Obama's loan guarantees on nuclear energy

[Full disclosure: My father worked on nuclear energy projects for about 40 years]

So it seems that

the President wants to provide loan guarantees to spur nuclear power development

[snip]

Mr. Obama portrayed the decision as part of a broad strategy to increase employment and the generation of clean power.

Is that a good idea? The important thing to remember about nuclear energy is that

No American power company has ordered a new nuclear power plant since 1978, and all reactors ordered after the fall of 1973 ended up canceled.

Why might this be? Cost is a very major factor.

In January 2008, MidAmerican Nuclear Energy Co said that prices were so high, it was ending its pursuit of a nuclear power plant in Payette County, Idaho, after spending $13 million researching its economic feasibility.

Also, consider that nuclear plants are very significant users of water. A plant with a "once-through" cooling system (As opposed to a "closed-loop" system) uses water at the following rates (PDF) of gallons per minute:

504,000 gpm at Millstone Unit 2 (CT); 918,000 gpm at Millstone Unit 3 (CT); 460,000 gpm at Oyster Creek (NJ); 311,000 at Pilgrim (MA); and 1,100,000 gpm at each of the two Salem reactors (NJ).

By contrast, the US is currently using irrigation systems on roughly 18.5 million acres of farmland. It takes about two acre-feet (Two acres of water, one foot deep) of water per year to produce crops, which works out to 651,702 gallons. So that means that the water used by a nuclear plant in a single minute very roughly equals that used by an acre of farmland all year.

Is there an alternative to using nuclear power? As a matter of fact, wind power is currently roughly comparable per kilowatt to what nuclear power is. Commercial nuclear power began in 1948, so nuclear power is a mature technology, a technology where we aren't likely to see any great cost reductions anytime soon. Wind power is currently in a stage where we can reasonably expect serious cost reductions over the next decade or so.

The author of a study in SolveClimate

arrived at an average cost for a nuclear plant: $8 billion for 2.21 GW [GigaWatts]

[snip]

At $1,920/kW, the capital costs of the wind farm would be $10.31 billion -- or $5.49/watt or $5,486/kW. That's 37% higher than our average nuke.

But that price advantage may not be permanent. The turbine is the biggest cost element of the wind farm setup. Fortunately, that's the element that's also the most likely to come down in price with technological development. And costs for nuclear power plants are soaring:

In the middle of 2006, reactor vendors estimated the overnight costs at $1,500 - $2,000 per kW. This year, only two years later, they now estimate $3,000/kW. That excludes the owner's costs and financing.

So yes, nuclear power is measurably cheaper than wind power now, but that doesn't look like a permanent state of affairs.

Update: My sister reminded me that if President Obama really wants to help America's energy picture, he might help the nuclear industry to re-start something that my father's company was working on when it went bankrupt. That would be a standard, basic nuclear plant such as France already has. Currently, one of the real problems with US plants that adds to their cost is that nuclear plants are all custom-built. For each and every plant, all of the spare parts have to be manufactured specifically for that particular plant. This adds enormously to the cost of maintaining those plants. Although it may be tempting to say "Let's never build a nuclear plant again," it's worth keeping in mind that nuclear plants were built to last 40 years, after which they have to be mothballed or pretty much entirely rebuilt.

It's also important to keep in mind that we're really not likely to be able to live without the nuclear plants we have for the foreseeable future. The Oildrum looks at the energy source that the US has after nuclear, wind and solar power, and that's hydrocarbons or oil. A report by six European companies might invite skepticism because they all have a strong vested interest in seeing substantial investments made in renewable energy. Nevertheless, it's worth noting that their report says that "peak oil" is already here (The world has already pumped half of all the oil there is). As China and India are rapidly expanding their economies (Indian and Chinese citizens watch American TV and like the idea of living like the characters in "Burn Notice" and "90210"), China and India are competing with the US for what oil remains, meaning the idea that America can do without nuclear energy for at least the next several decades is sheer wishful thinking.

Y'know, it's funny...

It's funny how for years and years, right-wingers would express great derision and contempt for those who discover new rights. Roe vs Wade saw privacy rights that weren't expressed before, "Human Rights" in the late 1970s were considered a dangerous innovation, detainees incarcerated by the US under "War on Terror" theories were challenging their imprisonment based on habeas corpus (Does that doctrine apply to prisoners of war? Did the detainees even have that status?) etc.

A bit of background: In September 2002, President Bush made a speech about Iraq that was supposed to have Americans quaking in fear over Saddam Hussein's Weapons of Mass Destruction and anxious to rush over there and stomp the whole country. Instead, two weeks after the speech, a substantial number of opponents of the proposed war showed up in Washington DC to conduct a protest against it.


This is a picture I took an hour before the protest began. This was the first and last time I saw a policeman openly taking pictures of protesters. Did protesters make a legal complaint or did the police decide that their picture-taking wasn't having any deterrent effect? Who knows? Note that the crowd is like "Okay, our protest is being surveilled. Well, that's the price we pay for freedom and dissent." We collectively understood that political activity carried a bit of risk and we accepted that price.

So I had to chuckle mirthlessly when Rick Santorum published a piece in the Inky today about proponents of Proposition Hate Eight being politically attacked (They had signed a petition stating that they didn't wish to see equal rights extended to gays and lesbians, progressive groups asked that their names be revealed, they panicked at the thought that their neighbors would know their political leanings) and how those who have expressed hatred for their fellow citizens should be protected from discovery by their neighbors.

Now, I'm generally in favor of all sorts of new rights and privileges being extended to citizens, but since when did we ever have the right to support controversial political causes anonymously? Voting is an act where we must register with our town or city with our full name and address, give our signature and in Pennsylvania at least, must sign a register before voting. If we give money to a political group or to a candidate for office, we need to fill out a form declaring who we are, where we live, how much we're giving, etc. No one is permitted to wear a mask at a protest rally due to (More or less reasonable) fears that they might be a terrorist who might set off a bomb and then escape without anyone knowing who they are.

Santorum decries the liberal lack of respect for people who wish to deny their fellow citizens the same rights that they have and to some extent, he's got a point. But that point extends equally well to his side of the political spectrum. The town hall mini-mobs of August 2009 were not exactly exercises in decorum or respect. The bulldozing of CDs made by the Dixie Chicks reminded people of the burning of books in 1930s Germany. And the commentaries by prominent people like Glenn Beck don't really help the cause of civility.

So, I'm sorry, but I really can't work up much concern over people who want to engage in politics anonymously.

Heartening news

[I wrote this for the Organizing For America/MyBarackObama website - Rich]

I was extremely heartened to see this in Daily Kos:

Charles Blow:

Since the State of the Union address, the president has been bounding about, displaying a new sense of vigor and confidence and a fighter’s spirit. He almost looks like the president people thought that he would be — a paladin, not a pacifist.

Why? Simple. Doing it Rahm's way didn't work, so now he's doing it his way.

I've never been impressed with Clintonian centrism. I've always felt that being successful on your own terms is vastly more useful to America and vastly more appreciated by voters than trying to slice ever-thinner slices of baloney and trying to target ever-more precisely that elusive middle-of-the-road voter's opinions. Centrism has proven over and over again to be an utter failure. The V-Chip was a much-appreciated centrist issue, a bloodless, technocratic, passion-free solution that President Clinton was happy to use. It was a good-enough campaign issue for 1996, when Clinton was up against Senator Bob Dole, a guy even my Republican father felt was simply too old for the job and a Right-wing vote that was split with Ross Perot. It was a fair-weather solution that was appropriate for good, sunny, trouble-free times.


