According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Hillary Clinton is a "big fan of the Rolling Stones."  So am I.

In 1993 it was questionable whether Bill Clinton would have the votes to get the North American Free Trade Agreement through Congress.  So he did something he almost never did for any other cause.  He twisted arms and promised the world to members of Congress to get their votes.  And to get the votes of 20 members from Florida and California, the Clinton Administration agreed to breach the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.  That's right, to get votes for NAFTA, Clinton sold out the ozone layer to a bunch of corporate farmers who grow cardboard tomatoes.

Barak Obama sold out his constituents to the nation's largest operator of nuclear plants -- and one of his major contributors.  The typical Washington cave-in happened when Obama's constituents were outraged that their drinking water was contaminated with radioactive tritium as a result of unreported leaks from a nearby nuclear power plant.

The company responsible for poisoning the wells was Exelon, the nation's largest operator of nuclear power plants.  It has contributed $227,000 to Senator Obama's various campaigns.

Obama initially offered legislation to require reporting of all leaks, granstanded on it, quietly caved to industry allowing his legislation to be gutted, then lied about getting it passed.

It's not as if Obama is in the same league as Duke Cunningham, but it doesn't really look good. Chicago real estate connecto Tony Rezko gave Obama some really timely help in buying a fancy, very nice South Chicago home.  Obama got himself a deal and Rezko helped out by buying the lot next door, which Obama didn't want, but was part of the sale.  This allowed Obama to get the property for about $300K less than it was listed for.

And, oh, Tony Rezko is Syrian.  And he was indicted by Patrick Fitzgerald (to quote Firedoglake commenters, "Fitz!!!!!!!!!!!!!") on extortion and fraud charges, which include shakedown allegations involving an Illinois pension fund.

For those of you who are interested, Brad DeLong has reincarnated an old piece he wrote on the Clinton Administration's attempt to reform health care.  Brad worked on that project, so his insights are really interesting.

More over the flip

It's over.  CNN, the SF Chronicle have both called CA-11 for McNerney.  The CA Secretary of State has him winning 53.3 to 47.7 with 90% reporting.

Hats off to kid oakland, Land of Enchantment, all the volunteers who walked the district and all of us who gave our lives, fortunes and our sacred honor. . . . I guess I'm getting a little carried away here.  But congratulations to everyone.  This was a true netroots win.

Jerry got here by first stuffing Rahm's boy toy Steve Filson, then went ahead with little or no support from the DCCC until the very end.  DFA helped Jer the first time he ran and we carried it along.  This race more than just about any other shows how far the netroots have come.

A big hand for everyone.

This is a very lightly edited version of a comment I posted yesterday at TNH.  I don't normally write diaries, but thought this might be interesting to a wider audience.

The main issue at the Enron trial wasn't whether Lay and Skilling knew the company was collapsing around them. The prosecution had an easier job than having to show that Lay and Skilling knew the company was collapsing.  Enron didn't collapse; it imploded in just under six months.

What the prosecution really had to prove was whether Lay and Skilling knew the company never was profitable and that -- over the course of several years -- they knew (or pretended not to know) that the company's accounting -- at its most basic levels -- was a massive shell game designed to make the company look profitable.

This is a public service announcement.  Yes, I know, it's bad form to have a diary just pointing to something someone else posted.  But Billmon is special.  So sue me; I write about two diaries a year.  

For those of us who've been jonesing since the Vegan Threat emerged, the Jimi Hendrix of blogging is back.  

Taking a series of quotes from the early days of Abramoff's career, Billmon demonstrates just what's been going on, why it's a Republican criminal enterprise, how fundamental it is to what the Republicans have become.  And he uses only quotes from DeLay, his honchos, or their media courtiers to do it.

Who knows how long this will last, but the drought has broken.

This is the front page lead story in the local paper about about my assistant taking off on the spur of the moment to visit Camp Casey in Crawford.  It's a tale of what the Democratic Party's fearsome activist base can mean for taking advantage of organizing opportunities that pop up unscheduled.  Republicans -- with their top-down management style -- could never pull something like this off.

Here in Humboldt County, California we've had almost twenty years of timber wars, with, now, generations of local activists taking on the Houston-based Maxxam Corporation. Because we've been fighting all these years, we have a very deep bench when it comes to people who know how to whip out a press release in minutes, know who to call to get stories in the paper and on the radio, and who to get to help with fundraising.

More below the fold

The L.A. Times advances the DeLay story its next sorry step, uncovering yet another cynical scam.  The story tells a tale of corruption right out of Mark Twain's The Gilded Age.  More below the fold.

