Patricia Clarkson at HRC Dinner

I have to say, this is one hell of a speech.

Joe Lieberman: Hypocrite Extraordinaire

Appearing at The Jaundiced Eye, the Independent Bloggers' Alliance, and My Left Wing.

Joe Lieberman then:

HAVING SPENT much of the past year mired in legislative trench warfare over Iraq, advocates in Congress seeking a mandatory withdrawal of troops are now refusing to pass funding for our forces deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan.

For Congress to fail to provide the funds needed by our soldiers in the field is inexcusable under any circumstances -- but it is especially disappointing right now, coming at the very moment when Gen. David Petraeus and his troops are achieving the kind of progress in Iraq that few would have dared imagine possible just a few months ago. [emphasis added]

A very petulant Joe Liberman now:

Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) lambasted transparency advocates at a press conference Tuesday, when they renewed their promise to bring Senate business to a halt until their bill blocking the release of detainee photographs becomes law.

"We're not going to do any more business in the Senate," Graham said, his face flushed red. "Nothing's going forward until we get this right."

The duo's bill, which would allow the Pentagon to exempt Bush-era photos from the Freedom of Information Act, was stripped from the conference version of the war supplemental Monday night. In anticipation of trouble, Lieberman and Graham had already inserted the bill into the tobacco-regulatory legislation currently on the floor of the Senate.

By turns sober and furious, the two senators vowed again Tuesday to vote against -- and, if possible, filibuster -- the troop-funding bill and all other legislation until they get their way. They equated the weapons supplied by the war supplemental spending bill with detainee photos that they said would serve as a recruiting tool for al-Qaida and a weapon against U.S. troops. [emphasis added]

So... who's playing politics with the troops?

The Trenchcoat Mafia & Other Tall Tales

Perhaps the most powerful lesson we could learn from the Columbine tragedy of 10 years ago, is how completely wrong the mass media can get a story. If you still think of Columbine as a cautionary tale on the dangers of violent video games or bullying and cliques, let it go. These are comforting fairy tales we tell ourselves to make sense of the senseless. It all seems so much more controllable, if we can identify the social mechanisms and change them. Don't get me wrong. I think anti-bullying programs in schools are a great idea, but nothing of the kind would have stopped Eric Harris, or his sidekick Dylan Klebold. Such is the conclusion of author Dave Cullen and of FBI investigators who scrutinized the evidence. Cullen's book, entitled simply Columbine, pubs this Wednesday.

Cullen concluded that the killers weren't part of the Trench Coat Mafia, that they weren't bullied by other students and that they didn't target popular jocks, African-Americans or any other group. A school shooting wasn't their initial intent, he said.

It turns out the reason for the Columbine massacre is as simple as it is troubling. Eric Harris was a psycopath. Dylan Klebold, the weaker personality, was a suicidally depressed kid who took on Eric Harris's ethos as his own. Together, they planned a spectacular event -- one that would have eclipsed the Oklahoma City bombing. Their bomb-making skills were inadequate and they failed to wipe out the entire school. But, their plan had little to do with personal grudges against individuals. They just wanted to kill as many people as they could.

The killers, in fact, laughed at petty school shooters. They bragged about dwarfing the carnage of the Oklahoma City bombing and originally scheduled their bloody performance for its anniversary. Klebold boasted on video about inflicting "the most deaths in U.S. history." Columbine was intended not primarily as a shooting at all, but as a bombing on a massive scale. If they hadn't been so bad at wiring the timers, the propane bombs they set in the cafeteria would have wiped out 600 people. After those bombs went off, they planned to gun down fleeing survivors. An explosive third act would follow, when their cars, packed with still more bombs, would rip through still more crowds, presumably of survivors, rescue workers, and reporters. The climax would be captured on live television. It wasn't just "fame" they were after—Agent Fuselier bristles at that trivializing term—they were gunning for devastating infamy on the historical scale of an Attila the Hun. Their vision was to create a nightmare so devastating and apocalyptic that the entire world would shudder at their power.

Harris and Klebold would have been dismayed that Columbine was dubbed the "worst school shooting in American history." They set their sights on eclipsing the world's greatest mass murderers, but the media never saw past the choice of venue. The school setting drove analysis in precisely the wrong direction.

In his original article for Slate, Cullen debunked the litany of Columbine myths propagated by the media:

1. Targeting jocks, blacks, and Christians: There were no targets. Harris and Klebold just wanted body count, and they didn't care who died. They expected their bombs to do most of the killing, murdering everyone in the cafeteria, irrespective of clique or social standing. When the bombs failed, they shot indiscriminately, firing into open crowds and under tables without bothering to see who their victims were. They taunted jocks briefly in the library, but they taunted virtually everyone else there, too.