Of course, it was obvious at the time that Clinton had no coattails and that for a politician to declare "I'm a loyal Clintonian" meant nothing of substance to voters. I noticed at the time that no one ever followed the collapse of Hillary Clinton's health care plan by trying to appeal to what she tried to do. There was no glory to recall, no battle-cry to revive. When the plan was defeated, it simply sunk without a trace. I felt that 2002 saw the complete and utter collapse of the DLC strategy. It's quite rare for an out-of-office party to actually lose seats in a mid-term election, but the DLC managed that highly unusual feat. I simply can't imagine why the DLC or its centrist strategy has had any credibility since then.


Apparently, the loss in Massachusetts has jolted the Obama Administration to realize anew the sheer folly and bankruptcy of trying to appeal to some mythical centrist voter that no one can ever locate precisely anyway. Obviously, Massachusetts would never have been a loss had the Democratic Party still been using Howard Dean's 50-State Strategy. Rahm Emanuel clearly thought Dean's ideas were no longer relevant. I'm happy to see the Obama Administration learn from its mistakes and that Emanuel simply does not have the better strategy.


As a proud DFH blogger, I strongly urge the whole Obama Administration to keep going on their new path. Whack the Republican obstructionists at every opportunity. Don't play the victim, but keep pointing out to the voters where the problems in Washington are and that you're trying your best to overcome the obstacles that Republicans keep throwing in your way. Getting all 60 of the Senators in the Democratic Caucus to vote for everything in the health care bill was an awful idea as getting those last few votes from Senators Joe Liebeman and Ben Nelson resulted in tearing the guts out of the bill and leaving just the really unpopular parts behind.


And remember, above all else keep this constantly in mind, the press corps is not your friend. These are a bunch of silly, vapid, go-along-to-get-along, mindless fashion victims who know nothing outside The Village, outside their Versailles-on-the-Potomac. Sure, go ahead and "consult" them, do what you must to stroke their egos, but please don't let yourselves be fooled into thinking they have any worthwhile insights to impart.

Round-up on the news

Following up on the Inky's piece on the scientist caught up in "Climategate" (Comments following the piece are FULL of right-wingers claiming Global Warming/Climate Change is a hoax), the blog Booman Tribune goes into further detail, it reproduces the "hockey stick" graph wherein the temperature follows a fairly steady, very gradual cooling (with an especially deep dip in the late 1400s) with a very sharp sustained upward movement starting around 1900. Yes, there have been rises and falls in temperatures over the millennia, but not this quick. The graphs I've seen usually have changes taking place over very long periods of time. For the temperature to go up this sharply, this quickly, is unprecedented.

Very interesting piece on the origins of the housing bubble. I've noticed that neither of the progressive economists that I read, Dean Baker or Paul Krugman (For the record, they're both Keynesians and yes, they've both "called" many economic issues correctly) have a whole lot to say about what really caused the housing crisis, they both focus on the lack of action by the Federal Reserve once it was clear that there was a bubble. The right-wingers are correct in blaming Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac/the Community Reinvestment Act, but the two economists I cited and James Galbraith here make it clear that the crisis was a whole lot bigger than just those liberal institutions.

Democrats are convinced that the message of the Massachusetts special election to replace the late Senator Kennedy was "Jobs, jobs, jobs."
The only real point of dispute was that many of them feel that getting health care done and done right, is crucial to economic health

How IS health care going? Hard to say. Kudos to Speaker Pelosi for keeping up the good fight, and refusing to just pass the weaker Senate bill but there's so much behind-the-scenes stuff going on that we just don't know.

Media Matters has been having a huge amount of fun following the misadventure of James O'Keefe, who entered the office of Senator Mary Landreiu (D-LA) wearing the outfit of a telephone repairman and claiming he was there to fix her phone system.
And no, it's not the slightest bit believable that Andrew Breitbart, O'Keefe's employer, wasn't fully informed as to what O'Keefe was planning to do.
Very, very interestingly, Landreiu is the senior Democratic member of the Homeland Security Committee, which means her office receives all KINDS of VERY highly classified information.
Could this case be far more serious than it appears?

A blogger looks at that ol' question about political opponents who use blatantly bad arguments: "Stupid or evil?"

Political information and how to judge it

Due to the letter I had posted in the letters column of the Inky, a right-winger I had been communicating with plus two other right-wingers all sent me emails to comment on what I was saying. The conversation in all three cases got around to the housing bubble that had burst on George W. Bush's watch, and so in all three cases, I referred them to Paul Krugmans' reprinting of a graph showing that, no, the housing bubble didn't just arise from Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac/the Community Reinvestment Act/etc., but was instead a broad-based bubble. One responded by asserting that one of the measurements Krugman was using to measure "Commercial Real Estate," was actually a measurement that often included Housing prices. I went to the link and showed him "Nope, the specific measurement Krugman uses covers precisely and only what is traditionally thought of as 'Commercial Real Estate.' " Another one told interesting, but irrelevant and beside-the-point stories concerning his family and their experience trying to buy a house during the bubble years. Ultimately, none of them were able to show that Krugman's point was in any way invalid.

The interesting point was that all three of them came down to the same bottom line. Krugman wasn't credible because he was a partisan. Krugman wrote articles with a very specific viewpoint, therefore, he couldn't be trusted. One of them accused Krugman of being a liar, but didn't provide any examples, so I didn't bother trying to follow that up.

A short time later, I ran across a piece by a head man of "The Village" (Lefty blogger term for the traditional media press corps), David Broder. Now Broder has been known far and wide for many years as a man of the center, as a moderate, as an objective journalist. Presumably, all three of the right-wingers I was exchanging emails with would have identified Broder as a columnist whose word could be trusted.

In this piece, Broder got very, very angry. He stomped his feet and got all red in the face and accused several Congresspeople:

As President Obama delivered his first formal State of the Union address, the reigning journalistic cliche described the "angry, frustrated electorate" he confronts. If you want to know where this anger should really be directed, look at the Tuesday Senate roll call and focus on the 22 Democrats, 23 Republicans and one independent who combined to scuttle what one sponsor has called "the last, best hope" to avert a catastrophe.

Broder was angry because the Senators Kent Conrad (D-ND) and Judd Gregg (R-NM) had come up with a useless, silly gimmick of a plan (Yes, President Obama endorsed the plan and commended it in his State of the Union speech) to freeze spending in a few categories. Note that the blame here is bi- or non-partisan. Both Democrats and Republicans are equally to blame. Would the plan have averted catastrophe? Nonsense. But note Broder's paragraph previous to this:

Of course, this being the 21st-century Senate, it meant defeat because of a failure to command the 60-vote supermajority the opposition now always requires.

The "need" for a 60-vote supermajority has nothing to do with this being the 21st Century and absolutely everything to do with Republicans putting their party above their country and obstructing absolutely everything. Isn't this obstructionism just a tad, just a smidgen more important than some silly gimmick of a plan? Not according to Broder, but then Broder has to maintain his "centrist" and "moderate" credentials. You see, Republican obstructionism cannot be blamed on both parties. Broder can't float above the conflict and blame both sides, so he can't blame the party that's truly causing gridlock in the Senate and slowing down The People's Business.

What are the consequences of this "centrist" approach? Unfortunately, the public ends up being very poorly informed. Only 32% are aware "that the Senate passed its version of the legislation without a single Republican vote" despite the fact that the public as a whole is very interested in the debate. Again, it's very important to remember that this information blackout is due to the fact that this is a partisan fact. Only one side is to blame. There's simply no way to blame both sides.

So my approach to information is not to say "Who says it?" but to ask "What is the quality of the information?" After all, if Sean Hannity says "The sky is blue and the clouds are white," what are ya gonna say? "Why no, that can't be true, Hannity's a liar"? You'd look like an idiot.

