An Award For Lil' Ol' Me?

Digby's Hullabaloo, one of the other sites I write for, has been nominated for a Weblog Award for Best Liberal Blog. It's probably not such of a big deal to her, but this is my first year on the site, and being new to the game and all, recognition like this is kind of fun, even while I recognize it's not necessarily based on my scribblings. Anyway, when the time comes, hopefully you can go over and vote for us. A win here would put me just 178 statuettes away from Al Gore.

How The Media Learned To Bend Over Backwards

OK, so welcome to the main exhibit hall, where we just had a debate between Markos and Harold Ford. (who defended the Congressional vote on FISA by basically saying that the Constitution doesn't poll very well. I'll elaborate later.)

Right now I'm in the front row of Digby's panel on the media, with Rick Perlstein, Paul Krugman, and Atrios. Not a bad group.

Digby dedicated this panel to Molly Ivins, who called for "sustained outrage" on the part of the citizenry against the instruments of power, admonishing the media for its too-cozy respect for authority. Now we're on to Rick Perlstein, who is giving a little history lesson on how the media went awry. Back in the early 1960s, footage of civil rights marchers having hoses turned on them galvanized public opinion against repression and bigotry. But in 1968, when the Chicago police beat up antiwar protesters half to death, the public opinion was the opposite, "Right on for the cops," etc. There was a popular bumper sticker in the country at the time, reading "I Support Mayor Daley and His Police." The press, who considered themselves guardians of the public interest, started to consider whether or not they were prejudiced, elitist, not rooted in the heartland of America, biased toward young people and minorities. And it basically all went to shit from there.

This is going to be good. I'll update...

...Now we're on to the media's liberal guilt, and Spiro Agnew's series of speeches (written by William Safire) on the "nattering nabobs of negativism" and how the media is trying to tell ordinary Americans what to think. We're 40 years on and these pundits still are haunted by this. Old narratives die hard.

Paul Krugman is up. He says he was never told to stop writing what he was writing in the run-up to war through much of the Bush years, but he was told that he was making management nervous. In 2005, he was indirectly told to lay up a bit, and that "the election solved some things." He said that a lot of these failures of the media aren't exactly political. They go beyond politics. "It is better to be conventionally wrong than unconventionally right." The example is how nobody who was actually right about the war is allowed to comment about it, but that's also true with the housing bubble, etc. "There's something wrong with you if you actually figure this out too early." There's a narrow range of being counter-intuitive. It's acceptable, for example, to say "Bush is actually better on the environment than you think."

My Second Life

I actually got called up to The Show and will be posting over at Digby's Hullabaloo for the rest of the week, though I'll cross-post a goodly portion of it over here as well.

So join me over there and help me not feel so much like the substitute teacher.

Welcome Digbyites!

And thanks to my pal Digby for sending y'all over, and putting me over the top of 100,000 unique visitors, a long-sought milestone. We who tend the smaller gardens of the blogosphere are always grateful for a nudge from the big boys and girls.

Two things: you came from Hullabaloo, so you all know what a sharp commentator of the political scene and a boon to the progressive community she is. Her annual pledge drive was on as of a few days ago, so let me reiterate that she deserves your support.

And number 2: if you're in the Southern California area and want to watch the Iowa caucus returns with people of like minds, our LA chapter of Drinking Liberally is going to have a special event that night, January 3, in Santa Monica at the Nocturnal Bar (2101 Lincoln, cross street is Grant, a couple minutes off the 10 Freeway). I'll have more on this later, and if you'd like the updates, sign up for the email list at the Drinking Liberally site.

Thanks for visiting!

What Digby Said

(Bob) Herbert reminds us about the Southern Strategy -- and famed GOP strategist Lee Atwater's candid admission: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger. By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

But what is unusual this time out is that the Republicans are getting more overt rather than less for the first time in 40 years. In recent campaigns the Southern Strategy had developed into a sophisticated code, even more obscure than Atwater's examples, where they would support "Southern heritage" symbols like the confederate flag and run on "law and order" but at the same time make a great show of "outreach" and inclusion to the public at large. This has been the pattern for some years now, perfected by the current president in his "compassionate conservative" campaign in 2000. But as Rick Perlstein points out here, they aren't even doing that anymore.

