George W. Bush’s brutalization of our children goes on — and on and on. This is from Alternet:

Iraqi families were routinely fired upon for getting too close to check points, including an incident where an unarmed father driving a car was decapitated by a 50-caliber machine gun in front of his small son, although by then, Mejia notes, “this sort of killing of civilians had long ceased to arouse much interest or even comment.”

Soldiers shot holes into cans of gasoline being sold alongside the road and then tossed incendiary grenades into the pools to set them ablaze. “It’s fun to shoot shit up,” a soldier said. Some open fire on small children throwing rocks. And when improvised explosive devices go off the troops fire wildly into densely populated neighborhoods, leaving behind innocent victims who become, in the callous language of war, “collateral damage.”

Does anyone know the actual source of the observation that the US is the only society to have gone from barbarism to decadence without passing through civilization along the way? Wikiquote says Wilde or Shaw or Clemenceau…

‘All the way through that flight I was on the verge of screaming,’ al-Rawi said. ‘At last we landed, I thought, thank God it’s over. But it wasn’t — it was just a refuelling stop in Cairo. There were hours still to go … My back was so painful, the handcuffs were so tight. All the time they kept me on my back. Once, I managed to wriggle a tiny bit, just shifted my weight to one side. Then I felt someone hit my hand. Even this was forbidden.’

He was thrown into the CIA’s ‘Dark Prison,’ deprived of all light 24 hours a day in temperatures so low that ice formed on his food and water. He was taken to Guantanamo in March 2003 and released after being cleared of any involvement in terrorism by a tribunal.

Turns out he had been a source for MI5, and had freely given information under the strictest assurances of confidance, which were — surprise — violated. Bad move, apparently.

The report confirmed that al-Rawi, 39, was only held after MI5 sent the CIA a telegram, stating he was an ‘Islamic extremist’ who had a timer for an improvised bomb in his luggage. In reality, before al-Rawi left London, police confirmed the device was a battery charger from Argos.

The committee accepted MI5’s claim, given in secret testimony, that it had not wanted the Americans to arrest him, in November 2002, concluding the incident had damaged US-UK relations.

Yeah, that’s how I remember November, 2002. A chill in US-UK relations.

Where’s the outrage? Pointed in the wrong direction, to allow us to acquit ourselves of participatory guilt.

Everywhere you look there’s outrage at the accusations against Michael Vick for running a dog-fighting ring. With good reason; the fighting alone is a disgusting thing, not to mention the gruesome executions. But I don’t really understand why people are surprised, or why it’s such a big deal.

Compared, say, to Chris Benoit’s murder of his wife and child, quite clearly a product of the same chemically-induced rage that Vick and his fellow scumbags sought a release for.

Or to the accusations that Pat Tillman was killed intentionally by comrades, shot three times in the forehead with an M-16 from ten yards away.

Or to the deaths of about a million Iraqis, and the torture of who knows how many others.

In my book, people are more important than dogs. I expect I’ll be accused of speciesism, but there it is. Hell, I may as well go all the way and declare that I believe war is more important than wrestling (especially fake wrestling), and, God help my future book sales, even football.

But it’s easier to direct one’s inner rage against a target like Vick. Especially given the sensitive nature of the steroid issue right now, and the approach by Bondsy Barr to hallows everyone knows he didn’t earn and doesn’t deserve, the official records of which should in my opinion be erased, not asterisked (at least his chemically-induced rage hasn’t killed anyone, as far as I know). Benoit, after all, has the benefit of being dead.

Just as with the war in Vietnam, and for the same reasons, Americans have a lot of inner rage right now. A lot of it comes from inner conflict, very especially among those who found some reason to support the war. It’s not just the right-wing warmongers who feel this; liberal interventionists like George Packer are still struggling to resolve the contradictions in their positions without having to admit they were wrong morally, wrong legally, and wrong realpolitik-wise.

Given all those inner conflicts, plus the constant drumbeat of distraction from the media, it’s not surprising that people look for scapegoats, and focus on things that don’t really matter to the exclusion of things that do.

You no doubt heard the reports, mostly but not entirely snarky, about Cindy Sheehan’s arrest in the office of John Conyers. I admire her commitment, but it seems to me that her view of the problem is the reverse of reality.

I certainly believe that the current situation calls for, indeed requires, that both the President and the Vice President be impeached. No one can honestly question whether they have committed impeachable offenses. The question is what to do about it, and in this regard the leading Democrats in Congress are proving to be as spineless a majority as they were a minority.

But Conyers is not the problem. It seems clear that he favors impeachment, but to overcome opposition from the Speaker, he needs an overwhelming number of colleagues to back him. Which, in my view, makes Nancy Pelosi the problem. Her office would be a better place to get arrested to make a political point.

As Nader says, what we need is not a third party, but a second one. The Democrats, following the Clinton pattern, talk progressive but act DLC. They need the progressive votes (usually, though in 2008 not so much), but they’re mostly corporatist. The wide-spread recognition of that fact might explain some of the high fives that Edwards got for his two best lines in the recent debate:

Do you believe that compromise, triangulation will bring about big change? I don’t. I think the people who are powerful in Washington — big insurance companies, big drug companies, big oil companies — they are not going to negotiate. They are not going to give away their power! The only way that they are going to give away their power is if we take it away from them!

and

We can’t trade our insiders for their insiders.

Which of course is why the media hates him: they’re insiders whose employers are owned by the big corporations that currently exercise the real power. It’ll be interesting to see if any changes come from the video his campaign released, showing clips of important stuff happening in the world while playing the song “Hair”. Will they get it? (Will they be allowed to?)

In the end, I think Ruth Conniff is on the money with her observations at The Progressive. She mentions Russ Feingold’s proposal to censure Bush and Cheney, the classic wimpy-liberal response to the difference between reality and what the wingnuts demand. This is why the right wing is powerful and the left wing gormless: the right fights and the left compromises.

Conniff talked with John Nichols of The Nation about Feingold’s comment at Kos: “The history books will show we were vocal in condemning the President’s abuses of power.” (That won’t keep the next President from doing the same things, though; do we care?)

While Democrats give voice to public discontent with the Bush administration, the leadership is still operating on the theory that as Bush and the Republicans head off the cliff, the best course of action is to get out of the way. Politically, Nichols concedes, they might be right: “They should just stand up and say if we abdicate our constitutional responsibilities and don’t do our job, we’ll reap the benefits. It will allow us to do good things. They might be right. Standing by and letting a crash occur might benefit you. That’s a credible case.”

Immoral, but credible. That’s the real problem the Democratic leadership faces: they know their strategy is immoral, so they can no more afford to state it than Bush can be honest about imperialism and oil.

Witness the recent Democratic meme that impeachment would keep them from getting useful work done.

“The idea that taking up impeachment will keep us from acting on health care, gay rights, etc., is ahistoric,” Nichols says. “The fact of the matter is that during the impeachment of Nixon back in the 70s, the reason Congress was so effective and got so much done was that Nixon was scared and, in a calculated move, started cooperating with Congress to avoid impeachment. So the right thing to do is move immediately — see what you can get out of Bush.”

For that theory to win the day, the pressure on Congress from voters has to continue to grow.

That means us. Have you contacted your Representative?

I’m leaving today for San Francisco, where one of my sons is getting married. Since I’m driving, any blogging I do will be pretty sporadic. I should be back in late August, but Buck Batard and Chuck Dupree and Dick Ahles will still be around for your reading pleasure.

If you’ve got college age kids, you need to warn them about something. Just watch the video below and you’ll know what I’m talking about. And don't forget the words of Kurt Vonnegut, who famously said, “True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.” I won’t spread terror any further by reminding you who’s still running the country right now. Thanks to Max for making this video possible.

The architect Ralph Adams Cram, who built the new West Point and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, wrote this in 1935:

It would seem to be true that by some mysterious law civilization divides itself into periods of five centuries, each with its swift rise, its high culmination, its dying fall, when all is to do over again. Our own five-hundred-year period has but a scant seventy years to run, and in spite of the delusive glamour of supreme scientific discovery, inventive achievement, and industrial supremacy, the signs of the declining curve of essential power are not far to seek.

Death in 1942 mercifully spared Cram the sight of Doctor Dre, Donald Trump, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, the Roberts court, and the three GOP candidates for the presidency who raised their hands when asked if they believed in evolution.

These are picked more or less at random from the endless parade of other clowns, fools, thieves, hypocrites and villains who powerfully indicate that we are indeed, just as Cram foretold, in the end times and heading down.

A former Israeli interrogator, talking about his trade as he makes tea for a Washington Post reporter:

“Sugar?” he offered. Sheriff stretched, relaxed. “I’ve got a clean conscience because I rarely use it.”

