On Wednesday, the Republican congresswoman got a call from President-elect Barack Obama, didn't believe it was him, and hung up on him. Twice.
According to Ros-Lehtinen's flack Alex Cruz, the congresswoman received the call on her cell phone from a Chicago-based number and an aide informed her that Obama wanted to speak to her. When Obama introduced himself, Ros-Lehtinen cut him off and said, "I'm sorry but I think this is a joke from one of the South Florida radio stations known for these pranks." Then she hung up.
What's worse: Getting pranked (ala Sarah Palin) or hanging up on the soon-to-be most powerful man in the world?
The Fairness Doctrine seems to strike fear into the hearts of the sicko radio jocks that pollute our airwaves. The right wing talkie-kabobs made that a major talking point during the general election. Here's a piece from Murdoch's rag:
SHOULD Barack Obama win the presidency and Democrats take full control of Congress, next year will see a real legislative attempt to bring back the Fairness Doctrine - and to diminish conservatives' influence on broadcast radio, the one medium they dominate
I often post the disgusting rants of people like Limbaugh and Hannity because it is truly offensive and destructive stuff, but there's a whole cabal of minor league right wing talking heads that spew the same garbage on a much smaller scale that still penetrates into many regional pockets of our nation.
Like their better-known counterparts, these syndicated and regional radio hosts have played active roles this election season in promoting falsehoods and smears in an all-out effort to foment hate and distrust among their listeners for President-elect Barack Obama.
While the hosts vary in the degree of vitriol they spew and in their ratio of rebuttable falsehoods to unbridled smears, Media Matters for America and Colorado Media Matters have identified common themes that many, if not all, have promoted over the past year.
Here are a few examples from Country Fair, but go and check out their list.
It isn't something Santa would approve of. And I'm sure they will all be good soldiers, fighting the scary "War on Christmas."
You can also look through our tag system under "smears" and find a host of others. When you look at them all together, it really is like a mutating virus...
Al Franken's campaign announced on Wednesday that, for the first time since the Minnesota recount began, the Democrat has actually pulled ahead of Republican Sen. Norm Coleman. Speaking on a conference call with reporters, Franken's chief counsel Marc Elias said the campaign's own internal count showed them up 22 votes, a jump from the 13 vote deficit that they faced on Tuesday.
"We have approximately 138,000 ballots left to count," said Elias. "94.3 percent of the state has now been counted... Obviously that number is going to change, but we are pleased thus far with how things are going."
Nate Silver's math is a little tricky for me, but he is predicting a Franken win by 27 votes...
I obviously want Franken to win for many important reasons, but if he does, watching BillO's never ending freak out would be an extra added bonus too..
[Derek Black, right, and his dad Don Black, January 10, 2007, "Values Voters" Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.]
White supremacists have been trying to reinsert themselves back into the mainstream (where once upon a time they were common) for a long time now. One of the chief avenues for this effort has for years been the Republican Party in the South, particularly in places like Louisiana, where David Duke operates, and Mississippi, where the Council of Conservative Citizens has a friend in Gov. Haley Barbour. It's all part of the legacy of the Southern Strategy.
In Florida, Republicans are now being confronted with the legacy of the Southern Strategy in the person of Derek Black:
Derek Black says "of course" he will attend a meeting Wednesday for new members of Palm Beach County's Republican Executive Committee. Never mind that the party chairman says Black's "white supremacist" associations are not welcome and he will not be seated.
"I was elected," Black, 19, says.
Sporting a black hat, the son of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Don Black was seated last week in a restaurant off Southern Boulevard. Sitting next to him was one of his supporters: David Duke, former Louisiana state legislator and another former KKK grand wizard.
"We're going to fight," Duke said. "I know Derek Black is going to fight for his constitutional liberties. That's why I'm here, because I want to assist Derek."
Sorry, says county GOP Chairman Sid Dinerstein. In the qualifying period in June, Black didn't sign a loyalty oath pledging he would not do anything injurious to the party. And that's not the only problem.
"He participates in white supremacist activities," Dinerstein said. "We're the party of Lincoln. We're the party that says we don't judge anybody by the color of their skin."
