Sunday, August 31, 2008

RNC 2008: Of Twitter & Tasers (4:24 pm)

My RNC 2008 began in Chicago at noon Saturday, after I took my seat on a bus idling outside of Union Station. Behind me sat a handful of early 20-somethings heading to St. Paul with one express purpose: to challenge the Republican Party - although they seemed as unsure what shape this challenge might take as the city’s preemptive police department.

We were barely out of Illinois and the convention already tasted authoritarian: A guy sitting directly behind me read aloud his cell phone’s Twitter feed from The Uptake (a great citizen journalism outfit covering RNC protests closely), so I learned about house raids and detainments occurring as we rolled through Wisconsin. It was already getting ugly, 48 hours before the convention was set to begin.

The conversation behind me turned to RNC 2004, and NYPD mass arrests. Two young men spoke with reverence for those protests, although neither were there and both sounded leery of being arrested this week.

“(Mass arrests) won’t happen.”

“It happened in New York.”

“You’re right.”

Might this convention spark something like the WTO protests in Seattle nine years ago? It seems nearly impossible: police have had too much practice.

So much practice, in fact, that St. Paul’s police department (in consort with the FBI?) decided to weaken and control protesters through early raids and confiscations of electronic gear (although the RNC Welcoming Committee did seem to have more than that) - and vehicles. As our bus drove through St. Paul around 6:30 p.m. or so, we passed this Earth Justice bus surrounded by cruisers. The bus was being impounded, leaving all of its passengers stranded on Interstate 94, Twitter relayed to the disgusted protesters behind me.

Not long after that, one said: “I’m more afraid of Tasers than being arrested.” A woman responded: “It’s not that bad. It burns.”

posted by Jeremy Gantz | 1 comment

Friday, August 29, 2008

Plant Killer (5:59 pm)

InTheseTimes.com reader MargBass eloquently responds to David Sirota’s latest column:

David,

I’ve lived in Denver at times. Not unusual for a Wyomingite who considers Denver closer than Washington DC. I was a visitor in 1988 just before the election, and that is the image I carry of “old Denver” because the new buildings on Colfax were mostly unoccupied, and as I took the bus to Casper I had time to reflect on really hard times in the US of A. Back in East Tennessee we were suffering through yet a year of terrible drought. The sunflowers in Northern Kansas drooped their misshapen heads. In Kansas City smoke from the Yellowstone fires shaded the sun and burned the eyes. In Wyoming the oil boom, which Carter helped after deep drilling became law, was temporarily bust. Saddest of all was looking at Iowa’s tall corn, frizzled to the height of gehu. It was the start of “economy stupid.”

It’s hard not to think of the 1988 election without thinking of the “Willie Horton” gibe. And harder still not to be alerted to Corsi and his newest swiftboat book, edited by the same person as was around during the Willie Horton ad.

When seeds of thought start to sprout, as you believe they have, into an uprising, so come doses of plant killer. Talk about money! It’s easy to have a best seller. Write a provocative book, place it with a collaborative publisher, and then buy up a couple of editions. In politics, the scorched earth approach works, leaving the newly-awakened to wonder what hit them.

posted by Jarrett | start the discussion

A Record Shorter Than A Funk ‘45 (4:14 pm)

So there’s a meme going around that it might not be smart for the Obama campaign to attack the inexperience of GOP VP nominee Sarah Palin, because he’s not a typical long-time national pol himself. Well, I don’t know, hell, maybe it’s smart advice, but check out the differences between the two candidates according to On the Issues.Org.

The site looks at the records and public statements of candidates on 24 different policy issues. Here’s Sarah Palin’s. You’ll note that of the 24 categories, she has no issue stance on 13 of them (including such obscure issues as “Foreign Policy,” “Free Trade,” and “Jobs.”) On the other 11, it doesn’t appear that she’s made public statements on any of them more than twice.

Now here’s Barack Obama’s. You’ll note that not only has he made public statements about every issue, but that he’s done so on each issue between 8 and 150 times.

It’s not that I think experience itself means that much; John McCain has plenty of experience and I think it’s pretty self-evident that he’d be a craptacular president. But—and you can call me old-fashioned—I would like my potential president to have at least thought through many of the issues he or she will face, and what’s more, made plain their conclusions about these issues in the public record. It’s not clear that Sarah Palin has done that.

UPDATE: I mean, come on. Take a listen to this. Her “plan” for Iraq is that it’s important for us to have one. This just isn’t serious.

posted by Brian Cook | start the discussion

Sarah who? (10:48 am)

By choosing Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, McCain is placing a pretty transparent bet to win over shell-shocked Hillary supporters. But the central logic of the choice (female veep=female voters) is, I hope, too cynical to gain wayward Dems and independent women. Have identity politics gained such currency that longtime Hillary-ites will support a pro-life Republican totally unknown on the national stage simply because of her gender?

This election has become even more interesting - with an historic result either way. But let’s hope it’s about more than electing the first black president or female vice-president.

posted by Jeremy Gantz | 2 comments

At DNC, God-Fearing Meet the Otherworldly (10:24 am)

DENVER - In the generic meeting rooms of the Colorado Convention Center, a revolution is taking place in the Democratic Party. The people of faith have arrived.

