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Last Sunday, conservative and former Bush speechwriter David Frum had the temerity to criticize Republican strategy in the wake of the health care and insurance reforms passed on Sunday.

Last Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal lashed out at him, claiming he “now makes his living as the media’s go-to basher of fellow Republicans, which is a stock Beltway role.”

Last Wednesday, David Frum was forced out of his position at the American Enterprise Institute.  Like others, I had a good time with the news, suggesting a paragraph on the AEI “About Us” page be rewritten as

“The Institute’s community of scholars is committed to expanding liberty, increasing individual opportunity, and strengthening free enterprise. AEI pursues these unchanging ideals through independent thinking, open debate, reasoned argument, and by firing anyone who disagrees with us.”

Scott Horton, in What Frum’s Firing Tells Us About Politics Today, writes that event

…tells us a good deal about AEI and the current dynamics within the Republican camp. In today’s AEI, policy experts aren’t there to do analysis and give advice—they’re there to serve as made-to-order propagandists. Differing views are not wanted.

And that’s true.  But what’s also interesting is how little Frum’s views differed from a Republican Party’s of not so terribly long ago, and how embarrassing they could and should have been for Sunday’s victors, not its vanquished.  For the centerpiece of what Frum wrote was this (emphasis added):

“This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.  Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big.“

And it’s true — even Nancy Pelosi and liberal columnist E. J. Dionne tout the Republican antecedents of the current legislation, identifying its ancestors in Heritage Foundation proposals of the early 1990s, the 1996 Dole campaign, and of course (however much he now hates to admit it) Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health care bill of 2006.  And they celebrate that.

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Imagine two spotlights illuminating a stage, one with blue light, one with red; there’s some overlap, and a small bluish dog squats there, producing small bluish dog output.  To its right, a tethered Doberman gnaws on a couple of bloody bones, with older ones gnawed clean and abandoned stage left.  When the Doberman’s occasional snarls frighten the little blue dog, it invariably wags its tale and briefly assumes a submissive posture.

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s obviously a lot else going on, but I’ll post this because it hardly requires further comment.  From Al Kamen’s “In the Loop” column in the Washington Post this morning:

…House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) and Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) sent out a “Dear Colleague” e-mail Tuesday asking for signatures “to the attached letter to President Obama regarding the Middle East peace process.”

The letter says the usual stuff, emphasizing that Washington “must be both a trusted mediator and a devoted friend to Israel” and noting: “Israel will be taking the greatest risks in any peace agreement.”

Curiously, when we opened the attachment, we noticed it was named “AIPAC Letter Hoyer Cantor May 2009.pdf.”

Kamen’s title: “Now, that’s lobbying.”

You know, it’d be cheaper if we just set up a web site called, say, itsourcongress.com on an AIPAC server and populated it with 535 little avatars called “HoyerMD5,” “CantorVA7,” and so forth.  There’d be e-mail blasts, a “congressional record” blog, people could vote for their favorite avatar, the works.

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UPDATE, 5/15: Here’s the letter (posted over at itsourcongress.com); here’s what MJ Rosenberg and Yglesias have to say about it. Rosenberg: “not one word in the letter that calls on Israel to do anything, not one word about the settlements, the blockade of Gaza, the checkpoints that make it impossible for Palestinians to travel from one village to the next.”

When I first heard from a co-worker yesterday that Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter might be switching to the Democratic Party, I asked, “But should we take him?” Since then, I’ve joked on facebook that “a Specter is haunting the GOP,” but my doubts about this have only deepened.

In his statement Specter explained that it was Pennsylvania Republican opposition to his pro-stimulus vote earlier this year that proved an “irreconcilable difference” with voters from his former party, but added:

My change in party affiliation does not mean that I will be a party-line voter any more for the Democrats that I have been for the Republicans. Unlike Senator Jeffords’ switch which changed party control, I will not be an automatic 60th vote for cloture. For example, my position on Employees Free Choice (Card Check) will not change.

