Truthers, Birthers, And Their Proper Side Of The Fence

I've seen Van Jones speak and had the opportunity to talk to him at the DNC last year. I'm going to rerun a bit of that discussion and have you tell me if these are the words of a Communist:

On green jobs, which is Jones' real focus area, he stressed that we need to move the environmental conversation from a cultural one to a political one. The green-collar economy "can be a place for people to earn money, not spend money. We need collective action for green citizenship, to create the jobs of the future in a Green New Deal. As long as carbon is free we're never going to move forward." He was pleased by the recent efforts by municipalities and states (green jobs bills have been passed in Massachusetts and Washington state, and the US Conference of Mayors is on board as well), but recognizes that the federal government must be involved as well. "This is about laws, not gizmos. Technology cannot be the savior. This has to be a bottom-up, inside-outside AND a top-down strategy. If the Feds are MIA, human life will be MIA in the future."

We talked about the offshore drilling debate, where Jones clearly stated that the Republicans won the day by lying to the American people. He had three major points:

• There is no such thing as American oil. There is oil drilled by multinationals that is sent overseas to China and India. American offshore driling will do nothing to solve any American oil problems.

• We banned drilling in offshore areas not to save birds and fish, but because of coastal families and coastal communities, because kids were walking into the water and coming out with oil on them, because property values were plunging. Democrats should not be willing to throw away America's beauty for a 2-cent solution in 10 years.

• We've seen the new phenomenon of the "dirty greens," who want to have an "all of the above strategy" on energy, with solar and wind, but also clean coal and drilling offshore and shale and all these dirty polluters. "All of the above" is not a strategy. It's not a wise choice, but a stupid swipe at a persistent problem.

That sounds like pretty mainstream liberal conceptions on energy and the environment. Jones was an activist who went into the government because he saw the need for a federal strategy to deal with green jobs.

But because he was previously involved with Color of Change, who has engineered a successful boycott of Glenn Beck, the Foc News crew has wanted to collect Jones' scalp. So they point to comments and replay them over and over. Not really anything he did, but things he said (ooh, he called Republicans assholes! What delicate sensibilities these chaps have), things he's signed. Although, I have to agree, this was certainly a mistake.

President Obama’s “green jobs czar” Van Jones has been targeted again and again by conservatives for his controversial views and now they’ll have another item to use as fodder.

Mr. Jones signed a statement for 911Truth.org in 2004 demanding an investigation into what the Bush Administration may have done that “deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.”

Jones has thus far apologized for prior statements and said he didn't agree "now or ever" with the 911 Truth letter. But if he has to leave his job at the White House, that will be the reason. And he absolutely made a mistake

But it brings up something interesting. There are now around a dozen Republican members of Congress who have co-sponsored legislation, essentially asking the President to reveal his birth certificate. The Birther phenomenon is at least as crazy and irresponsible as the Truther phenomenon. Why would it be OK to have 12 members of Congress who are conspiracy theorists, and not one in the White House? Now, the members of Congress would tell you they're not conspiracy theorists. So would Van Jones.

The range of debate that's acceptable and unacceptable keeps changing, somebody send me a scorecard.

The List Is Coming! The List Is Coming!

The buzzing of excitement at the concept of Barack Obama awakening the sleeping giant of "the list" to help him pass his budget seems like a Washington-centric read of things. First of all, Barack Obama isn't doing anything. Organizing for America has a separate organization, and they are making their determinations separately. Second, this isn't the "first" deployment of the sacred list - there were stimulus meetings last month. Third, the idea that off-cycle organizing is novel and interesting is an example of why Washington consultants shouldn't be trusted to run anybody's campaign. Let's look at what the ask is here:

The campaign, which will be run under the aegis of the Democratic National Committee, will rely heavily on the 13 million-strong e-mail list put together during the campaign and now under the control of Organizing for America (OFA), a group overseen by the DNC. Aides familiar with the plan said it is an unprecedented attempt to transfer the grass-roots energy built during the presidential campaign into an effort to sway Congress [...]

(David) Plouffe, who passed up a formal role in the White House but remains a conduit to the army of Obama volunteers, sent an e-mail to the OFA mailing list over the weekend signaling the ramping up of the campaign for the president's budget. "In the next few weeks we'll be asking you to do some of the same things we asked of you during the campaign -- talking directly to people in your communities about the President's ideas for long-term prosperity," he wrote.

