Unknown News put me onto an intriguing story from The Hill that I hadn’t seen elsewhere. Two bits that caught my eye…

This:

Moreover, a public-relations maxim of the Bush White House and its press officers was to shorten the lifespan of any bad press to make sure that it got out as widely as possible to as many major news organizations on the same day. For example, in February of 2006, after learning that The New York Times was going to run a story about an administration program to covertly obtain bank records to track down potential terrorists, the White House briefed reporters from the competing Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times so that they would all be able to publish the story that same night.

The case study of what occurred in that instance became the playbook for how public-relations specialists for the administration handled minimizing the impact of bad news and putting their own spin on it: Get everything out everywhere at once, get it out to authoritative news sources, and get your version out first.

And this:

After [Arizona U.S. Attorney] Charlton’s firing, there was speculation in the media that it may have been due to his pursuit of Renzi. (Charlton himself never publicly suggested that that was the case.) Yet the report into the firings of the U.S. attorneys concluded there was “no evidence” of that.

Charlton was targeted, the report said, because he clashed with Gonzales over a death penalty case. Charlton wanted the Justice Department to foot the bill for recovering a murder victim from a landfill to make absolutely sure the forensic evidence supported the conviction. Gonzales refused. “I didn’t want to be left to wonder a year later, or 10 years later, or 20 years later whether a life might have been taken unjustly just to appease some political paradigm,” Charlton said.

The first excerpt came as a surprise to me, although I spent a good many years as a press officer for a U.S. Embassy, the Carter campaign, and the Federal Aviation Administration. Silly me, I never thought of (or heard of) diluting the news value of a reporter’s story by leaking it immediately to the competition.

As to the second, no great news there, I guess. Just another example, no more ripe than a hundred others, of the schweinerei that Bush and Rove made of the United States Justice Department. Who would have expected the ineffable Alberto Gonzales to spend the taxpayers’ money just to find out if a condemned man was really guilty?

Chalmers Johnson has been telling us about blowback from our foreign adventuring for a long time; he basically predicted something like 9/11 would happen a year beforehand. His Blowback trilogy provides extensive detail, and talks a lot about how much our overseas bases cost us. The costs are by no means simply financial; for example, Okinawans would be glad to be rid of the two rapes a month that are committed, on average, by American servicemen against Japanese women.

On June 23rd, we learned that Kyrgyzstan, the former Central Asian Soviet Republic which, back in February 2009, announced that it was going to kick the U.S. military out of Manas Air Base (used since 2001 as a staging area for the Afghan War), has been persuaded to let us stay. But here’s the catch: In return for doing us that favor, the annual rent Washington pays for use of the base will more than triple from $17.4 million to $60 million, with millions more to go into promised improvements in airport facilities and other financial sweeteners. All this because the Obama administration, having committed itself to a widening war in the region, is convinced it needs this base to store and trans-ship supplies to Afghanistan.

I suspect this development will not go unnoticed in other countries where Americans are also unpopular occupiers.

Such countries can be found. Probably you’re not surprised.

…I have a suggestion for other countries that are getting a bit weary of the American military presence on their soil: cash in now, before it’s too late. Either up the ante or tell the Americans to go home. I encourage this behavior because I’m convinced that the U.S. Empire of Bases will soon enough bankrupt our country, and so — on the analogy of a financial bubble or a pyramid scheme — if you’re an investor, it’s better to get your money out while you still can.

This is, of course, something that has occurred to the Chinese and other financiers of the American national debt. Only they’re cashing in quietly and slowly in order not to tank the dollar while they’re still holding onto such a bundle of them. Make no mistake, though: whether we’re being bled rapidly or slowly, we are bleeding; and hanging onto our military empire and all the bases that go with it will ultimately spell the end of the United States as we know it.

Now that Al Franken is on his way to join the other comedians in Washington can we expect the Senate to be more fun than ever?

Franken, a professional funnyman and avowed liberal, will finally take his seat as the junior senator from Minnesota after seven hilarious months of legal wrangling over the vote count with the (finally) outgoing Republican incumbent, Norm Coleman, who is a joke but a bad one.

The big question is whether Franken, for all his success as a satirist, book writer, radio guy, and onetime stalwart of Saturday Night Live, can match wits with the likes of Orrin Hatch, Jon Kyl, John Cornyn, and Chuck Grassley, four of the funniest Republicans ever to crack wise on the Senate floor.