There's a familial connection between David Duke and Derek Black: Derek's mother, Chloe Black, was previously married to Duke, and their son is Derek's half-brother. But there's also a strategic connection, in that Duke did the same thing himself in the 1980's and '90s in Louisiana, largely taking advantage of the Republicans' Southern Strategy.
In his book on the Southern Strategy, Joseph Aistrup describes this (cited here):
In the first poll that I've seen since Obama won the presidency and started putting his cabinet together, USA TODAY's poll says Americans are very, very satisfied with what he's done so far.
President-elect Barack Obama gets soaring marks for his handling of the transition and his choices for the Cabinet, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, even at a time the public is downbeat over the economy.'
More than three of four Americans, including a majority of Republicans, approve of the job Obama has done so far — broad-based support he'll need as he faces tough decisions ahead.By 69%-25%, those surveyed approve of his pick of New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, his former Democratic primary rival, as secretary of State.
No matter how one feels about his cabinet choices, I believe Americans are quite relieved to have a man at the helm, responding like a true leader and making decisive decisions in a time of real economic crisis.
And they also feel as I do that a major stimulus package is needed to help kick start the economy.
In the poll, Americans by more than 3-1 say they trust Obama more than Bush to handle the economy. By 58%-33%, they support Obama's plan for a huge spending package to spur economic growth.
Asked if Obama's support for the Employee Free Choice Act remained as strong as his public proclamations suggested on the campaign trail, transition spokesman Dan Pfeiffer responded, succinctly, "Yes."
With the kind of support Obama's got going in, EFCA is something that's both achievable and necessary. Despite the hysterical commentary from the right these days, the fact is that unions strengthen the economy not weaken it.
The Preznit, out working on that Legacy Thing, was on ABC with Charles Gibson last night, and had this revealing exchange:
Gibson: You've always said there's no do-overs as president. If you had one --
Bush: The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said, you know ... the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn't just people in my administration, and um ... You know, that's not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.
Gibson: If the intelligence had been right, would there have been an Iraq war?
Bush: If he had had weapons of mass destruction, would there have been a war? Absolutely.
Gibson: No, if you had known he didn't.
Bush: Oh, I see what you're saying. Uh ... You know, that's an interesting question. That is a do-over I can't do. It's hard for me to speculate.
David N: As always with Bush, the Buck Stops Over There, Or There -- Anywhere But Here.
It obviously never crossed Bush's mind to consider the possibility that there weren't WMD in Iraq -- which, as we now know, was a lot of the reason the intelligence he received was getting so skewed. Indeed, it's obvious he'd probably have simply ignored that intelligence even if it had clearly warned there were no WMD.
Meanwhile, guys like Richard Clarke were warning him he shouldn't even go into Iraq if he was serious about combating terrorism.
Clearly, he wasn't. He was just intent on kicking Saddam's ass, regardless of the price paid.
And that's why, contra Karl Rove, he is forever doomed to be known as the Worst. President. Ever.
So far, Obama has only nominated one ambassador - career professional Susan Rice as ambassador to the UN. Here she is in September talking about Obama's foreign policy.
Following up on reports of Obama's intended Herculean cleaning of the Agean Stables at the Department of Defense, where the entire body of Bush-appointed deputies and under-whatevers are expected to be fired, the Washington Post now reports that the incoming Obama administration has told every single Bush political appointee as an ambassador that their services will no longer be required come January 20th.
That's an awful lot of ambassadors. An unusually high percentage of Bush's ambassador picks throughout his presidency - about half - have been "political appointees," as opposed to career foreign officers and without fail those political appointees have been big campaign donors, each raising over $100,000 for Bush and lots more for the Republican Party.
Nations that have had these, usually clueless, ambassadors foisted upon them just so that Bush could thank his biggest funders with a prestige sinecure include: Canada, Mexico, Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain, Australia, Belgium, Hungary, Ireland, Saudi Arabia, France, Portugal, Switzerland, Singapore and the European Union as well as a host of smaller nations. The United States is the only nation which habitually staffs its top diplomatic positions in other countries with check-writing rank amateurs rather than professional diplomats.