From Jenny Anderson’s column, “The Insider,” in today’s New York Times:

For limited [hedge fund] partners, there is cause for concern. Take the fund’s investments. Private equity firms theoretically buy undervalued companies, lever them up, cut waste sharply and then sell, ideally at a higher value. As a public company, they will need to focus on quarterly earnings and those results may influence when they buy or sell — taking in fees when they buy and profits when they sell. (Equity firms insist in their prospectuses that they will not manage investments to meet quarterly earnings).

Our civil religion — unbridled and seldom-questioned capitalism — has led us to believe that cutting jobs is a public service. It is not.

The old company’s profit went, in considerable measure, to provide a living wage to, let’s say, a thousand workers. The new company has now been slimmed down, trimmed. modernized, or streamlined. (Notice the vocabulary, incidentally. We would have a very different view of the process if we used words like gutted, looted, squeezed, or plundered.)

The new company now has five hundred workers. To simplify matters some, but not much, the wages of the other five hundred workers are now in the pockets of a handful of lawyers, moneylenders and stock market gamblers with inside knowledge. (Again, words matter; they prefer to call themselves investment bankers, hedge fund managers, investors, and financiers.)

The true worth of the company may have been — in a more moral society would be held to be — the jobs of the employees, and the value of the goods or services created by the company.

The latter may continue, although very possibly the personnel reductions will result in worse service or shoddy goods. But the jobs lost are gone forever, to the detriment not only of the individuals but the community.

You might as well say that a tick creates value, when all it does is suck your blood for its benefit and leave you with Lyme disease.

Holy Crowley, has it really come to this?

Today Gen. Petraeus and Amb. Crocker were grilled by Senators via video hookup. McClatchy’s article leads with the question posed by Sen. Lugar: are you planning for a change of mission or a redeployment? A clever question in a sense, because it emphasizes the issue of competence. Any military commander in Petraeus’s position had better have a plan for withdrawing, even if he’s been ordered not to admit it.

The Cheney administration has tricked, blamed, and otherwise exploited the military command structure beyond anything I’ve seen or read about in American history. As a result, the military, still harboring bitter memories of Vietnam, has lost significant prestige in the eyes of Americans. The command structure has again been presented with the choice between following orders and doing what’s right, and some officers have chosen poorly.

But the well-known preference of Americans for winning over for losing pales in comparison to the anger provoked by cheating and incompetence. Or at least we hope it will. We’ll know soon enough, if this is the best spin the administration point men can mount:

Asked for examples of progress, [Amb. Crocker] said that Iraq’s Shiite Muslim prime minister, Kurdish president and two vice presidents — one a Shiite and one a Sunni Muslim Arab — now met every Sunday morning. “I’m encouraged they can at least come together and thrash out their differences face to face,” Crocker said.

Which is something, I guess, but at this rate of progress there’ll be few Iraqis left by the time an entire legislature can even be convened, let alone decide on who gets how much of the oil wealth and, more importantly, how quickly rights to the oil can be signed over to American companies.

In response to Sen. Lugar’s question, the ambassador said No, we’re not planning.

The Indiana senator, who’s called for planning ahead for a withdrawal so that it won’t be done poorly, said there’d been reports that the Bush administration had pressed officials to abandon any such planning.

Crocker said he knew of no efforts to create a Plan B.

“I’m fully engaged, as is General (David) Petraeus, in trying to implement the president’s strategy that he announced in January,” he said, referring to an increase of nearly 30,000 U.S. troops, mainly to try to quell sectarian fighting in Baghdad. “The whole focus is implementation of Plan A.”

Which reminded me of a very old line so typical of loyal Bushies.

Some neocons began agitating inside the Bush administration to support some kind of insurrection, led by Chalabi, that would overthrow Saddam. In the summer of 2001, the neocons circulated a plan to support an INC-backed invasion. A senior Pentagon analyst questioned whether Iraqis would rise up to back it. “You’re thinking like the Clinton people,” a Feith aide shot back. “They planned for failure. We plan for success.”

Faith-based planning works just as well as faith-based birth control and faith-based farming.

Since I’ve never been very good at doing my part for the environment, I figure it’s about time to at least do something as a blogger, so I don’t have to feel guilty every time I see a hybrid automobile driving down the street or someone posts something that reminds me of my energy hogging ways. Over at Coding Horror, we are advised that not only can we do more to save the planet while sitting at our computers, but we can actually save money by doing it.

There are even some folks who recommend that you replace the energy hogging power supply on your computer to not only help save the planet, but save money as well. This sounds as sensible as buying any other more energy efficient appliance, perhaps more so. And for those of you looking for a computer program to help you do you part, the folks at Local Cooling,or alternatively, Co2 Saverexist to help you fight global warming at your desktop. They even have computer programs available that track how many trees you’ve saved or how much CO2 you've kept out the atmosphere, by getting your computer to make all the right moves that the programs are designed to facilitate. Right now the programs are only compatible with Windows XP or Vista. You folks using Ubuntu and Apple will have to keep track of the number in your head as I don't know of any similar programs for your computers, although our comments section is always open.

But buying that new power supply doesn’t sound like such a bad idea, although being the eternal skeptic, I’m always wondering why they want me to buy something to save the planet.

This just in minutes ago:

WASHINGTON — A federal judge dismissed former CIA operative Valerie Plame’s lawsuit against members of the Bush administration Thursday, eliminating one of the last courtroom remnants of the leak scandal. …

U.S. District Judge John D. Bates dismissed the case on jurisdictional grounds and said he would not express an opinion on the constitutional arguments. Bates dismissed the case against all defendants: Cheney, White House political adviser Karl Rove, former White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage.

The Associated Press didn’t think this little fact was worth including, but I do.

Nominated by George W. Bush on September 4, 2001, to a seat vacated by Stanley S. Harris; Confirmed by the Senate on December 11, 2001, and received commission on December 14, 2001.

Network coverage has been spotty, so you may not know that the AAU’s national girls basketball championship is going on in Cincinnati even as we speak.

The Minnesota Monarchs, out of Minneapolis/St. Paul, have just made it to the elite eight in the 13-year-old division and are looking good for tomorrow.

Why am I telling you all this? Because one of their forwards is Bethany Doolittle and she is my granddaughter and this is my blog.

Reinhold Niebuhr, writing in 1930:

It has always been the habit of fortunate people to ascribe their luck or their fortune to their own moral qualities rather than to any inscrutability of history, and our fortune-favored nation has developed this habit with the greatest possible consistency …

We make simple moral judgments, remain unconscious of the self-interest which colors them, support them with an enthusiasm which derives from our waning but still influential evangelical piety, and are surprised that our contemporaries will not accept us as the saviors of the world.

If you’re known by your friends and your enemies, Hillary’s making progress. She’s pulled down $40K from the ultimate enemy.

Like Obama, Clinton signed on when Jonathan Prince said, “We believe there’s just no reason for Democrats to give Fox a platform to advance the right-wing agenda while pretending they’re objective.” Me too, she said, while avoiding anything that Rupert might consider an attack.

At this point in the campaign, Hillary’s got $40K from Rupert, Barack’s a bit over $14K, and Edwards is slightly less than $1K.

Compare and contrast.

Although there are occasions that justify armed combat, a challenge to a duel isn’t one of them. Life is short and dangerous enough — why lower the odds of survival, why make existence even more precarious? “My friend, let us speak frankly,” Arthur Schnitzler wrote, apropos of the duel, “one must be somewhat limited to stare death so calmly in the face.”

So it begins.

It’ll be harder to extract our military from Iraq than we’ve admitted to ourselves (and that’s saying something), because with all the mercenaries and their support systems we’ve really got over a quarter-million people on the ground. Of course about a quarter of them are Iraqis, but a lot of those will want to leave.

They’ll have to catch something other than Expat Airlines, though. So will the Indians and Pakistanis who’ve been employed in large numbers by the various contractors, as described for example in Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City.

Pro Group, with offices in Amman and the United Kingdom, is launching Expat Airways in conjunction with the Jordanian Air Force. The Baghdad flights will use Jordan’s Marka Airport.

Ashraf Mraish, managing director for Pro Group, based in Amman, said Jordan’s tight visa restrictions drove the decision to exclude non-Westerners. Refugees have overwhelmed Jordan, which has imposed strict entry requirements for Iraqis.

“It would cost us much more to accommodate non-Westerners,” Mraish said this week. “We hope this flight is a solution to make (contractors’) lives easier.”

You can see why the Jordanian Air Force would consider it a national security issue to get Americans and other Westerners out of Baghdad, can’t you? Well, I can’t. It looks to me like a US operation under Jordanian cover. Probably Blackwater and Halliburton types starting to draw down.