If you want to see one form of how great blogging can be (and in the meantime learn a lot about how perilously close the world economy is to meltdown)  check out the parallel and intertwining threads on Noriel Roubini's global macroeconomic blog and Brad de Long's blog.  Here we have a running high-level debate about just how hard the economic landing for the U.S. will be, when, and what it'll look like.  Suffice it to say the prognosis isn't sunny.  Not surprisingly some of the best analysis (and, of course, writing) is supplied by Billmon in comments.  To quote one comment from the thread(s) I wholeheartedly agree with: "This has been such a good thread - it even lured Billmon out of his bunker. Thanks to DeLong and Roubini and everyone else."  A must read.

Remember the painting of Bush's face made up of monkeys?  It closed an art gallery in Chelsea a week or so ago when the owner grew incensed upon seeing what he thought was an insult to, well, Chimpy.  Now the painting has hit the big time, gracing a giant billboard in New York for the next month.  Little justices count too.

WaPo did its best today to innoculate the public against any outrage at Republican attempts to steal the election.  The thrust was that Democrats are doing it too -- they even registered Mary Poppins! -- and there'll always be a little jostling in any election.  Boys will be boys.

As with the Wall Street Journal, I'd generally learned to separate the news gathering/reporting part of the Post from its editorial page.  Now I'm going to have to reevaluate.  This story was a real stinker, obviously planned and placed "in a conference call with reporters" by the Bush campaign.  

My guess is that the Bush campaign knows it can play on the establishment media's need to maintain the pretense that elections here are fair and that our leaders are legitimate.  Generally, the Kerry camp did o.k. with what it was handed on this story, but the story gave Chimpco exactly what it wanted.

Sadly, I haven't seen the Kerry campaign get the very real instances of obvious Republican voter intimidation and disenfranchisement into the national media.   It's unclear if this is a strategy on Kerry's part or if the Kerry camp is just too busy with other things.  Josh Marshall has noted that no political reporter has asked the Bush campaign when it knew that New England Republican operative Jim Tobin was implicated in the New Hampshire phone jamming scheme and why the Bush Campaign kept him in place for so long after it became obvious that he was.  

One hopes the Kerry media pros can at least get someone in the press to ask Busco those two questions.  I can't see any political downside.  Can you?

Pasted below is the letter I wrote today to Daniel Okrent, Public Editor for New Pravda.  Atrios finally motivated me to write the prick.

Dear Mr. Okrent:

I just read your latest and have finally realized that you and the New York Times are the perfect match.  Like the Times and many (though not all) of its reporters, you are smug, arrogant and ever so conscious of your power.  

The Times has much to answer for in the lead up to the Iraq war.  The Times got into this mess by being silly in the credulity it gave to the pronouncements of Bush Administration officials and its paid handmaidens like Ahmed Chalabi.  Though the administration has been caught in one lie after another, the Times usually  suspends its memory of these lies and reports what the Bush administration says as if the administration had never been caught in lies.  If  a  Holocaust denier made assertions in a different context, the Times would certainly (and rightly), always, remind its readers that the person is a Holocaust denier.  The person's credibility would always be an issue -- made explicit -- whatever other issue the person was making news about.  This is the treatment commoners get from the Times -- and that is how they should be treated.  But the Times never gives (and never would give) the Bush Administration similar treatment.  The Times  won't (and can't) treat the reigning administration as the Times would treat any common liar.  To do so would be to negate  the Times's self-conscious status as a pillar of an establishment that is the modern equivalent of a royal court.  

At court, it was usually only the jester who could speak unpleasant truths.  No way the Times will ever allow itself to become the jester.  But in reporting uncritically about President Bush's new clothes, the Times has nothing to be smug or arrogant about, at least in a professional sense.  And the Times certainly has nothing on many of the political blogs out there, at least in terms of being fair, accurate and in telling an interesting and salient story.  

The times and the media are changing and given how much anyone with an internet connection can now learn and share about the Times's failings, your employer is losing the respect of tens of thousands of well educated, serious, well informed and reasonably well-off people.  These are precisely those to whom the Times has traditionally appealed.  Check out some of the blogs that cover the media -- Digby's "Hullabaloo" and Bob Somerby's "Daily Howler," for example.  They represent readers by taking a critical look at the Times (and other news sources) and they do it much better than you do.  Reading their work, and contrasting it to yours, helps us see what you are.  

In a sense you're a depressing symptom of how the Times has responded to the dilemma it faces: Is the Times a journalist or a courtier?  Your job is to allow the Times to pretend it's a journalist, or to help the Times plausibly deny (including to itself) what it is to be a courtier.  You help the Times lie to itself and to believe its lies.  Jean Paul Sartre would call this process "bad faith."  

When the powerful cannot be honest their defense is a sneer.  Arrogant dismissal replaces engagement.  You write with a smirk and a sneer.  The smug assurance and the arrogance you bring to your job makes you the perfect public face for the Times.  At this critical point in our nation's history that is what the Paper of Record has been reduced to in dealing with its own readers.  

Cordially,

Kaleidescope