Republicans continue to push the idea that this is a center-right country and that Americans have swooned for GOP anti-government posturing all these years, but the real electoral bait has been anger, recrimination and scapegoating. That's why John McCain kept describing Barack Obama as some sort of alien and why Palin, taking a page right out of the McCarthy playbook, kept pushing Obama's relationship with onetime radical William Ayers.
And that is also why the Republican Party, despite the recent failure of McCarthyism, is likely to keep moving rightward, appeasing its more extreme elements and stoking their grievances for some time to come. There may be assorted intellectuals and ideologues in the party, maybe even a few centrists, but there is no longer an intellectual or even ideological wing. The party belongs to McCarthy and his heirs -- Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Palin. It's in the genes.
Dittoheads on CNN's Late Edition, Sunday. Sajjan Gohel agrees the Mumbai culprits are the Lek, even though he told the WaPo the day before it was definitely Al Qaeda, and former CIA DDI John McLaughlin, with a straight face and without challenge, says Pakistan's ISI is "very responsive" to civilian authority.
The international community and media appear to have accepted India's allegations of Pakistani involvement in the Mumbai bombings, via an ISI proxy terror group. Yet no-one is mentioning India's atrocious record of widespread torture or the questionable nature of confessions gained by such methods.
WITH EACH passing day, suspicions of a Pakistani link to the slaughter of 174 people, including six Americans, in Mumbai grow stronger -- and more plausible. A captured terrorist has reportedly confessed to Indian officials that he received training in Pakistan from Lashkar-i-Taiba, a guerrilla organization that was nurtured by Pakistani military intelligence to fight India in the disputed Kashmir region.
But really, that confession by one captured terrorist is the only evidence thus far advanced, and (until late Tuesday) everything we know about it has been leaked by unofficial officials rather than with the full backing of the Indian government.
We onlyhavethisdetainee'salleged word that all the attackers were from Pakistan, that there were only ten of them, that the attacks were funded with Saudi money, that they trained at an LeK camp inside Pakistan, that they hijacked a single Indian vessel to transport then to Mumbai or that they had hoped to kill 5,000 rather than the 200 or so they did murder. All of this relies on the confession of one man, presumably not one of the attacks leaders because that possibility hasn't been mentioned at all and certainly would have been if it were there. The leaked details of his confession have then been amplified and added to by rumor and speculation, particularly by the understandably angry Indian press.
Rachel Maddow interviews Leo Gerard, the President of the United Steelworkers Union and asks if the auto industry is getting tougher treatment than the financial industry did when it was their turn for a bailout.
Gerard goes through the list of bailouts that have cost our economy trillions of dollars and notes that no one complained when CEOs made away with hundreds of billions of dollars over the years while they have taken our entire economy down the tank. He makes some great points on how "we've treated the people who take a shower after work much different than we've treated the people who shower before they go to work".
As one of those people who takes a shower after I get off work and not before, I concur.
Maddow and Gerard then move on to how politics is playing into this debate. Transcripts to follow:
What was the most important story in the news yesterday? According to Bill O'Reilly, it's the fact that an atheist group was permitted to erect a holiday display alongside a Nativity scene at the state Capitol in Washington state.
His entire opening segment on The O'Reilly Factor yesterday was devoted to the subject, replete with a chryon featuring Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire's phone number, and featuring one of Papa Bear's patented "Talking Points Memo" rants, claiming Gregoire had "embarrassed Washington state and the nation."
He had on local blogger David Goldstein, who opened by noting pointedly that Gregoire was busy meeting with President-elect Obama to work on an economic-recovery plan "instead of worrying herself over this annual tempest in a teapot, which is what this is."
What's odd about O'Reilly's rant is that the state did not move to prohibit any kind of displays. The problem for O'Reilly is that it was too inclusive: the state essentially makes the space available for any group that wants to use it for a holiday display. (See the explanation here.)
In other words, O'Reilly is less interested in defending Christmas here in this crazy-ass liberal state (as O'Reilly depicts us) than he is in denying atheists their free-speech rights.