2. The Trench Coat Mafia: A small group of Columbine students did dub themselves the Trenchcoat Mafia, and they did have a feud with a band of jocks in 1999. But it was never a formal gang or club, and most of the members graduated nearly a year before the massacre. Harris and Klebold were never closely affiliated with the group and did not appear in the 1998 yearbook picture identifying the members. The TCM had little to do with Harris and Klebold and nothing to do with the massacre. The killers wore long coats in order to hide their weapons.

3. The Hit List: Eric Harris did create an enemies list, with a wide and sometimes comical assortment of personalities—students who pissed him off, girls who refused his dates, Tiger Woods. There's no indication that these were ever intended as targets. No one on the list was killed.

4. Christian Martyr Cassie Bernall: One of the killers allegedly asked student Cassie Bernall if she believed in God, then killed her when she said yes. Bernall became a revered figure among evangelical Christians. In fact, one of the killers posed the question to another girl, Valeen Schnurr, after she had already been shot. They had a short exchange, he reloaded, got distracted, and she crawled away to safety.

5. Marilyn Manson: Klebold and Harris hated Marilyn Manson. On his Web site, Harris said he loved, "Good, fast, hard, strong, pounding TECHNO!! Such as KMFDM, PRODIGY, ORBITAL, RAMMSTEIN, and such."

6. Escape to New York: Harris' journal does contain a passage about hijacking a plane and crashing it into New York City, but that appears to have been an early fantasy. He settled on a more practical scheme long before he and Klebold actually staged their massacre. By the time of the attack, they fully expected to die at the high school. They refer to their death routinely and explicitly in their writings and in their videos.

7. Outcasts: Perhaps the most pervasive myth is that Harris and Klebold were rejected outcasts. They were not captains of the football team, but they were far more accepted than many of their schoolmates. They hung out with a tight circle of close friends and partied regularly on the weekend with a wider crowd.

Columbine is a cautionary tale. Just not for the reasons we were led to believe. It should serve as a reminder of how completely wrong the prevailing narrative can be, and how badly professional journalists can serve their audience, in their haste to tell us the story.

“Columbine” is an excellent work of media criticism, showing how legends become truths through continual citation; a sensitive guide to the patterns of public grief, foreshadowing many of the same reactions to Sept. 11 (lawsuits, arguments about the memorial, voyeuristic bus tours); and, at the end of the day, a fine example of old-fashioned journalism.

Gratefully Recovering Republicans

Now, that is something I'd like to see.

In the newest plot twist in the strange saga of RNC Chair Michael Steele's self-destructive love affair with the media, he has now suggested a Twelve Step recovery plan for the Republican Party. As one who has been ranting for eight years about how that dry(?) drunk Bush ran this country like a giant dysfunctional family, I applaud Steele's, most likely accidental, admission of how seriously ill his party is. I doubt, however, that he is prepared for what it would really mean for Republicans to work the steps. Humility, surrender, accountability... Well, these are the steps. I wish them well.

1. We admitted we were powerless over [Powermongering, Profligate Spending, Corporate Whoredom, Lawlessness, War Profiteering... ???] — that our lives had become unmanageable.


2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.


3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.


4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.


5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.


6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.


7. Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.


8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.


9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.


10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.


11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out.


12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

My New Hero

What I love about Mayor Bernaro's comments, aside from the fact that they are true, is that he managed to get a genuinely populist message on Fox. Not faux, Rush Limbaugh populism. Genuine concern for the working man, who has been watching his quality of life decline for years, while the rich got richer and Wall Street had its seemingly endless, drunken orgy.

The Huffington Post has more.

Fucking Hilarious

The Political Incorrectness of Helen Mirren

Appearing at The Jaundiced Eye, the Independent Bloggers' Alliance, and My Left Wing.

It seems the Brits are in a tiz over outrageous comments by Helen Mirren about rape trials.

Dame Helen Mirren was accused by the Solicitor General of making ignorant, absurd and dangerous comments yesterday after speaking out again about rape prosecutions.

In an interview, the 63-year-old Oscar-winning actress said that in such cases female jurors are deliberately selected by defence barristers because 'women go against women'.

She suggested that women jurors are less likely to convict a rapist since they tend to think the victim was 'asking for it'.

Well, how dare she suggest that sisterhood would not reign in a rape trial?

