For the Record

Got republican friends?

If so, this dKos diary from a former republican gives great insight in how to "market" Barack to them:

1.  TAXES.  As a member of the Illinois State Senate, Sen. Obama was cosponsor of a bill which ultimately passed, creating the largest tax cut in state history.   Since the start of his presidential campaign, he has consistently favored a broad-based middle class tax cut.  By contrast, Sen. McCain "voted against tax cuts before he voted for them", and has no real credibility on this issue among conservatives. McCain was very critical of the Bush tax cuts, which most Republicans believe gave us years of prosperity - until very  recently.  Obama can thus be taken more seriously than McCain as a President who will cut taxes, rather than raise them.

2.  SPENDING.  Most Republicans' biggest gripe with their own party - by far - is its failure to control the bureaucracy and reign in runaway federal spending and deficits.  It is useful to mention that while the last five (5) Republican Presidents promised fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets, all of them grew discretionary civilian spending by tremendous amounts, and ran up ever larger deficits.  Meanwhile, only Pres. Bill Clinton balanced the federal budget, and produced four years of surpluses, with the same forecast long into the indefinite future. A big problem with the federal budget is that almost nobody knows where all the money is going; its easy to add earmarks and pork barrel spending and special interest giveaways when the people back home cant tell the difference.   Sen. Barack Obama's major legislative accomplishment in the Senate, the The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 has been to bring transparency to federal spending.  Send your Republican friends to http://www.federalspending.gov which his legislation created, a veritable "Google of the Federal Budget", where anyone can research every dollar to see where their tax money is actually going.  The whole Federal Rathole is now online, for the first time ever, inviting scrutiny from whoever has the patience to slog through it all.  You dont have to be a CPA to realize that this does more in the long run to control wasteful federal spending than all the speeches Bush, Bush, Reagan, Ford, and Nixon ever gave on the subject, put together.

3. BIG GOVERNMENT.  In his North Carolina victory speech, among other things, Sen. Obama uttered the words "We dont need Big Government". Whether you agree with that or not, remind your Republican friends that Pres. Bill Clinton's National Performance Review reduced the federal civilian workforce by 250,000 positions (ones they will consider, rightly or wrongly, to be useless tax-sucking bureaucrats). This makes the last Democratic administration the only presidency since Eisenhower's to leave office with a smaller federal workforce that he started with - again, Bush, Bush, Reagan, Ford, and Nixon notwithstanding.  But, the real stones Obama brings to the table on this issue are his formative years on the south side of Chicago, doing meaningful community social work through voluntary, faith-based, non-governmental community organizations, rather than government bureaucracies. Yes, We CAN - rehabilitate the homeless, educate the illiterate, provide day care for single moms, dry out alcoholics, and clean junkies off the dope without buidling perpetual bureaucracies - Obama himself has proven that, through social entrepreneurship. By contrast, John McCain has never drawn a day's pay that didnt come from the public trough, courtesy of your tax dollars (getting fabulously rich by marrying an heiress or taking money under the table from special interests he did favors for doesnt count as 'earning money in the productive sector').

4.  PERSONAL LIBERTY.  Barry Goldwater must be rolling over in his grave over what debasements of the U.S. Constitution the Bush Administration has gotten itself into, and which the man who took his seat in the U.S. Senate, John McCain now ardently defends. Warrantless domestic wiretapping, warrantless searches and seizures, arresting U.S. citizens without probable cause, holding them without trial, etc., etc....No REAL conservative believes these things are legitimate perrogatives of the federal government. There are innumerable horror stories you can research and recount of how the GOP has sat idly by while our cherished Constitutional protections have been ignored, abrogated, and turned into a joke. The last thing real conservatives want is the Orwellian Police State we're presently heading for.  Grassroots Republicans dont necessarily trust the feds any more than you do.  Thats a case you can make - and make stick - with them.

