The Weekly Wrangle

Once again it's time for the Texas Progressive Alliance blog round-up, wrangled each week by Vince from Capitol Annex.

Refinish69 from Doing My Part For The Left is outraged with certain politicians in Fort Worth. Homophobia Rears Its Nasty Head in Fort Worth City Council Race tells who is being a jerk and how to contact one of them.

Muse was at Armando Walle’s campaign kick-off and reports why it’s time for a change in Texas House District 140. Kevin Bailey (D-Craddick) has been serving the speaker and not his constituents. Walle, who grew up in the district and has a proven track record of service and leadership, already has a large group of supporters lined up to help him take back 140 for the people.

Phillip Martin of Burnt Orange Report provides a detailed chart and analysis updating what's going on with the Craddick D's. The post brought forth an interesting reader response as well.

TXsharon at Bluedaze gives the Texas Railroad Commission Protection Money Breakdown, and makes it easy for you to take action. So please take that action before you become the next victim of RRC malpractice.

Hal at Half Empty wonders whether FEMA has finally taken a page out of George Orwell's book when they held a 'news conference' this past week without a single journalist in attendance.

WhosPlayin notes that he would gladly pay the $13.30 per year per person to pay for SCHIP.

McBlogger takes a look at the strange world of Focus on the Family and the very odd people that attended their Values Voters conference.

CouldBeTrue at South Texas Chisme notes that Gov. Perry appointed a public corruption figure to the UT System board of regents.

Johncoby at Bay Area Houston finds the highest and lowest costs for electricity in the Houston area in his post entitled "Power Watch: Highest and lowest rates for November".

Stace at DosCentavos features the trailer to the upcoming Jesse Salmeron film "This Is America", the story of a family torn apart by deportation.

NatWu at Three Wise Men exposes the truth about why we need net neutrality, especially with all the recent telecom shenanigans.

North Texas Liberal's Texas Toad gives a breakdown on the factions of the 'Trinity Vote' in his post entitled "Dallas Weighs Pros and Cons of Trinity Toll Road".

WCNews at Eye On Williamson wonders: What Will John Carter's Excuse Be This Time For Voting Against Health Care For Children?

Off the Kuff gives his recommendations for the state and local bonds and propositions.

NYTexan at BlueBloggin asks how many wars and how many enemies can Bush have?

Vince at Capitol Annex notes that Tom Craddick has borrowed a page from Warren Chisum in announcing that trial lawyers were behind efforts to remove him during the 8oth legislative session and wonders why, since he reported it some months ago, it is suddenly "news" to the mainstream media.

In the wake of the Houston Chronicle's announcement of a "position-elimination program", PDiddie at Brains and Eggs recounts his personal experience with Hearst newspapers, budgets, and staff cutbacks in The Trouble with the Newspaper Bidness.

Late Sunday Funnies

How conservatives use e-mail to advance smears and lies

Two more premises from the previous posting on the Christians and the Republicans deserve some further examination. First, the widely advanced postulate that Hillary hurts Democrats in ways that other candidates do not:

Many conservative Christian leaders say they can count on the specter of a second Clinton presidency to fire up their constituents. But the prospect of an Obama-Giuliani race is another matter. “You would have a bunch of people who traditionally vote Republican going over to Obama,” said the Rev. Donald Wildmon, founder of the Christian conservative American Family Association of Tupelo, Miss., known for its consumer boycotts over obscenity or gay issues.

In the Wichita churches this summer, Obama was the Democrat who drew the most interest. Several mentioned that he had spoken at Warren’s Saddleback church and said they were intrigued. But just as many people ruled out Obama because they suspected that he was not Christian at all but in fact a crypto-Muslim — a rumor that spread around the Internet earlier this year. “There is just that ill feeling, and part of it is his faith,” Welsh said. “Is his faith anti-Christian? Is he a Muslim? And what about the school where he was raised?”

“Obama sounds too much like Osama,” said Kayla Nickel of Westlink. “When he says his name, I am like, ‘I am not voting for a Muslim!’ ”

That last part is where we pause and consider just what conservative blind hatred blended with garlic-strength stupidity hath wrought: have you heard the one about Barack Obama being a Muslim? That he attended a "madrassa", a school for children associated with the radical Wahhabist sect?

On August 10, 2004, just two weeks after Obama had given his much-heralded keynote speech at the DNC in Boston, a perennial Republican Senate candidate and self-described "independent contrarian columnist" named Andy Martin issued a press release. In it, he announced a press conference in which he would expose Obama for having "lied to the American people" and "misrepresent[ed] his own heritage."

Martin raised all kinds of strange allegations about Obama but focused on him attempting to hide his Muslim past. "It may well be that his concealment is meant to endanger Israel," read Martin's statement. "His Muslim religion would obviously raise serious questions in many Jewish circles where Obama now enjoys support."

There's more about Andy Martin, but you can go to the link for that. We'll continue:

Within a few days of Martin's press conference, the conservative site Free Republic had picked it up, attracting a long comment thread, but after that small blip the specious "questions" about Obama's background disappeared. Then, in the fall of 2006, as word got out that Obama was considering a presidential run, murmurs on the Internet resumed. In October a conservative blog called Infidel Bloggers Alliance reposted the Andy Martin press release under the title "Is Barack Obama Lying About His Life Story?" A few days later the online RumorMillNews also reposted the Andy Martin press release in response to a reader's inquiry about whether Obama was a Muslim. Then in December fringe right-wing activist Ted Sampley posted a column on the web raising the possibility that Obama was a secret Muslim. Sampley, who co-founded Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry and once accused John McCain of having been a KGB asset, quoted heavily from Martin's original press release. "When Obama was six," Sampley wrote, "his mother, an atheist, married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian Muslim, and moved to Jakarta, Indonesia.... Soetoro enrolled his stepson in one of Jakarta's Muslim Wahabbi schools. Wahabbism is the radical teaching that created the Muslim terrorists who are now waging Jihad on the rest of the world."

On December 29, 2006, the very same day that Sampley posted his column, Snopes received its first copy of the e-mail forward, which contains an identical charge in strikingly similar language. Given the timing, it seems likely that it was a distillation of Sampley's work.

Yes, despite the e-mail that continues to be forwarded today, and the FOX and Friends news analysis (sic) and the Insight magazine article and the Townhall.com BS, Barack Obama did not ever attend a madrassa. Snopes.com painstakingly details how wild this exaggeration became (similar to Nigerian yellowcake, for example). CNN debunked it, and even FOX themselves corrected the smear, but the damage to fragile conservative minds, as you can see above, remains done:

Despite the fact that CNN and others have thoroughly debunked the smear, the original false accusation has clearly sunk into people's consciousness. One Obama organizer told me recently that every day, while calling prospective voters, he gets at least one or two people who tell him they won't be voting for Obama because he's a Muslim. According to Google, "Barack Obama Muslim" is the third most-searched term for the Illinois senator. And an August CBS poll found that when voters were asked to give Obama's religion, as many said Muslim as correctly answered Protestant.

Oh yeah. And the e-mail continues to circulate.

"Everybody started calling me" when the e-mail first made the rounds, Andy Martin told me. "They said, 'Hey, did you write this?' My answer was 'they are all my children.' "

Heard the one about Hillary Clinton snubbing the Gold Star Mothers? That John Kerry didn't earn his medals in Vietnam? That Al Gore invented the Internet?

Such is the power of the right-wing smear forward, a vehicle for the dissemination of character assassination that has escaped the scrutiny directed at the Limbaughs and Coulters and O'Reillys but one that is as potent as it is invisible. In 2004 putative firsthand accounts of Kerry's performance in Vietnam traveled through e-mail in right-wing circles, presaging the Swift Boat attacks. Last winter a forward began circulating accusing Barack Obama of being a secret Muslim schooled in a radical madrassa (about which more later). While the story was later fed through familiar right-wing megaphones, even making it onto Fox, it has continued to circulate via e-mail long after being definitively debunked by CNN. In other words, the few weeks the smear spent in the glare of the mainstream media was just a tiny portion of a long life cycle, most of which has been spent darting from inbox to inbox.

The profoundly uninformed, relying almost entirely on FOX and Limbaugh and Hannity for their "news", is at greatest risk for this kind of glaring ignorance:

For a certain kind of conservative, these e-mails, along with talk radio, are an informational staple, a means of getting the real stories that the mainstream media ignore. "I get a million of them!" says Gerald DeSimone, a 74-year-old veteran from Ridgewood, New Jersey, who describes his politics as "to the right of Attila the Hun." "If I forwarded every one on, everyone would hate me.... I'm trying to cut back. I try to send no more than two or three a day. I must get thirty or forty a day."

Do you have a Republican relative who forwards these, and other messages of similar intellectual laziness, to your inbox once a week or so -- which may be the only time they turn on their computer? Well, you're not alone:

Mike D'Asto, a 29-year-old assistant cameraman living in New York, received so many forwards from his conservative father he started a blog called MyRightWingDad.net, where he shares them with other unwitting recipients. "I suddenly have connected to all these people who receive these right-wing forwards from their brothers-in-law," D'Asto told me. "Surprisingly, a very large number of people receive these."

And that, as The Nation's Christopher Hayes notes, is the problem.

For conservatives, these e-mails neatly reinforce preconceptions, bending the facts of the world in line with their ideological framework: liberals, immigrants, hippies and celebrities are always the enemy; soldiers and conservatives, the besieged heroes. The stories of the former's perfidy and the latter's heroism are, of course, never told by the liberal media. So it's left to the conservative underground to get the truth out. And since the general story and the roles stay the same, often the actual characters are interchangeable.

Did you ever get the one about the Senator questioning Oliver North about a terrorist (who was named Osama bin Laden in the e-mail but in reality named Abu Nidal -- hey, they all sound alike, right?) In 2000, it was Gore; in 2004 it was Kerry.

"A lot of the chain letters that were accusing Al Gore of things in 2000 were recycled in 2004 and changed to Kerry," says John Ratliff, who runs a site called BreakTheChain.org, which, like Snopes, devotes itself to debunking chain e-mails. One e-mail falsely described a Senate committee hearing in the 1980s where Oliver North offered an impassioned Cassandra-like warning about the threat of Osama bin Laden, only to be dismissed by a condescending Democratic senator. Originally it was Al Gore who played the role of the senator, but by 2004 it had changed to John Kerry. "You just plug in your political front-runner du jour," Ratliff says.

So what can we expect for the next twelve months? Hillary's a lesbian? Check. Her husband still catting around? Roger that. Barack Osama hates America? John Edwards got an expensive haircut, and he and Al Gore are both gay and live together in a 40,000 square-foot house with a $10,000 monthly utility bill?

The next time you get one of these howlers in your inbox from you-know-which-relative, do two things: check out whether it's accurate at Snopes, and then send it back to the forwarder correcting their understanding.

Our republican democracy thanks you in advance.

The flock begins to scatter

The Christians are breaking up faster than the polar ice cap:

Today the president’s support among evangelicals, still among his most loyal constituents, has crumbled. Once close to 90 percent, the president’s approval rating among white evangelicals has fallen to a recent low below 45 percent, according to polls by the Pew Research Center. White evangelicals under 30 — the future of the church — were once Bush’s biggest fans; now they are less supportive than their elders. And the dissatisfaction extends beyond Bush. For the first time in many years, white evangelical identification with the Republican Party has dipped below 50 percent, with the sharpest falloff again among the young, according to John C. Green, a senior fellow at Pew and an expert on religion and politics. (The defectors by and large say they’ve become independents, not Democrats, according to the polls.)

Some claim the falloff in support for Bush reflects the unrealistic expectations pumped up by conservative Christian leaders. But no one denies the war is a factor. Christianity Today, the evangelical journal, has even posed the question of whether evangelicals should “repent” for their swift support of invading Iraq.

“Even in evangelical circles, we are tired of the war, tired of the body bags,” the Rev. David Welsh, who took over late last year as senior pastor of Wichita’s large Central Christian Church, told me. “I think it is to the point where they are saying: ‘O.K., we have done as much good as we can. Now let’s just get out of there.’ ”

This news may contain the fallen dry leaves of the GOP dynasty, or it may contain the seeds of John McCain's revival. Lots of insights; read it all.

Greg similarly recommends and suggests he may have more to say on the subject.

Early Sunday Funnies