That push begins today with an e-mail asking volunteers to go door to door Saturday to urge their neighbors to sign a pledge in support of Obama's budget plan.

Hey idiots, THAT'S WHAT YOU DO in an off-election year, or at least it's what you should do. Keeping in touch with neighbors and having what amounts to precinct captains in every corner of America is standard political organizing, and it's shameful that it has taken until now to get around to it. A pre-cursor to increasing political engagement nationwide is building up trusted networks in communities, so that individuals know where to go to get information and steps for action. This is not transformational, it's righting a grave wrong. Furthermore, the OFA/DNC effort is being asinine by re-starting this process over again and not retaining the on-the-ground organizers that were already implementing the 50-state strategy under Howard Dean. In addition, there are already email and Web-based campaigns that are very sharp, applying pressure on Democrats and Republicans alike - a good example is the Color of Change action to flood South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford with phone calls today for rejecting stimulus money (this enhances a DNC on-air effort to call out Sanford).

The lack of off-cycle organizing that is targeted on principles and explanations for policy is WHY there are so many wayward corporate Democrats talking about defying the President on his mostly progressive budget. The Party has long lost touch with the people who support it at the ballot. And the other side of this is that people who are energized by being instruments of change in the election are not necessarily going to hop to answer the call on whatever issue some folks in Washington decide is the most important. Here in California, I can tell you there is about four times as much energy and organizing going into marriage equality than there is on national priorities. And that focus is different depending on the regional area.

That OFA is deploying its list should not be a cause for joy; it should be a cause for embarrassment.

The Shootings At Algiers Point

Allow me to break with all journalistic convention and mention Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans, which would be more than what was done during the entire Presidential election. One predictable outcome of that tragedy was the extent to which the conservative noise machine hyped incidents of looting and mayhem, broken down exclusively along racial lines, to "prove" that black people resort to animal instincts in a time of panic. It was not only completely offensive and wrong, but now an astonishing report by The Nation shows that in at least one case, the opposite was true - white vigilantes shot African-Americans in the aftermath of the storm.

The way Donnell Herrington tells it, there was no warning. One second he was trudging through the heat. The next he was lying prostrate on the pavement, his life spilling out of a hole in his throat, his body racked with pain, his vision blurred and distorted.

It was September 1, 2005, some three days after Hurricane Katrina crashed into New Orleans, and somebody had just blasted Herrington, who is African-American, with a shotgun. "I just hit the ground. I didn't even know what happened," recalls Herrington, a burly 32-year-old with a soft drawl.

The sudden eruption of gunfire horrified Herrington's companions--his cousin Marcel Alexander, then 17, and friend Chris Collins, then 18, who are also black. "I looked at Donnell and he had this big old hole in his neck," Alexander recalls. "I tried to help him up, and they started shooting again." Herrington says he was staggering to his feet when a second shotgun blast struck him from behind; the spray of lead pellets also caught Collins and Alexander. The buckshot peppered Alexander's back, arm and buttocks [...]

Herrington, Collins and Alexander's experience fits into a broader pattern of violence in which, evidence indicates, at least eleven people were shot. In each case the targets were African-American men, while the shooters, it appears, were all white.

The new information should reframe our understanding of the catastrophe. Immediately after the storm, the media portrayed African-Americans as looters and thugs--Mayor Ray Nagin, for example, told Oprah Winfrey that "hundreds of gang members" were marauding through the Superdome. Now it's clear that some of the most serious crimes committed during that time were the work of gun-toting white males.

So far, their crimes have gone unpunished. No one was ever arrested for shooting Herrington, Alexander and Collins--in fact, there was never an investigation. I found this story repeated over and over during my days in New Orleans. As a reporter who has spent more than a decade covering crime, I was startled to meet so many people with so much detailed information about potentially serious offenses, none of whom had ever been interviewed by police detectives.

The vigilantes came from Algiers Point, a white enclave in the middle of the city, where the residents stockpiled guns and ammunition after the storm, fearing that blacks would flock to their area, which was relatively unhurt by the storm. They assembled a small group of white males with instructions to shoot anything that moved. The hysteria created by the lurid details of chaos and gang activity led to paranoia and the "frontier justice" that ensued.

Three-plus years later, this is largely an untold story. As AC Thompson says in his story (which should be read in full), no investigation has ever been opened, nobody has been arrested or even interviewed about the multiple shootings and even deaths. If this sounds like something out of the 1950s to you, well I agree.