Special election in Massachusetts lost

Well, Al Franken was sworn in as the Democrats' 60th Senator on the 7th of July 2009 and a bit less than 200 days later, on the 19th of January 2010, Democrats lost the special election held in Massachusetts in which the late Senator Ted Kennedy was replaced. As the fake-news comedian Jon Stewart put it, "the Democrats won't be able to pass health care reform with an 18-vote majority," a majority that George W. Bush NEVER had and remember, he could do whatever the %#@ he wanted to do!!!

Is this all bad news? Hmm, not necessarily. The Senate could give up the pipedream of getting things through with a filibuster-proof majority and could concentrate on using tactics like reconciliation and possibly modifying the filibuster rule (It's not in the Constitution, so it won't require a Constitutional amendment to remove or modify it) so that it would be a great deal tougher for the minority party to stop up progress and toss all sorts of obstacles in the way. It means that Democrats would no longer have the excuse of having to cater to minority Senators from small states like Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Max Baucus (D-MT) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME). There's strong evidence that spending time and attention on these fringe players and specifically, that re-working the health care bill to meet their demands has crucially deflated the morale of the Democratic Party's progressive voter base.

Progressive bloggers in general didn't feel appreciated and most certainly weren't listened to. As the late Molly Ivins put it, quoting an old Texas saying "Ya dance with the one who brung ya." Obama and his people didn't spend any time "dancing" with progressives, they were too busy chasing "centrist" (Read: "fringe" i.e., off to the right of where the party's base voters are) votes to see to it that progressive voters felt that the Democratic Party was concerned about their priorities.

What do liberals/progressives have to show for our roughly 200 days of a filibuster-proof majority? Damn little. There's very little that we can put up on the wall to say "See? We accomplished that with our filibuster-proof majority!" Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) admitted a few days ago that trying to get Senator Snowe to vote for the health care bill was a complete waste of time. Yeah, it would have been great to have had a least one Republican vote so that Democrats could claim a "bipartisan" victory, but

"As I look back it was a waste of time dealing with [Snowe]," Reid is quoted as saying

The House health care bill was voted out of its various committees right before the August recess and got their combined bill out by early November, but the final Senate committee didn't get its bill out until October and the Senate didn't get their combined bill out until late December. So the Senate was very significantly slower than the House and it made a great many more compromises, compromises which might significantly affect how well the final bill might work in practice. As progressives have pointed out, the public option, which was jettisoned to get Senator Lieberman's vote, is not just a "nice to have" feature, it's absolutely critical if the health care bill is to work.

"Our priority on the public option, the emphasis was not on 'public' - the emphasis was on 'option,' on something 'other than,'" [Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)] said. "The president said from the start, 'I believe that the public option is the best way to keep the insurance companies honest and increase competition. If you have a better idea, put it on the table ... So we will see what they have on the table."

Critics such as Dr. Quentin Young, of Physicians for a National Health Program, see a public insurance plan as having been sacrificed for conservative Democratic votes. "We are very dissatisfied with the way the end of stage negotiations are going," he said. "It seems to use from the very first day the administration has made concessions to the conservative wing who dominates the Senate."

Solution? Dump the provisions that the Senate's rogue, fringe (allegedly "centrist") Senators insisted on, restore the public option and dump the anti-abortion provisions. Make this bill something progressives can be proud of and ignore the beltway press when it squeals "You're not being bipartisan!" Just tell the press corps "No, we're not being bipartisan, we're seeing to the needs of the American people. That means we have to toss this idiotic bipartisanship fetish out the window and concentrate on producing good policy."

Rush Limbaugh: "The White House is politicizing 9-11!"

Rush Limbaugh claimed on his radio show that the White House, by calling for the date of September 11th to be observed as a day of service to the community, was "politicizing 9-11." Erm, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said:

With the intelligence all pointing toward bin Laden, Rumsfeld ordered the military to begin working on strike plans. And at 2:40 p.m., the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying he wanted "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H." – meaning Saddam Hussein – "at same time. Not only UBL" – the initials used to identify Osama bin Laden.

People in Washington DC first started hearing about the four hijacked aircraft at around 8:30am on the morning of September 11th. Apparently, Rumsfeld first became aware of Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37am. Rumsfeld was fitfully in and out of touch with the chain of command starting at around 10:00am (He had gone outside to view the crash scene). "Rumsfeld later claims that he only started to gain a situational awareness of what was happening after arriving at the NMCC" at 10:30am. The military was put on high alert at around 10:45am. At 1:02pm, Rumsfeld "tells Bush, 'This is not a criminal action. This is war.'"

So let's keep in mind when Limbaugh tells his listeners that President Obama is "politicizing 9-11," that it was politicized by a high-ranking member of the Bush Administration long before the fires were out and before President Bush had even made it back to Washington DC upon that date. The Bush Administration suggested to the public so many times, both directly and indirectly, that the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, had something to do with 9-11 that:

In his prime-time press conference last week, which focused almost solely on Iraq, President Bush mentioned Sept. 11 eight times. He referred to Saddam Hussein many more times than that, often in the same breath with Sept. 11.

Bush never pinned blame for the attacks directly on the Iraqi president. Still, the overall effect was to reinforce an impression that persists among much of the American public: that the Iraqi dictator did play a direct role in the attacks.

So strongly was the case made that Saddam Hussein and 9-11 were linked that two years later, 70% of the American public was convinced there was some sort of link.

Finally, former Vice President Cheney said in July 2009 that:

"I do not believe and have never seen any evidence to confirm that [Hussein] was involved in 9/11. We had that reporting for a while, [but] eventually it turned out not to be true," Cheney conceded.

So to say that the Obama Administration is "politicizing 9-11" is sorta like saying that a porn star is "sexing up" an adult movie or that an actor who plays a warrior is making a war movie violent. It's kind of a ludicrous charge. Personally, I think the idea of making September 11th into a day of community service is an absolutely wonderful idea.

Right-wing media

Wow! Tucker Carlson has found a real winner for a "humor" columnist.

For those unfamiliar with me from my day job at The Weekly Standard, I'll give you a capsule bio by way of introduction: I have the gift of wisdom. Does that sound arrogant? I'm sorry, that wasn't my intention. I didn't choose wisdom. It chose me.

Hmm, full of ourselves much? This might be forgivable if he hadn't promptly said:

...or to be the sexiest man alive, like Rachel Maddow.

Huh. Real humorous [/snark]. So wonderfully wise. Rachel Maddow has short hair of course, so as far as this "wise" person is concerned, that makes her a man.

So then, our "wise" and oh-so-charming "comedian" compares an automatic traffic-ticket issuer to, get this, rape. Yeah, he does. He speaks of computer/camera combinations that log the fact that an automobile was caught speeding or running a red light. The combination then automatically issues and mails tickets to the registered owner of the car. In one-quarter of all cases, the registered owner was not driving the car.

Of course, in these cases, the registered owner can ask the person who was driving to pay the fine as the exact date and time and location are logged onto the automatically made-out ticket citation. Yeah, I can certainly see this as a problem for registered owners who are themselves responsible drivers, but really, if the registered owner is not responsible for the behavior of the people who borrow his or her car, then who is? If you're someone who allows irresponsible people to drive your car, shouldn't you pay some sort of penalty for that? I mean, obviously, if your car was stolen or borrowed without your permission, then you can go to court and fight the ticket. Sorry, but I just don't see what the problem with this is.

Yet, our "comedian" compares these systems to "Legalized rape." Now, I realize that someone trying to be funny isn't always going to tell jokes that are in good taste and that he's trying to be irreverent, but really.

And speaking of Rachel Maddow, NewsBusters did a short piece about her exchange with David Corn of The Nation magazine. She thought "Climategate" was a complete crock. That's not terribly surprising as Mother Jones did a piece back on November 30th showing that "Climategate" was utter nonsense. Of course, NewsBusters fails to provide the slightest evidence that the issue is still a "live" one.