According to the article, US taxpayers are funding payroll for 180,000 contract workers in Iraq. And of course we also have about 150,000 uniformed military folks there. It’s gonna take a while to get that many people out. But with those in the White House seeing clear signs of desertion in Republican ranks, the panic they deny is obviously setting in.

So it looks like they’re starting to decamp. But they don’t want anyone to know that, a perfect symbol of which is that Expat Airlines planes will have no logo.

You might be happy to hear that the US is not included in the European Happy Planet Index, compiled by the New Economics Foundation and Friends of the Earth. They limited themselves to Europe, probably in consideration of our feelings.

The ratings don’t give Europe much to crow about. The Guardian considers that “Europe is now worse at creating well-being than it was 40 years ago.”

I went looking for details, and learned that conceptually the HPI is Life Satisfaction times Life Expectancy divided by Environmental Footprint.

The HPI reflects the average years of happy life produced by a given society, nation or group of nations, per unit of planetary resources consumed. Put another way, it represents the efficiency with which countries convert the earth’s finite resources into well-being experienced by their citizens.

Seems like a thing worth measuring, and a reasonable try at measuring it.

So it’s interesting to find the list that does include the US. (Here’s an interactive map of the world colored by HPI.) Of 178 countries, We’re Number One… Hundred and Fiftieth. The UK is 108th, Canada 111th, well ahead of us because of superior Environmental Footprints. The United Arab Emirates take the Worst-Of trophy in that area, with the US, Kuwait, and Qatar tied for second.

Certainly people will dispute the rankings, the definitions, the methods of calculation, and so on (possibly even including some folks not on an oil company payroll). To me the value of such a calculation is precisely that it generates controversy, which in areas such as environmental issues is often the only way that any conversation is allowed to take place.

And it’s not very hard to figure out why.

Andrew Simms, the foundation’s head of climate change, said countries with a strong market-led economic model fared least well. “What is the point if we burn vast quantities of fossil fuels to make, buy and consume ever more stuff, without noticeably benefiting our well-being?”

A rhetorical question, no doubt. Obviously, the point of capitalism is the concentration of capital.

State capitalism, at least. Chomsky talks about a continuum with completely centralized control at one extreme, and completely decentralized control at the other. (I believe a lot of this comes from Bakunin, but I’m not sure how much.) The first he calls “state” and the second “libertarian”.

Capitalism can be of the state variety, like ours, with massive market intervention. Subsidies of all sorts for the defense contractors, drug companies, and so on nudge most of the benefit of the common wealth to those already at the very top of the ladder.

Then there’s libertarian capitalism, which seeks to distribute capital much more widely. The first I remember hearing about such a batty scheme was watching Bill Moyers interview Louis Kelso, the inventor of the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). He, along with Mortimer Adler, published The Capitalist Manifesto in 1975. It’s now out of print; Powell’s has no copies, eBay has one for $65, Amazon has three from $40 to $125, aLibris has two starting at $51. Oh, and the San Francisco Public Library does not have a copy, though I did get one through interlibrary loan. Apparently either Moyers interviewed a complete nobody who once had a beer with Mortimer Adler, or Kelso said something you’re not supposed to know about.

As I recall the interview, Kelso advocated a legal and enforced upper limit on the amount of capital that anyone could accumulate. He believed that it’s good to have a lot of well-off people, and as Greider says, capitalism is the greatest wealth-generation engine humanity has encountered. The question is, who ends up with the wealth? Our system concentrates it; Kelso wanted to distribute it.

As much as I believe that capitalism is based on some of the worst aspects of human character, I can imagine that we could make it respond to reality. It’s our construct, after all; it’s not part of nature, or it would have existed throughout history. It’ll be tricky, kind of like turning around a bunch of Bush administrations. But there are signs that we’re learning something about how to do that in the political realm; perhaps that expanded consciousness might transfer to the economic.

For example, in The Soul of Capitalism Bill Greider talks about the extent to which corporations are able externalize many of their costs while internalizing the profits. Whether through loopholes or lax enforcement or political pressure preventing relevant regulations, they can often avoid paying for environmental damage they cause. But you sure don’t hear them talking about sharing their profits with the people in the area that was damaged. Quite the opposite: those people are the ones who pay the cost, in money and health and future.

Capitalism might work if it was forced to include all the actual costs in its calculations. It does not work in the US today. In fact it’s destroying our common fantasy of the American Dream on physical, economic, and spiritual planes.

If we can force Congress to do something about Bush and Cheney, we might actually be able to force Congress to do something about the environment as well. As long as the US is in form a democracy, we have the theoretical power to pull it off.

Thank God for Peter in Germany, who casts an anthropologist’s eye on the United States of Repression for we who dwell inside the bubble. He sends this from The Independent:

One of Germany's best-selling children's authors is embroiled in an extraordinary transatlantic row about nudity after a U.S. publisher refused to accept one of her books because it contained naive sketches of an art gallery with works depicting naked bodies …

The 59-year-old author said her American publisher had refused to accept her latest book for U.S. distribution because it contained elements deemed potentially offensive, including drawings of people naked or smoking. Berner said her U.S. publisher, Boyds Mills Press, had objected in particular to one of her illustrations which showed adults and children in an art gallery where the portrait of a naked woman was on show together with a seven millimetre high sculpture of a naked man exhibiting a barely discernible penis …

Berner said no other country had raised similar objections. In Germany — a country where nude public bathing is normal — the author's spat with her U.S. publisher met with blank incomprehension. “Micropenis excites U.S. publishing house” wrote Der Spiegel magazine in its online edition.

I’d tell you what I think about all this, but why bother? Human Too Human has said it for me:

But to show scenes of war and destruction, to go to church and see paintings of naked men tortured and flogged and crucified, to even hear gory and morbid details of torments inflicted on “saints”, to be exposed for hours to the vulgarity and superficiality of TV shows, quizzes, ads and so forth is OK in the USA …

This is our text for today:

Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign moved quickly yesterday to blunt what it sees as a sensationalist Swift Boat-style attack by a firefighters’ union.

Seeking to avoid the mistake of delay that so hurt the presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) in 2004, the former New York City mayor’s campaign went on the offensive before the attack was even formally released, dismissing the union as politically motivated …

Howard Safir, former New York City Fire Department commissioner, said firefighters across the country “are very supportive of Rudy and what he did.”

He added, “Firefighter unions are not firefighters. This is bogus stuff. This is not Swift Boat.”

In a reality-based world this would parse as follows: The union attack is bogus stuff; the union attack is not Swift Boat; Swift Boat was bogus. The union attack is true. Q.E.D.

But since Sapir is a Giuliani loyalist who was appointed commissioner by Mad Prince Rudolph, this can’t be what he means. We must therefore dig for subtext, and here it is: when Republicans lie about Democrats, it’s God’s truth; when Democrats tell the truth about Republicans, it’s a sensationalist lie. Speaking of which, the sensationalist picture below shows America’s draft-dodging hero in drag.

Unless she has been living on Mars since Bush let Libby walk, Judge Amy J. St. Eve knowingly perjured herself in her own courtroom yesterday:

CHICAGO, July 11 — A onetime grocer from suburban Chicago who was convicted of lying in a civil lawsuit about his ties to the militant Palestinian organization Hamas was sentenced on Wednesday in Federal District Court to 21 months in prison …

Judge Amy J. St. Eve said the sentence was meant as a deterrent to others who might seek to undermine the “truth-telling function” of the judicial system.

“It is important to promote respect for the law,” Judge St. Eve said. “You cannot lie in a courtroom.”

California has well over 35 million people. And who’s more connected than we are?

I just went to Senator Diane Feinstein’s web site and entered a comment from a constitutent. The site says “The total number of e-mails sent to Senator Feinstein through this web page”, before the one I sent, was 114,864.

Where the hell is everybody? Californians: Senator Feinstein is on the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Senator Patrick “Go Fuck Yourself” Leahy, currently attempting to extract information from Sara Taylor, Harriet Meirs, and the White House over the US attorney firings. Got anything to say to her?

Here’s what I said.

I believe the Senate should hold Ms. Sara Taylor, Ms. Harriet Meirs, and the President in contempt of Congress absent full testimony in the matter of the firing of the US attorneys.

My understanding is that Ms. Taylor and Ms. Meirs no longer work for the White House, and are therefore not under its direction. If the President is claiming that his executive privilege allows him to prevent former aides from testifying about possible illegal actions, I don’t believe such a claim would hold up even in today’s Supreme Court.

If the Congress does not act to restrain this President, he will cause even more harm to the country.

But the greatest harm, an irreparable one, would occur if the Congress fails to enact legal punishment for this administration’s illegal actions.

This President and, most especially, this Vice President have acted as if they are above the law. Congress must show them that they are not, most vigorously, or future Presidents will be completely unaccountable, and the Republic will fade away, like Rome’s did.