Orrin Hatch is probably best known of the current crop of GOP wits because he has been around forever and has never been able to open his mouth wide enough to say anything controversial. Orrin is from Utah and looks rather like one of those scary clean-cut missionaries, which he was, who periodically show up at your door wanting to talk to you about Jesus. Because no one can understand what he is saying, Hatch always gets re-elected.

He is also wonderfully funny, but not as funny as Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, who has made a huge contribution to the public weal by making life difficult for foundations and other philanthropic organizations that think their tax-free status gives them the right to give away money to good causes without asking him first. Chuck has kicked some eleemosynary ass and shown those smug foundation types a thing or two about who makes tax policy in this country. He’s funny but he’s also tough.

Funny and tough seem to be traits common to all the members of the Senate Finance Committee, which has set itself the daunting task of thwarting President Obama’s effort to reform the country’s perfectly healthy healthcare insurance system. You need a good sense of humor to go against overwhelming public opinion. Just because health care reform was one of the main reasons Obama got elected is no reason for smart, tough, funny Senators to get stampeded into something stupid, something that smells suspiciously like SOCIALIZED MEDICINE!

Do you want the government telling you what to eat, how many aspirin to take, how many hours of sleep you need? Do you want the government examining your prostate? Well, that’s what’s going to happen if Obama’s plan goes through. So let’s be thankful that the finance committee has some members smart, funny and tough enough to just say no. Solid, fiscally responsible Republicans like Jon Kyl of Arizona, John Ensign of Nevada, Mike Enzi of Wyoming, and Mike Crapo of Idaho, men elected by the few to block the will of the many.

And let’s not overlook the Democratic comedians whose tough, smart, funny performance as members of the Senate Finance Committee ensures their place in the history of tomfoolery. Senators Blanche Lincoln — who? — of Arkansas; Ron Wyden — huh? — of Oregon; Tom Carper — who’s he? — of Delaware; Jeff Bingaman — oh, him — of New Mexico, and some other jokesters you probably never heard of.

Then there are other Democratic Senators not on the committee who have joined the hallowed ranks: Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, to name three.

How do you feel about some clown from North Dakota, who represents about 140 people, wrecking the health plan that you sent Obama to Washington to enact? Pretty funny, eh? But this is the new fiscal responsibility. It’s okay to spend a trillion dollars smashing up a country where we’re not wanted but let’s not put money into creepy, creeping socialistic ideas about health care. Let’s be responsible.

It’s all pretty funny; well, not that funny. The big question is whether a true funnyman like Al Franken can fit in in the Senate. Maybe, in time, but it will probably cost him his sense of humor.

From the Sarasota Herald Tribune:

If you’re looking for a silver lining to the home-foreclosure story — and who isn’t? — the good news is that 8-foot-long Nile monitor lizards are taking over our abandoned properties. What, if anything, real estate agents will be able to make of this news is another matter…

Unless Governor Pawlenty makes the weird decision to buck the Minnesota Supreme Court, Franken is in and Coleman is, at long last, out of the U.S. Senate. Coleman can console himself with the knowledge that he has set a mark for ungraciousness in defeat that future losers will have great trouble surpassing.

From Reuters:

MINNEAPOLIS (Reuters) – The Minnesota Supreme Court on Tuesday declared Democrat Al Franken the winner of a tight U.S. Senate race over Republican Norm Coleman, which should give Democrats the 60-seat majority they need to overcome procedural obstacles and push through their agenda.

Coleman has said in published reports he is unlikely to appeal the state court’s decision to the federal courts. Under state law, the court’s decision gives Franken the right to occupy the seat, which has been up for grabs since last November’s election.

Religious notes from the New York Times:

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Some of those seated in the pews of New Bethel Church here Saturday night, their firearms tucked to their sides, saw themselves as modern-day pioneers…

Likewise, Tommy Hillerich, 68, a retired truck driver, and Maya, 58, his wife, a former auto upholstery worker, did not bring their firearms inside but firmly believe in their right to do so.

“I don’t see a thing wrong with having a loaded gun in there,” Mr. Hillerich said. “If the pastor’s in there and he’s got a concealed weapon and somebody comes in and starts shooting people, he can take him out. That’s his right.”