5.  NATIONAL SECURITY.  To the rejoinder, "yes, but its worked, we havent been attacked since 9/11", you must add:  "BUT, we havent foreclosed the threat by taking out al Queada, either".  The National Security argument is like the Tax-and-Spend one, it doesnt matter where you stand on "bombing al Queada back to the stone age" - the fact remains that your Republican friends will vote for the candidate they perceive to be most in tune with that idea, period.  McCain vocally disagrees with the successful CIA program to take out al Queada leadership when located in northwest Pakistan, without alerting the local tribal authorities and Pakistani Intelligence, who have always warned off our targets in the past.  Sen. Obama, by contrast, opposes giving al Queada sanctuary in Pakistan, and ardently supports this initiative.  When McCain attacked Obama as niave for "wanting to bomb an ally", the very next day the CIA took out the #3 leader in al Queada with just such a raid, with a missile fired from a Predator drone.  Coddling Pakistan's corrupt dictator for these eight years hasnt made us safer, and John McCain's simplistic continuation of this weak policy is just being Soft on Terrorism, no way around it. Also, its worth noting that whatever other implications it may have for John McCain's Character, Psyche, or Mental Makeup, having a plane shot out from under you and spending six years behind bars does not automatically qualify anyone as a "national security expert"; that notion is just ludicrous on the face of it.

6.  OPPORTUNITY.  While John McCain's four-star Admiral father ensured him a prized appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, his performance - 894th out of 899 cadets in his class - does not attest to diligent effort, whereas Barack Obama (from a broken home, on food stamps) won competitive academic scholarships to Harvard, which he proved himself worthy of by graduating Magna Cum Laude ("With Highest Honors").  Its been a long time since any politicians of either party could talk convincingly about "The American Dream", but Barack Obama can, because he lived it. Without handouts, family patronage, or inheritence, he pulled himself up by his bootstraps from the Chicago ghetto through his own hard work, enterprise, and initiative to become President of the Harvard Law Review, one of the most prestigious scholarly legal journals in the country.  Which President is more likely to make a difference in the lives of people, and motivate them with initiative to best achieve their individual God-given potential?

Those are the issues that real, hard-core Republicans think about when they vote for a president.  Talk TO them - not past them with vague, touchy-feely bleeding heart nonsense they wont understand or agree with - and you might very likely ring up another VOTE for Barack Obama this fall.  Getting your friends VOTE is all that matters, not winning their hearts to any grander philosophical cause; that just wont happen, so forget it.  Make common cause between your GOP acquaintences and Sen. Obama, even if its on points you, yourself, disagree with. THAT'S HOW YOU WILL WIN THIS ELECTION FOR OBAMA.

Once you wash that "tax-and-spend liberal, squishy-on-national-security" label away, none of the other, lesser acusations the Karl Roves and Rush Limbaughs of this world can make against Obama will stick, either. All other things thus being equal, the younger, more intelligent, more dynamic, less "Washington Establishment", less 'tainted-by-special-interest-money' candidate should prevail.  Even among Republicans...

Read this book (or at least the review!)

Larry Bartels's 'Unequal Democracy' reviewed here. Looks to be a treasure trove of interesting and/or surprising and/or hopeful info about the attitudes Americans hold about various political issues -- eg the alleged "rightward shift" in the US is pretty much entirely at upper income strata. (Not too surprising, when was the last time any high profile sources paid the slightest bit of attention to the "little guy"?)

"fingernails on the cliff"

Great lecture here by Harvard's Elizabeth Warren. It's an hour long so I'll summarize. She's compared household expenses today and in momndad-time, finds all sorts of creepy stuff. Eg, spending is down on all fun stuff, way up on unfun stuff; the latter eats up all the $ from working women and much from dad. Unfun stuff hasta be paid so need two jobs to avoid fail. Add decreased safety net and increased ed costs and you get rise in bankruptcy, esp for fam with kids. Scary portent: the lucky pull away from the unlucky, eventually Brazil.

Bush signature on torture authorization

I'm reposting this 7 February 2002 memo, signed by Bush. (Source: this archive, which I discovered via this dKos diary.)