It’s not enough to pass resolutions that call President Bush a bad guy. He’s a war criminal; he should be in the dock in The Hague along with his Vice President. In addition, he’s a domestic criminal: he’s violated our civil rights with abandon, and he’s made us less secure, breaking all kinds of laws in the process, and ignoring many more through signing statements.

There are so many reasons to impeach both the President and the Vice President that it appears to me to be the Constitutional responsibility of this Congress to proceed along that path.

Sincerely,
Chuck Dupree

Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig gently jabs the jolly Lucas giant.

A dark force, however, has influenced Lucasfilm’s adoption of Eyespot’s technology. A careful reading of Lucasfilm’s terms of use show that in exchange for the right to remix Lucasfilm’s creativity, the remixer has to give up all rights to what he produces. In particular, the remixer grants to Lucasfilm the “exclusive right” to the remix — including any commercial rights — for free. To any content the remixer uploads to the site, he grants to Lucasfilm a perpetual non-exclusive right, again including commercial rights and again for free.

Upload a remix and George Lucas, and only Lucas, is free to include it on his Web site or in his next movie, with no compensation to the creator. You are not even permitted to post it on YouTube. Upload a particularly good image as part of your remix, and Lucas is free to use it commercially with no compensation to the creator. The remixer is allowed to work, but the product of his work is not his. Put in terms appropriately (for Hollywood) over the top: The remixer becomes the sharecropper of the digital age.

Lessig, who is near the top of the list of folks I’d like to interview, is known for deep assessments and thought-provoking viewpoints on the convergence of reality and cyberspace. He adds to the long list of disses continued through the ages:

Lawyers never face an opening weekend. Like law professors, their advice lives largely protected from the market. They justify what they do in terms of “right and wrong,” while everyone else has to justify their work in terms of profit. They move slowly, and deliberately. If you listen carefully, sometimes you can even hear them breathe.

More reasons to think we’ll elect our first black President in 2008.

He’s among the leaders in the spin and chutzpah competition:

Presidential contender Barack Obama on Tuesday dismissed his Democratic rivals’ change of heart on the Iraq war as too little too late, while Hillary Rodham Clinton urged a quick end to U.S. involvement in the conflict.

There’s no question Obama opposed the war from the beginning. As far as I can tell — please correct me if you can — that was the last time he was right about Iraq. Perhaps it’s because he’s taking advice from Colin Powell:

According to Powell, the US cannot “blow a whistle one morning” and have all American forces just leave. The former secretary of state has twice met Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate, to advise him on foreign policy. Despite his antiwar stance, Obama supports a phased withdrawal that could leave a “significantly reduced force” in Iraq for “an extended period”.

Obama has so far succeeded having it both ways. He takes credit for being the most anti-war candidate, and simultaneously woos the DLC and the Republicans with the promise of an extended deployment, obliquely expressing his agreement with the imperial viewpoint.

If you love ads on your web pages, and your computer browses your favorite sites at blazing speed, you probably won’t care about this post.

As I’ve been configuring my new Linuxes, I’ve come across two tricks that have improved my browsing experience quite a lot.

First, there’s Privoxy, a free privacy-oriented proxy server. It examines the requests your browser sends out, and discards those headed for known ad servers. As a result, most of the ads on the front page of the New York Times, for example, are replaced by gray-and-white checkerboard patterns. You can probably configure the replacement image, but I haven’t looked for that yet.

Privoxy works on my Ubuntu and Kubuntu desktop, my XP laptop, and my mother’s XP desktop (she installed it in five minutes on the phone with me). I believe it also works on OS X but I don’t know that for sure.

Installation was trivial: download, unpack/install, set to run at startup, and start one now. Then tell the browser there’s a new proxy, and refresh the screen a couple of times. Presto! Ads gone. Didn’t have to reboot, even on XP!

Second, there’s OpenDNS. This is a free service that acts as a Domain Name Server of first resort. DNSs take a URL, more or less readable to humans, and convert it to an IP address (127.0.0.1), then dispatch the appropriate request to that address.

OpenDNS takes what you type into your address bar and interprets it with intelligence. It can correct spelling errors (craigslist.og when you mean .org), understand nicknames for sites and for actions, filter phishing sites, provide adult-content controls, and so on. But the most useful thing to me is that it speeds up browsing because they have enormous caches of recently requested web pages. If you request something that hasn’t expired, they ship you the cached one immediately, without having to contact the original site. This doesn’t matter in some cases, where your personal computer has cached the stuff; but in many cases you’ll notice significant improvements.

OpenDNS is even easier to use: there’s no software to download or install. All you have to is tell your system where the OpenDNS servers are, and you’re up and running. To use some of the features, you have to register, but it’s free and all you need is a working email address.

Obviously I have no monetary interest in these products, since they’re free. I don’t know anyone working for the companies, as far as I can tell. But I’ve had good experiences with them so far.

David A. Love eviscerates Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas below. His full column is in The Black Commentator.

Yet his supporters once assured us that in time, Thomas would evolve and make us proud. After all, they posited, he is African American and has experienced racism, he feels our pain. Well, his tenure on the Supreme Court has been over a decade and a half of disappointment, daunting mediocrity and misplaced priorities …

Thomas says that he selects only “the cream of the crop” when hiring law clerks: “I look for the math and the sciences, real classes, none of that Afro-American study stuff. If they’d taken that stuff as an undergraduate, I don’t want them.” Perhaps it should not be a surprise that all four of his law clerks are white males. A justice on the nation’s highest court, he fails to take advantage of a golden opportunity to do some good, in the time-honored tradition of leaving a place better than you found it.

Sadly, he continues to desecrate the memory of Thurgood Marshall. The late Judge A. Leon Higginbotham was right when he said “I have often pondered how it is that Justice Thomas, an African American, could be so insensitive to the plight of the powerless. Why is he no different, or probably worse, than many of the most conservative Supreme Court justices of this century? I can only think of one Supreme Court justice during this century who was worse than Justice Clarence Thomas: James McReynolds, a white supremacist who referred to blacks as ‘niggers.’”

Just came across this in the archives, and saw no good reason not to run it again—

One more reason for Bush to loath those brown-skinned Moslem masses and their upstart religion:

“It is in the Koran, not the New Testament, that we read the maxim — ‘A ruler who appoints any man to an office, when there is in his dominions another man better qualified for it, sins against God and against the State.’”

From John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.

There’s a lot of buzz about the editorial in the New York Times today calling for what loyal Bushies would term precipitate withdrawal.

Indeed, there are some striking statements from this organ of pre-war lies.

At first, we believed that after destroying Iraq’s government, army, police and economic structures, the United States was obliged to try to accomplish some of the goals Mr. Bush claimed to be pursuing, chiefly building a stable, unified Iraq. When it became clear that the president had neither the vision nor the means to do that, we argued against setting a withdrawal date while there was still some chance to mitigate the chaos that would most likely follow.

While Mr. Bush scorns deadlines, he kept promising breakthroughs — after elections, after a constitution, after sending in thousands more troops. But those milestones came and went without any progress toward a stable, democratic Iraq or a path for withdrawal. It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bush’s plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost.

The editorial lists some of the harms the US has suffered as a result of what it calls “this unnecessary invasion and the incompetent management of this war”, and accuses the President and Vice President of using demagoguery and fear as weapons against American public opinion. It ends with a call to action.

This country faces a choice. We can go on allowing Mr. Bush to drag out this war without end or purpose. Or we can insist that American troops are withdrawn as quickly and safely as we can manage — with as much effort as possible to stop the chaos from spreading.

Executive summary: we thought it would be a cakewalk securing Iraq’s oil, but it wasn’t. So our advice is to cut bait; just don’t let it hurt Israel.

But the Times is ready to give up on the occupation, not the oil.

The bottom line: the Pentagon needs enough force to stage effective raids and airstrikes against terrorist forces in Iraq, but not enough to resume large-scale combat.

This seems to me patently silly, totally PR, and the colors aren’t even particularly happenin’.

How can one tell whether a given number of ground troops and a fleet of bombers, fighters, and support craft constitute a force whose size is sufficient for effective raiding but not for large-scale combat? Is there a UN agency that does such surveys, or is it an NGO? Sounds like rhetorical cover is being sought.

Plus, there’s an argument to be made that the force we now have in Iraq is not a large-scale combat force; we didn’t expect to see large-scale combat except for a brief period during the invasion. If that argument held up, the Times would presumably be happy simply to remove US troops to bases in Kuwait and the budding Kurdistan. Bringing them home, and getting the hell out of Iraq, does not seem to be the primary goal.

Most importantly, why does our military need to “stage … raids and airstrikes against terrorist forces in Iraq” if we’re no longer bogged down there militarily? Are we claiming that we have vital interests in Iraq?