Goldstein smacked O'Reilly's whole premise by pointing this out:
Any religious organization that wants to put up a religious display gets to put one up. This is the problem of having religious displays on public property. It's a free-speech issue in the end. Once you allow one group to do it, then all groups get to do it. And in fact, I'm surprised that there's only three this year.
I think O'Reilly is starting to lose it, now that the recent elections have delivered a clear repudiation to just about everything he stands for, particularly that monumental waste of time and energy known as the Culture War. Unfortunately for him, he's built his whole career out of stoking the flames of that dimming fire.
So of course he has to do his damnedest to keep that faint little spark glowing. That seems to take a lot of huffing and puffing.
Amygdala: The new Nixon tapes. It's my favorite radio show ever!
Greatscat!: United Steelworkers president, Leo Gerard, points out that Washington rushed to bail out fat cats but scoffs at the notion of helping working people. Here's a different idea.
Even as Barack Obama was introducing his national security team to the nation Monday, Americans learned of a chilling new report detailing the scope of the global threat of weapons of mass destruction. Dramatically titled "World at Risk," the study led by former Senators Bob Graham (D-FL) and Jim Talent (R-MO) predicted a better than even chance that the world would experience a WMD attack within the next five years. As if President-Elect Obama didn't already have enough to worry about, the report eerily echoed the dire - and hauntingly accurate - February 2001 warnings by the Hart-Rudman Commission about the growing terrorism threat to the United States.
The nine-member Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism (web site here) offered its grim assessment (PDF here) that the United States and its allies must act quickly to avert the disaster of an attack carried out with biological, nuclear or other unconventional weapons somewhere in the world. The six month study, mandated by Congress to address a key recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, opens with both a dark forecast and a call to action:
The Commission believes that unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013.
While the Graham panel concluded "terrorists are more likely to be able to obtain and use a biological weapon than a nuclear weapon," nuclear weapons programs in countries such as Iran and North Korea and the growing risk poorly secured biological pathogens suggest, as the New York Times put it, "unconventional threats are fast outpacing the defenses arrayed to confront them." And at the very time "America’s margin of safety is shrinking, not growing," the panel warned, an increasingly unstable Pakistan will be at the center of Obama administration policymakers' nightmares:
Were one to map terrorism and weapons of mass destruction today, all roads would intersect in Pakistan. It has nuclear weapons and a history of unstable governments, and parts of its territory are currently a safe haven for al Qaeda and other terrorists. Moreover, given Pakistan's tense relationship with India, its buildup of nuclear weapons is exacerbating the prospect of a dangerous nuclear arms race in South Asia that could lead to a nuclear conflict...
...Pakistan is an ally, but there is a grave danger it could also be an unwitting source of a terrorist attack on the United States - possibly with weapons of mass destruction.
If this grim alarm to an incoming administration sounds familiar, it should. Back in 2001, the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century led by Gary Hart and Warren Rudman offered the new President George W. Bush a similarly frightening assessment of the looming terrorism threat.
Call it the price of success, or something less flattering, but Chuck Todd is now just mailing it in by simply retelling what the serious people in Washington tell him. In this case it's "very senior Democrats" who are "concerned" what sort of message an Al Franken win in Minnesota would send to the electorate.
Joe Scarborough thinks this is all great, of course, that they really don't want "[Franken] up there anyway", that "they're fine with 59", and that "some Democrats just want to keep the comedian up in Minnesota."
Todd picks up that ball and runs with it, adding that "had Democrats had a better candidate in both seats [Georgia also] both would already be over. They would have beaten Norm Coleman with any generic Democrat in Congress."
The message so alarming to "senior Democrats," evidently, is that everybody in the Hollywood Left would soon be running for office. As Todd mentions Tim Robbins, Sean Penn and Alec Baldwin, Scarborough laughs out loud at the prospect.
This is all very strange coming from a party that gave us a Hollywood B-movie actor as President in Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzeneggar as Governator in California.
One wonders what Chuck Todd will have to say if/when Chris Matthews runs for Senate in Pennsylvania. Although not a Hollywood Lefty, Matthews would be coming from a similar place in the media as Al Franken. It's just that Matthews happens to be a colleague of Todd's at MSNBC ...
