First Digby Post Ever !

A link to the Vonnegut interview mentioned in Digby's first post:
http://inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=38_0_4_0_C

Firedoglake:
pseudonymous in nc says:
June 19th, 2007 at 9:04 pm

Digby was a prolific and fantastic commentator at Eschaton, Hesiod’s site, and elsewhere, and was arm-twisted into getting her own blog. Haloscan has robbed us of many of those early comments, alas. But the Koufaxes for 2002 say it all (apart from getting the gender correct in the lede): “It is a pleasure to know that on any given day, I may get to read Digby.”

I thought I could survive quite well without knowing her (eir?) identity or hearing her voice. Well, she’s a good enough speaker to put that to rest, and a better political climate would funnel financial rewards into her lap.
As I said soon after Steve Gilliard’s death, his one long-standing gripe was with a lack of progressive political structures to sustain loud, clear, intelligent voices. Wingnut welfare allows the proliferation of bullshitters with bullshit titles at bullshit foundations, with money that slushes round — tax-deductible, natch.
Having Digby on stage, even before her closing words, reminded me of Steve’s voice and his presence and his force of personality. It’s still a painful gap: I read about Bloomberg and want his take. I read about Petraeus and want his take. I watch the CONCACAF matches and want his take. But on his issue of keeping the words flowing: if the big wallets won’t open, then the progressive blogosphere has the heft now, I hope, to support writers who either work in environments where a byline causes problems, or who labour without just reward.
(FWIW, I guessed Digby was female before the bigger hints dropped. I also wouldn’t have been surprised if she were African-American, though in hindsight, her posts on race reflected a different experience: one who lived through the Civil Rights era and was on the right side.
Link
Cool Link

Thanks Anon! :)

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There's one blogger I read religiously and check multiple times daily--Digby. And though I'm a day late and too many dollars short to the party, you should know that he's having a needed fundraiser. If there is one joint in the blogosphere that deserves your support, it's Digby's Hullabaloo.
Digby combines political shrewdness and insight with a fighting, can-do spirit. Then he delivers it in some of the finest and funniest prose around. Always lucid, always slicing right to the core of Republican rottenness, he is the sane Howard Beale. Digby is, to my mind, one of the most important voices in the left blogosphere and he could use some turkee.
I donated what I could (and wish it could be much, much more) and hope everybody reading this does.

Posted by Chiaroscuro _ on December 21, 2005 at 10:25 PM in Asides, Blog
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Blog for Take Back America 2007
Jun 19, 2007 at 07:45 PM by Isaiah Poole
A short, unassuming woman blended into the large audience that sat through a panel discussion I moderated on Tuesday, “The Blogosphere: From Ideas to Action.” It was not until the panel ended and I was rushing out of the room that I happened to notice the name on her tag: “Digby.”

Digby had amassed a large following and deep respect in the progressive blogosphere for insightful, passionate writing on political issues, but before Tuesday no one knew the person behind Digby. That night, Digby revealed herself to the world and gave a rousing speech about what progressive bloggers have contributed to the movement as she accepted, on behalf of progressive bloggers, the Paul Wellstone Citizen Leadership Award. Earlier in the day, I was able to spend a few moments chatting with Digby. Here are excerpts.

So what got you into this?

It was a reaction to the things that we were talking about in the panel, watching the events of the 90s and feeling impotent to do anything about it. And then there was a serendipitous moment when there was a new technology coming along that enabled people like me and other people who were interested and politically active. And I took to the Internet and I found that attractive.

So what were you doing before?

I was working in Hollywood. I worked in distribution for a number of years and had always been political.

And you created this anonymous personality.

Early on in the very early Usenet days when we're all writing online no one quite knew what to make of the Internet and we all used pseudonyms because we weren't sure what that meant to be yourself on the Internet. I found it a great challenge to write in sort of a genderless entity as a writer. I couldn't argue from authority, I couldn't even argue from my own experience, really. So I developed a way of writing and a way of thinking that was actually quite modern in the sense that on the Internet people were creating personalities that in a way I was kind of deconstructing.

Why the name Digby?

It was just a big name that my husband gave me. And I picked that in an instant. If I thought about it for a second I would've picked one of those grand Greek or Roman names that others have chosen.

