Chomsky: The choice for Dems: PR vs. addressing the issues

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday March 12, 2005 · 11:42 AM PST

2005/03/12 · 11:42

There has been a lot of talk about framing on dKos recently. Hudson has even broken new ground in this discussion with his introduction of the concept of "fencing", which is what Republicans do when they pre-empt our framing by not letting it reach that sector of the public whose thought they control.

But Noam Chomsky in a recent speech shows that there is a different way of seing the problem faced by Dems, one according to which the major hurdles we face are put up not by the Republicans, but by the Dem Party itself. On the issues, most voters are to the left of both Bush and Kerry. If Kerry had spoken on issues people really care about, such as health care, and given specific proposals, voters would have started to take him seriously, so that he would have had a good chance of winning on his own merits.

But both parties studiously avoid talking about the issues, because they do not want voters' real desires and values to interfere with the political process. Read More

Yushchenko poisoning allegation: the plot thickens

Alexander

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday March 11, 2005 · 12:04 AM PST

2005/03/11 · 00:04

Those of you who have been following the march of freedom will be aware that in the recent follow-up election in Ukraine that was called as a result of discrepancies between the election results and exit polls, a significant factor was allegations that the opposition candidate -- who emerged victorious in the follow-up election -- had been poisoned by a Russian-produced poison. A candidate whom the Bush government opposed won; then the Bush government claimed that the election that had just had been held was rigged, because exit polls contradicted the official results; finally, when a new election was called, the US-favored candidate on the second go emerged victorious, largely because of allegations that he had been poisoned by officials of the government he opposed.

Now however it emerges that politics were by no means absent from the way in which these conclusions about poisoning were reached and conveyed to the public. As we learn from a Washington Post story, it was American doctors who came up with the diagnosis of dioxin poisoning, although that fact was hidden from Ukranian voters "so as not to influence the elections". Read More

Why the military is failing in Iraq

Alexander

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday March 05, 2005 · 1:18 PM PST

2005/03/05 · 13:18

The excellent TomDispatch has an article by the sociologist Michael Schwartz about why the US occupation of Iraq is failing. Ironically, Rumsfeld hit on the core of the problem when he said: "You go to war with the Army you have."

The basic problem is that the US army was designed to fight conventional enemies, with a well-defined command-and-control structure. But in Iraq, they are fighting guerrillas, against which the army's equipment, training, and strategies have limited effectiveness.

This much has been written about before. What Schwartz adds to this is some organizational theory: when faced with a threat, organizations will see that threat through the filter of their own capabilities. Read More

Which is more credible: exit polls or Diebold?

Alexander

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday November 02, 2004 · 9:47 PM PST

2004/11/02 · 21:47

What is puzzling everyone at the moment is the discrepancy between the exit polls and the votes that are being reported. The way the pundits are framing this issue is: what went wrong with the exit polls?

But what reasons do we actually have for thinking the exit polls were wrong? Previously, exit polls have reflected fairly closely the finally recorded vote. (On MSNBC, I heard Matthews suggesting that Republicans not liking to talk to pollsters explained the discrepancy: that's a new one to me.)

The technology of exit polling has not changed. There has been a change in voting technology, however -- namely, electronic voting machines. Neither electronic voting machines nor exit polls leave a paper trail. (Actually, exit polls do leave a paper trail, but it has no legal import.) So why should we believe electronic voting machines more than exit polls?
Read More

Bin Laden's video, and SNL's mockery of it

Alexander

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday October 30, 2004 · 10:12 PM PDT

2004/10/30 · 22:12

I don't think anyone has processed bin Laden's video fully yet. It is inscruitable, and utterly postmodern. Why did he make it? What did he hope to accomplish by intervening with such sangfroid and finesse in our election?

To me, it had always been clear that bin Laden wanted Bush to win, since Bush had played so totally into bin Laden's hands. But in this video, bin Laden did three things: 1) he addressed the American people; 2) he used a rhetoric new to him, one of freedom; 3) he mocked Bush. Mocking Bush in this way that is spot on is hardly the best way of helping him get elected. I was somewhat caught off balance by that. Read More

Poll of Floridians who've already voted: Kerry 56/Bush 39

Alexander

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday October 29, 2004 · 1:14 PM PDT

2004/10/29 · 13:14

I thought I'd check out the freepers to see if they're getting fidgity, this is what I found: Florida: Kerry Leads Big in Early Voting. The source is NewsMax, which I believe is a fairly unreliable right-wing outfit.

Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were favored by 49 percent to 46 percent for Kerry and running mate John Edwards among likely Florida voters surveyed by Quinnipiac University pollsters between last Friday and Tuesday. Independent candidate Ralph Nader received 1 percent, while 4 percent said they were still undecided...

Among 16 percent of Florida voters who said they had cast early ballots, Kerry received 56 percent of those compared to Bush's 39 percent.

If what Kosians have been saying about polling having an inherent Republican bias is correct, Bush being ahead in general, but behind among people who say they have already voted, is exactly one would expect. A poster on the FreeRepublic thread said, "This was reported in the local papers this morning." Anybody here hear that?

