Jesse Helms Finally Dies

Posted by Harkavy at 12:08 PM, July 4, 2008

If we're lucky, he took some of his bitter bigotry with him.

Jesse Helms, an unrepentant supporter of unnatural causes throughout his life, died of natural causes this morning at the age of 86.

The only sign of moderation ever shown by the longtime North Carolina senator was his decision to stop saying the word "nigger" when he was likely to be quoted in public settings.

The death of Helms is just about the best birthday present the United States could wish for on July 4. Free at last — of Jesse Helms.

While the networks and most of the press will soft-pedal his virulent racism and reckless disregard for the First Amendment in his hounding of artists, foreigners and many others, Helms stayed his divisive course until the bitter end — at least until the end of his public career.

After building a reputation as a frankly speaking bigot, Helms ended his public life as a liar who whitewashed those previously bold stands.

In a 2005 review of a Helms autobiography and a Strom Thurmond biography, Michael Lind noted in the Washington Post:

Even though America has undergone many changes since the days when the word "nigger" was freely used, it's vital for us to not ban the word. We need it, in context, to accurately record our history. Black man Randall Kennedy, author of the book Nigger, has argued that point recently in "A Note on the Word 'Nigger' ":

Jesse Helms was such a radical that he was able to fan the embers of prejudice even when he spewed the milder N-word with malice aforethought.

In "Dr. Jim Crow," a 2003 article in the Journal of African American History about the post-World War II desegregation of Southern medical education in North Carolina, Karen Kruse Thomas noted:

The death of Helms, particularly on Independence Day, helps.

And it's fitting that he should die during a presidential race that features young black man Barack Obama.

Whether or not Obama wins, the death of Helms and the ascendancy of people like Obama represent at least some sign of progress in America.

In Fright Race, Pakistan Grabs the Top Spot

Posted by Harkavy at 6:29 AM, June 20, 2008

Always in partial meltdown, Pakistan is oozing more bad news right now than Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

Take one day's worth of news from Dawn, the biggest English-language newspaper in the planet's sixth most populous country.

You thought that things couldn't get worse, what with 4,000 U.S. soldiers dead in Iraq. Now the drumbeat in recent days is that Afghanistan is a sorer sore spot than Iraq, what with the Taliban regaining control over more and more of Afghanistan from Hamid Karzai, who couldn't survive without U.S. backing.

It's already apparent that Afghanistan is becoming even more of a quagmire than Iraq, and even Barry Obama is saying so. This from Agence France Presse:

Sorry — make that very sorry — Pakistan has overtaken both. Iraq and Afghanistan each has about 25 million people; Pakistan's population is 166 million, and it has nuclear weapons. And it has numerous fighter jets, eagerly brokered by the Bush regime. And it has an assassinated opposition pol (Benazir Bhutto) and a dictator (Pervez Musharraf).

The only hopeful note is that, in Pakistan, lawyers are prone to kill other lawyers.

Anyway, here are just a few headlines from Karachi-based Dawn's front page today:

For once, Rice is telling the truth.

But other Bush regime officials are trying to keep a stiff upper lip. Here's another headline from this morning's Dawn:

Well, we should know about Pakistan's intentions. After all, on the morning of 9/11, Porter Goss, then the chair of the House Intelligence Committee and later Bush's CIA director, was having breakfast in view of the Pentagon with a Pakistan intelligence official who turned out to be hijacker Mohammed Atta's bagman.

And then Osama bin Laden went into hiding in Pakistan and then we scaled back our search for him to invade Iraq and then — the rest is hysteria.

Goodnight Moon and Goodnight Bush

Posted by Harkavy at 2:20 PM, June 3, 2008

Not just for kids: a parody of the self-parody administration

Fight off your recession and read this requiem for a lightweight: Goodnight Bush, a parody to end all self-parody presidencies.

It's almost time to say "good night" to George W. Bush, and Erich Origen and Gan Golan pronounce the laugh rites over the administration.

Bush's favorite kiddie book in times of crisis may be The Pet Goat, but mine is now Origen and Golan's Goodnight Bush, which sends the regime up to the moon in the same way that Ralph Kramden was always threatening to do to wife Alice.

This is a very funny book, even if it may induce nightmares instead of sweet dreams. Cute illustrations abound: a refinery plume, piggy war profiteers, a spilt glass of water with Katrina victims floating in it.

The text is warm and fuzzy — not as fuzzy as Bush's brain but warmer than Cheney's heart:

See Dick run. See Dick run away. See Dick run away finally.

And see the book's website here.