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.

The WaPo continues its downhill slide

Now this I have to say that this is just absolutely amazing. The basic story is pretty simple. The Washington Post produced an article in collaboration with the group called The Fiscal Times. It seems that The Fiscal Times is run by Peter G. Peterson, who is a billionaire investment banker with very decided viewpoints on economics and politics. The organizations he has founded and funded have "long advocated reducing the deficit through entitlement cuts and have called for the creation of [an 18-member task force to see to reducing entitlements such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security]. The article produced by the WaPo-Fiscal Times collaboration was a single-source piece that didn't make any use of any source that didn't agree that "entitlement reform and balanced budgets" were good and desirable things. This, despite the fact that 40 progressive organizations take strong issue with the Peterson group.

What's really sad, though, was this paragraph:

“We wouldn’t put anything in the paper that we didn’t believe was independent journalism,” said Marcus W. Brauchli, executive editor of The Post. “We had complete editorial control. Our editors conceived of the story. We asked if The Fiscal Times was interested in producing the story. We edited the story.”

So let's get this straight. The WaPo, in collaboration with a front group that advocates the things "entitlement reform and balanced budgets," that billionaire Pete Peterson has advocated for years, produces a single-source piece (The piece quotes the Concord Coalition, another front group of Peterson's) that copies and pastes rhetoric that Peterson has been putting out for years through his various front groups, and they admit editing it?!?!?!

What exactly did the WaPo editors do?!?!? Did they just run the piece through a spellcheck? Did they fuss over the grammar? Obviously, they completely ignored the fact that the piece was single-sourced and concentrated wholly on Pete Peterson's viewpoints. The editors completely ignored the fact that there were 40 progressive organizations, every single one of which would have been happy to have provided a contrasting, critical viewpoint on the viewpoint presented.

How could any self-respecting editor take credit for such an awful piece o' crud?!?!?!

On writing political blog posts

How does one best think about the process of getting one's words and thoughts across to an audience? When I compose my letters to the newspaper editor (Usually on political subjects) for inclusion on the letters page, I often think of myself as a citizen writing to a politician.

What does a politician care about? Getting re-elected.

What does the politician do to achieve that? Deliver the right results to people who care about the issues (No point in expending effort and energy getting, say, the Darfur situation under control if nobody particularly cares about it).

How does a politician know that a citizen cares about an issue? If the citizen demonstrates a knowledge of the subject, if the citizen has a command of the facts concerning the issue and can identify the groups or persons involved with the issue.

Good spelling and accurate identifications are important. If you refer to Planned Parenthood as an anti-abortionist group or refer to Senator Joe Lieberman as the Republican Senator from Vermont (He's an independent from Connecticut), your politicians' assistants will go ahead and take some statistics from your letter, where you're writing from, your age and gender, party you normally vote for, etc. But your letter will then get tossed into the recycling bin and you'll go into a category that says "These people don't really care enough about the subject that there's any real concern about delivering on this issue."

For writing a non-fiction, political piece for the public, I sometimes like to think of myself as a speaker in a carnival sideshow tent. Potential readers are strolling down the carnival fairway, checking out the signs on each tent, wondering whether they wish to allocate a few minutes of their day to going into the tent and hearing what the speaker there has to say.

Each tent has a sign that tells people strolling down the fairway, i.e., your potential readers, the title of your piece and normally your name. More expansive websites will also offer the writer a short space in which to describe
what their piece is all about. A few people wander in and take their seats on the benches provided. The writer comes out onto the small stage and delivers his or her piece. The first few sentences are critical. If the writer just sort of rambles and makes vague, unsupported statements or makes wild, hyperbolic accusations or goes off into a description of something that's kind of beside the point that the audience came into the tent for, well, people will leave. They'll go back out onto the fairway, i.e., they'll click the "back" arrow on their browser, and they'll stroll on to read something else.

Traditionally, newspaper pieces are very deliberately written with short attention spans in mind. What provoked the writer to write about the subject is clear from the title and the first few sentences. They'll try and front-load all of the important information in the piece so that the average reader only needs to get the first few paragraphs in order to get the basic who, what, where and when of the things that are being discussed. More concerned readers can keeping reading for the "why" aspect and for related, relevant information. Sneaky newspaper writers will "hide" information back there so that only a few readers get it, but so that the paper can claim "we covered that."

My own personal preference is for the writing style termed "radical clarity," where the writer delivers a piece and it's not necessarily clear why the writer felt provoked to write it in the first place. The event that provoked the writer of the piece can be presented after the writer fills in the context so that the reader fully understands just why the event energized the writer to write the piece.

The essential point is that there's no one way to write the first few sentences. If one is using a traditional news template, one must begin with the essential, bare-bones facts. If one is doing a "radical clarity" piece, one begins with a detailed description that brings the reader fully up to speed before the writer fills them in on the who, what, where and when of the provocative event. There are, of course, numerous other styles that call for still more approaches.

The essential take-away though, is that one must give one's opening a good deal of thought. "Okay, the audience was just out on the fairway, strolling along and enjoying the sun. They came into my sideshow tent because I promised them a worthwhile show. The show can be amusing or entertaining or thought-provoking or what have you. But the pressure is on and they'll get up and walk out if my first few sentences don't get their attention."

After their attention is attained of course, comes the further hard part of rewarding the audience for sticking around by delivering worthwhile information, amusement, etc.

So what's Corsi up to TODAY?

Jerome Corsi claims on WorldNetDaily that President Obama's e-e-evil-l-l plan for world domination, or at least domination of the US, a country that he became president of about a year ago, has three critical elements that Obama's organization of e-e-evil-l-l-l henchmen (ACORN) is following:

1. Register as many Democratic voters as possible, legal or otherwise, and help them vote, multiple times if possible;
   
   
2. Overwhelm the system with fraudulent registrations using multiple entries of the same name, names of deceased and names selected at random from the phone book; and
   
   
3. Make the system difficult to police by lobbying for minimal identification standards required of voters arriving at polling stations to vote.

'Course, there are a couple of problems with all three items. The Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU Law School has been examining cases of "Voter Fraud" (Voting multiple times, fraudulent registrations, etc) and finds that the problem is hugely overstated. The State of Indiana attempted in 2007 to pass a law requiring tougher identification standards (See point #3 above), was challenged and was completely unable to provide (PDF) a single example (Out of an estimated 400 million votes cast since 2000) of a case of Voter Fraud that could have been prevented via tighter ID requirements.

But anyway, aside from Corsi attempting to use an elephant gun on a mosquito, Corsi is very, very, deeply concerned that Obama is attempting to destroy capitalism. If he were, this would certainly come as news to Timothy Geithner, the head of the US Treasury who was the CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and served as Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs from 1999 to 2001 under Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers. Geithner just recently acted to renew the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program until late next year, so it's pretty difficult to figure out how this substantiates the charge that the Obama Administration is trying to destroy capitalism. Corsi then devotes the last seven paragraphs of his piece attacking George Soros and his "inexplicable" hatred for George W. Bush, but how anybody could disagree that Bush and his people stomped all over the Constitution with muddy, hobnailed boots is the part that I find utterly and completely inexplicable.

One question that Corsi raises is how much did the de-regulation of the financial sector have to do with the "Great Recession" that's just now ending? Not a whole lot, the economist Dean Baker claims. He mostly blames the housing bubble and lots of miscellaneous acts of irresponsibility. Yes, the 1930s law Glass-Steagall was canceled on Clinton's watch and no, it was not a good decision. So yes, blame for America's economic mess is, to at least some extent, a bipartisan one.

How well is the traditional media doing its job?

A fellow named Perry Bacon of the WaPo answered a whole series of reader questions. Bacon felt that, yes, "...most Americans can follow Tiger, the Salahis, health care and Afghanistan..." without skimping on comprehension or losing track of any particular subject. Is that true? Wel-l-l-l, the "public option" is, to progressives, an absolute necessity for the health care plan that's been debated for the last several months to truly succeed. The WaPo's own Ezra Klein pointed out that, despite the fact that the "public option" concept is, "fairly simple, and undeniably prominent," most Americans (66%) don't feel they could confidently describe what the phrase actually means.

My own memory of discussing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (The "stimulus bill") in the online comment sections of my local paper was that my fellow citizens didn't have a very clear idea as to what constituted a true economic stimulus. A frequent complaint was that the bill, passed in early February, constituted "spending" and not "stimulus." Note: spending IS stimulus and even the WaPo columnist David Broder concluded that the stimulus bill was successfully doing exactly what it was supposed to do.

While I don't think anyone could argue that America's supermarket tabloids and various TV channels devoted to gossip and Hollywood news do not do a perfectly adequate job of covering subjects like the romantic difficulties of Tiger Woods and the party-crashers the Salahis, I find it very highly questionable that America's traditional media sources are doing even a barely adequate job of covering their primary beat, serious stories like health care and Afghanistan.

The challenge has been put forward:

I dare the Post to conduct a scientific poll of its readers, asking them a basic question about health care reform: According to the Congressional Budget Office, would health care reform that includes a government-run public insurance option increase the deficit or reduce it?

Obviously, if the readers of the WaPo were as well-informed as the paper claims they are, such a question would a simple no-brainer. Readers would be able to answer it without even thinking twice. Remember, progressives consider the public option to be a necessary component to a successful nationwide health care plan, so this crucial bit of data should be something that citizens have at their fingertips.

In FAIR's November issue (This crucial media watchdog group is running a fundraising drive right now, so if one clicks on the link, one will get a fundraising message above the analysis piece), FAIR looks at how well America's news consumers are being served by their for-profit, free-enterprise media. The answer? Not very. FAIR cites a study that found that having a college education made a significant difference in the US and Britain in terms of citizens being conversant with their issues of the day, but in Denmark and Finland, both of which spend heavily on public media, the gap between those that are highly educated and those with knowledge of the issues disappears.

Citizens in Denmark and Finland with just a high-school education are just as well-informed on the issues as are those with a college education. FAIR recognizes that a straightforward government-funded media would not be a practical alternative to our current free-enterprise model, so that piece and others explore different methods in which our media might be made more responsive to the information needs of US citizens. The need for a change is urgent. Traditional media in the US is fast becoming irrelevant to serious, real-life problems.

Demonstration against War in Afghanistan on December 2nd

A blogger reports that he was pleasantly surprised at one aspect of President Obama's announcement that he was preparing to send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. That aspect was what the President didn't say. The President made no attempt to follow the example of the last President. Nowhere in Obama's speech was there any reference to trying to help the Afghan people. He presented the escalation of the war there as something that was in the strategic interests of the US. It was not presented as an attempt to help out any particular groups in that country, but as something that would benefit people here at home. Of course, it falls apart on that basis as well, but this is a modest bit of progress in the right direction.

Reacting to President Obama's announcement, local anti-war activists made it clear that they weren't pleased about it. Brandywine Peace Community had arranged for a demonstration to take place soon after the announcement was made. The group Philly Against War issued a press release once the exact date was known. The announced demonstration was moved from the City Hall plaza to the sidewalk facing it as there was a Christmas celebration taking place at the projected time. About 100 of us gathered and as the photos show, we made a splash! Oh, and a local activist has compiled a whole set of resources for further research on the War in Afghanistan.

President's upcoming speech on Afghanistan

Reading the Inky's Afghanistan reporter's take on the issue of President Obama's speech on troop escalation there, one particular phrase jumped out at me "If the United States pulls out of Afghanistan precipitously, without ensuring the security of the population..." [emphasis added]. What Rubin ignores is the option of gradual disengagement.

This reminds me of people who defend George W. Bush's reaction to being told that the 9-11 attacks were underway and that Americans were burning and falling out of the World Trade Center towers at that very moment. "Well, you don't expect the President to jump up, look wildly about and then to run screaming out of the room, do you?" No, I expect our President to give the schoolchildren a quick, calm "Seeya" and to walk calmly out of the classroom, giving quiet instructions and then getting to a command post as quickly as possible.

No, there's no need for a precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan, but Rubin doesn't credit opponents of escalation with wanting a gradual, phased disengagement. It was also quite notable that a particular name was completely missing from the article, that of the former American Ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry.

Eikenberry is a former general and has extensive experience in Afghanistan. I don't expect a local newspaper to insist that their reporter pay attention to all kinds of different aspects to the story, but couldn't someone else have been assigned to provide us with the former ambassador's point of view and then placed that view alongside that of General Stanley McChrystal (as presented by Rubin)? Why are we limited to just McChrystal's point of view?

The projected plans for US forces in Afghanistan are also very hard to take seriously, "...more troops would make it possible to funnel more economic aid to troubled regions and intensify training of Afghan security forces," "The new troops would even improve the chances for a negotiated peace between Afghan leaders and top Taliban leaders...," "This could stabilize the situation sufficiently to pour in development funds and offer substitutes for poppy-growing...." These all sound like very good and positive developments, but they also sound like wishful thinking, like strategies that might work IF there were a real national commitment from the US and IF the US's whole population were engaged in the effort.

Instead, as Tom Engelhardt from TomDispatch.com points out:

7. Our all-volunteer military has for years now shouldered the burden of our two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if we were capable of sending 40,000-80,000 more troops to Afghanistan, they would without question be servicepeople on their second, third, fourth, or even fifth tours of duty. A military, even the best in the world, wears down under this sort of stress and pressure.

Unlike during World War II, when pilots would perform so many missions and then go home, the US is sending troops back to the front time and again because there simply are no people in the pipeline to replace them. After the fall of Baghdad but before the guerrilla war in Iraq got going (May to July 2003), President Bush tried to get volunteers to go to Iraq, not even to fight, but to do administrative work. Virtually no one took him up on his request. US civilians in Iraq were pretty much limited to the "Green Zone" by September because they had completely failed to establish any real presence in Iraq as a whole.

What have been the effects of US efforts in Afghanistan so far?

3. Despite billions of dollars of American money poured into training the Afghan security forces, the army is notoriously understrength and largely ineffective; the police forces are riddled with corruption and held in contempt by most of the populace.

And we can't even count the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai as a solid friend and ally. After President Ahmadinejad of Iran "won" a highly questionable electoral victory, Karzai was among the first foreign leaders to congratulate him.

Bob Herbert of the NY Times points out that:

More soldiers committed suicide this year than in any year for which we have complete records. But the military is now able to meet its recruitment goals because the young men and women who are signing up can’t find jobs in civilian life. The United States is broken — school systems are deteriorating, the economy is in shambles, homelessness and poverty rates are expanding — yet we’re nation-building in Afghanistan, sending economically distressed young people over there by the tens of thousands at an annual cost of a million dollars each.

The US is simply in no shape to conduct an imperial war halfway across the world. It's time to start the drawdown and leave that country to those who live there.

Movie review - Across the Universe

I'm pleased to say that I've had the enjoyable experience of watching "Across the Universe," a movie in which, as with that foul, disgusting piece of excrement "Forrest Gump," each character is there to represent the typical experiences of many millions of people during the 1960s ("Gump" continues on well into the 1970s whereas "Across" includes a British citizen and scenes from England).