It’s passing strange that The Nation’s Chris Hayes could cite this, and then write (emphasis added):

It’s possible, indeed likely, that this is merely a semantic shift. Specter will retain his own politics, vote the way he was before and have a D in front of his name instead of an R. He’s hoping he’ll have a clear path to re-election as a Democrat in a blue state. But, it’s also hard not to think that Democrats are in a much better position than they were 24 hours ago.

With all respect to Hayes — who’s probably more of a righteous lefty on his worst days than I am on my best ones: depending on the issues involved (see above) or the Democrats involved, it’s not that hard at all. From the Washington Post’s report (by Kane, Cilizza, and Murray) — with the dispiriting message to peons like myself that the “President Says He Is Pleased With Move but Does Not Expect Senator to Agree With New Party at All Times”:

A handful of Pennsylvania Democrats had been considering pursuit of the Senate nomination, but potential opposition to Specter began to melt yesterday as the would-be contenders learned that he would have support from Obama and practically every leading Democrat in Washington.

Read the rest of this entry »

Andrew Hofer, a right-of-center online friend who once maintained the fine blog “More Than Zero” and later joined Megan McArdle at “Asymmetrical Information,” used to decry what he called “argumentum ad Talibanum” — he considered it a variety of ad hominem argument usually criticizing Republicans because their attitudes resembled those of the Taliban on certain issues. And Hofer had a point — the comparison could easily be overdrawn, and sometimes it was.

But what if Republicans say the shoe fits?

On Thursday, Republican Congressman Pete Sessions called for a Republican “insurgency” against purported Democratic oppression.  Luckily, there’s a “model out there for insurgency”, as Sessions put it: for his part, he understands insurgency “a little bit more because of the Taliban,” who he believes have set an example “how you go about changing [people] from their messaging to their operations to their frontline message.” (A frontline message that includes squirting acid on schoolchildren’s faces, he neglected to mention.)

Thoreau, commenting in Unqualified Offering (”So, when did you stop stoning your wife?“), comments:

I cannot believe that the Congressman would dare to compare his honorable party to the Taliban.  The Taliban are a bunch of militant religious zealots.  Their base of support is largely rural, uneducated, and deeply religious.  They believe in second class status for women, other ethnic groups, and religious minorities.  They have close ties to all sorts of shady figures in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and their ideology demands violent struggle that would destabilize their entire region.  They are utter hypocrites on morality, simultaneously cracking down on all that they consider sinful while working with drug smugglers.  They have no regard for the civil rights of those that they rule over, and if allowed to regain power they would again devastate the country that they ruined before being forced out of power.

The Republican Party, by contrast….um, yeah.  OK.  Never mind.

Now it would be interesting if Sessions had compared GOP grievances to legitimate Afghan ones — civilian deaths in a counterinsurgency by air war, a seemingly endless occupation rather than a plan with an exit strategy. But he didn’t, and this really is what it looks like — a leader of minority party, crushed at the polls and lacking legitimacy, helping work that party into a rhetorical lather by flirting with the threat of violence — if not yet, this time, quite crossing that line as it’s been crossed in the past. That, too, has been the Republican way.

Maybe the best approach is to laugh Republicans out of the halls of power altogether — coupled with a guarded watchfulness about figures like Sessions.

…on selecting Michael Steele for chairman of the party — a guy who realized his only shot at winning elected office in Maryland was to pretend he was a Democrat.

Josh Marshall relays Charlie Cook’s report about the reaction of Republican staffers to the news of Senator Ted Stevens’ (R-AK) conviction:

Only the most partisan of Democrats or cold-hearted of people would fail to have some compassion or sympathy towards a party for which virtually everything has gone wrong. Someone recently likened it to watching a wounded dog kicked.

Stevens is one of the nine “Nazgul” (Republicans all, natch) who even voted against the torture amendment — McCain’s last decent act before he, too, joined the torturers with the Military Commissions Act. Today’s Republican Party deserves no sympathy — just a good old-fashioned “Raiders of the Lost Ark” mountaintop meltdown.

