Monthly Archives: June 2008

Little Katrina?

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Iowa has been slammed lately — killer tornadoes and now floods. The worst may be yet to come, if weather reports are correct.

I’ve been thinking of the Mississippi floods of 1993. I was living in New Jersey then, but the floodwaters covered parts of Missouri that I knew very well (near the southernmost dot on this map). The house my family lived in when I was a small child was, I was told, under water. Today there’s an empty field where a neighborhood of neat frame houses, vegetable gardens, and swing sets used to be.

Some people I knew in New Jersey weren’t terribly sympathetic to the Midwesterners. Why did those idiots live near a river, anyway? They didn’t comprehend the enormity of the flooding. There were places underwater that were no where near a river and had never flooded before, either in memory or, I’m pretty sure, recorded history.

Anyway, there are places in New Jersey that flood every ten to fifteen years, and it always catches people off guard, as if such a thing had never happened before.

Right now, I don’t believe a repeat of the 1993 floods is expected, but I don’t believe it has been ruled out, either. Depends on the weather.

Although the danger isn’t over, some righties already are thumping their chests and proclaiming the inherent superiority of Iowa over New Orleans. One writes,

The thing is, though, the people of eastern Iowa seem to be stepping up in the Iowa stubborn way. I have seen any number of man-on-the-street interviews, and nobody is complaining. They all seem to be working to solve their problem, which is not surprising because Iowans do not complain about tragedy. They complain about hot weather and dry weather, but not tragedy. And I have looked for reports of looting and come up empty so far. …

…In Iowa there is a 500 year flood, but the people are not paralyzed, whining, or looting. There will be no massive relief effort from around the world, and nobody will step up to help Iowans except for other Iowans. Yet years from now, there will be no Iowans still in FEMA camps.

From today’s Des Moines Register: “State officials promise aggressive push for federal money, other aid.”

BTW, don’t read the comments to the rightie post linked above unless you have a very strong stomach. Truly, the Ku Klux Klan is alive and well and on the Web.

As bad as the Iowa flood must be, it doesn’t compare to New Orleans. People who draw easy parallels are idiots, just as people who drew parallels between Katrina and 9/11 were idiots. Not only the extent and suddenness (or not) of the flooding, and the geological complications, but also the circumstances of the people living in the flooded areas are entirely different.

Even so, there are echoes of New Orleans in some Iowa news stories.

An estimated 24,000 Cedar Rapids residents were driven from their homes, including Lisa Armstrong – who wept in a shelter while watching television footage of a boat saving her as the waters flooded her home.

“I didn’t think it was going to be as bad as it was, and we should have got out when we were told to leave,” said Armstrong, one of about 150 evacuees moved to the gym at Prairie High School in Cedar Rapids.

As in New Orleans, when the floods are gone there will be at least a few people who have lost their homes and their jobs and who lack the resources to start over without assistance from somebody. Oh, and there will be stories about how many people didn’t have flood insurance. However, I suspect the flooded areas of Iowa have much lower population density than New Orleans, and people won’t be trapped there for days with no way out, so post-flood Iowa won’t be as awful as post-Katrina New Orleans. Nor will Iowa get the same media coverage, so you may never hear about the hardships to come.

And a rightie myth will grow that those Iowans put their lives back together in no time, with nary a complaint.

Iowans do have one huge advantage over New Orleans — no Karl Rove.

Tim Russert

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I’ve just learned Tim Russert is dead of a heart attack.

Update: I’m watching the MSNBC retrospective, and I’m struck by the absence of Chris Matthews, even during his regular program time. Keith Olbermann is playing chief moderator. I don’t know if this means anything.

Some People Are Certifiably Nuts

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A couple of days ago, while the wingnuts were trying to make an issue out of Barack Obama’s birth certificate, I wrote,

One might argue the Obama campaign ought to just release the mystery birth certificate to put the rumors to rest. But you know that would just set off a new round of rumors. Some rightie blogger would question the authenticity of the birth certificate, and that very evening Sean Hannity would look into a Faux Nooz camera and intone, why did Barack Obama release a forged birth certificate? Questions are being asked, after all.

Today Kos, who should have known better, posted a birth certificate for Obama without documenting how he got it. Big mistake. I assume it’s authentic, but it’s a big mistake to have played their game and posted it, anyway, especially without provenance.

Already people like this idiot, who apparently has little experience with resized .JPEGs (the distortion he finds suspicious is something I’ve seen a lot in graphics I’ve worked with. I don’t know what causes it but it’s not an indication of photoshopping, in my experience), insinuating the birth certificate is fabricated.

There’s also a certificate/certification flap at Suitably Flip (“Kos Tries To Pass Off Obama’s Birth Certification As Birth Certificate“). Children, if you have a copy of your birth certificate around — a notarized one as needed to get a passport or for other stuff — what does it say? Does it say “certificate” or “certification”?

