Liberal Media Elite

It’s such a relief to see the serious discussion about what Bush, Cheney et al. have done to the soul of this country by authorizing torture. The discussion is painful, it is necessary, and having the strength to engage in it is something America can be truly proud of.

Checking in after my morning work call, Everyone seemed to be really excited for Iowa. At frist I thought it was Final Four nonsense. Then I realized that Iowa isn’t in the Final Four.

Upon further research, something really, really cool happened there today.

Rock on, Iowa.

Pretty clever little trailer here:

watch?v=t5eDQKaKLYE

I haven’t seen it so I don’t have an opinion of it yet, but so far, so good.

Here is a list of places you can go to see it for yourself.

And for those of you who aren’t into the whole communal aspect of movie watching, you can just download it yourself here.

And to toot my own horn, I was in some b-roll footage of the protests from the 4th night of the RNC on Rachel Maddow. OK, it was like a 15th of a second. But there I was. I was on Rachel Maddow. So now I will include “As seen on Rachel Maddow” as much as possible.

In the days after 9/11, much thrill was made out of the French newspaper Le Monde’s headline, “Nous sommes tous Américains”: We are all Americans. How far we have come. For today, we are all not Americans. Today Rush Limbaugh has said in regard to Gen. Colin Powell’s endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama:

“I am now researching his past endorsements to see if I can find all the inexperienced, very liberal, white candidates he has endorsed. I’ll let you know what I come up with.”

You know, Rush, just because you and your ilk think everything’s all small-minded identity politics and just because you and your ilk are knee-jerk reactionaries doesn’t mean the rest of us have to be. Maybe some of us—maybe most of us, even—have a vision of America that transcends loyalty to a race or a party or an economic class or a region and actually, you know, embraces the idea of a whole country and all of the people contained inside it.

Yes, even the fat, mean, cynical drug addicts have a place.

I understand it’s difficult—if not impossible—for the closed-minded to understand open-mindedness, for the self-satisfied to understand the aspiring. There is an anxiety, a panic that consumes them, because they look at the rupture of their supremacy as a rupture of the country. They believe there is no America without a conservative Republican at the top of things. Everything else is illegitimate, the object of ridicule. This election might very well be a wholesale repudiation of that.

But it will (inshallah) be more than a rejection of something wrong: It may be an affirmation of what America really is all about, in all its splendid complexity and smarts and creativity and commitment to not just one another but to the idea that humans are free and equal, and all that other junk that gives people of goodwill goosebumps.

Maybe that’s why Rush and his ilk are on track to lose: They cannot see what French headline writers plainly can. Maybe that’s why these days they’re slipping from the merely offensive to the outwardly abhorrent. They’re forgetting that nous sommes tous Américains and they can’t take that away from not one of us, no matter how selfish they are, no matter the depths of their chauvinism.

Because, despite their best efforts to win through their various obscenities, we still are America:

I am cleaning up my photo folders and noticed that I hadn’t posted this one yet:

This is how it looks when you get hit in the leg by a tear gas cartridge. I met the guy in the picture, Stacy, a day after the Labor Day protests at the RNC and he told me that he had been with a group of people in downtown St. Paul when it happened.

The City of St. Paul announced today that they will not prosecute journalists arrested in connection with the RNC protests on Thursday night of the Republican convention. Here is MPR’s story.

Good. I’m off the hook for that misdemeanor they charged me with. I can tell Ron Kuby to stand down.

But I am still curious why it was necessary to arrest credentialed (some credentialed by the RNC themselves) journalists at all? And why some were placed under arrest and taken down town to Ramsey County Jail; while some others were processed and released at the scene?

I was astounded to see the next day on the internet that KARE 11’s arrested photog had made their live shot for the 10 o’clock news still wearing his credentials and with his citation (ticket) in hand. Are some journalists more equal than others?

I, on the other hand, was taken downtown and had my RNC credentials taken from me. I got them back in a “Blues Brothers” type of inventorying. They listed them as “other paper.” Then, I got my citation and was dropped off in a paddy wagon at 3 AM in a desolate spot of St. Paul.

