When demagoguing on illegals doesn’t work, when holding forth on the scourge of the Soviet Union fails to inspire, when fearmongering on Iran can’t gain any traction, there’s always pretending the UN will take your guns away.

Says Thompson, “Last year, the United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights declared that international human rights law requires all nations to adopt strict gun control laws. These “minimum” provisions are much more restrictive than any of those on the books anywhere in the U.S. and would almost certainly violate the Second Amendment of our Constitution.”

Except, that’s not true.

As you can see, these are pretty broad directives. And as you can see, no country is required to do anything. In fact, the only UN body that can require something of a member state is the Security Council, on which the United States has a veto.

He also claims that the UN has denied “the existence of any human right to self-defense,” which is so not true that it’s in Article 51 of the original UN charter of 1945.

This whole “The UN is about to take your guns” away is pretty far down the significant rung of made-up fears from the lunatic fringe, right down there with the NAFTA Superhighway and the fluoridation of water. It’s pretty deep in the wingnut id. Freddie can’t figure out how else to prove to the fundies that he’s one of them, so he has to pretend these lies are the truth, because that’s all he’s got.

Fred Thompson | 1 Comment »

Bringing the number to umpityteen.

In recent weeks, Republican presidential candidates have found time in their busy schedules to speak or debate before the Republican Jewish Coalition, “Value Voters,” conservative Floridians, even Wyoming Republicans, who hold virtually no sway in the primary race. They’ve also agreed to appear at the CNN/YouTube debate they at one point shunned.

But it appears that some GOP frontrunners are once again letting an opportunity to appear before African-American voters lapse…. The Congressional Black Caucus Institute announced in September that it had scheduled a debate for November 4 on Fox News for Republican presidential candidates. But a spokeswoman for the group confirmed to the Huffington Post that it has now been postponed, with no new date set. […]

Republican candidates have cited scheduling conflicts in resisting new proposed dates, [CBC Institute spokesperson Georgella Muirhead] said.

Yes, talking to white people does conflict with any date the CBC would set.

One of the biggest things forgotten in this reign of Bush is that the President of the United States is the President to all Americans. He doesn’t pick and choose his constituents. We’ve seen that these Republican pretenders to the throne have no desire to talk with very large sections of the population. Not just no interest in their concerns - no desire to even TALK to them. It’s a sad day for the Grand Old Party, which is building walls and gates around themselves so they don’t have to interact with the rabble. The problem is that what left inside is inevitably too small to be a ruling party any longer.

Presidential Debates, Candidates | 2 Comments »

This latest radio ad from Rudy Giuliani about health care is a perfect example of the Big Lie, where someone packs so many deliberate fabrications into one 30-second spot that it’s almost too difficult to unravel them all. But Ezra Klein does a good job. Basically, Rudy says in the ad that the survival rate for prostate cancer in the US is 82%, and in England, with “socialized medicine,” it’s 44%. This is not true.

England and America have vritually the same mortality rates from prostate cancer. In England (as of 1997), 28 males of every 100,000 died from prostate cancer. In America, then number was 26. The difference comes in “incidence” — there are many more diagnoses of prostate cancer in America, as we have an aggressive screening process.

Problem is, most of those cancers simply aren’t deadly, or even necessarily damaging. They’re slow-moving and benign. It’s like saying we have a lower death rate from car crashes because we record more near-misses in the statistics. We may indeed have a slight advantage of prostate treatment, but it’s not what Guliani is suggesting it is.

In Giuliani’s age group, where screening evens out, the percentages are precisely the same. In addition, most of that screening in later years falls under the Medicare program, which is - boo! - socialized medicine! And indeed, if you actually judge apples to apples, using a metric like years of life lost due to the health care system, the United States is actually pretty terrible, especially considering we spend twice as much on health care as practically every indstrialized nation.

But the most intriguing part of Klein’s takedown was this postscript at the end.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to find out if the gold-standard care Giuliani got during his prostate cancer came while he was on government-provided health insurance? He was mayor at the time, suggesting his care was coming through the city, which would suggest it was through the state insurance pool, which works very much like FEHBP — which is what the Democrats are proposing to expand to all Americans, and what Giuliani is calling deadly, socialized medicine.