So here’s one cold-hearted partisan saying OK, maybe this Republican Party’s like a poor old wounded dog — but the thing’s rabid, too.  Put it out of its misery.

I’m proud to have been a small part of this: we have a total of 9 “Get FISA Right” ads scheduled to air in Minneapolis/St.Paul during the Republican convention this week, including at least four on FOX News network — two are scheduled for daytime hours (9am-4pm) on September 3, two for evening hours (7-12pm) the same day.

Though another set of ads being aired are more partisan, the ones I helped place are more non-partisan — without being in denial about how the FISA Amendment Act came to pass:

For 200 years, the Fourth Amendment protected us from unreasonable searches and seizures.
On July 9, all the Republican Senators voted to allow the government to listen to your phone calls and read your email without a warrant.
We’re building a new movement that puts our Constitution above politics.
Don’t let American freedom die. Join us at getfisaright.net

“Get FISA Right” was originally formed as response by Obama supporters to Barack Obama’s disappointing “yes” vote on the FISA Amendment Act — breaking his pledge to oppose any bill featuring telecom immunity.  As disappointing as that was, though, a great deal of the blame goes to the administration that proposed the FISA Amendment Act and the lockstep Republican Party that unanimously supported it.*  Neither party can be let off the hook for the FISA Amendment Act; we need to be building support wherever we can find it to roll back that and other infringements of our civil liberties.

Moreover, given the crackdown underway in St. Paul (see prior post), “Get FISA Right” ads may be the closest encounter Republican conventioneers have with the Constitution and free speech.  As I wrote last week, it’s “a way to take a stand for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that GOP convention-goers can’t avoid: on their TV sets.”

It’s high time, too. The Bush era assault on the 4th Amendment is threatening to become an everyday feature of the political landscape.  The right against unreasonable search and seizure is also under siege by state, local, and federal police in Minnesota, as a  Joint “Terrorism” Task Force has intimidated, searched, and arrested people, and relieved of them of their laptops, video cameras, and the like, all on far-fetched suspicions of “intent to riot” and even of “fire code violations.”

FISA and the Fourth Amendment may seem like an abstraction to some people, but what’s happening in St. Paul isn’t abstract at all.  Those are your freedoms they’re trampling on.  These ads are one way to insist that’s not OK with us.

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* McCain, though absent for the vote, made clear he supported the bill.

NOTE: For other blog reactions to the ad campaign, visit this Get FISA Right wiki page (and please add your own entry!)
UPDATE, 9/2: Ari Melber, Washington Independent: Liberals Storm GOP Hotels in St. Paul
UPDATE, 9/3: Nick Juliano, Raw Story: Anti-FISA group targets GOP airwaves in St. Paul

Amy Goodman and Two Democracy Now! Producers Unlawfully Arrested at RNC (Democracy Now! press release via Alternet) –

Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and producers Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar have all been released from police custody in St. Paul following their illegal arrest by Minneapolis Police on Monday afternoon. All three were violently manhandled by law enforcement officers. Abdel Kouddous was slammed against a wall and the ground, leaving his arms scraped and bloodied. He sustained other injuries to his chest and back. Salazar’s violent arrest by baton-wielding officers, during which she was slammed to the ground while yelling, “I’m Press! Press!,” resulted in her nose bleeding, as well as causing facial pain. Goodman’s arm was violently yanked by police as she was arrested.

Massive police raids on suspected protestors in Minneapolis (Greenwald, Salon.com) –

Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets. Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff’s department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than “fire code violations,” and early this morning, the Sheriff’s department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying.

Federal government involved in raids on protesters (Greenwald) –

…the raids were specifically “aided by informants planted in protest groups.” Back in May, Marcy Wheeler presciently noted that the Minneapolis Joint Terrorist Task Force — an inter-agency group of federal, state and local law enforcement led by the FBI — was actively recruiting Minneapolis residents to serve as plants, to infiltrate “vegan groups” and other left-wing activist groups and report back to the Task Force about what they were doing. There seems to be little doubt that it was this domestic spying by the Federal Government that led to the excessive and truly despicable home assaults by the police yesterday.