From today’s New York Times:

Police officers, responding to an attempted robbery at a Brooklyn day care center on Friday afternoon, shot a man who had stormed into the center and pointed a gun at arriving officers as a group of frightened children stood nearby, the authorities said…

Later, one parent, Somalia Williams, smiled as she left the precinct station with her daughter, Yosha, 2, who was wearing a pink onesie over a diaper. Ms. Williams said the children were given snacks while they waited. “She’s O.K., thank God,” she said.

“My friends were crying,” Yosha said, adding “I had pizza.”

It has recently come to my attention that the entire population of the world except for China is being poisoned by chemtrails. These are the apparently innocent contrails from commercial and military jets — secretly modified by the Power Structure to suppress evolution so that the New World Order (NWO) can be imposed on mankind.

Why and how? This is complicated stuff, so pay attention:

The NWO will fail if citizens become genetically empowered to wake up and fight with superhuman powers against tyranny. This is already occurring, and chemtrails are ultimately ineffectual at preventing the inevitable.

Few know the chemtrail program’s true purpose, and most of those implementing it have been told lies. They believe the “mass vaccination” scenario, that what they are doing is beneficial to citizens. Unfortunately this illusion, like all others created by the power structure, shall fall away in due time.

The point (more fully explained here) is that we are evolving into organisms with 12 helixes in our DNA rather than the standard two. Dr. Berrenda Fox is currently working with children who only have three helixes, but are already telepathic and can fill glasses of water just by looking at them. Plainly if this kind of thing continues, mankind will become too intelligent to fall for the Power Structure’s tricks.

But it will not continue, because many ordinary people such as yourself have already armed themselves with orgone generators capable of neutralizing the evolution-halting power of those chemtrails that fill our skies.

These generators may be had at the website linked above for $95 plus shipping and handling for the natural finish model and only fifteen dollars more for a copper patina finish.

If I were you I’d go for the copper patina option despite its higher price. Why? Here’s why:

While many people are fascinated by the natural look of orgone generators, other people might prefer a more finished, art-like appearance with less need to answers questions like: “What’s it’s for?”

The Weathered Copper Patina finish gives these orgone generators the look of an esoteric art object either dug up from a ancient Minoan archeological site or something Mr. Spock brought aboard The Enterprise. Either way, it looks nice sitting on a shelf, on top of the TV, or on a desk — without raising suspicions about its true function.

Two good points on the Iranian situation from Gary Sick. He has some experience observing Iran as the principal White House aide for Persian Gulf affairs from 1976 to 1981, and working on the staff of the National Security Council under Ford, Carter, and Reagan. He’s also on the board of directors of Human Rights Watch, and is well known to students of history for his writings about the October Surprise. So he’s got a sense of the longitudinal aspect of the current struggle.

Don’t expect that this will be resolved cleanly with a win or loss in short period of time. The Iranian revolution, which is usually regarded as one of the most accelerated overthrows of a well-entrenched power structure in history, started in about January 1978 and the shah departed in January 1979. During that period, there were long pauses and periods of quiescence that could lead one to believe that the revolt had subsided. This is not a sprint; it is a marathon. Endurance is at least as important as speed.

I like that because it confirms what I’ve been thinking, which is that the show of force by Iranian hardliners is a sign of decreasing control leading to desperation. When you’re forced to assert that the election is the cleanest since 1979, while at the same time admitting there may have been 3 million votes screwed with; when you have to send in militia and riot cops to club peaceful demonstrators; when you have to eject representatives of the press, or keep them under house arrest; that’s when you better be packing your bags and arranging your Swiss bank account.

Sick points out that Iranian politics is a tricky and subtle business. “They prefer chess to football,” he says, a point I’ve also been known to make.

So what should we be doing?

For the United States, the watchword should be Do No Harm. The situation in Iran is being exploited for short term domestic political purposes by those who have been looking for an opening to attack the Obama administration. Wouldn’t it feel good to give full throated expression to American opposition to the existing power structure in Iran? Perhaps so — but it could also be a fatal blow to the demonstrators risking their lives on the streets of Tehran, and it could scotch any chance of eventual negotiations with whatever government emerges from this trial by fire.

The crisis in Iran is an Iranian crisis and it can only be resolved by the Iranian people and their leaders. There is no need to conceal our belief in freedom of speech and assembly and our support for the resolution of political disputes without bloodshed. But we should not be stampeded by domestic political concerns into pretending that our intervention in this crisis could be anything but pernicious.

Can President Obama play chess as well as he plays basketball?

While we’re on the subject of disgusting greedheads (see previous posting), let’s take a look at what the banksters are up to as well. You knew the current run-up in gas prices wasn’t plain old Econ. 101 stuff, didn’t you? A simple case of supply and demand?