But seriously if you were going to look at this picture and guess which one was a protester and which one was a journalist which one would you pick?

I helped you out by highlighting the green RNC credential and the notepad in the white circle…. things the guys wearing bandannas on their faces don’t have.

It still didn’t stop the riot police from shooting flash bombs seemingly right at me and corraling me in a scrum of photographers, journalists and protesters. After that maneuver, they held me and almost 400 others on the bridge for 3 hours. Then, they took me downtown for another 3 hours. They finally released me at 7th and Layfette (I still don’t know where that is).

At the same time I was released into the wild with the protesters I had bonded with -we were in the joint together ya’ know- I suspect the photog from KARE 11 and several other journalists through some unknown selection process were cozily in bed.

Don’t get me wrong. I am happy they are dropping the charges. It was a pretty weird situation that could have been worse.

But as one of the cops at the St. Anthony Ave. mugshot center at the foot of the Marion St. Bridge told me, “We got $5.5 million worth of riot gear for [the RNC]. When is the next time we are going to use it?”

And from the looks of it they still had a lot left over. They did have a very orderly, although slow, system for handling protesters and “out-law” journalists. I was even offered a brown paper bag with two slices of bread, PB&J and fruit. I turned it down though and went on an immediate hunger strike in my own protest.

So, assuming the charges stay dropped, I got an involuntary display of St. Paul riot police readiness, a tour of the Ramsey County Jail and an official looking citation.

But, I think there is a lot more to this story and I still have questions.

It’s interesting that it’s just become conventional wisdom that the surge worked in Iraq. If you are paying attention, you may realize that it’s a bit early to draw a quid pro quo assumption.

The McCain Campaign would like to make you think that the surge was the foremost thing that stopped violence (for the most part) in Iraq and was completely John McCain’s idea. They would also like you to think that because Barack Obama opposed the surge that he is on the side of violent chaos.

In Bob Woodward’s latest book, he covers the policy formation around the surge idea. Let’s take a look at who else in Woodward’s book reportedly thought the surge might not be so great:

“Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice opposed the surge, as did (Donald) Rumsfeld. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki also needed to be convinced.”

So Obama looks to be in interesting company there.

In short, McCain took a stance to support the President and the surge and since things are more peaceful there now he is taking credit.

So by extension, every decision McCain and Obama have made as elected officials or policies advocated in a stump speech is a reflection of how fit they are to guide America, right?

OK. So why isn’t the media discussing the “Gas Tax Holiday” in the same way? If McCain had his way the tax would have been suspended for a temporary alleviation of the soaring prices. Obama opposed this because he doesn’t give in to hysterical, gimmicky politics.

What happened since then? The price of gas has fallen because as the International Energy Agency said:

“The data suggest that the demand impact of weaker economic conditions and high prices during the summer — when oil prices reached an all-time peak — was more marked than expected, notably in the United States,” the IEA said in its report.

The “demand impact” they are talking about is people using less gas and oil. As Adam Smith will remind the Republicans, the price of oil got too high so the demand went down and now prices must go down to meet demand.

So who didn’t go the gimmick route and artificially deflate the price of gas so the price of oil would stay high?

OBAMA.

Good thing too. We apparently need to collect more tax revenue to bail out the common banking man.

I would love, love, love anyone in the media to admit that a liberal understood simple economics better than the conservative

Now what other stances can we take a look at McCain historically on?

I’ll leave it to you to Google: “McCain Martin Luther King Day”


A More Perfect Union from Andrew Sloat on Vimeo.

Some pictures we took yesterday:

The march starts at the State Capitol

Read it all..

Hmpf.

So, I’ve been reading that California exit polls show Hillary winning the gay and lesbian vote by something like a 2-to-1 margin. (Although the fawning over Hillary by gay men has been getting a little out-of-hand.)

They do understand that Hillary Clinton has no mention of gay civil rights issues on her Web site, right?

Barack Obama does.

Just sayin’.