Trouble is she's absolutely right.

I would not claim to know how juries are selected in Great Britain, and it may well be totally random, as Solicitor General Vera Baird claims. But, here in the US, where attorneys are very involved in jury selection, it's an absolute fact that your better rape prosecutors try to stack juries with men.

I was somewhat stunned to learn this some years ago, while reading up on the "preppy murder trial." Robert Chambers, who was convicted for the murder of Jennifer Levin, was prosecuted by renowned attorney Linda Fairstein. Fairstein, who specializes is rape prosecutions said, when interviewed, that she would always try to tilt juries in the male direction, because women jurors are less likely to convict rapists. Her statement struck me as so counter-intuitive that it always stuck with me. I did a bit of googling, to check my own memory, and Fairstein is not alone in this assessment.

However, female jurors frequently do not side with the female complainant. Indeed, according to a Newsday article, “The most sympathetic juror a rape victim can hope for… is not a well-dressed, educated working woman, but a stocky, conservative, middle-aged Italian man. The Italian man, the researchers reason, regards women as fragile and in need of defense and will usually side with the accuser” (Tyre, 1991, p. 10). The article also quotes Barbara Eganhauser, a lead sex crimes prosecutor in Westchester County, who believes “women, even young women with contemporary lifestyles and values, often reject another woman’s accusation or rape and sex abuse out of their own fear” (Tyre, 1991, p. 10).

Several other authors also note that female jurors often do not accept as true the testimony of complainants. Attorney Julie Wright (1995) argues that these jurors distrust the complainants because they do not want to believe that something horrible could happen to “good people”. Such women subscribe to the “just world hypothesis,” that bad things do not happen at random, but rather everything in the world occurs for a reason. According to this theory, misfortune strikes only those worthy of hardship (Wright, 1995). Wright cites Elaine Walster’s research study, in which undergraduates were told of increasingly horrible things that happened to another person. The worse the event, the more likely the subject assigned blame to the other person, as it was “reassuring if the person [could] somehow blame the victim, taking the loss out of the realm of the uncontrollable” (Wright, 1995, p. 20). Using this logic, female jurors do not wish to imagine that rape could happen to them, and therefore the more they identify with the complainant, and the more hideous the crime, the more they need to deny the complainant’s claim. Wright notes that “Linda Fairstein, Chief of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Sex Crimes Unit, has observed that ‘for many women, the need to shield themselves from their own vulnerability to sexual assault is paramount. If they can insist that the victim engaged in behavior that they would never engage in, such as visiting a bar or going to a man’s apartment, they can convince themselves they are not at risk’” (Wright, 1995, p. 22). Thus, it is so frightening for the female juror to identify with the complainant that she needs to deny the complainant’s testimony, in order for the juror to feel safe in the world.

Furthermore, Gloria Cowan (2000) contends that women often disbelieve other women’s tales of sexual violence out of their own internalized oppression. She writes that many women are hostile to their own sex, and internalize negative female stereotypes. These women are more likely to “blame the victim” in the case of rape or sexual harassment. Cowan’s research study, using questionnaire responses from 155 college women, found a correlation between women’s hostility towards other women and women’s toleration of men mistreating women. While Cowan’s article does not specifically apply to jurors in rape cases, it does provide a persuasive argument as to why females may be disinclined to believe the victim of sexual abuse.

Sad, but true.

Sarah Palin: Rainbow High

Recently, in her Huffington Post blog, Naomi Wolf compared Sarah Palin to Eva Peron. Now, there's an analogy that becomes more apt every day.

Like any peasant girl from the outskirts, Sarah Palin needs to dress the part of a political luminary.

While Palin's transformation from hockey mom to fashion plate has raised eyebrows, her "SNL" character, played by Tina Fey, has remained firmly in the red jacket. And according to Women's Wear Daily's Irin Carmon, "SNL" costume designer Tom Broecker said Wednesday night that dressing Palin for last Saturday's cameo required a compromise:

Of Palin, Broecker said, "In speaking with her, I had to get her to understand why she needed to wear the same thing as Tina [Fey]. We had gone off and created it for the first time a month ago, a look we identified as Sarah Palin. She had moved on in her own image of herself. I said, 'I know you've moved on ­ you're wearing tighter clothes, more black ­ but this is the character of Sarah Palin.'"

Silly SNL dresser. She needs to dress for her descamisados, up there in Alaska. (They're very cold.)

Besides, as John McCain says, "She needed clothes." (Well, ok. But does her seven year old really need a Louis Vuitton bag?)