Here’s why you were right. The excerpts are from McClatchy Newspapers, which have been out in front of the MSM on this story, as on so many others.

June 12: Oil prices shot past $72 a barrel this week, and a growing number of experts point to Wall Street speculators as a key reason why Americans are suddenly paying a lot more for oil and gasoline…

May 20: …This turns oil futures contracts into a way for investors to hedge against inflation at the expense of American consumers, who have to pay more to fill their gas tanks as oil and gasoline prices rise.

Masters and other critics say this speculative flow of money into commodities markets is a self-fulfilling prophecy that’s distorting the usual process by which buyers and sellers set prices and is driving up the prices of oil, gasoline, grains and other essentials…

And for facts and figures, see the PDF from which the following summary comes:

In our new world of trillion dollar Wall Street bailouts, $110 billion does not seem as shocking as it once did, but this number must be put it in perspective. The U.S. Congress and President Bush passed the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 in February of last year. It called for tax rebates of between $300 and $600 per person. By the time this stimulus finally reached the average American, the high cost of energy and food prices had nearly canceled out the entire economic benefit of the bill. At that point, the Stimulus bill simply helped Americans pay the “excessive speculation tax” levied on energy and other commodities…

Once again we have William Jefferson Clinton, Wall Street’s BBBB (Butt Boy Before Bush), to blame for this disaster. Him and his Treasury Secretary, the sainted Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs. Here’s Jim Hightower on this point:

Why is this allowed? Because the Commodity Futures’ Modernization Act of 2000 included a provision that was quietly tucked into the law by then-Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, specifically prohibiting any regulation of such commodity-based derivatives. Among the enthusiastic backers of this legalized thievery were Robert Rubin, the Wall Streeter who was Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary, and his protege, Larry Summers, who is now Barack Obama’s chief economic advisor.

This bipartisan cabal created a speculative mechanism that’s presently sucking money out of your pocket with every gallon of gas you pump. Meanwhile, every dollar that Goldman, Morgan and the rest use to inflate oil prices is a dollar they are not investing in real economic activity that could create middle-class jobs…

Here’s the money shot from an Associated Press story that the New York Times ran in today’s business section instead of on the front page where it belonged.

You have to admire the evil ingenuity and ravening greed of these people. Well, no, actually you don’t.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Congressional investigators said Wednesday that two-thirds of the nation’s health insurance industry used a faulty database that overcharged patients for seeing doctors outside their insurance network, costing them billions of dollars in inflated bills…

More than 100 million Americans have plans that allow them to see doctors who are not part of their insurance network. For more than a decade, insurers submitted data to Ingenix to determine the typical cost for care received in such visits.

But Congressional investigators say companies would deliberately skew data to underestimate the costs of medical services, leaving patients to pay more in out-of-pocket expenses.

“The result of this practice is that American consumers have paid billions of dollars for health care services that their insurance companies should have paid,” according to the report of the Senate Commerce Committee’s investigative staff.

Here is Princess Sparkle Pony, trying and failing to give money to two giant American corporations:

First I went to ATT’s web site to order the service. Now, here’s another bit of PSP trivia: I don’t have a credit card; haven’t since college! I do have a debit card, of course, but I simply don’t use credit. So at the ATT site, they did a “credit check” and found me wanting, and decided that the iPhone wasn’t for me. So I “spoke” to an online rep, and the conversation went something like this:

Me: Hi, I want to get an iPhone, but failed your credit check.
Rep: Sorry, then you are ineligible for the service.
Me: Really? Just like that? But I was going to pay with a debit card.
Rep: Sorry, if you fail the credit check, you’re ineligible.
Me: Seriously? What if I pre-pay for the whole two-year plan?
Rep: We don’t offer that.

Basically: no iPhone for me!

This morning, I decided to actually call ATT on the phone and find out if this was really true. And, of course, it isn’t. The person on the phone said I could, indeed, get iPhone service, but I’d have to go to an ATT store and would probably have to tender a $750 deposit (!!) as a punishment for being sensible with my money and not buying things I can’t afford.

South Carolina’s governor just retired the Wandering Politico’s Apology Cup for all time.