Newsday to Line Dolans' Bird Cage

Posted by Harkavy at 6:05 PM, May 12, 2008

Another paper falls to journalism know-nothings.

Jim Dolan makes Rupert Murdoch seem like Jesus H. Christ. And that's why Cablevision's apparently successful attempt to swallow up Newsday is making us gag.

Blessed with the huge cash flow of a monopoly cable company (thanks only to cities long ago giving up a public utility to private companies), the Dolan family has enough gelt to spend $650 million to buy the behemoth Long Island newspaper. For a while, it looked as though Murdoch was going to land the whale, but call me Ishmael if the Dolans didn't sink their hooks in deeper.

No matter that the Dolans (Jim's rich daddy is Chuck) have no experience in the news business — Cablevision's News 12 operation doesn't count. At least Murdoch knows the business. When he owned the Voice years ago, he was too smart to turn it into a right-wing rag. The Dolans will further blandify Newsday.

Wall Street's not exactly enthusiastic about the match, which makes about as much sense as the Dolan-owned New York Knicks spending a fortune to hire as coach Mike D'Antoni, who can't coach defense and inherits a roster ill-suited to his run-and-gun style.

Jim Dolan is the slack-jawed yokel who has screwed up the Knicks with his meddling into things he doesn't know about. His only experience with journalism is to squelch it. Colleagues have reminded me that the Knicks' policy toward reporters is unusually repressive and controlling.

When there's bad news brewing in the bowels of Madison Square Garden, Jim Dolan and crew make sure to clamp down hard to keep any of it from leaking out. Sure, every company does that, even newspaper companies, but the Knicks' operation is particularly harsh toward journalists.

Yes, these are the hard-hitting, courageous people we want running our newspapers.

You have to feel sorry for Newsday editor John Mancini (whom I used to work for at a now-defunct paper) and the other fine journalists who still have jobs there. That's because the Dolans' operations are relentlessly mediocre.

As a I said before, Wall Street's not particularly gung-ho. A story earlier this month in Newsday noted:

No matter. The newspaper business may be ailing, as its owners all over America keep moaning, but the New York Times pointed out yesterday that Newsday produced more than $80 million last year in profits on $500 million in revenue.

The Dolans will now have two cash cows, even if one of them is relatively sickly from eating too much newsprint.

The question is: What changed aging Chuck Dolan's mind? As Newsday's own Thomas Maier wrote Saturday:

Son Jim apparently isn't smart enough. But that's no surprise.

May Day! May Day! Cold War Heating Up!

Posted by Harkavy at 5:26 PM, May 5, 2008

The Rooskies are rolling out the hardware once again.

Everybody's talking tough these days. Hillary threatens to nuke Iran and now Vladimir Putin is launching the kind of "Victory Day" parade on Red Square that hasn't been seen since the Soviet Union collapsed.

Here's how France 24's Nick Coleman described it today:

Vlad the Paler may be stepping down as president, but he's still the prime minister, in every sense of the word. He ain't giving up anything.

He's rolling out the big guns, just like in the bad old days when thousands of missiles, troops, and weapons paraded in the square before the doddering conservatives who called themselves Communists.

Coleman's story goes on to note Putin's explanation of how the current display of planes, trained soldiers, and airplanes isn't anything other than peaceful:

Everybody loves a parade. That's an order.

Polls Inserted Where the Sun Don't Shine

Posted by Harkavy at 8:34 AM, January 28, 2008

More troubling than the recent resignation of the Los Angeles Times's top editor is the apparent absence of the paper's sub-editors. Today's Times story on the Democratic presidential race makes that point without meaning to. Reporter Janet Hook contends:

I pointed out last week that the Times misinterpreted its own poll by declaring that Hillary had a "clear" lead — when the statistics showed that the race is practically too close to call.

Now the paper is going even further astray by calling her lead over Obama "commanding."

Under a reasonable headline — "Super Tuesday Looks Close for Democrats" — the subhead blatantly editorializes:

Never mind the absence of Editor James O'Shea, who said he was quitting rather than make further and drastic budget cuts at the troubled behemoth paper. Where are the people who should have been editing Hook's story and writing its headlines? Criminal. Criminy.

Now more than ever, a stronger press is needed. The work of much of the mainstream press seems to be getting weaker as the real news about our country gets scarier. One recent tidbit: The U.S. has fallen into the planet's bottom category in privacy protection — or has risen to the top in surveillance of its citizenry, depending on how you look at it.