What would you say is the most important thing that you accomplished?

Con't

Thank God (whatever you conceive Her to be) for Digby.

(Or, She's Mad As Hell And She's Still Not Taking It Anymore!)
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As long as I've known ... her, Digby has never left anything on the table.

If no blogger is more consistent on a day-by-day, paragraph-for-paragraph and even word-for-word basis, the speech she gave at her "unveiling" at the Take Back America Conference this week was simply an elevated example of her gift for hitting a target with the utmost precision. In the name of progressive bloggers everywhere, she explained what we do, why we exist, and how we came to be in the clearest, most exact, and most exacting terms.

But you can read all about the speech from superlative textual bloggers, like Glen Greenwald. In this house, it's mostly about the picture -- which is what Digby gave us on Tuesday, with purpose.

As she explained to Joan Walsh at Salon:

"There wasn't any real plan to 'come out' but when Rick Perlstein approached me about this I felt it was an important moment for the progressive blogosphere, and I knew that it would be a good use of my (otherwise useless) mystique.

Digby's comment reveals two points in her thinking, both consistent with her impeccable instincts.

First, her revealing herself represents one more step in the rising visibility of the blogosphere. Like it or not, we are a personality-driven culture. To let herself be seen -- to put a face to the name, and a face to the words ... as well as to extinguish any last fantasy that Digby starred in "Network" -- was to play an ace she'd been holding to further boost the sphere's maturation.

Second, with "Decision '08" starting to acquire shape, the radical right still drunkenly stumbling around and the 'roots starting to really, well, sink roots, the hour was perfect. Said Digby (in this brief interview on the TBA Conference blog):

I don't think people have heard the progressive argument explicitly in a long time, not filtered through the right wing and the conventions of their media and interpreted by the mainstream media. ... I think there is a new political debate that has opened up at a very propitious time for us as a result of the unfortunate failure of the conservative project under George W. Bush, and let's just say there will never be another time like this one.
Con't Reading

thanks. i enjoyed reading diby

Sunday, July 01, 2007

by digby

Big Tent Democrat at Talk Left makes a nice point today in his post called The Invidiousness of Expert Broderism, about the detached nature of the discussion surrounding the Supreme Court term by liberals and moderates who backed the Lieberdem impulse to put John Roberts and Samuel Alito on the high court because they were ... well, great guys. (They'd had beers with them!)

My personal feeling is that this court is going to practice a form of radical right wing judicial activism that will transform our country over the next generation. (Remember, everything the right accuses the left of doing is what they actually are doing.) Democrats will spend a major amount of time when they are in power trying to find legislative and executive remedies for the dramatic judicial tilt toward big business, fundamentalist religion and racist, discriminatory outcomes --- which will have been made in service to the Republican party and its donors. (After Bush vs. Gore I think we can finally dispense with any notion that the justices are non-partisan.)But we knew that didn't we, when the gang of 14 decided they needed to keep their powder dry for a rainy day?

Roberts is a particularly unctuous character, with his sunny smile and youthful energy, while he dishonestly passes off wingnut bumper stickers like “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” as judicial reasoning. (I can hardly wait for him to read his decision on gun rights where he says "guns don't kill people, people kill people")

Rick Perlstein nails him to the wall with this passionate post about Roberts' other fatuous punchline: "Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin."

If I were a high school teacher and young Johnny Roberts wrote this on an exam on civil rights history, I would give him an "F." The idea that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court could cough up such a ludicrous hairball is evidence of a nation gone mad with amnesia. Or, if you prefer, a conservative intellectual class that knows the history full well, and has simply let itself lie.
Con't Reading

by digby

McClatchy has a new article up called "Was campaigning against voter fraud a Republican ploy?"

Uhm, yeah.

And here was an early clue:

Between 1958 and 1962, when Rehnquist was a private attorney in Arizona, he served as the director of Republican "ballot security" operations in poor neighborhoods in Phoenix. Rehnquist was part of Operation Eagle Eye, a flying squad of GOP lawyers that swept through polling places in minority-dominated districts to challenge the right of African Americans and Latinos to vote. At the time, Democratic poll watchers had to physically push Rehnquist out of the polling place to stop him from interfering with voting rights.

Two decades later, during Rehnquist's 1986 Senate confirmation hearing for appointment to head the Supreme Court, he denied targeting minority voters. Some election watchers, who had personally observed Rehnquist's tactics in Phoenix, accused him of lying to Congress.

This is an old story. What's new is that Karl Rove tried to use the Justice Department itself to steal elections rather than relying on "flying squads" of GOP thugs to suppress the Democratic vote. But then, Rove was the most successful election stealer in American history, so it's not exactly a surprise.
digby 7/01/2007
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Sunday, July 01, 2007
by digby

I've been enjoying all the shocked pearl clutching this week as Washington insiders suddenly discover that their favorite party guest Dick Cheney is a secretive megalomaniac. But if the insiders and the press had not been so blinded by Bush's adorable obsession with PB&J sammiches and his "pull my finger" style of boyish humor, (followed by a smooth shift into embarrassing codpiece worship after 9/11) perhaps someone might have wondered if his babysitter might have some odd ideas. After all, his love of monarchical presidential power is the one thing he hasn't been secretive about:

November 1987
Congressman Richard Cheney was the ranking Republican on the congressional committee investigating the Iran-contra affair, in which Reagan administration officials secretly diverted the proceeds of arms sales to Iran to fund the contras in Nicaragua, who were fighting to oust the left-wing government. Below are excerpts from the section of the committee's minority report on presidential power, which Cheney and his staff authored.

"Judgments about the Iran-Contra Affair ultimately must rest upon one's views about the proper roles of Congress and the President in foreign policy. ... [T]hroughout the Nation's history, Congress has accepted substantial exercises of Presidential power -- in the conduct of diplomacy, the use of force and covert action -- which had no basis in statute and only a general basis in the Constitution itself. ... [M]uch of what President Reagan did in his actions toward Nicaragua and Iran were constitutionally protected exercises of inherent Presidential powers. ... [T]he power of the purse ... is not and was never intended to be a license for Congress to usurp Presidential powers and functions.
I think you have to preserve the prerogative of the President in extraordinary circumstances not to notify the Congress at all.
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"The boundless view of Congressional power began to take hold in the 1970's, in the wake of the Vietnam War. The 1972 Senate Foreign Relations Committee's report recommending the War Powers Act [which requires presidents to seek Congressional authorization if they deploy U.S. troops for longer than 60 days], and the 1974 report of the Select Committee on Intelligence Activities (chaired by Senator Frank Church and known as the Church Committee), both tried to support an all but unlimited Congressional power by invoking the "Necessary and Proper" clause. That clause says Congress may 'make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing [legislative] Powers, and all Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department of Officer thereof.' The argument of these two prominent committees was that by granting Congress the power to make rules for the other departments, the Constitution meant to enshrine legislative supremacy except for those few activities explicitly reserved for the other branches.

"One must ignore 200 years of constitutional history to suggest that Congress has a vast reservoir of implied power whose only limits are the powers explicitly reserved to the other branches. ... The Necessary and Proper clause does not permit Congress to pass a law usurping Presidential power. A law negating Predidential powers cannot be treated as if it were 'necessary and proper for carrying' Presidential powers 'into Execution.' To suggest otherwise would smack of Orwellian Doublespeak.
Con't

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

by digby

Has there ever been a president who deserved it more? I don't think so. Looking at this as someone who believes that until we hold them accountable for their crimes, these zombie crooks will keep doing this over and over again until our country is unrecognizable, my instinct is to scream it from the rafters. But I'm still not convinced that the Democrats should try to impeach. The problem for me is threefold and it has nothing to do with the merits of the case or the desirability of doing it. It's about the political landscape.

First, I've never seen specific high crimes that could get voted out of the House (Elizabeth Holzman is dreaming if she thinks her charges could ever get a majority vote --- the national security questions are going nowhere without a lot more information which we won't get while Bush is in office, and the torture question was rendered pretty much moot by that "bi-partisan" military commissions act travesty.)

Second, time is not on our side. The executive privilege claims are going to take forever to litigate. And, of course, the conservative judiciary is likely to back them, if only by helping them run out the clock. During Watergate, the judiciary committee had the work of the Washington Post to go on ---- and then John Dean and the tapes --- in an easily understood narrative. Ken Starr gave Henry Hyde a nice little case about dirty sex all wrapped up in a pretty little pornographic package. Nobody had to do any investigation. The job of the congress, in both cases, was pretty much just seeing if impeachment applied to acts that had already been revealed. Things moved quickly.

This requires much more original investigation, particularly on those national security issues, which are going to be very touchy subjects and nearly impossible to get evidence or testimony on. (I think the national security stuff is going to have to be investigated in a different way, a la the Church committee, after Bush is out of office.)

Finally, there is the most important and indisputable fact that Bush and Cheney will never be convicted in the Senate. This isn't the GOP of 1974 and they will never cross over in enough numbers. They won't do it even if video tapes of Bush personally giving hush money to Scooter Libby turn up. Let's not kid ourselves about that reality. The fact is that impeachment will probably bring their caucus together.

But even so, that's not necessarily a good enough reason not to do it. It could be useful, if only to tie the administration up in knots until they leave the scene. But the risks are high that if you don't have a specific (and somewhat simple) crime to point to and a good chance of at least getting a quick impeachment vote in the House, that it could blow back pretty hard on the Dems. This is not because people like Bush and don't want him out of office. It's because they see that the presidential campaign is in full swing and know that Bush will be out of office soon anyway. That means many of them will likely be susceptible to the inevitable GOP screeching that the petty Democrats are playing politics, going for payback, wasting time etc. And the media will be thrilled to help the Republicans make that case.

Still, it still might be worth it if we could be sure that all this stuff is publicly aired and the Republicans are exposed for the crooks they are. For that we need a narrowly focused investigation on a specific act. To that end, I'd certainly be for holding hearings into whether this commutation constitutes a cover up of Bush and Cheney's crimes, with the explicit purpose of seeing if it leads to impeachment. (See Marcy Wheeler's article in The Guardian, here.) There is a certain symbolic simplicity to this particular event, that I think might work to open up the whole argument. And this is the one Bush crime where a nice information package already exists --- there have been years of investigation already into this crime and a full trial. (Perhaps Fitz might be persuaded to turn over his non-grand Jury material to the committee if they subpoenaed him nicely.)

But whatever they do, it's important to remember that impeachment is a nuclear political act, and because it's a nuclear political act it has to be judged on that basis with a clear view of the political playing field. The consequences of voting impeachment out of committee and failing to get a majority in the House --- or if we get a vote, failing to convict in the Senate (which is inevitable) are what's really at issue. I'm willing to consider that it's worthwhile anyway. But regardless, everyone needs to decide this course based upon the reality that Bush will not be convicted and barring an untimely demise, will not leave office before January 20, 2009.

So the question I ask is this --- is a failed impeachment going to hold them accountable? If so, then I'm for it. But if it actually ends up getting them off the hook, then not so much. It's not such an easy call.

And then there's the bigger question. What's the alternative?

Any ideas?

Paris Hilton did more time than Scooter Libby.

by digby

There's a ton of good coverage about Rove's resignation today all over the blogosphere, too many to link. But be sure to check around and read them all. Jane Hamsher wondered this morning what the press isn't telling us and it's a natural question. Considering the fact that Rove is currently under a cloud in a number of different scandals as Marcy Wheeler points out here, it's really not all that surprising that he would rather suddenly need to "spend more time with his family." (I can't believe they actually used that cliche when he has one kid who is in college.)

There are many possibilities but I would love for him to be taken down for his vote-rigging schemes in the Department of Justice and what I suspect is his involvement in political spying. After all, it's been his MO since he started in politics. As I wrote earlier this year:

My suspicion has always been that there was some part of this program --- or an entirely different program --- that included spying on political opponents. Even spying on peace marchers and Greenpeace types wouldn't seem to me to be of such a substantial departure from the agreed upon post 9/11 framework that it would cause such a reaction from the top brass, nor would it be so important to the president that he would send Gonzales and Card into the ICU to get Ashcroft to sign off on it while he was high on drugs.
Con't

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"Hello to our friends and fans in domestic surveillance."