He apologized to his wife. He apologized to his four sons. He apologized to his staff for “creating a fiction in regard to where I was going.” He apologized to his friend Tom Davis and to “all the Tom Davises of the world.” He apologized to people of faith in South Carolina and throughout the nation. He apologized to his spiritual adviser. He apologized to his father-in-law. He apologized to his “dear, dear friend” from Argentina, where he had “spent the last five days of my life crying.”

He did not apologize to me, but he didn’t need to. What he does with his dick is none of my damned business, and that goes for the dicks of McGreevey, Spitzer, Clinton, Edwards, Vitter, Warren G. Harding and so on and so forth throughout the long annals of American politics. It does not go for specimens like Ensign and Craig, who obsess unwholesomely over the uses to which other people put their dicks.

Actually I thought Governor Sanford handled himself with a certain amount of class during his public ordeal, and I applaud him for it. And I particularly applaud his wife for the dignity she displayed in not standing by her man during his self-crucifixion.

From Paul Krugman’s blog:

Really bad news on the health care front. After making the case for a public option, and doing it very well, Obama said this:

“We have not drawn lines in the sand other than that reform has to control costs and that it has to provide relief to people who don’t have health insurance or are underinsured,” Mr. Obama said. “Those are the broad parameters that we’ve discussed.”

There he goes again, gratuitously making a big gift to the other side.

My big fear about Obama has always been not that he doesn’t understand the issues, but that his urge to compromise — his vision of himself as a politician who transcends the old partisan divisions — will lead him to negotiate with himself, and give away far too much. He did that on the stimulus bill, where he offered an inadequate plan in order to win bipartisan support, then got nothing in return — and was forced to reduce the plan further so that Susan Collins could claim her pound of flesh.

Some excellent points have been made in comments about my previous post comparing Iranians and Americans, and I think they deserve a bit of exploration.

First, it’s certainly the case that a huge number of Americans turned out to protest the (most recent) war before it started, and that the TV news largely ignored those protests. To me, this indicates the problem with TV news. In general I think a word is worth a thousand pictures; the former conveys information, the latter feelings and sensations. (How many pictures does it take to tell you how to make beef bourguignon?)

From Iran we get tweets and mobile-phone videos, and I think we probably agree that this democratization of reporting is mainly a good thing. Disintermediation, it was called back in the dot-com boom days. If we had similar public strife here in the US we’d probably get similar tweets and videos.

Which leads to my second point. To my mind a critical lesson is that the struggle won’t be won soon. It won’t be won in this generation, for example. We can certainly hope to make significant strides; we can even dream, and not without reason, of taking bigger steps than those who struggled before us. But it’s not reasonable to expect to finish the fight, because we’re struggling against aspects of the human psyche that are likely to remain with us for some time to come.

That’s not meant as a downer, but as a realization of what’s actually possible. I fear a movement that overestimates its possible impact, because it will dissipate when it fails.

It’s also meant to help us stay grounded in the fact that our problems lie in the human method of thinking. It’s not just a few bad apples, any more than torture is. Humanity in general, and Americans in particular, have some habits of thought that get us in trouble. We need to recognize them in ourselves first, then we can help the community to eliminate them.

So it seems to me that the most recent war against Iraq could not have been stopped, no matter how many Americans took to the streets. Unless we made it impossible to raise an army, the invasion would have happened in the teeth of the strongest protests. But as Chomsky said, never before in history have millions of people protested a war before it started.

Having just chopped my thumb, I had to look up Akroyd playing Julia Child.

As we wait to see what will follow the latest protests in Iran, I’m struck by similarities and contrasts between our countries.

For instance, in Iran candidates for office are vetted by the religious establishment quite explicitly. Many Americans consider this a violation of the doctrine of separation of church and state, and I agree. As I understand it, Islam has a similar doctrine, and the Islamic Republic is in a way an attempt to finesse that issue.

On the other hand, our American doctrine is looser in theory but not much less so in fact. For example, I identify as a Zen Buddhist when asked in polls and so on. How many public offices in the US would be open to me, assuming I met the residency and other requirements? Suppose I converted to atheism — would that help me as much as converting to Christianity helped Obama? (Would Obama be President if he hadn’t converted?)

Here in San Francisco, neither would be much of a hindrance; I wouldn’t tend to get the Christian vote in any case, and it’s not as influential a block as in other spots. Of course my best shot, hypothetically (I’m not actually thinking of doing this), would be local office; not even in California would a Buddhist be elected to statewide office.

