via Atrios - The Ultimate Wanker

This is really, really, really fucking funny.

It's extra special to me because I was a big Ultimate Warrior fan when I was a kid. His Warrior Press was a cool finishing move, though I never really understood why lifting someone up in the air for a few seconds and then dropping them was supposed to hurt more than kicking them repeatedly in the face or any of the other non-finishing moves wrestlers use. Still, with a little willing suspension of disbelief it was a lot of fun to watch.

You often hear conservatives bemoan the entry of celebrities into the political arena, but regardless of where the line is between people who have some business being listened to on matters of public policy and people who are just silly cranks shooting off their mouths, I think we can all agree which side of the line ex-pro wrestlers fall on. And yes, that includes Jesse.

Media Bias

In recent years there have been a lot of wide nets cast to discern whether the media has a discernible bias towards Republicans or Democrats. These studies produce such a mishmosh of data that folks on both sides can claim their own contentions have been supported by the study.

But individual cases are often a much better indicator of the real picture. Take, for example, the case of Tony Blankley. Tony Blankley is on national TV every week.

Please try to imagine a Democratic partisan landing a regular TV gig who routinely wrote columns like this one. It's juvenile, it's vague, and it's downright sloppy writing. I can't even think of an equivalent Democratic writer - if Blankley were a liberal, he couldn't get work. Period.

Philadelphia Labor Dispute

I know we have a regular reader from Philly (I don't know who it is), so I thought I would pass along this labor article from the Philly Burbs.

I've remarked before on the decline of the labor press, so I should probably make it a point to highlight labor stories when I run across them.

One thing to keep in mind reading this - the workers had to STRIKE to get a contract reducing wages and benefits by 25%. What the hell was the original offer? Outrageous. Gotta love that free market.

Funny Spam

As annoying as spam is, I sometimes get a kick out of it. Today's best spam had a title that just struck me funny in a really odd way, and I thought I would share:

EXPLICIT: These girls do it all and much, much more!

Do they get paid time and a half for that? They should.

Swing State Project

Doing a vanity search on Google, I ran across this blog and found it to be quite an interesting and active site. It's a nexus of a lot of left-Dem news and commentary - the sort of site this would be if I weren't so damn fond of reading my own drivel.

Anyway, check out the Swing State Project, and if you have a moment, click through one of their ads and generate some tuition for DavidNYC.

Current Evidence Becomes More Current

The Seatle Times is reporting that Tom Delay connected fundraising pushes to specific pieces of industry-friendly legislation.

Delay's non-denial denial is a particularly equivocal one; he's not disputing the authenticity of these memos. I'm getting the feeling now like at the end of the second Ali-Quarry fight, when Quarry came out for the seventh and the ringside guy said matter-of-factly "I think we may be watching the last round coming up."

We were.

Optimism

People who don't know how to make use of optimism often think that it is mainly an emotional attitude. The reality is that optimism is a functional framework of thinking that can help in problem solving.

In this sense, pessimism is often merely a disguised excuse for laziness. One place where this can be easily seen and verified is when playing cards.

Often a player will be placed in a situation at the end of a hand where she does not know where a certain critical card is. She knows that if the card is held by her partner, there is still a way to win the hand. If the card is held by her opponent, all is lost.

The proper play in this situation is to simply assume that her partner has the card. After all, if the opponent has it, there is nothing that can be done. There is nothing to be gained from assuming the worst, and by assuming the best, we can discern the correct course of action.

Yet it is very common for a player to blunder in such a situation and, after the hand, offer the excuse that "I thought you didn't have the Ace." This reflects a pessimistic outlook that is of no use, except of course as an excuse for not thinking things through.

This principle is central to the debate within the Democratic Party about what sort of policy platform to adopt. The mantra of the DLC set is that the American people will never accept a truly progressive platform that puts working people ahead of corporate profits, commits to working within the structure of international law to resolve foreign policy issues, and brings responsible land and energy use to the forefront of our national consciousness.

These men may well be right. If they are, all is lost. Those of us who see this must thus assume, despite all evidence to the contrary, real or imagined, that they are mistaken.