The primary difference is that "Across the Universe" views people as making rational, intelligent choices. It treats people during that tumultuous era as young grown-ups who grapple the best they can with the situation they've got and who certainly run into their share of bad experiences. Is the whole experience ultimately helpful or hurtful? Depends really on how you view the Sixties. There's no question that "The Sixties" is shorthand for all sorts of emotional reactions, both good and bad.

"Forrest Gump," ultimately views people as dupes who are simply too stupid and easily influenced to be considered adult, rational human beings. The writer there takes so many liberties with basic human nature (A policeman is able to cut off the microphone for Gump when he arbitrarily deems Gump's speech offensive and no one is able to restore the sound until after Gump delivers a simplistic and insulting speech to the crowd, people take up jogging en masse when Gump starts running and somehow he never needs to stop for food or rest or a shower or even a change of clothes for what appears to be several weeks, etc., etc.), that it's difficult to see the characters in "Gump" as anything better than cardboard cut-out caricatures.

"Across" delivers full, rich characters making choices and living with the consequences. There are no easy answers. Prudence never gets to express her love, Jude goes back to England to find his former lover married and pregnant, Max goes to war and ends up badly wounded, but the choices are never simple black and white ones, straight good or bad. They're simply the choices that people made at the time. There's much joy to be had along the way and many of the choices turn out to be very positive ones.

"Across the Universe" is a worthy capsule history of the Sixties.

Open letter to a columnist

Re: "Enough Afghan debate" by David Broder WaPo Nov 15

In going over the various options for Afghanistan, David Broder claims that President Obama has "stretched the internal debate to the breaking point." What? What is Broder talking about? What exactly is threatening to "break?" America has a bunch of crazy warmongers who want action NOW and the majority of the population that sees no point in staying any longer and feels that we should leave Afghanistan to those who live there.

"Given that reality, the urgent necessity is to make a decision -- whether or not it is right." This is a completely insane idea, that we need to approach life and death decisions in any sort of hurry or that there's any urgency to the decision. The Taliban are native to Afghanistan and represent a substantial portion of the population there. Al Qaeda is neither here nor there in this debate as the Taliban are angry with al Qaeda, blaming al Qaeda for the Taliban's loss of power in the first place.

Broder claims US allies are "waiting impatiently." Sorry to hear that, but there's still no obvious reason as to why the US needs to rush pell-mell into a decision. After the many, many years that the US has had troops in Afghanistan without any clear strategy or direction, one would think that our allies could cool their jets a bit and help US official figure out just what we can reasonably hope to accomplish there.

Broder has no effective answer to Karl Eikenberry's very sensible and obviously-accurate objection to delving deeper into Afghanistan, that Hamid Karzai is "too weak and corrupt to govern the country effectively." Broder doesn't even try to come up with any real answer to the objection of progressives, that General McChrystal can't suggest any way to really end the war in Afghanistan other than by simply leaving.

As the "dithering" talking point was clearly taken directly from the poisoned pen of Karl Rove, Broder should at least credit his source for his article and admit that the "dead-enders" of the failed neoconservative movement are the people behind this column.

A good leader is not someone who simply stays the course because that's the course he's on. A truly good leader is someone who takes a thoughtful approach to problems and who thinks "Do we really need to do it this way?" I am 100% in favor of Obama's more careful, thoughtful approach and urge that Broder's advice be rejected entirely.

The House health care bill and reproductive choice

Huzzah! The House of Representative passed a reasonably decent health care bill. Now it's on to the Senate, where simply avoiding a filibuster is the major problem.

Major problem with the House's bill, though. Women and their reproductive choice got "thrown under the bus" so that the Democrats could get the bill passed. As Jane Hamsher explains (And yes, her language is a bit raw in this piece, but her anger is clearly justified), NARAL and Planned Parenthood were informed on July 1st that Representative Bart Stupak (D-MI) and his merry band of anti-abortionists wanted the health care bill to explicitly exclude coverage for reproductive choice. When the day came that the House could either pass the health care bill with the poison pill of the Stupak-Pitts Amendment or watch several months worth of work go down the drain, NARAL and PP had nothing in the works, nothing had been planned or positioned in advance, no money had been saved up, no lobbying had been done.

Well, will PP and NARAL at least "score the bill", i.e., will they make voting for the bill as it's currently written an offense sufficient to cause a Congressperson to be "downgraded" and denied reelection help?

Wel-l-l-l, er, um, no.

Is it a good idea for Democrats to toss aside the female, single, childless demographic?

No actually, that would be utterly suicidal. That would guarantee that Democrats would lose the 2010 midterms and that Obama would be a one-term President.

As to the plan of using all 60 Senators in the Democratic caucus to overcome a filibuster... Nuh-uh. Ain't gonna happen. The choices are stark. The Democrats can use the reconciliation process to get around the inevitable filibuster, or they can compromise the bill so much that it won't be worth passing. It'll be the Stupak problem all over again.

America can get a good health care bill, but we're coming down to the crunch time where we learn whether or not it will be a bill worth passing.

How seriously can we take media objections to the Fox News vs The White House "war"?

Charles Krauthammer complains that the President's Chief Of Staff "Rahm Emanuel once sent a dead fish to a live pollster. Now he's put a horse's head in Roger Ailes' bed." In other words, the White House is not only at war with Fox News, but it's a particularly nasty and vicious war.

What exactly is the White House accusation against Fox News? Krauthammer says:

Meaning? If Fox runs a story critical of the administration -- from exposing White House czar Van Jones as a loony 9/11 "truther" to exhaustively examining the mathematical chicanery and hidden loopholes in proposed health care legislation -- the other news organizations should think twice before following the lead.

That is, Fox is just doing "tough" but completely honest and aboveboard, "fair and balanced" reporting. Is that true? Erm, not exactly.

Fox's "news" staff regularly conflates commentary and news reporting. The network's "news" reporting is full of smears, falsehoods, deceptive editing, and GOP talking points. Just Thursday morning, the Fox & Friends crew parroted a House Republican press release and repeated its claim that the stimulus impact is "6 million jobs shy of what the administration promised us" since the administration stated "that 3.5 million jobs would be created. And, in fact, the United States has lost 2.7 million since the stimulus plan." However, the administration estimated 3.5 millions jobs created or saved by 2011. It's so much easier to read GOP talking points than actually do journalism!

Krauthammer talks about Fox being banned from a Treasury Department press pool and how the news media bravely and heroically stood up to the thuggish Obama Administration and forced them to include Fox. Mediaite tosses a bit of cold water on that thesis, noting among other things that: "As yet, none of the other network bureau chiefs has gone on record to corroborate Fox’s reporting."

Anyway, Krauthammer then gets all noble and Constitutional on us:

There's nothing illegal about such search-and-destroy tactics. Nor unconstitutional. But our politics are defined not just by limits of legality or constitutionality. We have norms, Madisonian norms.

Slight problem with that. Where was all of this teary-eyed nobility back during the Iraq War, specifically in early April 2003 when the Palestine Hotel was shot at by an American tank?

An American tank fired on the Palestine Hotel early Tuesday, where foreign journalists have been covering the war from balconies and the roof.

Less than a mile away, a reporter for Al-Jazeera television was killed when U.S.-led forces bombed his office. Nearby, coalition artillery battered the Baghdad office of Abu Dhabi television, trapping more than 25 reporters who phoned for help from the basement.
----

More than 50 news cameras were set up on [the Palestine] hotel balconies when the tank fired, according to Associated Press photographer Jerome Delay. "How can they spot someone with binoculars and not [see] cameras?" he asked.

And from the British reporter Robert Fisk:

The next assault, on Reuters, came just before midday when an Abrams tank on the Jamhuriya Bridge suddenly pointed its gun barrel towards the Palestine Hotel where more than 200 foreign journalists are staying to cover the war from the Iraqi side. Sky Television's David Chater noticed the barrel moving. The French television channel France 3 had a crew in a neighboring room and videotaped the tank on the bridge. The tape shows a bubble of fire emerging from the barrel, the sound of a detonation and then pieces of paintwork falling past the camera as it vibrates with the impact.

