice, he travelled to America to interview the key players in what he described as "a writing project I am engaged in on international law and the war on terror." Many Bush officials, including Feith and William J. Haynes II, the former Pentagon general counsel, who was also named in the Spanish lawsuit, agreed to meet with Sands, perhaps expecting a friendly chat. "I spent two years trekking around the country, finding out that they were manifestly untruthful," Sands said. "I've got a particular bugbear about lawyers," he added. "If not for lawyers, none of these abuses would have ever occurred."
As Sands went about his research, he conferred with human-rights experts all over Europe on his findings. Word spread that he had the makings of a high-level war-crimes case. Sands won't reveal exactly which human-rights authorities he consulted. But, in recent months, one of them was Gonzalo Boye, the Chilean-born Spanish lawyer who last week filed the criminal complaint against the Bush officials, on behalf of five former prisoners who were, they allege, tortured in the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay. Boye said last week of Sands, "Let me just say that he played a very big role in my thinking. His book showed me who the targets were." Feith, reached on the phone, called Sands's book "wildly inaccurate." He said, "It's not a happy thing for the Spanish Court to think of prosecuting Americans for advice they gave to the President of the United States!"
It is hard to predict what will happen next, but, if arrest warrants are issued, the Obama Administration may be forced either to extradite the former officials or to start its own investigation. Sands, who admires Obama, said, "I regret that I have added to his in-box when he has so much else to sort out. But I hope he does the right thing. There's not much dispute anymore: torture happened, and the law is clear—torture must be punished."
Meanwhile, Sands reiterated a warning that he made in his book. "If I were they," he said, referring to the former officials in question, "I would think carefully before setting foot outside the United States. They are now, and forever in the future, at risk of arrest. Until this is sorted out, they are in their own legal black hole."
MichaelMoore.com : Pakistan: Suspected US missile strike kills 3April 8th, 2009 11:52 am
Pakistan: Suspected US missile strike kills 3
By Ishtiaq Mahsud / Associated Press
DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan – A suspected U.S. missile strike on a car killed two alleged militants and a civilian in northwestern Pakistan on Wednesday, intelligence officials said, a day after the U.S.-allied country reiterated its opposition to such attacks to visiting American officials.
The suspected strike indicates the Obama administration is unlikely to give up a Bush-era tactic American officials say has killed a string of al-Qaida operatives, even if it strains the relationship with Islamabad.
The attack came as residents elsewhere in Pakistan's northwest tried to push out a group of Taliban militants who ventured into their territory from their stronghold in the Swat Valley and killed five people. In the south, meanwhile, police announced the arrest of five men alleged to be planning suicide attacks on the city of Karachi.
The latest suspected missile strike occurred near Wana, the main town in the South Waziristan tribal region, according to two local intelligence officials. A drone had been flying over the area, and the missile landed after people in the car fired at the aircraft, the officials said, citing informants and agents in the field.
The attack also damaged some shops in the village of Shin Warsak, wounding at least five villagers and killing one, they said.
One of the intelligence officials said the slain militants were from Pakistan's eastern Punjab province. The officials said Taliban fighters took away their associates' bodies. The two spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.
U.S. officials rarely discuss or acknowledge the missile campaign, which has escalated since August. Several dozen such strikes have been carried out in Pakistan's northwest.
On Tuesday, Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qurshi said his country wants a trusting relationship with the United States during a news conference with U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.
On the subject of the missile strikes, Qureshi said there was "a gap" between the two sides' thinking.
Pakistan says the strikes are a violation of its sovereignty and fuel anti-American sentiment and sympathy for the Taliban.
Despite the strikes and a range of government efforts to stem the insurgency — from controversial peace deals to army offensives — militants appear to be extending their reach across Pakistan from the lawless tribal regions that border Afghanistan.
Police said a group of Pakistani Taliban fighters crossed late Monday from the Swat Valley into Buner, a previously peaceful district on the Indus River just 60 miles (100 kilometers) northwest of the capital, Islamabad.
After the militants ignored appeals from community leaders to go back, armed tribesmen and police confronted them, sparking a battle that left three officers and two tribesmen dead, local police officer Zakir Khan said. Khan said more than a dozen Taliban also died but provided no evidence to back that assertion.
Behramand Khan, another police official in Buner, said negotiations were under way for the militants to withdraw.
Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan denied the militants were trying to expand their presence into Buner, calling the incident a "misunderstanding" stemming from some Taliban fighters' desire to visit a local cleric.
"They didn't know that the mullah was not there in his village," Muslim Khan said. "When they entered Buner, some people there informed the police and came out of their houses against the Taliban and opened fire on them. When the information about the attack spread, some other Taliban went to reinforce them."
Iqbal Khan, an area resident, said tribal elders had asked villages to arrange militias to defend against any encroaching Taliban. He said about 200 militants had arrived at one point, and that many were still there.
"The situation is very tense. We are very worried," Khan said, adding that a tribal council was expected to meet on the matter soon. He said the government seemed unable to mediate.
The provincial government agreed in February to impose Islamic law in Swat and surrounding areas to halt 18 months of terror and bloody fighting between militants and security forces that killed hundreds of people.
But President Asif Ali Zardari has yet to sign an order introducing the new legal system, fueling speculation that Washington is pressing him to hold back and that the cease-fire between the militants and the army won't hold.
Al-Qaida and the Pakistani Taliban have forged links with a variety of other militant groups in the country.
Police officials in the southern city of Karachi said the five suspects arrested Tuesday were members of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a group blamed in the past for vicious attacks on minority Shiite Muslims but increasingly associated with al-Qaida and the Taliban.
The suspects were arrested in the Sohrab Goth area, a hub for Afghan refugees and tribesmen from Pakistan's South Waziristan tribal region. Weapons, explosives and chemicals also were recovered, city police Chief Wasim Ahmad told reporters.
He said the suspects planned to strike government offices and Shiite gatherings in the city.
He said they had previously attacked a critical U.S. and NATO military supply line that runs from Karachi through Pakistan's northwest, but did not elaborate.
___
Associated Press writers Ashraf Khan in Karachi and Riaz Khan in Peshawar contributed to this report.
MichaelMoore.com : The trouble with Sanjay GuptaJanuary 6th, 2009 6:02 pm
The trouble with Sanjay Gupta
By Paul Krugman / New York Times
So apparently Obama plans to appoint CNN’s Sanjay Gupta as Surgeon General. I don’t have a problem with Gupta’s qualifications. But I do remember his mugging of Michael Moore over Sicko. You don’t have to like Moore or his film; but Gupta specifically claimed that Moore “fudged his facts”, when the truth was that on every one of the allegedly fudged facts, Moore was actually right and CNN was wrong.
What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he’s uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right. It’s sort of a minor-league version of the way people who pointed out in real time that Bush was misleading us into war are to this day considered less “serious” than people who waited until it was fashionable to reach that conclusion. And appointing Gupta now, although it’s a small thing, is just another example of the lack of accountability that always seems to be the rule when you get things wrong in a socially acceptable way.
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