More importantly, national offices are pretty much closed to non-Christians, except for a few Jews. There’s one Muslim in Congress, and no doubt a large number of lapsed thises and unbelieving thats. But I argue that our ideology is as strictly enforced as the Iranian one; it’s just that our enforcement mechanisms are more distributed and less obvious. Which I grant is preferable, as far as it goes. I’m just saying the differences here aren’t as big as they seem.

One contrast in particular strikes me, the active engagement in civic affairs. Watch one of the mobile-phone videos submitted to the BBC (which the Beeb notes it cannot verify); or read the accounts of the crowd size and the silent marching. Can you imagine such actions from Americans?

Suppose some color became associated with the idea of universal health care, which we know the vast majority of Americans want now, and have wanted for many years. Maybe the color would be white, or red, or whatever. Suppose further a large march some summer Saturday afternoon, coordinated around the country, a peaceful demonstration with an underlying political threat. I’m betting that Congress would be scared into taking some useful action, and quick.

Thank god we’ve got television and movies and video games to keep that from happening. We haven’t sunk to Iran’s level yet.

In 1963 I won an award for humor from the Washington chapter of the Newspaper Guild, perhaps the most ineffectual union in the history of the American labor movement. It was the only award of my life, making me particularly sympathetic to my loser of a granddaughter, Eliza. From one loser to another, then, I post this paper she wrote last month for her English class. The paper got an A, which of course casts doubt on its whole thesis.

I long for the days when everybody won an award. The days when no matter what you did someone patted you on the back and said, “Good job kiddo, have a nice shiny medal.” Those were simpler days when there were no grades (I went to an independent elementary school where teachers taught to “enrich our minds not to prepare us for a test”) and teachers said things like, “Eliza is an animated, expressive child who brought enthusiasm to our school day. She entered our classroom eagerly each day… She often had a story or point of interest to share with a sparkle in her eyes…” Isn’t that just the nicest thing? What it means, I have no idea, but it is really very nice.

Speaking of that girl, the second grader with the sparkling eyes, I have no idea what happened to her, she can’t possibly be this one here, now desperately trying to get into a good college.

Everyone wants to win, to be the best at something. It doesn’t matter what it is. We all want to have that wonderful feeling that we are better than everyone else. At least that’s what I imagine, seeing as I have never felt that way. Never, in my whole life have I won an award…

Already our education in the world of monster trucks progresses. Ten Bears comments that the truck in the first picture of the series wasn’t a truck at all, but actually a 1956 Chevy Belair with really big wheels.

Mike answers that the truth is more complicated. Since monster trucks lead a hard and short life, they are topped with disposable plexiglass “bodies” that can look like anything you want.

The picture below gives you the idea. In this case the owner made a shell that looks like a pickup body, and then defaced it with the team sponsor’s logo. When this one gets smashed up they’ll just bolt on another, cast from the same mold.

The New York Times reports that nearly three-quarters of Americans favor a government-run Medicare-like health care plan that’s open to everyone. This is a serious and direct threat to the existing power structure, and as such a perfect measure of whether The One is really gifted, or simply fluent. Let us hope for the former, because we need it.

What really surprised me is not that

• People with greater incomes are more upset about taxes
• Folks are concerned that their own personal health care might suffer, but they’re willing to deal with that outcome to make sure everyone has some
• Even half the Republicans responding favor a government-run option
• By 65-26, Americans think covering everyone is more important than controlling costs

No. What surprised me was that the Times straightforwardly asked the single most relevant question.

When anti-single-payer people are pressed to the wall, they’ll often say, “Well, do you want your health care run by the government?” No reasonable person is completely comfortable saying yes. But considering that the alternative is insurance companies running your health care, I was happy to see the Times mention what pollwatchers have long known.

The Times poll asks, Do you think the government would do a better or worse job than private insurance companies in…

• …providing medical coverage?
• …holding down health care costs?

For the first question, it’s Better by 50-34. Two years ago it was 30-44. For the second, it’s gone from 47-37 to 59-26. Another reason to thank George W. Bush.

No semi-intelligent semi-rational being falls for the insurance company propaganda about private enterprise doing things cheaper because they have the profit motive. If you’re assuming I’m that dumb, you can expect business from other locales.

First they cut down the forests in Canada and make a terrible mess on the denuded land. Animals flee, streams turn warm and can’t support fish.

Then they truck the trees to the paper mill where they are turned into newsprint. In the process the air is badly polluted, and so are the rivers into which the waste from the process is dumped.