John Conyers has now responded to the report.

Responding to an investigation published in The Nation into vigilante violence after Hurricane Katrina, Rep. John Conyers Jr. issued a public statement Thursday, expressing concern. The investigation details how, after the storm struck, some white residents in the Algiers Point neighborhood of New Orleans repeatedly attacked African-American men.

In interviews, eyewitnesses--including some of the vigilantes themselves and two men who were blasted with a shotgun--describe a string of shootings in which at least eleven people were wounded or killed. A video accompanying the report features interviews with some of the vigilantes, including one who says, "It was great! It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it."

"I am deeply disturbed by the reported incidents in Algiers Point, Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina," said Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, and chair of the House Judiciary Committee.

Color of Change, who brought the traditional media around to covering the Jena 6 case after months of activism, is distributing a petition calling for a full investigation into the Algiers Point shootings. Because this was at least in part caused by the media failure of hyping the "black menace" that led to the vigilantism, it's going to take even more pressure to get them involved. Please sign the petition.

I, Klan

So Color of Change and MoveOn put together a great protest of Fox News' racist attacks on Obama, delivering hundreds of thousands of petitions and enlisting rapper Nas, who actually has a new track called "Sly Fox" about the channel, to be their spokesman.



Since Fox News wouldn't accept the petitions, Stephen Colbert did and it turned out pretty funny.

So O'Reilly had to respond.

Fox officials are not only attacking Nas for selling his album (which already topped the charts), some are likening the anti-racism activists to the KKK. MTV reports that Bill O'Reilly also responded, deriding protesters such as MoveOn as "the new Klan" with "a radical left agenda." He continued:

"The latest smear from Move On is telling their Kool-Aid-drinking zombie followers that Fox News is smearing Barack Obama and is a racist concern. Of course, that's a lie. This broadcast and FNC in general have been exceedingly fair to Senator Obama. ... But in order to intimidate anyone from criticizing Obama in any way, Move On is playing the race card."

It's a fairly rare coalition that can include Nas AND the Klan, but that's the world according to BillO.

Being a member of MoveOn for almost its entire 10 years, it's pretty clear to me that they represent a kind of passive liberalism which engages people online who otherwise might not participate. In other words, they are the opposite of radicals, and while Fox News and other traditional media outlets want to marginalize them, they do so with exactly the wrong narrative.

But understanding MoveOn as the direct descendant of the '60s protesters gets the organization exactly wrong. MoveOn's success (and, indeed, its limitations) is powered by its appeal to today's non-shouters. Though its politics are in many ways the opposite of the Nixon silent majority's, they share a disposition. They are people not inclined to protest but whose rising unease with the direction of the country has led to a new political consciousness. For citizens angered, upset and disappointed with their government but unsure how to channel those sentiments, MoveOn provides simple, discrete actions: sign this petition, donate money to run this ad, show up at this vigil. "Before I joined MoveOn," says staffer Anna Galland, "I was organizing in Rhode Island doing faith-based antiwar activism. In March 2003, MoveOn had put out an action alert for a vigil against the Iraq War. There were 500 people on the steps of the Capitol, and I remember thinking, 'I know all the activists in the state; where did all these people come from?' I think many people have a MoveOn moment where they look around and realize that this organization has managed to tap into a much broader range of people than they might have seen at past activist events."

MoveOn is essentially a conduit for ordinary Americans to collect their voices and mobilize political power. Color of Change is doing the same thing in the African-American community. They aren't the Klan - they're actually you, your friends and neighbors. They have fairly baseline liberal beliefs, nothing shocking. This kind of activism isn't going to change the world - it's a gateway into more civic engagement and participation - and when it's demonized as "the Klan" or some outpost on the radical left the disconnect is remarkable. Of course, the goal of this marginalization is to strangle activism at the very outset - if MoveOn is smeared and made radical, there's not very much hope at REALLY engaging people. That's why it was so damn stupid for the Democratic Congress to condemn MoveOn for the "Betrayus" ad last year. MoveOn is effective not only in what it does, but by empowering citizens to do even more. And so it's a cornerstone in the movement to make the country more progressive. That's why O'Reilly can't stand it, that's why Democrats ought to be completely supportive of it, and that's why I'm a member. I don't always agree with them, I think they can always go further, but they are building organizers across the country and that's meaningful.