It actually isn't surprising. If you listen to right-wing talk radio these days you will hear more outright racist rhetoric than I can remember in the last 25 years. The Internet is even worse. Blacks, "illegal aliens," Muslims -- all day long you hear an endless litany of complaints about these illegitimate people who are allegedly trying to ruin the American way of life through whining and scheming, stealing jobs and trying to kill us all in our beds. The other day, even General John Abizaid's statement that the world could live with a nuclear Iran was greeted on rightwing forums with a spew of insults about his "Arab" ancestry.

The racist beast is clamoring to be set free.

That is the through-line connecting the immigration fight, Bill O'Reilly's surprise that black people eat like human beings, Jena, Ahmadinejad's visit and the imperial project in the Middle East. One party is less likely to cloak their racism anymore.

Say, you can MEET Digby tonight, and help us raise money for the Calitics ActBlue list, head down to our end of Q3 blograiser tonight in Santa Monica, in association with Drinking Liberally.

Featuring also Ron Shepston and Russ Warner, two great antiwar congressional candidates, LA City Councilman Bill Rosendahl, members of Iraq Veterans for Progress, and more.

Calitics Quarterly Santa Monica - One Hell of a Party

So if you built a bar, invited Digby, John Amato from Crooks and Liars, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, Todd Beeton of MyDD, members of the Russ Warner for Congress campaign, Drinking Liberally Westside LA, thereisnospoon, hekebolos, vernonlee, some CDP delegates, Calitics commenters like Zack from the SFV and Tim Goodrich, a whole mess of SoCal Kossacks like Shockwave and shayera and Major Danby and BruinKid and more, and ME... and had them come together to raise money for some great California candidates and have a blast...

Then you would have some indication of how it went last night.

Calitics and Drinking Liberally held a little event to raise awareness about the end of the quarter and try to drive people to our ActBlue page. We had lots of fun and energized the LA blogging community.  We have so many great bloggers here, but a lot of them focus on national issues.  It was great to have them out to support the local scene.  And of course, it was great to meet and thank Digby for all of her incredible work (from what I hear, those going to a certain convention in Chicago in August may get a chance to do that as well).  There was a parent who brought his 17 year-old daughter to the bar just to meet her!

It was a fabulous night.  Here are some pics:

Digby, dday

skippy, John Amato (Crooks & Liars)

vernonlee, thereisnospoon

hekebolos, Todd Beeton, Suzanne Savage from ACLU-Southern CA

shayera, Leighton Woodhouse (SEIU)

Digby holds court with hekebolos and thereisnospoon

Shockwave, thereisnospoon

dday, Todd Beeton

Late Night Video Watching - Obama, Edwards, Digby

I wanted to share some of the speeches from today's Take Back America conference in Washington, which I'm kicking myself that I'm not attending. Ezra Klein gave a good summary of the speeches by Obama and Edwards, which by all accounts were very well-received. It sounds similar to their stump speeches at the California Democratic Party convention; Edwards lays out specific ideas and calls for bold and transformational change, while Obama calls to change our politics by building a mass movement to close the vaccuum into which the lobbyists and corporate interests insinuate themselves. Both messages are important and vital, and both were told very well. As Ezra says:

The underlying message of all (Edwards') remarks, though, was that much could be done, and there is no reason, either political or substantive, to approach these problems incrementally, or even cautiously. To put the contrast another way, where Obama promised to radically change our politics, Edwards promised to radically change our policies. Those were the choices offered to the conference this morning, and they were good ones.

Here's Obama's speech:



And Edwards' speech:



But more important than all that, the progressive blogosphere was given an award by the Campaign for America's Future, and accepting on our behalf was Digby, one of our best advocates, who ended her years of anonymity and revealed herself with an excellent speech about who we are and why we do what we do. I was proud to have sat around in front of computer screens and typed furiously away lo these many years after hearing Digby, my fellow Santa Monican, explain to the world what this movement is all about. Thanks, Digby.

That Well-Worn Phrase

What Digby said:

(Wolf Blitzer and Jeff Greenfield) both marvelled at the tremendous response Schwarzenegger gets when he's in public. Wolf commented that when he was in Las Vegas recently for a sporting event, Schwarzenegger turned up with Maria and "he was greeted like a rock star!"

Uhm no. He was greeted like a fucking movie star, which is what he is. The man was one of the highest grossing box office attractions in the world for a couple of decades and yet Blitzer and Greenfield seem to think the fact that the public gets excited in his presence has something to do with his politics.

Arnold's political star quality has to do with the fact that... he was a star, for a long time. Nobody's flocking to his message of post-partisanship. Most people don't know what "post-partisanship" is. They want to see the guy who beat up the T-1000.