Posted 5:15 PM by Scoobie Davis

My Dinner With Bill Clinton--Well, Not Exactly

I was excited when I received an e-mail with the subject heading, "President Clinton Dinner - May 1st." When I opened the e-mail, I discovered it was the real deal; I invited to have dinner, cocktails, and discussion with Bill Clinton to benefit The Clinton Foundation at the home of Rica and Jon Orszag, an LA couple who had worked with Bill Clinton in the White House.

The e-mail and the invitation attachment didn't specify a minimum amount that an attendee so I thought that I might be able to slide in with a nominal contribution (before you accuse me of being a giant sponge, think about it: a guy who has gotten over $40 million in speaking fees since leaving the White House is asking me for money). It was only a few days later that I found out that it was a big fake-out--I read the other attachment that came the e-mail that informed me that dinner attendees had to contribute $5000 just to get in the door. Fuck that noise. The Clinton Foundation is a good cause and I was willing to contribute four figure amount to a good cause. The only problem was that two of the figures are behind the decimal point.

It's just as well. An event like that would totally not be my scene. In fact, last Monday night, I attended a Hollywood event to benefit the World Food Programme (see addendum) and met Rica Orszag; I asked her why a guy like me would be invited to have dinner with Clinton.

I don't want to give Bill Clinton any money, but I did prepare some good advice for the discussion portion of the evening. Since I can't get through the door, I am writing an open letter for President Clinton's benefit:

An Open Letter to Bill Clinton

Dear President Clinton,

I am honored to have been invited to have dinner with you on May 1 in Los Angeles. I am unable to attend dinner with you because I don't have the bread; perhaps in the future, you can have some kind of sliding scale.

I thought in lieu of a contribution, I could give you some advice. My main piece of advice is this: learn from your past. During your presidency, there were people who lied in order to discredit you. These people included Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes (now the CEO of Fox News), Richard Mellon Scaife, and Sun Myung Moon's media empire. These people exploited the tragic death of Vince Foster to score political points; unfortunately, none of these entities have paid a price for their actions. On my blog, I have discussed why the people in your administration did a horrendous job of addressing these attacks here.

It's one thing to have failed to mount an effective counter-attack. It's quite another to not learn from these costly mistakes. It certainly didn't benefit you when you reached out to Josette Sheeran, one of Sun Myung Moon's operatives; in fact, it was an unmitigated disaster: not only did it not stem the attacks from the cult leader's media apparatus but it gave the cult's media apparatus legitimacy that money couldn't buy. It certainly didn't help when you appeared on Rush Limbaugh's radio program last year. It didn't help when Hillary sat down with Scaife and the editorial staff of his vanity newspaper. It didn't help when prominent members of Hillary's 2008 campaign legitimized Ailes' Fox News. It doesn't help when Hillary recently endorsed Sun Myung Moon's Universal Peace Federation. I recently wrote a far-from-exhaustive post, "Notes of a Former Clinton Defender," on how you and your people have befriended the very people who have smeared you and Vince Foster's memory and who continue with the politics of personal destruction. It is folly to befriend them; they need to be discredited and defeated.

I hope my comments are of value to you.

Sincerely,

S

Addendum: On April 27th, I attended a Hollywood event co-hosted by MPAA CEO Dan Glickman and the Creative Artists Agency that benefited the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP). There was a reception followed by a discussion with Drew Barrymore, Arianna Huffington, and WFP director Josette Sheeran. For those of you familiar with my Sun Myung Moon blog know that I have written extensively about Sheeran, who was a longtime member of the Unification movement and editor of Moon's Washington Times (here and here are two informative posts on Sheerhan). My guest, a fellow indie filmmaker, didn't want to go and rub elbows with Glickman because the MPAA shills for Hollywood and sticks it to the indies--especially with movie ratings. My guest and I had a blast. We ate, drank, and met people at the reception; the discussion was thought-provoking.

Posted 10:37 AM by Scoobie Davis

Camp and The Wingnut Right
(Updated below)

People wonder how I can listen to Limbaugh, Hannity, and the other wing-nuts. Quick answer: I don't much anymore since sites like Media Matters for America started taking up the slack.

I'm a bit ambivalent about wingnut ranting. When the right was in power in the White House and in Congress, it was really scary that these fringe types were taken seriously by those in power. Now they're entertaining. I have a camp appreciation of the Thomas Paine/Bob Basso YouTube videos. In case you're not familiar with them, somebody put a washed-up ham actor (Bob Basso) in colonial garb and has him do stilted rabble-rousing rants as if he were Thomas Paine (great way to appeal to the Generation Y). Today, I was flipping through the stations and heard this rant, "The Second American Revolution" (funny how the right starts using revolutionary rhetoric when the voters kick them out of power).