General Buford Blount of the US 3rd Infantry Division claimed that there had been rocket fire from the Palestine Hotel, but no one who was in the hotel or in the area heard or saw any such thing.


The WaPo's Ruth Marcus asked what she clearly considered a rhetorical question comparing the Obama Administration with its predecessor: "Imagine the outcry if the Bush administration had pulled a similar hissy fit with MSNBC."


'Fraid to say, the Bush Administration did far worse than just to pull a hissy fit, military weaponry was used against reporters who were just doing their jobs. Was there any sort of outcry from the same people who are now crying and bleating and fussing over the Obama Administration now "beating up" Fox News? (Sound of wind blowing through the grass, crickets chirping).

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.

The GWOT and social progress

It's difficult to add much to this post on Charles Krauthammer's Weekly Standard piece on why President Obama is allegedly hastening America's decline, but I'll make a few extra comments anyway.

Krauthammer feels that "decline is a choice" and that America can remain the world's top dog if it wants to. I'm not so sure about that because the problem with the US remaining dominant is more than just the single nation of China. It's that before World War II and the following decolonization, the non-Western world was easily dominated by the advanced weaponry and advanced way of organizing their armies that the rest of the world simply couldn't match. We saw in Iraq, however, that Third World people are now able to do so. Nir Rosen authored a series in Asia Times back in 2005 that examined the Iraqi resistance to the American occupation. He shows us not just a stubborn and determined group of fighters, but a canny and sophisticated group that made good use of whatever technology they could get their hands on. The easy domination over other nations that Western powers enjoyed from around 1500 to roughly 1950 is over.

No, I disagree with his statement that "Decline--or continued ascendancy--is in our hands."

The current foreign policy of the United States is an exercise in contraction. It begins with the demolition of the moral foundation of American dominance.

Is it the statements made by President Obama that are demolishing the "moral foundation of American dominance" or is it actions like the tortures that took place at Abu Ghraib? Keep in mind that these tortures were justified by low-level functionaries like Judge Jay Bybee and John Yoo, they weren't simply the rogue actions of some out-of-control people indulging their own twisted desires. These were people who were carrying out official US policy.

Obama didn't just say "America's been bad," he instead went over many actions that the world already knew about and that it clearly and loudly disapproved of and he agreed "Yeah, these actions are wrong."

What happens if the US is no longer dominant?

But that leads to the question: How does this new world govern itself? How is the international system to function?

I would suggest that perhaps the rest of the world probably doesn't need a world sheriff or a daddy figure or an administrator. I would further suggest that liberals refuse to view US power and dominance as inherently good things not because the US is fundamentally bad but because all nations are fundamentally bad. In other words, liberals view competing international powers in much the same way our Founding Fathers viewed competing domestic political interest groups back in the day.

The UN may not be up to snuff today, but that hardly means that the liberal experiment in world government is a failure. Clearly, the countries of the world won't be able to get rid of armies and weapons tomorrow, but Europe is doing a pretty good job melding all their different countries into one framework. It is not the United States of Europe and may never be, but it's grossly premature to say that the experiment will never succeed.

Demonstrators are shot in the streets of Tehran seeking nothing but freedom, but our president holds his tongue...

Krauthammer ignores the very sound and sensible reason that Obama "holds his tongue" and refuses to interfere. It's because the Iranian opposition has asked America to keep its distance. The last thing Iranian supporters of a democratic Iran want is the US throwing its weight around, trying to "liberate" them. Partly because the Iranian opposition may (quite reasonably) fear that the US may seek to do so for the exclusive purpose of liberating Iran's oil fields, but mostly because Iranians consider democratization to be an internal affair that outsiders cannot effectively steer. It's not that the US specifically can't effectively usher Iran towards democracy, it's that no outsider can do so. Iran's opposition figures that democracy has to be something Iranians gain in their own way, on their own timetable.

Krauthammer seem quite upset that "there is no more 'Global War on Terror.'" Well, that's right. Maybe because the GWOT was a complete, total and unqualified failure. First of all, the GWOT has been extraordinarily expensive to parts of the Mideast:

As of April 2009, in the Occupied Palestinian, Iraqi and Afghan Territories post-invasion non-violent excess deaths total 0.3 million, 1.0 million and 3.2 million, respectively; post-invasion violent deaths total about 10,000, 1.3 million and 2-4 million...

The same piece estimated US deaths from terrorism (Including the 3,000 killed on 9-11) at about 10,000. Bit of a disproportionate response, I would think. The GWOT has also been very expensive as far as civil liberties are concerned, with citizen protections against overly-intrusive surveillance being especially hard-hit. And what did America get for it's money, time and effort? The chart here only goes to 2006, but it's rather obvious that the GWOT was having the exact opposite of its intended effect. Deaths and injuries due to terrorism steadily increased.

A recent piece in the Boston Globe shows that continuing along the course advocated by those who would like continued war in Afghanistan could very easily end up having the same corrosive effect on social progress in the US that the Korean War had under Harry Truman and that the Vietnam war had under Lyndon Johnson.

Krauthammer follows with a "parade of horribles" where it's rather difficult to see just what the US has lost that's of any value. My concern with these examples is not that Krauthammer is being at all untruthful, but that in all cases he's only telling part of the story, that he's only giving us a very partial and limited view of what's actually going on with these issues.

So when Krauthammer reaches the preliminary conclusion that:

The express agenda of the New Liberalism is a vast expansion of social services--massive intervention and expenditures in energy, health care, and education--that will necessarily, as in Europe, take away from defense spending.

My response to that is "And your problem with this is...?"

Views on the Afghanistan occupation

The leaders of Code Pink say that they have ascertained the views of Afghan women concerning continued US occupation of that country and the women there say they would prefer that US troops stay until an Afghan army is trained and armed and ready to provide them with security.

Mark Weisbrot of CEPR only mentions Afghan popular opinion by noting that "Five years ago, 70 percent of eligible voters participated in the Afghan presidential election. This year it was down to 38 percent." Even if Afghanis wanted US troops to remain, five years of occupation have seen a serious deterioration of the security situation.

Concerning the primary reason for being in Afghanistan, i.e., US troops are acting as a bulwark against al Qaeda, we might wish to keep in mind that "...Taliban elements have free reign in many areas of southern and eastern Afghanistan, yet the administration is contending that there are only an estimated 100 al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan."

How's the Afghan drug trade doing? Wel-l-l-l... "...the 13 provinces reckoned by Afghan and foreign observers to be largely under insurgent control, where poppy cultivation often extends to the outskirts of the government-controlled administrative centers and opium is sold in bazaars within a stone's throw of the governor's compound."

But the government is legitimate, right? Wel-l-l-l... Nasrine Gross says: "I have just returned from Kabul. And I am shocked how little the extent of fraud in the presidential elections is understood outside Afghanistan."

As much as I sympathize with Afghan civilians who want US troops to remain in their country, our troops need to leave Afghanistan yesterday!

The "a few bad apples" defense

A local columnist summarizes the current rap against ACORN:

...consider the ACORN videos, in which a fake pimp and prostitute seek help from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now to set up a brothel, commit tax fraud, and engage in sex trafficking of underage illegal immigrants. ACORN employees at five offices seemed happy to help.