Which is really the point. Whether true believer (Bush, Wolfowitz) or shameless profiteer (Cheney, Perle) or lying propagandist (most of the MSM, including the Times), it’s clear that for establishment types in the US, the war in Iraq is subtitled “Oil! And Israel”. The question is not whether the interests are vital, but how best to secure them.

To me, on the other hand, it seems that there are two points to securing the oil in Iraq. One is imperial: to have, as Chomsky says, our hand on the spigot that dispenses an ever more precious resource. The other is corporate: the profits being made in the oil business are nothing short of criminal, and should be treated as such.

We could use the billions we’d collect in fines to fund research into alternative energy and transportation.

Our relationship with Israel has a strong imperial tint as well; as Kissinger said, Israel is our lieutenant in the Middle East. And, given our actions in that area over the past few decades, damn near our only friend. Sure, our military might reinforces some monarchies that wouldn’t last a year without our support; but that’s a different sort of friendship.

Clearly we need a new plan for our forces in Iraq. But we can only make an intelligent one if we state our premises and assumptions. The problem is that my premises and those of the New York Times editorial board don’t match.

Seems to me there are three kinds of problems in Iraq.

• Resistance to foreign occupation
• Sectarian conflict
• Jockeying for government power and oil money

The last two overlap, of course, but it doesn’t matter, because we can’t solve either of them. All we’ve tried to do is buy the Iraqi government some time to get its act together and begin running the country.

Problem is, we know this isn’t going to happen. The Iraqi government did not win an election like those we (used to?) have in the US. Let’s not forget that candidates were often afraid to place their names on the ballot lest they be abducted, tortured, and killed. Campaigning was so dangerous that there was little of it, leaving people to vote for parties rather than individuals or clear positions on issues. As a result, the final tallies closely followed confessional lines.

Not to mention that the Saddam years provided a suboptimal training ground for up-and-coming Iraqi leaders.

In any case the Iraqi government has little real power to wield. It doesn’t control, in the classic sense, any territory at all in its own country. The US has the Green Zone, but even that receives mortar fire (which I don’t think is supposed to happen in an area you control).

The government cannot dispense those oil billions we were told to expect because of sabotage, part of the resistance to the occupation as well as the Sunni-Shia conflict.

It can’t even provide water and electricity — we’ve made sure of that by bombing the crap out of the infrastructure. And by creating a situation that killed or displaced many of the professionals needed to start anew.

Thus it seems that Cheney has succeeded in his plan: the establishment believes that to leave now would be to abandon our friends and give up on all that oil.

In the end, don’t you admire a man who persists in his plan in the teeth of resistance?

“He takes a range of medications that he and his doctors decline to detail. The extent of his atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries, which, if it extends beyond the heart to the brain, can cause hard-to-recognize changes in cognition) is unknown. Bypass surgery itself has long been associated with subtle changes in neurological function.

”At age 65, Cheney is easily 30 or more pounds overweight, seems to have slacked off on what was once a more rigorous diet, and appears to suffer from recurrent bouts of gout. At a roundtable lunch with reporters a couple of years ago, two who were present say, he cut his buffalo steak in bite-size pieces the moment it arrived, then proceeded to salt each side of each piece.“

If four heart attacks (that we know of) aren’t gonna teach him to avoid salt, it’s unlikely that he’s capable of learning anything.

Is it Cheney’s hope to tie us down in Iraq for many years to come, giving no-bid contracts to Halliburton, consuming lives in a perpetual war, and allowing enterprising young men to have other priorities than serving in it?

News reports have for some time shown the Iraqi resistance growing in size and in public acceptance. It’s increasingly clear that the US presence is aggravating the resistance problem to the point that it’s dominating the stage.

Without the US military, Iraq may well descend into a nightmare of bloodshed. Power struggles often go that way, especially among populations whose previous regimes have left them ill-prepared for self-government. But we can’t stop that.

Some of those who supported the war are now cloaking their imperial aims in humanitarian rhetoric. Others use similar rhetoric to cloak their interest in what they think is best for Israel.

We won’t make effective plans until we state our goals honestly. And we can’t do that because we don’t agree on whether the US should be an empire with a lieutenant in the Middle East.

Colin Powell is a war criminal just like the others.

The former American secretary of state Colin Powell has revealed that he spent 2½ hours vainly trying to persuade President George W Bush not to invade Iraq and believes today’s conflict cannot be resolved by US forces.

“I tried to avoid this war,” Powell said at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado. “I took him through the consequences of going into an Arab country and becoming the occupiers.”

Powell has become increasingly outspoken about the level of violence in Iraq, which he believes is in a state of civil war. “The civil war will ultimately be resolved by a test of arms,” he said. “It’s not going to be pretty to watch, but I don’t know any way to avoid it. It is happening now.”

As Colbert says, it’s never too late to speak out after it’s too late.

The way I understand it, participation in the execution of war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity is the issue in a court of law. What you tried to explain, even what you believed to be true, is of little consequence legally.

But at least he’s saying the right thing now. As far as I know, he never got around to doing that with the whole My Lai thing.

Thanks to Avedon Carol at The Sideshow, I now know that the great topical comedian Mort Sahl, the model for Howard Beal in Network, is alive and still on top of the news.

Here’s what he said at a tribute dinner at UCLA:

I know George Bush. I’ve met him and spoke to him a number of times. He told me he had stopped drinking. When I asked him how he did it he said he was born again. I said, you were born again? Why would you come back as George Bush?”

How bad do your prospects have to look before you can get excited about Ted Nugent’s friend Fred Thompson?

Chants of “Fred” and “Run, Fred, Run,” greeted the actor and former GOP senator from Tennessee from many among the 350 people at the Young Republicans National Convention. The crowd interrupted his nine-minute speech with wild applause and mobbed him when he left.

[…]

Kevin Fickert, a 22-year-old college student in Los Angeles who originally is from Massachusetts, said he liked Romney’s leadership as governor but thinks Thompson has more appeal. “Thompson has this star power about him that I really like,” Fickert said.

Hey, I’ve seen that guy on TV! Oh yeah, he’s, like, an actor, or President. Or something.

Why is it that only crappy actors make it in politics? Or perhaps I’m drawing an unwarranted line from Reagan through Schwarzenegger to Thompson. What kind of childhood generates this immense need for the overwhelming father figure? I thought it was about competition.

Thompson’s pro-abortion lobbying effort, directed at Bush I, appears to have caused barely a ripple among his supporters.

“Whatever choice do we have? Mitt Romney has been on both sides of the issue,” said Paul Boyd, 26, of Memphis, Tenn. “Rudy Giuliani is 100 percent pro-choice. John McCain, at least for the first four years of the Bush term, was against whatever the president was for. Everybody has their flaws.”

Good point (but who says, “Whatever choice…?”). Aim low, keep your expectations within reason, or failing that at least the realm of possibility. And you can see what he means when you read that

[Romney] said he would like to use the country’s leading marketing minds to help sell the idea of American values in the Middle East.

“People will give up half a day’s salary to get a Coca-Cola in some parts of the world. We market Coke well. We market McDonald’s well. We market our rap music, our movies, our jeans,” Romney said. “We market everything America sells brilliantly, but when it comes to marketing ourselves and what we stand for, we don’t do a very good job of it.”

Damn, marketing, of course! Why didn’t I think of that? That’s what we haven’t been doing enough of! If people will give up half a day’s salary for a bottle of sugar water, we can surely get away with torturing them and stealing their oil. We just have to market it appropriately, with a certain amount of local sensitivity and some happenin’ colors.

So you can see why Republicans are turning to the man Nixon called “dumb as hell“. (“But he’s friendly,” Nixon allowed.)

Thompson had his supporters. His mentor, for example, Howard Baker, defended him in no uncertain terms: “He’s tough. He’s six feet five inches, a big mean fella”. What he thought that would buy Thompson as re: his career remains uncertain at this point. A starring role, perhaps.

What does appear certain from the established record is that Thompson was keeping the Nixon White House informed of certain key events.

Publicly, Baker and Thompson presented themselves as dedicated to uncovering the truth. But Baker had secret meetings and conversations with Nixon and his top aides, while Thompson worked cooperatively with the White House and accepted coaching from Nixon’s lawyer, J. Fred Buzhardt, the tapes and transcripts show.

Thompson made his place in history on Monday, July 16, 1973, by asking former White House aide Alexander Butterfield, “…are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the president?” Butterfield said, yes, as a matter of fact I am, setting in motion the final act of the Nixon drama, as the tapes proved to be his downfall. Thus, no doubt, Cheney’s passion for secrecy.

But though this was news to the public, it was not to the committee. Thompson was allowed to ask the critical question because he was the lead counsel for the Republicans, whose leader was Baker, and the information had been obtained by a Republican interrogator (which probably didn’t mean the same thing in those days that it would now).