It's boilerplate right-wing rhetoric (e.g., Basso/Paine equates diversity with disunity and says "They call themselves progressive, global thinkers. We had another word for them in 1776; we called them 'traitors'"). I found this part near the end of the rant a bit scary:

Perhaps you allow all this destructive uncommon sense out of a distorted notion of tolerance. Remember what Aristotle said, "Tolerance is the last virtue of a dying society." You are tolerating the behavior that is destroying you. No presidential candidate, no political party can save you now. Only an aroused citizenry will turn this uncommon sense around. And he or she who does nothing now is helping them to destroy America.

Lighten up, Bob/Thomas. You lost a couple elections. Do some yoga or toke up; you'll feel better.

UPDATE: I just watched this Paine/Basso video, "On to Washington," for the first time. Paine is exhorting the teabaggers to march on Washington.
I can't do a full review but I have one piece of advice for people who watch it and take it seriously: if you value your job, don't "tell the boss you're taking a day off to fight for America."

Posted 10:39 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Robert Parry on the Democrats' 'Battered Wife Syndrome'

Posted 3:21 PM by Scoobie Davis

The Theocratic Chain of Misery
Read it. It is cross-posted on the Moon and Amway blogs.

Posted 2:45 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Joan Walsh on wingnut welfare.

Posted 1:55 AM by Scoobie Davis

Michael Savage's Other Frivolous Lawsuit
(Updated below because of another potential frivolous lawsuit)
Radio talk show host Michael Savage (née Wiener), along with the sectarian right group The Thomas More Law Center, filed a lawsuit against Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Eric Holder over the report put out by the DHS regarding tight-wing extremism. The lawsuit is clearly frivolous (here's a short blog post on why it has no merit).

This isn't' Savage's first frivolous lawsuit. Years ago, Savage and David Horowitz filed a frivolous lawsuit against the University of California Board of Regents because they didn't hire Savage for an academic position he was clearly unqualified to fill. I wrote about the frivolous suit in 2003 for the blog HorowitzWatch. Unfortunately, the blog is defunct but below is the post (I made a few changes for clarity and dead links):

The David Horowitz/Michael Savage Connection
The more I read about Michael Savage and the way his demented ideas are being applauded by people ostensibly in the mainstream, the more I feel like the teacher in the film Fast Times At Ridgemont High (portrayed by the late Ray Walston) who by the end of the film was convinced that everyone is on drugs. When Savage appeared on Hannity & Colmes on Monday [January 6, 2003], Hannity endorsed Savage’s best-selling book Savage Nation and called it a good read. I have been critiquing Savage Nation and I found out the Savage and David Horowitz were involved in one of the most frivolous lawsuits in California history—which is odd because trial lawyers are one of Savage’s biggest scapegoats.

Here’s what happened. In 1996, Savage applied for the position of dean at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. I’m sure that the hiring committee had a good horselaugh reading Savage’s vita. True, Savage has a Ph.D. but it is in epidemiology and nutrition science. Horowitz pointed out how Savage had written 17 books, but they are mostly books on herbs and questionable healing methods such as homeopathy. His job at the time—his current job—was incoherent radio talk show (click here for a recent example). Had Savage been chosen to head the journalism school, it would have been the laughing stock of academia.

Instead, the person chosen for the job was Orville Schell, a distinguished scholar and journalist. Schell has been honored with writing fellowships from the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Additionally, he has received awards from the Overseas Press Club of America for best article on a foreign subject and the Page One Award for the best investigative story. In addition, Schell has contributed to magazines such as The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Tricycle, The Atlantic, The Nation, Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, Granta, and The China Quarterly.

On his radio show, Savage claimed that he was snubbed because he was white (Schell is also white) and proceeded to sue the UC at Berkeley regents and the head of the search committee, Troy Duster (Savage sued through one of Horowitz’s Scaife-funded front groups). Horowitz called the lawsuit “a small but meaningful step toward the restoration of democracy and institutional integrity to the nation's university culture.” The lawsuit was quickly dropped. I couldn’t find out how much the University of California system spent defending itself against this frivolous suit.

Addendum: I recently wrote about how the more Americans learn about the whackos in right-wing talk radio, the more likely GOP to be a minority party for the foreseeable future. In the post, I wrote about how the 3:00 PM EST time slot has a ratings war between two completely unhinged right-wing competitors: Savage and Mark Levin. For those who are unfamiliar with Savage's looniness, that post, along with this post that I linked to in my critique of Savage's Berkeley lawsuit as well as my critique of Savage's book Savage Nation serve as a good introduction into the fringe nature of Savage's outlook. . . Frivolous lawsuits are nothing new to the Thomas More Law Center. Previously, the group was involved in a suit to put the teaching of intelligent design in the public schools as an alternative scientific theory.