Then tons of paper rolls are trucked out to newspapers around the country daily.

Then the newspapers are printed and delivered to the readers. When they finish reading them the readers discard the papers, and the taxpayers pay to have them collected and taken to landfills. There is some recycling now, but the newspaper companies never took it upon themselves to collect their used product.

From start to finish making newsprint and distributing newspapers cause major pollution and degradation of the environment.

Wait a minute. Don’t newspapers run editorial after editorial bemoaning the pollution that other manufacturers cause?

Posted by Bill Doolittle at 6:57 PM | Permalink & Email Post | Comments (4) |
Environment | Media

I’m guessing that a lot of you latte-sipping losers are less familiar with monster truck rallies than you ought to be. My son Mike the photographer is anxious to help out. He took this shot last month at the 4-Wheel Jamboree Nationals in Lima, Ohio. More will follow in the days to come, so you will at last be able to talk about monster trucks without making a total fool of yourself.

One of the most fascinating (and underreported) stories of the millenium has been the outbreak of democracy all over Latin America despite the best efforts of George W. Bush.

And a good way for the uninformed (such as I) to keep up with these developments is to visit BoRev.Net, which offers flip but deadly serious “dispatches from the Bolivarian revolution.”

An excerpt from today’s dispatch:

Special Rapporteur Philip Alston just wrapped up a 10-day United Nations investigation into the hundreds (thousands?) of innocent Colombians murdered by the military to meet government kill quotas. The report is out, and it’s devastating. The Uribe administration naturally still claims that most of the dead were a real live guerilla rebels, but duh they’re just lying:

‘The evidence that shows victims wearing newly ironed camouflage garments or wearing field boots four sizes bigger than their feet, or left-handed individuals holding a pistol in their right hand … negate even more the suggestion that they were guerrillas killed in combat.’’

The U.N. found that the murders were “more or less systematic,” not the actions of a few bad apples, and that the government has pretty much refused to punish the culprits, choosing instead to harass human rights workers who talk about it publically…

This doesn’t surprise me, but I hadn’t seen these figures before. They’re in a letter to the New York Times from David A. Balto, of the Center for American Progress.

I was disturbed to see your editorial suggest that the blame for “ever rising premiums” falls primarily on physicians. Let’s give credit where credit is due.

Between 2000 and 2007, the 10 largest publicly traded insurance companies increased their profits 428 percent, from $2.4 billion to $12.9 billion, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

During the same period, the number of insurers fell by nearly 20 percent, largely because of a huge wave of mergers that led to stunning consolidation. And premiums increased by more than 87 percent, rising four times faster than the average American’s wages.

Today, 95 percent of American insurance markets qualify as tight oligopolies. As in so many industries, blind reliance on free-market forces has failed the American public.

Clearly, doctors bear a responsibility to curb costs. But the real culprits are the middlemen who, after years of lax regulation, now have such a tight grip on the market that they can — and do — charge whatever they want.

Wonderful post on unions by Joe Bageant today. The taste below contains a quote — the one about one man, one vote — that was new to me. The unnamed speaker had nothing to worry about. In two short years the Supreme Court would solve his problem by ruling in Buckley v. Valeo that money was the functional equivalent of votes: the more of the former you had, the more of the latter you could buy.

If a few pricks and gangsters have occasionally seized power over the dignity of labor, countless more calculating, bloodless and malevolent pricks — the capitalist elites — have always held most of the cards — Gould could sneer, “I can always hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” And why a speaker at the U.S. Business Conference Board in 1974 could arrogantly declare, “One man, one vote has undermined the power of business in all capitalist countries since World War II.” And why that same year Business Week magazine said, “It will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow — the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more. Nothing in modern economic history compares with the selling job that must now be done to make people accept this new reality.”

We followers of Dan Froomkin’s wonderful blog at the Washington Post are teetering between depression and rebellion at the news that he’s been dumped. (Our esteemed founder has already weighed in, and Glenn Greenwald talks about it here.)

The Post, like any other major media company, will try to sell the dumping of any relatively clear analysis, claiming that such is inherently socialist and Americans don’t wanna hear it (in other words, to paraphrase Colbert, reality has a well-known socialist bias). They’ll say, I’m betting, that it was a business decision, not an editorial one.

But that’s obviously false. Froomkin seems to have been the most linked-to author on the paper’s website, and as the news migrates from paper to the web, you’d think you might want to keep writers who generate lots of links and thus traffic.