He goes on to say racism is a bogus defense that an ACORN board member used. From what I've seen of the case, I agree with the columnist that racism appears to be completely irrelevant to the launching of the sting operation. For me the question is: Just how much of a problem did the sting operation uncover? ACORN's CEO, Bertha Lewis, said:

Well, when you run an organization, what you need to do is to make sure that everyone knows your standards and everyone is trained to understand how to do intake. I think, in the end, most of these employees just felt like, well, I have to talk to whoever comes in here. However, that cannot trump common sense and also it cannot trump someone going to their supervisor and saying this is unusual, what do I do? So, in any case, though it's indefensible, that's why I terminated everyone. And I am making sure not to take this lightly. My board was outraged, and I think I owe it to the other employees that did the right thing. It's just a handful of folks out of hundreds and hundreds of employees.

The use of "It's just a handful of folks..." raises immediate red flags because we heard that for the Roman Catholic priests who were engaged in pedophilia. Father John Geoghan was identified as a child rapist by the alternative newspaper The Boston Phoenix in March 2001 (The Boston Globe followed up in January 2002 shortly before Geoghan was convicted, whereupon the case came to the attention of the public at large). A major aspect of the case from the very beginning was that Father Geoghan's activities were so extensive that it was suspected immediately that his activities had to have been known of by his superiors. He was "suspected of fondling, assaulting, and raping hundreds of children over three decades." And, "parents had complained to Geoghan’s superiors about his behavior with children as far back as 1973."

During the investigation and trial, Fitzpatrick, among other victims, charged that top Church authorities at the Diocese of Fall River had known about Porter’s behavior all along. ... Cardinal Law infamously blasted reporters for focusing on what he termed “the faults of a few”: “We deplore that.... By all means we call down God’s power on the media, particularly the Globe.” ... At the time Law made these remarks, Geoghan had already been placed on temporary “sick leave” at least once, according to the Official Catholic Directory. This leave of absence, as alleged in court records, followed a complaint of abuse against Geoghan by one mother of an alleged victim from Jamaica Plain.

Since then, pedophile priests have shown up in Ireland - In April 2002, the Irish government began its own investigation and issued its report in October 2005 and in Italy - The Meter Association, founded by Italian Father Fortunato Di Noto announced the existence of "A hundred online pedophile communities" in September 2009 and said they'd be dismantled and prosecuted.

Defenders of pedophile priests certainly tried to claim that the problem was limited to "a few bad apples," and while it's certainly true that it's wrong to physically attack priests "As if all priests are pedophiles. As if all priests are perverted. As if all priests are immoral, or corrupt, or just bad" (emphases in original), it was clear from the very start that the problem was an institutional one, that it wasn't just a couple of rogue individuals.

Torture at the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib was also allegedly limited to "a few bad apples," but the US made a very poor case for that owing to the lies used to justify the invasion of Iraq in the first place and again, the problem didn't trace back to just a few rogue individuals. The historical roots of the practice of torture with American assistance traced back to the Shah of Iran and his agency SAVAK. The Red Cross had found serious problems with US treatment of and policy towards Iraqi detainees as early as March 2003, the month that the US invaded Iraq. By March 2006, the website Salon had collated a list of government and private investigative reports.

It was also confirmed in May 2009 that the Bush Administration had a few low-level employees write out some torture-justifying memos, memos that opined on the authority of the President to order the lawless abuse of helpless prisoners at will. As the blogger Christy Hardin Smith put it:

The ACLU has put together a video of these words of tortured logic being read aloud. Watch it.

The words you are hearing were written by and for the US government. As guidance for governmental agencies acting in all of our names.

So, again, we're not dealing with just a couple of rogue individuals, we're dealing with an institution that went seriously off the tracks.

Back to ACORN, do we have any evidence that we're dealing with a deep, systemic problem? Any indication that ACORN is a corrupt institution? Well, the NPR story that quotes the ACORN CEO came out on September 21st and the quote from a local columnist came out today, October 4th. As one can see, there are no new developments in the case. There is no evidence that any of the employees who agreed to help the fake pimp and prostitute brought their case up to any higher levels. There's no evidence that any money actually changed hands or that any organizational favors were actually granted. As Anonymous Liberal points out, it's entirely understandable for people, faced with a completely unexpected situation to improvise as best they can and importantly, in as non-confrontational a mode as they can. This does not, of course, excuse the people who agreed to help the fake prospective clients, but it does make their actions more understandable.

No, I think the ACORN case is one where the idea of "a few bad apples" does indeed apply.

Teabagger demonstration

I just saw a reference to this video. It shows us a fellow who carried a big pro-health care reform sign through the Washington DC right-wing teabagger demonstration on Saturday. The fellow had a police escort and, naturally, as the crowd they were travelling through got more and more hostile, the escort was increased to several more police officers.
This bothers me because I can very easily see the shoe being on the other foot. I can very easily see an anti-abortionist carrying a doll dressed up as a bloody, dead fetus through a crowd of pro-choice people, a pro-military adventurism guy carrying an American flag through a crowd of anti-war people, etc.
I think for the guy to carry a pro-health care reform sign through a crowd that was clearly hostile to his message was cool, but I find it very disturbing that he received official sanction to do so, that he received police protection for doing that.
Oh, and just how big was the Glenn Beck/Fox News-inspired crowd to begin with? No, it was nowhere near the Michelle Malkin-reported two million (That would have been a larger crowd than was at the Obama inaugural). Many commenters here talked about on the crowd size and the commenters include many people who have been to many protests and other events over many years and they very credibly assert that the crowd was 30,000 to 50,000, but the left blogosphere as a whole has settled on the figure of 70,000, which they substantiate in a reasonable fashion. So yes, the October 2002 anti-Iraq War demonstration was a good deal larger at 100,000.

Very disturbing to see Van Jones retire under pressure

Van Jones has resigned as Special Advisor for Green Jobs at the Council on Environmental Quality, he claims that "opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me." Glenn Beck, who has very fortunately lost 57 advertisers due to his hysterical on-camera campaigns that have begun to enter very dangerous territory by using "analysis" that the fascists of mid-century Europe would have been comfortable with, has been the primary reason that Van Jones was under attack.

Thankfully, the Obama Administration does not appear to be giving way on the President's televised speech to schoolchildren scheduled for the first day of school, despite screeching and hollering by the right wing over it.

Then there was Michael Savage, the third most listened to radio host in America, who put it this way: "Hitler had the Hitler Youth, and Obama would like to have the Obama Youth."

Seems one of the "problems" that has caused the Obama Administration to pull back on defending Van Jones is that he also signed a "911Truth" statement.

Jones recently issued two apologies. One was for calling Republicans "assholes." The other was for signing a statement in 2004 supporting a call for further investigation of 911, which suggested that the Government might have had a role in the 911 attack. The original document can be found here, with Van Jones the 46th signatory (and this writer [Rob Kall of OpEd News] was the 47th.) Ironically, one of the most vocal "birthers, who question the validity of Obama's birth certificate, Phillip J. Berg, was also a signatory of the same statement, 8th on the list.

As there are significant numbers of American citizens who feel that there are numerous unanswered questions concerning 9/11 (A above-cited poll puts the percentage at 40%), this placed the Obama Administration in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" type of situation. On the one hand, they appear to be surrendering to a TV personality who really seems to have gone off the deep end, on the other hand, throwing a staffer under the bus at a time when people are questioning Obama's commitment to really pushing for a health care bill that will serve something other than wealthy financial interests makes the timing very poor.


Update: Jane Hamsher's view - The proprietress of the progressive website FireDogLake.com weighs in on the Van Jones case with a piece that urges liberals, progressives and leftists and their associated watchdog institutions to remain at an arm's distance from Democratic administrations.
Being too close to the Obama Administration has penned in those who need to maintain a skeptical view.
Oh, and she cites a poll that says that those members of the Democratic Party who believe 9/11 was an inside job constitute about 30% of the party as of 2007. Yes, Van Jones is in a minority, but it's a pretty big chunk of the party's base. The statement that Van Jones signed.