The McCain campaign assures us the clothes will go to charity. What they don't tell you: She'll be throwing them from a balcony.

"Please understand what you are looking at when you look at Sarah "Evita" Palin. You are looking at the designated muse of the coming American police state."

-- Naomi Wolf

Stealing Elections 101

Appearing at The Jaundiced Eye, the Independent Bloggers' Alliance, and My Left Wing.

Buy at AllPosters.com
With a tip of the hat to cometman, an update on the horror show that is Premier Election Systems, or Diebold. Cometman's other excellent diary, introducing cyber security expert Stephen Spoonamore, can no longer be found on Pff, because Pff is no more. Fortunately Arthur Gilroy reprinted it in full and it can be found here. Both of the Spoonamore interviews to follow. But first, this bit of joy from the Washington Post.

A voting system used in 34 states contains a critical programming error that can cause votes to be dropped while being electronically transferred from memory cards to a central tallying point, the manufacturer acknowledges.

The problem was identified after complaints from Ohio elections officials following the March primary there, but the logic error that is the root of the problem has been part of the software for 10 years, said Chris Riggall, a spokesman for Premier Election Solutions, formerly known as Diebold.

. . .

Officials in Butler County, Ohio -- north of Cincinnati -- were the first to raise the issue when 150 votes from a card dropped in March. Brunner's office originally said that 11 counties had the same problem but has since revised that to nine. Her office was not able to say how many dropped votes were discovered in those jurisdictions.

"I can't provide odds on whether dropped votes were not recognized" during the decade GEMS has been used, Rigall said, "but based on what we know about how our customers run their elections and reconcile counts we believe any results not uploaded on election night would have been caught when elections were being certified."

So, in 34 states, over 10 years this flaw that causes tabulation problems has only occurred 9 times. We know this because it's only been caught by election officials 9 times. Well, I know I feel better.

But now, the bad news. Diebold's voting machines may be riddled with problems such as these and we would have no way of knowing because Diebold won't allow any audit of their programming. 

Stephen Spoonamore, a cyber security expert, who has made a career of auditing similar systems, is baffled as to why to Diebold allows its banking systems to be audited, but not its voting machines. Well, not really. This life-long Republican is pretty sure he knows why. Because they're designed to steal elections. 

Among the revelations in these two interviews: 1) There is no such thing as unhackable computer security. The only defense is a transparent process that can be audited and Diebold won't allow it. 2) Spoonamore is certain that Max Cleland actually won the election he lost to the odious Saxby Chamblis. 3) A voting tabulator should have no reason to subtract votes, only add them. Yet, the Diebold machines have a subtraction function.

And much, much more.

Failing Ever Upward

Well, if you can't get Bernie Ebbers:

Carly Fiorina Live at the RNC
photo: AP/Paul Sancya

Carly Fiorina, who has been headlining with the McCain campaign -- and was even discussed as a possible running mate -- is being touted as a super-successful vagina-person. A reigning authority on big business and the tech world, or so we're told. Last night she spoke to the convention audience about the wonders of John McCain and with reporters about the travesty of sexist attacks on Sarah Palin.

These days, Fiorina is usually described as a former CEO of Hewlett-Packard. Sounds impressive, but it leaves out a few things. Like the fact she's the former CEO because she was fired, loathed by many board members and shareholders, and handed a golden parachute worth over $21 million that resulted in a lawsuit against the company. On the day Fiorina was given her walking papers, HP's stock jumped 7 percent. That's a whole lotta hate.

The HP board of directors asked Carly Fiorina to resign last week, ending the six-year reign of the highest-profile woman in American business. HP's dismal financial results provide the easiest explanation for the dismissal: while its revenues are climbing slowly, its stock is down 50 percent since her tenure began, and her poorly conceived and contentious takeover of Compaq has done little to strengthen HP's balance sheet. (The poor performance perhaps justified the board's particularly harsh public statement, which didn't contain the usual excuse of a suddenly demanding family.)

But the problem wasn't just the substance of Fiorina's leadership--it was also her style. She had plenty of it. Fiorina brought panache to HP: she combined the showmanship of Steve Jobs with a dash of Donald Trump's ostentatiousness. Instead of working quietly for the first few years to fix the company, she believed that building buzz for herself--including appearances in early TV ads--was key to re-energizing staff and exciting customers. Tech CEOs named Jobs, Ellison and Gates can get away with this; as founders, they seemingly have more leeway in cultivating a cult of personality. But Fiorina's style clanged dissonantly off HP's wonky products and the staid corporate culture that HP founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard initiated 65 years ago in a Palo Alto, Calif., garage. Some employees loved her--but many disliked her and were no doubt glad to see her go. Last week, interim CEO Robert Wayman told NEWSWEEK that senior executives "were very pleased with the reaction of the employees to all the communication. They were way more comfortable than [senior execs] had worried they would be."