Privacy International's rankings of all countries show the U.S. has fallen from being just an "extensive surveillance" nation to now being an "endemic surveillance" state, joining Russia, China, and the U.K.

The international organization released the grim news in conjunction with the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), whose site should be required reading.

The U.K. has a more extensive video-surveillance scheme than any other country. As the for the U.S., well, there are troubling developments. Here are three of them, from the Privacy International report:

With a national-ID scheme, at least voting will be less messy. It would be conceivable that the government will know exactly who voted for whom. That'll help restore some order.

One glimmer of democracy: The Democrats' primary-vote system is proportional, not winner-takes-all. That opens the door to someone like Obama, instead of assuring that we will continue this nonsense of going back and forth between our two royal families, the Bushes and Clintons.

Shake Your Bhutto, Rock Your World

Posted by Harkavy at 8:42 AM, October 16, 2007

Bad news on the global terror front: Unstable Pakistan will become even more shaky when its former leader (and Musharraf's enemy) returns home this week.

As Benazir Bhutto prepares to return to Pakistan later this week from her Dubai exile and becomes a target of strongman prick Pervez Musharraf's assassins, we can only recall how tragic it was for the U.S. to pull back from that volatile region more than five years ago.

Back in 2002, the Bush-Cheney regime abandoned the full-fledged hunt for Osama bin Laden and duped Congress and the country into invading Iraq.

Pakistan was where it was at. Bin Laden was hiding there and in neighboring Afghanistan. As the Soviets found out, you can't fight rebels in Afghanistan without somehow, some way also fighting them as they scurry across the border into Pakistan, where they have even government support.

Officials of Pakistan's spy agency, the ISI — widely credited with co-opting the Taliban and, along with the Saudis and Reagan administration, arming them — were sympathetic to bin Laden as long as he didn't destabilize their own country.

Recall that Porter Goss and Bob Graham, chairs of the House and Senate Intelligence committees, were having breakfast on the morning of 9/11 with Mahmood Ahmed, the Pakistani ISI official who later turned out to be hijacker Mohammed Atta's bagman. It was also Ahmed who had sent $100,000 to Atta on orders from the guy who later kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. You can't make this shit up.

Yes, we left Pakistan in 2002. Big mistake.

We invaded Iraq. Bigger mistake.

We inflamed the Shia-Sunni schism in Iraq, widening everywhere else that ancient rift between Islam's main sects. Take Pakistan. Unlike in Iraq, the Sunnis are the majority. Please remember that most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, and despotic monarchy Saudi Arabia is ruled by Sunni fanatics.

There has long been sectarian violence in Pakistan — see this October 2004 BBC backgrounder. Add to that the return to the country of Benazir Bhutto, whose daddy, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was Pakistan's prime minister in the '70s before he was executed by the country's military. Later, Benazir Bhutto — nearly a dead ringer for Andrea Martin/Edith Prickley's version of another South Asia strongwoman, Indira Ghandi — became prime minister, and then she was driven from Pakistan amid corruption charges.

Pakistan was a bigger threat to world stability after 9-11 than Iraq was. Yes, Iraq was a bigger threat to Israel and always a danger to Kuwait, but Pakistan's instability was a much more dangerous threat to the U.S., no matter what the Bush regime's propagandists have drummed into our heads.

Now's the perfect time to recall that the hunt by Musharraf and the ISI for bin Laden was half-hearted at best. Our reaction has been to step up arm sales to Musharraf, as I noted in April 2005.

Don't be surprised if that well-armed Pakistan government sends more Lockheed fighter jets swooping down on Bhutto than it sent to look for bin Laden.

Hans Off Our Elections!

Posted by Harkavy at 7:37 AM, October 4, 2007

The crucial vote on Hans von Spakovsky's FEC term.

Regarding "Tally Ho!: The GOP's Hounding of Voters" (September 27), which focused on GOP anti-Democratic, anti-democratic operative Hans von Spakovsky, the lawyers at NYU's Brennan Center for Justice gave me a heads-up on their mass mailing to senators about today's scheduled vote on von Spakovsky's confirmation for another FEC term. The letter, signed by Executive Director Michael Waldman, pulls no punches:

Read the whole letter (PDF), but forget about counting on today's hearing if you're planning on learning all about von Spakovsky's sordid history of partisan sabotage of voting rights when he worked for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and since his recess appointment by which George W. Bush's handlers sneaked him in at FEC headquarters. Members of the club known as the U.S. Senate have agreed to conduct only two hours of hearings about von Spakovsky before putting his name to a vote on the Senate floor. The Hill explains:

Will today's scheduled vote on the former GOP county chairman from Georgia rest on a simple majority in a Senate where the Democrats have a razor-thin handle on power? At this very minute, there's probably some pretty intense lobbying going on in the Senate cloakroom.