Some piece of paper –

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. [...]

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Gustav is not the story, Palin’s teenage daughter’s baby is not the story. Even Palin is not the story compared to this: jackbooted thugs are roughing up protesters and journalists at the GOP convention in St. Paul, and searching and arresting them without reasonable cause.

And this is part of a pattern — and not some dated one from the bad old days immediately after 9/11, but an ongoing one no longer excusable (if it ever was) by the fears of those days. In Maryland, in 2005-2006, the Maryland State Police infiltrated and surveilled anti-death penalty and anti-Iraq war groups with no reasonable basis for doing so. Note not just the risible “Terrorist” part of the “Minneapolis Joint Terrorist Task Force” name, but also the “inter-agency” description; recall the potential data sharing aspect of the Maryland story — “Case Explorer” — and wonder if records of the people unjustly surveilled will ever be deleted from federal, state, and local law enforcement databases.

We just got through weeks of tut-tutting about China doing this to its dissidents and journalists.  Either we’re a nation of hypocrites, a nation of sheep, or a nation of citizens with inalienable rights. Time to choose.

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UPDATE, 9/2: Ongoing RNC coverage at the Uptake.org, which has distributed video cameras to people who are recording and uploading reports to the site; reports locations are visible on a Google map of the city. (Via Jane Hamsher at “firedoglake,” whose post “The Revolution will be Twittered” lists other groups doing innovative coverage and monitoring of the RNC and local police actions.) See also Matt Stoller’s coverage at OpenLeft: “Gotham City is Safe From the Protesters.” Orin Kerr (”Volokh Conspiracy”), on the other hand, argues the police raids this weekend weren’t out of line because of the stated intentions of the “RNC Welcoming Committee.”  But National Lawyer’s Guild lawyer Bruce Nestor sees it differently:

…according to the Hennepin County Jail records they’re being held on probable cause. Which means no formal charges have been issued. No complaint has been reviewed or signed by a prosecutor or a judge. But the police have detained these people. They can be held on probable cause until Wednesday at 12 noon. In my view this is a preventive detention action by the Ramsey County Sheriff’s department. It’s designed to keep people off the streets. It’s designed to scare people from participating in protest activity . [...] Look if this raid was warranted people would be arrested on criminal complaints.

UPDATE, 9/3: See Nell Lancaster’s post “Conventional crackdown” for more. Nell:

The counter-terror targets: us. We commit conspiracy to riot by planning to assemble. Sure, you might insist it will be peaceable, but the security forces’ infiltrators have a different story to tell. And look: guys in masks smashing stuff, proving it’s just like they say.

UPDATE, 9/4: See also a guest post at “Making Light” by Elise Matthesen: “Who are these people?”

The GetFISARight.net group is at it again, offering a new way for regular citizens — for instance, people who don’t need staff help to count their homes — to have a direct impact on the politics of civil liberties: individual sponsorships of cable TV ads, targeted at the Republican Convention. Thanks to saysme.tv, you can run an ad on all major cable news channels in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area between September 1 and 4 for $103 during daytime hours (9am-4pm), and as little as $324 during evening hours. More information about how you can help get the ad on TV is at http://getfisaright.net/ad.

GetFISARight’s first ad featured a tombstone for the Constitution. The new ad stars the Constitution as the main player, with the visual featuring a pan over founding documents. One version of the ad takes aim at Republican Senators, who voted unanimously to extend the powers of government to listen to Americans’ phone calls and read their emails without a warrant; another highlights John McCain’s strong endorsement of the Bush Administration’s wiretapping policies over the last eight years.

It takes 48 hours from purchase to airtime, so don’t delay. Here’s a way to take a stand for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights that GOP convention-goers can’t avoid: on their TV sets. Please visit http://getfisaright.net/ad today!

