Don Heiny sends this:
Well, I say that the Democratic Party changed. The Democratic Party today was not the party it was in 2000. It’s not the Bill Clinton-Al Gore party, which was strong internationalists, strong on defense, pro-trade, pro-reform in our domestic government. It’s been effectively taken over by a small group on the left of the party that is protectionist, isolationist and basically will — and very, very hyperpartisan. So it pains me. I’m a Democrat who came to the party in the era of President John F. Kennedy. It’s a strange turn of the road when I find among the candidates running this year that the one, in my opinion, closest to the Kennedy legacy, the John F. Kennedy legacy, is John S. McCain.
The speaker is the despicable Joe Lieberman, on ABC this morning. Here is some earlier moralizing from Holy Joe, Likud’s man in Connecticut and soon to be, if his wettest dreams come true, McCain’s man on the GOP ticket this fall:
WASHINGTON — Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman reluctantly acknowledged Thursday that he does not believe waterboarding is torture, but believes the interrogation technique should be available only under the most extreme circumstances…The difference, he said, is that waterboarding is mostly psychological and there is no permanent physical damage. "It is not like putting burning coals on people's bodies. The person is in no real danger. The impact is psychological," Lieberman said.
Connecticut resident Jerry Doolittle reluctantly acknowledges that he would rather have just about anybody as his senator but Torture Boy Lieberman. In fact I once put my vote where my mouth is.
It was in 2000, when a Republican no-hoper named Philip Giordano was running against Lieberman for the senate seat that Holy Joe was clinging to for dear life while simultaneously dragging down the national Democratic ticket as the vice presidential candidate.
I only knew two things about Giordano. One was that he was mayor of Waterbury, which is significant in Connecticut politics. It signifies that you haven’t been indicted yet, but hold your horses. You’ll get there soon enough.
The second thing I knew was that Giordano wasn’t Joe Lieberman, which left me with no option but to cast the first vote of my life for a Republican.
Meanwhile the FBI had already been quietly investigating Giordano for corruption, a process which is triggered more or less automatically when a new Waterbury mayor takes office.
During “Operation LandPhil,” as the Bureau called it, the wiretappers snapped to attention one day when they overheard Giordano making arrangements with a local prostitute to bring two girls, aged nine and ten, to his office for oral sex. Now the former Marine is doing 37 years in federal prison.
And still I don’t regret my vote. I’d rather be represented in the Senate by a pedophile than by a whiny, smarmy, sanctimonious warmonger with the blood of innumerable nine- and ten-year-old girls on his hands.
BAGHDAD — Iranian officials helped broker a cease-fire agreement Sunday between Iraq’s government and radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, according to Iraqi lawmakers.The deal could help defuse a wave of violence that had threatened recent security progress in Iraq. It also may signal the growing regional influence of Iran, a country the Bush administration accuses of providing support to terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere.
Al-Sadr ordered his forces off the streets of Iraq on Sunday. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki hailed al-Sadr’s action as “a step in the right direction.” It was unclear whether the deal would completely end six days of clashes between U.S.-backed Iraqi forces and Shiite militias, including al-Sadr’s…
I’m one of those kids who was a baseball fan almost from earliest memory. Growing up in the hills of eastern Kentucky, I was entranced by the Cincinnati Reds, which serious fans know became the first professional team in 1869. When I was about twelve I first encountered the suspicion about not mentioning the no-hitter because it would jinx the pitcher, in this case my favorite Red Jim Maloney.
In the event our faith was rewarded and Jim pitched the no-hitter. In a fan letter I told him how happy I was for him. He replied with a postcard, the front an autographed photo, the back a “thanks for your letter” kind of deal, and I was hooked.
So when I see that the traditional honor of playing the first game of the season, till now accorded to the Reds (in the NL), has been handed over to another team, I’m already meditating on the Pure White Light of Stupidity, and the obvious inappropriateness of all things new. Then I see who actually gets to play the first game: the Senators! Or Nationals, or whatever they’re called. Naturally.
And the rightful players of the first game don’t start till this afternoon, in a game featuring Diamondbacks Cy Young award-winning pitcher Brandon Webb, who grew up in the same town that spit me out, against Aaron Harang, my favorite NL pitcher over the past three years, a guy who by all rights should have a Cy Young of his own by now.
Apropos of nothing, I was in O’Hare airport twice in the last week and found that it’s legal to carry beer up to the gate if it’s in one plastic cup per person. You have to dump it before you get on the plane, but up to then you’re cool with your Heileman’s or Sam Adams. Quite civilized, I thought.
— The Headless Nail is a senior government bureaucrat who has served under four presidents. He is what rightwingers call a headless nail: a career civil servant who, once embedded in the bureaucracy, is almost impossible to remove.The Headless Nail’s principal focus will be on the Bushies’ feverish but little-noticed attempts to lock hard-right policies permanently onto every branch of the government by quietly manipulating personnel and regulatory policies while they still can. If you know of examples, use the link in the right-hand column to email the editor and we’ll pass them along to the Nail —
While public attention is diverted to the elections, BushCo, in its waning days, is working energetically to cement its legacy and perpetuate its ideology, no matter who wins the elections.
We’ve seen reporting on how industries are pushing OMB (the Office of Management and Budget, which sets regulatory policy) for new business-favorable regulations for air quality, water quality, mine safety, and protection of health workers. Perhaps the Headless Nail will report on this subject in a future dispatch.
But today’s topic in the post-election prolonging of Bush ideology is the attempt to reinforce and extend the primacy of the “global war on terror“ (GWOT in Bush-speak) as the federal government’s mission.
To that end, the Department of Homeland Security recently issued Federal Continuity Directive 1. This 87-page document, arriving more than seven years after 9/11, is the distillation of the best strategic thinking and guidance of the Administration’s senior leadership on carrying out what Secretary Chertoff calls “the most critical functions necessary to lead and sustain the Nation during a catastrophic emergency.”
Let’s see how far DHS has progressed since the days of Tom Ridge and duct tape.
Right off the bat the gripping title — Federal Continuity Directive 1 — tells us that this is a document of critical importance for the safety of our country. The impressive cover page with the stylized fightin’ eagle carries the same message:
Now we’ll look inside FCD1 to sample its wisdom. It’s hard to select, because almost any page is rich with unintentional self-parody, but let’s start with some basics…
First, the directive answers a question many Americans have been asking for years: What is the purpose of the Department of Homeland Security? Gathering intelligence about threats? Preparing for emergencies? Protecting citizens? All wrong answers. The correct answer is on Page 7:
Maintaining and revising as necessary the various agency PMEFs and MEFs in order to meet requirements for continuity, including ECG, COG, and COOP.
Okay, got that?
For those of us charged with preparing federal agencies for emergencies, FCD1 provides some deep and insightful thinking on what to do in its “Program Management” guidance. Afraid that its wisdom might prove too knotty and perplexing for the average bureaucrat, DHS provides a helpful graphic summary of our responsibilities:
And for those who failed rebuses as children, the text informs us that Leadership, Staff, Facilities, and Communications are the “four pillars” of our program.
OK, then, now that we have learned how to manage the program, what is the program? Again, a handy graphic summarizes:
See how simple and colorful protecting our country is! Stack the three circles on top of the yellow triangle, just like in Montessori school. What are NEFs, PMEFs and MEFs? That’s the heart of the document, but you’ll have to find out yourself from the complete FCD1.
As I hope this brief selection has shown, FCD1 is not about protecting citizens or preparing for emergencies. It’s sad and scary to realize that it’s not a parody, but the best thinking and main work product of the Bush appointees charged with keeping the country safe.
What is the real purpose of this compendium of vacuous bloviation, consultant babble, and bureaucratic neo-acronyms?
First, to extend and strengthen the reign of the Bush Terror Presidency within the federal government. FCD1 has a companion volume (with the unsurprising title of FCD2) of mandatory terror-related busywork for bureaucrats.
This ensures that we will spend months filling out forms, preparing reports, conducting training, and running exercises to document our preparedness for a terrorist attack. The message to the federal bureaucracy is the same as the BushCo message to the public: pretending to fight terror is what this country is about.
If you work for the government, your mission is not health care, or environmental protection, or job creation, or safety. Your job is to pencilwhip terrorists with your program plan and your four pillars.
The second objective is the same as for almost any Bush initiative: Siphon off federal money to favored contractors. The Bush White House will enforce compliance with these directives, and former Homeland Security officials are lining up to develop the plans and manage agencies’ security programs. If that means your agency will have less money for its real mission, don’t worry because your mission is not important.
If the Bush plan works, and the primacy of terror management can be embedded deep within the government, we bureaucrats will continue to fight the phony Global War on Terror long after the Bushies have vacated 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
So watch out jihadis, and fear my newly sharpened pencil.
The sad thing about the attacks on Senator Obama for things said by his wife and by his pastor is that attention was paid to them by anyone except Jon Stewart. It was as if the Senator were being pilloried for consorting with persons who claimed that grass is green and — the horror, the horror! — that water runs downhill.
Reverend Wright and Michelle Obama may, for all I know, harbor private beliefs as evil as those which lurk in the minds of Richard Cheney, Osama bin Laden or, back in the day, Vlad the Impaler.
If so, however, the fact has not been reported. What has been reported proves only that both the Obama pastor and the Obama wife are guilty of truth-telling in the first degree. For example, anyone who believes that American foreign policy bore no causal relation to the 9/11 attacks is simply a fool.
And as to Michelle Obama’s deplorably recent feelings of pride in her country, I will refer you, as Judy in Canada has referred me, to this efficient evisceration of the whole issue by Rick Salutin of The Globe and Mail. I’ll add only this from Edmund Burke: ‘For us to love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”
The problem of patriotism really comes down to one question: Are patriots permitted to be critical of their nation, or must they be proud and unquestioning at all times? Once that’s answered, the puzzles dissolve.Take Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle, who said: “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback..” That’s Position 1. Candidate John McCain’s wife, Cindy, took Position 2: “I have and always will be proud of my country.”
