PRAWN Blog

The Client List

2012-01-17T13:22:00.000-05:00

Interesting flick! Just saw it on a rental. Jennifer Love Hewitt plays someone who was the prettiest girl in high school, then a happily-married mother of three, then...a hooker! No question, Hewitt sure enough was a purty thang in I know what you did last summer, Heartbreakers (With Gene Hackman and Sigourney Weaver) and the TV series Ghost Whisperer, so I could see the role as being a natural for her in some respects. Before the movie goes into the sin, the downfall and then the redemption of Samantha Horton (Hewitt's character), she does something interesting, she adopts that good ol' American can-do, entrepreneurial attitude and gives some serious thought as to how she can improve her appeal and increase her share of customers. She comes up with an interesting answer.

BTW, I notice that the movie was apparently pretty successful as it's going to be a TV series!

Housing Crisis

2012-01-16T10:33:00.000-05:00

After President Obama settled the question of the stimulus (The stimulus didn't end the recession, but successfully prevented another Great Depression), he turned his attention to housing. With many millions of homeowners underwater on their mortgages or having difficulty keeping up payments on them, Representative Boehner of the Republican Party asked:

“Does your plan compensate banks for the bad mortgages they should never have made in the first place?” Mr. Boehner asked. “Will individuals who misrepresented their income or assets on their original mortgage application be eligible to get taxpayer-funded assistance?”

Obama had already shown he was sensitive to criticism concerning perceptions of excessive government spending and had acquiesced in reducing his stimulus proposal from $1.2 trillion to a little under $800 billion. An essential problem with that approach however, was and is that criminal fraud plays a very substantial role in the housing crisis.

Up until August 2011, all 50 State Attorney Generals were negotiating with five banks (Ally Financial, Bank of America, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo) that were accused of “robo-signing” documents and conducting illegal home seizures. In that month, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman decided to oppose what he felt was Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's undue haste in trying to get a settlement and to instead pursue criminal charges against the five banks.

This month, Schneiderman accused Bank of New York Mellon, the 11th-largest U.S. bank by assets, of "repeated fraud and illegality" when it came to its actions as a trustee for various mortgage securities, and he accused Bank of America of fabricating missing documents when foreclosing on some homeowners who defaulted on their mortgages.

Other State Attorney Generals have followed Schneiderman off of the settlement group. By October, the blatant illegality of what the five “robo-signing” banks were up to was becoming really plainly obvious:

A Florida lawyer says financial institutions, trying to rush through thousands of home foreclosures, hired hair stylists, Walmart floor workers and former assembly line employees to work as the "foreclosure experts" that have come to be known as robo-signers.

[…]

The testimony is from 150 robo-signers -- so called because some of them signed as many as 10,000 affidavits a month.

By November 2011, three other State AG's had left the group and the Obama Administration's responses were becoming increasingly unsatisfactory:

To date, the Obama administration has attempted a seemingly endless number of programs designed to prevent foreclosures and heal the housing market. Each has been introduced with great fanfare and as an innovation that will not suffer from the failures of the previous program. Each has then failed.

One of the casualties of the foreclosure crisis in late 2011 was a firm that threw a Halloween bash in which employees dressed up as people who had lost their homes. Thankfully, the firm went bankrupt three weeks later.

In December, the State AG's that were still part of the national settlement was only 43 as the number of drop-outs was now seven. Still more illegality had been uncovered:

A criminal investigator for the Nevada Attorney General’s office said that out of tens of thousands of documents from LPS that his investigation of the fraud examined, an overwhelming majority seemed suspicious.

“It’s hard to find [a document] that you wouldn’t be suspicious of,” the investigator said, adding that legitimate documents from the company seemed to be the exception instead of the rule.

It wasn’t just the signatures that were fraudulent. According to the investigator, some of the forged documents contained information that had not been verified by those signing them. This sometimes led to the wrongful foreclosure of houses because of the innacuracies [sic].

“One out of every 69 homes in America received a foreclosure filing last year,” and with “newly aggressive Attorneys General investigating, and a new Occupy Our Homes movement raising awareness of the crimes, I [FireDogLake blogger David Dayen] think that the prediction of a resolution to processing problems will be just as shortsighted as ever.”

Foreclosures have been a very serious problem, but much worse is down the road. “Foreclosures were in full delay mode in 2011,” which means that “only” 804,000 homes were repossessed and “foreclosure filings jumped 21 percent in the third quarter of 2011,” meaning that banks are clearing up their procedures and clearing their decks for many, many more foreclosures. We're expecting foreclosures to jump even further in 2012. “[T]he New York Federal Reserve anticipates that 3.6 million foreclosures will occur in the next two years.”

Thoughts on flyers

2012-01-03T20:06:00.000-05:00

From a Facebook buddy:

I think that a future event should have a well thought out flyer a month before event, to build up anticipation.

I agree completely. Having both produced and distributed many pre-event flyers, I believe each one needs the following elements:

Identification of the group(s) sponsoring the event (Many groups like listing all of their co-sponsors, as well)
Eye-catching graphic(s) - should be around a quarter of the page. Ken Heard feels children are necessary elements, I like flags myself, close-ups of people are good, pictures should be upbeat and on the cheerful side
Time/date/place event will take place
Sponsor contact information
Any specifics, such as if payment/contribution is requested

For most events, that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for much else. As flyers are also posted in coffee shops, churches, colleges, etc., we also have to make sure that the flyer is designed cleanly enough to be read at a fair distance.

Girl Scouts of America revives old dispute about objectivity

2011-12-31T14:24:00.000-05:00

Media Matters For America (MMFA) was cited by a Girl Scouts of America (GSA) guide to the media as a good fact-checking website to counter lies and misinformation in the media. Well, the right wing wasn't going to have any of that! As they're frequent targets of MMFA, they of course resented it's inclusion in the Girl Scout piece and especially the suggestion that it was a reliable source for girls and their parents. Quoted by MMFA from the Glenn Beck website:

Her daughter, Sydney, a 15-year-old who served as a Girl Scout for eight years, left the organization in 2010 after she found that it embraces some controversial stances. Now, Sydney co-edits "Speak Now: Girl Scouts Website," which provides plenty of other examples of what some may see as liberal bias.

Perhaps the Girl Scouts staffers were too busy to respond to us, but considering the fact that the Media Matters reference is, in itself, a form of misinformation, bias -- potentially even indoctrination -- we assumed that the book would no longer be on the market. But we were wrong. [TheBlaze.com, 12/27/11]

Steve Doocy of Fox News has a basic, fundamental objection to the Girl Scouts using MMFA, and that is that MMFA is "a site that is clearly with an agenda." So for an informational site to have a real point of view, to have an agenda even, is somehow inconsistent with being able to provide girls and parents with accurate information.

Problem: PolitiFact is considered to be a site that doesn't have an ideological point of view or any sort of agenda. Yet PolitiFact published their "Lie of the Year" and they named the Democratic Party assertion that Republicans, and specifically Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), want to "End Medicare." Turns out after a considerable amount of back and forth that PolitiFact now agrees that Democrats are charging Republicans with wanting to make such drastic changes to Medicare that it would be a program that would be essentially different from what it is now. PolitiFact appears to be really grasping at straws here and is trying to tell the public that there's a fundamental difference between "Ending Medicare" and "Ending Medicare as we know it."

So my question would be "What's so great about objectivity?" Isn't it better to have a site that makes no claims about being objective and above it all and to have no pre-concieved ideas about anything? Obviously, just because Politifact claims it's an objective source, that doesn't mean that they provide good, solid, reliable information.

Chris Wallace of Fox News purports to be an objective journalist, but the biggest problem with MMFA that he could come up with was:

But industry blog Mediaite says Media Matters has a, quote, "far left bent that is both transparent and indisputable." [Fox News, Special Report, 12/29/11]

Which again, is a "criticism" that causes many folks to dismiss MMFA out of hand, but I'm not really sure why having a "far left bent" is automatically disqualifying. My feeling is that if MMFA provides substantiated accusations, charges that are backed up with evidence, i.e., video, audio and photographs, and if they go the extra mile and provide contest for the accusations (Quoting whole paragraphs as opposed to just giving us the sentence or sentence fragments that are damning), well, what's the problem?

The Girl Scouts reportedly agreed that MMFA is not a source they should be using.

"Girl Scouts constantly reviews our materials based on feedback and suggestions we receive from our members and we update our materials on a regular basis," said the statement. "As a result of this process, upcoming reprints of journeys materials will not include links to Media Matters."

I see this far more as a matter of the GSA backing down to political pressure placed upon them by right-wing media figures than it is any sort of epiphany that MMFA really is biased.

Score another victory for right-wing pressure to conform to their idea of what constitutes "bias" and "objectivity."

Becky Sharp and evolution

2011-12-15T00:05:00.002-05:00

In the piece "Gay gene, deconstructed," the observations were made that:

Most scientists who study human sexuality agree that gay people are born that way. But that consensus raises an evolutionary puzzle: How do genes associated with homosexuality avoid being weeded out by Darwinian evolution?

Some gays and lesbians do reproduce, said Pennsylvania State University anthropologist and geneticist Mark Shriver, but not as much as straight people do. Even if a gene decreases people's fertility by 1 percent, it's going to be eliminated.

To which I answer "Becky Sharp." Was she the heroine of Vanity Fair? Hmm, "heroine" would be much too complimentary a term. "Protagonist" will do. Miss Sharp was a woman who very much enjoyed sex (It's made clear that her primary reason to marry the fellow she does is so she can have plenty of sex without the scandal of being a single woman doing so) and who bore a number of healthy children. Problem: She didn't particularly like children. She didn't enjoy spending time with children and greatly preferred the company of grown-ups.

Let's presume that that was the natural consequence of regular old human diversity and ask "How could such a gene survive?" Clearly, in an agricultural or an industrial society, it wouldn't. But in a hunting and gathering society, I can very easily see how people who were attracted to same-sex partners could ally themselves with the Becky Sharps of the world.

For humans, with their lengthy times for child-raising, producing the child is only a first step. To get a fully competent human being that can raise itself and take care of its own needs requires, what for any other mammal, would be a very extended period of care and devotion from at least one parent, but preferably from two of them.

In an agricultural or industrial society, a nuclear family is the preferred social unit because that's the ideal social group for assuring that material wealth is passed down from one generation to the next. Why don't we see nuclear families in hunting and gathering societies? That's easy, in that type of society, there's no material wealth to pass down.Everything that's used is taken directly from the environment and is easily replaceable.

Without being constrained by a nuclear family, where husbands and wives stay with each other and with their children, the Becky Sharps who don't like spending time with children can pass them off to a same-sex couple that is less likely to produce children themselves. The same-sex couple is then able to take over the job of raising the children that the Becky Sharps produce.

So, my theory is that the two types of people, women who produce children but don't like spending time with them and gay couples who are likely to produce fewer children than regular opposite-sex couples would, would ally with each other in a symbiotic relationship. Their own tendencies would complement each other.

Round-up of events - Nov 30th to Dec 9th

2011-12-09T14:54:00.001-05:00

Wow! Awesome speech by the President! After so many "populist" appeals by the Tea Party (Genuine populism takes the side of regular folks against billionaires, the Tea Party was largely founded by billionaires), the President makes a genuinely populist appeal to the American people! Naturally, a fellow on Fox News has a problem with it. Very interestingly, he tips his hand as to how weak his case against the President's speech is. The President is "quoted" as saying "Rugged individualism doesn't work." Did Obama actually say any such thing? Here's the part where Obama says "rugged individualism":

OBAMA: Now, just as there was in Teddy Roosevelt's time, there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let's respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. "The market will take care of everything," they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes -- especially for the wealthy -- our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else. And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn't trickle down, well, that's the price of liberty.

Now, it's a simple theory. And we have to admit, it's one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That's in America's DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. (Laughter.) But here's the problem: It doesn't work. It has never worked. (Applause.) It didn't work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It's not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the '50s and '60s. And it didn't work when we tried it during the last decade. (Applause.) I mean, understand, it's not as if we haven't tried this theory. [emphasis added]

Obama isn't saying that "rugged individualism" doesn't work, he's saying that trickle-down economics doesn't work. That's something entirely different from what the Fox News guy "quoted" the President as saying. This goes back to G.W. Bush and his constant "straw man" arguments. If an opponent has to make up straw men in order to make an argument, that indicates that they don't have any good arguments to begin with.

Right-wingers are now using urban legends to deny economic help to struggling constituents. People need help after being unemployed for months? Nah, right-wing Congresspeople are just contending that there are just too many lazy people collecting unemployment! How is that approach affecting the middle class? Very badly, as a matter of fact. Another urban legend appears to be the talking point that, by proposing to raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires, Democrats want to raise taxes on "job creators" and that small businesses in particular, would be devastated by those new taxes. Slight problem with that talking point:

We wanted to talk to business owners who would be affected. So, NPR requested help from numerous Republican congressional offices, including House and Senate leadership. They were unable to produce a single millionaire job creator for us to interview.

NPR lists several other groups they contacted to try and locate these elusive "millionaire job creators" but, amazingly enough, couldn't locate any [/snark]

Heh! Elizabeth Warren is doing extremely well in her campaign to replace Senator Scott Brown (R-MA), so well in fact that Karl Rove is tossing everything and the kitchen sink at her! His latest ad accuses Warren of approving of the TARP bailouts of late 2008 (After an ad accusing her of being too close to the Occupy Wall Street crowd failed miserably). Warren responds by noting that Rove gets the situation completely backwards and that, boy, he sure is getting desperate.

Republicans block nominee for Consumer Financial Protection Agency (The vote "lost" with 53 in favor against 45 opposed as 53 wasn't sufficient to break the Republican filibuster). Republican Senator openly admits that the nominee was qualified, but that he opposes the whole idea of the agency to begin with.

Politico shows itself to be an organization utterly without integrity. Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) presented a ludicrously half-baked mess of a plan to end Medicare and to replace it with a voucher system. Not only that, the system would diminish in value to senior citizens every year, leaving them increasingly unable to afford health care. Naturally, just about every Republican member of Congress voted for the idea, a vote that Democrats would do well to hang about their necks in 2012 as the idea quickly proved to be wildly unpopular. To the absolute delight of partisan Democrats, Mitt Romney has now wholeheartedly adopted the Ryan plan as his own.

And in cheerful news, a Fox News host has to back down after calling the Muppets a group of communists.

Round-up on the news 19Nov2011

2011-11-19T19:52:00.000-05:00

Very pleased to note that Democrats hung tough on the latest vote on the Balanced Budget Amendment.

In 1995, 72 of the 202 Democrats who voted crossed over and voted for the BBA. That’s quite a few, and it means that it wasn’t just conservative and Blue Dog Democrats; quite a few mainstream or even liberal Dems thought it was worth supporting for substantive or political reasons. Today, however, only 25 Democrats crossed lines to support the amendment, while four Republicans voted against it.

Yes, Democrats have previously gotten all wobbly-kneed, caved in and voted for packages that they considered insane, but lately, they're definitely learning and toughening up.

Bwah-hah-hah!!!! Michele Bachmann insists "I haven't had a gaffe." Uh, gee, some random, unknown person in a receiving line tells Bachmann that a vaccine causes mental retardation, so Bachmann insisted that this random person knew what she was talking about. Erm, slight problem, the claim is complete and utter poppycock. Rush Limbaugh even came to the defense of the vaccine, and when Limbaugh tells you you've "jumped the shark," you've really gone overboard! Oh, and her plan to run the government without taxing anybody was a good one! Bachmann's gaffes have been quite frequent.

Speaking of Limbaugh, the fellow got very confused and claimed that the former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was gay. No, gays, straights and lesbians all fall into the category of adults who make love to adults on a consensual basis. Rapists and pedophiles fall into a different category, that of people who abuse victims and who really couldn't care less what the gender of their victims are.

Thankfully, the Super-Committee/Cat Food Commission II seems to be headed for complete failure. The likely result is sequestration in 2013. Given that Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have declared, in response to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's claim that sequestration would result in a "substantial risk of not being able to meet our defense needs" that

"We are staunchly opposed to this draconian action. This is not an outcome that we can live with, and it is certainly not one that we should impose on ourselves. The sequester is a threat to the national security interests of the United States, and it should not be allowed to occur.”

In other words, sequestration is not a serious threat as these Republican Senators will clearly not allow it to gut their preferred programs. Unfortunately this is, by the count of the FireDogLake blogger, President Obama's fourth attempt at a "Grand Bargain." Sure would be nice if it were to be the last.

It's difficult to keep from sympathizing with Occupy protesters when law enforcement authorities get so completely out of control that they use pepper spray directly onto the faces of Occupiers who are just sitting there peacefully. Of course, pepper spray is torture and should never be used unless police officers are in extreme peril, a condition that very obviously did not apply in this case. Great picture from the same blog, by the way. What's the ultimate goal of the neoliberals who are the opposition to #OWS? Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam and the US have been negotiating, behind closed doors naturally, for a Trans-Pacific Partnership that would lock in many of the worst aspects of NAFTA, but in the Pacific instead of Central America.

And lastly, former Senator from Pennsylvania Rick Santorum, gets all philosophical and declares that, when contemplating the vast number of Americans who are getting food stamps as opposed to being able to work at jobs, that hey, well “suffering is part of life and it’s not a bad thing, it is an essential thing in life.” Um, yeah, considering that Santorum’s estimated net worth is between $880,000 and $1.9 million, this is a real generous, Christian attitude.

Occupy Philadelphia & Occupy Wall Street march in solidarity

2011-11-14T18:34:00.001-05:00

On the evening of Sunday the 13th of November, marchers from Occupy Wall Street (OWS) joined up with members of Occupy Philadelphia (OP) to collaborate in a night-time march. The OWS people were on their way to Washington DC to make it clear that "We are the 99%!"
As I've pointed out, that concept is a bit more complicated than just a matter of dollars one makes in a year. We of the 99% don't consider, say, the filmmaker Michael Moore to be a member of the 1%, even though he obviously makes enough money to qualify. The question is one of collaboration in neoliberalism (Don't think "liberal," think in terms of "capital wants to be liberated from all constraints!") and in trying to act in ways that are contrary to the interests of the rest of us, the regular people.
Of very great concern I think, and something that I find utterly baffling when I try to examine it through the lens of Democratic Party self-interest, is that the Democrats are prepared to help the Super Committee/Cat Food Commission II remain in existence past the statutory November 23rd date for the Commission to issue its report.
What's the point of the Commission? To try and tackle the deficit problem.
How many Americans give a rat's ass about the deficit? 6%.
Well then, what do Americans care about? Jobs. To get jobs, a strong majority supports raising taxes on the rich.
Does the Commission want to raise taxes on the rich? Ha, ha, ha! They'll do no such thing, of course.
Is the Commission in the pockets of the 1%? Yup. The Commission needs to be disbanded immediately. Neither regular citizens nor any members of the Democratic Party stand to gain anything whatsoever from its continued existence.

Update:
Two comments I thought were worth reproducing:
Occu-Posse….March to DC
Submitted by Baja K (not verified) on Mon, 11/14/2011 – 8:21pm
How to find out where and when the NYC to DC Occupy March will be?
Those who’d like to join for all or part of the march can’t do so if the info doesn’t get out there and spread around a bit ahead of time. Various “Occupy” sites may have this info but it’s hard to find.
Check out some old Hopalong Cassidy movies where his posse, galloping along to the rescue of something, was joined by another group of members, and then later by more, and then more and more and more till the whole screen was filled with the cowboy version of what the march on DC might be.
Think “Occu-posse”. Don’t confuse with the James Bond film of similar-sounding name.
————-
I though that was a pretty good question, so:

From a publication called The Root:

CBS is reporting that members of the Occupy Wall Street movement are heading to the nation’s capital. A group from the encampment in New York City’s Zuccotti Park are embarking on a two-week walk to Washington, D.C. They left at noon today and will arrive by Nov. 23, the day of the deadline for the congressional “super committee” to come up with its deficit-reduction plan.

RT.com says:

Organizers on the OccupyWallStreet.org website have revealed plans for Occupy the Highway: The 99 Percent March to Washington. Protesters will be playing in safe, however, and will ditch the major roadways in exchange for more pedestrian-friendly thoroughfares. They intend on leaving New York City Wednesday at noon and plan to march roughly 20 miles a day, stopping along the way in Trenton, Philadelphia, Baltimore and elsewhere before arriving in Washington two weeks later.

The Inky tries to explain Occupy Wall Street

2011-11-11T14:01:00.001-05:00

Raghuram Rajan, in the Inky of 11 Nov 2011 is absolutely correct, the Occupy Wall Street movement is using a rhetorical shorthand to describe what it's complaint with America's current status is and why they're out protesting. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement that began in the late 1950s, the opponents of Occupy Wall Street are in need of careful definition as the problem is nowhere near as obvious as it was for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers. The traditional media, of course, very clearly won't do that for us and those wanting clarity will obviously have to look elsewhere than into any daily newspaper or TV news show.*
The blogger and Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Juan Cole, has put out a piece describing the worldwide movement that Occupy Wall Street is a part of. Neoliberalism is the economic movement that wants capital and business to be liberated from government regulations and it both got Ronald Reagan elected President and greatly benefited from his administration. As Cole points out, the worldwide movement in reaction to neoliberalism encompasses not just the "Arab Spring" countries of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, but Chile, Spain and Israel as well as the United States.
It's irresponsible capital that seeks freedom from government supervision that's the problem, not merely those who earn lots of money. As Rajan makes clear, there are many people who earn lots of money that the Occupy Wall Street movement doesn't have a problem with. Rajan points to a long-term problem that indeed will require a coordinated effort from the whole of American society, but that particular problem doesn't explain why the Occupy Wall Street movement exists.

Update:

Further pieces defining who the 1% are and are not:

The people who tossed out Glass-Steagall are most definitely part of the 1% that we’re criticizing:
http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2011/11/clinton-and-gingrich-now-say-it-was.html
The wealthy people who are standing up with the 99% are very clearly not part of the group that we’re condemning:
http://firedoglake.com/2011/11/11/1-is-a-state-of-mind/

*As an example, the Inky ran a piece written by Senators Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) that was allegedly pro-litle guy and pro-small businesses, but the actual position they took was completely opposed to Net Neutrality. The piece was very shortly followed by a vote where all the Republican Senators voted against Net Neutrality, meaning the article was written in a deceptive manner, to suggest that the two Republican Senators were opposed to the interests of big corporations and in favor of small businesses.
In contrast to the assertions made by the Republican Senators, Internet program and content providers do not compete on an even playing field because of capitalism and competition, but because of government regulations. This is why the traditional media cannot be relied upon to accurately tell the public what the Occupy Wall Street movement is all about.

Fair Game

2011-10-30T20:51:00.000-04:00

Finally got to see the DVD of Fair Game, the story of the Bush Administration's rush to war against Iraq in late 2002, early 2003. Very good and no, it doesn't leave the slightest doubt that Bush's people knew full well that in the two cases the film looks at, the aluminum tubes (centrifuges or missile launch tubes?) and whether of not Niger sold raw uranium to Iraq, that the Bush Administration very consciously, deliberately and with malice aforethought, lied to get Americans enthusiastic about going to war with Iraq.
I had never before heard the exact reasons the CIA gave for not believing that the aluminum cylinders were for missile launch tubes as opposed to being nuclear fuel enrichment centrifuges, but in the film, the agents laughingly answer a Bush Administration official that the tubes that Iraq possessed were three to four times thicker and twice as long as centrifuges would have been. Makes sense, as centrifuges wouldn't need to be very thick, but a launch tube would need to be able to withstand a rocket going off inside it.
I could tell when Joe's article came out in late 2003 that there were lots of problems with the idea that Iraq got uranium from Niger (Joe Wilson pronounced it Ni-zheer, precisely to distinguish it from Nigeria). There are no railroads in that part of the world and the film specifies that it would have taken 50 heavy trucks to have carried a sufficient quantity of raw yellowcake uranium to have made a few bombs. I looked at a map and saw that it was 400 miles from the Southeastern tip of Niger to the nearest ports in Benin or Nigeria. The author Tony Hillerman wrote about people living in isolated areas such as one finds in Niger and Northern Benin and Nigeria. Hillerman wrote about two Apache detectives who lived in the American West. When vehicles in those isolated areas move, they get noticed and commented on. People in the Hillerman novels get asked if they've seen, say, a blue car going West. They usually remember just such a car and approximately when it passed. Even if Niger could have gotten all 50 trucks the 400 miles in one day (That of course, presumes really well-maintained roads), it would still take quite a while to get all the yellowcake offloaded from the trucks and loaded onto a ship. There's simply no way that even the most minimal due diligence wouldn't uncover all kinds of testimony and other evidence about such a large shipment. Even if satellites didn't pick up such a large movement for that region, spies in the ports would definitely have gotten lots of pictures of the loading. Obviously, the ship would have been carefully tracked and intercepted long before it got to Iraq.
I was surprised to hear that Valerie Plame Wilson (Played by Naomi Watts) didn't tell her husband (Played by Sean Penn) that she had informed her supervisors in the CIA that Joe had previous experience being a General Services Officer in the late 1970s to Niger. And no, I never believed for a single moment that she "sent" him to there. Her explanation that she merely suggested that "Oh, if we need someone to go to Niger, my husband has relevant experience being in that area." Joe didn't work for the CIA, he went voluntarily and Valerie wouldn't have had the authority to send him anywhere as she simply didn't play any such role in the CIA.
What was always the most ludicrous charge thrown against the Wilsons was that Valerie had sent Joe on a "junket." When I served in the Navy (1991-2001), I spent two years in the Mediterranean (1996-1998) onboard the USS LaSalle (AGF-3), the command ship for the Sixth Fleet. I certainly got to the big party/tourist ports, Venice, Italy; Cannes, France; Mallorca, Spain, etc. But I also got to some not-so-wealthy, not-so-touristy places, Constanta, Romania; Tunis, Tunisia and Poti, Georgia, among others. Now, if I were told by a US government official "Mr. Gardner, your country would appreciate it if you were to go to [one of these places to do whatever]", I'd salute, say "Aye-aye," get over there and make the best of it. But would I go to any of these places as though they were tourist destinations? Uh, hardly. There's a scene in the film where Joe turns on a tap and, instead of getting water, gets some sort of thick, black liquid. Clearly, Niger was not any sort of touristy kind of place that wealthy Americans or Europeans were visiting for the fun of it. So I never found it the slightest bit believable that Joe Wilson had set out to Niger for any reason other than what he said he was there to do, to see whether Niger had sent uranium to Iraq.
And yes, I agree with the films conclusion, that it's right for citizens to stand up when things are wrong and to publicly say so.I greatly appreciate both of the Wilsons for having done so.