5/7/09 UPDATE: Savage says that he is planning to sue British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith because Savage is on a list of people banned from Great Britian for allegedly fostering extremism or hatred.

Posted 1:04 AM by Scoobie Davis

Interesting
(via Mark Crispin Miller)

The Political Prosecutions of Karl Rove
A Documentary Record

Project Save Justice and world renowned film maker John McTiernan announce the release of The Political Prosecutions of Karl Rove, a video documentation of the systematic prosecution of Democrats by the Bush Justice Department. Drawing inspiration from the Shields Report, a 2007 and 2009 academic analysis showing that during the Bush years, the U.S. Department of Justice prosecuted seven times more Democrats than Republicans, the hour long film delves deeper than the few high profile cases that have caught the attention of the mainstream media, and instead sheds light on many of the 600 cases brought against Democrats across the country between 2002 and 2008.

In the hands of McTiernan, director of the Hollywood blockbusters, Predator, The Hunt for Red October, and the Die Hard trilogy, The Political Prosecutions of Karl Rove offers a documented record of the pervasive misuse of the Justice Department. Sadly, as the film documents, Democrats were targeted at all levels of the system and in many states across the country. The film reveals startling evidence supporting the use of the U.S. Department of Justice to create a permanent Republican majority. In fact, statistics show that in the 15 months leading up to the 2008 general election, indictments of elected Democrats increased by nearly 50%. The soul-stirring documentary offers convincing evidence to indicate that a vigorous and comprehensive strategy was pursued to attack lower levels of the Democratic Party designed to completely uproot and undermine any challenges to Republican political power.

Posted 1:34 AM by Scoobie Davis

The Latest Wingnut Meme
(Updated below)
Yesterday morning, I was flipping through the stations and heard a local Rush Clone bitching and moaning about how presidential advisor David Axelrod was trying to marginalize conservatives, particularly those who were involved in the teabagging events last week. The basis for this accusation was something that Axelrod allegedly said about the teabaggers: ". . . I think any time that you have severe economic conditions, there is always an element of disaffection that can mutate into something that's unhealthy."

The local Rush wannabe then used his radio time to go into a long harangue about how poor wingnuts were being targeted as mutations by Axelrod and as terrorists by the Department of Homeland Security. Like the wingnut spin on the DHS report on right-wing extremists, the claim about Axelrod was a right-wing talking point that was taken out of context and is being spread by the usual suspects such as Fox News and Sean Hannity on his radio program.

The truth about what Axelrod said is more complicated. Axelrod made these comments in an interview with Harry Smith on Face the Nation. What these right-wingers failed to mention was that Smith asked Axelrod about the teabaggers AND the genuinely nutty talk by Texas governor Rick Perry about the possible secession of Texas from the United States. Here are Axelrod's comments in their full context:

SMITH: What do you make of this spreading and very public disaffection with, not only the government, but especially the Obama administration -- the tea parties this week? You even have the governor of Texas even using the word "secession"? What -- should Texas be allowed to secede?

AXELROD: Well, I don't think that really warrants a serious response. I don't think most Texans were all that enthused by the governor's --

SMITH: But what about the first part of the question? This building disaffection --

AXELROD: -- by the governor's suggestion. Look, I think any time -- I think any time that you have severe economic conditions, there is always an element of disaffection that can mutate into something that's unhealthy.

SMITH: Is this unhealthy?

AXELROD: Well, we're in a -- this is a country where we value our liberties and our ability to express ourselves, and so far, these are expressions. Now, one thing I would say is, the thing that bewilders me is this president just cut taxes for 95 percent of the American people. So, I think the tea bags should be directed elsewhere, because he certainly understands the burden that people face.

UPDATE: Media Matters has a video and a response to the way that Axelrod's comments were distorted on Hannity's Fox News show.

Posted 9:21 AM by Scoobie Davis

I'll Second That
Nobel Prize Winner Paul Krugman: "[T]here is now no way to view the people who ruled us these past 8 years as anything but monsters. "

Posted 9:05 AM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
What 420 means. Also, have a happy 420 Day.

Posted 7:58 AM by Scoobie Davis

Fox Nation
I love those ads on Fox News promoting Fox Nation, claiming that Fox Nation is for those who don't like media bias. Media Matters reports that the Fox Nation website had the following headline, "Taliban Copies Democrat [sic] Playbook." The only flaw in the MMFA account is that it didn't mention the wingnut use of the word "Democrat" as an adjective.