But, Fiorina picked herself up, dusted herself off, and reinvented herself as a political mover and shaker. Thus were we treated to her compassionate words last night about the concerns of average Americans.

Today, Americans are concerned about keeping their jobs. They're concerned about keeping their homes; about the rising price of food and fuel. They are concerned about whether they will able to find and afford the right kind of health care. They are concerned about whether they or their children with have the skills and education they need to compete in the 21st Century.

Yes. I'm guessing the thousands of workers HP laid off, under her tenure, had many such concerns.

At HP, Fiorina developed the reputation of a manager who knocked heads together—or who chopped them off. And there were massive layoffs during her tenure. In 2003, the company announced it would dismiss almost 18,000 people. (That year, the firm posted a $903 million loss on $56.6 billion in revenue.) When the outsourcing of jobs turned into a national political issue, Fiorina became the poster-girl for an industry campaign aimed at blocking any legislation that would restrict a company's ability to can American employees in favor of workers overseas. She and executives from seven other tech companies issued a report that argued that any such measures would hurt the U.S. economy. The best way to increase American competitiveness, they declared, was to improve schools and, yes, reduce taxes. At a Washington press conference, Fiorina said, "There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore. We have to compete for jobs." The remark did not go over well with critics of outsourcing, who have ever since used it as an indicator of corporate insensitivity.

Such detached perspective is a whole lot easier when your own fuck-ups net you a $21 million severance. Most of us average folk don't get to make soft landings on big piles of money, when we're shit-canned.

Last night she also talked about the importance of corporate transparency and accountability. Hmmm.....

In March 2004, after HP shareholders voted 1.21 billion to 925 million to expense stock options, she opposed the move, essentially opting to stick with accounting practices (that were used by other corporations) that did not reveal a company's true value. That same year, Forbes reported that Hewlett-Packard was "among many other U.S. companies that kept offices in Dubai and were linked to Iranian traders there." The article suggested that HP and other countries were skirting export controls to trade with Iran.

But, no one should be surprised that Fiorina's star is rising within the Republican Party. She could be its poster child. She embodies the ethic that has driven them since the glory days of Ronald Reagan and the era of greedy excess he ushered in.

We have reached escape velocity and launched into the No-Consequences Economy. To pause for a moment of overgeneralization: America used to be about exceptionalism and optimism, a place where anybody could try anything and make it work. Across the business and political spectrum, it's now about entitlement, where everyone deserves a shot but no one gets blamed for screwing it up. Stuff happens, as Donald Rumsfeld said, referring to another affair with no consequences for the architects. (Read more about the consequences of no consequences.)

When Bob Nardelli said in September 2006 that he took "full responsibility" for manhandling Home Depot, how was he to know that he'd be kicked out four months later with an extra $210 million in the bank? Or that he'd end up at the wheel of an American icon, Stan O'Neal, who also mouthed the responsibility platitude, received $160 million when he was dumped after billions of dollars of bets went bad and word leaked out that he had toyed with selling the company without talking to his board.

Other disgraced Wall Street executives are hot commodities in the job market, valued for their perceived ability to walk through fire and survive. Private equity firms are turning away from deals signed mere months before. J.C. Flowers & Co. even managed to leave Sallie Mae at the altar and not pay the contractually negotiated breakup fee. Housing-industry shills who championed a rising market are keeping their jobs. Banks that made disastrous loans are cutting in line to borrow at below-market rates from the Federal Reserve. "It's amazing, the lack of shame," says Lawrence Mitchell, a George Washington University professor and author of The Speculation Economy: How Finance Triumphed Over Industry. "The guys on Wall Street claim they believe in free markets and are entitled to enormous compensation because of their risk taking. But when they lose, do they say to themselves, 'I'm going to take my losses'? No, they go running to Uncle Ben"—Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman—"and he, in a grotesquely irresponsible move, bails them out.

After all, we've endured nearly eight nearly 8 years of an incompetent CEO President Portfolio once compared to Fiorina.

Fiorina didn't know the industry or the company, and she announced the day she arrived that she had her strategy.

No, Fiorina was right at home on that stage and will, no doubt, be right at home in a McCain Administration.