British vs French or incrementalism vs overnight change

2011-10-26T14:23:00.000-04:00

Had an extensive debate with a fellow member of UFPJ-DVN on Facebook about his use of the term “Working Class,” he was using the term in its classical Marxian Das Kapital 1867 meaning, to denote those who work for, and get a wage from, those who own the means of production. I was using it to mean people who are wealthy enough to own homes as opposed to those who rent apartments.

The immediate, practical difficulty here is “What is going to work to advance our goals?” Is it going to help the movement to insist on Millennial goals, on trying to overthrow capitalism and to try and replace it with communism? I pointed out here that communism failed. Communism simply couldn't keep up with capitalism. Did it fall into the dustbin of history or, as Ronald Reagan and other right-wingers insisted, was it pushed by US military expenditures? My own interpretation is that it fell due to

the fact that it simply doesn't work for certain sectors of the economy. Government control works fine for health care and education as those two sectors don't act like markets, with competent customers making informed, unhurried decisions in a reasonably fair marketplace. When, on the other hand, one is purchasing shirts or houses or lawn mowers, markets work fine. Now, we saw with the Triangle Waist factory blaze that corporate capitalist enterprises simply cannot be trusted (Remember, the blaze occurred in 1911, many decades after corporate industrial capitalism began, so it's not like it wasn't given a chance to regulate itself) that the Federal Government must assume oversight of corporate enterprises to see that workers are protected.

I believe there is an inherent, inborn tendency towards wealth and property to concentrate, for a wealthy person with a lot of land to obtain more wealth and land. As the Bruce Springsteen song goes:

Poor man wanna be rich,
rich man wanna be king,
And a king ain't satisfied,
till he rules everything, ...

For those people with more modest means, they must occasionally struggle to keep what they have. These struggles started with the development of agriculture and I simply don't see them ever ending. In the Soviet Union, we saw the development of the nomenklatura, in China, they saw the Red-Hat Businessmen. In both cases, the group that had the most (In Marxian terms, they're referred to as the Ruling Class) morphed and changed shape and adopted new terms, but never essentially changed from what they always were. My own preference is for the term aristocracy as I consider that to be a more accurate and descriptive term.

So what's with the title of this post? As either a tween or as a young teen, I read a piece comparing what the author termed the “British” and the “French” method of social change. The French method was what my fellow member obviously prefers, a sudden, vast, overnight change from the old to the new. The British method, by contrast, was referred to as “muddling through.” It consists of moving incrementally, moving in a general direction as opposed to being focused on specific goals, trying one thing at a time, seeing how it works, modifying it if necessary and then moving again.

We all saw how the French Revolution worked, it very quickly resulted in bloodshed and empire and their defeat at the hands of foreigners and a return to the bad old days. The Netroots, on the other hand,

have been quite successful. Their electoral strength was shown first in 2006 by the defeat of Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary for Senator of Connecticut. It was very much a partial victory, one step forward, another step back, but Lieberman was no longer speaking with any credibility for the Democratic Party as Democratic voter had booted him out of the party. He was still able to do some damage to progressive goals, but not as much as he was doing before. The Netroots had handed over the day-to-day control of policy to our President, who went in a Blue Dog Democrat direction and promptly suffered losses in the 2010 midterm, but we're pushing back again with the assistance of the Occupy Wall Street people.

The anti-war movement has very definitely gone in the direction of incrementalism. We don't describe ourselves as being pacifists as that implies we have a fixed and rigid and unchangeable goal, but as people who oppose this particular war or that particular action. The ultimate shape of our proposed policies may resemble those of doctrinaire pacifists, but by showing how particular policies are bad or ineffective on a case-by-case basis, we build a far more credible case for the general public that we're taking a thoughtful, flexible approach to the issues of the day.

Our approach to economic issues is similar. We don't oppose the wealthy simply because they're wealthy. We oppose particular wealthy people because they're cheating and not following the “rules of the game.” England had to conduct several land reforms between the Norman invasion of 1066 and the switch-over to industrial society during the 1800s. Land had gotten too concentrated and was held by too few people, just as wealth today is far more concentrated than it should be, so land got broken up and moved into many more sets of hands. The redistribution of wealth that occurred after the crash of 1929 (Second chart on this page) was done in a far less conscious and deliberate manner, but resulted in many good things for people of regular income. What progressives today would really like to see is another version of land redistribution or a more conscious process of returning some wealth back to regular people, as was done via the Great Depression. Obviously, we'd like to do that without going through another Great Depression.

Entertainment - Vampire Diaries

2011-10-16T18:28:00.000-04:00

When I'm seeking entertainment, I have no desire to review issues that actually affect me. I don't have any desire to see shows or movies about people who are broke, I don't need to be reminded of that particular problem.
Now, in the latest Vampire Diaries, we have a blond vampire who's sleeping with a Latino werewolf, the brother of the series' heroine is caught up in a love triangle between his former girlfriend, who's now a ghost and his current girlfriend, who's a former witch. The fellow who's going out with the heroine is yer classic "bad boy," only much more so as he has the bad habit of biting and draining the blood of people he doesn't like (There are a lot of people he doesn't like as he's got a generally bad attitude). So you know, these are the sorts of problems I like seeing on TV, precisely because I'm most likely never going to run into them in real life. Falling Skies was also pretty cool for just that reason. Not much chance we'll have an alien invasion where our young people are drafted into picking up scrap metal and having the aliens carry off the metal back to their own planet. In the recently-canceled comics series Secret Six, a super-heroine was carrying on a kind of Romeo-and-Juliet sort of thing with a super-villain. It struck me that her hero buddies would probably be a lot more judgmental about her going out with him than his villain buddies would be about him going out with her.
Fun stuff to worry about and consider, precisely because I'm highly unlikely to ever run into such problems myself.

Privatizing education - a zombie idea that just won't die

2011-10-16T06:56:00.000-04:00

(I wrote this in response to a piece in the Inky, gave it to a buddy of mine to check and he never got around to reading it. With the news that Rupert Murdoch' of the News Corporation (NY Daily News, Fox News, Wall St. Journal, etc.) giving the keynote speech at an education summit, I've decided the piece is just too relevant to continue to hold back.)

Re: "School choice programs are making inroads" Aug 28

Y'know, it would sure be nice if the Inky would expand their explorations of certain issues beyond simply reprinting right-wing think-tank handouts. A perfect case in point is a piece from the Heritage Foundation "School choice programs are making inroads" that they published on August 28th. A better explanation of the article's thesis comes from a piece from a Heritage Foundation blog ("FamilyFacts.org: Education Spending Skyrockets While Achievement Remains Flat" March 29th of this year) makes the more detailed case that while spending on education has gone up, achievement by students has remained flat. The New York Times, however, took a detailed look ("Growth in Education Spending Slowed in 2009" May 25th) at why education spending has gone up.

As economists have pointed out, the main driver of the growth of federal budget deficits is America's health care system. Not surprisingly, health care for teachers and other school personnel is a major factor in the rise of schooling costs. We also might keep in mind the rise of mandates in education, things that parents would like to see schools do and teach. The Heritage Foundation blog is correct, there are many, many more persons working in positions in schools today that weren't there 100 or even 50 years ago.

As far as costs go, however, it's important to keep in mind that once a school has paid for things like their grounds, their building and their furniture, there are standard yearly expenses like books and uniforms and sports equipment and daily expenses like cafeteria food. But the vast majority of money was, and I believe still is, spent on salaries for the teachers, the administrative staff, the janitorial staff and others.

I worked as a secretary for a private school from 1985 to 1990. Computers were just beginning to become standard equipment (Popular use of the Internet was still a long way off) and I used a typewriter for most of the documents that I produced for some of the teachers. These included tests and student evaluations.

When, near the end of my time there, I brought in a laptop computer, I produced student evaluations for teachers faster and better, but as I had a lot of free time anyway (I got lots and lots of reading done on that job, sometimes finishing big hardback books in a week), it didn't make much difference to the workloads of the teachers. They still gave me drafts written in pen and I still typed them out on paper with carbons. Technology was a nice thing to have, VCRs were helpful and although photocopiers were in use, lots of paper reproductions were still done via the mimeograph (slide projectors weren't replaced with computer slideshows until long afterwards), but as teaching was mainly done through teachers talking to students from the head of the classroom and with students writing their thoughts and answers and essays on paper, technology didn't make a whole lot of difference to the teacher's workload.

Education simply is, was and always will be a very labor-intensive field. Obviously, money can make some difference, students can achieve more in a clean, well-lit and physically comfortable classroom then in a place where the roof leaks and books are in short supply. But once a certain level of spending is reached that enables classrooms to reach that level, a point is quickly reached where the school's spending hits the point of diminishing returns. At that point, money continues to be helpful, but ceases to be critical to whether a school can teach children effectively.

So the idea that the educational system is simply throwing money at the problem of bettering education is not very credible.

There's no question that the school choice movement is a growing one. The real question is why that is. From a generally rah-rah piece on privatizing schools ("Julia Steiny: The Excellent School-Choice Movement Accidentally Leaves Vulnerable Children Behind" June 9th):

Mind you, research shows that apart from a few truly great schools, the choice movement hasn’t boosted academic performance overall. Charter schools, for example, have roughly the same range of good, bad and indifferent as regular district schools.

And from a question and answer session with the Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute ("Frederick Hess: Questions and answers" January 23rd):

So far, charters have had mixed results. They haven’t been shown to be consistently better than traditional district schools...

A piece in Z Communications ("The History of the School Privatization Movement" March 15th) states:

However instead of improving funding to these struggling schools, the one intervention supported by statistical research, they continue to aggressively shift education funding from public schools to private charter schools – despite the Stanford study showing that charter programs don’t improve achievement levels...

So if proponents of charter schools/school choice aren't delivering better quality schooling for our youngsters, then what's the point? Z Communications makes the case that the movement is a neoliberal attack on liberal activist government generally.

It's a very generously-funded movement (Counterpunch "The Future of Charter Schools" August 26th, 2009) that forces teachers to be mere

...technicians, dispensaries of information for memorization purposes in accordance with the testing regime of NCLB

As I suggested in my opening, there is very considerably more to the school choice issue than any right-wing think-tank hand-out will ever tell you.

Of straw men and arguments

2011-10-10T15:46:00.000-04:00

George Will makes an interesting assertion in opposition to Elizabeth Warren's famous YouTube talk to a group of supporters:

Warren is (as William F. Buckley described Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith) a pyromaniac in a field of straw men: She refutes propositions no one asserts.

Let's look first at exactly what a straw man argument is. G.W. Bush was famous for using them. Bush would address and “refute” arguments that no one was making in the first place. Bush tackled the question that perhaps the Iraq War was making terrorism wordwide worse. There was strong evidence for this, as terrorist incidents worldwide shot up enormously after the Iraq War was launched. But Bush spent his answer insisting that US interests were attacked before the Iraq War was launched. That's all very fine and well and entirely true, but that didn't address the essential criticism, that the Iraq War increased terrorism.

Have right-wingers asserted the opposite of what Warren asserts, that when they build factories and turn out products, that they owe their success entirely to themselves? As a matter of fact, some commenters quoted by the right wing Instapundit do exactly that:

you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; No, you did not educate them. You babysat them for 12 years. Then I hired them, taught them how to be responsible and show up for work, taught them how to communicate in clear sentences, taught them that there are rights and wrongs and (unlike with your schools) wrongs have consequences in the workplace. Then paid for extended education for my employees so they could continue to improve themselves and better add value to what we do around here.

No, sorry, but when Warren's argument is met head-on and addressed directly by critics, it's not a straw man argument! George Will adds an interesting paragraph:

The collectivist agenda is antithetical to America’s premise, which is: Government — including such public goods as roads, schools and police — is instituted to facilitate individual striving, a.k.a. the pursuit of happiness. The fact that collective choices facilitate this striving does not compel the conclusion that the collectivity (Warren’s “the rest of us”) is entitled to take as much as it pleases of the results of the striving. [emphasis in original]

Of course, Will completely fails to tell us how on Earth government is supposed to “facilitate individual striving” without taking “ as much as it pleases of the results of the striving.” Government is supposed to build useful things for us for free? Sure, I'll go along with Wills' statement near the end of his piece:

Society — hundreds of millions of people making billions of decisions daily — is a marvel of spontaneous order among individuals in voluntary cooperation.

But where is society supposed to get the money to produce “such public goods as roads, schools and police” if society cannot “take as much as it pleases of the results of the striving”? The airy-fairy philosophy of Will falls apart on the practical question of “Where are we supposed to get the money to pay for all of this?”

A Review of Deena Stryker's Lunch with Fellini, Dinner with Fidel

2011-10-06T00:30:00.000-04:00

Ebook available from Girlebooks .

Full disclosure: I've known Deena for awhile, having worked on her website and I saw much of the material that she used in this, her autobiography, before she wrote it.

The theme of an independent woman, striking out on her own and blazing her own path is by now a familiar one, but this ebook is a very well-done tale of a woman doing just that in the early 1960s. Deena Stryker sets the tone of the book early on as she describes being 15 years old in 1949 and being on a train in Germany and being confronted by a train conductor over her lack of a “Tripartite Pass.” She never heard of such a thing before or since, but the way in which she handled her confrontation with the conductor was striking and showed someone who was ready to fearlessly confront the world.

Deena was aware of the “women's lib movement” in the early 60s, but didn't have a lot of contact with it. She spent most of her early decades shuttling around between her native Philadelphia, Europe (Paris, Rome and several countries behind the Iron Curtain) and Fidel Castro's Cuba. She gained great sympathy for the viewpoints of Communists. The Cuban government was so pleased with her piece on them in the French magazine Paris Match, that she was invited back to Cuba to conduct more interviews, but she was always more ideologically in tune with West European Social Democrats.

Before Deena went to Cuba, she wrote a book about the Italian film director Federico Fellini and followed him around while he made the movie 8 ½. She saw the making of the film in up-close detail, but was still quite impressed by Fellini's talent when she saw the film again 13 years later.

Deena has two sons, but she remained single. She made it into the US Government as a speech writer to the Assistant Secretary of State for Cultural Affairs under President Jimmy Carter. She lives today in Philadelphia and still keeps up with world and political affairs enough to maintain the blog http://otherjones.com/.

Decisions reached on Occupy Philadelphia

2011-10-04T23:49:00.000-04:00

The occupation will begin at City Hall at 9:00am on Thursday, October 6th. Come one, come all! Bring the kids, bring the grandparents, heck, bring the family dog!

Occupy Together has put together some down-loadable posters here.
Here are the Occupy Pennsylvania websites.

Now, I've always had a problem with the Cat Food Commission and don't have much use for Cat Food Commission II, or the Super Committee. But now it's become clear that the second iteration of the Cat Fod Commission is simply unable to produce a useful consensus. The Republican Party is holding firm on a no-cuts-to-the-military and no-tax-increases platform which means all of the automatic cuts will fall on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and any other socially vital program.
No, let's call for the complete elimination of the Commission.

The assault on the needs of regular people

2011-09-30T13:00:00.000-04:00

In their "Abbreviated Pundit Round-up" Daily Kos today details a few of the many ways Republicans are trying to cripple the government so that it's unable to assist regular citizens. One of the items that makes no logical sense from the perspective of regular taxpayers/citizens is Amtrak. The Staggers Rail Act of 1980 freed railroad companies to focus on freight lines and to pretty much ignore passenger rail via the founding of Amtrak. Passenger rail wasn't all that profitable as people appeared to prefer either driving for shorter distances or flying for longer trips. 9-11 led to increasingly tight and inconvenient rules for air travel (I had to dispose of several bottles of liquids before getting on a plane a few years ago, and no, the expense wasn't huge, but it was quite annoying to have to do that) and it made for lengthy delays at airports. Not surprisingly, that's led to increased popularity for Amtrak.

With other countries having high-speed rail, that's made airplanes even less appealing as long and medium-distance transportation. Could the US simply turn rail back over to private industry? Probably, but as the linked piece indicates, freight lines aren't really compatible with the new high-speed passenger lines.

[Freight railway] owners worry that the plans will demand expensive train-control technology that freight traffic could do without. They fear a reduction in the capacity available to freight. Most of all they fret that the spending of federal money on upgrading their tracks will lead the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), the industry watchdog, to impose tough conditions on them and, in effect, to reintroduce regulation of their operations.

Just seems to me that conservative/right-wing plans to destroy Amtrak would give America the worst of both worlds, we'd keep our annoying and inconvenient restrictions on air travel, but we wouldn't be able to just use Amtrak as an alternative. Would private service be cheaper? Probably, but that's not because private service is inherently better than government service. The main difference is that private lines could concentrate on medium-distance services of 50 to 500 miles and not have to worry about longer-distance lines of over 500 miles (The Boston to Washington Northeast Corridor is 440 miles long) whereas Amtrak has to run much longer-distance lines that run from California to Illinois or from Chicago to New Orleans. So yes, privatised rail service would see a big drop in costs for rail passengers, but those relatively few people who use long-distance passenger rail would get clobbered with either very expensive service or no service at all, being forced to go by air or having to drive.

Last night, I was at the public meeting that was considering an occupation of Philadelphia, modelled on the successful Occupy Wall Street action. As a traditional-news reporter was asking questions, it occurred to me that one of the major reasons I was so excited about it was that it pushes the Republican assault on government off of the front pages and that it drives the Republican/Tea Party-inspired drive for austerity and cutting the budget onto the back pages and out of peoples' view. If we can keep the attention of American citizens focussed on what we citizens need as opposed to what the plutocrats and oligarchs want, we're far more likely to succeed.

Living in the past

2011-09-23T11:55:00.002-04:00

Rick Santorum comes out strongly against gay and lesbian servicepeople being "out" and open about their sexual identities. His fundamental point is that military service has nothing to do with sexuality and that Soldiers, Sailors, Marines and Airmen should focus on their jobs and not bother with the distractions of wanting to get married or raise a family while in the service.
In the times that Santorum appears to be nostalgic for (No, Santorum never served in any branch of the military, so "nostalgia" is not really an accurate term), in the 2004 movie King Arthur, our heroes get drafted into the Roman Army for a term of 30 years. If they had sex lives at all during that time, it was expected to be with "ladies of easy virtue." If they sought to maintain a family on the side, well, they could probably have done so. Families in the old days didn't expect to receive any financial benefits from the Army. Families were expected to simply live off of what they grew or hunted and to simply do without a father and a husband (Female soldiers are, historically, an extremely recent innovation) for extended periods and well, if the soldier was lost in combat, the family would eventually learn about it from his buddies when the group got home.
Back during the late 90s, I believe it was a Marine officer who expressed the opinion that Marines simply shouldn't get married while on active duty. I can sort of, kind of see that for a four-year enlistee, but to expect a 20-year careerist to live that way is simply not taking into account the fact that families nowadays need to be supported by the family breadwinner. Families don't simply live off the land any more. American employees who worked on farms in 2010 were just a little over a million. Number of total nonfarm employees for the same period was up to nearly 138 million in 2008 and down to 129 million in 2010. Children need to be educated, they need to move on to college or graduate school if their families really want them to get ahead. Older parents get care these days, they don't simply die off when health problems come up.
Unfortunately for people like Santorum, these days, the American armed services need to involve themselves in family issues anyway. Dealing with gay and lesbian personnel is just one more issue that gets tossed onto a pile of many other issues. A look at the Armed Forces Crossroads website shows us that supporting families is hardly just a throw-away or side issue. It involves many, many people working full time on many different aspects of the non-military parts of servicemember's lives.
Update: Gotta love this piece from Washington Monthly. The blogger points out: "...because nothing says 'support the troops' like booing a U.S. Army serviceman currently in Iraq."

Blue Dogs and the budget

2011-09-14T23:42:00.001-04:00

A Blue Dog Democrat said:

"...we've got to get our fiscal house in order," Shuler said. "We're at 15 percent of GDP in revenue and 24 and a half percent of expenditures. You want to take that 15 percent to 13 percent and increase spending to 27 percent.... I've ran a business, that doesn't go good on my balance sheet. I'm in the red when that happens."

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities agrees with these percentages and also points out that the US is spending nearly half a trillion dollars on safety net programs. Where does our Blue Dog intend to make a cut so that our budget goes down from 15% to 13%? The safety net programs are a pretty tempting target because safety net money normally goes to constituents that don't write big checks to politicians, that the politicians then spend on re-election campaigns.

Well, aren't there expensive programs that everybody agrees aren't all that useful? Back in 1981, President Reagan's first year in office, there were a few small cuts that everybody could agree on. The US was publishing an estimate every year of how much coal remained in the ground. The estimate ran into the hundreds of years worth. That publication was canceled. Problem was, despite the Golden Fleece Award given out by former Senator William Proxmire (D-WI) from 1975 to 1988, there just wasn't much of what politicians refer to as "low-hanging fruit," so after mid-1981, there simply haven't been any serious budget cuts. There was a slogan that David Stockman, Reagan's first Budget Director, liked to cite "We're against weak claims, not weak clients." Great slogan, but one that was very difficult to stick with in practice, because those who write big checks for re-election campaigns have a pretty powerful and persuasive voice when it comes to budget priorities.

It's far from clear where Blue Dogs want to make cuts in the budget, but it does appear pretty clear that their preferred route is not to get more Americans employed, but to slash expenditures. As the Daily Kos piece says, what the Blue Dogs want is "not just bad politics, it's bad policy." The essential problem that Blue Dogs don't appear to understand is that the government is not a business.

Governor Rick Scott of Florida (R), tried to run Florida's government as though it was just another private, for-profit corporation and quickly learned that

The inclination is to give a new governor the benefit of the doubt and let him settle into office a bit. Scott squandered that with his arbitrary decisions and disregard for other institutions, including the Cabinet, Congress, the voters and the media.

Scott is used to running an enterprise as a one-man show, where he's not answerable to anyone. State governments don't work that way and there's no reason they ever should. It's extremely important to remember:

Democratic Government is not structured to make a profit. It's job is to spend the pooled contributions of the citizens (taxes) to provide services to those citizens - health, education, defense, infrastructure. There is no profit, as we, the People, are supposed to run this country, and are not selling these services to ourselves.

It's simply a contradiction for the Democratic Party to include Blue Dogs, who just don't appear to understand this. There's a very strong argument that the Democratic Party has been too much of a big tent party and that it needs to shrink down by kicking all of their Blue Dog Democrats out. Let those guys form their own party. Will that make Democrats a minority? Probably, yes. The advantage, however, is that Democrats would speak with one, consistent and unified voice. In contrast, what we have is a party where someone says something like this:

I am a former prosecutor. I put people in the electric chair. I have a gun. I believe in capital punishment. I believe in this war on terror. And I'm a Democrat.

As Digby says:

According to this fellow, I'm not a member of the Democratic Party and nobody gives a damn what I think. I get that, and I believe it. But considering his list of identifiers there, the real question is, why is he?

As to the policy front, the contractionary austerity policies that Blue Dogs appear to favor is opposed by no less an institution than the International Monetary Fund (IMF). As an anti-globalizer, (A popular policy position in the 1990s-early 2000s, it's very highly skeptical of the financial sector and strongly suspects that the MOTUs don't really know what they're doing, but capitalism is far from dead or useless) is a political position that I strongly identify with and the IMF has long been a e-e-evilll boogeyman to the anti-globalization movement, so I thought it was very interesting to see the IMF put out a very useful and informative study of contractionary policies. The IMF looked at 173 instances in 17 countries to gauge the effectiveness of contractionary or "consolidation" policies.

The challenge facing the United Kingdom and many advanced economies is how to bring debt down to safer levels in the face of a weak recovery. Will deficit reduction lead to stronger growth and job creation in the short run?

Recent IMF research provides an answer to this question. Evidence from data over the past 30 years shows that consolidation lowers incomes in the short term, with wage-earners taking more of a hit than others; it also raises unemployment, particularly long-term unemployment.

In other words, no, contractionary policies are pretty worthless. The IMF was unable to identify any positive results from those 173 instances. The recent orgy of budget-cutting in the US has been followed by an economic downturn, with employment gains going flat. There's nothing mysterious or coincidental about that. One led very directly to the other.

Seriously, there's absolutely no reason for liberal Democrats to do anything to keep Blue Dogs in the party.

Just thought I'd point out...

2011-09-12T14:39:00.002-04:00

Charles Krauthammer today credits the Iraq War with having damaged al Qaeda:

Iraq, too, was decisive, though not in the way we intended. We no more chose it to be the central campaign in the crushing of al-Qaeda than Gen. Dwight Eisenhower chose the Battle of the Bulge as the locus for the final destruction of the German war machine.

Al-Qaeda, uninvited, came out to fight us in Iraq, and it was not just defeated but humiliated. The local population - Arab, Muslim, Sunni, under the supposed heel of the invader - joined the infidel and rose up against the jihadi in its midst. It was a singular defeat from which al-Qaeda never recovered.

Slight problem here, though. The Council on Foreign Relations gives us the history of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and well, er, um, it's really not quite so clear that AQI was a part of al Qaeda that existed prior to the invasion of Iraq.

Ahead of the 2003 invasion, U.S. officials made a case before the UN Security Council linking AQI with Osama bin Laden. But a number of experts say it wasn't until 2004, when Zarqawi vowed obedience to the al-Qaeda leader, that the groups became linked. "For al-Qaeda, attaching its name to Zarqawi's activities enabled it to maintain relevance even as its core forces were destroyed [in Afghanistan] or on the run," observed (PDF) al-Qaeda expert Brian Fishman in 2006. Fishman, formerly with the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy, says the relationship eventually broke down when Zarqawi ignored al-Qaeda instructions to stop attacking Shiite cultural sites.

Sorry Charlie, but your theory's a bust. Had there not been an Iraq War, there never would have been an AQI. The defeat of AQI was hardly a defeat for al Qaeda.

Turkey vs Israel over Gaza

2011-09-11T00:19:00.000-04:00

I was curious to read in a Trudy Rubin column that Turkey and the Palestinians of Gaza had been given a good offer by the UN and that they should have taken it up. The offer concerned the "US Ship to Gaza" or the "Freedom Flotilla" that had as its flagship the Mavi Marmara. I was especially struck by these passages: Israel had a "right to impose and enforce a naval blockade on Gaza" and "As the panel makes clear, Israel had a legal right to search the ship, but made a bloody mess of it."

In May 2010, the Mavi Marmara was about 80 miles from shore and Israel had a 12-mile limit, but there's no question that it was headed for Gaza. Israel's right to intercept and detain any ship attempting to break the siege or blockade of Gaza is hardly clear at all. Guests of the radio show Democracy Now, Huwaida Arrat and Norman Finklestein, strongly dispute that Israel had any such right.

Essentially, the proposed compromise is that Israel could check incoming shipments for weapons, but could not otherwise stop imports. That has the problem of defining a weapon. According to Israel, cement (Freedom Flotilla II had lots of cement onboard), which is widely used as a construction material for housing in the region, is also useful for constructing fortifications. The distinction between imports via land and via sea differ only in that imports via land can be checked more easily.

The UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories writes for Uruknet that, in the case of the report of the Palmer panel, that "the report failed to address the central international law issues in a credible and satisfactory manner."

But to be satisfactory, the report had to interpret the legal issues in a reasonable and responsible manner. This meant, above all else, that the underlying blockade imposed more than four years ago on the 1.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza was unlawful, and should be immediately lifted. On this basis, the enforcement by way of the 31 May attacks were unlawful, an offense aggravated by being the gross interference with freedom of navigation on the high seas, and further aggravated by producing nine deaths among the humanitarian workers and peace activists on the Mavi Marmara and by Israeli harassing and abusive behavior toward the rest of the passengers. Such conclusions should have been 'no brainers' for the panel, so obvious were these determinations from the perspective of international law as to leave little room for reasonable doubt.

China's news service says that "Ankara announced a series of measures against Israel, which included downgrading Turkish-Israeli diplomatic ties to the second-secretary level, suspending bilateral military agreements, and demanding a review of the Israeli blockade of Gaza by the International Court of Justice."

Jonathan Chait's case for Obama

2011-09-05T22:16:00.000-04:00

I guess what really annoys me about the last paragraph in Jonathan Chait's “What the Left Doesn’t Understand About Obama” (Sep 2), is that the piece as a whole reminds me of how my brother-in-law described Colin Powell's 2003 speech at the UN, warning us all of Iraq's mythical Weapons of Mass Destruction. He told me that “Yeah, it was real convincing, provided of course, that you had no prior knowledge of the debate and had no knowledge of the issues. Other than that, yeah, it was really persuasive.”

Chait's final paragraph was:

Liberal critics of Obama, just like conservative critics of Republican presidents, generally want both maximal partisan conflict and maximal legislative achievement. In the real world, those two things are often at odds. Hence the allure of magical thinking.

This might be convincing if President Obama had truly “left everything on the road,” had he truly made a genuinely maximal effort to achieve the goals he said he was committed to. “Liberal critics” were very much aware that the legislative option of “reconciliation” was available for passing the Affordable Care Act in the Senate, meaning that it was completely unnecessary to have a supermajority of 60 Senators to bypass the Senate's filibuster rule (The House operated by plain old majority rule, so there was no need for any bypassing there). The filibuster is, by the way, nowhere mentioned in the Constitution. Chait's statement:

Yes, Bush passed his tax cuts — by using a method called reconciliation, which can avoid a filibuster but can be used only on budget issues.

But that's a rather bizarre observation, considering that reconciliation was used after the Senate passed the Affordable Care Act, but before it went to the House for final passage of various fixes. It simply wasn't necessary for Obama and his people to permit the Blue Dog Democrats to act as though they had veto power over what went into, and what got thrown out of, the bill. Sure, Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) was a terrible fellow for getting the public option deleted from the ACA, but Speaker Pelosi made it clear that, although she was in favor of re-introducing it “...the Obama administration [had] shown no interest in the public option over the past year.“

Yes, President George W. Bush conducted a PR campaign to gut Social Security and feed it to the sharks of Wall Street, but I paid pretty close attention to the 2004 campaign for Bush's re-election, but after that campaign and vote, the introduction of his plans concerning Social Security came as a complete surprise to me. Bush had successfully convinced America that Senator John Kerry (D-MA) couldn't be trusted to be our President, but that's pretty much all that the 2004 campaign was about. It was also clear that Bush wanted to continue the Iraq War and that Kerry was a bit less enthusiastic about that, but Social Security was simply never an issue in the campaign. So yes,

Bush did have one episode where he tried to force through a major domestic reform against a Senate filibuster: his crusade to privatize Social Security. Just as liberals urge Obama to do today, Bush barnstormed the country, pounding his message and pressuring Democrats, whom he cast as obstructionists. The result? Nada, beyond the collapse of Bush’s popularity.

But this episode says absolutely nothing about the filibuster and nothing about the ability of Presidents to force Congress to do as they urge it to do through PR campaigns. If Bush had a mandate, if he was describing reality by saying "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style." then yes, one could draw conclusions about how effective it is to barnstorm the country on a PR campaign. But a far better example would be Harry Truman's Whistle-Stop Tour, where he reminded the public what the Democratic Party stood for:

I'm asking you just to read history, to use your own judgment, and to decide whether you want to go forward with the Democratic Party or whether you want to turn the clock back to the horse and buggy days with such people that made up that "do-nothing" 80th Congress.

That Congress tried its level best to take all the rights away from labor. That Congress tried its level best to put the farmer back to 1932. That Congress tried its level best to put small business out of business. For what purpose? To help the big interests which they represented.

Note that Truman was successful precisely because he wasn't trying to ram through a deeply unpopular proposal. He was, instead, reminding people of what they already liked about the Democratic Party. Sorry Chait, but if Obama tours the country, advocating a jobs program, then I think Obama's job would be far more similar to Truman's tour than to Bush's.

Perhaps the oddest feature of the liberal indictment of Obama is its conclusion that Obama should have focused all his political capital on economic recovery. “He could likely have passed many small follow-up stimulative laws in 2009,” Jon Walker of the popular blog Firedoglake wrote last month. “Instead, he pivoted away from the economic crisis because he wrongly ignored those who warned the crisis was going to get worse.”

Nothing the slightest bit “odd” about it. Historically, a high unemployment rate has doomed presidential re-election chances. Getting Americans back to work was and remains a top-of-the-line political priority.

Rather than deploy every ounce of his leverage to force moderate Republicans, whose votes he needed, to swallow a larger stimulus than they wanted, Obama clearly husbanded some of his political capital.

Sorry, but I saw that in early 2009 and continue to see it today as an extremely poor strategic choice. That political capital did Obama no good whatsoever in passing the ACA and winning over “moderate” Republicans (Whose voting records tend to be indistinguishable from their more hard-line colleagues in any event) has been a complete bust. Obama saved his political capital for nothing.

But by far the most serious problem, as the economist Brad DeLong points out, was that Obama pivoted to deficit reduction far, far too early. Appointing the Bowles-Simpson Deficit Commission (Progressives popularly refer to it as the “Catfood Commission” and it's second iteration, the “super committee” created by the debt-limit deal, as “Catfood Commission II”) was a true stinker of an idea that, among many other problems, made it politically impossible to ask Congress for another stimulus without the Obama Administration appearing to be a bunch of incompetents. This was an entirely unforced error that has severely hamstrung the Obama Administration, turned them away from their own best interests and aided and abetted their political opposition by making it appear that their favorite issue since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, deficit reduction, was more important than putting people back to work, addressing Global Warming or addressing Peak Oil. All three of these issues are many, many times more important than deficit reduction is, was or ever will be.

No, I disagree with Chait's title, I think the left understands Obama just fine. Obama's a moderate Republican. He's in the wrong party and his errors have probably made a second term impossible. He needs to disband Catfood Commission II and he needs to adopt a full-blown campaign to get Americans back to work. He needs to put deficit reduction on the far, far back burner until other priorities are addressed and are well on the way to being solved.

Cowboys & Aliens

2011-09-04T00:26:00.002-04:00

Good stuff. Takes a while to really figure out what's going on, so patience is definitely called for. Definitely a surprise to see Harrison Ford playing the role he does. Reminds me of the comics series Secret Six (Group shot of them) in that heroes and villains are all mixed up.

Sympathy?

2011-08-28T14:37:00.001-04:00

Should we feel any sympathy for former President George W. Bush?

By that time, W. had belatedly realized that Cheney was a crank whose bad advice and disdainful rants against “the diplomatic path” and “multilateral action” had pretty much ruined his presidency.

There were few times before the bitter end that W. was willing to stand up to Vice.

I'm remembering that "W." had pretty much the same reaction to appointing John Bolton to be our UN Ambassador, standing with him and against his many critics and finally realizing and lamenting that "I spent political capital for him." No, 'fraid to say my sympathy for G.W. Bush could barely fill a thimble.

Cheney was the one who struggled for months with the Department of Justice over the warrantless surveillance program. Bush was finally informed that officials from the DOJ were prepared to resign as a group over the program's blatant illegality, but he had to do a lot of frantic catch-up because Cheney had kept him completely in the dark about it. Even the President's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and the President's Counter-Terrorism Adviser, Frances Townsend, had very little information about the program.

Former General and Secretary of State Colin Powell is unimpressed with Cheney's "Heads will explode" statement, comparing it to a statement one might find in a supermarket tabloid. Lawrence Wilkerson denies that the Bush Administration continued torturing suspects after the Abu Ghraib photos came out. Gee, if Cheney's favored methods of getting information was so amazingly successful, then why did the Bush Administration feel so free to so completely discard such methods?

--------------
Unsurprising update: Condoleezza Rice strongly disagrees that she "tearfully" said anything to Cheney at any time. That description from Cheney struck me as wishful-thinking, after-the-fact revisionism the moment I heard it.

Colombiana

2011-08-27T14:56:00.000-04:00

Very cool flick! Question though, is Colombiana a superheroine? It's not like she explicitly has any superpowers, but her exploits are so fantastically amazing early on, I was completely prepared to exercise suspension of disbelief in later scenes. One of the last scenes, though, is good in that restores a real sense of humanity and realness to the character. She emerges all disheveled and ragged looking, so I accepted that "No, no the character really went through all that and survived solely because she's just an amazing ninja babe-type character."

Just as I said

2011-08-26T12:51:00.002-04:00

In former Vice-President Dick Cheney's book, we learn:

The book opens with an account of Mr. Cheney’s experiences during the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when he essentially commanded the government’s response from a bunker beneath the White House while Mr. Bush — who was away from Washington and hampered by communications breakdowns — played a peripheral role. (emphasis added)

Of course Bush was reduced to playing a peripheral role! As I said back in 2005 (I said it as early as 2002, but this is the earliest point in my blogging that I can locate this statement):

My conclusion that during 9-11, the President should have gotten himself to a command post, either at a base, to Air Force One or onto a ship is based on my Damage-Control experience.

And:

There are two reasons for the President to get to a command post:

Safety. A ship or a plane can get underway or take off and can promptly be surrounded by escorts, i.e. other ships and planes. Military bases are normally placed in safe, defensible areas and the base command post is usually well inside the base, able to be surrounded by troops. Of course, there's a reason to want the President to be safe. Being safe is not an end in itself. The President is only one person and there are 250 million other people in the United States for us to worry about. Accordingly, we're concerned about:
Communications. The other primary reason is so that the President can communicate with the Armed Services. Not just one-way communications. Both directions are needed. The President must be informed in real time as to what's going on and he should respond in real time so that the proper orders can be issued. An example would be during the September 11^th attacks in 2001.

As I said, for Bush to fail to get himself to a command post on the morning of 9-11 constitutes what the UCMJ refers to as Dereliction of Duty. When the President fails to do his job, that's when unauthorized people get the chance to muck things up.

Heated comments

2011-08-23T17:09:00.001-04:00

Rick Santorum made some rather angry-sounding, heated comments about Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA). Waters had pressed for job-creation policies and used some rather heated language herself:

"This is a tough game," she explained. "You can't be intimidated. You can't be frightened. And as far as I'm concerned -- the 'tea party' can go straight to hell."

Why is Waters so angry? A lot of her frustration actually has to do with the President.

...Illinois Democrat Jesse Jackson, Jr. says he understands her frustration. “President Obama got 96 percent of [the black] vote but he isn’t dealing with our biggest problem—unemployment—which is more than twice that of whites,” Jackson told Colorlines.com...

And

The Los Angeles representative was unhappy that the president chose to take his recent bus tour through Midwestern rural areas instead of urban centers where blacks live...

Co-founders of the Tea Party Patriots are very unhappy with her remark, of course, and they condemned her remark and asked "Is civility required only of their opponents?" Santorum added:

"She's a caricature of what's wrong with Congress," Santorum told conservative radio host Steve Malzberg. "She's vile. She's always been that way, and she's just one of these real, real nasty, you know, anti-basic traditional, fundamental values of this country."

"This is the left in America. They absolutely despise, you know, the founding principles of this country, that believes in free people, that believes in limited government. She is someone who believes she should control what's going on in America, that she knows best, and that people that stand by constitutional principles of limited government are folks who are to be condemned."

Whoof! Did we get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?!?!? "Vile"? But what I found especially interesting here is his apparent defense of Herbert Hoover-type policies as opposed to Franklin Roosevelt-type policies. Problem is, if Hoover-type policies were so effective, why aren't Republicans claiming that they're working just fine? It probably doesn't help that economic indicators are getting softer as Republicans pass their 200th day in control of the House of Representatives. Housing sales are off. The economy is dipping. A blogger looks at a growing company (Apple) versus a shrinking company (Eastman Kodak), compares US economic policy to Kodak's and concludes that both the US economy and Kodak are showing poor morale and an aversion to risk that augur poorly for the future. Will the "super committee" created by the debt-ceiling deal accomplish anything? Probably not.

So, I have a feeling that if "basic traditional, fundamental values" were doing well, Santorum wouldn't be nearly as upset. If doing essentially nothing were causing the economy to pick itself up, then Santorum would be much easier and breezy about Waters' criticism. As it is, Santorum sounds pretty bent out of shape about it.

False equivalence

2011-08-14T21:19:00.000-04:00

This is the most maddening of the Washington DC press corps' failings, this constant resort to false equivalence, the idea that "both sides do it." The conclusion of this constantly-repeated tale is, of course, that the "Goldilocks" conclusion gets continually reinforced, the idea that if "this bowl is too hot (or leftist) and if this bowl is too cold (too right-wing) then the one in the middle, the "sensible" centrist, must be just right."

Matt Bai of the WaPo examines the Republican debate of August 11th and writes a few very sensible paragraphs about how extremely reactionary the candidates all are on taxes. But then he veers off the rails with this abominable paragraph:

If this were merely a Republican phenomenon, the party would be alone in suffering the wrath of the average American voter. But it isn’t. You could have put a lot of Washington Democrats up on that stage, and asked them if they would have accepted $10 in new taxes or new stimulus in exchange for $1 in cuts to Social Security, and you probably would have gotten much the same response: hell, no.

Nonsense. The Democratic Party is nowhere even near as fanatically stubborn on any issues as the Republicans are on just about anything. The reason the Republican Party is not "alone in suffering the wrath" of the voters is (And Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell understands this very well) is because voters can only spend so much time and attention to understanding political issues. If outlets like, say, Fox News take up some of that limited time with a lot of lies, then only a small minority of voters truly understands what goes on. Voters understand that our political system is deeply dysfunctional, but not necessarily why that is. If the average voter were truly well-informed and had the time and motivation needed to truly understand the issues, then Bai's analysis would be correct.

As a direct consequence of Bai's mis-reading, he then moves on to reach more incorrect conclusions:

And this is the central disconnect between Washington and the broad center of the country, the source of all that fury you see in the polls. Fewer and fewer Americans engage as activists in either party, which means that primaries are financed and waged primarily by the ideological extremes on either side.

There is no "broad center." Voters may not have any idea as to where they are on the political spectrum, but they have definite opinions as to what the right answers are. If they're given a set of questions and one then scores their answers on a right-left scale, Americans are a pretty leftist lot. True, both sides during primary votes are dominated by motivated, high-information voters, but Bai can't demonstrate, with actual, concrete examples, that Democrats are as equally ideological or intransigent as Republicans are. In order to maintain his narrative (that is based on a false equivalence), Bai has to be completely incoherent about the President. In one sentence, voters are "losing faith because [Obama] got rolled, and they’re still looking for someone — as they were in 2008 — who has the strength and shrewdness to reform the system." In a later sentence: "At least Mr. Obama seems determined to seek a grand compromise on cuts and revenues that would change the nation’s fiscal trajectory."

Erm, sorry, but "getting rolled" doesn't sound to me as though it's equal to having the "strength and shrewdness to reform the system" and wow, would anyone trust such a person to seek a "grand compromise"?!?!?! Going for a "grand compromise" and "getting rolled" sound to me like a surefire formula for a grand failure! How in the heck does all of that work in one package? Once one starts off one's analysis badly, one just goes downhill from there.

Status of my car

2011-08-08T17:21:00.000-04:00

Okay, the car is fixed and I'm mobile again. Whew! Price was kinda “Yikes!” but I managed it.

Toyota, where I brought the car, had been sending me notices about having to get an inspection, so they were my first choice for getting the car repaired: “Oh, sorry, we're backed up for a week. We can't get to your car until at least the 15^th.” Shriek!

Fortunately, I decided several years ago that I didn't want to be dependent on just one shop, so my brother-in-law introduced me to the shop he used. They were the guys I called. By early afternoon, the car was fixed. The big shops and malls certainly have their place, but so do the littler guys. For instance, I tend to buy computers at big computer places, but I like getting the upgrades and improvements at the smaller shops.

Glenn Beck and historical accuracy

2011-07-20T10:22:00.000-04:00

Sorry, but the history major in me just couldn't resist when I read this:

Russia and China and Saudi Arabia -- Saudi Arabia is so upset with us right now and our president that Saudi Arabia is negotiating a deal with China for their oil. What do you think is going to happen with that one? And these three are really critical. Nobody ever -- nobody ever thought these countries could come together and form any kind of alliance. And the reason I say nobody ever thought it is because people have been looking for these three to bring an alliance together for thousands of years.

Okay, I'm reading the book The Great Game, the story of the fight by Great Britain to prevent Russia from capturing India during the 1800s and the early part of the 1900s. The distance between Baku, Russia and Rawalpindi, Pakistan is about 1300 miles. Now this was considered a really, really lengthy distance in those days, especially when traveling by land. It took several months of travel on horseback to cover this kind of distance and the book relates several stories of how difficult it was for travelers to sustain themselves over several stretches between cities in this region. Yes, the Mongols swept across the plains of Central Asia centuries earlier, but keep in mind that the Mongols traveled very lightly and lived off the land. They didn't need to maintain supply lines back to Mongolia.

Naturally, travel via ship or railroad was faster. Ships were around for several thousand years beforehand, but that mode of travel wasn't exactly speedy and they couldn't carry a whole lot. In the 1600s, a voyage across the Atlantic in ships that typically displaced from 150 to 200 tons of water (A guided-missile cruiser today displaces 9,600 tons) could take from 47 to 138 days. By the 1870s, ships had gotten quite a bit faster and, with a good wind, could make up to 50 miles an hour.

Railroads are a pretty recent invention, the first one came about in 1830. By the time of America's Civil War, they were in very wide use, but the Russian Trans-Siberian Railroad wasn't ordered completed until 1891, meaning China and Russia couldn't very easily communicate until then. Rail lines in Saudi Arabia weren't put in until 1951.

The distance between Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and Baku is less, only 1100 miles and the distance between Baku and Kunming, China is nearly 3200 miles. Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to Kunming is a bit under 3500 miles. So, the idea that Russia, China and Saudi Arabia could easily communicate and send armies back and forth is a complete fantasy. Kievan Rus was a powerful state from the late 900s right up until they were conquered by the Mongols in the early 1200s. Ivan the Terrible wasn't crowned the first Tsar until 1547 and Russia, the successor to Kievan Rus, wasn't considered a serious power until then. Under Peter the Great, Russia was declared an empire in 1723. It's appropriate to say Russia was truly an actor on the world stage at that point.

China was a great power going back around 4,000 years, but the Opium Wars with Britain in the early 1800s demonstrated that the Industrial Revolution of the West had passed China by. China didn't begin to regain international relevance again until Mao Zedong's Communist Revolution of 1949.

Erwin "The Desert Fox" Rommel, the German general who ran the German-Italian "Afrika Korps" from 1941 to 1943 considered Saudi Arabia a desirable target, but that was entirely because it was a producer of oil. Saudi Arabia produced few, if any, troops for that fight and truly, hasn't been involved in any actions since then. In 1991, Saudi Arabia was far more a staging platform for an allied force to be used against Saddam Hussein's Iraq than it was anything else.

So, sorry Glenn Beck fans, but the idea of Russia combining with either China or Saudi Arabia in any effective manner that the West would have felt threatened by is hardly "thousands of years" old.

Seriously people, anyone who ever depended on Glenn Beck to provide worthwhile information on any topic is completely out of it.

Iraq's future

2011-07-09T23:46:00.000-04:00

Local Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin surveys the shape of Iraq today and worries about the future when US troops are scheduled to depart. She felt that Iran, which had not expanded its territory since, as far as I'm aware, the early 1600s, would gain tremendous influence. This is hardly a new concern.

In the spring of 2003, the Islamic Republic of Iran not only proposed to negotiate with the Bush administration on its nuclear program and its support for terrorists but also offered concrete concessions that went very far toward meeting U.S. concerns.

Bush, swelling with pride and hubris, refused to consider opening negotiations and the opportunity to defuse tensions between the US and Iran was quickly frittered away. Allegations of Iranian involvement in Iraq go back to late 2006. A great deal was made of (allegedly) Iranian EFPS (Explosive Formed Penetrators, sort of like IEDs, but more useful against armored vehicles), but there wasn't actually much evidence that the EFPs came from Iran.

These same weapons were first used by the IRA and spread to Columbia's FARC and Spain's ETA as well as Hizboullah and other terror groups worldwide years before the US-led invasion of Iraq. They are easy to make in any minimally equipped machine shop and at least three manufactories for EFP's have been found inside Iraq itself.

One of the real problems Rubin identifies with Iraq trying to remain out of Iran's orbit is that

Iraq already depends on Iran for about 10 percent of desperately needed electric power (U.S. inability to help Iraq produce enough electricity, despite many aid projects, has bewildered Iraqis).

There's no mystery about the US failure to reconstruct Iraq. I've long identified the need for, and advocated, and have known that there will never be, an American “Colonial Corps” for Iraq. The US could have used such a unit in Iraq after the fall of Baghdad, heck, such a unit could have prevented the sacking of Baghdad's government buildings in the aftermath of the US takeover, which would have in turn facilitated reconstruction. The US could have used such a corps in 2005, 2007, 2009 and could still use it today. I'm not speaking of some touchy-feely “Let's get Iraqis and Americans to get to know each other” kind of stuff.

The US needs about 10,000 to 15,000 people (A buddy of mine suggested that the US Army Corps of Engineers would be extremely well-suited for this job. True, so would the US Navy Seabees. I just don't think it's a job that only military people can handle as the ability to march in formation or handle weapons would be irrelevant to doing this job) to survey each city, town and village for reconstruction projects that need to be accomplished, would order the necessary materials from the US or from geographically closer sources, and would see to it that funds were obtained from the US to pay Iraqis to carry out the projects.

This would absolutely need to be a hands-on project. There would need to be American people on the ground, speaking the language and seeing to it that projects were carried out with minimal corruption. In 2008, Iraq received very low scores by Global Integrity, which was reporting on government and corruption. Also, as of mid-2008, the US had lost $23 billion to corruption in Iraq. A separate corps is needed to provide accountability. It simply cannot be outsourced to local persons. Also, Americans have to run the projects as America need to get the credit for doing so. Americans can and should utilize local expertise and should try to work through existing authorities, but outsourcing the management of the reconstruction projects to Iraqis means not only will projects never be completed, but no one will attribute the projects to the right source.

President George W. Bush never made a full-throated appeal for people to go to Iraq as soldiers. In late 2003, as country after country dropped out of the “Coalition of the Willing,” the call went out for volunteers to serve on draft boards. But as Bush realized that a draft would open up all sorts of problems, nothing followed that. Shortly after the fall of Baghdad, as Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad's Green Zone" showed, the Green Zone was run by hopelessly young, completely unqualified people. America's experienced professionals preferred to stay home and blog against the “Enemy at Home” (i.e., liberals). As Naomi Klein showed in her book "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism," L. Paul Bremer was far more concerned with imposing neo-liberal economic policies in Iraq than he was with actually rebuilding the place and getting services to function again.

As a buddy of mine, Ben Burrows, puts it in an LTE:

Boo hoo, Trudy Rubin (Worldview, 7/8). The nice little war you cheered from the Petraeus bunker, the nation-building you and Tom Friedman so desperately wanted to succeed, is winding to an end. The trillions we spent in Iraq that might have been applied to medical care or industrial investments at home lie wasted on desert sands, often used against us by the very people you thought were our friends and allies. The lives that have been maimed or lost heroically in the pursuit of some Kipling-esque White Man's Burden "nobility" can never be repaid, and the productive capacity and intelligence they might have provided will be permanently lost. Yet Rubin longs still for a better outcome, that shining sunny Teheran on a Hill that might have been.

The idea that the US can construct or even enable a workable government from half a world away is, as Burrows says, a fantasy. Back during the “Great Game” between Britain and Russia for Afghanistan (Russia's ultimate goal was India, Britain successfully stopped Russia several hundred miles short of that), Rudyard Kipling wrote “Kim,” a book that popularized the Great Game and made Britons identify very strongly with the struggle over there. There is nothing even remotely comparable in America's culture today towards any country in that part of the world. As Rubin points out:

Of course, Americans are even more weary of this war than of the Afghan conflict. And any extension of U.S. troops would require a request from Maliki, a Shiite, which he looks unlikely to make.

So, I just don't see any sort of American victory on the horizon. A Colonial Corps would need to be protected by an able military force and would need to spend lots and lots of money at a time when Republicans, Blue Dog Democrats and even President Obama are shrieking and pulling out their hair about deficits. Why are they all concerned about deficits at a time of 9% unemployment, at a time when Global Warming and Peak Oil are screaming for attention and at at time when President Obama explicitly declares that US infrastructure needs $2 trillion in upgrades and maintenance? Damned if I know, but I think such concerns are weighing far more heavily in Washington DC than concerns about Iraq ever will and Iraq is simply never going to be fixed up short of a serious national effort coming from this side of the world.

On being a "dick"

2011-07-05T09:35:00.000-04:00

The context of the debt limit debate is that it's long since been leaning very, very heavily to the right-wing side. President Obama offered all sorts of sweeteners and concessions and outright gifts and was just asking for a few minor concessions to get revenue a bit up. What did he get for his troubles? He got called a "dick" by MSNBC’s Senior Political Analyst Mark Halperin. Full disclosure: My full legal name has always been Richmond, but I used to go by the nickname Dick. Back when I worked as a receptionist at a private school, I was thinking of changing it anyway and the final straw came when two female students were talking to each other in front of my desk: "So what do you think of [Our Vice-Principal who also taught a few courses]?" "Oh, he's okay, but he's kind of a dick." I didn't say anything to them, but I decided that since some people I liked were using the nickname of Rich for me anyway, I'd adopt that as my new nickname. So yes, in some contexts, dick is a swear word, but in others, Dick is simply a first name.

Why did progressives consider it outrageously unacceptable for Halperin to call the President a naughty name? We, as a group, are not particularly concerned with "naughty language," but James Fallows of the Atlantic put his finger on the problem:

In this case, the "what" of Obama's press conference -- the unbelievable recklessness of mainly House Republicans in inviting the largest self-inflicted economic wound in American history -- deserves every bit of frustration Obama showed, and lots more. In the long run we'll have some sense of whether Obama's typical surreal unflappability, whatever its origins (I have my theories, but for another time), was the wisest long-term response to today's Republican party -- and whether this unusual flash of emotion worked in directing public attention to a looming and entirely unnecessary blow to America's wellbeing. [emphasis in original]

The problem was, as Fallows said, that Halperin, as a political commentator, was acting instead as though he were a theater critic or a figure-skating judge. He was judging Obama's performance and making judgments as to "how it was playing in Peoria." That's not the job of a political commentator. How something plays with the public is something that should be left up to the public to decide. A political commentator can refer to polls if he likes, but he's not a theater critic and shouldn't second-guess the public. The real problem was the incredibly radical stance that the Republicans Party as a whole was and is taking in the deficit debate. That's the job of a political commentator! Their job is to look below the surface and to tell us why the actors were behaving the way they were. Calling the President names because Obama showed an uncharacteristic flash of anger shows us an incredibly shallow commentator who really should find himself another line of work.

Just ran across a piece explaining how Howard Kurtz considers Halperin "a substantive guy." Kurtz does indeed mention that

"Now the indictment is being expanded to saying Mark Halperin is the epitome superficial theater criticism and, you know, empty beltway conventional wisdom," Kurtz noted.

Of course, Kurtz's comment is a typical piece of Village "empty beltway" commentary as he completely fails to explain what any of that means to someone who hasn't been reading the blog posts of lefty critics. As a TV performer, Kurtz's audience is obviously vastly larger than those of the blogs and magazines that have leveled that charge at Halperin. The effect, of course, is to characterize Halperin's critics as making obscure, hard-to-understand charges.

Now, a very important thing to keep in mind when one looks at the deficit debate is that in 2004, President G.W. Bush offered corporations a "tax holiday," an opportunity to bring back the cash that they had earned overseas with very small taxes to pay in return:

And it was a total failure. Companies did indeed take advantage of the amnesty to move a lot of money back to the United States. But they used that money to pay dividends, pay down debt, buy up other companies, buy back their own stock — pretty much everything except increasing investment and creating jobs. Indeed, there’s no evidence that the 2004 tax holiday did anything at all to stimulate the economy.

What the tax holiday did do, however, was give big corporations a chance to avoid paying taxes, because they would eventually have repatriated, and paid taxes on, much of the money they brought in under the amnesty. And it also gave these companies an incentive to move even more jobs overseas, since they now know that there’s a good chance that they’ll be able to bring overseas profits home nearly tax-free under future amnesties.

So, does it really do America any good to permit corporations to keep more of their earnings? Sure doesn't sound like it to me. This is a critical leg of the whole deficit debate. The idea is that government spending crowds out private investment. The charts shown at the link show private investment going down from 2007 to 2009 and government spending going up. These facts are entirely true, but there was no "crowding out" effect as the collapse of the housing bubble explains private investment going down while the need for government to step in and maintain necessary services and to therefore engage in deficit spending explains government spending going up. It's simply not the case that government spending was making it difficult for private investors to obtain "scarce resources."

The problem here of course, is that the crowding out theory is a theory that regards investment as a fixed value, as a zero-sum game and not a positive-sum game. When a football team gains yards towards its goal, the other side is pushed further away from its goal. This is an example of a zero-sum game as the total yardage doesn't change. When a baseball team gets bases on the other hand, this is a positive-sum game as the number of bases that one team gets to is limited only by the time that the teams have to play in and by the competence of the teams' opponents.

Government spending and private investment are engaged in a positive-sum game where there is no limit to the amount of wealth that they can both spend. The "crowding out" effect doesn't exist.

An interesting chart from Business Insider shows that the income of the top decile (Top 10% of income-earners) has been growing by leaps and bounds, starting in the early 1970s and really taking off during the Reagan Administration. How was productivity doing during the same period? Productivity is the value produced by each worker. Actually, the gains in wealth by the top income-earners closely tracks with the gains in labor productivity. Productivity, too, has been growing rapidly. A not-terribly-surprising result of these two trends is that corporations are sitting on enormous piles of cash, surely as much as a trillion dollars and probably more.

So how are regular folks doing? What about state finances? The government of Minnesota is alleged to have a serious spending problem. The Republican House Speaker, Kurt Zellers says

“We’re talking about runaway spending that we can’t afford,... And we will not saddle our children and grandchildren with mounds of debts with promises for funding levels that will not be there in the future.”

While the New York Times publishes this charge without making any attempt to demonstrate that the charge is either true or false, substantiated or not, the economist who quotes them shows very quickly and easily that state spending hasn't actually increased over the past decade, not is it scheduled to increase over the next half-decade. Again, as with Howard Kurtz and the "theater criticism" charge, the press corps lies by omission. It's not that they say things that are false, but that the reader is left with no way to determine whether the charge is true or not. The result of that is that Minnesota's government has to partially shut down for the indefinite future, but very few people in the state have a clear understanding as to why that is. All they know is that the Republican Party is screaming about the state suffering from some sort of fiscal crisis. A crisis that doesn't actually exist in the real world.

What are some of the other consequences of the alleged fiscal crisis? Well, Republicans in Congress have decided that certain government departments are not really needed, specifically, that "the principal federal agency that does testing for contamination — such as E. Coli — of fruits and vegetable produce" is a superfluous, unneeded waste of the taxpayers' money. Ordinarily, Americans would choose to keep such government services running anyway, but if the US is suffering a fiscal crisis, well then, sacrifices must be made!

Ordinarily, the US Government would have the political strength to punish companies that pollute through both routine leakage and spillage and through the occasional disaster.

An oil spill in Montana's Yellowstone River surged toward North Dakota on Sunday as outraged residents demanded more government oversight of Exxon Mobil's cleanup.

An estimated 750 to 1,000 barrels, or up to 42,000 gallons, spilled overnight Friday through a damaged pipeline in the riverbed, Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers said. The break near Billings could be related to the river's high water level, officials said.

Montanans are urging a much more energetic reaction because their fishing industry is almost as important to the state's economy as oil is. Montana gets about 11 million tourists a year in a state with a population of less than a million. Having an oil spill like they do could do serious harm to the standard of living of residents. Obviously, an energetic clean-up effort by Exxon/Mobil would be an all-expenditure project, with no prospect of serious profit at the end. Exxon/Mobil might earn a bit of good-will, but it's hard to show that on profit-loss statements.

A strong government hand is necessary here because Exxon/Mobil is obviously slacking off and clearly doesn't wish to expend serious resources to contain the spill. Not that there's any reason, under classical capitalist theory, why they would. The problem is, this sort of strong government reaction is precisely what the Grover Norquist "Starve the beast" theory explicitly rules out. A government that's competent to take charge of the spill response is necessarily one that is well-funded and that has the extra cash and personnel to handle something like that.

In a generally good piece, USA Today makes a point that I strongly disagree with:

Republicans deserve major credit for forcing action on deficit reduction when President Obama and many Democrats in Congress were showing little interest.

But there was a reason that Democrats "were showing little interest." Cutting expenditures is a grand idea in theory and is generally a good thing for a country to do, but not when cutting expenditures interferes with more important priorities. Global Warming and Peak Oil are two problems that are vastly more critically important and that need much more urgent attention. US unemployment is around 9%. That's vastly too high a rate for Americans to be puttering around with unneeded distractions like the deficit. When, in five or ten or so years, these higher priorities have been handled, then we can worry about deficits!

I strongly disagree with President Obama's approach to dealing with Republicans. Starting up what progressives call the "Cat Food Commission" (Officially, the Simpson-Bowles Deficit Commission) was an awful idea that gave far too much credence to Republican complaints and distracted America from getting the aforementioned problems under control. The President is obviously a Blue Dog Democrat who leans much too far to the right for my tastes, but he has been showing some stiffening of the spine lately and that's something progressives should encourage. If that makes people like Halperin angry enough to call him names, tough for them!

Pleasant day

2011-06-28T20:27:00.000-04:00

Ahhh (Sigh of contentment)! A very pleasant and productive day. Took a few pounds of pork ribs to an IMR (We're the group that's neither greybeards, nor are we young'uns) get-together with fellow congregants from my church, FUMCOG. Had a few pounds left over, so I bought a pack of chicken and a big steak and went to the Nockamixon State Park to grill it all. After I got it all grilled and packed away into meal-size portions, I had one of the ribs plus a few side dishes I had packed, then went over to the pool about a half-hour before they closed and swam around for a bit. I figure my freezer now has enough barbecued meats to last for about two dozen meals.

Green Lantern

2011-06-25T01:30:00.000-04:00

Saw Green Lantern. Decent stuff. I liked how people who aren't familiar with Lantern's “civilian” identity (Hal Jordan, played by Ryan Reynolds), didn't have any idea who that masked man was, but people who knew him well recognized him without much trouble. I looked back through my own collection and of course have reprints of the famous Denny O'Neil (Writer) and Neal Adams (Artist) issues where he and Green Arrow tackled relevant social issues in the early 1970s. The only other issues I have are some from 1992 where his lover in the film (Carol Ferris, played by Blake Lively) battles him in her acquired identity as Star Sapphire. Ferris goes by the code word “Sapphire” in the film, so we're sure to see that in the future GL movie(s).

One very technical complaint I have is that one of the alien Green Lanterns (Our Green Lantern is the Lantern only of this sector of space, so Jordan is the Earth GL) takes credit for “training” EGL. Uh, no. I went to Navy Boot Camp and that takes six weeks. All that does is that it conditions you so that you can accept real training afterwords. Basically, it just teaches one not to make stupid errors and to accept the culture of the armed services. The alien GL spent just a few short minutes with our EGL, so “training” is, uh, just a bit of an exaggeration.

Zielinski - a film

2011-06-25T00:38:00.000-04:00

Was John Zielinski crazy? (Link to picture of Zielinski) That was the thought that occurred to Chase Thompson and Ryan Walker when Zielinski showed up at their public access studio in Columbia, Missouri. Zielinski showed up with a VHS camera and after telling them his tape was stuck inside, asked if they could help and then told that the tape would bring down the American government.
As Thompson and Walker work in public access TV, they listen to a number of cranks, politely, and then do what they can for those persons. So they sat down and listened to this latest one. But this “crank” was different and in the film “Zielinski,” we hear that the documentary “Conspiracy of Silence” was produced, but that Zielinski was pressured not to release it. Zielinski had produced a total of 25 books and was a world-class photographer (Zielinski himself gives us a detailed run-down on his career here), so it was far from clear that the fellow had a screw loose.
In its review, Variety sniffs that “Production values are terrible.” Walker agreed, but pointed out that Zielinski lives in a $100 trailer (Picture of Zielinski today) and while Walker and Thompson did what they could with Zielinski's materials, they didn't have much of a budget to work with.
While the filmmakers still feel that many of Zielinski's assertions are pretty wild and “out there,” one of his major assertions was one that he started making 25 years ago, that children are being kidnapped and sold into slaves. Unfortunately, authorities have come around to the view that Zielinski's charges are accurate and after about 20 years of people keeping their distance from Zielinski (“Stay away from the crazy man!”), his assertions on that score were vindicated.
The film “Zielinski” will show at Saturday, June 25 @ 7:15 pm at the Media Bureau at 725 North 4th St. Philadelphia, PA 19123

Cleopatra

2011-06-22T00:10:00.000-04:00

Just finished watching a 1970 Japanese cartoon version of Cleopatra (Lots of bare breasts and some fuzzy, soft-focus love-making scenes. You can download the no-cost Torrent file from here). They cover Cleopatra's affairs with three Romans. Julius Caesar is portrayed as a rough, tough, very muscular he-man. In manliness, Marc Antony is portrayed as being no competition whatsoever for Richard Burton in the 1963 version of Cleopatra. Elizabeth Taylor was attractive in that film, but she was no match for Claudette Colbert in the 1934 version. Octavius gets a very small role, with a rather shockingly backwards and un-PC scene near the end. Cleopatra in this film reminded me of Vietnamese women of the that time period who were torn between their American lovers and patriotism towards their native land. This Cleopatra makes a lot of cold calculations, but comes across as fundamentally pretty feminine and sentimental. The overarching theme of "Invader, leave our land!" is expressed rather forcefully.

Ann Coulter, at it again

2011-06-12T08:59:00.001-04:00

Seems Ann Coulter is at it again. She's again taken up a case and again the traditional media is covering just her side of the story and completely ignoring the side of the less-connected people who are on the opposite side of the issue. This time, Coulter isn't talking about the 9-11 Widows, but about Kent State 41 years ago. In the first case, she claimed that the 9-11 Widows were attention-seekers who were pleased at having their husbands die during the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. Now, she's claiming that the students at Kent State were a "mob." I reviewed the Kent State case in detail as a college student back during the early 1980s and no, the students were simply not organized enough to have constituted any sort of threat to the soldiers who opened fire on them. They were not a mob in any recognizable sense as they simply weren't focused enough to fit the description that Coulter gave of them.
Why would Coulter be putting out such outrageous accusations? More importantly, why now? A YouTube video by the sister of one of the Kent State students who died in 1970 tells us that new evidence has been uncovered. A student recorded the whole incident from a window ledge as it happened and it took until very recently for forensic experts to be able to play the tape and analyze it for clues as to what actually happened on that day. The video is well worth watching. And again, I don't for one moment believe that Coulter is acting on her own initiative. I don't think she's being forced to say outrageous, incendiary things against her will. I believe she enjoys that part. But I don't thinkit was her idea to say them.

Classic apples & oranges comparison

2011-06-06T11:40:00.001-04:00

*Sigh!* Sarah Palin gets fourth grade American history really, REALLY wrong! ThinkProgress has the detailed corrections.

I ran across these two comments in the MMFA piece:

You liberals are so pathetic, always trying to make a big deal out of a minor slip up. Obama said there are 53 states, does this make you question education under Obama?

To which another commenter responded:

Screwing up the history of Paul Revere (it was lanterns, not bells and he wasn't warning the British...hence the whole reason behind his secret ride and why they used lanterns and not bells...so they wouldn't alert the British) then lying about it is not a mole hill.

Here's the difference: Obama made a mistake when he said 57 states. He admitted it, explained how it happened and moved on.

Palin makes a mistake about a fundamental aspect of American history, refuses to admit she made a mistake, accuses those who points out that it was a mistake of "attacking" her and her moronic fans try to edit Paul Revere's Wikipedia page to try to get it to fit her version of what happened.

Oh yes, right-wingers tried to edit the Paul Revere page in Wikipedia to make it consistent with Palin's hilariously inept re-writing of Revere's famous ride.

If Democrats don't take advantage of THIS...

2011-06-04T10:55:00.000-04:00

Emptywheel points out that whatever Obama's plans are, they ain't workin'

Any Rand hated Christianity (Jesus was weak and soft).
Rep. Paul Ryan loves Ayn Rand's philosophy.

Yup, you guessed it! Ryan went to a meeting of religious right-wingers, was offered a free Bible by a Republican youngster AND REFUSED IT!!!!!

It's going too far for Democrats to say that Republicans represent the Anti-Christ, but with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor demanding that the people of Joplin, Missouri can't get disaster relief unless those expenditures are offset by cutting government expenditures elsewhere

Democrats should, at the very least, be charging that Republicans are the Anti-Jesus Party.

X-Men: First Class

2011-06-04T02:07:00.001-04:00

Just watched X-Men: First Class. Not bad, not bad at all. It's a prequel, it begins when Professor X and Magneto and Mystique are all kids and the main action takes place in the early 1960s. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby started the X-Men comic in 1963, Roy Thomas and Neal Adams wrote and drew them for a very well-known set of stories in 1969, right before the series went on an extended hiatus of reprints. Chris Claremont took over as the writer after a revamped team was introduced in 1975. I followed the series closely during the three years from 1978 to 1980 (Here's the link to a collected book of the first ten issues of that run). That was a definite high point for the series, when John Byrne was the artist. Paul Smith followed soon after. He was also an excellent artist on the series. I pretty much stopped reading X-Men by 1990, but I've been checking in on them and following the series and checking out stories from time to time ever since.

I write letters

2011-06-02T22:53:00.000-04:00

In response to the piece in FDL that showed that a Democrat is getting upset about the US having to leave Iraq by the end of this year, I wrote the following paper letter to him:

Representative Gary Ackerman

Ranking Member - House Foreign Affairs Middle East and South Asia subcommittee

218-14 Northern Boulevard
Bayside, NY 11361

Subj: Agreement to withdraw from Iraq – Please do not break agreement

Distinguished Representative Ackerman,

It's come to my attention that with the Iraqi refusal to request that American troops remain in their country past the agreed-upon deadline of the end of this year, that you have disagreements with the statement “Most Americans believe we’re done in Iraq.”

In late 2008, the US and Iraq agreed that the US would leave a country that American occupation has left in vastly worse shape than it was in when the US invaded it nearly a decade ago. There is no mission, as far as I'm able to determine, that remains to be accomplished.

I don't believe Republican propaganda on the issue of the budget and the deficit either, but they're screaming and hollering about the deficit and our President apparently takes their dire warning quite seriously. How can the Democratic Party take Republican talking points on the deficit seriously AND advocate that the US remain in Iraq for longer than we agreed upon staying?

Personally, I think the President should tell our troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan to stand down and not conduct any operations until the debt limit is raised. That would place our operations there in the proper perspective. Republicans want to get all panicked about Iraqi insurgents and the Taliban gaining ground, good! Let 'em get panicked! That would create some useful pressure to be responsible about the debt limit.

There's absolutely no reason to break our 2008 agreement with Iraq to leave their country. Please keep to the agreed-upon schedule for withdrawal.

Pirates of the Caribbean part IV

2011-05-29T07:09:00.001-04:00

Saw Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Nothing profound to say about it. If you liked the first three installments (I did), then you'll like this.
So, ya thought that because you figured how to deal with vampires, zombies and werewolves that you were safe, huh? Heh, well now, we've got a new supernatural menace to worry about...mermaids!
Someone asked me whether the spell they cast upon unlucky sailors was a spell that affected both genders equally. I had to say I wasn't sure as the only female crew member (Penelope Cruz) was out of range when the mermaids attacked. Not sure that it was their singing that entranced the few sailors who were affected (that would have made them Sirens) though they did indeed sing. But the sailor who got a good look into the eyes of one of the mermaids was hopelessly smitten and spoke lovingly of her long afterwards. So whether they cast a spell that would leave gay men and straight women unaffected or whether they entranced straight men in a way that just seemed like love to the smitten men is a very good question.

A right-winger looks at US policy in the Mideast

2011-05-24T21:30:00.002-04:00

Frank Gaffney, writing in the Washington Times, made a statement that caught my eye after it was reprinted in Media Matters.

If Mr. Obama persists in the latter, his already checkered record as commander in chief (sic) may make him... [emphasis added]

This statement puzzled me as I wasn't aware of Obama failing in his duties as Commander-in-Chief in any significant way. Turns out that Gaffney was complaining about things like the scheduled US withdrawal of troops from Iraq. This was a withdrawal that President G.W. Bush agreed to after both the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and presidential candidate Barack Obama agreed that US troops simply had to leave. The other presidential candidate, John McCain, grumbled a bit, but agreed with the other three that the US simply had to leave Iraq. Gaffney comes up with arguments as to why Obama should turn around and break the agreement made back in 2008, such as: Iraqis may have changed their minds and might want US troops to remain, the neighboring country of Iran essentially ends up as the victor of the Iraq War and “the immense investment we have made in lives and treasure” will have been wasted.

Problem is, all of these drawbacks were obvious in 2008 when the agreement to pull out was made. The only possible exception is that Gaffney suggests that Iraqis may have changed their minds on US troops leaving Iraq, but that seems highly unlikely and Gaffney doesn't provide any kind of proof by linking to anything that might constitute evidence. Remember, Muntadhar al-Zeidi “gained cult status” by hurling his shoes at G.W. Bush, a sign of great disrespect in Arab culture. If it was a popular idea for US troops to remain there, why would al-Zeidi's shoe-tossing have been such a big deal?

So Gaffney is calling Obama weak on national defense because he is refusing to break an agreement that was agreed to by the four principal players in the situation several years ago.

Gaffney celebrates

the valor of our troops and others trying to build a 21st-century nation (Afghanistan) out of a backward sixth-century tribal/Islamist entity

which sounds really wonderful, but what's the likelihood of success when the US has less than one percent of its population that's actively engaged in that project? There is absolutely nothing in our popular culture about this struggle. There is no modern-day equivalent of the Rudyard Kipling novel Kim, that was written in 1900 about the Great Game in Afghanistan and was widely popular in Britain. What popular movies, TV series, magazines or even websites are concerned with the wars in either Iraq or Afghanistan? It's not that no one is aware of the fighting over there, but when the information on those two wars are presented only to a small and select audience and when soldiers who are taking part in it are on their third or fourth or even fifth or sixth tours of duty, which even in 2008, were getting pretty exhausting, I just don't see that Americans in general are engaged.

Looking at the polls, it's far from clear that Americans citizens even approve of our troops being over there to start with. PollingReport.com quotes the AP-GfK Poll of May 5-9 of 2011 to say that 59% of the public opposes the war in Afghanistan, 80% approve of the official plan to leave there and 57% think the pace of the withdrawal is about right.

With the Republican Party making all sorts of noise about the US overspending and insisting that Congress can't even deliver on disaster relief unless Democrats agree to still further cuts in the budget, I just can't see US citizens agreeing that the project of building Afghanistan into a modern nation is something that they feel any real or serious commitment to.

Sorry, but the question is not “How ignominious will be our defeat,” but “who cares?”

“Then there is Mr. Obama’s first 'elective war,'” i.e., Libya. I generally agree with Gaffney's lack of enthusiasm and have lots of reservations on that war myself, but one item I don't have the slightest concern over is that

Mr. Obama has tried to limit the costs and offload responsibility for this fiasco onto the French, British and other NATO allies.

That's precisely as it should be. If we're going to be involved over there to begin with, why on Earth would it be a problem for the US to have allies in the effort? The US has far more buy-in and approval from not only NATO countries, but from neighboring Arab and Muslim countries than G.W. Bush did not have before the invasion of Iraq.

For some odd reason, Gaffney identifies the following as a problem:

In his speech last week to what he calls “the Muslim world,” the president made it U.S. policy to support whoever manages to get elected in the various nations of North Africa and the Middle East currently undergoing political upheavals.

Uh, more idealistic Americans might refer to that as “supporting democracy,” which, as far as I'm aware, is something that Americans generally endorse. If the US is going to ignore existing political groups, then the only option for carrying out various political projects is to implement them via military occupation. As I pointed out above with Afghanistan, that's really not an option at all. If the US doesn't work with local groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, then the US is free to pack up its things and go home. Regardless of how many problems US policymakers might have with the Muslim Brotherhood, the option of working without them or around them simply doesn't exist.

Gaffney appears to believe that the US is an energetic and ascendant empire that has unlimited resources that it can commit to the various projects it has going on in the Mideast. Sorry, but that's what G.W. Bush believed as well and his invasion of Iraq rapidly turned into a quagmire.

No, I don't agree that President Obama has a “checkered record as commander-in-chief (sic),” I think President Obama has played a so-so poker hand about as well as it can be played given the realities on the ground over there and with US public opinion.

Confessions of a Shopaholic

2011-05-23T23:17:00.001-04:00

Ahhh! (Sigh of contentment) Gotta love the Internet! Early Sunday morning, I checked up on Saturday's TV schedule and was very disappointed to see that I had missed “Confessions of a Shopaholic,”a show that I had intended to catch when it first came out. Not to worry, I looked up where I could download the Torrent file from, did so, burned it to a CD and have watched a little over a half-hour of it (I often watch movies a bit at a time). Can one download more recent films, films that haven't made it to the rental shops yet? Yeah, but that feels more like cheating. If I'm going to download a film, I prefer to get one that's at least a year old.

Isla Fisher had been very attractive in “The Wedding Crashers,” so I was interested in seeing her in this, but I have to admit that when her character, Rebecca Bloomwood, battles another woman in the department store over a pair of boots, I just can't identify with the character even a little bit. That particular sort of obsessive behavior is completely unknown to me.

Very interesting to see that the movie borrows heavily from “Pretty Woman,” Bloomwood is much more an “endearing mess” than Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts) was. We've learned since Pretty Woman came out that the initial script called for Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) to be both emotionally brutal and brutally honest. The idea was that he'd get Ward's company for a while and would fully compensate her for her time, but would then just coldly dump her. Test audiences didn't like that, so the movie ends with Lewis arriving in his limousine as though he were riding on a horse and waving his umbrella as though it were a sword, y'know, doing the whole “knight in shining armor” routine.

I think the test audiences took a bum rap, though. They were characterized as being romantics, as desiring a happy ending over a cold reality. There's a lot of truth to that, but I don't think that was quite the entire problem. I think the Edward character was so emotionally cold that no one could identify with him. No one could find any common human bond with someone who could spend time with someone as charming as Ward was without wanting to stay with her.

In charm and beauty, Bloomwood and Ward are pretty close to being equals. My own personal preference is that I'd enjoy dealing with them both as co-workers, but neither one really appeals to me romantically.

I think Shopaholic does a good job with our romantic interest/villain Luke Brandon (Hugh Dancy). Brandon is seen as a corporate supervisor interacting with other corporate supervisors and he openly announces his e-e-eville plan to utilize Bloomwoods' talents in order to benefit the corporation he works for. Bloomwood is as innocent and unknowing as Ward was, but our villain is a much more believably human type, someone who's chasing corporate profits at the expense of his humanity, but who ju-u-ust might fall under Bloomwood's charms before his evil plan can come to fruition. In this, the stakes have been clearly marked out and there hasn't been any romantic and/or sexual type of contact prior to our knowing that Brandon is up to no good. So as Bloomwood and Brandon dance around each other and take turns instructing each other in their own particular specialties, we can enjoy the ride and learn a bit about the obsession of shopping.

Yoo's story

2011-05-16T20:34:00.004-04:00

The fellow who provided the legal justification for torture, John Yoo, makes the claim that:

Sunday's success also vindicates the Bush administration, whose intelligence architecture marked the path to bin Laden's door. According to current and former administration officials, CIA interrogators gathered the initial information that ultimately led to bin Laden's death.

Unfortunately for Yoo, this claim was directly addressed by Leon Panetta, the head of the CIA, who denies it:

Mukasey, whose assessment was quickly embraced by the right, claimed waterboarding Khalid Sheik Mohammed produced the first grain of intelligence that got the OBL ball rolling — the name of bin Laden’s favorite courier. McCain described Mukasey’s remarks as “false.”

And Panetta’s correspondence bolster’s McCain’s judgment. Indeed, the CIA director makes clear that “no detainee in CIA custody revealed the facilitator/courier’s full true name or specific whereabouts. This information was discovered through other intelligence means.”

I did find the following statement from Yoo amusing:

President George W. Bush, not his successor, constructed the interrogation and warrantless surveillance programs that produced this . . . actionable intelligence. For this, congressional Democrats and media pundits pilloried him for allegedly exceeding his presidential powers and violating the Bill of Rights.

It wasn't just an allegation. The intelligence architecture that failed to get bin Laden also exceeded G.W. Bush's powers as President and violated the Bill of Rights. Even if Yoo were correct and the information obtained via torture was decisive in getting bin Laden, those two statements would remain true.
Yoo asks a hypothetical question:

Imagine what would have happened if the Obama administration had been running things immediately following 9/11.

Okay. Osama bin Laden would not only still have been found and eliminated, but the US would not have followed several false leads.

Further, the narrative the AP tells now makes it even more clear how ineffective the CIA program was. The AP’s sources specify that KSM did not admit he knew al-Kuwaiti while being waterboarded. But that sort of dodges the whole issue: in response to his torture, according to KSM, he made up false locations for OBL. At the same time he was shielding information that could lead to OBL–and he continued to shield it under “standard” interrogation (again, it’s a pity FBI’s KSM expert never got to interrogate him). And then al-Libi, when he was in the CIA’s interrogation program, managed to shield that same information even after the CIA recognized it was important.

The CIA program failed to do one of the most important things it set out to do, break through detainees’ efforts to hide OBL.

The blogger Marcy Wheeler goes through the evidence and concludes that waterboarding produced more false leads than it did actual intel.
Yoo points out, correctly, that Obama has gone back on several promises that he made at the beginning of his term, but “demands of the real world” had nothing to do with Obama's retreats. The problem there is that Obama is fundamentally a Blue Dog Democrat who doesn't share progressive priorities and is not prepared to fight for them.
Don't know about whether bin Laden could have been taken alive or not. My concern would have been not so much that he would have shot at those who wished to detain him, but that he might have had a button he could have pressed that would have destroyed all of his computer data. Difficult to say which is more valuable, bin Laden alive or his computer data.
---------

Addendum: Rick Santorum says his knowledge of the case is superior to that of the CIA Director:

"I mean, you break somebody, and after they're broken, they become cooperative. And that's when we got this information. And one thing led to another, and led to another, and that's how we ended up with bin Laden," said Santorum.

Erm, slight problem with that. People are not horses and getting them to give up knowledge is not like getting them to carry you around on their backs. When the guy throws up his hands and says "All right! *sob* All right, I'll tell you" that does NOT mean that he'll then give you accurate information. Our real-life experience with Abu Zubaydah was that he did the whole "I give up" speech, after which he told his interrogators false things that he knew full well were not true. Problem is, US agents had to go out into the field in order to check these stories out and they then came back a few days later to report that "Yup, we were given another made-up story!!!!"

Update: Ooh! THAT's gonna leave a mark!

Ron Paul may be the wackiest candidate in the GOP field. But for pure, blind stupidity nobody beats Santorum. In my 20 years in the Senate, I never met a dumber member, which he reminded me of today.

Ronald Reagan's legacy as seen by Mike Huckabee

2011-05-15T23:41:00.003-04:00

Mike Huckabee puts out an, uh, interesting set of short videos that purportedly, allegedly, theoretically, tell us important facts about American history that everyone should know. Huckabee includes a segment that praises President Ronald Reagan for getting Americans fired up and enthused and believing in America again. I believe that assertion is essentially true (Witness the popularity of Bruce Springsteen's “Born in the USA,” even though the song was actually more critical than it was celebratory, it was enthusiastically played and sung as an uncomplicated and jingoistic celebration).

Of course, a truly enlightening film (And yes, I realize that the film's extremely short length makes any detailed historical examination impossible) would have covered the fact that Reagan's two terms left behind an America with an extremely poor reputation for its observation of international law, that Reagan attempted to get the extremist Judge Robert Bork onto the Supreme Court, Reagan's officials were hardly examples of uprightness and propriety:

Surely Tumulty, who was born in 1955, is old enough to remember the 20-odd top Reagan administration officials convicted of felonies in the Iran/Contra, HUD and other assorted scandals. As with Zakaria’s fond remembrance of Reagan’s benevolent foreign policy, Time [Magazine] is recalling a Reagan administration that never existed.

Reagan tromped all over the rule of law in the Iran-Contra scandal. FAIR describes Reagan's Central American policies:

Reagan's fervent support for right-wing governments in Central America was one of the defining foreign policies of his administration, and the fact that death squads associated with those governments murdered tens of thousands of civilians surely must be included in any reckoning of Reagan's successes and failures.

Reagan's stewardship of the economy was hardly any better. As the economist Paul Krugman points out:

The Reagan economy was a one-hit wonder. Yes, there was a boom in the mid-1980s, as the economy recovered from a severe recession. But while the rich got much richer, there was little sustained economic improvement for most Americans. By the late 1980s, middle-class incomes were barely higher than they had been a decade before — and the poverty rate had actually risen.

[snip]

Eventually productivity did take off — but even the Bush administration’s own Council of Economic Advisers dates the beginning of that takeoff to 1995.

The independence of the press corps took a severe hit. From a piece where the Philadelphia Daily News columnist Will Bunch comments on Reagan's funeral in his book “Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy,”

“I was worried about that.” Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne said at week’s end on CNN. “I mean, I think what you’ve had is a sort of 30-year campaign on the conservative side to say the media is liberal, and now I think you’re having another reaction from liberals who are saying, wait a minute, when we look at a week like this, a week of praise for Ronald Reagan, it is very hard to say we have a liberal media anymore.”

Hard indeed. Even the right-wing Fox News Channel presents more liberal Democrats in a normal week than a viewer saw on any of the cable channels in the second week of June 2004, in which viewers were treated to a non-stop cavalcade of right-wing stars such as Peggy Noonan and Pat Buchanan, each with his or her own adoring memories of the patron saint of their conservative movement, each reinforcing the headline, picture, story that Reagan had won the Cold War and restored America’s faith.

In the beginning of the Reagan campaign against the independence of the press corps, the reporter Mark Danner covers the massacre in El Mozote, El Salvador, in December 1981 and the ensuing reactions by the press corps. The Reagan Administration came down on them for their accurate, but inconvenient reporting:

Yet as an institution, their paper has closed ranks behind a reporter out on a limb, waging a little campaign to bolster his position by impugning his critics.

[snip]

Oddly missing from these paragraphs, and from the rest of that very long editorial, was any acknowledgment that the two reporters had actually seen corpses — in Guillermoprieto’s case, at least, dozens of corpses — and that Meiselas had taken photographs of those corpses. Instead, the editorial said that the two journalists “repeat interviews in which they were told that hundreds of civilians were killed in the village of Mozote,” and then said immediately afterward that Enders “later cast doubt on the reports” — as if Enders, or his representatives, had actually made it to the village, as if the kind of evidence he was purveying were no different from what were, after all, two eyewitness accounts, if not of the events themselves, then of their aftermath.

Did Reagan win the Cold War? No. The Soviet Union was very clearly suffering enormously from a poorly-organized economy. It's important to keep in mind, while reading the following accounts, that the reason the American North and South went to war in 1861 was because the agrarian economy of the South was economically incompatible with the industrial economy of the North (Slavery, was of course, the ultimate cause of the war because without slavery, the South could not have maintained an agrarian economy). Likewise, the centralized, communist economy of the Soviet Union, simply couldn't survive alongside the capitalist economy of the West.
From Russia: A Country Study. Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress

During several distinct periods, Soviet leaders attempted to reform the economy to make the Soviet system more efficient. In 1957, for example, Nikita S. Khrushchev (in office 1953-64) tried to decentralize state control by eliminating many national ministries and placing responsibility for implementing plans under the control of newly created regional economic councils. These reforms produced their own inefficiencies. In 1965 Soviet prime minister Aleksey Kosygin (in office 1964-80) introduced a package of reforms that reestablished central government control but reformed prices and established new bonuses and production norms to stimulate economic productivity. Under reforms in the 1970s, Soviet leaders attempted to streamline the decision-making process by combining enterprises into associations, which received some localized decision-making authority.

Because none of these reforms challenged the fundamental notion of state control, the root cause of the inefficiencies remained. Resistance to reform was strong because central planning was heavily embedded in the Soviet economic structure. Its various elements--planned output, state ownership of property, administrative pricing, artificially established wage levels, and currency inconvertibility--were interrelated. Fundamental reforms required changing the whole system rather than one or two elements. Central planning also was heavily entrenched in the Soviet political structure. A huge bureaucracy was in place from the national to the local level in both the party and the government, and officials within that system enjoyed the many privileges of the Soviet elite class. Such vested interests yielded formidable resistance to major changes in the Soviet economic system; the Russian system, in which many of the same figures have prospered, suffers from the same handicap.

From Ronald Reagan's 30-Year Time Bombs by Robert Parry

However, a strong case can be made that the Cold War was won well before Reagan arrived in the White House. Indeed, in the 1970s, it was a common perception in the U.S. intelligence community that the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was winding down, largely because the Soviet economic model had lost the technological race with the West.

That was the view of many Kremlinologists in the CIA’s analytical division. Also, I was told by a senior CIA’s operations official that some of the CIA’s best spies inside the Soviet hierarchy supported the view that the Soviet Union was headed toward collapse, not surging toward world supremacy, as Reagan and his foreign policy team insisted in the early 1980s.

The problem with the history produced by the Reagan Administration is that America has never really recovered from much of the evil that Reagan and his people did. The press corps never fully recovered from the discipline that the Reagan Administration imposed on it. The left blogosphere has certainly helped to restore some independence to the general field of reporting, but as Rachel Maddow observed, the Sunday talk shows, right after the “biggest story in American politics right now (The killing of Osama bin Laden),” featured a line-up of... Bush Administration officials! The Sunday talk shows, which apparently represent what all the serious people are talking about, featured what the last administration thought of what the new administration (Which had been in office for over 28 months) had accomplished.

Smallville

2011-05-15T23:22:00.002-04:00

So, Smallville comes to an end after a solid decade on the air. I must admit that when the very attractive Kristin Kreuk, who played Superboy's Smallville girlfriend Lana Lang, was replaced by the dull-as-dishwater Erica Durance, who played Superman's Metropolis girlfriend Lois Lane, I lost a lot of interest in the series. The further loss of Michael Rosenbaum, who played Lex Luthor, pretty much sealed the deal, but I caught the last show anyway. In it, Clark finally learns to fly (Yup, he spent the whole of the last ten years ground-bound) and finally adopts the familiar red & blue outfit that everyone knows him by. I was distressed to hear Lois' initial reason for not getting together with him “Every minute that I spend with you is another minute you could be saving someone.” Well...yeah, but no one can be a hero 24/7. I mean, people have to have some downtime, some time to just be regular people. Fortunately, that hesitation doesn't last and the two of them make it to the altar.

I'm pleased to say I never purchased a single issue of the all-time best-selling Superman story arc, the 1992 Death of Superman. Ever since the death (1893) and resurrection (1903) of Sherlock Holmes, death for a character in popular serialized fiction has been more of a temporary inconvenience than any sort of true ending-point. There are a few examples of true, lasting deaths. The Ancient One was a mentor of Dr. Strange and he “became one with the Universe” in 1973. Ferro Lad of the Legion of Superheroes perished in 1967. We've seen the Legion's memorial room a few times and his statue is usually featured in it, along with a few other deceased Legion members. A more recent passing concerned the whole Jack Kirby “Fourth World” set of “four interlocked adventure series” that was integrated into the DC Comics universe in the early 1970s, but even though it played a role in the Smallville finale, it came to a definite conclusion in the comics in 2007.

But there have been a series of “not really” deaths in comics. There's the well-known example of Professor X of the X-Men perishing in 1968, “only to turn up alive and well” in 1970. Probably the most famous death and resurrection in comics has been that of the Doom Patrol. In 1968, all of the characters perished in a very noble and honorable manner. Just one of the characters, Cliff Steele, was revived in 1977. Niles Caulder and Larry Trainor followed in 1989 and Rita Farr was re-introduced, completing the re-assembling of the team, in 2004.

The 2011 death of Johnny Storm of the Fantastic Four seems pretty permanent, but a review asked: “will he remain dead for long?”

So, yes, it's nice to read about characters who can do amazing things and who look better and are smarter than we all are and to see that, hey, even they've got to deal with all sorts of problems. But I think that by killing Superman, DC Comics just pushed the whole “suspension of disbelief” thing too far. It's hardly unusual to see characters in comics dying, but the idea that DC Comics would kill off their primary identifying character and, more to the point, that they would allow his to remain dead, was simply beyond any reasonable belief. It was never credible. Sure enough, it wasn't long before Superman was resurrected. I've mostly read Superman stories when he's been acting as a team member of either the Legion of Super-Heroes or the Justice League.

Still more on the torture debate

2011-05-09T17:13:00.002-04:00

A columnist for the New York Daily News, Andrea Tantaros, claimed that liberals are selectively displaying outrage. While she says it was morally wrong to shoot Osama bin Laden, that particular case of moral outrage doesn't stir liberals to protest. On the other hand, according to Tantaros, torturing terrorist suspects is morally equivalent to shooting an unarmed bin Laden, but it's only torture that's the subject of moral outrage! Actually, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had a pretty good statement on the bin Laden shooting:

AG: Well, I think what happened over the weekend is very separate apart from the discussions that we had in 2002 over the Geneva convention, you asked me whether I thought it was legal to kill him, again, I wasn’t there I don’t know all the facts, but based on what I’ve been told, and based upon the reporting it seems to me that it was in fact a lawful kill. Osama Bin Laden was an enemy of the state, he was a military target and consequently it was legitimate to kill him during our conflict with Al Qaeda. If someone is raising a question that in fact he may have attempted to surrender then of course international laws would prohibit the United States from killing someone once they’ve indicated that they’re going to surrender. But the fact that he may have been armed, he may have been unarmed, if in fact he resists capture or makes any kind of threatening move you have to remember you have the military in a very dangerous situation, decisions have to be made in a split second and based on what I understand I think that there’s no question this was a lawful killing.

Personally*, had I been the person who broke into bin Laden's room and saw that he wasn't immediately surrendering, my concern would not have been that he was reaching for some sort of weapon, but that he'd activate some sort of suicide device that would kill everyone in the room. But the essential problem that both Gonzales and I have with her conflating the two situations is that it's an apples and oranges comparison. In the bin Laden shooting, we're talking about a battlefield-type situation where a split-second decision was called for. The US Navy SEAL simply didn't have the luxury of the time needed to determine for certain whether bin Laden posed a threat or not.

Gonzales is, of course, completely wrong about the legality of torture. Agents of the United States strapped (at least) three people down to a table and poured water onto their faces in such a way as to produce a sensation of drowning. It doesn't matter in the slightest whether there were “safeguards” Very clearly, the purpose of causing physical distress to those three people was to force them to tell our agents things that they otherwise wouldn't have said. If one looks at how human right/anti-torture laws are written, it's clear that they're not written in such a detailed way that clever lawyers can play word games with them. The United Nations Convention Against Torture does not establish any “levels” or “intensity” of pain or degradation in order for an act to qualify as torture.

In the Convention, the reason for which the pain is being inflicted is immensely important, which brings up another item that the Fox News moderator in the show brought up. She asked about US personnel who undergo training on how to resist torture if they're captured and rhetorically asked whether this should or should not inspire moral outrage. This is, again, an apples and oranges comparison. I once underwent a medical procedure that was immensely, enormously, blindingly painful. I didn't suffer any sort of trauma, not did I experience any PTSD-type syndromes. Why? Because I recognized that the doctor's intention was purely to assist me, to determine something about my medical condition.

If someone is a trainee and is undergoing a painful situation, he or she is likely to be surrounded by friends and buddies, or at the very least, to recognize that the intentions of the people surrounding them are purely friendly. When one is in a situation where one has been captured by known enemies that assuredly want you dead, the situation is entirely different and not at all comparable. Does it make the slightest bit of difference whether one has been trained or not in how to resist torture? My strong suspicion is that any sort of training would be completely irrelevant. One either has good reason to resist or one doesn't. As I pointed out, KSM managed to resist successfully and there don't appear to have been any methods or procedures that he used. Seems to me that he simply said to himself “The identity of bin Laden's courier is far too valuable for me to give to the Americans. I simply can't live with myself if I give that up.” So, he didn't.

*I'm of course presuming in this case that frequent IMC contributor Stephen Lendman is not correct and that bin Laden was still alive when US personnel raided the compound in Abbottabad. A writer from Chelsea Green agrees with this. Lendman may very well be correct, but we simply haven't seen enough evidence to say for certain.

Projecting much?

2011-05-08T14:37:00.003-04:00

Dana Milbank is often a Villager in good standing, but occasionally makes really good points.

Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum attempted to explain why he criticized “radical feminism” for working women and why he said Islam was “stuck in the 7th century.”

Erm, uh, okay. So lemme get this straight. Santorum considers it bad to be stuck in the 7th Century if you're a Muslim, but wants women in America to go back to the 1950s, where they were stay-at-home moms and homemakers. Ri-i-ight!

Just for the record, one of the reasons that women have gone into the workforce since the early 1970s has been that the salaries of people who were making $50,000 a year or less have remained essentially flat for the past several decades. Inflation hasn't been out of control since the early 1980s, but although inflation has been mild since then, there has been some. As a result, Americans of modest income have had their standards of living squeezed for quite some time. This is not the post-World War II period (Late 1940s to the early 1970s), where salaries steadily rose for people making modest incomes.

Yes, part of the reason for women entering the workforce has been feminism, but a large part has been a squeeze on wages and living standards, which means that for an ordinary family to maintain its living standards, the stay-at-home mom/homemaker had to go out and get a job.

Thor

2011-05-07T00:35:00.002-04:00

Just saw "Thor"! Kewl stuff! It got just two stars from the Inquirer today, but remember, it's an origin story, so it did a data-dump of lots and lots of introductory information while trying to be an exciting story and to set up future stories, all at the same time. For good stories in the comic series, MTV Geek chooses a lot of good ones. Personally, I don't think I really started following or enjoying Thor until Walt Simonson began writing and drawing him in 1983, though I was interested to see that they folded Richard Wagner's "The Ring of the Nibelung" into the series in 1980. I guess I've mostly seen Thor as a member of the Avengers (And no, the spy duo John Steed and Emma Peel had nothing to do with the comics-book Avengers) and yes, there's an Avengers movie in the works. I liked some of the Avengers stories that Thor was in during the late 1970s, the Count Nefaria battle being an especially classic one.

Returning to the torture debate

2011-05-06T13:41:00.002-04:00

American intelligence operations located Osama by following his trusted couriers, whose names were given up by al-Qaida members during harsh interrogations at CIA black sites under President Bush.

Yes, the same interrogations endlessly denounced by the entire Democratic Party (save Joe Lieberman), the mainstream media, and an especially indignant Jane Mayer in The New Yorker.

Ann Coulter 5May2011

According to “Matthew Alexander, a former senior military interrogator who conducted or supervised over 1,300 interrogations in Iraq, leading to the capture of numerous al-Qaeda leaders”:

One of the things that people aren’t talking about is the fact that one of the people that was confronted with this information that bin Laden had a courier is Sheikh al-Libi, who was held in a CIA secret prison and was tortured and who gave his CIA interrogators the name of the courier as being Maulawi Jan. And the CIA chased down that information and found out that person didn’t exist, that al-Libi had lied. And nobody is talking about the fact that al-Libi caused us to waste resources and time by chasing a false lead because he was tortured.

The other thing that’s being left out of this conversation is the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed certainly knew the real name of the courier, whose nom de guerre or nickname was Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. But Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had to have known his real name or at least how to find him, a location that we might look, but he never gave up that information. And so, what we’re seeing is that waterboarding and enhanced interrogation techniques, just like professional interrogators have been saying for years, always result in either limited information, false information or no information.

In other words, as the Roman jurist Ulpian (1,800 years ago) noted, when tortured, the strong will resist and the weak will say anything to end the pain. We can see both resistance methods being used in the example above. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed simply refused to say anything that would have assisted American interrogators and Sheikh al-Libi lied, telling his interrogators what the obviously wanted to hear, and thereby causing them to waste resources searching for people who didn't exist. No, Ann Coulter is wrong. The name of the courier was indeed critical to finding bin Laden, but that name was not discovered via torture, i.e., through “harsh interrogation methods.”

All of which suggests that that great piece of intelligence al-Libi gave us–that OBL’s couriers would only check in every two months which meant he was just a figurehead–led directly to the CIA’s decision to stop focusing on bin Laden.

And if that’s the case, then al-Libi’s torture didn’t lead us to OBL; rather, it led us to stop searching in concerted manner for OBL.

Marcy “Emptywheel” Wheeler 4May2011

The CIA closed down its' bin Laden unit in 2005, meaning the US Government was not searching for bin Laden in any coordinated or concerted fashion for at least three years, until President Obama got the search for bin Laden up and running again.

Sorry Ms. Coulter, but Jane Mayer was absolutely, 100% correct. Torture did nothing to help locate bin Laden.

"Chuck" and "Bandslam"

2011-05-03T01:25:00.002-04:00

Chuck (Zachary Levy) had a pretty interesting episode lately (Number 421) and they reproduce an interesting scene from it here. Sarah (Yvonne Strahovski) tries to reproduce Chuck's look when he “flashes” (He retrieves data that was inputted into his brain via advanced technological means). We get a bit more into the Sarah character than usual because we get to meet her dad and see some of her early life. She's certainly come a long way since she was just a CIA agent who really didn't seem to have any sort of private life. Sarah and Chuck make an interesting pair because there are definitely areas where she's more capable and competent than he is, but he's plenty competent in enough areas so that his ego is never in danger.

I described a movie to both my sister and my niece. “This fellow, who's in high school, meets up with a blond babe and a modest brunette. And of course, guess who it is that wins our hero's heart?” Very curiously, both of them guessed the blond babe. I'm like “What? No, no, no, the modest brunette is the more virtuous one, therefore she's the one who prevails over the prettier blond gal.” Lots of good songs, I especially liked the one where the band really comes together and finds its rhythm under the blond gal. Plenty of minor problems with the script, lots of items where you have to use the ol' “suspension of disbelief” thing, but a very, very good, rocking out version of the 1970s Bread song “Everything I own” (Bread was actually a soft-rock group) where our true heroine gets the entire audience rocking along to her performance.

Response to letter in DelCo Times

2011-05-02T10:22:00.004-04:00

I submitted this comment to the DelCo Times in response to a letter there, but several hours later, it still hasn't been posted. Here it is anyway:

I was out of town when my letter was published on April 18^th, but feel that I am obliged to respond to the latest from Margaret Kane. First off, someone asked me what a “progressive” was as opposed to a “liberal.” Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) is a liberal while Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) is a progressive. Ideologically, they're very similar, but Schakowsky and Durbin were both members of the “Cat Food Commission” (Officially, the “Deficit Commission,” or “Bowles-Simpson”) but Schakowsky quit in disgust, denounced the group and produced her own (much better) deficit-reduction plan as the other members clearly just wanted to punish all non-millionaires for not being millionaires. Durbin voted for the Commission's recommendations, pathetically mewling that he had to maintain credibility with the hard-core Republicans in the group. Today, Durbin is further disgracing himself by remaining with the “Gang of Six,” even though the Republicans in the group have said “No way, no how, ain't gonna happen” to any sort of tax increase.

So essentially, liberals are wimpier versions of progressives.

As a progressive, I absolutely and unequivocally denounce JimmyG's comment that he desires the death of Sarah Palin. Back during the Bush-Cheney years, we progressives made it a point that “I oppose the death penalty so much, I wouldn't even apply to Bush or Cheney.” Even with all of the evil those guys performed, we still didn't want to call for their deaths. We wanted people to oppose the Bush-Cheney policies and not Bush and Cheney as people.

As to Kane's essential point, that “both sides do it” and that progressives and right-wingers are equally bad in calling for violence against their opponents, this is what we call a “false equivalence.” The examples have some elements in common, but they're simply not the same. The reporter/blogger David Neiwert has documented a rising tide of right-wing violence that simply has no equivalence on the left.

And yes, Sarah Palin was contributing to increasingly violent language in politics with her “target” map and richly deserved to be denounced for it. Was she the one and only example? Not at all, but she was an especially high-profile target for critics as her map was especially irresponsible in normalizing talk of violence in politics.

Corporate overreach and who the media focuses on

2011-04-20T14:37:00.001-04:00

There certainly are a number of good things I can say about private enterprise. There are many areas of the economy that it handles better than either straight government control or even heavily-regulated utilities do. Education, though, really isn't one of those areas. The essential problem here seems to be that people agree that an educational institution should be run efficiently and effectively, but the idea of “running government like a business” should really end right there. Often, the interests of a business and the consumers and/or stockholders of that business are the same. In those cases, the business model is a good one. In the case of educational institutions though, the interests of society as a whole in educating as many young citizens as possible is in conflict with the business' need to save on resources and to not toss money into difficult cases.

The piece that I linked to goes over the experience of Seattle and out-of-state students. Those students pay $25,000 as opposed to in-state students, who pay $11,000. That's fine as long as the institution is controlled by the state and where the state can insist that the institution carry a certain percentage of in-state students. In this case however, the institution is controlled by private enterprise and as the institution wants to make money, they lowered their percentage of in-state students so that they could take in more-profitable out-of-state students. Very simply, there's a conflict of interests between what's good for the State of Washington and what's good for the private entity of the University of Washington.

It's hardly in the interest of students to be saddled with thousands of dollars in student loans that get used to make the educational institution profitable, but that situation is fine by private educational institutions as they make lots of money that way. Only a government-run institution cares about lowering the financial burden on students as managers and stockholders of a private company are perfectly happy to pass that burden on. Socializing the costs of doing business is what businesses do.

Another serious conflict of interest occurs with our press corps. The Tea Party was, from the very beginning, as astroturf organization, funded by billionaires (Americans for Prosperity, i.e., the Koch brothers) and given millions of dollars of free publicity by Fox News. After Madison, Wisconsin saw protests of up to 100,000 pro-union members, the protest rally held there on April 17^th was a grand, whopping 6,500. And as the 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th videos in this post make clear, the equally large crowd of Tea Party opponents was there to boo the headliners Sarah Palin and Andrew Brietbart. But both CNN (The 1^st video) and Fox News (The 2^nd) photographed the rally in such a way as to hide the miserably poor size of the crowd and adjust their sound so that their TV audiences can't hear the booing. As Rachel Maddow pointed out on the 18^th, the Tea Party is pretty much dead as a movement. The only Americans who don't appear to have gotten the memo on that seem to be the traditional Beltway media people.

An old and still really annoying example of media coverage of electoral victories are the two Time Magazine covers of the Republican electoral victory of 1994 (A charging elephant) and the Democratic electoral victory of 2006 (A %$#&@!!! Venn diagram). In both cases, a party re-won both Houses of Congress after a period in the wilderness, but Republicans were given a cover that had some drama. This week, the Sunday talk shows featured Tea Party spokespeople and gee, somehow forgot to include any progressives to provide any sort of balance. Tea Party folks frame the disputes over the Federal budget as though it were a family budget, which it most certainly is not. The most direct example of the difference is that families can't issue bonds, but the Federal governments' ability to do so makes it possible to engage in deficit spending. No one is supplied to the show to make this very elementary point and thus, this Republican talking point goes completely unchallenged.

Okay. I'm sure that if the executive producer of This Week responded to my emails, he would say that having representatives from the majority party is an appropriate booking and that the Tea Party caucus is a notable movement of today. That's an arguable position to take. However, how many freshman Democratic reps did ABC book after the Democratic sweep of 2008. None. I would also suggest that the media seems more enthralled by the tea party movement than most Americans. Why else would they cover exhaustively a few dozen protesters in Boca Raton and ignore the thousands protesting BP's environmental violations?

There are, I suppose, two possible answers.

My father was in the Navy, I'm a Navy veteran myself (PN3, 1991-2001) and was very interested in military history long before I joined up, so I tend to “project” my own view of how reality works onto everyone else, that is, I tend to think that the media reports in a particular way because they're receiving orders from people they recognize as being either their lawful superiors or as having essentially that sort of authority.

I found it very difficult to avoid that view when it came to Ann Coulter suddenly taking it into her head that the “9/11 Widows” or the “Jersey Girls” were “reveling in their status as celebrities.” Despite MSNBC persons reacting to her statements with horror, Coulter was interviewed twice on June 6^th, once on June 14^th, again on June 26^th and yet again on July 14^th. At no time did MSNBC invite the widows on to respond to Coulter's charges. And while a few of them have appeared in the media since, America essentially stopped hearing from them.

Considering that the Widows were a real embarrassment to the Bush Administration, pushing them into forming the 9-11 Commission and then complaining that the investigation left lots of loose ends unresolved (See especially Kristin Breitweiser's challenge to Karl Rove at the link), I saw Coulter and MSNBC as both having received orders from President Bush and/or Vice-President Dick Cheney to do those interviews and get it out to the country that the Widows were now to be avoided.

Where would this relationship of the government and the press have started? In 1981, the media embarrassed President Reagan by uncovering the El Mozote Massacre in El Salvador and Reagan promptly set about disciplining the media. Raymond Bonner of the NY Times took an immense amount of criticism. Bonner was pushed out of any further reporting for the NY Times, even though he was vindicated several years later.

A really interesting example to test this thesis would be the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. In 2004, Presidential candidate Senator John Kerry (D-MA) was looking as though he had a lock on veterans after his flags and banners nominating convention. The Swift Boat Vets produced lots and lots of sound and fury and all sorts of charges, none of which turned out to be valid. I never had much doubt that the group was simply an extension of the Bush-Cheney campaign and sure enough, there was plenty of evidence that they took their instructions directly from the Bush-Cheney reelection effort. What was very clear at the time was that the effort was receiving top-notch legal advice. They were very expertly maneuvered around campaign finance and disclosure laws so as to appear as independent as possible for as long as possible.

The entire month of August 2004 saw an intense focus on the Swift Boat Vets by the media, which concentrated on them to the severe detriment of many other, more pressing and urgent issues. Granted $20 million buys a lot of ads and makes one a formidable campaign presence, but was the media focus due to orders or did they just take clever advantage of media weakness?

When the ad hoc group known as the Swift Boat Vets launched their attack on 2004 Democratic presidential candidate Kerry, the group quickly achieved media stardom and became a household name. Their accusations that Kerry misrepresented his Vietnam record and didn’t deserve his numerous decorations—“Kerry’s phony war crimes charges, and his exaggerated claims about his service in Vietnam,” as one ad put it—were repeated endlessly as Swift Boat leaders became ubiquitous TV guests, often accompanied by free re-airings of their spots. These dramatic claims gave a significant boost to George W. Bush’s campaign by casting doubt on Kerry’s honesty and tarnishing his image as war hero; some credit the group with a major role in Kerry’s defeat.

FAIR brings up an extremely good point, the Swift Boat Vets had a large cheering section in the rest of the media and were thus armed with powerful loudspeakers in terms of access to major media players. The non-profit advocacy group FactCheck.org certainly made itself felt by refusing to come down definitively against the Swift Boat Vet ads (Though they came out very strongly against a NARAL ad almost exactly a year later).

Could it be that the news outlets that gave round-the-clock coverage to the Swift Boat Vets were not being ordered to do so, but were simply interested in the business side of the issue? That Republicans and Republican-sympathizing rich people were handing papers and news programs a ready-made story, complete with cool pictures and public-interest-piquing charges? After all, the Swift Boat Vets were always available for interviews and offered programs a reason to go delving into past history, which is, was and always will be less controversial than current issues.

Yeah, that could be the case. At the minimum, people's motivations for doing things can be very tangled and reason can be fuzzy and obscure even to the people involved.

Ugly Betty gets a makeover

2011-04-01T17:08:00.002-04:00

America Ferrara plays a young, undocumented immigrant on “The Good Wife” whose father needs to be rescued by the campaign manager of the husband of the shows' protagonist. Quite a change from “Ugly Betty,” a show where Ferrara's looks were really downplayed. Eli, the campaign manager, displays a serious crush on “Natalie Flores” and gallantly comes through in a pinch when her father most requires assistance. As Natalie is portrayed as a smart, serious and hard-working person, I can definitely identify with Eli's feelings.

The Koch brothers

2011-03-28T22:48:00.002-04:00

The first and best resource I've seen on the Koch brothers is this New Yorker piece by Jane Mayer (Extensive at 22 printed pages or 67 kilobytes). Some very important items that come across here are that there's an amazing coincidence between what's good for the brother's corporate enterprises financially and between what they espouse as philosophies. There's simply no daylight between what they consider good as a theoretical, philosophical matter and between what profits them by aiding and assisting their companies. Second, we really don't know what exactly they run as ideological assistance to the right wing. They make it a practice to do much of what they do “under the radar.”

There's an excellent pro-Koch piece put out by the Weekly Standard. Of course, it tries to make them out as gee-whiz type guys who just sincerely believe in what they're doing and golly-gee willikers, they're just so full of patriotism and good intentions that wow, how can anybody have anything against them?

As Glenn Greenwald points out, there's a very revealing passage in the Weekly Standard piece:

A left-wing blogger ambushed David when he traveled to Washington to see the 112th Congress sworn in. The liberal group Common Cause organized a protest at the most recent Koch fundraising seminar in Palm Springs. The lefties outside the hotel unfurled a white banner with the words "Koch Kills" printed in red. Drops of blood fell from each letter.

Believe it or not, David Koch didn't only find this noteworthy (Greenwald himself considered the protest thoroughly routine), it elicited the following reaction from him:

"These people were very, very extreme," David said, "and I think very dangerous" . . . "But that was pretty shocking, to see what we’re up against, or what the country’s up against: to have an element like this."

Whoa! Pretty sensitive guy, there! And he wants to be politically active, eh? Jennifer Rubin in The WaPo comes to the Koch's defense:

Left unsaid in all of this is the degree to which the Kochs’ political giving has been exaggerated. How much do they give? Over the last 20 years, about $11 million.

As the New Yorker piece makes clear though, this is only the very tip of the iceberg. The $11 million figure only counts money given as declared contributions that are given directly to politicians. It doesn't count any of the money that's gone into Americans for Prosperity, a group that heavily subsidized the Tea Party and bussed in members to town hall protests all over the country in the summer of 2009 to fight the Affordable Care Act. Greenwald estimates that their expenditures are in the “hundreds of millions.” As he says:

But the Koch brothers go far beyond mere writing about political issues. They single-handedly fund advocacy groups and covert campaigns on a wide variety of highly controversial issues that adversely impact huge numbers of people.

Rubin also claims the Kochs don't support the two wars over in the Mideast, Iraq and Afghanistan. As far as I could tell, that's true, I didn't run across any info on them and overseas interventions. Not every rich person supports all aspects of right-wing/Republican policies.

A blogger from Crooks & Liars concludes that the Kochs really have no idea what they're talking about when they evangelize about how wonderful the free market is. The free market is nowhere near as good to the bottom 99% of the wage ladder as it is to the top 1%. Those in that very top percentage point are extremely privileged to not have to suffer much of any of what the rest of us put up with all the time.

What do the Kochs and their buddies have to do with the extended battle over unions in Wisconsin? Everything! The Kochs and their privileges have far too much influence on US politics and need to be restrained so that the rest of us can get by.

Sucker Punch

2011-03-26T23:33:00.003-04:00

Just saw "Sucker Punch" tonight. Interesting. Unfortunately, I can see why it got a bad review as what's happening and why, isn't terribly mysterious. If y'all just let the ol' "suspension of disbelief" take hold and one just enjoys the action, it's well worth watching.
Frankly, I got the impression it saw things from a heavily female perspective "Yep, me and my posse, a buncha gorgeous chicks who kicked evil-guy/evil-robot butt with enthusiasm" seems to have been to motivating idea behind much of the flick.

Clintonian liberal interventionism

2011-03-21T19:01:00.001-04:00

Most interesting. Ross Douthat, the conservative columnist of the NY Times, looks at President Obama's strategy concerning Libya and well, makes a really excellent argument for Clintonian liberal interventionism. Not that he meant to, of course, but his summary of how Obama's intervention into Libya differs from Bush's invasion of Iraq reminds me and fellow progressives of just why Bush and his policies were so hated.

[Obama] just wanted to make sure we were doing it in the most multilateral, least cowboyish fashion imaginable.

[…]

[in] a stark departure from the Bush administration’s more unilateralist methods. There are no “coalitions of the willing” here, no dismissive references to “Old Europe,” no “you are with us or you are with the terrorists.”

My reaction to this, of course, is “Yes!!!!!” but it's pretty obvious that Douthat intended to present Obama's intervention into Libya as a “parade of horribles.” The following is an interesting paragraph, not so much for what it says, but for what it doesn't say and for the argument that doesn't follow it.

But there are major problems with this approach to war as well. Because liberal wars depend on constant consensus-building within the (so-called) international community, they tend to be fought by committee, at a glacial pace, and with a caution that shades into tactical incompetence. And because their connection to the national interest is often tangential at best, they’re often fought with one hand behind our back and an eye on the exits, rather than with the full commitment that victory can require.

The issues that goes unaddressed here is the one of how slow consensus-building actually compares in the real world to unilateral kick-ass action that gets taken “Right NOW!” Seems to me that the brusque and decisive booting of Shirley Sherrod from the Department of Agriculture was a sterling example of when decisive action can be hugely premature and can hurt ones' cause far more than it can help it. One might also note that because the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan didn't rely upon consensus-building and because there's no apparent way that they can ever result in victory, there's no easy way to end them.

What is the exit strategy for getting out of Afghanistan? General Petraeus certainly doesn't seem to know. He seems to want to keep that war going until it produces a victory and apparently, he'll keep on fighting that war until the last Afghan drops into the dust from sheer exhaustion. Afghans themselves would be perfectly happy to see US troops leave their country tomorrow. One recent friction point has been the killing, via a drone, of several boys aged 12 and under. Several high-ranking US persons have assured Afghans they'll be more careful in the future, but clearly, drones simply can't distinguish targets very well. We know from this and many other cases that drones can't distinguish between firewood-gathering expeditions and wedding parties and guerrillas assembling for hostile action. Afghans understand that the US is using a baseball bat where a tack hammer would be far more useful. That's because a guerrilla war is not the same thing as a World War II-style conventional war. Guerrilla wars require far less in terms of sheer brute force and far more in the way of intel, in terms of precise knowledge as to who the bad guys are and in terms of understanding just what their appeal to the people of the countryside is.

The argument that doesn't follow the quoted paragraph above is that the Iraq War was a success that should be emulated. Douthat doesn't make that argument because it simply isn't true. US troops were not “greeted as liberators,” or at least a small proportion of the Iraqi people did see US troops in that light early on, but it was far from clear in 2006 that the Arab world in general was enthusiastic about the US barging into Muslim countries and imposing made-in-America solutions to their problems, no matter how serious those problems were.

And y'know? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that if the two following propositions from Douthat are true, then a “forward strategy” is the last thing America wants! “Our coalition’s aims are uncertain” and “our supposed partners don’t seem to have the stomach for a fight.” I mean, are those really the conditions that call for an aggressive, kick-ass, no-holds-barred strategy? Really?!?! Sounds to me like Obama's pursuing a strategy that's constrained by the real demands of the real world and not a strategy that's been thought up in the romper room of kids playing cowboys.

Maybe, as Douthat says, “war and moralism are uneasy bedfellows,” but it seems to me that G.W. Bush tried the route of pretending that moralism was irrelevant and that he could just do whatever he pleased and that it was a spectacular failure.

US treatment of Bradley Manning

2011-03-15T00:41:00.001-04:00

Back during the scandal of G.W. Bush's illegal surveillance:

...the NSA is or was provided total, unsupervised access to all fiber-optic communications going between some of the nation's major telecommunication companies' major interconnect locations, including phone conversations, email, web browsing, and corporate private network traffic.

The initial explanation as to how the surveillance was structured was:

The President has authorized a program to engage in electronic surveillance of a particular kind, and this would be the intercepts of contents of communications where one of the -- one party to the communication is outside the United States. And this is a very important point -- people are running around saying that the United States is somehow spying on American citizens calling their neighbors. Very, very important to understand that one party to the communication has to be outside the United States.

Another very important point to remember is that we have to have a reasonable basis to conclude that one party to the communication is a member of al Qaeda, affiliated with al Qaeda, or a member of an organization affiliated with al Qaeda, or working in support of al Qaeda. We view these authorities as authorities to confront the enemy in which the United States is at war with -- and that is al Qaeda and those who are supporting or affiliated with al Qaeda.

This initial explanation as to how the program was carefully limited was never the slightest bit credible as everyone who had access to the underlying data, the raw data that was being gathered, was either a pro-Bush partisan or was a government or corporate employee who was sworn to secrecy.

On January 17, 2007, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales informed U.S. Senate leaders by letter that the [illrgal surveillance] program would not be reauthorized...

[...]

On September 18, 2008, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an Internet-privacy advocacy group, filed a new lawsuit... They sued on behalf of AT&T customers to seek redress for what the EFF alleges to be an illegal, unconstitutional, and ongoing dragnet surveillance... [emphasis added]

Again, the explanation made by the Bush Adminstration that "Hey, the program's all fixed and no more illegal surveillance is taking place" was simply not credible as there was still no investigation conducted by anyone who had opposed the program in the first place. Everyone with access to the gathered data was still either a pro-surveillance partisan or was sworn to secrecy.

Much the same is true of information concerning how Pfc. Bradley Manning is being treated while in military custody.

Manning's treatment has been reviewed by the General Counsels of the Department of Defense, Navy and Marine Corps and found to be legal, according to the Pentagon. They say he is being treated the same as any other maximum security prisoner on Prevention of Injury watch would be.

[...]

Following news that Manning was being forced to sleep without clothes in his cell, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) charged that the miilitary's treatment of Manning is comparable to the abuse carried out at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The Pentagon now says that Manning's underwear was taken away from him at night after he said that if he wanted to kill himself he could use the elastic waistband on his underpants. He now wears a "tear proof garment" and does have blankets and a pillow.

It'd be nice to believe that the Pentagon is not carrying out Abu Ghraib-style mental conditoning on Manning in order to force him to confess to collaborating with Julian Assange in the Wikileaks case. It's also nice to hear that Senator John Kerry (D-MA), who said he'd look into Manning's case, has apparently decided that everything there is okay. But if Manning was not being conditioned to confess, then how do we explain the following?

[Mannings' lawyer David E.] Coombs also filed a demand for a speedy trial on January 9. The lawyer’s web site notes that Manning has been held in solitary confinement since May 29 of last year without formal charges being made against him.

Also,

The conditions under which Manning is held are in sharp contrast to those the Army affords to the dozen soldiers from the Stryker Brigade charged with killing Afghan civilians, cutting off body parts as trophies, or covering up those atrocities. These soldiers also face Article 32 hearings, but none is held in solitary confinement and the majority are merely confined to base, not jailed.

What truly makes the testimony of both military officers and the Obama Administration unbelievable has been that Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) has been trying to see Manning for over a month.

Obama says DOD has assured him everything they’re doing to Manning is standard. If so, then why are they fighting so hard to prevent a member of Congress from visiting him?

As the lawyer/blogger Glenn Greenwald has tweeted:

CNN says Crowley resigned "under pressure from WH" - http://is.gd/yuyqbN - detainee abuse is allowed - speaking out against it isn't.

What happened to prompt that statement?

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley denounced the conditions of Bradley Manning's detention as "ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid," forcing President Obama to address those comments in a Press Conference and defend the treatment of Manning.

[...]

So, in Barack Obama's administration, it's perfectly acceptable to abuse an American citizen in detention who has been convicted of nothing by consigning him to 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement, barring him from exercising in his cell, punitively imposing "suicide watch" restrictions on him against the recommendations of brig psychiatrists, and subjecting him to prolonged, forced nudity designed to humiliate and degrade. But speaking out against that abuse is a firing offense.

Why would the military/the Obama Administration be abusing Manning in this manner?

Justice Department officials are trying to find out whether Mr. Assange encouraged or even helped the analyst, Pfc. Bradley Manning, to extract classified military and State Department files from a government computer system. If he did so, they believe they could charge him as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them.

Sounds to me then, that their attempt to find evidence of an active conspiracy came up empty and they're trying to force Manning to confess that Assange played a more active role anyway.The State Department spokesperson who resigned (Obviously, President Obama demanded his immediate resignation), P.J Crowley, pointed out in 2009, quite properly, that:

More importantly, the United States and its allies need to drive a wedge between affiliated groups and broader communities. On this front, Al Qaeda is actually vulnerable. The vision of Islamic society that bin Laden propagates—his bridge to the seventh century—is not shared by the masses. In Iraq and elsewhere, Muslims have turned against bin Laden once they recognized that Al Qaeda’s violent attacks largely victimize fellow Muslims. But turning the tide is simply not possible as long as the United States pursues its current strategy—occupying Iraq, defending autocratic leaders such as Musharraf and violating international norms regarding torture and the treatment of detainees. Such actions create the perception of grievance that opens the door to radical recruitment.

The point is that if the US behaves just as badly as the brutal, extremist radicals of al Qaeda, why on Earth should Muslims take our side against them? It's hardly sufficient to say that "Hey, it's only one person who's being abused" or that "Obama is playing seventh-dimensional chess." Fortunately, the left blogosphere has reacted appropriately. In fact, supporters of Obama are now appearing on the right-wing side of the aisle. Gee, wasn't there a concern in October of 2008 that John McCain's elecyion as President would constitute a "third term of Bush"?

It makes you wonder...

It sounds like the plot for the latest summer horror movie. Imagine, for a moment, that George W. Bush had been allowed a third term as president, had run and had won or stolen it, and that we were all now living (and dying) through it. With the Democrats in control of Congress but Bush still in the Oval Office, the media would certainly be talking endlessly about a mandate for bipartisanship and the importance of taking into account the concerns of Republicans. Can't you just picture it?

If the US is willing to continue going down the G.W. Bush path, if it's willing to cast aside civilized norms and to brutally abuse one of its own citizens for dishonorable reasons, then our country has no reason to expect anyone to look up to us. The US becomes a completely non-credible spokesperson for human rights.

Red Riding Hood

2011-03-12T00:57:00.001-05:00

Just saw Red Riding Hood. Not bad. It's a pre-firearms movie, so at the most, people are armed with swords and crossbows. They're pretty restrained on all of the blood and gore and bodice-ripping (Well, the guy starts to undo her bodice, anyway). Very cool look at how medieval folks conducted a celebration early on, where the townspeople all "let their hair down" and enjoy themselves. Our heroine gets involved in all sorts of romantickal difficulties.

More on Republican budget-cutting

2011-03-11T20:28:00.002-05:00

When you think of Republicans and the budget and their advertised desire to reduce the budget as much as possible, just take a look at Japan and their tsunami (And please remember that the disaster also affects two nuclear power plant units) that struck Thursday night and remember that Republicans want to drastically cut the disaster-preparedness budget. Apparently, Republicans think disaster preparedness is a silly luxury item and that we can better spend that extra money on a war halfway across the world or upon tax cuts for the rich.

Update:

Fukushima nuclear power plant explodes

Japan is battling to stave off a nuclear disaster after an explosion at a north-eastern nuclear plant in the wake of the enormous earthquake and tsunami.
Authorities are evacuating tens of thousands of residents living within a 12 mile (20km) radius of the Fukushima Daiichi plant and those within 6 miles of a second installation in Futuba, 150 miles north of Tokyo.
The explosion followed warnings of a possible meltdown after problems with the cooling system and confirmation of a radiation leak at Fukushima No 1 plant. But nuclear safety officials said it was unlikely the reactor had suffered serious damage, according to the Kyodo news agency.
It is feared that 1,300 people died in Friday's double disaster, most being killed as the wall of mud and water engulfed buildings, roads and vehicles, Japanese media reported. But the priority now is to tackle the crisis at the power plant.
more

Surveillance by law enforcement and by national security agencies

2011-03-10T13:51:00.002-05:00

A former director of the CIA and a former Attorney General argue that the Patriot Act must be renewed without any conditions and without any “sunset” provisions (Provisions designed to expire after a certain date). The Seattle Times spoke eloquently about how human beings simply can't be trusted with that sort of unlimited surveillance authority. I read in someplace about how President Lyndon Johnson was one day fuming about a political opponent of his and how he'd like to take a look at the fellow's FBI file. His wife recommended against doing so with the observation that FBI files contained a lot of garbage, that is, a lot of unverified information and unconfirmed rumors. Why would that be? Was the FBI of the mid-1960s a bad place that was careless about how it gathered information?

I would argue that it wasn't. That the FBI files of people that the President both liked and didn't like contained un-screened information because that's how the FBI gathers information. Being an agency that was dedicated to protecting the public, they wanted then and still want today to throw up as wide a screen as possible to vacuum up everything that could possibly be of any relevance, no matter how irrelevant it appears to be at the time it's collected. Even small details that appear to be of no consequence can be crucially important when placed together with other small details.

The problem, and this is something I have never seen any Republican or any conservative acknowledge since 2001, when the issue of surveillance first became of deep relevance, is that domestic law enforcement agencies have a different mandate that requires a different approach. Domestic law enforcement agencies require that, in order to enforce a law by punishing a citizen, the agency must be confident that the citizen really, truly, indeed, committed the crime that he or she has been accused of committing. That is why there was a “wall” between the national security agencies and between the law enforcement agencies. That is why civil libertarians argue for re-erecting such a wall today. That is an argument that isn't even acknowledged by right-wingers to this day and which is glaring by its absence from the WaPo article today.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, 10 Mar 2011. Pages4 - 5

2011-03-10T11:49:00.003-05:00

What I find interesting about the piece "Afghan War Gains 'Fragile'" is in what it doesn't say. Where is the President's mandate to fight a war in Afghanistan, the "graveyard of empires" that is due to be even more violent than it was in 2010? The DNC decided in late February that the President doesn't have any such mandate. What he does have is a mandate to make serious, sizable withdrawals in July of this year.

The Philadelphia Inquirer
10 Mar 2011

In response to CNN piece

2011-03-05T00:08:00.003-05:00

Media Matters drew my attention to a CNN piece. My comments on the piece are:

Re: “Are whites racially oppressed?” Mar 4

In CNN's article “Are whites racially oppressed?,” it would have been appropriate to have followed Mona Charen's sensible, skeptical comments with the narrator of the piece showing that the views of people who feel that “whites” have been magically transformed into a harassed minority are not dealing in reality.

Very obviously, the piece talks about people who are horrified that America has a black President. What is also quite obvious is the fact that Barack Obama was elected President and that what that shows is that those horrified people are a minority.

The phrase “...many white Americans feel anxious about their race...” should have read “...a small minority of white Americans feel anxious about their race...”.

The statement: "There was no one for white males until we came around," is patently ridiculous as there is no need for anyone to be “for white males.” White males are doing just fine, thank you very much.

I'm puzzled as to why CNN felt the need to legitimize the person named Peter Brimelow. Why did CNN feel the need to grant him an interview? Couldn't they simply read the racist claptrap this guy publishes and quote some of it? The website VDARE was declared a hate site many years ago and it truly is a disgrace for CNN to give them any legitimacy by doing an interview with someone who writes for that site.

“Some may see him as extreme, but Brimelow argues in his columns that more white Americans are moving toward his stance on immigration and other issues.” Ugh, “Some may see him...” is SUCH a classic “He said, she said” equivocation! Was it impossible for CNN reporters to have gone over Brimelow's words and to have unequivocally declared him to be a racist? Was it THAT difficult for someone to have done a BIT of homework on the issue?

Neither Brimelow's nor James Edwards' words are followed up with any evaluations by the author. Their statements are followed with the ludicrous accusation that "[whites] are the victims of [racism] every day,” Yes, the SPLC is given the final word, but it's such a broad, general statement that's so lacking in specific details that it's easily overlooked.

“Obama's 'unpopular liberal expansion' of the federal government” wasn't unpopular at all during the 2008 campaign, where Obama very specifically went over his proposals many times. Obama didn't pull the wool over anybody's eyes. He did what he said what he was going to do and was attacked for it because Republicans saw it as the death knell for their party. It would have been good for CNN to have gone over the fact that Republicans adopted a “scorched earth” strategy and that they bear a great deal of responsibility for the minority of Americans who feel that the “white race” is under attack.

Joke Line vs Krugman

2011-02-21T14:29:00.002-05:00

Joke Line (Time Magazine's Joe Klein) is the guy who was supposed to be a liberal back during the build-up to the Iraq War, but apparently forgot which side he was supposed to represent and decided to go with the other team. Apparently, Klein is still confused about which team he's supposed to be playing for.

Are there problems with teachers unions and other public-employee unions? Yes, I'm afraid there are. Klein does a good job of sketching out what those problems are. Are those problems the reason, the cause, the focus of the protests in Wisconsin? Not in the slightest.

Paul Krugman does an excellent job sketching out what the protests in Wisconsin are really about.

So it’s not about the budget; it’s about the power.

In principle, every American citizen has an equal say in our political process. In practice, of course, some of us are more equal than others. Billionaires can field armies of lobbyists; they can finance think tanks that put the desired spin on policy issues; they can funnel cash to politicians with sympathetic views (as the Koch brothers did in the case of Mr. Walker). On paper, we’re a one-person-one-vote nation; in reality, we’re more than a bit of an oligarchy, in which a handful of wealthy people dominate.

Given this reality, it’s important to have institutions that can act as counterweights to the power of big money. And unions are among the most important of these institutions.

As Rachel Maddow pointed out via an interview with Wisconsin State Senator Jon Erpenbach (D), the fight is entirely about the continued existence and viability of unions. Are unions important to the non-wealthy? Heck, yes!!! Of the top ten institutions that contributed money to the 2010 Congressional campaigns, three of them were controlled by progressives and all three of them were unions. Without unions, progressives can't put much of anything into the field.

As Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) put it in the wake of the ACORN “sting” (James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles didn't actually uncover anything in the way of illegal conduct, but ACORN was disbanded anyway):

“Defunding the left is going to be so easy,” said Bachmann, “and it’s going to solve so many of our problems.”

The idea on the right wing of “defund the left” has a history that stretches back to the Civil Rights Movement as the Movement used the tax-exempt status of their foundations to fund voter-registration drives. Real pushback against the sources that provide funding for left-leaning political movements started with the Reagan Administration and The Heritage Foundation with the two of them working arm-in-arm to do as the anti-environmentalist Ron Arnold claimed: "We want to destroy the environmentalists by taking away their money and their members."

How useful is money to the left? Well, probably the most high-visibility project that the anti-war left in Philadelphia undertook in recent years was the “Sea of Tombstones” done by the Delaware Valley Veterans For America. It was lots of fun to take part in that project, but it involved a bit of money. We met in the backyard of one of our prime members, he purchased wood and hammers and nails and paint and rented a truck to get the “tombstones” down to the area of the Liberty Bell and spent several hours setting it all up. We all took turns guarding the set-up and answering questions and handing out literature.

The Coalition for Peace Action is also a reasonably successful peace group. If one does a Google search for “news of..” the CFPA, it's clear that they're a well-known group in New Jersey. They do fund-raisers and concerts and are active in nuclear issues. On the other hand, a search for the less-cash-rich Philly Against War comes up with not a whole lot other than the publicity that the group and allied groups have themselves generated.

The lesson here is that a peace group can have a fair impact on public perceptions without spending a lot of money, but money sure helps! Money magnifies your impact many times over. The right wing is absolutely correct in that going after progressive sources of funding is a good way to weaken the public impact of progressives in general.

The fight in Wisconsin is absolutely critical. Progressives must win or their influence on the rest of America will pretty much evaporate.

I thought so

2011-02-20T20:29:00.002-05:00

Pleased to see that my prediction was correct. I felt all along that when the military was told that gays would be accepted as full members, that they'd salute and get cracking on making gays welcome within their ranks. There were a number of skeptics, Marine Commandant General. James Amos and Senator John McCain (R-AZ) among them. General Amos said: "...he addressed some 12,000 Marines about the change and “everyone said, ‘Sir, we got it. We’re going to do this thing.‘”
McCain felt that 12% of the military would up and quit in response to gays coming out, but although it's impossible to say with absolute certainty why people may decide not to re-enlist, the numbers of those not re-enlisting are essentially unchanged from before. There has been no surge towards the exit doors.

The Egyptian Revolution 25 January - 11 February

2011-02-16T20:27:00.001-05:00

A summary of how various PhillyIMC contributors covered the Egyptian revolution of early 2011.
Past Philly IMC Feature: Young Philadelphia demand Egyptian president Mubarak to step down now! | | | IMC-US Features: Solidarity Builds for Egyptian Struggle | Celebrating People's Power in Egypt | | | Global Indymedia Feature: Tens of thousands on the streets say down with the regime
PhillyIMC first published a piece on the uprising in Egypt on 27 January. It was Mass Street Protests in Egypt by someone who posts very frequently to IMC sites, Stephen Lendman. He quoted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as saying:

"Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people."

But Lendman also quoted Facebook organizers, who wrote:

"People are fed up with Mubarak and his dictatorship and his torture chambers and his failed economic policies. If Mubarak is not overthrown tomorrow then it will be the day after. If it's not the day after it's going to be next week."

Aladdin Elaasar, who wrote The Last Pharaoh, also saw great significance in the uprising and sketched out how Egypt looked at this point:

"The 83 years old President Mubarak plans to run for another 6 years term this year and to have his son Gamal Mubarak inherit him as the next president of Egypt. Mubarak has ruled Egypt with an iron fist through oppression, cooptation and cronyism. Only a small elite connected to his regime has benefited. A sense of frustration, hopelessness and repression seems to be haunting Egyptian youth and the older people as well, struggling to make ends meet."

Elaasar provided many more details about Mubarak's regime the next day and urged Presidet Obama to support the uprising.

Zahir Ebrahim contributed a deep-think piece on the uprising, comparing it especially to Iran's unsuccesssful "Green Revolution."

Rich Gardner documented a rally in central Philadelphia that was in support of the Egyptian uprising on 1 February. He also contributed a summary of pieces around the blogosphere the next day.

Baba Bob Shipman covered another rally held shortly afterwards.

"Approximately 250 protesters marched from 22nd and Market streets in Philadelphia to City Hall in support of the Egyptian people calling for the ouster of the current president. The overwhelming theme of todays protest was freedom, stating 30 years is enough."

Between The Lines puts the uprising in persepective by showing that the uprising is just the latest in a long series f actions carried out against US-backed regimes in the region.

By 4 February, Stephen Lendman was wondering After Mubarak: What's Next?

On 6 February, Rich Gardner contributed a set of further thoughts and observations.

An anonymous person put out views on several personalities that were behind the uprising.

By 7 February, PCInt was documenting that Egypt [was] in flames and that:

"For 10 days the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, Suez and many other Egyptian cities have witnessed a great wave of anger among the masses who can no longer bear to live in unemployment, poverty and hunger: after Tunisia and Algeria now its Egypt's turn."

On 9 February, Seven Star Hand was of the opinion that the US and the Vatican were playing good-cop, bad-cop with Egypt.

Finally, on 13 February, Uhuru put out a statement of triumph "Victory to the People of Egypt!"

"However, now the tides have turned and the people of Egypt refuse to be used as cannon fodder for US imperialism, just as the African community right here is resisting."

Rich Gardner comments on whether or not the CIA could possibly have foreseen the uprising:

Potential Republican presidential candidate and former Governor of Minnesota Tim Pawlenty thinks that the Obama Administration “should have had one message that was clear and consistent and measured and appropriate” on Egypt. Which sounds really great in theory, but aside from the obvious goof-up of having a top diplomat, Frank Wisner Jr., go to Cairo and declare that Mubarak's "continued leadership is critical," there really wasn't much in terms of lack of coordination and poor messaging. (Also, Pawlenty's idea that America should forthrightly state its principles is fine, but the formulation of “One, we don't want a radical Islamic result. Two, we favor democracy,” is a complete mess as the two messages completely contradict each other.)

"I've had a very long-time interest in intel matters and in figuring out what the other guy is up to. I went to college in Washington DC (American University) where there were a number of Iranian students. I read some of the stuff they were posting around campus and spoke with a few of them. When the revolution of 1979 broke out, I was absolutely astonished to hear that the CIA had been caught completely flat-footed. They had no idea that a revolution had been brewing!

"But I really don't see that a failure to predict the Egyptian uprising of January 25th is anything to be ashamed of. As Panetta puts it: "People can tell you where the tremors are, they can tell you where the fault lines are," he said. "They can tell you the threat of something happening is close, but they can't tell you exactly when the earthquake will take place." (The Huffington Post piece goes on to look at events like 9-11, the nonexistent Iraqi WMDs and the economic weakness and later collapse of the Soviet Union. I'm not so sure these were CIA missteps as much as they were stories that both the elder and the younger George Bush's pressured the CIA into not seeing properly.)"

Did G.W. Bush support democracy?

2011-02-14T11:31:00.003-05:00

Today, Charles Krauthammer attempts to assign some credit for the Egyptian Revolution to G.W. Bush.

This is incorrect. In 1984, Ed Herman, a professor from the University of Pennsylvania, wrote a book called “Demonstration Elections” where he showed that the elections in South Vietnam after the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem were not essentially distinguishable from the elections in Eastern Europe that were undertaken while those countries were under occupation from the Soviet Union's Red Army. Reading Krauthammer carefully, it's clear that Krauthammer doesn't really disagree that Bush pressed countries of the Mideast to elect the “right” parties and that his reaction when the Palestinians elected the “wrong” party in 2006 (Hamas, which is very hostile to Israel), demonstrated that he really wasn't all that committed to democracy. Bush may have liked the idea of democracy in the abstract, but he clearly wasn't prepared to live with the consequences of actual, real, live, messy and unpredictable democracy in the real world. One could argue whether or not Hamas was the correct choice for Palestinians to make (The Guardian showed that the Bush Administration started immediately plotting against Hamas right after it won the election), but democracy is an all-or-nothing proposition. A nation either trusts another nation to control its own destiny or it doesn't. A nation cannot pick and choose for another nation who gets to run it and to then claim they support democracy in any meaningful sense.

So, can the Bush Administration claim any credit whatsoever for the revolution in Egypt? No, because Egypt did not comply with the conditions laid down by Bush's “Freedom Agenda.”

Green Hornet

2011-02-11T23:25:00.002-05:00

Saw Green Hornet tonight. Good stuff! Did I see the late 60s TV series? Eh, I was pretty young at the time, so not really sure. I do remember seeing him and Kato guest-starring in Batman (Ah yes, I remember Julie Newmar and Yvonne Craig in their respective catsuits...yowza!) around that time. The movie deals well with both Britt Reid's privilege granted by his wealth and with his white privilege in how he relates to Kato. The secretary, Lenore Case (played by Cameron Diaz) makes for a good foil against Reid's male privilege. The challenge for the actor was to have all that privilege and to still make Reid a reasonably sympathetic character, i.e., to not come off as a complete dick. I think all three of them did a reasonably good job with that. Of course, being an action film, there''s vast amounts of property destruction (Woo-hoo!) and scientific gadgets galore (Whee!).

Republicans substantiate talk about cutting budget

2011-02-09T00:29:00.000-05:00

The National Journal shows in great detail just how the Republican-majority 112^th 2011-2012 Congress plans to spend less of the taxpayer's money. Some of the proposed cuts show just how Congress sees cutting the budget as being a strictly one-way street. To Republicans, a cut is a cut is a cut. But it's hard to see how cutting Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy by $899 million is going to benefit the country. In fact, that sounds to me like the very definition of “false economy.” If one is spending less on “energy efficiency,” then wouldn't one be spending more on energy? Wouldn't spending on efficiency be a better use of dollars than spending on non-renewable fossil fuels? And cutting Fossil Energy Research by $31 million along with Clean Coal Technology by $18 million? I dunno where anybody got the hare-brained notion that cutting spending was a priority that took precedence over the most simple, basic, common-sensical ways to actually benefit the country and make our energy dollars stretch further.

They want to cut State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance by $256 million. Gee, now there's a grand idea! Camden, NJ, has “the second worst crime rate of an American city, but also they're $26.5 million in the red.”

The mayor of crime-ridden Camden, New Jersey, has announced layoffs of nearly half of the city's police force and close to a third of its fire department.

One hundred sixty-eight police officers and 67 firefighters were laid off Tuesday, as officials struggle to close a $26.5 million budget gap through a series of belt-tightening measures, Mayor Dana Redd told reporters.

Gee, cutting assistance to local law enforcement when local law enforcement is already cutting back is such an awesome, swell idea! I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

Legal Services Corporation to be cut by $75 million, the Food Safety and Inspection Services by $53 million (For the FY10 budget) and the EPA by $1.6 billion. These are all easily predictable cuts for a Republican Congress to make as they are, after all, Republicans. Therefore, these are pro-rich and pro-business actions that rescue businesspeople against anything that might reduce their profits.

Job Training Programs take a $2 billion whack. High Speed Rail gets hit for $1 billion, the FAA Next Gen gets sliced by $234 million and Amtrak takes a hit of $224 million. Again, these strike me as false economies. How are ya gonna run an economy effectively when people can't get training? When we're already falling behind Europe and Japan in high-speed rail travel? Do we really want America to remain as dependent on air travel as it is when we're also so worried about security on flights that “porno scanners” (Which are not difficult to defeat) and body groping are issues that have caused all sorts of hate and discontent with air travelers?

Now, these cuts, Community Health Centers by $1.3 billion, Maternal and Child Health Block Grants $210 million, Family Planning by $327 million, Poison Control Centers by $27 million, Center for Disease Control $755 million, National Institute for Health by $1 billion and Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services by $96 million, strike me as especially obtuse and counter-productive. The 112^th Congress is especially and energetically against abortion rights. In theory, Republicans argue, they're not anti-women, they're just against “killing babies.” But by cutting the budget for poison control, they are killing babies! Obviously, old people may have problems with poisons, but it's especially the very young that are most likely to end up accidentally getting poison in their bodies. How on Earth is it “pro-baby” to cut poison control? Cutting the budget for maternal health is “pro-baby”?!?!!? Huh? As Daily Kos puts it:

...with these cuts, we once again see that those strong feelings Republicans' profess to have for life stops at the delivery room door ... assuming you can afford to go to the hospital, of course.

Pandagon has a typically cuts-to-the-bone comment on abortion as seen by the involved man and woman:

Because there are just a lot of men out there who really need to believe they made the baby by having an orgasm, and that no one should credit the person who gained weight, contributed a quarter of her daily nutrients for 9 months, threw up a lot, saw her feet change size, and then pushed an 8 pound human out of her genitals while suffering massive pain. Because if you admit that bitches can pull that stunt off, you might have to admit that they’re good at other things, too.

Pandagon also has some worthwhile commentary on Lila Rose and her video “sting” of Planned Parenthood (That didn't sting very much as it didn't actually reveal any illegal conduct, though they did snag an idiot employee who “coached them to lie about the age of the girls’ sex partners.”).

Make no mistake: Lila Rose is out to make sure that low income and young women are deprived access to decent health care, including and especially contraception and cancer screening, both of which are the majority of Planned Parenthood’s work.

And when you remember that Lila Rose is getting all sorts of support from both elected Republicans and Fox News, it becomes pretty clear where they stand in regards to women's health.

And in their final wrap-up, we see that:

As things now stand, the budget deficit will be $1.500 trillion for this fiscal year. If the GOP has their way, it will be $1.477 trillion. That's a cut of merely 1.5% . Despite everything the GOP is going after, our budget deficit will be 98.5% of what it would have been otherwise -- virtually unchanged. In other words, the only thing they didn't slash was the budget deficit.

Bottom line is that cutting the budget to get a smaller, leaner government is a grand idea in theory. In actual fact, when the rubber hits the road and real, actual, on the ground decisions are called for, it's an awful idea.

Further updates on Egyptian revolution

2011-02-06T23:08:00.003-05:00

Why did Egypt's revolution occur to begin with? The answer given by the reporter Robert Fisk is that the dictator Hosni Mubarak failed to keep the country infantilized. Egyptians had gotten used to a strongman telling them what to do to the point where they had been transformed

...into political six-year-olds, obedient to a patriarchal headmaster. They will be given fake newspapers, fake elections, fake ministers and lots of false promises. If they obey, they might even become one of the fake ministers; if they disobey, they will be beaten up in the local police station, or imprisoned in the Tora jail complex or, if persistently violent, hanged.

As Harper's Scott Horton suggests, Egypt's economy was doing reasonably well, but wasn't keeping up with population growth. Economic shortcomings, especially as they impacted the employment opportunities for young men, were ultimatley decisive in getting Egyptians to shake off Mubarak's hold over their imaginations. A writer at FDL makes the comparison between Egypt's long-abused population and a battered wife/family. The primary difficulty Egypt is having is convincing the batterer that he is not the hero/protector he imagines himself to be, he is the problem. The problem, of course, with Egyptians depending on the US to play the hero and to help them is that the US has an authoritarian problem of its own.

The Obama governing pattern is consistent: When the economic elites crash and loot the economy, devastating millions, tell the public you’ll fix this. But then make only superficial changes in the power structure, promise to oversee them better using the people who were asleep or complicit the first time, but leave the essential structure and those who crashed it or let it fail in power.

So how has the “Bush Doctrine” fared? Has it been verified or has it been discredited? A piece in Daily Kos argues that the Doctrine has been hopelessly discredited. What precisely happened in Iraq?

Instead of being greeted as liberators, we were greeted as invaders. Long-simmering sectarian tensions caused a bloody civil war. Civil institutions collapsed completely. Law and order disappeared. Millions became refugees. A trillion dollars borrowed, spent, and never repaid. And many, many, of our finest citizens cut down in their prime. All to build up a democracy that chose our worst enemy as its closest ally. This is the final verdict the Bush Doctrine of democracy by gunpoint: a fragile, weak state propped up by a coalition of gangsters and theocrats. This is not what America should stand for.

What has the revolution in Egypt cost the US? Virtually nothing as it's run pretty much entirely by “People Power.” What did the US have to do with sparking the revolution in the first place? Again, virtually nothing. The decision was made there, by the people themselves. As Horton points out in the piece cited above, it's far from clear that out of the neoconservatives and the war on terror fearmongers,

Neither group seems to have any real mastery of the dramatis personae of the conflict and its economic and social underpinnings, or to understand Egyptian law as it affects succession, and so forth. The message they deliver seems keyed to domestic partisan politics and not towards helping us understand what’s happening in Egypt.

It’s dangerous to venture summary opinions about the developments in Egypt without understanding something about the country’s culture, economy, history, and political structures. I know enough to recognize that the great bulk of the “experts” being offered up on the U.S. media feed are no experts at all.

What baffles Professor of History Juan Cole is that Europeans are sensibly preventing G.W. Bush from visiting Switzerland by threatening to put him on trial for torture, but at the same time are supporting Omar Suleiman

for interim president of Egypt, even though he was the one who undertook the torture for Bush? Suleiman tossed some 30,000 suspected Muslim fundamentalists in prison, and accepted from the US CIA kidnapped suspected militants, whom he had tortured. Some were innocent. One, Sheikh Libi, was tortured into falsely confessing that Saddam Hussein was training al-Qaeda operatives, an allegation that [went] straight into Colin Powell’s speech to the UN justifying the Iraq War.

So, if everything goes well anyway and Mubarak and his henchmen are tossed out of power and some legitimate person is placed in power, is local Philadelphia columnist Christine Flowers correct and will Egypt quickly turn into an even worse place than it is now, with a Western-inspired dictatorship being replaced by an Islamic fundamentalist-inspired one? Dan Froomkin of the Huffington Post thinks that's unlikely.

"There is a liberal tradition in Egypt of people who support strengthening the rule of law, constraints on state power, and the notion that government is accountable to the people," he said. "I don't think they'd support any kind of theocracy."

As for the Brotherhood: "It's a middle class institution. Its leaders are lawyers, doctors, engineers and so on, who have in a very careful and systematic way over the last 15 years, debated how to reconcile the principals of Islam with democratic governance and have come up with thoughtful ways to do that."

Things are still uncertain and there are many things that can still occur. It's hard to come up with any predictions at this point, but there appears to be good reason to hope that a democratic revolution is just a matter of time.

Update: Angry Black Lady has a hilarious take on Sarah Palin's latest talk on the situation in Egypt.

Getting my chair fixed

2011-02-05T12:27:00.002-05:00

Looking SouthWest at my apartment's main section and going clockwise, there's my kitchen area, then my eating area, then a passageway/storage area, then my desk, then my TV section. The chair that I was using for my eating section is one that I use both as a dining room chair and as a desk chair as I do a lot of writing on my computer while sitting there. So, after a couple of years, my chair got pretty beat up and was quite loose, with most of the joints wobbling and with one of the arms falling off completely. I looked around at a local thrift shop, at a few used furniture stores and at stores like Wal-Mart and Target. Finally, I went back to the furniture store that I got my chair from to begin with (My sister described my furniture style choice as “Mission,” here's a description as to what that design movement was all about and while this is not an exact match to my chair, it's reasonably close) and asked how I could go about getting it fixed. Turns out they have a repair shop!

My sister came by this morning and picked me up with my chair and we got over to the furniture repair shop. We got it to the repair person and he's looking it over. I'm sitting there thinking “Okay, if he charges less than $100, I can do this. If he charges between $100 and $120, I'll have to agonize over it a bit, but will probably go along with it, over $120, then either we try to fix it ourselves or I'll look around for a reasonable replacement.” He announced “$35.” My sister and I both tried hard to keep our best poker faces on as we agreed that that sounded like a reasonable deal.

Aah (Sigh of contentment)! Having a good day.

Adventures in wifi

2011-02-04T10:42:00.004-05:00

Went to a diner last night to get a light meal and so ordered the salad bar. Actually, the waitress suggested that I get a full meal, get some food right away from the salad bar and then take the rest of the meal home for later. Good idea! I'll do that next time. Anyway, I just had some soup, some coleslaw and a bit of seafood salad. The problem was that I used to be able to get wifi there.
Well, apparently, I still can. I clicked on the wireless connection icon on my laptop and it gave me two options, a small letters and numbers combination and "diner." Since this was the only diner in the immediate vicinity, I figured this must be where that connection was originating from. Problem: the symbol for the diner's connection had an icon next to it indicating it was shielded and that I needed a password to use it. I tried just "diner," but that didn't work. I asked the waitress and she said they didn't have any sort of wifi connection.
Now, I just don't think the waitress was properly informed and if I asked someone else, they'd probably know the password, but there was no one else nearby to ask. Ah well, I'll just make sure I have something saved on my computer to read when I go there again and I'll try my luck asking again then.

The revolution in Egypt reaches critical stage

2011-02-02T18:49:00.003-05:00

Unfortunately, the British reporter Robert Fisk says that the US had short window of opportunity where

Had [Obama] rallied to the kind of democracy he preached here in Cairo six months after his investiture, had he called for the departure of this third-rate dictator a few days ago, the crowds would have been carrying US as well as Egyptian flags

[…]

But no. All this was squandered in just seven days of weakness and cowardice in Washington – a gutlessness so at odds with the courage of the millions of Egyptians who tried to do what we in the West always demanded of them: to turn their dust-bowl dictatorships into democracies. They supported democracy. We supported "stability", "moderation", "restraint", "firm" leadership (Saddam Hussein-lite) soft "reform" and obedient Muslims.

Personally, I supported Obama's stance, seeing a careful neutralism as the best chance for a good outcome, but Fisk is right. When you have an uprising where

Women in chadors and niqabs and scarves walked happily beside girls with long hair flowing over their shoulders, students next to imams and men with beards that would have made Bin Laden jealous. The poor in torn sandals and the rich in business suits...

You then have a real, live “people-powered” revolution that will simply not be denied. Is this revolution going to be good for the US? Will it serve US interests? Fisk states that he is not of the opinion that the revolution in Egypt is Islamic in character. He feels that it is Egyptian, that the people control how it's going and that no single group is in control. And you know what? That's not our problem. It's their country and how they conduct their self-government is their concern.

As Maureen Dowd pointed out today, for Americans to freeze up and mis-react would hardly be new. G. W. Bush and his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice completely misjudged the appeal of Hamas to the Palestinians and forced the followers of Hamas into the open-air prison of Gaza instead of doing anything to try and work with Hamas. Bush's pretty words about democracy were revealed to be just that, pretty words. His words were revealed to be hollow and without substance as he had shown that he had no respect for the choices that Palestinians had made.

Obama, in his administration's latest responses, appears about to repeat Bush's sorry performance. As of February 2^nd, the battle for Egypt's public spaces has reached a violent stage, with Mubarak's people acting in a very well-organized way and energetically pushing back against the protesters. Previously, we heard that they were ransacking homes in an attempt to divert protesters from the streets (See 5:25 & 5:00).

…Heck, even four Israeli journalists have been arrested for trying to report on events. The government doesn’t want anyone to see what happens next.

If Obama wants to get in front of events and place himself on the right side of history, he doesn't have much time left. If he's comfortable putting himself on the side of a dictator who conducts a massacre, well, he only has to keep dithering.

Update: A buddy of mine sends a source of lots and lots and LOTS of pictures! Another one sent me a set of photos from an Arab website. Warning! Plenty of pictures of bleeding people

Evidence that the left is just as bad as the right?

2011-01-15T14:49:00.003-05:00

A commenter in the Inky gives us a link to a blog post by Michelle Malkin that purports to show that the left is just as bad as the right when it comes to uncivil and incendiary rhetoric. To quote Howard Dean talking about Colin Powell's case that Iraq had WMD “I was impressed not by the vastness of evidence presented by the Secretary, but rather by its sketchiness.”

Malkin presents lots and lots of objectionable material put out by the left in their presentations (Written and during protests) against various figures on the right. I was particularly disgusted by the image Malkin chose to start off her piece with, a picture of Sarah Palin being slugged by a very large hand, her glasses flying off and her teeth breaking. This is a revolting image that I have absolutely zero problems denouncing and condemning. There's also a video of a fistfight that took place at a Tea Party rally where the Tea Partiers were just minding their own business and exercising their First Amendment right to protest government policies. Again, I have absolutely zero problems condemning this sort of thing, Malkin presents a long list of mugshots accompanied by their crimes, some serious, slashing tires, stalking and trying to run down a Congresswoman with his car. Many of the charges also include people attacking campaign signs and throwing salad dressing and custard cream pies. None of the conduct that's documented is excusable and all were properly punished.

What's missing is anything from any sort of prominent person on the left side of the political aisle. Madonna and Sarah Bernhard, who are more entertainment than they are political figures, are about it. The rest are all members of rallies and/or people you've never heard of. As the book review to "The Case For Bush Hatred: Mad About You" by Jonathan Chait, makes clear:

The trouble with this parallel is, first, that this sort of Bush-hating is entirely confined to the political fringe. The most mainstream anti-Bush conspiracy theorist cited in York's piece is Alexander Cockburn, the ultra-left, rabidly anti-Clinton newsletter editor. Mainstream Democrats have avoided delving into Bush's economic ties with the bin Laden family or suggesting that Bush invaded Iraq primarily to benefit Halliburton. The Clinton haters, on the other hand, drew from the highest ranks of the Republican Party and the conservative intelligentsia.

Lefty blogger Digby cites Right Wing Watch:

In 2007, conservative activist Mark DeMoss launched something called The Civility Project, seeking to get governors and members of Congress to sign on to a short pledge vowing to conduct themselves civilly:

I will be civil in my public discourse and behavior.
I will be respectful of others whether or not I agree with them.
I will stand against incivility when I see it.

Four years and thousands of dollars later, DeMoss is shutting down the project after securing such pledges from only three members of Congress while enduring countless insults from his fellow conservatives:

The piece goes on to cite conservatives who were so angry at being called to task that the author declared many responses to be unprintable.

FAIR lists an awful lot of what conservatives describe as “lone nuts.” Yeah, these are people who acted alone and without obvious co-conspirators, but gee, they all had a real problem with liberals and Democrats.

Firedoglake looks at certain right wing reactions to Arizona Sheriff Dupniks charge that the political climate in Arizona made the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) possible and finds there was quite a bit of what the Red Chinese would have referred to as “self-criticism” in their remarks. They cite a Republican Senator making fairly innocuous criticisms of the Tea Party who, very interestingly, feels the need to do it anonymously. Are we worried about right-wing violence, perhaps?

Quoting right-wingers who make inflammatory statements that have the potential to encourage violence isn't difficult at all. The left-wing media watchdog groups FAIR and Media Matters have long lists of right-wingers making such statements. In fact, Media Matters has documented three separate individuals who have been “inspired” by Fox News' Glenn Beck to try and commit violent acts. Fortunately, all three persons were stopped before they could carry out their intentions.

Finally, we must also remember that truth is an absolute defense against charges of libel. So when right-wingers charge lefties with being uncivil when they charge that President George W. Bush lied and committed crimes against humanity, I really have a hard time applying the label of “uncivil” to such rhetoric.

Update:

Good column looks at the shooting of Rep. Giffords and the larger picture of civility in our politics. This was a particularly chilling statement that jumped out at me:

After Loughner’s massacre, Humphries was still faulting her — this time for holding "an event in full view of the public with no security whatsoever.”

Rep Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) shot, survives, but six others dead

2011-01-10T13:03:00.003-05:00

A federal judge and a nine-year-old girl are among the deceased from that attack. Newsworks reports that a granddaughter of former Phils manager was also among dead. A suspect is in custody.
More coverage: Heroism from an intern | One Anti-Authoritarian Perspective on the Hierarchy of Violence
I received a very heartfelt note on Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot today.

Federal judge John Roll and five others are among the deceased from that attack.

Yes, unfortunately, Giffords was one of the Congresspeople “targeted” by Sarah Palin who “jokingly” and “light-heartedly” put rifle cross-hairs above several Congressional districts back during the 2010 campaign.

Fox News demonstrated unequivocally that they were all-to-aware of that graphic. When someone mentioned Sarah Palin's name at a vigil, they quickly cut away.

A blogger from Crooks & Liars says: “In one of the most remarkable press conferences I've ever seen, Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik called out for an end to the violent rhetoric that leads to acting-out by people who are 'unbalanced' not once, but three times.
Calling Arizona a 'Mecca for prejudice and bigotry', Dupnik spoke sharply about the rhetoric coming from radio and television sources."

Eliminationalist rhetoric explained.

A reprinting of Clinton's speech after the Oklahoma City bombing.

Update: And of course, in what's clearly force of habit, a member of the traditional press corps calls out for calm and civility in the language of false equivalence:

"...we've already heard from some members of Congress who have been on our air earlier today saying that they do hope that this is a wake up call, a wake up call for both parties to try to get out... get the word out their to their supporters, to constituents, to maybe even the blogosphere, which is not easy, to tone it down a little bit."

Of course, it's not a call for the Republican Party, which is broadcasting virtually all of the hatred, to tone it down. No, it's a call for "both side" to tone it down, because, you know, both sides are equivalent and both sides are expressing eliminationist rhetoric.
-------------

Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake concludes

Submitted by Rich Gardner on Mon, 01/10/2011 - 10:31am

that the fellow who shot Giffords was a lone wolf who was acting on his own and that there's no evidence that Arizona's toxic, hate-filled climate, fueled by the demagoguery of the Republican Party and Fox News, played any significant role in egging him on to do what he did.
Still, it's most interesting and instructive to see how right-wingers reacted to being accused of fostering a climate of hate in which Loughner might have felt that he had been given permission to shoot someone that he disagreed with politically.

Contextualizing the shooting

Submitted by HansBennett on Mon, 01/10/2011 - 12:52am

James and Dave make good points about the hierarchy of violence, and I can't say I disagree, but I'd like to add that the right-wing, Sarah Palin-esque, ie. fascist camp that had been attacking Rep Giffords and reportedly making threatening phone calls, was in fact criticizing her not being racist and militaristic enough.
Certainly the support for the militarization of the US-Mexican border is indefensible, and in the corporate news, we never hear about the many deaths of immigrants trying to cross the US-Mexico border. Or, for example, how bad working conditions are for undocumented workers that many die because of this, while many more suffer terribly --I consider this to be state violence as well, since I think all the anti-immigrant hysteria is pumped up to make immigrants (particularly those without papers) as vulnerable as possible, so that immigrants can be maximally exploited in the workplace.
That said, I see this attack in the context of how the right wing has been stoking and resurrecting this country's dark history of lynch mob style racism and anti-Left violence. Sarah Palin's open appeals to racism and anti-Left sentiment during the presidential campaign against Obama honestly shocked me because the appeals to racism were much more overt than I'd expected. Many obviously hated him simply for being Black (notably Obama has bent over backwards to accommodate white racism, even criticizing Jimmy Carter for describing the Tea Party as racist). A Reuters article reported a few weeks after the election that there had been a mountain of death threats against Obama in the last months of the elections, that escalated in the last few weeks leading up to the 2008 election, and Reuters cited the Secret Service as officially attributing it to Sarah Palin.
My point here is that during the 2008 election and post election the right has become even more overtly fascist, and this shooting should be seen in the context of this. Rep Giffords was hated by the right wingers because she did not support SB 1070 and supported mainstream immigration reform. This was too much for them. Even though radicals think she should not support militarization of the border and the many murderous Drone attacks, she was considered too far left by the Tea Party crowd.
And, this, I think is quite significant.

Jon Stewart is outraged

2010-12-17T00:54:00.006-05:00

And he's got every right to be. The usually mild-mannered comedian puts the funny stuff aside so that he can talk about the fact that 9/11 first responders are being denied a bill that will give them medical care. Republicans are filibustering the bill because, well, they're just filibustering everything because Rush Limbaugh told them all two years ago “I Hope Obama Fails,” so like obedient little drones, they've striven to obey. Here's the link to The Daily Show. As of midnight, the December 16th show isn't posted yet.

The true outrage here though, is not just that Republicans are filibustering what should be a no-brainer, unanimous “good thing” that everybody should agree on without hesitation, the true outrage is that hardly anyone is covering this vote! Media Matters agreed with Stewart on the night of the 13^th, that

On the night of the 9/11 first responder bill vote, neither ABC, CBS, nor NBC mentioned the story on the evening news. Cable news channels seemed equally uninterested.

And again, Stewart pointed out tonight, that all of the major news stations demonstrated a complete lack of interest in the vote. Well actually, one TV station did cover the vote with a full 22-minute report, Al Jazeera! Yup, the first responders have had their plight documented by the station that also featured Usama bin Laden. But the US major networks can't bring themselves to mention that Republicans are making complete hash of their supposed reputation for supporting the heroes of 9/11. As Stewart pointed out, Fox News has absolutely zero problems cranking up the outrage when they want to. Why haven't they wanted to in this case? Seems pretty obvious to me that, first and foremost, they're a Republican station.

What explains the rest of the media? Why is everybody else so quiet about such a no-brainer issue? The problem with the media, I think, goes to the love that journalists these days have for balance. Personally, I think the Fox News slogan “Fair and Balanced” is fine as far as fairness goes. Fairness is always good, is always appropriate and should just be a habit for journalists to engage in. Balance? Eh, not so much. Not much point in balancing the science of evolution with the religious beliefs of Intelligent Design / Creationism / Biblical Literalism because that stuff simply isn't science. But to present a one-sided issue, where the Republican Party is solely and exclusively to blame, journalist would have to sacrifice their beloved balance and to say “One side is to blame.” That, I believe, is something journalists simply don't want to do. In an attempt to be fair to both sides, networks are shortchanging the viewers by refusing to let them in on a serious story.

Update: Here are the videos.

Further update:
The utter moral degeneracy of the opponents of the 9/11 First Responders bill just absolutely astonishes me. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) complained bitterly about Democrats trying to set a time limit for debating "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

"To have a time agreement after all of the fooling around that we've been doing on [the] Dream Act, on New York City ... we will not have a time agreement from this side," he insisted angrily.

Oh, and it turns out that it's the national Chamber of Commerce that has persuaded Republicans not to support the bill "because it's financed by closing tax loopholes for foreign businesses that do business in the United States."

"If we keep taxes low on America's high earners, the terrorists win. "

2010-12-16T10:05:00.004-05:00

I wrote the following in response to Did someone say we're at war? The writer of this argued that the burden of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is being unfairly borne by a very small portion of our population. What's truly amazing is that people are actually arguing that taxes should be kept low, as though there wasn't a war going on!

I completely agree with this, but I would point out that G.W. Bush tried to get Americans interested in what I call a "Colonial Corps," a group of people who would take over the administration of cities, towns and villages. Most importantly, they'd assess what these people needed and then request money and material from the US Government. The military was drafted into doing this to a degree, but that's really not a military function. That requires a separate organization. So, when Bush suggested ideas along those lines, did the country respond? Nope. They remained sitting on their comfortable couches and in their nice climate-controlled homes and with their loving families. During the Spanish Civil war, left-wingers ran off to join the Lincoln Brigade. But occupying Iraq was not a left wing project. During the Iraq War, right-wingers stayed home.

We appear to be on the road to imperial decline

2010-12-09T09:37:00.003-05:00

Alfred W. McCoy, author of the 1972 The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, has written a very depressing, but probably quite accurate view of the near-future collapse of the American empire (Probably by 2020 or 2025). With two active wars, around 800 military bases arounthe globe, but a declining economy accelerated by the Republican/Blue Dog Democrat/Tea Party refusal to allow government stimulus measures to pull America's non-wealthy out of the sharp economic downturn that began in late 2007 with the collapse of the housing bubble (The wealthy are doing splendidly, thank you very much), America appears to be very solidly set upon a path to national decline and "imperial overstretch."

McCoy considers the invasion of Iraq to be the crucial event that future historians will compare to the Athenian attack on Sicily and the joint British-French-Israeli attack on the Suez Canal. These were the events that sounded the death knell for their respective empires. Of course, Athens and Britain continued long after their empires disintegrated, so naturally, the US wil survivie any approaching cataclysm. The anti-war left in the US considers the beginning of the Iraq War to be a good, universally-agreed-upon time to protest the Iraq War at least once a year. That date may one day be regarded as the beginning of the end of American supremacy over the rest of the world.

What's curious is to see all the yelling and screeching and beating of chests over the US budget deficit, with no thought of, perhaps, reducing America's military commitments. Very bizarrely, with states struggling to make ends meet and to keep citizens from falling into poverty and starving, the President and Republican opponents have agreed to extend tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. Unfortunately, as with the political fight over the public option in the Affordable Care Act, it's pretty clear that the President isn't really on the progressive
side, despite his many earnest-seeming protestations.

An interesting turn of phrase

2010-12-05T22:10:00.002-05:00

The WaPo uses an interesting phrase that I'm not sure actually means anything in the context in which it's used. In talking about the WaPo's reaction to the movie "Fair Game," they say:

The movie portrays Mr. Wilson as a whistle-blower who debunked a Bush administration claim that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from the African country of Niger. In fact, an investigation by the Senate intelligence committee found that Mr. Wilson's reporting did not affect the intelligence community's view on the matter, and an official British investigation found that President George W. Bush's statement in a State of the Union address that Britain believed that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger was well-founded. [emphasis added]

The sentence that I added the emphasis to, the assertion that Wilson's review did not change the intelligence community's view of the question "Did Iraq buy yellowcake uranium from Niger?" appears to be indisputable true. The intel community was highly skeptical that Iraq has made any such purchase.

Also in early October 2002, an Italian journalist, Elisabetta Burba, received copies of documents from Rocco Martino that indicated the Iraqi government had arranged the purchase of 500 tons of "yellowcake" uranium from Niger in 1999 and 2000. The documents were signed by officials of the government of Niger and appeared to be on official letterhead. Under instructions from her magazine's editor, Burba gave copies of the letters to officials at the U.S. Embassy in Rome, and then left for Niger to investigate the situation herself.

It quickly became obvious to Burba that the story was unsubstantiated and she quickly dropped it. Seems pretty clear that if a reporter could quickly discover that the story was baseless, then US intel services could, too. So did Wilson tell US intel services anything they didn't already know? Probably not, but the important point was, what was President G.W. Bush telling the rest of the world? What were those famous "16 words"? Oh yeah:

“The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Bush very obviously had no intention of ever re-visiting the issue or of ever clarifying that the British claim was quickly found to be without substance. In 2006, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reported that:

On February 27, 2003, the CIA responded to a January 29, 2003, letter from Senator Carl Levin which asked the CIA to detail "what the U.S. IC [intelligence community] knows about Saddam Hussein seeking significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The CIA's response was almost identical to the points passed to the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] in early February, saying "two streams of reporting suggest Iraq had attempted to acquire uranium from Niger." The response said the CIA believes the government of Niger's assurances that it did not contract with Iraq but said, "nonetheless, we question, based on a second source, whether Baghdad may have been probing Niger for access to yellowcake in the 1999 time frame." The CIA's response left out the sentence, "we cannot confirm these reports and have questions regarding some specific claims," that had been included in the U.S. government's IAEA brief.

Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on Postwar Findings About Iraq's WMD Programs and Links to Terrorism and How They Compare with Prewar Assessments (United States Senate, 2006), pages 16–17.

Both a US Senator and the International Atomic Energy Agency were told that Iraq most likely tried to obtain uranium from Niger. Keep in mind that Jaques Baute, the IAEA Chief for Iraqi Nuclear Matters, did a single day's research on the allegation (Hubris, p. 203) and quickly concluded that the documents that were supplied to him had a number of extremely serious flaws.

Within a couple of hours, he discovered about fifteen significant anomalies in the papers. The letterhead, the signatures, the dates, the format of the document—none of them matched up.

Okay, "an official British investigation found that [the Niger story] was well-founded." But if any such evidence for such a conclusion existed, why did the US forward such preposterously flawed documents to make their case to Baute? If either the US or Britain had better evidence, why didn't they transmit that better evidence to the IAEA?

Joe Wilson did Americans an enormous favor by informing them that Bush was knowingly, consciously and deliberately lying to them.

The important question was not what the intel community knew. Bush's people, if not Bush himself, already knew for a fact that the intel community knew full well that the report was baseless. The important question is what was Bush telling the American people? On that, the WaPo had nothing to say.

Libelous Lapse

2010-11-29T20:05:00.001-05:00

A recent BBC Editorial Complaint Unit ruling has led to the BBC publishing an apology to pop musician Bob Geldof over claims made in several recent reports about the use of Live Aid benefit money and how it was used in Ethiopia.

The pieces that prompted the apology were a BBC World Service program called Assignment broadcast on March 4, 2010, in which a reporter investigated whether or not money raised by Bob Geldof's Band Aid Trust had gotten into the hands of the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front and was used to purchase weapons and further politics, rather than provide famine relief. This prompted Geldof's organization to complain, given the damage done and the lack of evidence necessary in order to make such a claim, as well as the fact that the organization did not get to respond.

The apology later goes on to mention pieces run on bbc.co.uk that mention exact amounts of money raised and hypothetically spent on weapons with insubstantial evidence, with claims that upwards of $95 million was raised by western organizations and then used to further rebel warfare in Ethiopia.

The BBC's apology then consists of a list of findings for each of the programs and pieces either broadcast or published online, with many of them pointing out the fact that the BBC's investigators used certain pieces of evidence to tie Band Aid towards funding rebel activity when it was a blatant stretch to do so. It also points out the fact that the report provided insufficient reason to the Band Aid Trust to provide a response before the piece ran given the nature of its allegations.

The apology further picks apart a number of pieces, pointing out places where similar moves were used to tie the Band Aid Trust towards rebel fighting and emphasize Geldof's unwillingness to discuss the issue, with each piece's complaints either being listed as "Upheld," "Partially upheld," or "Not upheld" (with complaints concerning PM, The Andrew Marr Show, and The Media Show) all being dropped.

As a resolution, the BBC published and broadcast apologies to the Band Aid Trust on BBC One, the News Channel, Radio 4 and BBC World Service. The organization also made edits to online pieces in order to ensure that readers know that complaints have been made and upheld about the articles before they view them and pointed out several more instances in which the piece that aired on Assignment was either "inaccurate or potentially misleading" about the success of Band Aid Trust fundraising towards Ethiopia.

In essence, the BBC faced consequences more than anything else for sensationalizing what would otherwise be a fairly normal piece of reporting, using insubstantial evidence when making rather lofty claims about how large sums of money were spent and the consequences. Geldof and his organization were understandably angry, especially if they have the proof that 95% of relief money was not, in fact, used to fund rebel warfare in Ethiopia, which the ECU's investigation seems to have pointed out.

Andrew Hall is a blogger for My Dog Ate My Blog and a writer on Accredited Online Colleges for Guide to Online Schools.

This year's Unity08

2010-11-28T18:13:00.004-05:00

Kathleen Parker of the WaPo is excited about a group that calls itself No Labels. Problem is, there's no obvious difference between No Labels and early 2007's Unity08, a group that was being touted by David Broder, that centrist "Dean of the Press Corps." The problem that both Parker and Broder cite is that neither group has/had a leader who had anywhere near the popularity of Jesse Jackson or Ross Perot. But the real problem that both pundits ignored was that the centrist voters who don't like either party, but who will vote for a mushy compromise party is a real group, but it's a very, very small one that will only have clout in a closely-divided electoral contest.

Parker's thesis is that both of the major parties are just so awful. Her evidence that the Democrats are now extremists consists of Speaker Pelosi's opposition to the absolutely awful group led by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. Yes, one is a Democrat and the other is a Republican, but they've both richly earned their group the name of the "Cat Food Commission" as both persons obviously despise Social Security recipients and clearly want to see grandma and grandpa living on scraps retrieved from the garbage dump.

Her charge that Republicans are extremists has a good deal more substance to it because Republicans really are extremists who really have put the squeeze on moderates in their party. Remember, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) said: "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." Dunno about you, but that sounds like an awfully extremist statement to me. The Senate minority is even opposing the ratification of the START Treaty. This is quite serious as the treaty is what allows the US to inspect Russian nuclear armaments. With the treaty being allowed to lapse, inspections have ceased and they will not begin again until and unless the treaty is ratified. Yet, Republicans appear perfectly content to allow the treaty to remain a dead letter. Again, that sounds pretty darned extremist to me.

No, America doesn't need a centrist party. What it needs to do is to see to it that Democrats get a spine-stiffener and to toss Republicans out on their keisters.

Reviewing "Decision Points" - G.W. Bush's memoir

2010-11-27T13:03:00.001-05:00

Dan Froomkin, one of the better critics of G.W. Bush during those dark years when he was in office, focuses on two particular items that Bush addresses in his memoir: The "decision" to go to war against Iraq and the decision to torture detainees. I was especially amused by one part of the decision on torture from another Froomkin piece on June 2009:

Comey describes how he and some of his colleagues had "grave reservations" about the legal analyses being concocted for Cheney. And he accurately predicts that Cheney and other White House officials would later point the finger at the Justice Department during the investigations that would inevitably ensue once the administration's actions were made public.

Indeed, in one e-mail, Comey describes an exchange with Ted Ullyot, then Gonzales's chief of staff: "I told him that the people who were applying pressure now would not be there when the s--- hit the fan. Rather, they would simply say they had only asked for an opinion."

And in Bush's justification for ordering torture:

"Because the lawyer said it was legal," Bush replied. "He said it did not fall within the Anti-Torture Act. I'm not a lawyer, but you gotta trust the judgment of people around you and I do."

Following illegal orders is not just a bad thing in itself, there's a high probability that you'll get tossed to the sharks or thrown under the bus if the people you're carrying out illegal acts for find that they're feeling the heat for the acts that you performed for them. Froomkin goes over the many Bush and Cheney assertions that torture "worked" (That is, that acts of torture resulted in the obtaining of useful information) and finds each and every time that, well, they're simply assertions that after all this time, remain completely unsubstantiated.

The only clear benefit that Froomkin can find for torture under Bush is that it provided clear (even if obviously coerced) "confessions" that helped to make the case for launching the Iraq War. As he points out, both Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell used the "confession" coerced out of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi by Egyptian authorities to make speeches in which they declared that they had "proof" of the danger that Iraq posed. Of course, neither man saw fit to inform the public as to where exactly this information came from and, as a consequence, how reliable this "confession" truly was.

Did Bush make a "decision" to go to war against Iraq? Froomkin points out that in order for there to have been a real decision, there needed to be an alternative course of action that might have been chosen in preference to what actually happened.

Prados wrote that the cumulative record clearly "demonstrates that the Bush administration swiftly abandoned plans for diplomacy to curb fancied Iraqi adventurism by means of sanctions, never had a plan subsequent to that except for a military solution, and enmeshed British allies in a manipulation of public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic designed to generate support for a war."

That's right: There never was another plan. And therefore -- ironically enough, considering the title of Bush's book -- there never was an actual "decision point" either. There were some debates about how to invade Iraq, and when, but not if.

I took part in what I believe was the first anti-Iraq War demonstration. It was in September 2002, in the same month when Bush made his "We gotta git Saddam afore he gits us" speech at the UN. I very clearly remember that none of the speakers at the march nor any of the people carrying signs made or even suggested anybody else make, any attempt to communicate with the President and to try and convince him to change his mind. I believe we all reached the same conclusion, that Bush had absolutely and unequivocally made up his mind and that he was going to invade Iraq, period.
As another reviewer points out:

The structure of “Decision Points,” with each chapter centered on a key issue—stem-cell research, interrogation and wiretapping, the invasion of Iraq, the fight against AIDS in Africa, the surge, the “freedom agenda,” the financial crisis—reveals the essential qualities of the Decider. There are hardly any decision points at all. The path to each decision is so short and irresistible, more like an electric pulse than like a weighing of options, that the reader is hard-pressed to explain what happened. Suddenly, it’s over, and there’s no looking back.

Also, I found this description to be all-too-accurate:

Here is another feature of the non-decision: once his own belief became known to him, Bush immediately caricatured opposing views and impugned the motives of those who held them. If there was an honest and legitimate argument on the other side, then the President would have to defend his non-decision, taking it out of the redoubt of personal belief and into the messy empirical realm of contingency and uncertainty.

Yep, I remember the pieces about "Some say...", the phrase that signaled to readers and listeners that Bush was about to drag out the rhetorical device of a straw man to make his argument of the moment.

Campaigning for Republican candidates in the 2002 midterm elections, the president sought to use the congressional debate over a new Homeland Security Department against Democrats.

He told at least two audiences that some senators opposing him were "not interested in the security of the American people." In reality, Democrats balked not at creating the department, which Mr. Bush himself first opposed, but at letting agency workers go without the usual civil service protections.

And it's almost amusing to run across this statement about trying to decide whether to go to war against Iraq:

During this period, Bush relates, “I sought opinions on Iraq from a variety of sources.” By coincidence, every one of them urged him to do it.

Yeah, funny how that happens when you've absolutely made up your mind to do something and when you have a limited circle of advisers, everyone you speak with just happens to have reached the same conclusion! One of the Bush vacations that really stuck me as wildly irresponsible was in August 2003. It was becoming clear that the Iraq War was transitioning from a straightforward military-to-military battle followed by a more-or-less peaceful occupation regime and turning into a situation more like what Mao Zedong described as "protracted war" where the objective is to outlast a technologically-superior foe. Had Bush drawn around him a more heterogeneous set of advisers, had he been listening to something other than a bunch of "yes-men" or "loyal Bushies," he would have spent that August hunkered down in the map rooms and consulting with people who knew something about guerrilla wars. Instead, he just treated that month as simply another vacation and twiddled his thumbs on his Texas ranch for a month while the Iraq situation deteriorated.

More on Bush's dodgy language:

Bush writes in the memoir: "No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn't find weapons of mass destruction. I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do."

[...]

And Bush of course never actually tells us who he's angry at, or what exactly sickened him. He's certainly not willing to say that he was angry at himself, or that going to war was a sickening mistake.

It's most curious that the Republican Party constantly speaks of personal responsibility and how important it is and how Democrats don't observe it, but for Bush, just about everything that went wrong appears to have been somebody else's fault. He says "My bad" for purely rhetorical mistakes, things like the "Mission Accomplished" banner on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) or for saying "bring 'em on" in response to a question about the emerging Iraqi insurgency. But when it came to really serious misconduct on his part:

In fact, Dubya and his ghostwriters’ version of the Plame-CIA outing is even more curiously incurious than Packer suggests. Condensing the lengthy investigation and Libby’s trial to roughly a paragraph, Bush faithfully cites the GOP talking point that Richard Armitage was Robert Novak’s source in exposing Plame, so special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald shouldn’t have bothered investigating anything or anyone else… and then blithely notes that he refused to pardon the convicted Libby because his lawyers unanimously agreed the verdicts were justified. [emphasis in original]

Bush's book just came out a little while ago, but as Froomkin points out, the traditional press corps, "The Village" as the blogger Digby calls them (The Village and how they're responding to Sarah Palin), is doing its collective best to ignore, downplay and paper over Bush's crimes and the immense damage that he did to this country and to the rest of the world. They shouldn't be allowedto get away with that. If the US doesn't place Bush on trial and then imprison him, we risk a reprise of the temporary imprisonment and national embarrassment of Augusto Pinochet in 1998. From a piece on Bush and torture:

Tom Porteous, the UK Director of Human Rights Watch said, “There is no point having international justice for petty African dictators if you can’t apply it to the leaders of powerful countries like the US."

Porteous is right. For justice to not simply be "victor's justice," something that the winners get to apply to the losers, it has to apply to the "Leader of the Free World" as well.

Bit of an adventure

2010-11-19T23:06:00.001-05:00

Tried starting up the car this afternoon. Lights went on, but began fading, suggesting that the battery had gone bad. I was without a car for the first year I was in Pennsylvania, so I remembered how to do a lot of stuff. I determined that I was going to see "Fair Game," so I walked about a half an hour to get to the nearest spot where the local bus picks passengers up. Fortunately, I didn't have long to wait. I got to the theater around 7:20, but unfortunately, the times the movie showed were 7:30 and 10:30. Hadn't had anything to eat since morning, so I knew I couldn't last through a movie and heck, it's just a little after 10:30 as I write this.
Went to a restaurant in the same shopping center that the movie theater was in. Hadn't eaten there for several years. Noticed that they now had wi-fi. Woo-hoo! Pulled out my laptop and had plenty to read for dinner. Had a nice long leisurely meal and again, caught the bus going back very shortly after I began waiting for it.
So, I have a computer society meeting tomorrow, I can get to a bus line going there by walking another half an hour in the opposite direction that I walked in tonight. After that, I guess I'll stop and pick up a car battery. At that point, it's probably better to just get a cab to get the rest of the way home where, hopefully, it's just a new battery that the car needs. Must remember to get the specs on the current battery before I take off.