And more has been added to that story today:

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Rudy Giuliani | 2 Comments »

Rudy Giuliani is doing some part-time work in between denunciations of Hillary Clinton.

Ten months into his presidential bid, Rudolph W. Giuliani continues to work part time at the security consulting firm he promised to leave this past spring to focus on his pursuit of the Republican nomination.

I could snark about how someone confident in winning the nomination wouldn’t be keeping his old job, or I could joke that he’s just keeping it for the health insurance, because buying his own with that pre-existing condition is such a nightmare. But there’s actually a serious part to this.

Several of the firm’s employees do volunteer work for his campaign. And Giuliani did not decide until mid-June, six months after he entered the race, to bill his campaign for the cost of the security detail traveling with him on campaign trips; before then, the firm paid the expense […]

Federal election laws prohibit Giuliani’s firm from absorbing costs or providing services that legally should be covered by political donations, campaign experts said.

“This is a lawyer’s nightmare,” said Republican political consultant Scott Reed, who ran the 1996 presidential bid of then-Sen. Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.) but is not aligned with a presidential campaign in this race. “I don’t think the vulnerability is with voters on the level of his commitment to the race. The concern is really about FEC violations and whether anything this corporation does to help him essentially is making a contribution to run for president in the form of staff time, materials, travel billing or security.”

And since Giuliani clearly believes that the law doesn’t apply to him, I don’t see him caring much about that. The question is whether or not the FEC will do their job. What’s funny is that this is the guy running as a law and order candidate. But he also refuses to give anybody else credit for his achievements, which could explain why he wants to run a campaign and a security firm at the same time. And by running for President the way he ran for mayor, these pieces of petty graft are possibly the best we can hope for:

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Rudy Giuliani | No Comments »

Ron Paul launched a series of television ads in New Hampshire this week. I believe this first one is called “White People that are Terrible Actors for Ron Paul.” If Mitt Romney wasn’t such a flip-flopper and devoid of any real political principle, I would have said this was the worst acting in a presidential ad all season.

In the second ad, Ron Paul stands in front of a disappearing Constitution.

One quick question: aren’t campaign logos suppose to stay until the end of the ad? Seems like political advertising 101.

According to The Hill, via Todd Beeton of MyDD, this is part of a $1.1 million ad blitz on the part of the Paul campaign. They got hosed on the first ad.

Ron Paul | 9 Comments »

As you may recall, John McCain put out an ad entirely based on a pre-scripted line used in a recent Fox News debate, prompting Fox News to send a cease and desist letter to McCain’s campaign demanding that he not violate their copyright. It didn’t take too much digging to discover that plenty of other campaigns, like Rudy Giuliani’s and Mitt Romney’s, were using Fox News footage all over their websites. So Fox News was forced to apply their standard fairly and bar all Republican candidates from using their footage in any capacity. A tiny crack of sunshine from reporters who raised an eyebrow to the initial McCain letter forced a shift in Fox News’ attempt to tilt the playing field. That’s something to file away and remember for later.

Presidential Debates, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney | No Comments »

Another way in which we see the failure of our media is in their sustained characterization of Rudy Giuliani as a “moderate” Republican with “liberal views” on a variety of subjects, when the evidence is entirely clear that he is more like an extreme form of authoritarian neoconservative with meaningless views on social issues that he’s desperately trying to abandon. David Greenberg in the Washington Post finally provides the context that voters need:

As any New Yorker can tell you, the last word anyone in the 1990s would have attached to the brash, furniture- breaking mayor was “liberal” — and the second-to-last was “moderate.” With his take-many-prisoners approach to crime and his unerring pro-police instincts, the prosecutor-turned-proconsul made his mark on the city not by embracing its social liberalism but by trying to crush it.

Most notable here of Greenberg’s copious examples - including his efforts to censor art exhibits at the Brooklym Museum and fund parochial schools with government money - are those which concern extreme executive power.

In 1999, for example, he directed (without the City Council’s permission) the police to permanently confiscate the cars of people charged with drunken driving — even if the suspects were later acquitted […]

The fanciful notion of Giuliani’s liberalism also omits the piece de resistance of his mayorship: his flagrantly undemocratic bid to stay in office for an extra three months after Sept. 11, 2001. During earlier crises, even World War II, U.S. elections had always managed to proceed normally. But Giuliani maneuvered for weeks to remain mayor after his term-limited exit date. Only as normalcy returned to New York did his power grab fail.

Try as he might, Josh Marshall could not come up with one other instance in American history where a politician sought to overstay his legally sanctioned term of office. This shows more than anything the willingness for Giuliani to take advantage of any opportunity to expand his power.

There’s also official secrecy, a hallmark of the Bush and Giuliani years, in the latter’s case including the laundering of his mayoralty documents.

Shortly before Rudy Giuliani left the New York mayor’s office in 2001, close associates worked out an unprecedented and controversial deal to transfer his mayoral papers from City Hall to a private, tax-exempt foundation, the Rudolph W. Giuliani Center for Urban Affairs.

Billed as a leadership think tank, the center served as a conduit for Giuliani to copy and archive 2,100 boxes of documents from his time as mayor before returning the originals to the city.

That record, which includes the months after the Sept. 11 attacks when he was anointed as “America’s mayor,” serves as the foundation of Giuliani’s presidential campaign today. Because he moved his papers through a private organization led by his political supporters, however, the integrity of that record has been called into question.

And if you look at the issues he’s foregrounding in the Presidential race, they all have to do with a megalomaniacal view of foreign policy fueled by his batshit insane B-Team advisers.

There can be no doubt that the pundit-based media is completely misreading the Republican field, touting it as a battle between social conservatives and the “liberal” Giuliani, when nothing can be further from the truth.

Rudy Giuliani | 4 Comments »

Because political reporters are no better than failed sportswriters:

This is a chart from the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. It follows the topics of Presidential campaign stories thus far in 2007. 63% of the stories were horse-race, or process, stories, and another 17% covered the candidates’ personal backgrounds. Just 15% covered policy proposals. And iIt’s actually worse than that:

The press’ focus on fundraising, tactics and polling is even more evident if one looks at how stories were framed rather than the topic of the story. Just 12% of stories examined were presented in a way that explained how citizens might be affected by the election, while nearly nine-out-of-ten stories (86%) focused on matters that largely impacted only the parties and the candidates. Those numbers, incidentally, match almost exactly the campaign-centric orientation of coverage found on the eve of the primaries eight years ago.

The common argument from the press is that they’re simply giving the people what they want. Actually, that’s completely untrue, too.

What Topics the Public Wants Covered

Candidates’ position on issues: 77% (want more), 17% (want less)
Candidate debates: 57% (more) 32% (less)
Candidates’ personal backgrounds and experiences: 55% (more), 36% (less)
The candidates who are not front runners: 55% (more), 37% (less)
Sources of candidates’ campaign money: 55% (more), 35% (less)
Which candidate in leading in the latest polls: 42% (more), 45% (less)

This is crystal clear. The press is completely failing at doing their jobs in helping the eletorate choose a candidate. Which is why the electorate is tuning them out in increasing numbers. I’m not someone who will ever call the media liberal or conservative. That’s fundamentally the wrong question. They’re LAZY. They have no interest in and little knowledge of public policy, and at the elite reporter level have no idea how those policies can affect or improve their lives. So they break it down to something they can easily understand, the meaningless “who’s up/who’s down” that you typically see in reports of box-office receipts.

There are dozens of examples of this, but the most recent one is the sudden decision to anoint Mike Huckabee as a “rock star,” mainly on the basis of one speech in Washington and some funny interviews, without examining his policy record. For example, his image in the media is of a “populist” despite favoring the Fair Tax policy, the most regressive tax imaginable. It’s completely at variance with actual events. And how the media frames Iowa after the Republican caucuses will have a significant impact on who wins the election. If they see Mitt Romney as the unchallenged winner in Iowa and Huckabee as a distant second, for example, Romney rolls into New Hampshire as a prohibitive favorite. If Huckabee is seen as pulling off a miracle in Iowa, EVEN IF THE NUMBERS BETWEEN HIM AND ROMNEY ARE EXACTLY THE SAME, then Romney is wounded, Huckabee is ascendant, and probably Giuliani benefits. And those are the range of stories that we’ll see, and you’ll notice that none of them have anything to do with policy in any way.