This was a, perhaps the, turning point in the Watergate investigation. Republicans had rallied around their wartime President, a simple, cloth-coated patriot with a dog, who would never stoop to burglarizing an opponent’s office. In fact Baker’s famous “What did the President know and when did he know it?” was, according to historian Stanley Kutler, originally an attempt to show that the evidence hinged on the word of a single person, John Dean, a disgruntled employee if there ever was one, against that of the President of the United States, Leader of the Free World and Political Ass-Kicker Extraordinaire. (I mean, dude, he was friends with J. Edgar; you don’t fuck with those people.)

Unfortunately for Baker et. al., it turned not to be the case. Butterfield revealed the existence of the tapes, and it reached the point where only a Nobel Prize-winning spinner could deal with today’s headlines alone, leaving aside last week’s. It became necessary to look like you supported basic justice, even for Nixon’s moles inside the Watergate committee.

Thompson called Buzhardt over the weekend [before the Monday question] to tip off the White House that the committee knew about the tapes.

“Legalisms aside, it was inconceivable to me that the White House could withhold the tapes once their existence was made known. I believed it would be in everyone’s interest if the White House realized, before making any public statements, the probable position of both the majority and the minority of the Watergate committee,” Thompson wrote in his book.

Scott Armstrong, a Democratic investigator for the committee who was part of the Butterfield questioning, said he was outraged by Thompson’s tip-off.

“When the prosecutor discovers the smoking gun, he’s going to be shocked to find that the deputy prosecutor called the defendant and said, ‘You’d better get rid of that gun,’” Armstrong said in an interview.

Law and Order, that’s what it’s all about. Or is it image, I can’t remember…

It has just come to my attention that “when a male mantis is decapitated, cutting off the brain from the ventral nerve cord, the body begins incessant stepping movements which carry it in a circle.

“In addition, the abdomen and genital appendages begin incessant copulatory movements and a headless male can often mate sucessfully.”

This suggests all sorts of avenues for speculation, none of which I will explore. But don’t let that stop you. Contrast and compare.

I have seen many weird things in my day. I watched Richard Nixon give his Checkers speech live and then again, 40 years later, in the Nixon Library. I have stood in the Reverend Bob Schuller’s magnificent Crystal Cathedral, in silent awe at the stupidity of my species. I have watched Jimmy Carter and Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia pretending nonchalance on the speaker’s platform while the rest of us gagged on tear gas from an anti-Shah demonstration on the Ellipse. I covered American Nazi Party protesters at Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. I even watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre at a drive-in theater.

And now, courtesy of Waiting for Dorothy, I have watched the video below and you can, too. Hang in there till the very end.

Josh has been following the spread of the meme connecting universal health care with terrorism. Seems to have started on Fox Noise, then moved to MSNBC, and now to the New York Sun.

Are these folks really that stupid, or is this propaganda from a desperate position?

The fact that the Al Qaeda plot to detonate car bombs in London and Glasgow was carried out by doctors working for the National Health Service has shocked the British public far more than the fact that they were Muslims.

The notion that the NHS might have been infiltrated by jihadists from the Middle East is as disturbing as the emergence two years ago of young British Muslim suicide bombers.

In fact, it is more disturbing, not just because doctors are meant to save lives rather than commit mass murder, but because the violation of this inner sanctum of the British way of life threatens the whole idea of integration — which is meant to be the answer to Islamism. The line between integration and infiltration is a thin one.

The NHS is the nearest thing to a religion that the British now have. For half a century the British have convinced themselves that the NHS is the envy of the world. It is — for the third world. And it is the third world’s doctors and nurses who keep alive this socialist cult of security from cradle to grave.

For many years, probably because of Watergate and the anti-McCarthy cartoons of Herblock, the Washington Post has been considered a liberal paper by those who don’t read it.

But even when I worked there, back when the world was young, its editorial page was for the most part reliably Tory. The editor of it was J. Russell Wiggins, whose shilling for the Vietnam War was rewarded by LBJ with an ambassadorship to the United Nations. Later, when the editorial page started to look a little pink to the union-busting publisher, Kay Graham, she turned it over to her conservative pal, Meg Greenfield.

These days the page is run by Fred Hiatt, about whom I know nothing. But by his works, presumably, ye shall know him. Here’s a prediction from one of his editorials that has held up particularly well since its publication in January of 2006:

Humility is called for when predicting how a Supreme Court nominee will vote on key issues, or even what those issues will be, given how people and issues evolve. But it’s fair to guess that Judge Alito will favor a judiciary that exercises restraint and does not substitute its judgment for that of the political branches in areas of their competence. That’s not all bad. The Supreme Court sports a great range of ideological diversity but less disagreement about the scope of proper judicial power. The institutional self-discipline and modesty that both Judge Alito and Chief Justice Roberts profess could do the court good if taken seriously and applied apolitically.

If you grew up in South Carolina in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s or 1970s, it is unlikely that you made it through puberty without learning how to learn how to shag to South Carolina Beach Music. Had my family not had to move to a new town, I’d have started my shag lessons at the tender age of twelve. Too bad the new town we moved to didn't have a shag teacher who taught children.

No Avedon, I’m not talking about the kind of shagging folks on the island where you live are famous for, but the kind of that every enlightened child in South Carolina had to learn before puberty. Learning to shag to South Carolina Beach Music was a rite of passage. And the dance and the music were both made famous at a place that what was once better than Coney Island, every beach on the California Coast and anything and everything Florida ever had to offer combined — The Grand Strand of the Carolina Coast. That was before the big corporations came in and trashed the place. So why am I mentioning Shagging lessons?

One of the last of the great shag men is dead. Rest in Peace, Bill Pinckney of The Drifters. The world is never going to be the same without you.

Posted November 10, 2005:

The sputtering fuse under what remains of Bush’s administration isn’t the warmongering Scooter Libby, who will surely keep his mouth shut in return for the inevitable pardon. It’s an old Bush family tradition, you’ll recall, with George Herbert Walker Bush pardoning all the Irangate criminals who could have testified against him.

Robert L. Borosage and Katrina vanden Heuvel write in The Nation:

As governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney led the effort to implement a universal state program that required companies and individuals to get healthcare. But he says very little about his plan now. “I don’t like calling it universal coverage. That smacks of Hillarycare,” Romney says. He adds, “The Democrats’ path is always government-mandated, government-run, government insurance...[which is] almost by definition going to be inefficient, ineffective and expensive.”

Definition depends on the definer, who in this instance is full of shit. When you say something is “going to be” something, you’re in Future Land, which means that it is, almost by definition, speculation. And in this case faith-based speculation at that, the faith being that of the Capitalist Church.

Unlike the future, however, the present and the past are almost by definition fact-based and the fact, shown by numerous studies and by the general experience of mankind, is that Medicare is is far more efficient, effective and cheaper than private medical insurance.

The further fact is, as Romney would know if he were not sheltered from reality by a huge fortune, that profit-mandated, profit-run, profit-making private insurance is a disaster for the consumer. It could hardly be otherwise. Out of whose hide do you suppose that profit comes?

To take an example close at hand, some years ago I was bitten by a raccoon which had gotten into the house and was later was found to be rabid. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Connecticut refused to pay the $2400 bill for the series of shots that saved my life, on grounds that I should have gone to my primary care physician for the shots rather than to the more expensive emergency room.

It did no good to explain that my primary care physician was the one who sent me to the emergeny room, because he, like every other doctor in the area, did not keep rabies vaccine on hand. It is very expensive and its shelf life is likely to expire before it is needed, which is almost never.

Let’s say my doctor had the vaccine, though. How much cheaper would my course of treatment have been? I asked him, and I asked the chief of the emergency room. The savings to my HMO would have been $16.

Interesting piece by columnist and radio talk show host Colin McEnroe on how the Hartford Courant tanked for Connecticut’s insurance industry when it came time to review Michael Moore’s Sicko.

He also put a headline I wish I’d thought of on the photo he posted of Bush wearing Crocs with socks (the latter tastefully decorated with the presidential seal awarded to him by the Supreme Court) and a to-die-for little cap with a black Scotty embroidered upon it.

Am I starting to sound like Maureen Dowd here? I am, but I can live with that.

Back to the headline: It’s “I'm the Commuter! Of Scooter!” As to my own headline on this posting, it probably sounds like nonsense to you. Which explains why you’re not on the Supreme Court.

From the McClatchy Newspapers story on how convicted liar Irve Lewis Libby, Jr., AKA Germ Boy and Scooter, was turned loose to lie again by the Liar-in-Chief.

Bush had vowed at the start of the investigation in 2003 to take a hard line against anyone involved in the leak. He ordered his staff to cooperate with investigators and threatened to fire the leaker.

