Corporate overreach and who the media focuses on

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are, I suppose, two possible answers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ugly Betty gets a makeover

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

The Koch brothers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sucker Punch

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

Clintonian liberal interventionism

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

US treatment of Bradley Manning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[...]

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

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

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

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

[...]

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

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

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

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

Also,

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

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

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

As the lawyer/blogger Glenn Greenwald has tweeted:

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

What happened to prompt that statement?

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

[...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

It makes you wonder...

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

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

Red Riding Hood

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

More on Republican budget-cutting

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

Update:

Fukushima nuclear power plant explodes

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

Surveillance by law enforcement and by national security agencies

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

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

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

The Philadelphia Inquirer, 10 Mar 2011. Pages4 - 5

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

---

The Philadelphia Inquirer
10 Mar 2011

In response to CNN piece

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

Re: “Are whites racially oppressed?” Mar 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joke Line vs Krugman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I thought so

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

The Egyptian Revolution 25 January - 11 February

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

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

But Lendman also quoted Facebook organizers, who wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baba Bob Shipman covered another rally held shortly afterwards.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did G.W. Bush support democracy?

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

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

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

Green Hornet

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

Republicans substantiate talk about cutting budget

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further updates on Egyptian revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting my chair fixed

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

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

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

Adventures in wifi

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

The revolution in Egypt reaches critical stage

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lefty blogger Digby cites Right Wing Watch:

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

• I will be civil in my public discourse and behavior.

• I will be respectful of others whether or not I agree with them.

• I will stand against incivility when I see it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eliminationalist rhetoric explained.

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

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

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

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

Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake concludes

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

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

Contextualizing the shooting

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

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