Too bad the hearing on von Spakovsky is being limited to two hours. That's not enough time for Americans to fully learn about his shenanigans in keeping citizens from voting. OK, so, unlike William Rehnquist, he hasn't personally stopped black people from voting on Election Day in 1964 before becoming chief justice of the United States. Von Spakovsky is more of a behind-the-scenes operative.

But leaving this guy on the FEC is absurd, not only for Democrats but for all voters. If he survives, our 2008 elections automatically become less democratic, and you'll have to rewrite your kids' civics textbooks.

Tally Ho!: The GOP's Hounding of Voters

Posted by Harkavy at 9:15 AM, September 27, 2007

Rehnquist is dead, but his spirit lives. The Supreme Court and Rove's man at the FEC pump life into "voter fraud" scheme.

A snapshot of current American electoral politics is one of the ugliest pictures of the year, now that the increasingly conservative Supreme Court has decided to hear a major voter-fraud/national photo ID case before next year's elections.

The GOP-engineered presidential-vote debacle in 2000 has developed into what may become a major scandal involving the use of photo IDs, which the GOP has been trying to engineer in time for next year.

"Voter fraud" — a purported invasion of polling places by illegitimate voters — is the battle cry of Republican officials hoping to stem turnout by likely Democratic voters in battleground states.

And "voter fraud" is right: The requirement that voters present photo IDs is their scheme, and Hans von Spakovsky is their standard-bearer at the Federal Election Commission. That uncomfortable sensation felt by small-d democrats is their cherished poll being shoved up a place where the sun don't shine.

Who said Karl Rove left the building? Coupled with the appointment of Michael Mukasey to oversee the Justice Department and its Civil Rights Division, the GOP is setting itself up well for '08, fighting a winnable war against U.S. voters while it fights an impossible war overseas. Rove's fingerprints are all over this, whether or not he's still using his White House keyboard.

Iraq has left the Republicans flaccid, but their "voter fraud" canard and accompanying strategy threaten to give the GOP yet another election.

Shades of Bill Rehnquist! Before he was chief justice of the U.S., Rehnquist personally blocked black people from voting in Phoenix in 1964, using "voter fraud" as his excuse. I wrote about that in September 2005 ("Rehnquist Death Gives Bush Chance to Deepen American Crisis"), recalling Dennis Roddy's riveting column in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that itself recalled Rehnquist's totalitarian behavior in Arizona as a GOP operative.

Rehnquist died in September 2005, but that didn't help because John Roberts, who favors corporate citizens over human citizens, took his place. An event that may turn out to be equally vital to the GOP occurred three months later, when Bush made a recess appointment to the FEC of von Spakovsky, a former Republican county chairman in Georgia. Before his FEC appointment, von Spakovsky was the chief civil-rights violator in the Justice Department's civil-rights division, leading the move to suppress minority and poor voters.

Von Spakovsky is up for confirmation to another FEC term. And the Roberts Supreme Court announced yesterday that it will hear the issue involving national photo IDs and voting — just in time for next year's election. This is dangerous, because it will likely bollix up '08 voting in key states.

There's plenty to read on this topic. From Paul Kiel at Talking Points Memo this past June:

Kiel refers to a 2004 piece by Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker whose headline says it all: "Poll Position: Is the Justice Department poised to stop voter fraud — or to keep voters from voting?"

See Lou Dubose's 2006 account of how von Spakovsky collaborated with Rove to scheme Tom Delay's crooked redistricting in Texas earlier this century. More to the current point, Dubose noted at the time:

Dahlia Lithwick's piece two days ago in Slate is also vital for understanding the back story on von Spakovsky.

Legal beagles can parse Bob Bauer's analysis yesterday of the politics swirling around the vote case the Supreme Court has now agreed to hear.

For a very recent story hinting at the bad smell emanating from the Justice Department, see "The Stooge," by David Martin of Kansas City's The Pitch.

As for following this issue, though, nothing beats wonk lawyer Rick Hasen's Election Law site, though Hasen is perhaps too hopeful that the high court will protect the rights of voters.

As I've pointed out before, in a September 2004 piece about dubious electronic-voting machines, Hasen is always a captivating and current legal-news live wire.

Those who can't live without the New York Times can learn some things from an April 12 story, "In 5-Year Effort, Scant Evidence of Voter Fraud," co-bylined by Ian Urbina, whose copy I used to have the pleasure of editing.