Perhaps that’s only true if the writer in question favors torture. Froomkin recently had a dust-up with one of the Post’s in-house neocons, Charles Krauthammer, over this issue. Krauthammer is one of many Republicans these days who are comparing themselves to oppressed folks around the globe, to the point that he says critics of Obama on Fox News are “a lot like [Hugo Chavez’] Caracas where all the media, except one, are state run.”

Yeah, here in America we have freedom of the press, and the newspapers all parrot the same line, which is part of why they’re dying. They used to offer a variety of views, reporting from different angles and with different agendas, but no longer. What we’ve lost is huge. What we’re left with is a privately owned media monopoly that is collectively the best propaganda machine in history, which is at the service of a small and shrinking set of mega-corporations that are trying to control the world, water, air, soil, seeds, the genome, everything.

The Mighty Wurlitzer remains powerful, but alternative voices are starting to be heard more clearly, in large part due to the internet’s democratizing influence. My guess is that Froomkin was originally brought on board as a sort of loss leader to bring in readers from the blogs; but he’s got a bit of a voice now and he’s using it to contradict the Fred Hiatt pro-war pro-torture lines. And that will not be tolerated.

Personally I’ve taken the Post off my browser’s speed dial, and complained to the ombudsman. I’m sure they don’t care what I think; henceforth I return the compliment.

Bad news from Steve Benen at Political Animal:

Update: I've spoken to Dan [Froomkin], who confirmed that he is, in fact, leaving the Post.

“I’m terribly disappointed,” Dan said. “I was told that it had been determined that my White House Watch blog wasn’t “working” anymore. Personally, I thought it was still working very well, and based on reader feedback, a lot of readers thought so, too... I also thought White House Watch was a great fit with The Washington Post brand, and what its readers reasonably expect from the Post online.

“As I’ve written elsewhere, I think that the future success of our business depends on journalists enthusiastically pursuing accountability and calling it like they see it. That’s what I tried to do every day. Now I guess I’ll have to try to do it someplace else.”

Indeed, far-right complaints notwithstanding, Froomkin has spent months scrutinizing the Obama White House, cutting the Democratic president no slack at all. Just over the past couple of days, Froomkin offered critical takes on the president’s proposed regulations of the financial industry, follow-through on gay rights, and foot-dragging on Bush-era torture revelations.

Froomkin was one of the media’s most important critics of the Bush White House, and conservative bashing notwithstanding, was poised to be just as valuable holding the Obama White House accountable for its decisions.

When I worked at the Washington Post myself, in the pre-Watergate days, it was considered a liberal paper. But it wasn’t. It merely, as Karl Marx once said of John Stuart Mill, drew its eminence from the general flatness of the terrain. The only truly liberal dailies I can remember from that period were the Madison Capital Times in Wisconsin, the York Gazette in Pennsylvania, and the New York Post. (Yes, you heard right.) The Washington Post owed its liberal reputation almost solely to its anti-McCarthy cartoonist, Herblock.

And then came Watergate.

Any paper willing to stand up to Nixon and take him down had to be liberal, Q.E.D. Right? Actually wrong. Ben Bradlee hated Nixon because Bradlee was in Kennedy’s inner circle. And Nixon was a parvenu, a sweaty striver. Left vs. right had little to do with it.

It would have taken a close observer to discern an ideological difference between Kennedy and Nixon. On questions of race, war and peace, and economic policy, both were slightly right of center in what had become, after World War II, a very frightened, aggressive, and conservative nation. On the most important issue of the day, the Post supported the Vietnam war so slavishly that President Johnson named its editorial page editor, J. Russell Wiggins, as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

(Wiggins offers further proof of my theory that you can never trust a man who parts his name to one side; I knew I was in trouble when I arrived at our embassy in Laos at the height of the war to discover that the ambassador and my new boss was a gun-toting, draft-dodging old Yalie who called himself G. McMurtrie Godley III. You can’t make this shit up.)

But back to the Washington Post.

There were and are many fine reporters at the paper, and they have done immensely valuable work over the years. But though the leash was sometimes a long one, it was always present. Since Eugene Meyer bought the paper at a bankruptcy auction in 1933, that leash has always been held by conservative publishers from his family.

The surprise isn’t that Froomkin has been fired, but that he lasted as long as he did. And the beauty of the internet is that he will be able — if he so desires — to keep the audience the Post enabled him to assemble.

I hope he so desires.