Every day has seen a panel or gathering or both of religious and spiritual leaders, some gathered together by Joshua DuBois, the Obama campaign’s director of religious affairs, others convened by outside groups such as Faith in Public Life. Each gathering has the whiff of a “walk-into-a-bar” joke — as in, “A rabbi, a priest and a minister walk into a bar…” — a distinctly different scent than a gathering of GOP religious.

And it doesn’t end with church-mosque-temple-synagogue crowd. Add in the unchurched but spiritual set, and you’ve got a negotiation of the higher power in politics unlike any ever tried before.

To the mainstream media, Oprah Winfrey, who will attend Barack Obama’s acceptance speech tonight, is simply a very powerful celebrity, a pop-culture icon like a rock star or something. But to her viewers - her followers, really - Oprah is a priestess. First on the menu of her Web site, Oprah.com, is a channel called “spirit.” When she introduced Barack Obama on the campaign trail during primary season, she did it in oratory laced with religious references. In Des Moines, she spoke this way of making the choice to, for the first time, publicly endorse a presidential candidate: “I feel like I?m out of my pew.”

Because of the diversity of the Democratic party, the Obama campaign’s concerted outreach to what are called “faith voters” is not without risk. In the GOP, the religious faction have a broadly shared agenda, centering mostly on issues of sexuality and women’s freedom. Among the leftward-leaning religious and spiritual types, you find a pretty consistent agenda on poverty, health care and the social contract, but wild divergence on reproductive freedom, same-sex marriage and how far to take faith values into the political arena. And then you have some of the religious types simply dismissed the “unchurched” believers — the spiritual types — as “secular”, when they are anything but.

In the past, the spiritual types... read more

posted by Adele Stan, Media Consortium | start the discussion

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Obama Speech: Convention Address Makes Economic Populism Central Thrust of Election 2008 (9:49 pm)

If his convention speech tonight is any indication, Barack Obama has (finally) signaled that progressive economic populism is going to be the central thrust of Democrats campaign in the stretch run of the 2008 election.

The speech is probably the most populist national speech Obama has given.

Here are the key snippets:

“We measure the strength of our economy not by the number of billionaires we have or the profits of the Fortune 500, but by whether someone with a good idea can take a risk and start a new business, or whether the waitress who lives on tips can take a day off to look after a sick kid without losing her job - an economy that honors the dignity of work…

Change means a tax code that doesn’t reward the lobbyists who wrote it, but the American workers and small businesses who deserve it…

It’s a promise that says the market should reward drive and innovation and generate growth, but that businesses should live up to their responsibilities to create American jobs, look out for American workers, and play by the rules of the road…

I will make certain those [health care] companies stop discriminating against those who are sick and need care the most…

Now is the time to change our bankruptcy laws, so that your pensions are protected ahead of CEO bonuses…”

This is strong stuff - the kind of thing I was talking about when I wrote a newspaper column back in June entitled “Countering Race With Class.” That column said the only way for Obama to counter the GOP’s cultural populism is with a full-throated economic populist message.

For a while now, I have wondered why it has taken him this long to get back to this same economic language that he used in the Democratic primary. It probably is a mix of factors: The Wall Streeters whispering in his ear, Democrats’ typical (self-defeating) move to the right in general elections, and the virulent free-market fundamentalism that the New York Times says he embraced at the University of Chicago.

But now, he has to win... read more

posted by David Sirota | 18 comments

Convention Dispatch: Dinner with the Ruling Class, Lunch In the Police State (8:01 pm)

As the world waits to hear Barack Obama’s message of change tonight at Invesco Field, I am still marveling at how I got to eat dinner last night with the American ruling class. Well, OK, not with, but near - and the experience was one of those “more things change, more things stay the same” moments that make it hard to hear Obama’s soothing bromides - and that led me to opt out of the final night of the convention.

Following Bill Clinton’s speech at the Pepsi Center, I headed over to Elway’s to have dinner with my friend Bill Hillsman, the iconoclastic media consultant who I got to know on Ned Lamont’s campaign. We were later joined by Working Families Party executive director Dan Cantor and a few other progressives, and our conversation inevitably ended up focusing on whether Barack Obama would really push the kind of change he is promising.

That’s when the ruling class showed up.

Over the course of about 10 minutes, a few Obama advisers trickled into the restaurant, followed by a flood of some of the biggest sharks that swim in the murky delta where money and Democratic politics meet. Among others, Bob Rubin (Citigroup chair), Larry Summers (former Treasury Secretary), Jim Johnson (political rainmaker) and Laura Tyson (former Clinton economic adviser) filed in and sat down at a long dinner table - clearly some kind of economic pow-wow with Obama officials, leavened with other political celebrities like former-vice-president-turned-corporate-board-member Walter Mondale and journalist Al Hunt.

I tried to capture the room in the picture at right. In the foreground you can see a goofy Hillsman posing as a bandit (left) and a grinning Cantor, and in the background, you can see those Ruling Class suits kibbutzing in the background (the tiny gray head above Hillsman’s head is Rubin’s). The whole scene really summed up the strange oxymoronic forces that collide at conventions like this. Here we were, progressive grassroots activists plotting how to pressure Obama to fulfill his populist promises on issues like trade and corporate power. And right next to us was a dinner... read more

posted by David Sirota | 2 comments

What’s missing from the DNC (3:12 pm)

You’d think the last eight years were merely slightly off… Glenn Greenwald hits it out of the park, per usual.