It’s odd that no reporters put Cindy McCain on the spot, named dubious things the U.S. has done, like its genocidal assault on aboriginals, and asked: Are you proud of that? Michelle Obama is the one they keep saying has dug her and her husband a big anti-American hole, one she still hasn’t got past.
But under Position 1 — criticism allowed — her words imply she is a true patriot, and one with a generous spirit. She didn’t wait for solutions to what presumably blocked her pride in the past: like failure to deal with the ongoing problems of race in the U.S. She was ready to be proud on the fairly flimsy basis of reactions to her husband’s campaign. She’s not just a patriot, she’s an optimistic one.
Under Position 1, the patriot test is: Does she continue to want to be proud of her nation, while demanding it live up to standards. By that test, she is a patriot with no hole to climb out of, and so probably is her pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who has taken a lot more stick than she has.What did he say that anyone could object to on patriotic grounds — that the chickens are coming home to roost in events like 9/11? That’s just foreign policy analysis, stated metaphorically. You can disagree, but it isn’t unpatriotic. Or: “The government ... wants us to sing God Bless America. No, no, no, God damn America ... for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human.” That is utterly in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
According to the Hebrew prophets, God consigned his beloved chosen people to exile for allowing social injustice, allying with evil nations — i.e., shabby foreign policy — and religious infidelity. (The black church in the U.S. has always had a preferential option for the Old Testament parts of the Bible.)
Another way to put Position 1 is: You cannot say, Blessed is the nation, unless you can also say, Cursed is the nation — they go together under love of nation. As political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote: “There can be no patriotism without permanent opposition and criticism.”
She said that in 1963, under fire from other Jews for her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. She was a lifelong Zionist but critical of the direction Zionism had taken. In fact, Jews often split into the two positions over loyalty to Israel. It’s odd how that, too, has now been woven into U.S. politics. Candidates for president are required to show unquestioning allegiance to Israel as much, or more, as to the U.S. The same is becoming true in Canada.
Of course, we also have unique Canadian versions of unthinking patriotism. When the “loyal” opposition criticized the handover of detainees by our forces in Afghanistan despite possible torture, Stephen Harper and his instruments replied: Why do they criticize what our troops do? Why do they care more about the Taliban than our brave Canadian soldiers? Got that — it’s unpatriotic to ask if our country did anything to be ashamed of?
Hannah Arendt also wrote about Judah Magnes, a Zionist pioneer and founder of the Hebrew University. “Being a Jew and a Zionist, he was simply ashamed of what Jews and Zionists were doing.” The sense of shame is what can save the honour of the group and the nation. It is what Position 1 patriots provide. If there are no patriots capable of shame for what is done in the nation’s name, so there is only praise and pride everywhere, then patriotism easily slides into stupidity and worse.
I few days ago I posted on a scummy GOP dirty trickster who tipped off the FBI as far back as December that Eliot Spitzer was supposed to have visited a prostitute in Miami. Since then more information has become available on the tipster, an unpleasant specimen named Roger J. Stone, Jr.
Roger J. Stone, Jr. is the one in the pants suit, below. He’s also Donald Trump’s flack and was a key player during Bush’s 2000 theft of the presidency in Florida. Let this be a lesson to Roger J. Stone, Sr. When you pass along your name, you never know how the little fellow is going to turn out. He might grow up to be president, but even then…
Mr. Stone, who has referred to politics as “performance art,” is a longtime Republican consultant known for hardball politics and a cloak-and-dagger sensibility. He started out as a teenager in the campaign of Richard M. Nixon, and has a tattoo of the former president’s head on his back.
...if we don’t change our ways, someone will be singing the American version of this song one hundred years from now. John McCain’s name will be an integral part of the song unless we can learn to get along. Oh well, I’m singing to the choir. The great unchurched masses who want you and me to be left behind probably will never change their ways.
Mark Danner is an exceptionally useful citizen who teaches journalism at Bard College and the University of California at Berkeley. What follows are excerpts from a long piece that I hope you’ll be tempted to read in full. Professor Danner has given an explanation as intelligent and convincing as any I’ve seen of why we were dragged into Bush’s Folly in the first place. As to a plan of escape, he has none. No “peace with honor” is by now possible, any more than it was in Kennedy’s, Johnson’s and Nixon’s Folly.
Again, a remarkable statement, as many commentators were quick to point out; for declaring war on “terrorism” — a technique of war, not an identifiable group or target — was simply unprecedented, and, indeed, bewildering in its implications. As one counterinsurgency specialist remarked to me, “Declaring war on terrorism is like declaring war on air power.…”That broader story comes down to a matter of two strategies and two generals: General Osama bin Laden and General George W. Bush. General bin Laden, from the start, has been waging a campaign of indirection and provocation: that is, bin Laden’s ultimate targets are the so-called apostate regimes of the Muslim world — foremost among them, the Mubarak regime in Egypt and the House of Saud on the Arabian peninsula — which he hopes to overthrow and supplant with a New Caliphate.
For bin Laden, these are the “near enemies,” which rely for their existence on the vital support of the “far enemy,” the United States. By attacking this far enemy, beginning in the mid-1990s, bin Laden hoped both to lead vast numbers of new Muslim recruits to join Al Qaeda and to weaken U.S. support for the Mubarak and Saud regimes. He hoped to succeed, through indirection, in “cutting the strings of the puppets,” eventually leading to the collapse of those regimes…
The latter perception — that terrorism as it struck the United States arose from political factors and that it could only be confronted and defeated with a political response — strikes me as incontestable. The problem the administration faced, or rather didn’t want to face, was that the calcified order that lay at the root of the problem was the very order that, for nearly six decades, had been shaped, shepherded, and sustained by the United States.We see an explicit acknowledgment of this in the “Bletchley II” report drafted after 9/11 at Defense Department urging by a number of intellectuals close to the administration: “The general analysis,” one of its authors told the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, “was that Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where most of the hijackers came from, were the key, but the problems there are intractable. Iran is more important ... But Iran was similarly difficult to envision dealing with. But Saddam Hussein was different, weaker, more vulnerable ...”
The United States has made possible the rise to power in Iraq of a Shiite government which is allied with its major geopolitical antagonist in the region, the Islamic Republic of Iran. And the United States has been fighting with great persistence and distinctly mixed results a Sunni insurgency which is allied with the Saudis, the Jordanians, and its other longtime friends among the traditional Sunni autocracies of the Gulf…
At this moment, the Iraq War is at a stalemate. Confronted with a growing threat from those “enemies allied with its friends in the region,” the Sunni insurgents, the Bush administration has adopted a practical and typically American strategy: it has bought them. The Americans have purchased the insurgency, hiring its foot soldiers at the rate of $300 per month. The Sunni fighters, once called insurgents, we now refer to as “tribesmen” or “concerned citizens.”
Remember the surge? Probably you thought it was the kind of a thingy you see in a tidal river, or when a dam is opened or a toilet floods. The kind that goes up and then goes down, or maybe comes in and then goes out. Actually though what Bush had in mind was more like the kind of a thing you get in a lava flow, that comes in or goes up or whatever and then like hardens and turns into this llke rock stuff.
WASHINGTON — Troop levels in Iraq would remain nearly the same through 2008 as they have been through most of the five years of war there, under plans presented to President Bush on Monday by the senior American commander and the top American diplomat in Iraq, senior administration and military officials said…
General David Petraeus blames Iran for yesterday’s mortaring of our occupation headquarters in the Green Zone. Maybe, but maybe also we should keep in mind the legal principle of cui bono.
Suppose you are the public face of a “surge” which you claim has greatly reduced violence by al-Qaeda in the country your troops occupy. And suppose your own headquarters has just come under heavy bombardment.
Then suppose you run right out and tell the press that al-Qaeda had nothing to do with the attack. No, indeed. Instead, by one of those happy coincidences to which we have become so accustomed since 9/11, it was outside agitators. What’s more they were from Iran which — what are the odds? — your own commander-in-chief happens to be desperate to invade. What a fortunate confluence of God’s own truth and your own self-interest that would be!
And there was more to come, of a surprising nature:
In response to the news that 4,000 US military personnel have now been killed in Iraq, [Petraeus] said it showed how much the mission had cost but added that Americans were realistic about it.He also said a great deal of progress had been made because of the “flipping” of communities — the decision by Sunni tribes to turn against al-Qaeda militants. The extent of this had surprised even the US military, he said.
Before we let it surprise us, however, we might want to read the full article in Rolling Stone from which this excerpt comes. The author speaks Arabic, which turns out to be handy once you leave the Green Zone. Apparently everybody out there talks funny except the ones who report to General Petraeus.
Having lost the civil war, many Sunnis were suddenly desperate to switch sides — and Gen. David Petraeus was eager to oblige. The U.S. has not only added 30,000 more troops in Iraq — it has essentially bribed the opposition, arming the very Sunni militants who only months ago were waging deadly assaults on American forces. To engineer a fragile peace, the U.S. military has created and backed dozens of new Sunni militias, which now operate beyond the control of Iraq's central government…In districts like Dora, the strategy of the surge seems simple: to buy off every Iraqi in sight. All told, the U.S. is now backing more than 600,000 Iraqi men in the security sector — more than half the number Saddam had at the height of his power. With the ISVs in place, the Americans are now arming both sides in the civil war. “Iraqi solutions for Iraqi problems,” as U.S. strategists like to say. David Kilcullen, the counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. Petraeus, calls it “balancing competing armed interest groups…”
“Before the war, it was just one party,” Arkan tells me. “Now we have 100,000 parties. I have Sunni officer friends, but nobody lets them get back into service. First they take money, then they ask if you are Sunni or Shiite. If you are Shiite, good.” He dreams of returning to the days when the Iraqi army served the entire country. “In Saddam’s time, nobody knew what is Sunni and what is Shiite,” he says.
The Bush administration based its strategy in Iraq on the mistaken notion that, under Saddam, the Sunni minority ruled the Shiite majority. In fact, Iraq had no history of serious sectarian violence or civil war between the two groups until the Americans invaded. Most Iraqis viewed themselves as Iraqis first, with their religious sects having only personal importance. Intermarriage was widespread, and many Iraqi tribes included both Sunnis and Shiites. Under Saddam, both the ruling Baath Party and the Iraqi army were majority Shiite.
Lawrence Lessig who pioneered Internet campaigning for Howard Dean in 2004 and was a senior adviser for the John Edwards campaign has started the Change Congress coalition. The Internet and Wiki tools will be harnessed to get Congress to listen to the people they represent instead of lobbyists and fat cats.
Change Congress’s website has the tools to “Reclaim your District!”. The San Jose Mercury-News article has more information.
Members of Congress and candidates will be asked to support four goals: reject contributions from lobbyists and political action committees; ban spending on pet projects known as earmarks; work for public financing of campaigns; and back transparency for the work of Congress.“The presidential campaigns this year have mobilized thousands of people who want change, but the next president alone won't be able to change Congress. That's where we need fundamental reform,”Lessig said. He thinks the surge in online political activism and blogging — from the right and left — can be turned on Congress.
An obesity flash from McClatchy Newspapers:
MEXICO CITY — Fueled by the rising popularity of soft drinks and fast-food restaurants, Mexico has become the second fattest nation in the world. Mexican health officials say it could surpass the U.S. as the most obese country within 10 years if trends continue.More than 71 percent of Mexican women and 66 percent of Mexican men are overweight, according to the latest national surveys.
Isn’t there anything left for us to be number one in? Oh, yeah. Prisons.
We know where we’ve been. But who can tell us where we are going? Let us hope that an American spring will arrive soon. It’s hard to be hopeful after almost eight years of a long winter nightmare.
Our esteemed colleague Mike from Cannablog (whom I met in meatspace at the last BARBARian gathering) some time ago graced us with an Excellent tag. We’re passing on this compliment to some folks we like; you might too.
Dean LeBaron blogs as an Adventure Capitalist.
News of the Restless brings an emphasis on Latin America.
Dennis Perrin is a serious jokester with an attitude.
The HorseRaceBlog at RealClearPolitics provides actual data for political junkies in addition to opinion and speculation.
The Regressive Antidote brings us rants and musings from political science prof David Michael Green at Hofstra.
The Early Days of a Better Nation is novelist and techno-utopian socialist Ken MacLeod’s political and literary blog.
Why Now? caters to the Iditarod fans among the politically aware, but also includes intelligent political thoughts, snarky graphics, and cat-blogging.
The women and men at DMIblog provide progressive views on “Politics, Policy, and the American Dream”.
Fellow NCF alumnus Laurence Hunt’s eponymous blog specializes in how we might intelligently respond to events, especially economic ones.
NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen’s PressThink is full of intelligent critiques of what we used to call the MSM until we decided that we’re just as damn mainstream as anyone. Well, almost. Now we call them the TM, applying the epithet of “Traditional” with a certain degree of sarcasm.
PRESIDENT’S BANK PLAN GETS WIDE SUPPORT; National Real Estate Leaders and Congressional Chiefs Call It Constructive Move. CONGRESSMAN IN FAVOR OF IT President Is Studying Submission to Congress — Reserve System Not to Be Touched. H.M. Robinson Credited With PRESIDENT’S BANK PLAN GETS WIDE SUPPORT. Realty Men See Plan Stimulating Building and Other Lines.
Special to The New York Times. November 15, 1931, Sunday
You can pay the NY Times $3.95 and read the whole thing, but a lucid analysis of Hoover’s real estate plan and comparison to the Bush/Paulson/Bernanke plan and their similarities is available for free at Bits of News, complete with comparative graphs. I urge you to go read the whole thing.
And go read this article at Bloomberg for more deja vu.
By X.J. Kennedy
We had to have him put away,
For what if he’d grown vicious?
To play faith healer, give away
Stale bread and stinking fishes!
His soapbox preaching set the tongues
Of all the neighbors going.
Odd stuff: how lilies never spin
And birds don't bother sowing.
Why, bums were coming to the door —
His pockets had no bottom —
And then-the foot-wash from that whore!
We signed. They came and got him.
Being an “I told you so, sort of person”, at least when I’m right (let’s not mention the times, as I often am, wrong), I'd like to reiterate something I said in comments back in 2004 on this blog, repeated below:
Tom, I basically agree with you, but the dollar fluctuation is only temporary. Its on a long term downward trend and the rest of the world knows it. Bush and the rest of his crowd might monkey around with it so it doesn't fall apart next week, or even in the next year or two, but eventually the chickens will come home to roost....and we’re the one’s sitting at the bottom of the chicken coop.You might want to go grab some Krugerrands.
Posted by: Buck on December 10, 2004 10:52 PM
So where are the naysayers now? Gold went down from well over a thousand dollars to the low 900’s on Friday. Which way is it heading long term? Anyone want to venture a guess? I’m sticking with the plan, and I’d buy some on this temporary weakness if I was flush with cash. Anyone changed their minds on this subject?
Those who have been following the Eliot Mess closely will recall that the FBI staked out Spitzer’s hotel room during an earlier Washington visit in December, but came up empty-handed.
What do you suppose led them to do that, since the FBI almost never goes to these lengths in prostitution cases? Unless maybe they get a tip from a scummy GOP dirty tricks artist? For which, see this Miami Herald story:
Almost four months before Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned in a sex scandal, a lawyer for Republican political operative Roger Stone sent a letter to the FBI alleging that Spitzer ‘‘used the services of high-priced call girls’’ while in Florida.The letter, dated Nov. 19, said Miami Beach resident Stone learned the information from ‘‘a social contact in an adult-themed club.’’ It offered one potentially identifying detail: The man in question hadn’t taken off his calf-length black socks “during the sex act.”
Melvin "Man-o-war" Costa has a classic Nazi eagle and swastika insignia tattooed across his chest and a prison gang spider web inked on his right elbow.Melvin sounds like an okay guy, actually. You know, for a Nazi.Costa, 26, also is a convicted felon, self-avowed white nationalist and currently the 10th-ranked light heavyweight fighter in King of the Cage, one of the most popular semi-professional "mixed martial arts" (MMA) combat leagues in America.
Judging by online forum discussions, Costa's growing legions of white supremacist fans seemed far less concerned with his swastika or spider web tattoos than a third tattoo, circling his navel, that boasts, "I have a small penis." The common theory is that, as one fan said, "He might be going for a bit of sarcasm, depending on the actual size of his penis, given the false stereotype about us."
BBC moved this story at 10:22 p.m. (EST) Thursday, and the 11 o’clock news only carried a sentence or two on it. But it will be all over the news by Friday morning, barring massive media misconduct. Which of course we can’t bar at all.
The US Department of State has fired two contractors and disciplined a third for accessing the passport file of presidential hopeful Barack Obama.A spokesman for the department, Sean McCormack, said the cases were likely caused by “imprudent curiosity.” But he said it was not clear what the employees may have seen or what they were looking for.
A spokesman for Mr Obama suggested that the government could be using private information for “political purposes.”
The BBC’s North America editor, Justin Webb, says it is an extraordinary lapse in security which allowed temporary state department employees access to personal information on a man who is guarded by the secret service day and night .
The state department tracks those who access its passport database. Breaches occurred on three separate dates — 9 January, 21 February and 14 March.
“We believe this was out of imprudent curiosity, so we are taking steps to reassure ourselves that that is, in fact, the case,” Mr McCormack said…
Andrew W. is a former neighbor of mine who now lives in the midwest. He used to be a heavy drinker, but now keeps sober by attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings almost every day. At these meetings, often held in church basements, he and the others trade amazing stories of struggle and survival, small victories and big defeats, hard lives and sometimes hard deaths. Here is Andrew’s first installment of Church Basements. with names and identifying circumstance altered when necessary to preserve anonymity:
Mary came in Sunday with her son, Mark, a tall fair, freckled-faced boy. He had red hair like his mom, who sat beside him. He was new to these rooms, but his mother was a veteran. Her freckles had bloomed into red blotches, and worry lines slalomed down through them. Mark sat silent holding, as we say, onto his seat.
A few meetings later John, a retired Marine, announced that Mary’s son, “the one we saw last week,” had died of an overdose the day after his first meeting. Others nodded knowingly and someone said, “This is a deadly disease.”
AA meetings in church basements are the valley of the shadow of death. Nearly every member has told stories of children, parents, siblings, other relatives or friends, close and distant, whose premature death was caused by “drinkin’ and druggin’.” Most relate stories of their own close calls, lost weekends, months or even years in a black hole where memory is trapped by addiction.
Mary missed a few meetings to mourn and attend her son’s funeral. During her absence one member said, “At least she has other children.”
“Yeah, but they’re out there too,” remarked one of Mary’s friends under her breath.
The picture became clear. Mary attends AA meeting to keep herself clean. She persuades an addicted son to come to a meeting but it is too late. He dies of an overdose. And her other kids are using, too.
The next week she came back, heading a meeting, but did not mention the death of her son. Instead she shared about how much she loves the meeting. “My life is here,” she said as tears welled up. “I’m at home here with people who understand me, are just like me.”
We could relate because it is true that people with addictive personalities are similar, whether or not they are using. Most of us are compulsive, careless and shy. So when people share at meetings others follow, starting out with, “I can relate to what she said,” and then swinging into their similar character defects.
After one meeting I approached Mary and said, “I lost a daughter to drugs and booze. I always used to say, of my four kids she was most like me, but I never realized how true it was.” I handed her my number and said,“Call me if you need to talk.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Mary whispered.
Before you read this, grab a bucket or be very near a toilet. It's more than enough to make you gag. A longer analysis appears on The Mess that Alan Greenspan Made. I also recommend many of the links on the sidebar of this blog. America is hurting, thanks to Mr. Greenspan, obviously a man who relishes the pain and agony that he foisted on the American people.
Alan Greenspan in 2005:
Where once more-marginal applicants would simply have been denied credit, lenders are now able to quite efficiently judge the risk posed by individual applicants and to price that risk appropriately. These improvements have led to rapid growth in subprime mortgage lending; indeed, today subprime mortgages account for roughly 10 percent of the number of all mortgages outstanding, up from just 1 or 2 percent in the early 1990s…As we reflect on the evolution of consumer credit in the United States, we must conclude that innovation and structural change in the financial services industry have been critical in providing expanded access to credit for the vast majority of consumers, including those of limited means. Without these forces, it would have been impossible for lower-income consumers to have the degree of access to credit markets that they now have.
Allen Greenspan speaking in 2008.
The crisis will leave many casualties. Particularly hard hit will be much of today’s financial risk-valuation system, significant parts of which failed under stress…We will never be able to anticipate all discontinuities in financial markets. Discontinuities are, of necessity, a surprise. Anticipated events are arbitraged away. But if, as I strongly suspect, periods of euphoria are very difficult to suppress as they build, they will not collapse until the speculative fever breaks on its own. Paradoxically, to the extent risk management succeeds in identifying such episodes, it can prolong and enlarge the period of euphoria. But risk management can never reach perfection. It will eventually fail and a disturbing reality will be laid bare, prompting an unexpected and sharp discontinuous response.
Here’s good news. The market spoke last night, and decided that the best stock investment in history was a Big Three auto manufacturer? A sprawling steel conglomerate? An energy giant? A monster retailer? A grain merchant to the world or a global pharmaceutical company?
No, it was Visa, whose motto isn’t but ought to be, “Your Debt is Our Product.”
NEW YORK (Fortune) — Visa buyers paid a whopping $17.9 billion, or $44 a share, when the company priced its initial public offering Tuesday evening…The San Francisco-based credit card processor became the largest IPO ever, surpassing the $11 billion record held by AT&T wireless as well as its own $37 to $42 a share price range.
From today’s Washington Post:
Standing with two of his Senate colleagues at the Citadel, a set of ancient ruins in downtown Amman, McCain told reporters that he is concerned about Iran’s influence in Iraq and cited a recently discovered cache of weapons that he said could be particularly lethal in being used to target Americans in the country.“We continue to be concerned about Iranian [operatives] taking al-Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back,” he said in comments after meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II on Tuesday afternoon.
Pressed to elaborate, McCain said it is “common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran; that’s well known. And it’s unfortunate.”
A few moments later, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), standing just behind McCain, stepped forward and whispered in his ear. McCain then said, “I’m sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al-Qaeda.”
I was disorganized enough to have missed Obama’s speech in Philadelphia this morning, nor have I read it yet. But here’s the transcript. More later…
Okay, this is later. First a couple of other people’s reactions to the speech. Here’s James Fallows of The Atlantic, Jimmy Carter’s chief speechwriter:
…as impressive and intelligent a speech as I have heard in a very long time. People thought that Mitt Romney’s speech would be the counterpart to John Kennedy’s famous speech about his faith to the Houston ministers in 1960. No. This was.And here’s the Rude Pundit, your basic tough audience, live-blogging from under his bridge:Will this defuse the Rev. Wright issue? Who knows what cable news will make of the speech. But it was a great moment, to which Barack Obama rose.
(Update: …I will correct the preceding sentence. It was a moment that Obama made great through the seriousness, intelligence, eloquence, and courage of what he said. I don’t recall another speech about race with as little pandering or posturing or shying from awkward points, and as much honest attempt to explain and connect, as this one.)
10:59: Damn. We’re not used to this sort of honesty from a candidate. Can’t compute. Cynicism circuit shorting out.11:00: Talking about Wright, he’s gonna hang the Reverend out to dry, says Wright’s comments present a “distorted” view of America. Whew. Thank god, the cynicism circuit can work again.
11:02: Oh, shit, now he’s getting Wright’s back. Saying that Wright’s a Marine who has credibility, intelligence, compassion. Shorting out again.
11:16: Addresses affirmative action and welfare anger and how politicians and the media have exploited those things. How the Reagan Revolution was based on it. The Rude Pundit gets an erection.
11:23: Brings up OJ, Katrina, Wright, says we can keep race as a divisive issue and “nothing will change.” This is the straightest talk this blogger has heard from a major presidential candidate in a very, very long time, maybe, truly, without hyperbole, in his lifetime.
11:27: “This union may not be perfect, but...it can always be perfected.” That’ll be the line that’s quoted endlessly. Like here.
Bottom line: that was a m______f___in’ speech by a m______f___in’ President of the United States. You remember what that’s like? No, not here either.
And here’s video of the whole speech.
This is your own, personal mantra. Repeat it to yourself silently, over and over, with your eyes shut and your ears plugged. It will help, I promise. It has worked for others.
No cognition, no dissonance.
Now that Wall Street is getting a taste of its own medicine (although we get to suffer as well for their sins), a new toy has emerged for all those big boys out there who still have to have the biggest and the baddest toy on the block:
HUMMER, the world’s most iconic boy’s toy, has converted the new right-hand drive H3 into the ultimate gadget for grown ups &mdash a life-sized remote controlled car that definitely won’t be available in your local toyshop.
From the looks of things, there are going to be a good many of these toys to go around for all those toy takers out in the real world. Too bad there won’t be many toys for the poorest little children this Christmas. Could we load these Hummers up with Republicans and let the little children who will have nothing but high priced coal this Christmas man the remotes and drive the whole crowd of Republicans, neocons, White House traitors and Wall Street thieves off a cliff? It sure seems like it might solve a good many problems the nation faces.
Worried about the state of the world economy, the American piece in particular? You might want to skip the Bear Stearns story.
Bear Stearns, recently the fifth largest investment bank in the US and heavily invested in the subprime mortgage market, was badly damaged by the troubles there. So badly that it’s been forced to sell itself for a relative song, and even that in a stock-only transaction.
A collapse of Bear Stearns could have heightened anxiety in world financial markets amid a deepening credit crunch. JPMorgan’s acquisition of Bear Stearns represents roughly 1 percent of what the investment bank was worth just 16 days ago.The deal marked a 93.3 percent discount to Bear Stearns’ market capitalization as of Friday, and roughly a 98.8 percent discount to its book value as of Feb. 29. The company is set to report its first-quarter results after the closing bell on Monday.
Bear Stearns shares closed Friday at $30 a share. At their peak, the shares traded at $159.36.
A 99% loss in two and a half weeks, worth thirty bucks on Friday, sold for two on Sunday — it’s the kind of thing that leads skittish investors to panic. So JPMorganChase stepped in, and the government acted on a weekend, hoping to forestall the event everyone’s worried about.
Stipulating that true change must come from true grass roots rather than national politics, I propose a thought experiment related to the upcoming Presidential election.
The way I read the campaign right now, Sen. McCain is chortling on the sidelines watching Sen. Clinton, whom one of his supporters famously called a bitch, ripping into Sen. Obama, the purveyer of hope to many young and otherwise formerly excluded voters. What can one project from such a scenario?
First, it appears that we can confidently look forward to a Senator moving to the Oval Office for the first since JFK.
Second, the Clinton machine seems to be willing to exercise the Sampson option, bringing down the house to avoid losing. They’ve already run through a good portion of the book of tricks. They’ve tried to change the rules when it looked like it would help them; they’ve played the race card every time there’s a chance; recently they’ve switched to the victim card; and they excuse the lot by explaining that the Republicans will do worse in the general. Even some people who consider themselves friends and supporters are dismayed by the tone taken by the Clinton machine in the primary. It’s almost as if the Clinton/DLC faction has adapted to Republican attacks by mirroring the style.
This leaves Obama’s campaign in a quandary. To strike back is to abandon his most saleable feature, the ability to rise above the hurly burly and remain focused on hope, and, we can hope, solutions as well. Can he be provoked into losing his above-it-all-ness? (After all, Putin will be worse…)
Which provides the backdrop for my experiment. It looks like there four possible scenarios:
- Going negative works, in that, whether Obama doesn’t strike back and looks weak or he does strike back and loses some of his aura, Clinton gets enough of a bounce to win the nomination. That, in my opinion, would leave us staring down the barrel of President McCain of the Hundred Years War.
- Going negative works, and despite my prediction Clinton survives the Republican assault to enter the White House.
- Going negative fails and Obama wins the nomination, but the Clinton attacks soften him up for the Republican attack dogs, and he’s so damaged that he loses to McCain.
- Going negative fails, and Obama survives the Republican attack machine to win the whole shebang.
Options 1 and 3, either Clinton or Obama is nominated but loses to McCain, seem to me to leave the Clinton machine in the cold. If the Democrats lose in November in this political and economic climate, as Nader says, they should close up shop and go home. Or at least the DLC should. Maybe then we could begin to tilt the Democratic party back toward its democratic roots. Either way, the US and the world will be a weird and dangerous place with a temperamental lobbyist-loving militarist like McCain roaming the White House at night.
Option 4 avoids the worst dangers of McCain, but makes the Clintons the previous generation, no longer exciting or relevant.
Option 2, Clinton becomes President anyway, seems to me the least likely of the four, but it’s the only one in which the formerly all-pervading influence of the Clinton Clique on the Democratic party heirarchy is not greatly diminished.
The current direction of the campaign process, fodder for the VRWC’s echo chamber, is alienating many Obama supporters and some potential ones as well. Clintonian campaigning, like Rovian, is nearly the political equivalent of total war, i.e., there are no civilians and nothing is banned. Presumably it’s the lack of alternatives to the loss of power that has brought the Clinton machine to this expedient.
The question that intrigues me is, will true-blue Democrats blame the Clintons if the Democrat loses in November? Should they? Or will they blame the left wing for not signing onto four more years of Iraq and Wall Street-friendly financial policies?
Years ago Esquire had a feature called “Dubious Achievements of 19XX.” It was accompanied by a photo of the disgraced President Nixon, grinning as if he were eating chocolate ice cream or something of similar appearance. The caption was always, “Why Is This Man Smiling?”
Today’s Maureen Dowd column asks the same question. It starts off with:
Everyone here is flummoxed about why the president is in such a fine mood…
Dowd goes on to catalogue Bush’s string of weird public performances these last few weeks— jigging, dancing, giggling, grinning, joking and singing as the new Rome burns all around him.
And she concludes:
Or perhaps it’s a Freudian trip. Now that he’s mucked up the world and the country, he can finally stop rebelling against his dad and relax in the certainty that the Bush name will forever be associated with crash-and-burn presidencies.
Her analysis gives me the opportunity to utter once again the sweetest words known to man: I told you so.
Here’s Dubya’s Creepy Death Wish, from September of 2002.
Then in May of 2006: Mission Almost Accomplished.
And last July, an update in The Smirking Chimp called Dragging Daddy Down.
I’m glad to welcome Ms. Dowd aboard, and only wish she had seen through Bush a little sooner — for instance when her public fawning over the adorable drugstore cowboy from Greenwich during the 2000 campaign caused keener judges of manflesh to mutter in disgust, For Christ’s sake, guys, get a room.
The article from which this comes is in the Styles section of today’s New York Times. Since it doesn’t appear in the online edition, I have laboriously copied the following out by hand. That way you’ll know that at least one person is thinking straight about this whole Eliot Mess.
Bob Beleson, 58, an independent beverage marketer who lives in Manhattan, said that the discussions he had with several buddies condemned the governor not for his sins but for his excess. “These guys that pay $4,300 for a hooker are the same guys that pay $9 for an espresso,” he said. “They’re ruining it for everyone else.”
While the mainstream media slobbers over Jeremiah Wright’s supposed “sins” (Joyful Alternative tells me that the Prophet Jeremiah was much harder in his approbations of the society that he lived in than Reverend Wright is on ours, but the Bible is not my bailiwick), David Corn, a modern day reincarnation of the great intrepid reporter, the Green Hornet, has been hot on the trail of John McCain and his spiritual adviser, a fundamentalist televangelist named Rod Parsley:
Yesterday, I posted a piece at MotherJones.com that disclosed that a megachurch pastor whom John McCain has hailed as a “spiritual guide’ has called for the destruction of the “false religion” of Islam. This fundamentalist televangelist, Rod Parsley, who is an important political ally of McCain in the all-important state of Ohio, means this quite literally. In a 2005 book, he writes that there is a “war between Islam and Christian civilization” and notes, “The fact is that America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed.”Being a responsible reporter, I called both Parsley and the McCain campaign’s communications director, Jill Hazelbaker, before posting the story. I had to leave a message for Parsley and didn’t hear back from him. And I never got through to Hazelbaker, but I spoke to another communications aide at the campaign. I explained why I was calling: I was about to publish an article noting that a prominent McCain supporter, with whom McCain had campaigned in Ohio last month, advocates a holy war with the aim of eradicating Islam. “Oh,” she said. Can I read you some of Parsley's quotes? I asked. Go ahead, she said reluctantly. I got through three sentences, and she said, “That's enough.”
Go read the rest of Corn’s piece to find out what the McCain campaign didn’t have to say on this subject. And of course, as was pointed out on this blog several years ago, America is not and never was a Christian nation and is a friend of Muslims everywhere, at least according to George Washington and a Senate that once had the guts to say so.
Good stuff from Dennis Perrin on the MSM’s current fan-fluttering and attacks of the vapors over Obama’s pastor’s ventures into truth-telling.
In the real world, out where the flag-lapel crowd and the yellow ribbon boys never venture, 9/11 was indeed, as Reverend Jeremiah Wright said, the result of stupid and provocative actions taken by the United States in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Israel.
This is not to excuse the 9/11 attacks. They were evil, murderous and unforgivable. But so had been our own actions in the Middle East and Afghanistan, over many years and many presidents. There are no good guys in this alley fight. This is essentially what Reverend Wright said, and he was right. Get over it, people.
And go read Perrin’s piece on the Reverend, from whence cometh this:
I've been pretty hard on the Obama campaign, and still am; but if anything would soften my view, it's this bullshit furor over Jeremiah Wright. If you are white and don't listen to black talk radio, now would be a good time to start.Wright's opinions are not deemed crazy there, and you'll hear much stronger denunciations of imperialism and racism than you ever will on a white liberal's show. Sure, some dementia is present: this is America, after all.
But contrast the opinions exchanged between African-Americans to those expressed on the corporate kabuki programs, or worse, white reactionary broadcasts. Which do you think is closer to what's actually going on?
And speaking of white reactionary programs, here’s Rush Limbaugh, who is apparently back on his meds:
Later in the day, Rush Limbaugh dwelled on Mr. Wright in his radio program, calling him “a race-baiter and a hatemonger.”
In case you’re one of the lucky few who’s still flush with cash, Amazon has just the ticket to deal with the problems facing the economy right now. Along with some other useful items . In case that doesn’t work, I know some good root doctors on the South Carolina coast who will be glad to help you out. Just in case voting doesn’t do the trick.
From Reuters, March of 2008:
WASHINGTON — U.S. President George W. Bush got an earful on Thursday about problems and progress in Afghanistan where a war has dragged on for more than six years but been largely eclipsed by Iraq…"I must say, I'm a little envious," Bush said. "If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed."
From Army counsel Joseph Welch to Senator Joe McCarthy, June of 1954:
Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
What follows is my transcription of New York Times columnist Thomas L Friedman explaining his flat world on The Charlie Rose Show. I don’t think I’ve heard this much concentrated stupidity since listening to Ambassador G. McMurtrie Godley III at country team meetings in wartime Laos.
The transcription below contains the money shot, as they call it in the frankly pornographic rather than the political side of show biz. But if you have time to watch the whole interview you’ll see that Friedman’s performance was well-rehearsed and at least partially memorized. Thus the last three appalling paragraphs were not misspoken, but intentional.
Particularly unattractive, like Bush’s fake Texas accent, are Friedman’s tone-deaf attempts to sound like an ex-Marine Corps pogue tough-talking at the Legion Hall late at night. (Suck on this, Friedman, okay?)
And what we learned on 9/11, in a gut way, was that [the terrorist] bubble was a fundamental threat to our open society because there is no wall high enough, no INS agent smart enough, no metal detector efficient enough, to protect an open society from people motivated by that bubble and what we needed to do was to go over to that part of the world, I’m afraid, and burst that bubble. We needed to go over here basically and take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble.And there was only one way to do it because part of that bubble said, “We’ve got you. This bubble is actually going to level the balance of power between we and you because we don’t care about it. We’re ready to sacrifice and all you care about is your stock options and your Hummers.”
And what they needed to see was American boys and girls going from house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You don’t think we care about our open society? You think this bubble fantasy, we’re just going to let it grow? Well, suck on this, okay?”
That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia; it was part of the bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Baghdad because we could.
Grace Nearing at Scriptoids has a depressing but unfortunately accurate description of the Hobson’s Choice facing us in this election season.
It’s called “Why, you’d almost think this election actually means something,” and it’s addressed to “Obamaniacs and Clintonistas.” I’ll go one sad step further and add McCain. I’ll add this, too, from Edmund Burke:
“There never was for any long time a corrupt representation of a virtuous people, or a mean, sluggish, careless people who ever had a good government of any form.”
Back in the late seventies, when opinions about the possibilities of artificial intelliegence were harder to find but no less broadly speculative, I encountered a wonderful book, both erudite and charming, called Computer Power and Human Reason. I was fascinated by the ideas in it and those it led me to. I was equally impressed by the simple fact of someone thinking at that level. Its author, Joseph Weizenbaum, died a week ago in Gröben, Germany.
What is it, after all, that makes people different from machines? Sure, we die, and they turn off. But do we think differently? Is one of our approaches preferable? This is the kind of stuff Weizenbaum enjoyed considering.
In 1962, he published a comparatively simple program called ELIZA which demonstrated natural language processing by engaging humans into a conversation resembling that with an empathic psychologist. The program applied pattern matching rules to the human’s statements to figure out its replies. (Programs like this are now called chatterbots.) Weizenbaum was shocked that his program was taken seriously by many users, who would open their hearts to it. He started to think philosophically about the implications of Artificial Intelligence and later became one of its leading critics. His influential 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason displays his ambivalence towards computer technology and lays out his case: while Artificial Intelligence may be possible, we should never allow computers to make important decisions because computers will always lack human qualities such as compassion and wisdom. This he saw as a consequence of their not having been raised in the emotional environment of a human family.
…saw that computers adjusted human intelligence ‘from judgment to calculation,’ that they privileged mathematical models and instrumental reason as the basis for action, and that they created a paradoxical situation in which computers initially empower humans but will eventually render them powerless. he urged his colleagues not to put themselves in the service of the military and other death industries, and specifically called for computer scientists to refuse to conduct research on projects that would couple organic and mechanical systems, and to avoid speech recognition research because it would profoundly alter the way people understand one another.Assuming that computer capabilities continue to increase at something like a Moore’s Law rate, they’ll very soon overtake us in the areas of gathering and processing data. They can already land an airplane more precisely and reliably than a pilot and beat the world champion at chess. Will they outperform us at sex and cooking next? Music? The novel? Or will we, the creators, choose to draw some lines and create some definitions? Are some things uniquely human, or is everything an artifact of electricity and chemicals?
These questions are too big for even a particularly gifted thinker to answer alone. But Joseph Weizenbaum helped me realize that questions like these could, and in fact demanded to, be asked.
Joseph, good work, bro. Keep it comin’.
The Clinton campaign’s response to the Ferraro flap provides another indication that the macrocosm is reflected in the microcosm.
One who considers both remaining Democratic candidates classic examples of the DLC strategy for destroying the party may attempt to innoculate himself against ism charges by pointing to past votes for Presidential tickets headed by a black man, Ron Daniels, and seconded by a woman, Geraldine Ferraro.
I remain a big fan of Daniels, the kind of guy who, in a (subscription only) conversation with Lewis Lapham, Nader, Kevin Phillips and others, might say:
We need a transformative vision, one advancing the notion that America can be more than it is today for average, ordinary people. The Democratic Party should advocate a program of basic rights, like the one enjoyed by many social democratic countries in Europe. Americans really feel that they have the best standard of living in the world. They don’t, but they don’t know they don’t. Virtually every nation in Western Europe has universal health care. In Sweden, Norway, and Holland, the social benefits are so generous that poverty has been practically eliminated. Wages in most European countries now outpace wages in the United States.
If I remember correctly, back in August 2004 the dollar was still worth more than the euro; so presumably he was talking about value, not exchange rates.
My vote for Ron Daniels was the first time I was really happy casting a ballot for President, and I was still pleased the next day. That experience molded my judgment: I felt better about myself for voting for the candidate I really thought was the best. Indeed, I’d vote for someone running on his platform again.
- Cut the defense budget in half next year.
- Spend half the savings on retooling the weapons factories and retraining the defense workers, so the companies and individuals don’t get screwed by the switchover, and end up building stuff we actually want to use.
- With the other half, rebuild the national infrastructure.
I wasn’t naïve enough to think that the American plutocracy would let such a program be implemented. But I still think it would work, in the sense of accomplishing all reasonable goals. It’s just a question of when we decide to move forward.
The reason we don’t do it, of course, is that “all reasonable goals” is an incomplete set: it doesn’t include the normal focus of American communal actions. The basis of our economic system, and thus of our political and social systems as well, is a particularly feral variation of the capitalist mythology. The skeleton seems to have been adopted in toto from Veblen. To help developing countries reach our exalted heights, we talk up free-market solutions we assiduously avoided, as William Greider documents.
Our economic methodology encourages the emergence of a very small number of very successful survivors. Whether they excel through honesty and business acumen (Buffett) or prefer to game the system (Gates, Ellison), they inhabit a rarified atmosphere reserved for those smart, lucky, and vicious enough to reach it. Social Darwinism, the philosophy was called, back in the days when it was considered gauche. Nowadays we know from gene-pool studies that variety is not merely the spice but the touchstone. Survival of the fittest in a vicious business world produces the most vicious businesspeople, who may not be ideal seed corn.
More importantly, we have arrived at the first moment in history in which life does not have to center around a struggle for insufficient resources. Sure, we're running out of oil, and private corporations are buying public water supplies; but that's because our economic system is geared toward concentration of wealth rather than distribution of capabilities.
If we chose, we could feed, clothe, house, and educate every American. Why don't we choose that?
Unfortunately the second half of this tale is neither so uplifting nor so edifying. The sad spectacle that surrounds the one-time nominee for Vice President, Geraldine Ferraro, for whom I voted proudly at the time, seems at this point devoid of moral beyond the simple one enforced on commuter trains in the Bay Area: don’t be a jerk, or at least don’t let others know you’re a jerk. It’s surprising how difficult some people find that task.
I’m surprised, too, by the reports that she said Jesse Jackson wouldn’t have been in the 1984 Presidential field if he weren’t black. Still, no one seems to be denying two things.
- That such overt racism not only made it onto a Democratic Presidential ticket a quarter-century ago, but was still a known, available, and useful tool for the more vicious of the two DLC candidates in 2008
- That in any contest to determine who is most vicious, the representative of the Clinton team will be in the running no matter the cost
To me this is another example of my political theory of entitlements. The territory of the Democratic party has been occupated by disgruntled Republicans. After the MLK/LBJ civil-rights bills, the racists, sexists, homophobes, and xenophobes congregated around the Republican banner. Those Republicans who thought of blacks as “mentally inferior” as opposed to “hanging material” gradually found themselves at the left end of the party, and some became independents or Democrats. Personally I’m stunned to find Ferraro among such reprobates, but there it is.
Dwelling on the conspicuous concern for self over party and country exhibited by both Clintons in every imaginable type of situation is duplicative. My point here is the sense of entitlement.
Many Democrats, uncomfortable with their decision to support wooden and unconvincing candidates (not all of whom even pursue legitimate wins), seem to consider the votes of everyone in America to the left of Katherine Harris their rightful territory. Sure, you say you wouldn’t have voted for the Democrat even if we legally prevented you from voting for a Green or a Libertarian; but we know you’re lying. Your vote is ours, so hand it over.
Perhaps it’s a similar deal with Ferraro. As a woman who’s withstood the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, perhaps she figures it’s her turn. She, and her avatar Hillary, deserve their time with the scepter. Will she overcome the challenge, diminish, and go into the West? Or succumb to the lure of the Ring, the Dark Side, the power?
Hillary’s supporters, no more DLC than Obama’s at the party-hierarchy level, nevertheless have a greater sense of entitlement. [Update: (Sirota) “Why do the Clintons always treat the public like we are just drop-dead stupid?”] Is that what we mean by electability? How likely is that to work in the general?
The Clinton wing of the DLC seems to have announced its willingness to follow what Seymour Hersh called the Sampson Option: pull down the house rather than let anyone else win.
Good! Let the Republican party disappear, the DLC rename itself the Republicans, the Green party rename itself the Democrats, and the remaining Greens return to leading the way.
I knew you’d want to know. Full details.
MUNICH, Germany — A woman was stopped at Munich airport after baggage control handlers found the skeleton of her brother sealed in a plastic bag in her luggage, police said Wednesday.
From the New York Times:
“Every time that campaign is upset about something, they call it racist,” she said. “I will not be discriminated against because I’m white. If they think they’re going to shut up Geraldine Ferraro with that kind of stuff, they don’t know me.”
Creating a movement’s not like it used to be.
It’s very hard in this modern day of ours to build mass movements. Look how hard it is just to get people to turn out for rallies and marches. We did better dozens and dozens of years ago on this score as a nation. But we’re calling our campaign an ’08/’09 campaign and by that we mean that we’d like to bring together in each Congressional district about 1,000 publicly conscious citizens who will form a watchdog lobby on Congress and put before Congress about ten major redirections of the country, like single-payer health insurance etc. … Every Congressional district has about 600,000 people in it. Just about every Congressional district has community colleges, colleges and other institutions that can be tapped into for these 1,000 people. I can’t overemphasize, as a person who’s worked on the Congress for over forty years and testified and exposed it, I can’t overemphasize the enormous turnaround value of a thousand people connected to one another holding accountability sessions, challenging the members of Congress putting pressure — you know, the good old-fashioned American way of lobbying, how it can change the Congress. And the Congress can pivot the entire federal government. It’s the most powerful branch of government if it chooses to use its constitutional powers, and that’s what we’re aiming for. The more people we get in this campaign the more we’ll say to them, Well, after November there’s going to be a real focused movement in each Congressional district. So we’re going to have the table out there for people to put their cards on in terms of mobilizing. Without that it’s not going to happen.
Muhammed Cohen expostulates wittily on on McCain's possible VP choices, considering Rice, Powell, Romney, Huckabee, and several others.
The Democrats are almost certain to field either a female or a black candidate; so the Republicans need to keep up with the Joneses (Veblen’s urge to emulation). Cohen considers the positives and negatives of the people John McCain is probably considering. For instance, the governor of Alaska, popular for anti-corruption stances, would be an excellent pick, but pregnancy means she’s unlikely to be interested in spending every waking hour on the campaign trail.
One of the most interesting possibilities is Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, 36, a Roman Catholic son of Punjabi immigrants, who has apparently become a Limbaugh favorite. Cohen recommends him.
In the end, though, Muhammed Cohen figures there’s one choice who comes closest to being everything the Republican party wants.
Is there a black man out there who would firm up McCain’s right flank, get love from the Republican establishment, and, unlike Rice, at least potentially appeal to African-Americans? Yes, and he’s been hiding in plain sight since 1991.At its heart, the vice presidential choice is a cynical, craven appeal to voters. On one hand, the vice presidential nominee is supposed to be ready for the presidency, and voters can even prefer the running mate to headliner. But the presidential nominee absolutely, positively doesn’t want the vice president to become president. The Clintons raised the cynical art form to a new low in recent days with their suggestions of Democratic frontrunner Barack Obama as Hillary Clinton’s running mate while questioning his fitness for the top job.
But when it comes to cynicism in politics featuring race, one name should leap to mind: Clarence Thomas. …
[…]
…the most cynical part of putting Thomas on the ticket is perhaps the most appealing to Republican grandees. As a sitting Supreme Court Justice, appointed for life and virtually untouchable, Thomas would have to be nuts to trade that job for the vice presidency. But that doesn’t mean he can’t run for the office while keeping his Supreme Court seat. It’s possible that he could serve as vice president and a Supreme Court justice at the same time, but the simpler solution would be to resign as vice president if he’s elected.
Trent Lott won re-election to a six-year term as Mississippi senator, but resigned a year later to become a lobbyist. Thomas would simply be setting the clock further ahead. Thomas’ resignation in November would let McCain pick from a large field of Republican worthies likely to be out of work after the November vote. A pitcher of spit that’s a heartbeat from the presidency looks pretty good if you’re unemployed.
Naw, they wouldn’t stoop to that…
The Fallon resignation leaves me wondering if we’ve reached a Saturday Night Massacre and a McMaster point simultaneously.
H.R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty tells us that during Lyndon Johnson’s acceleration of the war in Vietnam, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were ambivalent about a land war in Asia. To a man they agreed that the American system had to be defended against the godless Commies, but there were questions about what it would take to win in Vietnam, whether it was worth it, whether we had the resources and the resolve, and so on. Not to mention which service should take the lead. Should the Navy shell the enemy from the sea, or the Marines establish beachheads, or the Air Force bomb them into submission, or the Army put boots on the ground to excerise the only real control that matters? Interservice rivaly contributed greatly to their failure to offer better options early on, and more coherent resistance to the poor decisions as the quagmire deepend.
Many members of Johnson’s inner circle, in fact, lacked trust in the military and intelligence communities.
- CIA recommendations and predictions led to the debacle at the Bay of Pigs.
- Civilian officials considered much high-level military strategy obsolete in light of atomic weapons.
- The military and intelligence communities do not seem from the record (imperfectly reliable with respect to covert agencies) to have supported releasing the photos Adlai Stevenson showed the UN to engage the world in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The themes of Stevenson’s bravura performance were repeated as farce in Colin Powell’s fiasco preceding the US invasion of Iraq.
As a result of their perceived ambivalence about taking over the colonial burdens of the French in Indochina, the Joint Chiefs were consigned to tasks involving only tactical considerations. In the planning stages they were rarely consulted except for political cover or occasional feasibility studies. Input from the military at the strategic level was unwelcome.
The CIA was also feeling ignored. Its frequent reports of difficult social and economic situations in Vietnam, and the political realities that arose from these conditions, were generally edited out of the situation reports to Washington from the US embassy in Saigon. The Agency, of course, was not dependent on State to get its reports back to Langley, so some administration skeptics eventually heard some of the information. But the tide of groupthink was too strong, and the lure of war profits too great, for a few leaners to change the course of the ship of state.
In the end, the CIA director resigned in protest against the LBJ inner circle’s refusal to accept Agency input on the situation in Vietnam; but none of the military brass whose advice and experience was treated with sometimes-polite contempt followed his lead. McMaster’s book is well enough known to prompt the question among intelligent military folks of when it’s time to resign rather than accept a destructive and probably illegal order.
Then there’s the Saturday Night Massacre, involving consecutive firings by the embattled Richard Nixon of two Attorneys General (Eliot Richardson, William Ruckelshaus) who refused to rid Nixon of the troublesome Special Proscutor investigating Watergate, who had him dead to rights. Finally the one left standing at main Justice was the ever-helpful Robert Bork, who courageously stanched the flow. Perhaps Michael Mukasey can manage to keep the courts from hauling George W. Bush before the bench for the next ten months or so? My mantra is, There’s no statute of limitations on war crimes.
It appears the struggle to create a war with Iran is in its last throes.
Meanwhile, the uneasy partnership between Karl Rove and Dick Cheney continues. While Rovian operations take out political opponents like Don Siegelman in Alabama and Eliot Spitzer in New York, the Cheneyists struggle against the so-called adult leadership of war criminals like Robert Gates and Condoleezza Rice, and the increasingly lonely rational Republicans in Congress. Wikipedia reports that
The final report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters, issued on August 4, 1993, said that Gates “was close to many figures who played significant roles in the Iran/contra affair and was in a position to have known of their activities. The evidence developed by Independent Counsel did not warrant indictment…”
When such a person is your adult leadership, the outlook is sub-optimal indeed.
And sure enough, the makeshift patriots on the Dark Side have managed to gain one of their objectives: Admiral William “Fox” Fallon is resigning as Commander in Chief of Central Command, which includes Iran and Iraq. (Check out this map; I knew CentCom covered a lot of ground but I didn’t realize it was this much, basically Kenya to Kazakhstan.) Fallon is said to have called General (soon, presumably, Saint) David Petraeus, who reports to him, an ass-kissing little chickenshit. Evidence available to the public since the revelation of this remark suggests the characterization was not entirely without merit; but it was certainly unwelcome in the White House, and even more unwelcome in the Undisclosed Location. No doubt similar reactions followed the reports of Adm. Fallon responding to a question about a US war against Iran with “…not on my watch.’
Apparently Fallon’s approach was insufficiently aggressive.
The Persian Gulf right now is booming economically, and Fallon wants to harness that power to connect the failed states that pockmark the landscape to the outside world. In this choice, he sees no alternative.“What I learned in the Pacific is that after a while the tableau of failed, failing, or dysfunctional states becomes a real burden on the functional countries and a problem for their neighborhood, because they breed unrest and insecurities and attract troublemakers very well. They’re like sewers, and they begin to fester. It’s bad for business. And when it’s bad for business, people tend to start restricting their investments, and they restrict their thinking, and it allows more barriers, so we’re back to building walls again instead of breaking them down. If you have to build walls, it means you’re moving backward.”
Fallon has no illusion about solving the Middle East or Central Asia during his tenure, but he’s also acutely conscious that with globalization’s rapid advance into these regions he may well be the last Centcom commander of his kind. Already Fallon sees the inevitability and utility of having a Chinese military partnership at Centcom, and he’d like to manage that inevitably from the start rather than have to repair damage down the line.“I’d like to continue to do things that will be useful to the world and its inhabitants,” he says. “I’ve seen a lot of good things, and I’ve seen a lot of stupid things.”
He omitted to specify the deciders in the cases of the stupid things he’d seen, or even which side they were on.
Discussing one of the incidents in which Iranian Revolutionary Guard speedboats showboated around and taunted American warships in the Strait of Hormuz,
Fallon’s eyes narrow and his voice becomes that whisper: “This is not how a country that wants to be a big boy in the neighborhood behaves. How are we supposed to take these guys seriously as players in the region? You’d like to deal with them as big-league players, but when they do this, it’s very tough.”As before, there is the text and the subtext. Admiral William Fallon shakes his head slowly, and his eyes say, These guys have no idea how much worse it could get for them. I am the reasonable one.
And time will tell whether being reasonable will cost Admiral William Fallon his command.
Well, it has. I’m not one to glorify any part of military life or militarism, so I don’t mean to put Fox on a pedestal. I agree with Gibbon:
…as long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.
Nowadays, as Thorstein Veblen pointed out, we’re more likely to vanquish our enemies with lawyers than soldiers. If you’re a threat to win a governorship we want, we’ll find a way to put you in jail on trivial or even trumped-up charges. If you’re a rising star, we’ll investigate your private life, and tell lies about your name, history, family, and religion. If you get elected President on a platform you copied from us, we’ll impeach you for adultery.
And if you try to stop our war machine, we’ll run over you.
In case you think for a moment that the Feds’ investigation of Eliot Spitzer was just law enforcement business as usual and mighty bad luck for the governor, read this story. Now read it again, substituting Arnold Schwarzenegger for Eliot Spitzer, and ask yourself if an investigation would have even gotten off the ground. Pay particular attention to the moment when it became obvious to the Republican U.S. Attorney that no tax fraud or political corruption was involved.
Addendum: see this for a fuller treatment. The whole mess is starting to “shine and stink like rotten mackerel by moonlight,” as John Randolph of Virginia once said.
Brother Bill emails:
This lead graced the front page of the Pocono Record last week:“If sewage could talk, it might one day say, “What a long, strange trip it has been.”
Actually sewage can talk, Bill, and here’s the kind of thing it keeps saying:
”We're in a battle with evil men — I call them evil because if you murder the innocent to achieve a political objective, you're evil.”
Eliot Spitzer seems to be an arrogant and unpleasant but nevertheless useful human being who has generally opposed the true evildoers in our society. It is probably a net loss to the nation that he will be driven from office by a 98-year-old law resurrected for the purpose by a corrupt Justice Department fresh from Roveroading another useful Democratic governor to prison for seven years.
But that’s life, in Bush’s America anyway. You win one, you lose a couple dozen.
So let’s consider another aspect of this case. Here’s a snippet from the government’s complaint against Governor Spitzer. (Later on in this exercise you will be asked to enlarge it, but be warned that it’s a long load for dial-up connections.)
First of all there are no typographical or spelling errors; nor are there any, as nearly as I could tell, in the whole 55-page document from which this comes. Either it’s the product of an organization run by rigid control freaks or of a spell-check program.
Probably not the latter, however, since the document appears to have been typed on a manual typewriter. Was it, though? There are digitized fonts that mimic typewriters, schmutz and all. But now click to enlarge the image and examine the word “that” in the sixth line from the bottom.
Note the difference between the first “t” and the second. Note the difference between that “that” and that “that” that appears almost directly below it. Plainly what we have here is a document hand-typed by a female (almost certainly) human who exerted, as humans do, varying pressures with each keystroke.
In the Hughes Memorial Library in West Cornwall, Connecticut, (open Saturdays, depending on the weather) between 10 and 12:30) there is just such a typewriter as the one used by the human being referenced above. It is there for the amusement of children, who mash down the keys with varying degrees of force, usually considerable, and enjoy the clack as the corresponding letters magically appear on a sheet of paper wrapped around a device known as a “platen.”
Once I saw an adult sit down before this old Royal and bat out a few words for nostalgia’s sake. When she got to the end of the line the machine seemed to jam. The librarian had to remind her to use the lever to the left of the platen, called a “carriage return.”
So how come the FBI still uses manual typewriters in the twenty-first century? Is it because the complaint is based on a 98-year-old law, dusted off and set back up on its feet? If you were invoking the Monroe Doctrine, would you have to use a quill pen?
Or did J. Edgar impose some weird typewriter protocol (spaces between the periods in ellipses, for instance, as in the above sample) that the fearful Fibbies still follow lest they offend the old deviate himself, down where he twirls in his tutu for the Devil?