Quick note: I went on the Fox Nation website and they had the following headline: "Why Does Obama Keep Blaming America?" that links to a Moonie Times article that simply reported on President Obama's trip to Mexico in which he noted that most of the guns used in the Mexican drug wars came from the United States.

Posted 7:14 AM by Scoobie Davis

Run Newt Run!
(Updated below)
There is talk that Newt Gingrich will run for president in 2012. I want him to run. The main reason: a polarizing figure like Gingrich is sure to lose.

There's also a bit of self-interest in my desire to see Gingrich in the race. Every time Gingrich appears on cable news program hinting that he will run, my post on this blog in which I have the transcript of the conversation with Sean Hannity in which I stop Slanthead dead in his tracks when I tell him that Bill Clinton is a lot better than Gingrich because at least Clinton didn't dump his wives and trade them in for a new model every few years. This slew of traffic to my site is due to the fact that on Google, the post is listed in the top ten for a Google search for "Marianne Ginther" (Wife Number Two for Gingrich) and the post is in the top 30 sites for a Google search of "Callista Bisek" (Wife Number Three for Gingrich).

So it's a win-win situation for all with a Gingrich run: a candidate who can't win will be in the race (but who could possibly get the nomination) and slew of hits to this site.

UPDATE: It didn't take long for me to find another instance of Gingrich being a total douche.

Posted 5:24 PM by Scoobie Davis

Top Party Schools according to Playboy
The latest issue of Playboy magazine (May 2009) has a list of America's top colleges and universities for partying:
1. The University of Miami (Florida). Quick note: a few years ago, my alma mater, Miami of Ohio, was listed in Playboy's honorable mention for party schools. Miami University is a party school for people who want it to be a party school (like me) but there were a lot of people who went there who didn't party (e.g., MU had a reputation for having a large number of students who are with Campus Crusade for Christ).
2. The University of Texas at Austin
3. San Diego State University
4. The University of Florida
5. The University of Arizona
6. The University of Wisconsin
7. The University of Georgia
8. Louisiana State U.
9. The University of Iowa
10. West Virginia University

Posted 2:38 PM by Scoobie Davis

Hollywood Film State of Play Has Blogger Character
Hollywood hottie Rachel McAdams plays a newspaper's blogger in the just-releaseed political thriller State of Play. It's not my kind of film. The trailer is here.

Posted 7:48 PM by Scoobie Davis

New Post on the Moon Blog
Click here.

Posted 9:42 PM by Scoobie Davis

Exclusive: Incendiary Rhetoric by Washington Times Commentator
On the Moon blog.

Posted 2:51 PM by Scoobie Davis

The Color Beige: The Tea Party Protests
Several commentators who either attended the tea party protests have noticed the dearth of non-white people in attendance. Kind of reminds me of when I went to see Bill O'Reilly speak in Westwood a few years ago.

Posted 1:11 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Robert Parry "US News Media Fails America, Again." One nugget of wisdom:

the American Left never took media seriously, putting what money it had mostly into “organizing” or into direct humanitarian giving. Underscoring the Left’s fecklessness about media, progressives have concentrated their relatively few media outlets in San Francisco, 3,000 miles away – and three hours behind – the news centers of Washington and New York.

By contrast, the Right grasped the importance of “information warfare” in a modern media age and targeted its heaviest firepower on the frontlines of that war – mostly the political battlefields of Washington – thus magnifying the influence of right-wing ideas on policymakers.

One consequence of this media imbalance is that Republicans feel they can pretty much say whatever they want – no matter how provocative or even crazy – while Democrats must be far more circumspect, knowing that any comment might be twisted into an effective attack point against them.

Posted 9:39 PM by Scoobie Davis

Teabagging America
Paul Krugman's column on the tea parties.

Daily Kos takes on that annoying actor portraying Thomas Paine.

Also, in case you missed it, here's the tea party video--I have more info on a previous update:

Posted 6:49 PM by Scoobie Davis

Right-wing Bush Defender Lets It Slip Out that Fox News is Controlled by GOP
Robert G. Kaufman, iscontributor to the Weekly Standard, the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review, and the Moonie Times makes the following observation while discussing his book In Defense of the Bush Doctrine:

The fifth thing that Republicans have to do is understand the problem of communicating in a world where much of the television media, particularly, is hostile...If I had to recommend one single thing that the Republicans should be doing to help articulate the message, it is to acquire another television network so that there is not just FOX, but multiple sources of alternative information that will do a much better job than we did in 2008 to keep things honest.

