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From State of the Union, National Security Advisor Ret. Gen. James Jones responds to McCain's criticism that he is playing politics with the decisions being made on troop levels in Afghanistan.

KING: But you know you have some critics. Having seen general McChrystal made his case publicly, having spoken to General Petraeus, having been to the region, some Republicans including Senator John McCain say that you, sir, and others in the White House are playing politics with this decision. I want you to listen to Senator McCain.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MCCAIN: It's well known, it's broadcast all over television, that there are individuals, including the vice president of the United States, now, unfortunately, the national security adviser, the chief political adviser to the president, Mr. Rahm Emanuel, who don't want to alienate the left base of the Democrat Party.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Is that a factor in the White House, rising Democratic opposition to sending more troops to Afghanistan? Do you, sir, say, "Mr. President, no more troops because of politics," as Senator McCain says?

JONES: Senator McCain knows me very well. I worked for Senator McCain when he was a captain. I've known him for many, many years, and he knows that I don't play politics with national -- I don't play politics, and I certainly don't play it with national security, and neither does anyone else I know. The lives of our young men and women are on the line.

This is -- the strategy does not belong to any political party, and I can assure you that the president of the United States is not playing to any political base. And I take exception to that remark.

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Rick Sanchez who's show is generally a mixed bag between trying to act like an actual journalist and just the usual CNN hackery, did something I don't see enough of on CNN, or any of the cable "news" networks for that matter, when interviewing Rep. Anthony Weiner. He asked him about the money flowing from the health care industry into the campaign coffers of politicians.

I'm sorry the conversation didn't lead to a discussion about public financing of political campaigns, which would put a stop to politicians feeling the need to chase after money from wherever they can get it to continue being re-elected. If our system of legalized bribery doesn’t change, I don’t see things getting any better for the average citizen out there any time soon.

SANCHEZ: I don't know what to say.

It appears that you, as a Democrat, as a guy who likes this public option, who likes getting the government involved in this thing, you're losing. And it may be because you began five yards behind the finish line. I mean, didn't you give the health insurance companies a huge big start by beginning the debate with universal health care off the table and the public as something we might do, but we really don't want to do it?

WEINER: Well, one thing for sure is, everything the health insurance industry has asked for in the Finance Committee up to now, they have gotten. It's a good playing field for them. We in the House are going to keep pushing for a public option. And frankly the president, who's our cleanup hitter, ultimately I believe is going to wind up mediating this dispute, and he says he wants a public option.

But you're exactly right. The real easy answer here is Medicare for all Americans. We give it to people who are 65. Why not 55? Why not 45? Why not do it? It's a low-overhead program. Sure, it has a financing problem, but so does all insurance at this point.

But at least we know it has very low overhead. We're not putting any into profits or advertising. So, that really was the smart place to start. We didn't. But we are going to try to get closer to that in the final product.

SANCHEZ: Let me just be real blunt with you real quick.

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It looks like Tom Ridge's lastest revelations in his book have given Keith a chance to say he was correct when he did his series on the Nexus of Politics and Terror. John Dean weighs in on the criminality of what Ridge has admitted to in his book. He thinks Ridge gave himself some wiggle room since he said he only believed the terrorist threat level was being manipulated for political reasons, and did not say he knew it to be a fact.

It's so nice to see all the dirty f@%#king hippies were right about this, huh? It will be interesting to watch the Villagers try to explain why they didn't report on something as plain as the noses on their faces back when this was going on. Other than Keith, I don't recall any of them speaking out about it other than to repeat the government propaganda. I'd also like someone to ask Tom Ridge why he didn't resign when he first knew this was happening.

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(1971 - the brief respite between the World's Longest Party and Our Great National Nervous Breakdown)

Hard to imagine that 1971 was a sort of resting point in our rather skewed history. At the time of course, it didn't seem that way - in 1971 Campuses were still hotbeds of disturbance, Vietnam was still grinding on, cities were falling apart. But we were optimistic all was going to be okay with the world and prosperity was just around the corner.

Sadly, no.

This documentary, part of the NBC Radio series "Second Sunday", aired in April 1971 was concerned about our place in the world. A reassessment of who we were as a society - the old "who am I, what am I doing and where am I going" mantra that was so popular during those years.

And questions are posed to a number of people - Ralph Nader, newly elected Governor Jimmy Carter, Senator Howard Baker, Gunnar Myrdal, Jean-Francois Revel, John Gardner (founder of Common Cause) and Dr. Milton Eisenhower who offers this interesting observation:

Dr. Milton Eisenhower: “We do seem to have a new kind of violence in this country, we have some people who are actively advocating revolution, which I think is relatively new in America.”

Question: Where do think this will lead? Do you think this is a self-defeating thing?

Eisenhower: “ First let me say that there are nihilists, there are revolutionaries; most of them young. Many of them, in our colleges and universities. But it’s terribly important that the American people understand that they constitute a very small minority. They make a lot of noise and I may say the mass media give them a great exposure to the American people, but they can’t be more than one, two or three percent of the total. Yes, this is something new.”

Question: “How do you answer the argument that we engage in violence in Vietnam, so violence is warranted here in America. And those who argue that the system is so rotten and has such basic defects that the system itself is not worth preserving and hence you need revolution in this country to purify the government.”

Eisenhower: “Well I think that’s a terribly specious argument. If we lived in a dictatorship, and the dictatorship had proclaimed and carried on the war, and therefore citizens could do little if anything about it, one could well argue that in these circumstances revolution, internal revolution would be the corrective measure to take. But once the people themselves have taken possession of the basic social power, which is the situation in our free democratic society, and we exercise this power through a representative form of government, then the only way, the only reasonable way to get action is to work through these political procedures. All other methods are illegitimate and are self-defeating. Margaret Chase-Smith made a speech in the Senate that was worth the attention of the American people, in which she said that, if the left-wing extremists, who are causing a good share of the trouble don’t look out, they are going to drive America to the right. The danger in America is not going too far to the left – the danger in America is going too far to the right.”

That last quote is particularly telling considering where the country would wind up in the next decade.

Of course, at the time no one suspected a thing . . . .

From The Onion:

In The Know's new live internet poll feature revolutionizes how pundits shamelessly cater to what viewers want to hear.

I'm reading Will "Attytood" Bunch's new book, "Tear Down This Myth: How The Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future" about how deeply ingrained the Reagan mythology is in our country's political culture (with the help, of course, of a complicit media).

Fascinating book, really thorough. (There are things in here I didn't even know, and I'm more informed about Reagan than the average bear.) The Reagan myth is so large, so unquestioned that he even gets credit for the things he didn't do: Star Wars! Stopped the Cold War! Made the economy hum like a top! (If you have a Reagan-loving in-law, this is the book you want to read before your next family get-together.)

From the first chapter:

[...] The Reagan myth isn’t just a political problem for the GOP. Increasingly, as the idealized Reagan took hold in the American imagination, Democrats seemed to struggle even harder with the question of just who was Ronald Reagan – and whether political success going forward depended upon undercutting Reagan’s legend, simply ignoring it, or embracing all or part of it. That’s why it was a political bombshell when Sen. Barack Obama made it clear in early 2008 that Reaganism was playing some role in his thinking as he mapped out his own more progressive route to the White House – but the specifics of what Obama was getting at were open to debate.

"Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not, and a way that Bill Clinton did not," Obama told the editorial board of the Reno (Nev.) Gazette-Journal in January 2008. Seeking to elaborate, the Democratic senator said that "[w]e want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing." Obama’s comments caused a scramble among his Democrats: Was the presidential frontrunner simply praising the political style of the twice-elected Republican, or was his comment also intended to voice support for some of Reagan’s policy ideas? Obama advisors stressed the former – that he was merely seeking to remind voters of Reagan’s “hope and optimism.”

Obama’s statements seemed to flummox the Democrats in 2008 almost as much as Reagan himself did circa 1984. John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator who was appealing to the party’s more progressive wing in those early primaries, said Reagan “openly did extraordinary damage to the middle class and working people, created a tax structure that favored the very wealthiest Americans and caused the middle class and working people to struggle every single day…I can promise you this: this president will never use Ronald Reagan as an example for change."

And yet just a couple of weeks later, it was Edwards who was gone from the presidential race, and Obama who was soldiering on – leaving the unanswered questions of whether even a progressive Democrat in the White House could tackle not just the immediate problems of Iraq, record-high gasoline prices, a skyrocketing federal debt but the more ominous issues of world energy supply and climate change without doing so under the deepening shadow of the legacy of Ronald Reagan.

How did we get to this point in American politics? It would be easy to give all the credit to the Ronald Reagan myth machine, to the neo-conservatives and tax-warriors-turned-lobbyists behind the move to seemingly pave over and rename one long Ronald Reagan Boulevard from sea to shining sea. But no myth would be possible without the man. And if there was ever a man who instinctively knew how to write that screenplay – who rode in from Hollywood to create a new kind of presidency that would focus on strong words and cinematic images that would last long after people forgot the policies sometimes loosely attached to them – it was Ronald Wilson Reagan.

As a rule I hate looking back. The trouble with looking back is you tend to stare at it a long time, and nothing really good ever comes of that.

I'm also not a big fan of "nostalgia". I think of nostalgia and think "fond remembrance of events that never occurred" - time tends to blow small events out of proportion and large events into heart stopping defining moments which, at the time didn't amount to much.

So why look back at all?

The idea of putting together a site like Newstalgia is to help put history and current events into perspective. Some things never change, some people never change - only the names and situations and outcomes. Sometimes history consists of the same set of events and circumstances over and over until the lesson is learned or the methods changed.

Much of history is a series of repeats: (India/Pakistan war over Kashmir - 1951)

Much of history includes investigations, exhaustive, scathing,combative:
(Senate Crime Committee Hearings headed by Estes Kefauver, 1951)

Some history involves people - in a certain place, in a certain time:
(first general election in Ghana after Independence 1957)

All of these are issues I plan to present, by way of audio, some video and what other documentation I can find from my lifelong collection of news and current events to convey the continuing nature of history - what it did to us then, and what it means to us now. Some things never change and some things are destined never to be the same again.

That's what I'm trying to do. I hope you enjoy the ride.

Gordon Skene - The Gordon Skene Sound Collection
(Algeria, 1957)

Newstalgia

This is a subject close to my heart, since I've spent at least half of the past decade as a member of the uninsured class. Right now, I'm unemployed again and paying COBRA out of reader donations - donations which run out next month, with no job in sight. Oh well!

When Obama announced Tom Daschle as his health czar, my heart sank. After all, Daschle worked for a law firm whose lobbying arm represented the insurance industry, and that didn't bode well for actual reform. Instead, it seems to point toward corporate-friendly incrementalism.

I hope I'm wrong. I hope the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress are focused enough to produce legislation which actually solves this massive problem. But voters will certainly have to stay vocal if they want to make their own interests the priority in this national healthcare debate:

Karen Goroncy, a home health aide in Washington, Pa., has taken care of people for 25 years but can't afford health insurance to take care of herself.

A reader has promised to buy Goroncy insurance after she was profiled this fall in The Inquirer, and she hopes to have hernia surgery in the New Year.

But short of the generosity of readers - not a good national solution - Goroncy and millions like her are awaiting the sweeping health reform now being considered by President-elect Barack Obama.

Obama's plan, which has not been formally announced, could mark the biggest change in health care in 40 years. A central goal will be to cover 50 million Americans who don't have insurance. It is conceivable that all Americans will be required by law to have health insurance.

A principal architect of Obama's reform - Tom Daschle, nominated to become secretary of the Health and Human Services Department - has written at length about creating a powerful new board that would control health-care spending much like the Federal Reserve Board influences the nation's monetary policy.

The Chesapeake Bay area is one of the most beautiful places in the country, and the inability of officials to control upstream pollution is a sad tale:

Government administrators in charge of an almost $6 billion cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay tried to conceal for years that their effort was failing -- even issuing reports overstating their progress -- to preserve the flow of federal and state money to the project, former officials say.

The cleanup, which had its 25th anniversary this month, seems doomed to miss its second official deadline for achieving major reductions in pollution by 2010.

The goal of rescuing North America's largest estuary was formally entrusted in 1983 to a group of federal, state and local authorities under the loose guidance of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The task: controlling runoff from 4.8 million acres of farmland, installing upgrades at more than 400 sewage plants and managing the catch of more than 11,000 licensed watermen.

But the agencies charged with the cleanup have never mustered enough legal muscle or political will to overcome opposition from the agricultural and fishing industries and other interests.

Instead of strengthening their tactics, though, they tried to make the cleanup effort look less hopeless than it was.

It's always hard to know where to begin with Tasers. I mean, they're a nightmare for the citizens against whom they're used, the lawsuits will end up costing millions of taxpayer dollars and they inevitably suppress freedom of speech and assembly. Why are they still in such widespread use?

I suppose it didn't hurt that right-wing heroes Rudy Guiliani and Bernie Kerik were so heavily involved in marketing them to police departments around the country. (Did you know the police officers recruited to demonstrate them to their departments receive stock options and/or payments? That explains a lot.)

On Sept. 24, in Brooklyn, N.Y., a 35-year-old man named Iman Morales fell to his death after a 22-minute standoff with New York Police. Morales, who was described as "emotionally disturbed," had climbed onto the fire escape of a building in Bedford-Stuyvesant, naked and waving a metal pole. Unable to talk him down, one officer, under order from his lieutenant, shot Morales with a Taser gun, at which point he fell to the sidewalk, head-first.

He was taken to the hospital, where he was declared dead.

One week later, the officer who gave the order, Lt. Michael W. Pigott, drove to Brooklyn's Floyd Bennett Field, a former air base used by the NYPD, took a 9mm Glock from a locker room, and shot himself in the head.

It's hard to know which are more ubiquitous at this point: stories of accidental death by Tasers, or stories of police brutality involving bullets. Just this week, in New York, a Bronx man was shot and killed after he allegedly waved a baseball bat at police officers who entered his home. In theory, these sorts of confrontations are the reason such "non-lethal" weapons as Tasers exist. But news reports tell a different tale. In the United States and Canada, more than 400 people have died after being Tasered since 2001.

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Dutch journalist Thomas Erdbrink, who is based in Tehran, has a must-read piece today in the Washington Post which details how, now that Obama is the President-Elect and offering no-precondition talks, non-trivial but junior members of the Iranian government are making noises about walking back their own offers to hold unconditional talks.

“People who put on a mask of friendship, but with the objective of betrayal, and who enter from the angle of negotiations without preconditions, are more dangerous,” Hossein Taeb, deputy commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, said Wednesday, according to the semiofficial Mehr News Agency.

... In recent interviews, advisers to Ahmadinejad said the new U.S. administration would have to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq, show respect for Iran's system of rule by a supreme religious leader, and withdraw its objections to Iran's nuclear program before it can enter into negotiations with the Iranian government.

"The U.S. must prove that their policies have changed and are now based upon respecting the rights of the Iranian nation and mutual respect," said Mojtaba Samareh Hashemi, the president's closest adviser.

Ahmadinejad's media adviser, Mehdi Kalhor, said that "in fair circumstances" Iran would be open to talks. "But that is not when you have a bayonet pressed at your artery," he added, referring to the U.S. forces deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf.

All this provides neocon hawks with the perfect opportunity to bang the "prefidious Iranians" drum, and Ed Morrissey doesn't miss that chance:

This is the point that Obama and his allies never seem to understand.  Some people just hate us, and not because of our policies on trade and security.  Iran is a nation run by radical Islamist mullahs who see secular democracy as the enemy of their religion, and Western values as a temporary heresy which they plan to correct with a global caliphate under Iranian control.

Irans’ mullahs see America as the bastion of these values, and Israel as our outpost for them in the region.  Europe is mostly irrelevant to them; they can deal with Europe after eliminating the arsenal of democracy, or hobbling it so badly that we no longer make a difference.

But it's Ed who is missing the point. As Spencer Ackerman points out, Obama is more of a threat to those mullahs than Bush ever was. If you're an intransigent theocon Iranian leader:

All of a sudden, you’re deprived of a method of demagoguery that’s aided your regime for a generation. And if you refuse to negotiate, you’ve just undermined everything you told the international community you wanted, and now appear unreasonable, erratic, and unattractive to foreign capitols. Amazing how the prospects for peace are more destabilizing to the Iranian establishment than any inevitably-counterproductive-and-destructive bombing campaign or war of internal subterfuge.

That's an analysis born out by Erdbrink's past work too. Back in 2004, he co-wrote a Time piece which pointed out that "dominant hard-line clerics are worried that friendly American behavior might aid reformers, who are less anti-Western than the conservatives."

There's a presidential election in Iran next year and a moderate now heads the committee which would choose the replacement for the ailing Ayatollah. In other words, it's not about nukes or about international opinion - its about the shakier thrones Irans hardline government now find themselves sitting upon; with the best weapon in their arsenal, Bush's neocon ways, consigned to history.

On the streets of Tehran, Reuters recorded some video "postcards to Obama" from ordinary Iranians back on Nov. 5th. The message - carry through on negotiations, forget the hawks.

Crossposted from Newshoggers, video added.

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From The Situation Room Oct. 30, 2008. While discussing the response of Kay Hagan to the Elizabeth Dole ad calling her Godless, Wolf Blitzer actually asks Donna Brazile and Bill Bennett if it's okay for candidates to be associating with atheists. I'm not sure what's more disturbing, his question, or their answers.

Blitzer: But did she make a mistake Donna by going to that fundraiser at the home of the woman who professes that there is no god?

Brazile: You know Wolf there are a lot of believers. I'm one of them. And there are people who just don't believe in an existence of a god. I don't know why because clearly there's strong evidence that there's a god but I believe that you serve all the people. Not just those that profess to have faith but those with little or no faith. That's how you convert them.

Blitzer: Is it a problem Bill to associate with atheists?

Bennett: Well this is an active atheist. This is a woman, ah, people who are campaigning to get "In God We Trust" off the currency. You know it would have been sensible for Kay Hagan or Kay Hagan's advisers to say let's just pass on this one. That's just going to get you into the association game. You know the "house of" like Barack Obama's been tagged with for the last six months or six years.

This is just so wrong on so many levels it's hard to know where to begin. First of all Donna Brazile, yes if you hold a public office you should serve all and not just those who profess to have faith, but that's not how you convert them!! Are you kidding me??!! There are plenty of people out there who don't care to be converted thank you. I know George Bush and the GOP have blown a hole right through this but we are supposed to have separation of church and state in this country, and we don't need to have two theocratic parties. One is one too many already. And Wolf, there is nothing wrong with being an atheist or heaven forbid associating with them. There's nothing wrong with atheists that might want to..gasp.. run for office. Just like there's nothing wrong with Muslims who want to run for office, or agnostics, or Jews, or Catholics. And Bill Bennett, we do still have a thing called free speech in this country and if someone doesn't like the words "In God We Trust" on the currency, they have every right to express that view without being treated like commie pinkos. Shame on all of you for this interview.

Rightwingers scare more easily than liberals, according to a new study.

... participants were then given two laboratory tests, to establish their physiological responses to frightening or unexpected stimuli. In the first test, they viewed 33 images, three of which were distressing or threatening: a large spider on the face of a frightened person; a dazed person with a bloody face; and maggots in an open wound. The scientists measured the electrical conductance of the skin, a standard measure of distress and arousal.

In the second test, the volunteers were subjected to a loud, unexpected noise, with scientists measuring the involuntary blinking that followed. A strong startle response is indicative of heightened fear and arousal. The results, which are published in the journal Science, revealed significant differences in both responses, which corresponded with people’s political views. Those with “markedly lower physical sensitivity to sudden noises and threatening visual images” tended to support liberal positions, while those with strong responses tended to be more conservative.

This would fit with the hypothesis that people who have more fearful responses to perceived threats are more likely to be conservative, while those who have weaker responses develop more liberal views.

Jeebus, they went to all that trouble when they just could have asked Karl Rove? The GOP has been using fearmongering - on terrorism, evil axises, taxes, guns, God, gays etc etc - as a vote-getting tactic for how long now?

Remember this?

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Crossposted from Newshoggers

  The UK's conservative Daily Telegraph reports that Buffy The Vampire Slayer presents a clear and present danger to the Church of England (h/t Kat).

[A] report claims more than 50,000 women a year have deserted their congregations over the past two decades because they feel the church is not relevant to their lives.

It says that instead young women are becoming attracted to the pagan religion Wicca, where females play a central role, which has grown in popularity after being featured positively in films, TV shows and books.

... The report's author, Dr Kristin Aune, a sociologist at the University of Derby, said: "In short, women are abandoning the church.

"Because of its focus on female empowerment, young women are attracted by Wicca, popularised by the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

"Young women tend to express egalitarian values and dislike the traditionalism and hierarchies they imagine are integral to the church."

Hmmm. Opposition to single mothers, to woman clergy, to sex outside marraige, to abortion, to equal rights for women in so many ways. What could possibly make young women "imagine" traditionalsim and hierachies in church? 

But I'm actually quite surprised that the McCain campaign hasn't had a go at Wiccans yet, maybe by suggesting that "Muslim" Obama's wife Michelle is a secret coven-goer. After all, McCain campaign spokesman Michael Goldfarb recently tried to tie Obama to Dungeons and Dragons players, hitting the twin themes of geeky basement-dwellers (i.e your average Fighting Keyboarder) and Christian evangelical horror fables about rpgs being closely tied to Satanism. And we're told that while no-one in America will vote for an atheist, they're more likely to vote for an atheist than a pagan. Give it time, I suppose. Goldfarb can only manage so much hackery at once.

Poll: Most Americans Think Church Should Steer Clear of Politics....Analysis by Dalia Sussman