But you must keep clicking on the excellent McClatchy home page (formerly the Knight-Ridder D.C. Bureau), and definitely read Greg Gordon's story last April, "Administration pursued aggressive legal effort to restrict voter turnout." Gordon noted:

Next year those of you who can vote might want to vote early and vote often.

A Magna Carta Sales Event!

Posted by Harkavy at 9:26 AM, September 25, 2007

Sotheby's to sell a raggedy-ass copy next month in New York City. Habeas corpus not included.

With the Lieberman-Kyl Amendment's momentous move toward a pre-emptive strike on Iran, now's as good a time as any to sell off the Magna Carta. As everyone can see, George W. Bush has poked enough holes in it to reduce its value.

In our era of take no prisoners, but if you do, hold them unlawfully at Abu Ghraib, Gitmo and various torture chambers around the world — new AG Michael Mukasey is bound to agree and, more importantly, he'll be much more effective at running that game on us than Alberto Gonzales was. So it makes sense to peddle this piece of civil-liberties paper to the highest bidder.

In December, Sotheby's plans to do just that in New York City. The privately owned copy, dated 1297, is expected to fetch $20 million to $30 million — undercoating included. But after the past seven years of the Bush-Cheney regime's erosion of the ancient document's key provision on habeas corpus, the question is whether it's worth the vellum it's scrawled on.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's appearance in New York City coincides perfectly with the attempt by war hawks Joe Lieberman and Jon Kyl to push us into a pre-emptive strike on Iran. Rapping the Iranian ruler's knuckles was so easy that it was bound to stir up the populace and take their minds off the tragedy in Iraq.

The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh wrote years ago about the current administration's thirst for Persian blood, and various Israeli officials have beat those drums too.

That's all we need: another war to produce more prisoners whose rights of habeas corpus we can deny.

Bad Guys at Ground Zero

Posted by Harkavy at 9:32 AM, September 21, 2007

This oily business of dealing with evil foreign leaders.

New York's tabloids and assorted pols came unglued yesterday about the very idea of Iran's crackpot hardliner Mahmoud Ahmedinejad wanting to visit Ground Zero.

Where were they when Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov, whose regime boils people to death, was courted by George W. Bush and Mayor Mike Bloomberg?

Don't let your own blood boil at the thought of a bad guy visiting our sacralized 9/11 site. Condemn it, if you want, but Ahmedinejad was just trying to score political points, as our own pols do all the time at Ground Zero. He got what he wanted: The angry U.S. reaction will play well back home in Tehran, especially with the radical mullahs who really run Iran and like to stir up hatred for the "Great Satan."

Do we even have to say that in international politics, enemies today are pals tomorrow, and vice versa, and that the reasons almost always have to do with greed for money and natural resources?

On the other hand, it would be nice if our press at least reported these events. The Uzbek despot Karimov laid a wreath at Ground Zero in 2002, and there was literally not one word in the U.S. press about it at the time — I'm not talking about criticism or praise but any words at all. Nothing.

So Karimov is not a bad enough guy to get you worked up? Saddam Hussein was brown-nosed by Don Rumsfeld in December 1983. There's no reason to condemn Rumsfeld for that; it was just oil politics — just like the oil politics that Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney played when they seized upon the 9/11 attacks to justify invading Iraq.

After all, when Texas oil execs questioned Cheney in 1998, when he was still at Halliburton, about the physical dangers of pursuing oil in turbulent parts of Asia, the future vice president and de facto commander in chief told them:

Saddam is gone, but we still don't really have Iraq's oil. We do, however, have such evil people as the Taliban to deal with, right? Well, the Taliban were hailed as Afghan freedom fighters by Ronald Reagan during their triumphant visit to the White House on March 21, 1983. Reagan said at the time:

That's ancient history, huh? In fact, they were still our pals 14 years later. In late 1997, the Taliban were wined and dined at the homes of Bush's pals, the Houston oil execs, during Dubya's reign as the hangingest governor in U.S. history.

The oil schnooks were buttering up the Taliban for pipelines and other bidness, of course. See Wayne Madsen's "Afghanistan, the Taliban, and the Bush Oil Team" for details.

At least that courting of the Taliban less than 10 years ago was reported at the time. Of the many words in the mainstream press, my favorites are from a December 14, 1997, story by Caroline Lees in the Telegraph (U.K.), in which she describes the Taliban officials' visit to Unocal vice president Martin Miller's palatial Houston home: