Attorney General Michael Mukasey refused Friday to refer the House’s contempt citations against two of President Bush’s top aides to a federal grand jury. Mukasey said White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former presidential counsel Harriet Miers committed no crime.
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Hillary Rodham Clinton can bank on the support of women. Conservatives will never trust John McCain. Southern white men won’t vote for Barack Obama.
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I’ve had food poisoning since yesterday. The primary suspect is some old pastrami.
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A White House official who served as President Bush’s middleman with conservatives and Christian groups resigned Friday after admitting to plagiarism.
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Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and his advisers are doing their best to brush aside questions — raised in the liberal blogosphere — about whether he is qualified under the Constitution to be president. But many legal scholars and government lawyers say it’s a serious question with no clear answer.
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An economist has found increases in the number of federally declared disasters in presidential election years and speculates that it’s because a president seeking to be re-elected or who wants to help maintain his party’s control will try to be seen as a hands-on executive who dispenses aid to voters.
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N.Y. senator campaign spot comes as polls show her losing ground to Obama in Texas and Ohio.
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The journalist and political commentator talks about why she chose to write about her husband?s death, what she thinks of Hillary Rodham Clinton and why cats are a girl?s best friend.
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Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton discovered an unlikely foreign-policy role model this week: George W. Bush.
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Eleanor Clift column on the desperate state of the Clinton campaign.
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One of the unfortunate personal consequences of taking a break from blogging, over the last year, seems to be a dramatic deterioration in my ability to write stuff in nice little quick bites. The post you’re reading now started as a few observations, but ballooned uncontrollably into a 1,500 word essay. I apologize for the length and understand completely if nobody makes it all the way through.
Visiting a few moderate and centrist blogs, reading a little bit here and there, one of the things that comes through rather clearly is that centrism is a broad-spectrum kind of movement. There isn’t a small set of issues, or a limited agenda, that encapsulates what moderates and centrists bring to the table socially and politically. We have views on the issues, along with a detailed interest in policy. But we also have an interest in process, attitude, the culture and norms of political interaction, and a particular interest in drawing lessons from the way regular Americans approach their everyday business and family lives.
I bring this up because I think I’ve just run across one more way — one slightly unexpected path — through which centrists can contribute a little bit to the health and value of the ongoing public debate.
It was something I noticed while doing a little research into a cultural phenomenon currently in the midst of a spectacular growth curve. I was vaguely aware of one or two small parts of it, but I took the opportunity to learn more, just in the last week or so, after a member of my family developed a strong interest in it.
Various labels are put on this internet-fueled movement. The term “Truthers” is sometimes used to describe the folks who believe in this stuff. British author Damian Thompson uses the term “counterknowledge” to describe the movement in a timely book just released on the topic last month.
The most prominent cultural touchstones are a few internet-based movies, including:
The “international bankers” conspiracy is the broad, all-encompassing one that we’re all familiar with. The bankers and the Federal Reserve have controlled every major development in the last couple hundred years of Western history. They started all the wars, kicked off the Great Depression, and found a way to manipulate (and profit from) each significant historical turn.
The most recent of these films, Zeitgeist, breaks new ground by adding a fourth major thread to the conspiracy. It starts with a long segment explaining how religion, and Christianity in particular, has been used as a tool to control us. Jesus did not even exist as a historical person, according to this movie. He was invented by the powers-that-be and used as a tool to prevent us from thinking clearly and asking questions.
If you dip your toes into the portions of the internet where these movies are currently being watched and discussed, you find a vibrant, large-scale, active debate. In terms of numbers, the Truthers seem to have the advantage. The sheer number of folks who watch these things and share with their friends is staggering. The number of new people emailing their friends every day with messages like “Have you seen this? It truly opened my eyes!!!” is apparently quite sizeable. A few months ago, when Rosie O’Donnell started spouting 9/11 conspiracy stuff on The View, it was most likely part of the cultural backwash of this red hot viral internet phenomenon.
Looking at the current online debate, especially the folks taking the time to argue against the Truthers, I get the broad sense that they share some classically centrist qualities. A number of them have this powerful, unshakeable focus on getting the facts straight, along with a basic sense of balance in the way they evaluate information. Sites like Snopes.com attract the sort of folks who want to know the bottom line and are determined not to be spun. They’re pretty busy dealing with the influx of Truthers over there.
Of course, these aren’t qualities we can ascribe to centrism in any sort of exclusive fashion. There are folks on the left and right who are reasonably tough-minded and fact-based in their basic approach to the world around us. A blog called Screw Loose Change was started by two Republicans who engage in daily debate with the Truthers, while the site Debunking911.com was started by a liberal who wants to clearly document why these conspiracy theories aren’t true. The funniest piece written by a skeptic was the one by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, complete with a purported script by the 9/11 conspirators.
In this, there seems to be a drive that flows right along the empirical lanes we centrists tend to travel. Let’s figure out what’s really happening in the world around us first, regardless of who gains or loses from that assessment. Let’s not walk around with alternate sets of simple facts about the world, particularly if those facts can be checked.
Of course, the concept of “truthiness” was recently developed by a prominent liberal, Stephen Colbert, as a critique of guys like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, who seem to derive their sense of what’s real from “gut feelings” and are rather adept at sweeping aside inconvenient facts.
Moving the “truthiness” concept into this debate would seem perfectly appropriate, both linguistically and logically. If we begin to sweep in the bogus theories on the left, like conspiracies that claim George Bush planned 9/11, we may someday end up with a concept of “truthiness” that helps weed out the gross factual inaccuracies on both sides of the aisle.
It seems to me, with a mass phenomenon like the Truthers currently underway, that centrists can make a contribution by helping to tug these folks back to some semblance of reality, while giving a boost to those segments of the left, right, and middle who want to build real standards of factual accuracy into the public debate.
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The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday justified blocking California and other states from cracking down on auto emissions by saying the problems of global warming aren’t unique to one state.
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A South Carolina gun dealer who sued New York’s mayor for saying his shop engaged in ‘criminal behavior,’ has asked judges in two states to put his case on hold so he can fight an unrelated criminal charge.
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A penny for your thoughts? Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson thinks the answer to that question should be not much. In fact, if he had his way, he would like to get rid of the penny.
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The New York Senator’s campaign concerns, just days before the contest, is drawing a warning against legal action from the state’s Democratic Party.
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Record illegal drug production in Afghanistan supplies the Taliban insurgency with money and arms and the U.S.-backed government must take direct, prompt action against poppy growers, a State Department report said Friday.
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The Pentagon can require its troops be vaccinated against anthrax, a federal judge said Friday.
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A Chicago alderman took a weeklong challenge to survive on food stamps to see firsthand how more than a million people in Illinois live from week to week.
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Prince Harry is to be pulled out of Afghanistan immediately amid fears for his safety after news of his deployment was made public, the British Defense Ministry said Friday.
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GOP candidate, born in Panama Canal zone  says issue was put to rest in 1964 during Barry Goldwater’s run for the White House.
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Despite calling for a swift end to Turkey?s offensive against Kurdish guerrillas, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said he had received no assurances from Turkey on when the offensive would be over.
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The Nation of Islam minister says backers of the Illinois senator shouldn’t be dissuaded by the Obama’s denunciation during Tuesday’s Democratic debate.
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi responded to Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s refusal Friday to investigate Bush advisers by saying she will sue the White House
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People here like to say everything is bigger in Texas, and their oversized presidential race is no different with a primary election and a caucus added on, too.
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