The ConWeb Wrings its Hands Over Tom

Conservative bloviation mills are having a little trouble knowing what to make of Tom Delay's recent troubles. The National Review published a lukewarm defense of the embattled majority leader today, but dittohead Eric Pfeiffer is pretty careful not to put himself in the position of actually suggesting he thinks Delay is innocent. The closest he comes is the first sentence of his concluding graph: "The current evidence suggests DeLay would not be found guilty of wrongdoing on the subject of foreign-travel expenses if investigated by the House Ethics Committee."

This is essentially a non-defense defense, since we don't know whether the "current evidence" really reflects all the evidence. He's left himself the option of changing his position any time if defending Delay starts to look really silly.

The Weekly Standard is avoiding the subject altogether; probably the best policy available right now. The redoubtable NewsMax.com has a nicely kooky piece complete with the requisite Hillary angle, and a goofy mixed metaphor thrown in for good measure.

At the roots level, conservative bloggers are mostly coming down on the "why are we sticking out necks out for this guy?" side of the fence, with no one in the right-wing media having the heart to tell them "because he knows where the bodies are buried."

The disturbing piece of all of this for me is the treatment the story is getting from the New Democrat quarter. New Republic has a piece behind the subscriber wall that frets openly about the fact that Delay may cost the Republicans control of the House. NDOL's website doesn't mention Delay. Lieberman's not talking about it. Are these guys in it to win it? They Republican leadership is down, and these guys are offering to help them up so they can keep pounding on us for another decade or so.

What gives, guys?

Too Much Focus on Delay

Last week, as the Tom Delay story started to heat up, I started to plan a story on Delay's connection to the uber-lobbying firm Alexander Strategy, and possibly to Erik Prince, the publicity-averse founder of Blackwater Security, one of the key mercenary companies handling the "private" side of the Iraq war.

Now I'm beginning to think that with Republicans looking ready to throw Delay under the bus, it is probably better for the Democrats to let the GOP go after Delay and for the Democratic Party to point out the fact that Delay is really the most egregious example (and an extremely egregious example he is, don't get me wrong) of the culture of corruption, cronyism, and hypocrisy that defines the modern Republican party.

Anonymous Commenting Now On

I noticed someone on David Corn's blog mentioned that he would have left a comment here if he hadn't needed a blogger account to do so. I had figured that since signing in was free, people wouldn't mind, but the reality is I know when registration is required for something I don't usually do it.

So now anon comments are on. So come back, Dear Reader, and share with us your comment!

Jon Chait on Delay

In today's LA Times, Jon Chait has an article that explains the bare bones of the biggest couple of scandals currently surrounding Tom Delay.

I'm currently researching a piece that would go into all this in a bit more depth, focusing on a little outfit by the name of the Alexander Strategy Group. ASG is basically the mechanism by which Delay and his allies coordinate their cronyism.

One of the key figures in Delay's inner circle, so far untouched by the investigations into Delay's financial and ethical hanky panky, is a man by the name of Erik Prince.

Prince is an extremely interesting character, son of an industrial tycoon, Navy Seal, and head of Blackwater, the mercenary company that employed the four soldiers who were burned and hung from a bridge in Falluja.

In somewhat related news, the families of the victims in that incident have had quite a time getting any info about the incident from Blackwater, and the House, which could conduct a public investigation, has refused to act.

Surely this has nothing to do with the fact that immediately after the incident, Prince and Blackwater hired ASG for "crisis managemement." But you know, it does create the appearance of a conflict, does it not?

Hyperbole and the Deterioration of Language

The thing I related earlier about the Pope got me to thinking. One of the most pervasive literary devices in modern times, particularly among political commentators and party hacks like myself, is hyperbole. Everybody is described as "crazy" or "evil" or as an "imbecile" or something like that.

It all seems rather inocuous when we do it, mostly because readers know it's hyperbole - when I say Dennis Hastert is a madman, people know that he's not actually marauding around with a meat cleaver whacking off the body parts of his staffers or anything like that, if for no other reason than CSPAN would have probably covered something like that.

I'm as guilty as anybody else of this transgression, and I have a feeling that my idol, the late great Hunter S. Thompson, had a lot to do with its proliferation. But the trouble with using this device, other than the fact that it's just lazy writing, is that when you're faced with the task of describing somebody who really is legitimately a lunatic, you have nowhere to go. You're already at 11, as it were.

It's a subtler-than-usual instance of the "cry wolf" phenomenon. It's as if you spent ten years calling everyone you didn't like "Satan," and then one day you wake up and go into the office and sit down to interview a guy for a story and there's Satan, big red horns and cloven hooves and fiery pitchfork and everything just ambling into the meeting room munching a scone.

And later you're writing the article and you're like "Shit! If I say it's Satan, how do people know I mean Satan like you mean Satan when you talk about Satan, and not Satan like you mean Satan when you talk about Bud Selig?" And you've painted yourself into a corner.

Which is where I'm at, basically, with Tom Delay. I've been following Delay for years, since long before anybody knew who the hell he was, and there really is no way to accurately describe what this man is like without sounding like you're making some kind of joke. You can really only understand it if you experience the actual sensations that fill your heart when you listen to the man speak, or better yet, watch him on television, and realize with mounting horror that he is one of the most powerful men in the world.

Tom Delay is a person who is so divorced from reality that if it weren't for his all-consuming drive for power to focus his mind, he would probably - and again, I am NOT trying to be humorously hyperbolic here - be wandering the streets with a shopping cart full of high heels, rambling on and on about how the Pope is the antichrist and the Giant Bonus Card is really the mark of the beast.

The way you can tell this is that unlike most Republicans, who are mentally unbalanced in much milder and more socially acceptable ways, Delay really has no conception of what kind of lies you can get away with telling because they are plausible and hard to disprove, and what kind of lies will be immediately understood to be lies because they are screamingly stupid on top of being untrue.

It's not a made-up story that Delay told a roomful of reporters that he and Dan Quayle couldn't get into the military during Vietnam because all the slots had been taken up by minorities. That actually happened in 1988 and was reported by a Houston paper, unfortunately before the days of widespread web archiving so you can't read it online. Delay's never even denied saying it, to my knowledge.

But the real goods on Delay can be had just by listening to him for 45 to 60 seconds, speaking off the cuff on basically any subject. This doesn't happen too terribly much because, at least until recently, Delay has been very good at avoiding the media. But it happens often enough that if you look around you can find a clip of Delay talking at length. Here is one such clip; Delay comes on at about the 10 minute mark.

Most of what he says is just descriptive, he's talking about what happened WRT the Schiavo subpoena and why the Republicans did it. But even during the purely descriptive portion, he's jumping around, having trouble saying two things in a row that have much of anything to do with one another.

The really weird part starts at 15:00, so if you're bored by general discussion of political wrangling, skip all the way to there. Once Delay begins to talk about "what this fight is really about," you get a real good look at the way his brain works, or doesn't work, as the case may be.

Delay tries mightily to describe why the Schiavo case is "critically important." "It's critically important," he assures his audience. "This is a critical issue for people in this position, and it's also a critical issue to fight the fight for life, whether it be euthanasia or abortion [sic.]"

I know I don't have to point out that none of this, aside from making any sense, gets hold of any kind of real purchase in terms of a moral rationale for Congress intervening in the Schiavo case. He's just stating and restating over and over how critical it is. But his crazy little brain feels a deep need to really explain why the Schiavo case is important.

And so, inexplicably, Delay's brain jumps the tracks and starts to really explain why the Terry Schiavo case is important. What he has to say is really beyond shocking, but not only because it's so craven and self-serving. It's shocking because Delay does not realize how what he is saying sounds to other human beings, because he can't conceive of the idea of other human beings having feelings and reactions. This is textbook sociopathic thinking. This is also why he can't vocalize what issues are really at stake in the case, beyond empty language about "fighting the fight for life."

Quoting directly now (and this could not be more in context):

"And I'll tell you, ladies and gentlemen, one thing God has brought to us, is Terry, Terry Schiavo [sic], to elevate the visibility of what's going on in America, that Americans would be so barbaric as to pull a feeding tube out of a person that is losing [?] and starve them to death for two weeks."

The little piece of his brain that has any idea how to not sound like a raving lunatic has reached the end of its meager resources now. This is circular, of course, he's saying that Terry Schiavo was brought to us to elevate the visibility of, well, of Terry Schiavo. But this is just the last defense mechanism; he's babbling away the last barrier his conscience has erected against saying what he says next [i'm skipping a little bit of restatement here, but the context is preserved]:

This is exactly the issue that's going on in America, that... of attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others. The point is is the other side has figured out how to win, uh, and defeat the conservative movement, and that is to go after people personally, charge them with frivolous charges, link that up with all these do-gooder organizations funded by George Soros, and then, and then get the national media on their side.

That whole syndicate that they have going on right now is for one purpose and for one purpose only, and that's to destroy the conservative movement. It's to destroy conservative leaders, not just in elected office, but leading, I mean, Ed Fullner, today, at the [Harry Stroth?] Foundation, is under attack in the National Journal, I mean, this is a huge, nationwide concerted effort to destroy everything we believe in.

Keep in mind this is a speech that is about Terry Schiavo, purely about that issue and nothing else. And Delay is standing there saying to a room full of people that they should be thankful that God sent them Terry Schiavo because it will help shield him from attack by Democrats and their evil liberal media empire. This isn't speculation about motives, this is Delay standing up in public and saying this.

A person that would do this is mentally unbalanced. He has no conception of what is acceptable behavior for a person in society. All he knows is that the damn liberals are after him, and thank God for this "thing" Terry Schiavo, who came along to help him beat the rap.

Addicted to Statcounter

For all the fellow bloggers out there in Bloggerland, I reluctantly direct you to StatCounter, where you can get detailed information about the traffic to your site.

I'll warn you, though, I've become a bit obsessed with the statistics, which are pretty comprehensive and have uncovered some interesting facts that I would not have guessed about this blog.

The first is that the site gets a significant amount of what I can only refer to as "walk-in traffic;" people clicking through the blogger "next page" button and randomly winding up at the blog. What's weird about this traffic is that it seems to cluster around certain times of day, which I couldn't puzzle out but my wife astutely guessed might indicate that rather than being truly random, there is some sort of master list that's constantly changing, so that while your blog is high on that list you get a lot of walk-in traffic, and while it's low you don't. Interesting.

Of course, the best part is the vanity aspect of it; I'm apparently big in New York City, especially the Brooklyn Public School system. That is, two different people have accessed the site from Brooklyn Public. New York and LA generate a fair number of visitors, along with Texas. That's unsurprising because those states are the most populous, but there are some more interesting hot spots as well - I've gotten a couple different visitors from Nebraska, for example.

I've had a modicum of international traffic, including someone from a university in the Czech Republic. I think that one is the best so far.

About 70 people clicked through to the blog from the article yesterday, which implies that at least a few hundred people read it. I've never been able to get DU to tell me how much traffic the front page articles get, so it's good to know someone out there is actually reading the stuff.

Traitor Joe More Popular With Republicans than Dems

This article in a New England newspaper makes it pretty clear that the Dems in the Northeast, at least the ones interviewed by this reporter, are fed up with Traitor Joe.

BTW normally I would shy away from a word like "traitor" to describe someone who really hasn't risen to that level (that we know of) but the play on "Trader Joe's," the popular low-cost hippie grocery store chain, is too much to resist.

I'm skeptical we'll be able to bump Joe in the primaries, but it would be really nice. I might consider going to Connecticut to canvass for his opponent, since my sister lives up in that neck of the woods and I've never been to visit her.

Crud, baby's crying...

Tom Delay Scandal of the Day, Day 2

Hey, who knows, maybe there really will be enough material to make this a regular feature. Anyway, this isn't a new scandal, but it's different from yesterday's TDSotD, so I'm posting it. The article is pretty boring, but it's worth it to get a look at a picture of Tom Delay trying to cry on camera. He looks to me somehow like what I imagined the robot Andy in the Wolves of the Calla looking like. Not sure why, just jumped into my head when I saw the picture - "hey, andy's crying."

Oh, yeah, here's the link.

At the risk of spoiling the book for those who have yet to read it (and who couldn't figure out from the twenty-five really obvious clues King, with his usual subtlety, throws in early on) Andy turns out to be a corrupt, baby-torturing monster.