I dug mine out of a file and lo, it says “certification.” Yet it’s still what is commonly known as a “birth certificate” and, as it is notarized, it’s a legal document that will fill the bill whenever anyone asks me for my “birth certificate.”

The “birth certificate” document that was issued to my parents when I was born has a lot more stuff on it. I have seen it, but I don’t know what happened to it or even if it still exists. But typically (I’ve retrieved birth certificates for my children, born in Ohio and New Jersey, over the years also), what you get if you ask a state for a “birth certificate” is the simplified, notarized “birth certification.”

However, the wingnuts will dance around with the certificate/certification thing for a while and try to make an issue out of it. Just watch ’em.

And this is exactly the sort of thing that I predicted would happen if the birth certificate became public, which is why I said there was no point making it public.

See Philosophers’ Playground:

The fact is what we are looking at is trap…the same stupid one the Republican operatives been using for two decades. They create a dilemma:

If you don’t answer their inane questions, it’s an argument from ignorance based inference that something is being hidden. Gotcha.

If you do respond to debunk it, then (just like with Intelligent Design) they simply repeat, repeat, repeat the accusation while ignoring the evidence refuting it. The fact that there is now a “serious disagreement” involving a Presidential candidate shows that it is a serious topic to be reported on widely and the fair and balanced way to present the story is “some say this is true, but slimy politician worried about getting votes denies it.” Gotcha.

Further, once you’ve shown you’ll play their silly little game, they’ll deluge you with made up accusations to tie you up and make sure you can’t stay on message. They will work hard to use up all the oxygen in the room — gotcha.

And so on. The only way to respond is to turn the tables on them and slam them back. If they trap us into perpetually playing defense to their offense, we lose.

Update: See Jack and Jill Politics.

Who Needs Satire When You’ve Got Wingnuts?

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You may have seen this elsewhere, but it’s too rich — I want to pile on, too. Yes, below is the famous Faux Nooz clip in which Little Lulu discusses “substantive” charges against Michelle Obama while the scroll calls her “Obama’s Baby Mama.”

Of course, today Malkin defends the use of the phrase “Obama’s Baby Mama,” showing us once again she’s got all the integrity of the post-iceberg Titanic.

See also Oliver Willis and Kyle Moore.

Update: Be sure to read Liza.

Update 2: See also The Poor Man.

McCain: Bringing Troops Home “Not Important”

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Note what he says about casualties being “down.” First — certainly the number of casualties in May (19) was down from what it had been in April (52). But, um, April was way “up.” You have to go back to September 2007 for a worse number. It’s not as if the violence has been steadily diminishing; it just comes in waves. We may head back “up” any time.

Second — 19 deaths in May are still 19 too many.

More Slime

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[UPDATE: Greg Sargent has more on what a snake Lieberman really is.]

You may have heard of the recent encounter between Barack Obama and Joe Lieberman, in which the new leader of the Dem party let the former Democrat know that he was not pleased with the the “personal attacks and his half-hearted denials of the false rumors that Obama is a Muslim.”

Now the snake in the grass is fighting back, telling Mark Halperin of The Page that “If the Obama campaign thinks they are going to intimidate Joe Lieberman with these sleazy tactics then they are sorely mistaken.”

I agree with Josh Marshall:

…Lieberman’s days in the Democratic caucus, or more specifically, his days with a committee chairmanship courtesy of the Democratic caucus are numbered in months.

My assumption is that after the November election, regardless of the outcome of the presidential campaign, Joe will be stripped of his chairmanship. (This seems even more certain to me if Obama wins the general, but I suspect it will happen regardless.) Whether he’ll actually be expelled from the caucus I don’t know and probably doesn’t really matter. Once he’s stripped of the benefits he gains from it, presumably he’ll leave himself and become an actual non-caucusing independent or, more likely, start caucusing with the Republicans.

What that tells me is that Lieberman has no incentive not to make the maximum amount of trouble over the next five months both for his senate colleagues and for Sen. Obama.

Listen, Dems, we tried to tell you to support Ned Lamont. We almost got Creepy Joe out of the Senate for you, and you wouldn’t listen to us.

What’s even slimier than Joe is the fact that the Right is using this episode to add to their “Obama is anti-semitic” smear: “How smart is it of the Obama camp to antagonize a revered figure in the Jewish community?”

Shameless. And you know the righties won’t let go of this. They’ll be fabricating “evidence” of Obama’s alleged anti-semitism until the election.

Update: See also Jane Hamsher, “Lieberman Whines After Obama Kicks His Ass.”