The central finding of the memo is that members of AQ are not covered under either article 3 or 4 of the Geneva Conventions. Accordingly, "detainees" held to be members of AQ need be "treated in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva" only insofar as is "appropriate and consistent with military necessity". In other words, torture away.

The central finding is clearly false. According to convention IV, part 1, article 4, paragraph 4:

Every person in enemy hands must have some status under international law: he is either a prisoner of war and, as such, covered by the Third Convention, a civilian covered by the Fourth Convention, or again, a member of the medical personnel of the armed forces who is covered by the First Convention. There is no intermediate status; nobody in enemy hands can be outside the law.

There you have it, war crimes approved by Bush's hand.

Obama's speeches

The MLK day/economic justice speech here.

"A More Perfect Union" here.

¡Viva Obama!

McCain's top campaign adviser works for Hillary's top campaign adviser???

What the fuck???

Mark Penn isn't just Hillary Clinton's chief strategist -- he is also the CEO of one the world's largest public affairs firms, Burson-Marsteller.

Burson-Marsteller's DC-based lobbying subsidiary is headed by one of John McCain's top advisers, a Republican lobbyist named Charlie Black.

Guess this splains why HRC and JMcC gave the exact same speech on Tuesday!

A little patience

One last word, courtesy of Thomas Jefferson, from a letter to his friend John Taylor:

A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles.  It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, & incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt [...]  And if we feel their power just sufficiently to hoop us together, it will be the happiest situation in which we can exist.  If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, & then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.

Farewell

We started For the Record on 6 December 2003. This was an especially dark time in US politics: the Iraq war was only nine months old at the time, 9/11 just over two years old. The Bush Gang, and the right wing more broadly, still maintained an incredibly intimidating stranglehold over the national discourse.

Many of our interlocutors still bought into all those comfortable political myths of the 90s -- the third way, globalism, corporations are great for prosperity, the rising tide lifts all boats, the Dems need to give up on the New Deal, efficiency is the prime institutional virtue, the US government is controlled by law and basically wisely stewarded by competent technocrats acting in the public interest, US foreign policy is basically benign, American exceptionalism, the institutional goal of big corporate journalism is to speak truth to power and serve as the fourth estate.

We had recently discovered Chomsky and Krugman, so we had replaced those comfortable myths with ugly and depressing realities. We felt that the nation and the world were going down the tubes in terms of economic and social justice, the environment, and the ability of institutions to preserve and maintain a decent society. We felt that it was essential to shake people awake, to alert them not only to the long-standing Chomsky line that the US is not benevolent in foreign relations, that corporate journalism plays a propaganda role, that unregulated corporate capitalism is neither natural nor just, that comfortable myths blind us to the atrocities the state commits on our behalf -- but also to the alarming Krugman line that the Bush gang had summoned up a new era of corruption, amorality, immorality: that the US would now be brazenly vicious in foreign relations, that corporate journalism would distribute naked propaganda, that the economic system would be geared increasingly toward vacuuming wealth and power upward, that the public mind would manifest increasingly irrational jingoism.

At the time there were of course voices on our side -- The Nation's and Harper's's longstanding advocacy journalism; Kos, Atrios, JMM, digby, billmon, Gilliard, Needlenose; in the philosophical community, Brian Leiter, with whom we maintained a close and cooperative blogging relationship; and of course Chomsky and Krugman. Still, it was our feeling that we had a distinctive contribution to make, by focusing on issues and generating a narrative that tracked our specific interests, and by reaching a distinctive audience that at the time was, it is my sense, not awake to the issues we stressed.

Now, four years and 1200 posts later, we feel it is time to hang up our blogging pen. Thanks to the herculean efforts of many of the voices listed above, political blogging has become a full time job; fatigue finally set in for us. But on the bright side, we feel as though there has been a genuine shift of the tide in terms of political opinion, both in the nation at large, and among our interlocutors. Obviously the country as a whole has woken up to the hideousness of the Republican Party; in terms of our local social circle, I know of few people who encounter political thinking with the naive optimism of the 90s. To the extent that any of this was our work, we feel as though our work is done.