More than 80 lawyers who are providing free-of-charge legal services to detainees in Guantánamo Bay endorsed Barack Obama in a public statement yesterday:

We are at a critical point in the Presidential campaign, and as lawyers who have been deeply involved in the Guantanamo litigation to preserve the important right to habeas corpus, we are writing to urge you to support Senator Obama.
[...]
Some politicians are all talk and no action. But we know from first-hand experience that Senator Obama has demonstrated extraordinary leadership on this critical and controversial issue. When others stood back, Senator Obama helped lead the fight in the Senate against the Administration’s efforts in the Fall of 2006 to strip the courts of jurisdiction, and when we were walking the halls of the Capitol trying to win over enough Senators to beat back the Administration’s bill, Senator Obama made his key staffers and even his offices available to help us.

According to the Boston Globe, one of the co-authors, Chicago lawyer Gary Isaac, didn’t intend the “all talk and no action” comment to be a jab at Clinton, but was “really intended to respond to the contention that Senator Obama is all talk and no action. We wanted to share our experience where he was a leader on an issue of great importance to us.”

Did he just pull a I-did-not-inhale on a Clinton?

Read This. Read this and tell me how this man will not be the greatest president since JFK.

It’s a long one, but it’s worth it.

I was raised—a German Catholic—to believe that fascists and totalitarians were, essentially, simultaneously cruel and incompetent. They’d torture Václav Havel, for example, and then let his satires appear on stage. So…

Between this and this, I’m beginning to think we’re in serious trouble.

So I’ve been following the saga of Jack McClellan. The guy’s a self-proclaimed — and also non-practicing — pedophile.

He’s pretty much a grade-A creep. He claims to abbhor any kind of non-consensual relationship, then identifies his favored age-range as being between three and eleven years old. Now, on some basic, primal level of the reptile brain, I can grasp the appeal of a nubile teenager — those are, after all, the years in which the body is transitioning to adulthood, and begins sending out all kinds of sexual signals. It’s literally in our DNA. Not that I by any means condone someone who chooses to pursue a sixteen-year-old — just saying that I recognize how it could happen. But, ugh. A three-year-old? What kind of consent could possibly take place?

There’s some legal gray area here — although he claims to have never touched a child, he’s posted sites that are essentially “how-to” guides for meeting young girls, and he’s been seen hanging around places like playgrounds. If I burst into a bar, wielding a gun and screaming profanities, I’m behaving in a threatening manner and should probably be stopped, regardless of whether or not I actually pump a bullet into someone. So legally articulating exactly where that line is is difficult.

That’s a discussion worth having. But it’s not a discussion that’s taking place anywhere near the hysterical news coverage, in which every interview I’ve seen displays an undisguised disgust with a legal system that leaves a guy like this on the streets. And, y’know? I hate to be the one to say it, but the fact that this guy is on the streets is probably an indication that our legal system is *working*. If he hasn’t committed a crime, then he isn’t a criminal. Not that I’d allow this guy anywhere near, say, my niece — but I don’t see any way to bring down the hammer of the law without going in a direction that strikes me as fundamentally *worse*.

That’s something like thought crime, something a lot like a pre-emptive strike — the same kind of mentality that leads us to bomb nations under the mere suspicion that they have the means to harm us, the same kind of mentality that leads us to disarm law-abiding citizens. Jesus may have said “…if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out…” but this seems to me to be somewhat impractical as state policy.

We can’t prosecute someone who hasn’t committed a crime. That’s the painful trade-off of living in a free society, the very thing that makes freedom so terrifying — because it means sacrificing a degree of safety, a degree of security. The rule of law, and the presumption of innocence, both leave us occasionally exposed to criminals. But the alternative? The alternative is unthinkable.

Pope Benedict just put the final nail in the European Catholic Church.

Pope Benedict XVI rebuffed calls to let divorced Catholics who remarry receive Communion in a new document Tuesday and told Catholic politicians they are expected to wage the church’s fight against abortion and gay marriage.

Thank God North Americans will probably just ignore him. As usual.