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CROSSPOSTED to American Street, DailyKos. SEE ALSO: GetFISARight organizer Jon Pincus’s post on this: “Senate Republicans voted unanimously for the FISA Amendments Act — and (except for Specter) in favor of telecom immunity as well. A majority of Democrats voted against FAA, and only five supported telecom immunity. So there are clearly significant differences between the parties.” Julian Sanchez (Ars Technica): “Get FISA Right turns crowdsourced guns on McCain:“…the group seems to have calculated that they’re more likely to exert influence from within than by taking a “pox on both houses” approach.”

UPDATE, 8/26: WELCOME, “Sideshow” readers! Because I really want outclicks (and pledges, of course), I hope you’ll also click here just to take in the very interesting “fundable.com” mini-pledge drive model we’re using; you may want to give it a try yourself sometime. The pledges are void if the pledge drive goal isn’t reached.

FURTHER UPDATE, 8/26: I’m informed that the “fundable.com” model should only be used for informational, issue-advocacy ads. These are the so-called “FISA Tombstone” and “FISA Constitution 1″ ads. “FISA Constitution 2″ (“John McCain would do the same” — the one above) could be considered a political ad expressly advocating the defeat of a candidate; we’re advised to be cautious and not do any group “fundable.com” purchases for this ad. So I won’t, and pledges will go to the “Constitution 1″ ad.
If you’ve got the money, though, individual purchases of the “Constitution 2″ ad — you, saysme.tv, and $100+ — are strongly encouraged.

UPDATE, 8/29: A total of at least 8 ads have been purchased and will air in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area during the GOP convention.

The people at “rejecttorture.org” just e-mailed to let me know that the Republican Party is soliciting input for their national platform at http://www.gopplatform2008.com.

The GOP is thus doing something similar what Obama and the Democrats did with the kind of “Listening to America” event I attended — except they’re apparently doing it all online, and calling that “the most grassroots-driven platform in the history of American politics.” They specify that participants need not be Republican to have a voice in their platform process.

Naturally, the “Reject Torture” people are urging all of us to weigh in with variations on “reject torture” and “no torture, no exceptions.” As they noted in their e-mail, the Democrats actually have “reject torture” in the draft Democratic platform,* as well as rejecting the “legal” processes that have kept torture hidden away for years –

We reject the use of national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. We reject the tracking of citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. We reject torture. We reject sweeping claims of “inherent” presidential power. [...]

…To build a freer and safer world, we will lead in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people. We will not ship away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries, or detain without trial or charge prisoners who can and should be brought to justice for their crimes, or maintain a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of the law. …

So let’s take the Republican Party organizers at their word and see what happens. There’s a sign-up process - be sure to check the box next to “Attribute Ideas, so your first name and city will appear — followed by a followup e-mail from the site. Once you use the password in the e-mail to log in, you’re presented with the kind of online form similar to those used by many politicians and businesses, in which your comments are categorized by issue. Since none correspond directly to the issue of torture — surprise, surprise — the “Reject Torture” organizers suggest you categorize your anti-torture input as either “Protecting American Values: Other” or “National Security: Human Rights.”

I chose the latter, and wrote:

The United States should never torture anyone under any circumstances. To do so demeans our country as a whole, and ignores what interrogators tell us over and over again: that torture doesn’t work.

There are better ways to get information from those who have it, instead of having to follow up on every desperate lie told by someone just trying to make the pain or torment or degrading treatment stop. And there are costs and risks every time we stoop to torture: every time it happens, our country runs the real risk of making an enemy out of a bystander, loses any ability to try our true enemies fairly, and loses the respect of more of our friends around the world.

It’s time to draw the line and say “no torture, no exceptions” — not for the military services, not for the intelligence services, not for anyone.

I hope you’ll join me in sending messages like this to Minneapolis, to the Republican Party, and to John McCain.

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* EDIT, 8/23: Democratic platform section added. The cited parts can be found on page 49 of the document, p.54 of 56 PDF pages.