Update: Have you heard about the “veep vetter” controversy? One of the members of Obama’s vice presidential search team is being linked to mortgage industry lobbyists because he took a loan from a mortgage company whose lobbyists contributed to the Clinton campaign, and Obama had criticized the Clinton campaign for taking the lobbyists’ contributions, and somehow this make Obama a bad person. I haven’t had time to check all the details out myself, but unless there is something about this story nobody is telling me, I concur with Mark Adams’s opinion:

Now just for the record, the head of Obama’s VP selection team didn’t hand out fraudulent loans or anything, right? He wasn’t a lobbyist for Countrywide, was he, or one of it’s executives?

He was an extremely good credit risk who took out some loans with the company, and paid them back. So WTF?

The Wingnut Smear Machine at Work

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We’ve been watching this happen for years now: Some juicy bit of disinformation appears on a far-right blog or forum, and within hours it goes up the rightie media infrastructure food chain — to NewsMax to Drudge to Limbaugh to the Washington Times to Bill O’Reilly — and then corporate media reports that “a story is circulating about. …”

And, IMO, many of these juicy bits are planted originally by highly placed political operatives who also make sure the other links in the chain are tipped off.

Dave Johnson provides a current example (emphasis added):

“Someone” posted an anti-semitic comment at the Obama blog. (See if you can guess who posted a comment that a right-wing blog knew about a few minutes later.) A few minutes later the hate site Little Green Footballs wrote a post saying that the Obama blog says so-and-so. (If you don’t know about this site, spend a few minutes there and you’ll get the picture. No, it is not a parody of right-wing nuttiness.) Then dozens of far-right-wing sites quickly echoed the “story.” It rapidly turns into a great big right-wing hissy fit.

Soon the right’s Politico has picked it up. (Which shows they’re spending time reading hate sites.) And then Rush Limbaugh talked about it on his show.

You see, someone (guess who) leaving a comment at the Obama site proves that Obama is anti-semitic. You’ll be hearing about it from every direction very soon.

Obviously, it’s enormously unlikely LGF would have known about and blogged about the anti-semitic post “a few minutes later” unless someone involved in the origination of the post tipped them off.

The Right did a hell of a job with this during the 2004 “swift boating” of John Kerry. It’s the easiest thing in the world to pull a crazy allegation out of thin air and then float it around as if it were legitimate inquiry. You’ll remember this classic confrontation between Chris Matthews and Michelle Malkin:

Ah, I never get tired of that. Anyway — Questions are being asked whether John Kerry shot himself to get a purple heart. We don’t need evidence or anything approaching a factual basis for those questions. Somebody makes up some questions, and away we go. Questions are being asked whether Michelle Malkin worships the Devil. Questions are being asked if Michelle Malkin tortures puppies. Hey, I’d like to know.

Now Michelle Malkin is asking questions about Barack Obama.

Jim Geraghty takes a look at longstanding blog buzz over Barack Obama’s birth certificate, which the campaign refused to release to the St. Petersburg Times in April:

We tried to obtain a copy of Obama’s birth certificate, but his campaign would not release it and the state of Hawaii does not make such records public.

Has anyone seen it? Why shouldn’t the record be in the public domain for presidential candidates?

Geraghty walks through various rumors now circulating in the wake of the Obama campaign’s birth certificate blackout, including this one:

Rumor Three: His mother did not want to name him after his father, and his birth certificate says “Barry.” Perhaps the most plausible of the rumors, as Obama was known by that name through much of his childhood and young adulthood. If true, this would spur a new round of “When Barry Became Barack” stories – a minor headache for the campaign, but hardly a major scandal.

Other rumors are that Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii; his middle name is really “Muhammad,” not “Hussein”; his parents weren’t really married.

One might argue the Obama campaign ought to just release the mystery birth certificate to put the rumors to rest. But you know that would just set off a new round of rumors. Some rightie blogger would question the authenticity of the birth certificate, and that very evening Sean Hannity would look into a Faux Nooz camera and intone, why did Barack Obama release a forged birth certificate? Questions are being asked, after all.

The hunger of the right-wing rumor beast can never be satisfied. However, I do strongly suggest the Obama campaign hire some hall monitors for their campaign web sites — no more unfiltered public comments allowed. Obama supporters will understand.

Regarding the Barry/Barack question, you might ask why that’s a question. I don’t know, but then — I’m not insane. Apparently Obama’s given name is Barack, and as a child people called him “Barry,” but as he approached adulthood he decided he’d rather be called “Barack.” No rational person could read anything sinister in that. Little Jimmies and Bobbies do have a way of becoming Jims and Bobs when they grow up, and Jameses and Robertses if they become important.

But we’re talking about wingnuts, so … never mind. Questions are being asked about why Obama changed his name. There must be some double super secret darkest Africa gang-related terrorist fist-jab reason.

Update: BTW, I won’t be letting the wingnuts hijack the site today. If you are a right-wing troll, don’t hold your breath waiting for your comment to be posted. No, wait … do hold your breath. Please.