US murders journalist and 11 other civilians on live TV

Alexander

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday September 12, 2004 · 6:38 PM PDT

2004/09/12 · 18:38

A television journalist was shot dead as he made a live broadcast from Baghdad yesterday when United States helicopters fired on a crowd that had gathered round the burning wreckage of an American armoured vehicle.

Mazen al-Tumeizi, a Palestinian working for Al-Arabiya, one of the main Arab satellite television channels, was among 12 people - all believed to be civilians - killed in the incident on Haifa Street.

TV reporter killed by US fire during live Baghdad broadcast

Tell me again why they hate us? Oh, I remember: it's because we love freedom. Read More

Gore should give another speech on the media

Alexander

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday September 07, 2004 · 10:26 AM PDT

2004/09/07 · 10:26

Ernest Partridge has a post making the point that even America's flagship newspapers act like a Pravda on the Potomac, devoting countless news cycles to the Swift Boat Vets' smearing of Kerry, but letting the scandalous outing by the Bush administration of a mole that Pakistani intelligence had inside al Qaeda disappear entirely from the news horizon.

Gore has made one speech already in which he talked about how the media provides the right with an "echo chamber" in which the right's lies get amplified and recycled. It is time he made another one. Read More

Without Evangelicals, BushCo would be impossible

Alexander

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday September 03, 2004 · 10:04 AM PDT

2004/09/03 · 10:04

The London Independent has an article with a slew of statistics shedding light on the Bush administration: Bush by numbers: Four years of double standards. The article states that 23 out of the 50 million people who voted for Bush are Evangelicals.

Right-wing Evangelicals are a blight upon this country. Without them, the US probably wouldn't be that different from Canada. It is their religion that is the fundamental reason why America is a country divided. It is ironic that while the US is supposed to be the most advanced nation in the world, in terms of its religious development, it is at the stage that Europe was in in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which were dominated by wars and strife between Catholics and Protestants.

Progressives are going to need to figure out some kind of strategy to deal with this problem, if the US is ever going to become a normal country again. Read More

Pithy Bush bio in Counterpuch

Alexander

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Tuesday August 31, 2004 · 10:29 AM PDT

2004/08/31 · 10:29

For those looking for a respite from the continuing media portrayal of Bush as a decent human being, here is the first part of a terse two-part biography that goes through just about everything that I heard that was wrong about Bush before he got selected in 2000. And here's something I hadn't heard about:

In dreary west Texas ... he ... met Laura Welch, the steamy librarian who had slain her own ex-boyfriend, by speeding through a stop sign and plowing broadside into his car with a lethal fury. (Rep. Bill Janklow got 100 days in the pen for a similar crime; Laura wasn't even charged.)

High Plains Grifter

The real intelligence failure behind the invasion of Iraq

Alexander

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday August 21, 2004 · 9:45 AM PDT

2004/08/21 · 09:45

TomDispatch has an excellent piece by Jonathan Shell, author of a recent book on the history of empire.

The war, launched in pursuit of a mirage (those missing weapons of mass destruction), is an unqualified disaster. But the most remarkable "intelligence failure" in Iraq was not to see weapons of mass destruction where there were none; it was to blind ourselves to the struggle of national resistance that history told us would have to follow American invasion and occupation... It was delusional to imagine that the people of a post-colonial country would happily accept a new occupation. No consultation with British or French or Israel intelligence agencies was needed to grasp this lesson. It was writ large in the annals of twentieth century history, including the voluminous records of the United States' defeat in Vietnam.

Can the Democrats learn from history no better than the Republicans? Read More

Where are those crew-cut boys with their daily briefings?

Alexander

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday August 20, 2004 · 8:05 AM PDT

2004/08/20 · 08:05

No one in the media seems to find it at all strange that despite the ongoing US military operations not just in Najaf but throughout Iraq, we are not getting any briefings from the US military at all.

With the "handover" of power, it was civil authority that was (supposedly) transferred. The military organization stayed exactly the same as before. Before the handover, we had briefings from Bremer and his spokesmen and from the military. Now, we just have briefings from Allawi and others in the interim "cabinet". That doesn't make any sense: given the ongoing military operations, why are we getting briefings from civilians, but not from the military? The answer is simple of course: this is a transparent but entirely successful attempt to give the American public the impression that the US is no longer running things in Iraq, that US forces might still be there, but they are merely serving the desires of the Iraqi "government", so what goes on there now has nothing to do with us, really.

The Bush administration has pulled a con job on us big-time. I've seen it mentioned occasionally that it is funny that we don't ever hear anything from Negraponte, Bremer's replacement. But no one, not even in the blogosphere, has raised the question: given that there's at least as much of a real war going on now, as there was at the time of the invasion (to have a war, you need to have two sides that are fighting each other): why aren't we hearing anything from the generals, or their nice crew-cut boys with their status reports? The sheer brazenness of this PR trick is so mind-boggling, that it seems that no one has the will to point it out.

Newer
Older

RSS