The result of this study does not bode well for democracy. The Internet and alternative media simply aren’t big enough yet for the entire country. Large sections will still get their news on the Presidential race from a process-obsessed media. They’ll have a shallow understanding of civic engagement because the media demands nothing more from them than charting names on a list. It’s not enough to rely on more people flocking elsewhere and leaving the press behind; that’s not realistic. Traditional media itself must change.

Mike Huckabee | 3 Comments »

Everybody’s trying to read tea leaves, wondering if there would be an evangelical third-party run if the nominally pro-choice Rudy Giuliani were to take the Republican nomination. The latest signals are conflicting. Sam Brownback, whose support is so wide and deep that he just dropped out of the race in the middle of October, proclaimed himself much more confortable with Giuliani’s views on abortion and particularly the appointing of “strict constructionist judges,” which is code. The backlash from various sources suggests that Brownback’s view is kind of unpopular, which is obvious, considering he’s no longer in the race.

“There’s obviously something more going on here than fidelity to the pro-life cause,” said (Jim) Bopp, a legendary pro-life activist and lawyer who is an important voice for Romney because he vouches for his conservatism. “Brownback is angling for some personal political benefit by cozying up to Giuliani.”

[…]

“I’ll believe he supports Giuliani when I see it,” FRC veep (Charmaine) Yoest says. “For the pro-life movement as a whole, life is a deal-breaker. There would be no better way to demoralize the GOP base than to nominate Giuliani. It would be a disaster for the Republicans party.”

Whether this is all talk, or presumptive of action, is the $64,000 question. I think at this point, it’s clear that there would be a third-party effort against Giuliani. The real question is whether or not it will be sanctioned by the larger groups of social conservatives, or whether it will be just from the fringe. The latter is manageable; the Constitution Party runs a wacko candidate every year who gets a handful of meaningless votes. The former would really close Republican hopes in 2008. I don’t think anyone can be confident about which way things will go.

Rudy Giuliani, Sam Brownback | 3 Comments »

Fred Thompson has almost sane views on executive power:

Thompson agreed that he didn’t share the views of Vice President Cheney when it comes to the supremacy of the executive branch.

“No, I think the constitution in times of war, especially, is very definitive about that,” he said. “The president is the commander in chief, but the Congress has the power of the budget. The power of the purse. So everything has to go through that prism. So it’s divided power in the constitution. Our founding fathers divided that up. Divided it up at the federal level, the idea being that things like Watergate should be made very difficult to happen. So no one branch of the government can misuse power.”

Thompson described checks and balances as “a constant tug and pull. Controversy and differences of opinion over legitimate national security concerns is not a bad thing. Every branch needs to stand up for itself. And I saw that as, in effect, an attorney for the executive branch, and then as a legislator.”

Now, there’s less than meets the eye here. Later in the interview, he says he agrees with the Bush Administration on “issues of surveillance,” which after all was what Watergate was about. Plus, he tries hard to frame Congress’ power as solely through the funding mechanism, while saying vaguely that “All the executive authority rests in the president.” In Thompson’s view, if the Congress disagrees with something the executive does, they can refuse to fund it. Of course, this isn’t Congress’ only power, they write the laws and have the explicit power to declare war. But Thompson tries to elide that basic Constitutional reading.

What this does show is that, even in the case of a so-called “skeptic” of unitary executive theory, the next President is going to have a big toolbox of new powers and isn’t going to be too concerned about giving them away. That holds whether the President is a Republican or a Democrat. And so it’s up to the Congress to assert themselves - in ways other than just through funding - to ensure that the balance of power is tilted back toward equilibrium.

Fred Thompson | 1 Comment »