So maybe that's where the association came in, and not the picture.

Tom Delay's Severability Problem

The Republican Party is faced with an interesting challenge right now in terms of what to do about Tom Delay. Delay is so obviously crooked that it seems unlikely (though nowhere near impossible) that he will survive this most recent round of scandals. The problem has nothing to do with potential censure by Congress - there won't be any with the Republicans in power. The problem is in Texas courts.

Texas, strangely enough, actually has some fairly strict campaign finance laws. Delay's disdain for (and open defiance of) those laws has been an open secret for many, many years, but in the last few election cycles Delay has gotten sloppy and brought the heat down on himself fairly hard.

Now that Delay's cover is blown, the Republicans would like nothing better than to throw him under the bus. Unfortunately for them, The Hammer is probably in a position to take most of the party with him if and when he does go down.

The financial hub of the Republican Party has been in Texas for a long time, basically since the Nixon machine collapsed. And since that time the Lone Star State has drifted perilously close to some major, major scandals that could have brought the whole house of cards tumbling down for good.

Texas, along with California and Florida, was at the epicenter of the Savings and Loan scandal that buzzed the GOP tower in the 1980's, and of course most recently Enron's successful gaming of the California energy market and, later, the FTC and SEC. Enron's diversion of many of the profits of that illegal enterprise to Texas Republican politicians could have been something of a problem for the party, had September 11th not intervened.

To make a long story short, Delay was central to all of these crazy get-rich-quick schemes and dozens of others, and if he really does get popped, the shit will splatter on a lot of important people.

One thing I've had fun with recently is looking around at movement conservative sites where users are wrestling with the vexing question of whether to dump support for Delay or keep defending him. A lot of the rank-and-filers want to cut Delay loose to prevent him from further harming the party in the 2006 elections, but the real Delay Problem for the Republicans may well be that the cure might be worse than the disease.

More to come...

BREAKING - The Pope Died

A friend of mine at work brought this up yesterday and I thought it was a very interesting point. Now, this guy sometimes will present some fairly shopworn ideas to me as his own, but he also thinks up some interesting stuff, and from what I can tell this particular angle has not been particularly well-explored.

This guy, we'll call him Joe, wonders, what would the media be doing if the pope had been, say, assassinated, or abducted by aliens, or drowned in a well or something? They couldn't possibly have more coverage. As the director will say to the actor who is emoting madly, "You're already at 11 in the first scene. What are you going to do in Act IV?"

Which is not to say I think the next pope will have any of these things happen to him. But if something weird does happen to the next pope, there will be no way to tell that the media thinks it's a bigger deal than just some old guy dying of being old. They're already at 11.

I often think about what aliens would think about human priorities if their only contact with the planet was via American mass media news. Washington Post, New York Times, NBC nightly, and CSPAN, we'll give 'em, just for the sake of argument. Their picture of human society would be a pretty absurd caricature.

For an instance, an old religious leader dies of natural causes, that's wall-to-wall coverage, everywhere you look, for like two weeks. Oil company reserve statements begin to indicate that the planet's entire economy may collapse in the next decade due to dwindling fuel supplies, that's an A16 story in the Saturday New York Times.

Weird country.

Open Thread for comments about the Article

Fire Away.

Tom Delay Scandal of the Day

Tom Delay is a crook.

OK, I'm not really adding a Tom Delay scandal of the day feature... But the point is, I could. This one is just particularly funny because of the aggressively chincy nature of the scam.

It's like those "contests" in the back of the newspaper where you write a poem or short story or something and then they try for like 6 years to get you to buy the book with your "winning" poem in it.

Pitiful.

What's maybe a little more scary is that there are this many physicians out there willing to pay $1250 for a fake award.

The Triumphant Return of, erm, Someone Completely New!

Well I'm finally back in the DU saddle for the first time since the arrival of the Monkeyworm. I was informed by my editor that tomorrow's lead will carry the first ever AP Short byline, so I'm finally dragging the family name into this whole politics business. It's a long one, so block out some good readin' time in your work day tomorrow.

Or you could look at my blog at home, I guess. Yeah, at home, that's the ticket.