We intend, unlike Billmon, to preserve these records of the last four years, both since we wish to continue to endorse for the most part the stands we took during this dark period, and as a record for the future of how things can go wrong. However, it is not our intention to continue to update this blog.

Thanks for your attention.

Powerful idea

Over at Huffington Post they are selling posters which list events, names, and slogans evoking various nightmares of the Bush years (with the tag line: 'Haven't we had enough?  Democrats '08).  Proceeds will go to plaster giant versions on the walls of buildings in NY, LA, and DC, assuming they can find buildings tall enough.

Unbelievable

No, wait.  It's believable.  In fact, it was easily predictable.  Which doesn't make it any less astounding:

The increase in incomes of the top 1 percent of Americans from 2003 to 2005 exceeded the total income of the poorest 20 percent of Americans, data in a new report by the Congressional Budget Office shows.

The poorest fifth of households had total income of $383.4 billion in 2005, while just the increase in income for the top 1 percent came to $524.8 billion, a figure 37 percent higher.

What can one say about this sort of thing?

This is what the U.S. abroad has come to.

Record records

Weather update.

Horrible John Howard voted out

Good riddance.

On Remembrance Day

*CANADA** IS AT WAR *

Canada is at war right now.

We barely know why.

At school we never talk about it

For math is on our minds.

We always say we will remember

When 'Remembrance Day' is here.

But once this day is done

We go back to our school year.

World War One was said to be

"The war to end all wars."

In World War Two, "Never again"

Would we die on foreign shores.

But we are fighting in Afghanistan.

We must understand why.

We should always talk about it,

And remember our lost lives.

-          Emma Toner age 10

Celebrating torture

From Jim John:

An article in defense of torture as US policy by someone named Deroy Murdock appeared in the National Review Online this Monday.  It features the astonishing remark that "[w]aterboarding is something of which every American should be proud."  [Murdock also says "In short, there is nothing “repugnant” about waterboarding".]  I'm not making this up.  The article can be read here:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZjNkYmU2NWVlOWE4MTU5MjhiOGNmMWUwMjdjZjU2ZjA

I discovered this morning that Murdock is listed as a faculty member at the libertarian-leaning Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University.  Their contact information is here:

Institute for Humane Studies
at George Mason University
3301 N. Fairfax Dr., Ste. 440
Arlington VA 22201-4432
800.697.8799 (toll-free)
703.993.4890 (fax)

It seems the Institute ought to change its name.  Please do take action on this.

For first time, unmarried women outnumber married women

This post has lots of treats, including the cool Women's Voices.  Women Vote.  (yes, that's an irritating name) video with all those awesome women in the Oval office (including one of my fav bloggers---Digby of Hullabaloo).  Cached in there is an interesting statistic:

Recent polling in particular indicates that unmarried women, for the first time a larger demographic than married women, vote more heavily for Dems than practically any other group.

God, I am so sick of seeing crazy old white guys calling all the shots.  Married or not, here we come!

Bush wishes he could do this

Musharraf imposes military rule:

Musharraf, who took power in a 1999 coup and is also head of Pakistan's army, suspended the constitution on Saturday ahead of a Supreme Court ruling on whether his recent re-election as president was legal. He ousted seven independent-minded Supreme Court judges, put a stranglehold on independent media and granted sweeping powers to authorities to crush dissent.

One small difference: Bush would probably keep the complicit Supreme Court who anti-democratically installed him in the first place.

Hat tip to my most excellent stepfather, Don Doiron.

What is the truth about inflation?

This post argues frighteningly that the true rate of inflation in the US last year was over 16% -- by contrast the government-reported figure was an absurd .8%. The former wouldn't be surprising, considering the absurdly high prices of real estate and health care, on top of near $4 gas, widely reported spikes in food prices, etc. If the 16% figure is right that certainly wiped out whatever your pay raise may have been last year!

Whitewashing Blackwater

The old site, and the new site.

Wired is helpin' out with a new logo contest.

Hat tip to Lisa Rivera.