“If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of,” he said then.

True to his word for once, Bush has indeed taken care of his consigliere’s consigliere.

Even a stopped watch is right twice a day, and even the Freepers can sometimes spot a crook when they see one.

Something very significant happened during our country’s savings-and-loan crisis, the greatest financial disaster since the Great Depression. It happened quietly, secretly, without any fanfare and attention. It happened before our very eyes, yet we knew it not.

What we all missed was the massive transfer of wealth from the American taxpayers to a select group of extremely rich, powerful people. What these people had in common -- unknown to the American public -- were their symbiotic relationships to the Mafia and the CIA, and to the two most prominent, powerful politicians from Texas, President George Bush and Senator Lloyd Bentsen.

This small cabal of businessmen realized that the S&Ls were going the way of the dinosaurs. They recognized that S&Ls couldn’t survive under rapid inflation and high interest rates. So they decided to exploit the situation for their own purposes, with help from, and rewards for, the Mafia, the CIA and their favorite politicians. They probably figured that the insulation and protection these powerful institutions and individuals conferred upon them, in addition to all the endemic protections with the financial, judicial, political and journalistic systems, made them invulnerable. They were probably right.

[…]

This information enables one to view the 1988 elections, in which not one cross word was ever spoken about the savings-and-loan debacle, in a whole new perspective. It was not merely a fortuitous coincidence that both Bush, the Republican nominee for President, and Bentsen, the Democratic nominee for Vice President, were part of, and beholden to, the same group of Houston businessmen. Even if the Democrats lost that presidential election, as they did, Bentsen could still win re-election to his Senate seat under the so-called "LBJ rule." The Houston boys, as usual, had their bets covered.

I’ve read Pete Brewton’s book (The Mafia, CIA and George Bush) from which this is quoted, and (despite the URL) the contents appear to be pretty solidly reported. Brewton wrote for the Houston Chronicle, a surprisingly aware newspaper considering its locale, and chronicled some bad craziness, which after all is all they’ve got to do in the heat and humidity of Houston. Alternatives include hanging out on the freeways, bowling, and driving to what’s left of Nawlins.

Brewton shows connections between Bush I and the Vice Presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket at the time, Lloyd Bentsen, and says that if Dukakis and Bentsen had won he would have named the book The Mafia, CIA and Lloyd Bentsen, but otherwise would have had to change very little.

It’s all about strategic placement of the bombs in front of your flag. Put your marshals and generals where they can attack but also fall back. Make sure you’ve got a couple of “low-level officials” to throw under the bus; that should at least slow it down and buy you some time.

And make sure those low-level officials don’t actually have to serve any hard time.

Possibly the most interesting comment comes from Patrick Fitzgerald, who said he would continue to “seek to preserve (Libby’s) convictions through the appeals process.”

So the Scooter scoots. Bound to happen. I originally thought Shrub would wait until after the election, but he really doesn’t seem to care about his party any more. He’s got his.

The thing is, commuting Libby’s sentence is a smart defensive move. With all the scandals that are breaking, and who knows how many more about to break, you don’t want an example like Libby having to spend any time in jail. Folks might be willing to lie and take the fall as long as they get off with a $250,000 fine after having raised millions for the defense fund. (Crappy defense, too, by the way — Scooter deserves a rebate on that…)

But isn’t it kind of an admission of complicity in guilt?

And won’t there be a bump in the pro-impeach crowd? Personally, I immediately wrote to my Representative (“Madame Speaker, we must impeach…”)

Putin isn’t the only one to oppose Bush’s idiot plan to protect Europe from nonexistent Iranian missiles with an unworkable antimissile system in Poland and the Czech Republic.

This pointless and childish attempt to restart the Cold War is just as unpopular with the people it’s supposed to protect, the McClatchy Newspapers report:

There are only about 600 people in this poor but bucolic village in the Brdy district west of Prague, but the view along the cobble-stoned streets is nearly unanimous: they are against the U.S. plan …

In a recent referendum, 98 per cent voiced opposition to the U.S. plan. In nearby Sedlec, 96.5 percent were against it. In Vranovice, it was 96 percent. And, just up the road, in Rozmital, 94.5 percent oppose the plan. Throughout the Czech Republic, public opinion is 60 per cent against the plan …

Magnus Ranstorp, research director for the Swedish Defense College, and one of the world's foremost experts on terrorism, put it this way: “It's a defense system that doesn't yet work intended to stop a threat that does not yet exist…”

Experts said the Bush administration negotiated the radar deal directly with Poland and the Czech Republic, leaving NATO and European nations out of the loop. By doing so, thereby weakening NATO's stature in Europe …

The unilateral U.S. drive for an unproven system has in fact divided Europe, according to Otfried Nassauer, an expert on defense policy at the German research center Berlin Institute for Trans-Atlantic Security.

“In the end, Europeans have to decide whether a theoretical defense system is worth a very real split in Europe,” he said. “It's classic Bush. He had a plan and he's going ahead with it, no matter the costs or arguments against it.”

A young woman in Kennebunkport has the same problem facing so many Repubican members of Congress:

Carrying signs that read “Impeach the Son of a Bush,” and “Stop the War,” the marchers passed by a couple of dozen war supporters who held a modest counterprotest.

“We’re here to show there’s another side of the story,” said Byron Grant, 62, a salesman, at the counterdemonstration.

There was some confusion in the demonstrators’ ranks. A young woman sitting peaceably with the war supporters and holding one of their machine-made “Support the Troops” signs and pictures of two soldiers she called “my boys,” said, “I just want them home.” Realizing that she was in the wrong spot, she eventually moved on.

Looking for something else, I just came across the transcript of one of Bush’s performances as he traveled around the land in February of 2005 trying to destroy Social Security.

It’s almost too easy to pick on Bush’s rhetorical and intellectual inadequacies, so let’s do it. These specimens come from an appearance in Omaha:

Look, I'm worried about a society in which there's too many lawsuits. I believe all these lawsuits make it hard for people to form capital.

(On the surface, this seems utterly inane. Form capital? And yet something must have been stirring feebly in the presidential brain. All I can think of is that such things as the judgments against the tobacco industry, for instance, may have prevented major stockholders from getting even richer.)

I think there's a group — the life expectancy of certain folks in our country is less than others. And that makes the system unfair. In other words, if you're dying earlier than expected, the money you put in the system simply goes to pay somebody else.

(This time the message is clearer. Not only does the Decider fail to grasp the basic principle of the Sermon on the Mount, he also fails to grasp the basic principle of the insurance industry.)

MS. MORNIN: That's good, because I work three jobs and I feel like I contribute.

THE PRESIDENT: You work three jobs?

MS. MORNIN: Three jobs, yes.

THE PRESIDENT: Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that. (Applause.) Get any sleep? (Laughter.)

(No argument from me on this one. Bush has got it exactly right. It is uniquely American. It’s how a certain few among us — not Ms. Mornin of course — “form capital.”)

Administrations come and, though it sometimes takes forever, they go. Individuals last a bit longer; but arguments outlive us all.

Consider, for example, the argument between the Parliamentarians and the Royalists that caused the English Civil War in 1642, leading to the execution of King Charles I and the exile of his son, later Charles II. Apparently the historical knowledge required to make useful comparisons was insufficiently widely distributed. (Unfortunately Decline and Fall would not be published for 135 years.) What were they thinking, not killing the kid? Mercy and regicide don’t mix. Not that the alternative always succeeds, mind you; but you gotta start somewhere.

In American Theocracy, Kevin Phillips talks about the connections between the English Civil War and the American one. New England, after all, was favored with lots of Puritans, who were generally sympathetic to Cromwell’s Roundheads. Many New Englanders shipped back to England to fight against Charles I.

Big Men in the Southern states, on the other hand, expected the privileges their patrons back in England had of owning and ordering, and basically living in a Cavalier fashion (how else?). The Province of Carolina, for example, was named after the headless king. It was granted to eight supporters by Charles II when he regained the throne. (One of whom, Lord Shaftesbury, employed a secretary named John Locke.) Most of the Southerners who returned to England to fight in the Civil War were Royalists. They tended to believe in centralization of power, since they were in the center. Unfortunately we’re not able to do a controlled experiment in this regard, but had their quarters been swapped for those of their slaves, they might have thought differently.

The conflict, in other words, was inherent in the soul of the United States from long before it became an independent political entity. Monarchy or Parliamentarianism? You’re either with us or against us.

Which adds a bit of back story to the current conflicts between Congress and the White House over whether, despite Tony Snow’s ruling, Congress has, and will execute, Constitutional oversight responsibilities with respect to the executive branch.

Kanye West might be right, though it seems to me that Shrub cares more about money than skin color; he and Snoop seem to be cool with each other, for example. But I can name one black person George Bush does care about: John Conyers, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and the only member who was involved in the Congressional fight to get documents from the Nixon White House. Then there’s Henry Waxman, neither the most beautiful Representative nor the most riveting speaker, but something of a progressive Javert. John Dean says Waxman “may be the nation’s most diligent and vigilant member of Congress”. That, beloveds, is truly what the Founding Fathers intended, Federalist Society be damned.

In the Senate, the White House faces Patrick “Go Fuck Yourself” Leahy, who just might harbor a bit of resentment against the Cheney administration’s imperial style. And Leahy, like Waxman, was elected to Congress for the first time in November, 1974, three months after Nixon resigned.

“This is a further shift by the Bush administration into Nixonian stonewalling and more evidence of their disdain for our system of checks and balances,” said [Leahy]. “Increasingly, the president and vice president feel they are above the law — in America no one is above law.”

The question now is what to do about the obvious facts — namely, that the President and the Vice President, among others, have committed serious crimes, in my view including war crimes and crimes against humanity, and violated their Constitutional responsibilities.

There’s an X-Files episode about Mulder and Scully going to Texas on an investigation, and filing reports afterward. Their reports are quite different, and the episode shows flashbacks from both points of view. It’s one of their silliest; the scene with Mulder explaining that it’s surprisingly difficult to shoot out the tires on an RV making circles in a parking lot is great. It’s filmed in black-and-white, and includes a sheriff who Mulder recalls as a country bumpkin with buck teeth and Scully recalls as a southern gentleman of whom Mulder is jealous.

Turns out the town is infested with the undead. Our heros realize this when, as a result of ordering pizza, they wake up with their shoelaces tied and the pizza uneaten. Aha, says Mulder, vampires.

When they finally get the scoop, they realize the sheriff is also a vampire. The vampires, it seems, have learned to live in relative peace with the surrounding community by keeping their heads down and only feeding in ways that the locals can dismiss as religious visions or alcohol-induced fantasies. The sheriff, realizing he’s got a sympathetic audience in the FBI agents, confesses, and apologizes for the pizza-delivery boy: “He never got the concept of low-profile.”

Which, I assert, is a metaphor for government. Like vampiring, government resembles typography and refereeing; when it’s done well, it’s unnoticeable. In a basketball game, where calls make much more difference than in baseball, football, soccer, or tennis, the best referees are quiet: they call all the blatant stuff and let the dinky stuff go, and they do so in a relatively even manner. This is what people want when they petition for referees to “let the players decide the game”.

Problems arise when one side adopts a consistent strategy of not simply pushing the envelope of the rules but openly flaunting its refusal to obey them. How then can a fair referee “let the players decide the game”? Inadvertent rule violations are one thing; cheating is another, and the nature of things in such cases is that the “activist” referees control the outcome. And we saw how well that worked in 2000.

The question now is, God help us, what the Supreme Court will do if the dispute over subpoenas arrives there. I doubt there’s any pro-Monarchist position that couldn’t attract Scalia and Thomas, and probably Alito. But I think, for now, that the rule of law might hope to get five votes. We’re very likely to get Kennedy, who’s often called The Swing Vote; and we might even get Roberts on the issue of separation of powers, an area in which the Court has historically guarded its prerogatives, and where the Chief Justice’s own power and prestige are affected.

Thorsten Veblen describes another kind of vampire in his Theory of the Leisure Class. The Wikipedia entry notes, among other things, that Veblen’s critique is more radical than that of Marx, who grants the superiority of capitalism over feudalism. Veblen doesn’t; he considers capitalism to be the modern manifestation of primitive tribal behavior, in which status is the highest value.

In Veblen’s view, the development of human society grew from the prehistoric search for necessities, specifically food. At first, everyone brought back what they found, and everyone ate. Then some people realized that they could intimidate others, or attack them and steal their take, and avoid the hard work of gathering.

Over time, this “leisure class” did less and less real work. They preferred hunting to gathering. Hunting generates food when it’s successful, but it burns a lot of calories with uncertain results. They might occasionally raid neighbor tribes and bring back booty that was useful to everyone, thus provoking Paleolithic blowback. Which in turn creates the requirement for a constant vigil to protect the home land.

The leisure class concentrated on two things:

• Warfare, manufacture of the associated weapons and propaganda, and rules to restrict the knowledge of weapons
• The development of various forms of status to differentiate the two classes

There are several natural results of this social structure, such as endemic warfare and lies, and the endless struggle for alpha-dog status. (“Think I’ll buy me a football team.”)

Veblen argues that status quickly dissociated itself from utility, to the point that one can now determine the status of an activity largely by judging its usefulness: the more useful it is, the lower its status. Think farming versus bond trading. Even activities that might seem to have useful side effects, such as the physical fitness required to play football, can be masquerades, according to Veblen, who considers that the “relation of football to physical culture is much the same as that of the bull-fight to agriculture”.

Thus he derives the concept of conspicuous consumption, consuming more than you need: if you can waste, you must have a lot, so waste indicates high status. Once you’re consuming as much as you can, you want people to know it, otherwise you don’t get the status points.

Next there’s conspicuous leisure. If you can sit on the porch and wave as the neighbors leave for work, you’re higher status than they are. Then comes vicarious consumption — your dependents are also wasteful — and vicarious leisure — your servants sit on the porch and wave.

Veblen proceeds to apply this viewpoint to a variety of society’s oddities, often with comic effect. You can tell, he says, that society affords God very high status by looking at the number of people employed for his vicarious leisure. He has a stretch of about two pages on why dogs are higher status than cats that is hilarious. In his view, hunting is an expression of the right of the leisure class to do whatever useless thing strikes its fancy. The fox hunt, for example, is certainly not done for the sake of calories, and that inefficiency is a hallmark of status. The more useless, the higher the status.

He must have been pretty popular at cocktail parties back in 1899 with that kind of line.

So when I catch myself having Nixon flashbacks, I remind myself: yes, this is really a new version of the same battle. Yes, this is a battle that’s apparently endemic to American life. Yes, it even goes back three and half centuries to the English Civil War. And, okay, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that it’s what humans have always done. We’ve also always killed each other. Doesn’t mean we can’t stop.

We’re not seeing replays from the Nixon years randomly. This struggle’s been going on for centuries. Should the United States have an all-powerful executive, kinda like a pope or, here’s an idea, a king? Or should we elect, say, a legislature or a parliament to make the rules?

It comes down — surprise! — to the rich and powerful few against the meek and voiceless many. And the rich are way richer now, compared to the rest of us, than they were only a decade or two ago. Maybe, after all, we should just return to a feudal society and admit the rich will always control us. Feudal serfs, after all, were assured food, clothing, and health care, such as it was, by the lord’s need for laborers at the next harvest. We peasants had some value. (Especially after the Black Death, when the number of laborers dropped in Europe dropped by about a third in a year and a half. Good times!)

Alternatively, we could shoulder our burdens as citizens and try to emulate the founders, or rather to realize their highest statements of ideal. We are many, and we have recently found new ways to organize and to make ourselves heard.

There is much to do. War still rages in Iraq, there is still great poverty in the richest nation in history, and many of our citizens are without health care. Past generations of Americans have surmounted obstacles more difficult than these. It is our turn.

It’s possible that we’re on the verge of a new flowering of democracy in America — of all places! — arising from the abuses of the Cheney administration.

But if so, the first step is to confront the abuses and the lawbreaking head-on. I don’t mean that we’re ready to confront our own national nature as couch-potato bullies; that’ll have to be put off. At a minimum, though, we must accept that our government can be hijacked by people whose actions, whatever their statements or even intentions, are destructive to the point of criminality.

And that this affects us all.

The President and the Vice President command, and to some extent control, the entire federal bureaucracy, including what amounts to a private army in the CIA, and a huge and nearly unaccountable intelligence community with an unknown budget. I haven’t read everything written by the founders, but I have yet to encounter anything I could interpret as countenancing a President’s private army or an unaccountable spy network. This, it seems to me, is exactly what they were rebelling against. And exactly how things happened in Rome.

In this continuing argument, I’m reminded of the judgement of Lazarus Long:

Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.

I’m basically a libertarian in that I don’t want government to tell me what to do. But I also think we can do things collectively that we can’t do alone: schools, roads, hospitals, moon shots, cures for cancer. What do we call the entity that executes our wishes in this collective fashion? I think the word is government, but I’m not stuck on that.

I’m also a socialist in that I think our collective actions should have the goal of increasing the common wealth. And it seems to me that a big part of our common wealth is our heritage of participatory government.

If we fail to confront the blatant law-breaking by the President and the Vice President in some institutional way, we will take a big step down Rome’s path. Probably we can’t impeach both Bush and Cheney before the 2008 election. But we should try.

And there’s no statute of limitations on war crimes.