Posted 1:03 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must View
Media Matters for America's "From Conspiracy Theories to Cable News"
(Updated below)


Apr 12, 2009 UPDATE: "Burn all the books . . . The brainwashing books like the evolution crap!" Check out the train wreck of a meeting of Glenn Beck's teabagging party. The things one teabagger made about the Coupon-eligible converter box (CECB) reminded me of what the John Birch society used to say about fluoridation: "This thing they're putting on our TVs,[the coupon-eligible converter box] it's a brainwash unit, seventeen million people are going to be brainwashed with this thing when you hook it up to your TV in June. Why do you think Obama waited until June? He wanted to wait until June till he put this thing in here, it's a brainwash device. They were using it in the federal government for at least the sixties. Now they're using it against us. If we don't get serious about this, we're gonna perish."

Posted 2:28 PM by Scoobie Davis

The F Word (Fascism)
Media Matters has a comprehensive list of commentators who have compared the Obama administration to Nazis, Facists, Stalinist, etc.

UPDATE: (via First Door on the Left) Jon Stewart on "Baracknophobia." Potato Day indeed! Enjoy:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Baracknophobia - Obey
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

Posted 4:10 PM by Scoobie Davis

WorldNetDaily's Marginalization
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the fringe right was able to do damage to the Clinton administration with its paranoid conspiracy theories about Vince Foster's death but that recently things have been rough. WorldNetdaily, run by Scaife-paid operative Joseph Farah, was a major proponent of the Vince Foster conspiracy theories. Before Farah ran WorldNetDaily, he was the head of a Scaife front group, the Western Journalism Center, whose goals was to provide cedibility to another Scaife-subsidized operative Christopher Ruddy (now at NewsMax), who had concocted theories (all of them discredited) about Foster's death.

The current conspiracy theory put forth by WorldNetDaily and the Western Journalism Center (currently run by veteran dirty tricks operative Floyd Brown) is that President Obama was not born in the United States. This time around, right-wing conspiracy theories are paying a price for their loony theories. This is largely due to forces such as the Daily Show, MSNBC, and media watchdogs like Media Matters for America.

Addendum: Terry Krepel of ConWebWatch has a comprehensive article about Brown's ascension to the helm of the Western Journalism Center . . . I noticed in today's WorldNetDaily that columnist Peter W. Heck cited a discredited study by fringe researcher Paul Cameron. Years ago, the Bookie of Virtue William Bennett cited the same methodologically flawed study.

Posted 4:47 PM by Scoobie Davis

Laugh Alert
This just in from the Politico (not The Onion): "Palin calls for Begich's resignation"

Shannyn Moore has the full story on Ted Stevens' botched prosecution.

Posted 3:56 PM by Scoobie Davis

New Jack T. Chick Tract: "It's All About You!"
Check it out here. Nothing particularly interesting about this tract--it's has the standard fundamentalist message of the need for a sinner to accept Jesus or roast in Hell. It's slams Catholicism (though it's nowhere near as inflammatory as Chick's second-most-recent tract "Papa?").

Posted 5:41 PM by Scoobie Davis

Ed Schultz to Have MSNBC Show
The Huffington Post has the details. You have to hand it to Schultz, he knows the score. Blast from the past: I confronted Hannity about chickening out on a debate with Schultz.

Posted 1:04 PM by Scoobie Davis

Texas-Style Justice and The War on Some Drugs
(Updated below)
I just received an e-mail informing me about American Violet, a film that is a dramatization of events that occurred in Hearne, Texas. In 1999, 28 people, mostly African-Americans, were arrested in Hearne for allegedly distributing drugs. There was a similar situation in Tulia, Texas the next year. In both cases, the raids were motivated by corrupt local officials who were interested in obtaining federal fund; hey, if a few black people are wrongly convicted--hey, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. Along with American Violent, there is a feature film by John Singleton on the Tulia case, Tulia, that will released later this year (it stars Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry).

The War on Some Drugs in Texas is a national disgrace. More recently, there is the case of blacks being singled out and having their money and property seized in Tenaha, Texas. It sure as fuck didn't help having George Chucklehead Bush as governor for eight years. I wrote the following when Bush called Rush Limbaugh "a great American" after it was disclosed that El Rushbo used enough hillbilly heroin to get all of Appalachia high: "[W]hen Bush ran for governor, he shamelessly demagogued against Governor Richard’s programs to help nonviolent drug offenders with treatment instead of harsh sentences. Bush called it 'Penal Code Lite.' For drug offenders who don’t do Bush’s political dirty work like Limbaugh, Bush has one terse thought: 'Incarceration is rehabilitation.'"

UPDATE: Here's a scene from American Violet: