Glenn Davis and the 190th District

Glenn Davis is the Chair of the Philadelphia Green Party and is running to be the Representative for the strongly Democratic 190^th Pennsylvania House of Representative district. His campaign is currently in the process of getting signatures and the real campaign will commence once that's done. Is there any chance he'll be a spoiler and that splitting the liberal vote will result in a Republican Representative? Happily, there are no Republicans running for that district, so a vote for Davis and the Green Party is a free vote.

If he's successful, will Davis be a good Representative or is he just interested in the symbolism of the Green Party winning a seat? Davis has three children, Shyenn (11), Nathenn (8) and Shanenn (7) and he's heavily invested in seeing to it that his children receive the best education possible. He is very interested in reversing the damage that has been done to Pennsylvania schools via Governor Corbett's mindless and destructive cuts.

The 190^th Legislative District is largely a one-party district. Just as in the Senatorial race in Mississippi was pretty much done and over with when Thad Cochran prevailed against Chris McDaniel (There are very few votes to be had for Democrats in MS), so Vanessa L. Brown thought she had the had the race for Representative safely locked up as soon as she had prevailed in the Democratic primary. With the Green Party in the ring, Davis can, if nothing else, press Brown to take better positions prior to her winning November's election.
Davis is a veteran of the Gulf War of 1991 (He was an Army Specialist (E4 68J) from 1989 to 1993) and currently makes his living by working at McDonalds. His house is currently, along with those of many thousands of fellow Philadelphia citizens, in foreclosure. He is energized by that issue as pay for a fast-food worker is inadequate to solve that problem. He is also the Vice President at the Shepard Recreation Center and is involved with the Women's Community Revitalization Project and DecarceratePA.

 
Mayor Nutter recently tried to address Philadelphia citizens whose minor legal problems were making their job searches unnecessarily difficult. Davis sought to get a 2009 misdemeanor charge pardoned and found that he was in a group of roughly 3000 fellow citizens who were all seeking pardons for similarly minor offenses. Nutter appears to have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of people who needed relief, so this is yet another issue that is energizing Davis. He and the Green Party are both trying to see to it that the average citizen gets a break.

The Philadelphia Green Party website is at GPOP.org.

Round-up on the news 19Nov2011

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.

The Egyptian Revolution 25 January - 11 February

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.)"

Further updates on Egyptian revolution

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.

The revolution in Egypt reaches critical stage

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

Fluff vs substance

My roommate back in college admitted once that he spent an awful lot of time complaining about things (Usually justifiably, I thought) but felt he really had to make an exception once and to declare that the meal we were eating at a usually not-so-great cafeteria was really first-class. In the same light, I'd really like to commend the front-page piece in the Inky today summing up the health care summit yesterday. It's a solid, substantive piece that lets one know where all the players in the health care game are standing and where they're headed.

For the record, Democrats from the President on down appear to have really lost patience with Republican delaying and filibustering and offering "deals" that Democrats simply can't accept, primarily the "deal" of starting from scratch with a blank piece of paper and then building up a brand new health care bill from the ground up. Democrats absolutely refused to start over or to promise not to use the reconciliation process in order to bypass the filibuster.

A columnist from the WaPo, which is a source that is again a frequently unsatisfactory place for political news, does an excellent job delineating where all the political players are and their statements as to what they stand for. Although the columnist is clearly a liberal, he's very fair in sketching out the proposals of four Republicans, showing us that these are good and worthwhile proposals. He also points out their problem in getting anyone to take their observations seriously:

What we didn't hear from Kyl, or Camp, or Coburn or McCain, however, was an offer to vote for a health reform plan if these problems were fixed and their ideas were incorporated. Without even the hint of such offers, there was little reason for a willing president and his unwilling allies to even consider serious compromise. Now the losers will be the American people, who could have surely benefited from such productive dealmaking.

As for the "fluff" guys, ho-o-o-o boy!!! These "news" pieces leave me so completely unenlightened about where people stand and how the legislation is proceeding, the pieces are so full of useless "he-said, she-said" and mindless complaints about how substance-free the Blair House meeting was, I felt my IQ going down just reading that trash. Supermarket tabloids give me more substantive news about celebrities and their romantic liaisons.

On Jon Stewart's Daily Show last night, Stewart pointed out that, well of course, Fox News had fluffy, uninformative, "he-said, she-said" pieces that told citizens nothing of value. Much worse was the fact that Fox portrayed the summit as a game that the two sides were "winning" or "losing." Stewart made it clear that this completely missed the point of the summit. Disturbingly CNN, an allegedly serious source for news, a place where objectivity is valued and that's supposedly information-heavy, took much the same approach. They also saw the health care summit as being about winning and losing. I checked out the CNN piece on the web this morning and was not surprised to see that Stewart was right, but was absolutely appalled to see how completely and utterly worthless CNN's "reporting" was. Their primary summary piece was basically a lot of complaining and griping and carrying on about how worthless the summit was. As the WaPo piece that I earlier cited showed, the summit was extremely helpful for showing the American people that the Republicans are simply not interested in pushing the health care bill forwards and simply want to stand in the way. The CNN piece leaves readers completely in the dark about that.

The Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall St Journal (Murdoch also owns Fox News and the New York Post) also dis-served citizens by mocking the anecdotes that Democrats told to put a human face on the problems with health care in America these days. Apparently, if Democrats are moved by their human feelings to note that their fellow citizens require assistance with their medical needs and then Democrats try to express this with personal anecdotes, that's unacceptable. I guess we can tell now just how much Murdoch cares about his fellow human beings.

Bicycles and hauling trash, recyclables and delivering packages

Back during my youth I read a book, which I believe is the same one advertised here, "Bicycles in War" (1974, Hawthorn Books). The book demonstrated that bicycles, while they're not as dramatic as gasoline-powered vehicles, nor can they carry as heavy a load as quickly, are nevertheless very highly useful items that can serve a great many important purposes. The most interesting use to which they were put in the book was to carry items down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to Vietnamese forces battling American troops in that country. It wasn't possible for Vietnamese porters to ride the bicycles with such heavy loads on them, so they simply pushed the bicycles down the trail. It may very well be that the bicycle trailers shown here, had they been in use then, might have solved their problem and might have made pushing the bicycles unnecessary.

As I continued to use bicycles for transportation as well as for pleasure riding right up until the age of 40, I was especially interested to see this piece in Daily Kos. Seems that the group Pedal People has been hauling trash to the landfill for the town of Northampton, Massachusetts since 2002 and in that time, they've hauled an estimated 341,000 cubic feet of trash. Yes, it snows a lot that far up North and yes, the group hauls through just about any sort of weather. They can continue to haul trash during the winter.

I did ten years in the Navy (PN3(Ret) USN, 1991-2001), but I've always had a romantic attachment to the old wooden ships that got around by using wind power. The only pictures of metal ships I have on my walls are the ships that I actually served on. All the rest of them are wooden sailing ships. For that matter, my photo albums contain pictures of all the bicycles I've ridden. Not sure I have all of my cars documented. Bicycles have the same advantage that the wooden ships did, they get around by means much more natural than by burning fossil fuels. As a result, not only do the bicyclists used by Pedal People carry trash quietly, they do so without creating pollution.

Obviously, they haul loads more slowly than metal trucks do, but hey, once the trash leaves your curb, why do you as the customer care how long it takes for the bicyclist to reach the landfill? And if it takes a whole battalion of bicycle riders to haul trash and deliver packages as opposed to a few drivers of gasoline-powered vehicles, why should a customer care? The US is suffering from unemployment and underemployment right now. We could use a job for people that not only gives them some spending money but that helps to keep them in better physical shape.

And yes, Philadelphia has a bicycle-hauling service, The Pedal Co-Op.

Disregarding the War on Drugs

WaPo columnist Kathleen Parker puts out a column about the recent decision by the Obama Administration to legalize state-run pot dispensaries, places where people who need the marijuana for medical purposes get to consume it in a non-partying, non-secretive, or back alley-type setting. A blogger calls the decision "one of those rare instances of unadulterated good news from Washington." Both writers feel that the War on Drugs started by President Nixon and continued up to the present day is a complete flop. The section of the public that agrees that the War on Drugs should be consigned to the dustbin of history is still in the minority (44% to the 54% that wish to continue battling on), but it's a large and growing minority.

A right-wing writer featured on Sadly, No! feels that it's awful for the Obama Administration to stop enforcing a law, that the law should be changed, rather than just ignored. He's correct in principle, but he ignores the fact that President Bush

...quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.

Seems as if the principle of not ignoring a law is one that applies exclusively to Democratic presidents, or IOKIYAR (It's OKay If You're A Republican). The absolutely huge difference between the Bush and Obama approaches to disregarding the law is that Bush did so secretly. The article linked to above was published in 2006, meaning it took from January 2001 to April 2006 for the public to discover that signing statements were being used in an unprecedented fashion. There's nothing wrong with putting out signing statements and just about every president has done so, but never before was a signing statement used to justify disregarding a law or a portion of a bill passed by Congress and signed by the President.

President Obama, on the other hand, very clearly and openly announced that he would take a more or less "state's rights" position and allow specific state laws to override a specific type of federal law. This is more along the lines of a "command decision" or in the case of civilians, an "executive decision." This is where a supervisor openly announces to anyone within hearing or to anyone who reads the memo that "I know I'm disregarding instructions, but I'm going to do it anyway."

Ex obiter dicta (A more or less related point): I've long felt that the "command decision" was the way to handle the "ticking time bomb" scenario where the protagonist has to decide between torturing a suspect or allowing a bomb to go off. Sure, okay, fine, make the call, but a command decision is not a "get out of jail free" card. If the protagonist is wrong and the suspect doesn't know anything, the protagonist should go to prison for having violated the human rights of the suspect. The moral error right-wingers make is in saying that torturing suspects should be a completely cost-free exercise, one where a wrong call should have consequences only for the suspect and never for the protagonist. The protagonist should be absolutely, positively 100% certain beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt that torturing the suspect is the one and only way to get the desired information in time. If he or she is wrong, there should be meaningful consequences so that the decision is never taken lightly or casually.

More on health care disruptions

Lou Dobbs makes a complete idiot out of himself by saying about Howard Dean that:

"I thought we had gotten rid of this left-wing pest for a while," Dobbs said of the former Vermont governor. "But I guess he is just resurgent.... He's a bloodsucking leftist. I mean, you gotta put a stake through his heart to stop this guy."

Dobbs sorta, kinda, not really walked his statement back a wee bit. What strikes me is that Howard Dean is not at all any sort of failure. He's not some fringe figure that never accomplished anything. Dean was the author of the "50 State Strategy," the idea of "Let's contest EVERY seat everywhere." This was a strategy that put Democrats firmly into the driver's seat.

Dobbs' ranting and raving has caused a great loss of credibility for the media critic Howard Kurtz. Dobbs and Kurtz both receive paychecks from CNN. When Dobbs makes insane statements, Kurtz's silence is deafening.

The Inky today did a front-page piece about the birthers/teabaggers/anti-health care people who are screaming and yelling and disrupting town hall events across the country.

The piece does indeed bring up the astroturf organizations Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, in the story's eighth paragraph and stating that they have organized "some" of the protests. The evidence is that they've been the driving force behind ALL of the protests. No other coherent reason is given for the over-the-top opposition to health care in the piece.

Amazingly, a Blue Dog Democrat (Blue Dogs are frequently given the positive "purr-word" designation of "moderate" or "centrist" and it's usually an undeserved accolade) talked some common sense on the subject:

“When people say, oh, we don’t want the government programs I ask how many of you are on Medicare, how many of you are veterans. When the hands go up I say, I don’t know if y’all know this but those are both government-run programs,” Cuellar said.

A few conservatives have whined and moaned and groaned "Wa-a-ah, sob, sniffle, the bill is much too long to read!!! Obama is trying to put one over on us!!1!!" Wel-l-l-l, a single individual somehow didn't seem to have any trouble going through the entire bill and finding all sorts of "awful" things in it. He gives a very detailed list of all the "problems."

Oh, and BTW, not all faith-based political movements are conservative. A group of progressive Christians says:

5PM EDT Wednesday, August 19th, the faith community is hosting a national call in and audio webcast on health care reform and President Barack Obama has accepted the faith community’s invitation to join the call.

MyBO has health care canvassing materials

I just went on to the MyBO site to congratulate our President. He pretty much knew that Republicans were not on his side in the health care debate, but it also looks like he realizes that the Blue Dog Democrats are not on his side either. From a healthcare roundtable at Children’s National Medical Center:

Now, there are some in this town who are content to perpetuate the status quo, are in fact fighting reform on behalf of powerful special interests. There are others who recognize the problem, but believe — or perhaps, hope — that we can put off the hard work of insurance reform for another day, another year, another decade.
Just the other day, one Republican senator said — and I’m quoting him now — “If we’re able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.” Think about that. This isn’t about me. This isn’t about politics. This is about a health care system that is breaking America’s families, breaking America’s businesses, and breaking America’s economy.
And we can’t afford the politics of delay and defeat when it comes to health care. Not this time. Not now. There are too many lives and livelihoods at stake. There are too many families who will be crushed if insurance premiums continue to rise three times as fast as wages. There are too many businesses that will be forced to shed workers, scale back benefits, or drop coverage unless we get spiraling health care costs under control.

The MyBO site has a walking campaign option and a calling campaign option. As I’ve never really liked calling (I can do it in a group, but have zero desire to do it by myself), I chose the walking option.

Assessment of President Obama

I think with this description of the detention powers that the Obama Administration claims it has, I can definitely say that, as an Obama supporter, I'm definitely of the "Cafeteria Catholic" variety. I think some of the stuff our President has done has been wonderful, specifically his Iran policies, his administration's attitude towards Missile Defense and his economic stimulus policies, but I have absolutely no respect whatsoever for his War on Terrorism policies (Yeah, he's retired that term, but has kept the substance of those policies). Even a right-winger who supports Obama's WOT policies

... policies of indefinite detention and denial of due process...

is uncomfortable with the idea of keeping prisoners locked up even after they're declared innocent of all charges

...there is something Orwellian about this administration's attempt to have it both ways -- to get the credit for putting detainees on trial only to disregard the outcome if they don't like the verdict.

In the same post, the NPR Ombudsman demonstrates that, while discussing the question of the torture of prisoners, she suffers from complete and utter obliviousness. Essentially, the US is "good" and can therefore never perform any act as unequivocally awful as torture. Our enemies and countries we're not interested in defending are all "bad" and so are perfectly capable of committing the terrible, morally indefensible act of torture. Is torture a bad thing? Wel-l-l-l, that depends on who's doing it.

I agree with this assessment that these administration statements on the stimulus are puzzling, especially because they're so completely unnecessary

In other news, in answer to a question about whether the stimulus was adequate, Biden also said that everyone had misread how bad the economy was back in January, which I think is nonsense. Everyone knew that the economy was in very, very deep trouble. It was politics that made the stimulus inadequate, not imperfect knowledge.

I understand why he would say it, but I don't think it rings true considering all the talk about the "worst economy since the Great Depression" at the time. Plus, I think it's a weak play. They knew that even the best stimulus would take time to kick in --- they said so then --- so they should just stick to their guns. "No one could have predicted" excuses are lame in most cases, but especially lame in this one.

Seems to me the stimulus policies are good, but the administration appears to be defending the Blue Dog Democrats who weakened the stimulus by bellyaching about the cost and stripping it of many needed billions of dollars. It's especially a source for grim humor that Republicans are whining and crying about how long the stimulus is taking to work. Remember that virtually no Republicans voted for it, so it's not like they can claim any credit for it if it does work.

Obama's policies on health care? Good grief, don't ask! With his Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel going all wobbly on whether he supports the "public option" (American citizens prefer Single Payer, but Public Option is a reasonable substitute). So I'm not sure I can put any faith into that team on their major domestic priority.

Update: The Inky ran a piece today (July 10th - Page A7) on the Obama Administration defending how the Presidential administrations briefed/briefs Congresspeople on what the intel agencies are up to. As the blogger emptywheel points out, the current briefings to Congress are a hopelessly broken mess that require deep and serious reforms.

In order to maintain proper separation of powers and to ensure that intel operations are legal and effective, the briefings must be seriously reformed.

Iraq withdrawal & Franken wins!!!

I'm very pleased to say that the suspicions I expressed in early March have turned out to be unfounded, at least for now. The first phase of US troop withdrawal from Iraq, the removal of troops from the cities and the ceasing of regular patrols there, occurred on schedule.

Not to worry, though. Presidential spokesperson Robert Gibbs assures us that there will be no "Mission Accomplished" sign.

"I will keep the banner printers from doing anything crazy."

Finally, eight long months of Norm Coleman dragging his feet have come to an end and newly-minted Senator Al Franken (D-MN) is on his way to being sworn in. As Democrats will now have 60 Senators, that means that the Republican ability to frustrate and hamstring the Democratic agenda are pretty much finished. Republicans simply no longer have the numbers to effectively filibuster anything/

An explanation as to just why health insurance companies fear government-run health insurance

Anti-Casino activists protest downtown

ScotusBlog explains why the Supreme Court disagreed with Judge Sonia Sotomayor on the Ricci case

And hoo-boy! The conservative media-criticism blog Newsbusters makes a comment that Media Matters has to explain to them. They have to explain that the scandal concerning the SC Governor Mark Sanford is NOT like the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. They need to type slowly, so Newsbusters gets it.

Bolton's "special interests"

I must say, I truly appreciate the opinion piece by the former UN Ambassador John Bolton. In it, the guy who accomplished pretty darn close to nothing during his tenure in that job, tries to make it sound as though the Obama Administration was doing something wrong by not continuing Bush's failed policies. He complains that Obama, by canceling the highly provocative, destabilizing Missile Defense system in Eastern Europe "is simply giving it away." Well, yeah. When you have an item that's not doing you any good and the other country considers it a threat, i.e., it's actively hurting your relationship with the other country, it's a good idea to get rid of it.

I was most puzzled by the following statement:

Fortunately, Russia seems likely to save us from the dangerously low warhead levels proposed by Senator John Kerry and others, but the risks of foolish, unnecessary concessions remain high. [emphasis added]

What in the heck is a "dangerously low warhead level"? I learned during the late 1970s that nuclear weapons are only good for deterrence, so if both sides have say, 50 weapons of each type, plane-delivered bombs, ICBMs and submarine-launched missiles, then both sides are "deterred" and everybody's happy. China has 100 to 200 warheads. That appears to be a completely appropriate amount. It's hard to see why any more are needed. With the US currently having almost 6000 nuclear warheads and Russia having over 4000, it's not at all clear what a "dangerously low warhead level" would be.

Bolton wants the US to preserve tactical nuclear weapons. It's difficult to understand why. They're the worst of both worlds. They're harder to secure and as they're less destructive, they have less deterrent effect. They can't be used as any sort of true "tactical" weapon (Any use short of national deterrence) as any use of nuclear weapons will inevitably escalate into full-scale, all-out world-wide destruction. As someone who was a history major during college, I generally hate using the word "inevitable," but this scenario was gamed out during the 1970s and no one ever came up with a way to prevent the situation from escalating all the way up to the complete destruction of the human race.

Why Bolton wants to pursue an arms race in outer space is another puzzle. If there's currently no threat to our satellites from any other nation, why create a threat that others will have to respond to? Why does the US want to create a threat where none currently exists? Does that serve any purpose other than creating jobs in the arms industry? Back during the 1980s, President Reagan would derisively refer to "special interests." Are arms manufacturers pitting their own "special" financial interests against the interests of the American taxpayer?

Sanity returns to US-Russia relations

Six months ago, the US confronted Russia over the much smaller state of Georgia in the South Ossetian War. The US Establishment was trying to present the war as an heroic "David vs Goliath" tale of the brave and noble Georgians standing up to their much bigger and stronger neighbor, Russia. The liberal blogger Juan Cole caught Fox News in a D'oh! moment when Fox interviewed "an Ossetian-American 12-year-old girl who thanks Russian troops for saving her from Georgian aggression." As Georgia had indeed started the war, the Fox News people frowned and sputtered and fumed, but couldn't come out and flatly contradict the girl.

The US had been supporting Georgia in the years before that to such an extent that the Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili felt confident that if he attacked the ethnic Russian citizens of the Georgian province of South Ossetia, that the US would come to his rescue. Oops! The US promptly demonstrated that it was a paper tiger that was completely incapable of coming to the aid of an alleged ally.

Now it appears, the US has thought better of its earlier stance. The US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, didn't completely ignore Georgia, but said:

"We can and must find ways to work constructively with Russia where we share areas of common interest, including helping the people of Afghanistan," said Mrs Clinton.

The BBC adds:

US foreign policy is now very much a team game and US Vice-President Joe Biden will be in Brussels next Tuesday for a more detailed exchange of views on Afghanistan.

And that:

Mrs Clinton added that Nato "should continue to open Nato's door to European countries such as Georgia and Ukraine and help them meet Nato standards".

So Georgia is not entirely kicked to the curb but it's quite clear that good relations with Russia have taken priority over the previous, untenable, relationship with Georgia. Cole suggests that helping Afghanistan while maintaining hostility towards Russia was simply not a realistic option.

A member of the local NorthWest Greens, Arn Specter, has been documenting relations between Russia and the US, looking at the relationship through the view that "neo-cons aim to achieve full military domination over the rest of the world" via building a Missile Defense system and just generally taking a very hostile view of pretty much everything that Russia does. Of course, it's possible that a major reason that the Obama Administration has been unenthusiastic about neo-con ideas is that Missile Defense is a complete turkey of a system. It does the job of funneling billions in taxpayer dollars to defense contractors, but never did and probably never will actually defend America.

So, brava to Mrs Clinton! Pursuing better relations with Russia is the practical and sane thing to do.

Is the Iraq War on a path to ending?

There was the guy at the Bureau of Indian Affairs who was found sobbing at his desk. What's the trouble? He raised his head. "My Indian died."

Ronald Reagan joke as related by Peggy Noonan

When we on the left comment on President Obama's speech concerning the winding down of the Iraq War, it's been a real fear of mine that we would be seen as defending our own interests by saying that nothing has changed and that the war continues. In the joke above, the bureaucrat at the BIA had a job for as long as a particular Native American remained alive. The bureaucrat was crying for himself because when the Native American perished, the bureaucrat had to go out, in Reagan's thinking, into the "real world" and find himself a "real job," he couldn't depend on some "cushy, taxpayer-funded job" anymore. Of course, the two situations are not the same in that being a member of the anti-war movement is not a job that pays anything. I listened to lots of accusations back before the war started that communists and/or foreigners were funding the anti-war movement.

Being unemployed at the time, I assured the accusers that if there was any money to be made in opposing the war, I would have found a way to make some.

In any event, I don't want us in the anti-war movement to be seen as defending "our turf" by saying "The war continues." The President certainly doesn't try to make it sound as though everything is peachy-keen and that the US can start drawdowns with ease or that all is smooth sailing ahead:

"But let there be no doubt: Iraq is not yet secure, and there will be difficult days ahead. Violence will continue to be a part of life in Iraq. Too many fundamental political questions about Iraq’s future remain unresolved. Too many Iraqis are still displaced or destitute. Declining oil revenues will put an added strain on a government that has had difficulty delivering basic services. Not all of Iraq’s neighbors are contributing to its security. Some are working at times to undermine it. And even as Iraq’s government is on a surer footing, it is not yet a full partner – politically and economically – in the region, or with the international community."

As a veteran, I appreciated his words for the troops:

"For the men and women of America’s armed forces – and for your families – this war has been one of the most extraordinary chapters of service in the history of our nation. You have endured tour after tour after tour of duty. You have known the dangers of combat and the lonely distance of loved ones. You have fought against tyranny and disorder. You have bled for your best friends and for unknown Iraqis. And you have borne an enormous burden for your fellow citizens, while extending a precious opportunity to the people of Iraq. Under tough circumstances, the men and women of the United States military have served with honor, and succeeded beyond any expectation."

The drawdown is clearly split up into two distinct pieces, and after 31 August 2010, we'll get to the second part of it:

"After we remove our combat brigades, our mission will change from combat to supporting the Iraqi government and its Security Forces as they take the absolute lead in securing their country. As I have long said, we will retain a transitional force to carry out three distinct functions: training, equipping, and advising Iraqi Security Forces as long as they remain non-sectarian; conducting targeted counter-terrorism missions; and protecting our ongoing civilian and military efforts within Iraq. Initially, this force will likely be made up of 35-50,000 U.S. troops."

Obama promises to work with the region as a whole, including Iran and Syria.

"This reflects a fundamental truth: we can no longer deal with regional challenges in isolation – we need a smarter, more sustainable and comprehensive approach. That is why we are renewing our diplomacy, while relieving the burden on our military. That is why we are refocusing on al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan; developing a strategy to use all elements of American power to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon; and actively seeking a lasting peace between Israel and the Arab world."

Concerns here, but a generally sound and sensible policy. And yes, this speech is absolute music to my ears after Bush's lies and nonsense and straw-man arguments and simplistic verities. The liberal blogger Juan Cole asks: "So has Obama been reduced to 'Bush Lite' on the Tigris?" commenting that Obama "has made the left of his party as nervous as a vegan in a butcher shop." Cole points out that producing a navy and an air force are developments that will take an independent Iraq many, many years to accomplish, so we shouldn't expect any quick drawdown of either. Cole swats aside the claim that Bush's policies prepared the way for Obama to achieve such a success. He makes it clear that staying out of Iraq to begin with would have been the better, less destructive policy.

John McCain, like an Arizonan Cassandra, harped on the small terrorist movement that styled itself "al-Qaida in Mesopotamia," and predicted that "If we leave Iraq there will be chaos, there will be genocide, and they will follow us home." Obama's compromise decisively rejects McCain-style fear-mongering and his quixotic quest for long-term bases.

The new president forcefully rejected Bushian mission creep. Obama admitted, "We cannot rid Iraq of all who oppose America or sympathize with our adversaries. We cannot police Iraq's streets until they are completely safe, nor stay until Iraq's union is perfected." In other words, he is prepared to depart Iraq even if it remains somewhat divided, even if a drumbeat of subdued violence continues in its cities, and even if anti-Americanism retains a certain purchase on the population.

Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) feels that as the US has been training Iraqis since the war began, then there's really very little hope that their training will be completed any time soon. The interviewer pointed that he called Obama's speech a "step in the right direction" four times in four minutes. Siun of firedoglake points out that:

At the same time, the level of control Obama has granted the Petraues/Odierno team over the withdrawal is worrying– in particular, his willingness to allow them to keep the bulk of US forces in Iraq through the next election – and then some.

Here’s why:

Nowhere in the speech (nor in the various commentaries) have I seen a mention of our plans for withdrawing US forces to bases this June as required by the SOFA. This requirement - meant to get US forces out of the day to day active involvement in Iraq security seems to be forgotten – and given Odierno’s statements even as the SOFA was being signed that we could ignore that requirement – why not?

 

The SOFA is the Status Of Forces Agreement that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki insisted that President Bush agree to. Bush clearly agreed because he saw no alternative.

Askari said the United States didn't give in to Iraqi demands for the power to prosecute American soldiers but that Maliki decided this was the best deal Iraq could get.

Maliki may have felt that he had to settle for the details of the final deal, but clearly, the deal was not simply dictated by the US. It was the result of intense bargaining between the US and Iraq.

It's troubling that the SOFA was not spoken of as the final word on the deal. Cole agrees that large-scale troop withdrawals might have to wait until after the Parliamentary elections of December 2009. March to December is an awfully long time to wait and still keep up political pressure to see to it that withdrawals happen on schedule.

It's also troubling that there appears to be some mission creep going on.

"But I think that we can say without equivocation that our military was successful, and if we get it right over the next few months and years, that there is the strong possibility that we can leave Iraq as a stable, peaceful partner in the region."

If this is indeed a redefinition of the mission, then it could turn out to cause very major problems down the road. If the US is determined to withdraw, period, that's one thing. If the country adopts the goal of leaving Iraq in a particular shape, then it's very hard to say when, or even if, we'll see a withdrawal occur.

And it's not like things will be quiet here on the domestic front until after the Parliamentary elections in Iraq. Obama seems to be taking a seriously positive, progressive approach to the economic mess that the last president left us. NY Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman explains how the housing crisis happened. And concerning the televised rant on the Chicago trading floor a little while ago:

Commodity trader Rick Santelli made himself into a national hero of sorts with his televised diatribe about being forced to pay the mortgages of "losers" who could not afford, or would not pay, the full cost of their mortgage. Santelli apparently hit a chord among those who want to blame deadbeat homeowners for the country's economic woes.

Was his rant a hit among "The Village," the Washington DC-based press corps? Oh my, yes!

In terms of revealing deep truths about the corporate media, I'd suggest Santelli's off-kilter tirade, followed by his puffed-up prancing around, and the press corps that cheered him on, told us a helluva lot more abut the press than did Matthews' split-second "Oh God" utterance.

The historical parallel appears to be that of Lyndon Johnson trying to have both guns and butter and ultimately having to "go all in" on Vietnam. Obama has proven himself to be a very smart fellow, see his proposed approach to handling further Republican obstructionism on the budget (He's threatening to use the budget reconciliation process to make the 60-vote margin for Senate votes irrelevant) and I'm unwilling to say flat-out that he'll end up as badly as Johnson did.

Progressives on the left can certainly make a convincing case that Obama intends to allow the Iraq War to continue, but it's certainly a harder sell than it was under Bush.There are many open questions and Obama's a lot smarter than the last guy was.

President's TV interview with al Arabiya

President Obama's first television interview was with the station al-Arabiya (The comedian Jon Stewart did a "startled" double-take on "learning" that Obama's first interview was primarily aimed at a foreign audience), and it contained some very refreshingly realistic views:

"[Peace between Israel & Palestine is] going to be difficult, it's going to take time. I don't want to prejudge many of these issues, and I want to make sure that expectations are not raised so that we think that this is going to be resolved in a few months. But if we start the steady progress on these issues, I'm absolutely confident that the United States -- working in tandem with the European Union, with Russia, with all the Arab states in the region -- I'm absolutely certain that we can make significant progress.going to be difficult, it's going to take time. I don't want to prejudge many of these issues, and I want to make sure that expectations are not raised so that we think that this is going to be resolved in a few months. But if we start the steady progress on these issues, I'm absolutely confident that the United States -- working in tandem with the European Union, with Russia, with all the Arab states in the region -- I'm absolutely certain that we can make significant progress."

Obama made it clear here "I'm not G. W. Bush, I'm not going to make wildly unrealistic promises" and also, that the US is not going to try and solve this problem all by itself. Many other actors will be called in to assist.

Some realistic talk here:

"Now, Israel is a strong ally of the United States. They will not stop being a strong ally of the United States. And I will continue to believe that Israel's security is paramount. But I also believe that there are Israelis who recognize that it is important to achieve peace. They will be willing to make sacrifices if the time is appropriate and if there is serious partnership on the other side."

Meaning let's not let those who are sympathetic to the Palestinians get carried away with enthusiasm. Yes, this President is more realistic than the last one was, but only in a relative sense.

Still, this is an encouraging promise:

"I think it is possible for us to see a Palestinian state -- I'm not going to put a time frame on it -- that is contiguous, that allows freedom of movement for its people, that allows for trade with other countries, that allows the creation of businesses and commerce so that people have a better life."

Obviously, "contiguous" means only as far as the West Bank is concerned and no mention is made as to how to deal with Israeli settlements. Does "freedom of movement" mean that the President wants to take down Israeli highways running through the West Bank and dismantle the Israeli checkpoints? It's impossible to say at this point, but this is a reasonably good and hopeful start.

Q: How concerned are you and -- because people sense that you have a different political discourse. And I think, judging by (inaudible) and Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden and all these, you know -- a chorus --

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, I noticed this. They seem nervous.

Q: They seem very nervous, exactly. Now, tell me why they should be more nervous?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that when you look at the rhetoric that they've been using against me before I even took office --

Q: I know, I know.

THE PRESIDENT: -- what that tells me is that their ideas are bankrupt. There's no actions that they've taken that say a child in the Muslim world is getting a better education because of them, or has better health care because of them.

In my inauguration speech, I spoke about: You will be judged on what you've built, not what you've destroyed. And what they've been doing is destroying things. And over time, I think the Muslim world has recognized that that path is leading no place, except more death and destruction.

Now, my job is to communicate the fact that the United States has a stake in the well-being of the Muslim world that the language we use has to be a language of respect.

What Obama is doing here is that he's differentiating "hard" military power from "soft" persuasive power. Judging by their words, al Qaeda appears to recognize that he's got a point, that "soft" power poses a real threat to al Qaeda's ability to act as the savior of the Muslim world.

And again, this sort of language is extremely refreshing after the past eight years:

"But ultimately, people are going to judge me not by my words but by my actions and my administration's actions.
----------
"We're going to follow through on our commitment for me to address the Muslim world from a Muslim capital. We are going to follow through on many of my commitments to do a more effective job of reaching out, listening, as well as speaking to the Muslim world."

As well, this next statement is extremely refreshing after hearing propagandistic nonsense terms like "Islamo-fascism" come from our former President:

Q: President Bush framed the war on terror conceptually in a way that was very broad, "war on terror," and used sometimes certain terminology that the many people -- Islamic fascism. You've always framed it in a different way, specifically against one group called al Qaeda and their collaborators. And is this one way of --

THE PRESIDENT: I think that you're making a very important point. And that is that the language we use matters. And what we need to understand is, is that there are extremist organizations -- whether Muslim or any other faith in the past -- that will use faith as a justification for violence. We cannot paint with a broad brush a faith as a consequence of the violence that is done in that faith's name.

Unfortunately, I have to reduce President Obama's grade for the interview from an "A" to a "B" for the following statement on Iran:

Now, the Iranian people are a great people, and Persian civilization is a great civilization. Iran has acted in ways that's not conducive to peace and prosperity in the region: their threats against Israel; their pursuit of a nuclear weapon which could potentially set off an arms race in the region that would make everybody less safe; their support of terrorist organizations in the past -- none of these things have been helpful.

Iranian politicians have said Israel is a terrible country and that, like the white dominance of South Africa, that the Israeli oppression/occupation of Palestine should simply cease to exist, but it's simply not accurate to say that the state of Iran has officially threatened Israel.

Iran has claimed, though not proven, that it's pursuit of nuclear power is for strictly peaceful purposes. Obama should at least acknowledge this complication and qualify his statement rather than to simply state baldly that Iran is trying to produce nuclear weapons. And as Juan Cole points out:

And the main thing American politicians seem to mean when they accuse Iran of supporting terrorism is that it backs the Lebanese Hizbullah Party, which hasn't done anything that qualifies as international terrorism for a decade at least. (Being a national liberation movement and working against the Israeli occupation of Lebanese territory was not terrorism in international law.) At least, Obama put the 'support of terrorism' clause in the past tense (was he thinking of the 1980s and early 1990s?) and avoided the odd rhetoric of Condi Rice, who branded Iran the biggest supporter of terrorism in the world; wouldn't that be al-Qaeda?

But this was a good ending:

But I do think that it is important for us to be willing to talk to Iran, to express very clearly where our differences are, but where there are potential avenues for progress. And we will over the next several months be laying out our general framework and approach. And as I said during my inauguration speech, if countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.

A positive review of the interview from Foreign Policy.

YouTubes of interview: one two

Happy, happy, joy, joy

While the economic situation continues to deteriorate and while Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has made some amazingly bad decisions, we've also seen some really astonishingly good news on the political front. I kept watching President-elect Obama's pick of Leon Panetta for CIA head to end up as a typical, clumsy, Democratic cluster----, but amazingly it didn't and America has thus made a very strong statement that the torture of people in US custody is a policy that will die a well-deserved death when the Bush Administration leaves office.

The first clue that Obama would take a different approach to the whole cluster of issues that the neocons have stood for was when he chose General Eric Shinseki to be the Secretary of Veterans Affairs. This was significant because Shinseki strongly disagreed with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld over how many troops would be needed to occupy Iraq after Saddam Hussein fell. But that personnel choice simply put a neocon opponent into a meaningful position. The pick of Panetta is even better because he's directly involved in making policy decisions concerning people in US custody and has had absolutely nothing to do with Bush's torture policies, in fact, he's spoken out against them.

When one learns that the actions of a politician are drawing opposition, well, that's not always a bad thing. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-CA, aka "DiFi") and Senator John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV, departing Intelligence Committee Chair, aka "Jello Jay") were all at least initially upset by the choice. Of course, as the two Senators' main complaint was that they weren't informed of the choice before it was announced and as they were both quickly mollified over it, they're perhaps better described as "peeved" or "miffed." The really good thing is that while Obama apologized to the Senators, he didn't back down! Panetta was announced as the Director of the CIA on the 9th.

People have noticed this and are taking advantage of Obama's apparent willingness to extract a real price from Bush/Cheney and their people over the torture issue. The Obama transition website (change.gov) is open for questions and 70,000 have pushed the question:

Will you appoint a Special Prosecutor -- ideally Patrick Fitzgerald -- to independently investigate the gravest crimes of the Bush Administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping?

Even though there doesn't appear to be a general national outcry over these two specific issues of presidential lawlessness and although it's really not clear what kind of game VP Cheney is playing by not wanting a presidential pardon, the issues don't appear to be going away anytime soon.

Senator John Kerry is running at Obama from the left on how to shape the economic stimulus bill. The bloggers Digby and dday are both convinced that he's doing a kabuki play, an elaborate playacting to open up some space to Obama's left and ultimately make it appear that Obama's a centrist who will take the "Goldilocks approach" of choosing some policy option between the two extremes. If so, this is something that the lefties of Z Magazine and The Nation have been pressuring Democrats to do for decades. Apparently, he's lowballing the size of the needed stimulus in the hopes that Democratic lawmakers will bid the size of it upwards. In other words, Obama is not going to take the approach of trying to do everything himself. He realizes the right wing is far too strongly entrenched into the nation's system for him to take it on all by himself. He's going to need the help of an active and engaged citizenry to succeed. It's also quite noteworthy that he appears to be taking the advice of economists like Paul Krugman seriously as Krugman was one of those who saw the Housing Bubble early.

No, the world is not all sweetness and light. Bush just backed out of a Gaza ceasefire resolution, condemning that unhappy part of the world to still more violence, death and destruction. Still, it's noteworthy that the political general David Petraeus is speaking about talking with Iran.

A reason to write a nice letter

The blog County Fair within the website Media Matters has been busily documenting the wretched, sorry spectacle over the last few weeks of the traditional media panting, slavering, grasping and lusting to write the next "Whitewater" story or to kick off the next "Monica Lewinsky" scandal. America apparently has a bunch of middle-school-age adolescents in charge of much of the traditional media.

The good news is that we saw some pushback on MSNBC Live on 11 December.

...anchor Tamron Hall forcefully challenged Republican strategist and TheHill.com blogger Doug Heye's characterization of President-elect Barack Obama as a "good friend" of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich's (D).

Now obviously, if Obama and Blagojevich were "good friends," it would be entirely appropriate for the strategist's/blogger's report to go unchallenged. It would be entirely appropriate for the MSNBC person to smile and say "Thank you for appearing with us" and to then go on to the next topic. But because Ms. Hall found Mr. Heye's description to be off the mark, she DID HER JOB as a newsperson and challenged him.

This is the kind of thing that active and alert citizens should notice and encourage. Any time that a traditional media outlet goes beyond merely ignoring a bad story and instead challenges the spreader of lies, we should let the station know that their action is noted and appreciated.

Write to:

MSNBC
Mr. Phil Griffin,
Senior Vice President, News
NBC Television Network
30 Rockefeller Plz
New York, NY 10112
phil.griffin@nbc.com

Steve Capus,
President, NBC News
steve.capus@nbc.com

MSNBC
letters@msnbc.com
MSNBC/Microsoft-NBC
30 Rockefeller Plz
3rd Fl
New York, NY 10112
(212) 664-4444

You can only send an email to Mr. Capus, but Mr. Griffin will take both emails and paper letters and MSNBC as a whole will take emails, paper letters and phone calls.

How should we as citizens deal with the notion, sincerely held by many people, that the best way to deal with a silly, trivial media obsessed with gossip and personalities, is to ignore them? As Republicans have ceaselessly pointed out since 9-11, we live in a dangerous world. As the writer, lawyer and activist Mike Hersh points out, President Clinton's anti-terrorist efforts ran into continual Republican roadblocks.

President Clinton also ordered a "terrorism threat assessment of every federal facility in the country," which had "already begun" when, in February 1995, the Clinton Administration introduced a counter-terrorism bill in the Senate (S. 390) and the House of Representatives (H.R. 896). Note: this was before the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building Oklahoma City bombing on April 19 that year.

--------

Unfortunately, Republicans sabotaged Clinton's efforts to keep us safe. If in force before April 19, 1995 federal officials might have detected and prevented the Murrah Building plot.

Why didn't people notice and complain about this obstuctionism? Well, a silly, trivia-obsessed media is a dangerous distraction that allows important work to be put aside in favor of hysterical scandal-mongering and baseless impeachments. It's very much in our self-interest as American citizens to nip this ridiculous stuff in the bud and to stop it before it gets too far.

What is the extent of the current problem? Eric Boehlert points out that;

As much as I hate coming to the defense of "conservative pundits," they're hardly the only ones making the "tainted" claim, despite the fact Obama was "exonerated" on the tapes. It's pretty much the entire Beltway press corps that's been playing up that angle.

Crooks & Liars observes that "taint" seems to be the "Word of the Day." Two Democratic politicians, both from Illinois and one is supposedly "tainted" by the scandals of the other. But gee, it's funny that George W. Bush and Tom DeLay were two Republican politicians from Texas and somehow, for some strange, amazing, inexplicable reason, Bush was never "tainted" by the scandals of DeLay. Funny how that works!

Election reactions

Ah, the sweet smell of success! Victory has been attained, but it's not a military-type victory, attained with the blood of our enemies, the wailing of foreign widows and the crying of the children of other lands. No, the election of Barack Obama by 63 million to 56 million was obtained peacefully, with persuasion, with good arguments, and yes, with an economic situation that was the direct result of Republican rule over this land since 1981 (CEPR counts Clinton as a "Republican-lite" for the purposes of this study). Certainly, the Mideast, with the exception of Israel & the Kurdish NorthEastern part of Iraq, has been hungry for change and so welcomes the American regime-shuffling.

And yes, I know it's mean, but I really had to guffaw at the National Review Online guy who bitterly complained that:

Just watched Wonder Boy's speech. Hmph. "Callused hands?" When did he ever have callused hands?

Ri-i-i-ight! Like, anybody at the NRO knows about "callused hands" from anything but storybooks and the occasional field servant that they dealt with in their youth. He then blames "the swooning complicity of the media," but it's quite clear that the traditional media was firmly on the side of McCain throughout the election campaign.

Media Matters also compared coverage of Obama's association with former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers to coverage of McCain's association with G. Gordon Liddy, whom Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman has described as McCain's "own Bill Ayers."
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Moreover, while these same media outlets mentioned Obama's ties to Ayers 311 times in 2008 through Election Day, they produced only five reports mentioning McCain's connections to Liddy, whom McCain has praised and repeatedly associated with in public and in campaign settings.

And our NRO guy then has asks a question:

Sour? You bet I'm sour. Where was conservatism in this election?

Hmm, okay. but we have to ask, what exactly does he mean by "conservatism"?

Where was restraint in government? Where was national sovereignty? Where was liberty? Where was self-support?

I heartily agree that government has been completely unrestrained under Bush. What with warrantless wiretapping, detaining prisoners without evidence of wrongdoing in defiance of habeas corpus (or the Geneva Conventions, as applicable), voter suppression through the widespread use of "vote caging," (that is, "sending 'Do Not Forward' letters to minority voters that, if returned, could be used to challenge them as nonresidents"), vote purging (famously seen in Florida before the 2000 election) and the firing of US Attorneys who weren't sufficiently pursuing bogus "voter fraud" allegations (as opposed to "vote fraud," which is when vote suppression is done by the government).

Problem: Where was the NRO during all of this lack of "restraint in government"? Seems to me that conservatives of all stripes and varieties spent the early part of this century praising Dear Leader Bush and bashing the liberals who tried to object. Or did the bulldozing of Dixie Chicks' CDs strike people as an action where the right wing showed respect for political dissent? And remember:

The "K Street Project"—the most successful shakedown operation since the first Gilded Age—was the brainchild of Representative Tom DeLay and Grover Norquist...

I don't remember any conservative objections to that, either. Granted, the "K Street Project" was shut down shortly before the Democrats took over Congress, but let's not confuse a preemptive, defensive reaction to an action based on principle.

Quite frankly, Obama's choice of Rahm Emmanuel for Chief of Staff fills me with joy, as no, he's not as liberal as I'd prefer (He backed NAFTA and wants to privatize the border), but he "doesn't do 'bipartisan'," which I find completely cool at this point.

A piece on PhillyIMC makes an interesting charge, that as the left of 1993 didn't put up much of a fight to control Bill Clinton's "Third Way," "Republican-lite" tendencies, that the left of 2009 will be equally useless at guiding and directing an Obama Administration. I dunno. Seems to me that the left of today is much more together, more energetic, more connected than it was in 1993. President Reagan garnered genuine support from the American people and the elder Bush, who inherited a lot of that good feeling, was less of an overt criminal than the younger Bush is. When the press corps of 1993 launched its all-out assault on Clinton with idiotic crap like "Whitewater," the press being crazy and out of control was a new thing and progressives weren't sure how to handle such a thing. Nowadays, we're fully aware of it and know how to deal with it. That's not to say the netroots are as powerful as the traditional media is, but I think they're far more able to take on the combination of the right-wing noise machine and the traditional press then they were before.

Finally, I agree that there's a danger that Obama will become the new Dear Leader who can do no wrong and who will be defended from our side of the aisle whether he deserves it or not, but I think this blogger makes some very good points:

But I genuinely expect that those who have made the restoration of our Constitutional framework and preservation of core liberties a top priority over the last eight years will continue to pursue those goals with equal vigor, regardless of the change of party control. And few things are more important in that effort than having a Supreme Court majority that at least minimally safeguards those principles. It's hard to overstate the importance of last night's election outcome in ensuring a reasonably favorable Court majority and, even more so, in averting what would have been a real disaster for our basic rights and system of government had John McCain been able to replace those three Justices with GOP-approved nominees. By itself, maintaining the Court more or less as is won't reverse any of the Constitutional erosions of the last eight years, but it is an absolute prerequisite to doing so.

I think all the work we put into making sure that McCain did not succeed Bush was well worth it.