From McClatchy Newspapers:
WASHINGTON — An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network.The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam's regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime…
The Caballero's Way, a story by O. Henry, begins with this:
The Cisco Kid had killed six men in more or less fair scrimmages, had murdered twice as many (mostly Mexicans), and had winged a larger number whom he modestly forbore to count. Therefore a woman loved him.
The operative word here, of course, is “therefore.” To kill, particularly outside your own tribe, gets a guy laid. Who’s to blame for this stupidity? Men? Women? Hollywood? TV? Hemingway? Darwin?
In any event there it is, deep in America’s amygdala and apparently inoperable. We are a nation of cowards, firing at shadows and fawning over our hired guns. With no evident sign of embarassment we are even capable of such pathetic cringes as this:
There's a national movement pushing for law students to have the right to carry guns on campus. They've even got an official acronym: SCCC (Students for Concealed Carry on Campus). The group formed in response to the VA Tech shootings last year, and currently claims to have more than 16,000 members…
Still mongering fear after all these years of plummeting polls, America’s protector spake thus this week to his troops at the Department of Homeland Security:
We're in a battle with evil men — I call them evil because if you murder the innocent to achieve a political objective, you're evil.The events of September the 11th, 2001 demonstrated the threats of a new era. I say "new" because we found that oceans which separate us from separate — different continents no longer separate us from danger. We saw the cruelty of the terrorists and extremists, and we glimpsed the future they intend for us. In other words, there's some serious lessons on September the 11th that it's important for all Americans to remember.
Two years ago, Osama bin Laden warned the American people: "Operations are under preparation, and you will see them on your own ground once they are finished." All of us, particularly those charged with protecting the American people, need to take the words of this enemy very seriously. And I know you do.
At this moment, somewhere in the world, a terrorist is planning an attack on us. I know that's an inconvenient thought for some, but it is the truth. And the people in this hall understand that truth. We have no greater responsibility, no greater charge, than to stop our enemies and to protect our fellow citizens.
The wonder of it all is that the nation doesn’t collapse in laughter or shame or both when Bush trots out this evildoer stuff. Let us start by understanding that most fights are not between a good guy and a bad guy. Most fights are between two bad guys. The good guys aren’t hanging around bars looking for trouble; they’re home playing with the kids or watching other people fight on TV.
So, in the interest of reason and common sense, let’s drop all this crap about what a rotten swine Saddam was. Of course he was. He deserved to die a thousand times over.
Let’s put him at ten on the evil meter, okay? And let’s assume that leaving this butcher in power over the last five years would have resulted in the murders of 100,000 innocent Iraqis.
Now let’s do the math, our unit of measurement being Iraqi corpses. According to every calculation of Iraqi casualties, even the Pentagon’s, George W. Bush outscores Saddam on the evil meter by at least five to one and probably closer to ten to one.
Set against that pile of corpses Bush’s good intentions will count for nothing when his personal End Time comes. St. Peter knows what the road to hell is paved with; if Bush actually believes in a Judgment Day, he’d better hope he’s wrong.
More disgusting news from Halliburton, Vice President Richard Cheney’s favorite war profiteer:
…The inspector general's report said some troops noticed problems with the water. Between October 2004 and May 2005, troops at Camp Ar Ramadi said bathwater was discolored and had an unusual odor. The report said KBR failed to treat the nonpotable water and monitor water quality during the same period.At Camp Q-West, KBR inappropriately delivered chlorinated wastewater for showers and latrines without informing military preventive medicine officials, the report said. "KBR did not monitor or record the quality of water at point-of-use containers before April 2006, even though the ... contract required the company to do so," the report added.
Medical records for troops at Camp Q-West indicated 38 cases of illnesses commonly attributed to problem water. These include skin abscesses, cellulitis, skin infections and diarrhea. Doctors diagnosed 24 of the cases in January and February 2006, the same period when medical officials warned of a rise in bacterial infections at the base…
More news from Halliburton, which as you will recall has Vice President Dick Cheney on its payroll to this day. I urge you to read it the whole story in the Boston Globe. Benumbed as we are from our long wallow in the squalor of the most corrupt administration in American history, this still retains the power to shock.
CAYMAN ISLANDS — Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation’s top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in this tropical tax haven.When Texas pipe-fitter Danny Langford applied for unemployment compensation after being let go by Service Employers International Inc., he was rejected, he was told, because he worked for a foreign company.
More than 21,000 people working for KBR in Iraq — including about 10,500 Americans — are listed as employees of two companies that exist in a computer file on the fourth floor of a building on a palm-studded boulevard here in the Caribbean. Neither company has an office or phone number in the Cayman Islands.
The Defense Department has known since at least 2004 that KBR was avoiding taxes by declaring its American workers as employees of Cayman Islands shell companies, and officials said the move allowed KBR to perform the work more cheaply, saving Defense dollars…
Can we assume that the ever-vigilant, ever-honorable Democrats in Congress will discuss whether this incompetence rises to the level of criminality? Or will they just try to use it for electoral advantage?
During his 2003 investigations it was startling to Mike Hurley, the commission member in charge of investigating intelligence, and the other investigators on his team, just what had gone on in the spring and summer of 2001 - just how often and how aggressively the White House had been warned that something terrible was about to happen. Since nobody outside the Oval Office could know exactly what Tenet had told Bush during his morning intelligence briefings, the presidential and senior briefings were Tenet’s best defence to any claim that the CIA had not kept Bush and the rest of the Government well-informed about the threats. They offered a strong defence.The team’s investigators began to match up the information in the senior briefings and they pulled together a timeline of the headlines just from the senior briefings in the northern spring and summer:
“Bin Ladin Planning Multiple Operations” (April 20) and “Bin Ladin Threats Are Real” (June 30) It was especially troubling for Hurley’s team to realise how many of the warnings were directed to the desk of one person: Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Adviser. Emails from the National Security Council’s counter-terrorism director, Richard Clarke, showed that he had bombarded Rice with messages about terrorist threats. He was trying to get her to focus on the intelligence she should have been reading each morning in the presidential and senior briefings
“Bin Ladin Public Profile May Presage Attack” (May 3)
“Terrorist Groups Said Co-operating on US Hostage Plot” (May 23)
“Bin Ladin’s Networks’ Plans Advancing” (May 26)
“Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent” (June 23)
“Bin Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats” (June 25)
“Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile Attacks” (June 30),
“Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays” (July 2)
Susan Sontag, who read books and learned from them and was in many other ways a suspicious person, wrote the following a few days after 9/11. Fools and warhogs, always in the majority, promptly called her a despicable traitor to all that America holds dear. Time has told.
The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public.Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq?
And if the word “cowardly” is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards…
Let’s by all means grieve together. But let’s not be stupid together. A few shreds of historical awareness might help us understand what has just happened, and what may continue to happen. “Our country is strong,” we are told again and again. I for one don’t find this entirely consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that’s not all America has to be.
President Bush at a press appearance in Crawford with Prime Minister Rasmussen of Denmark:
Q: Thank you, Mr. President, and thank you for bringing us to the great weather.THE PRESIDENT: Yes, back to Texas, man. I cut his teeth in Texas. (Uneasy Laughter.)
(Actually the transcript doesn’t say “uneasy.” I just figured the laughter had to be uneasy, because otherwise it would have to be servile, and these guys and gals of the press are watchdogs, not cringing curs.)
Seems to me that these are the only poll numbers that Democratic voters, delegates and super-delegates ought to be paying serious attention to. And these match-up figures have held fairly steady throughout the ups and downs of the primary season.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain trails Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in hypothetical matchups, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released on Wednesday.Illinois Sen. Obama leads McCain by 12 percentage points — 52 percent to 40 percent; New York Sen. Clinton leads McCain by 6 points — 50 percent to 44 percent, the poll found.
This piece of mine ran several days ago in Salon. com. To see it in its original home, go here. One of the commenters, Blueturtle, made a point that hadn’t occurred to me, but seems aesthetically solid:
Beyond the Left's often correct belief that wearing the flag is facile posturing, there is a larger, deeper problem with the lapel pin.Isn't it the great unspoken truth that the American flag is simply ugly? Bold, primary colors parceled out in too small stripes and indeterminant stars. It has always paled in comparison to the understated tricolor of France, the composite crosses of the Union Jack, or the beautiful exoticism of any number of developing nations' standards.
The stars and bars speaks for a nation that never could really figure out what it stood for. In response, states' rights and muddled federalism left us with a compromise guidon of cobbled together symbols.
Obama knows that will clash with any outfit that is not made for preschoolers in their bold jumpers.
Flag Pins are for Losers — Literally
Is a man fit to be commander-in-chief if he won't even fly the flag from his buttonhole?
Does that man, Barack Obama, think he's "too good — too patriotic! — to wear a flag pin on his chest?" Because that's what William Kristol believes.
Grow up, the Chicago Sun-Times advises: "Oh for Pete's sake, Senator Obama, pin the darnn American flag to your chest. Otherwise, the poor dope will "catch a world of hurt for ... polarizing comments [that] make him sound like a hardened leftist."
Has Obama's failure to wear a flag pin really done "more damage to his White House hopes than a bomb bursting in air?" The New York Daily News thinks so.
Or is it just possible that Barack Obama knows more about getting to be president than all of these pundits laid end to end, as they probably should be? Is it possible that an empty buttonhole might actually help a candidate of either party, now that the nation's number one flag-wearer is circling the bowl with the lowest presidential approval ratings ever recorded?
Let's go beyond the Beltway and take a look. Out there on the campaign trail, who's actually been wearing lapel flags in this race and who hasn't -- and how's that been working out for you guys anyway?
On April 26 of last year in Orangeburg, South Carolina, the Democrats held the first debate in the campaign that never ends. First thing that morning the candidates were all in a hurry to throw on their clothes, grabbing any old thing that came to hand. Yeah, right.
It was the most important day of their political lives to date, and they agonized over each tiny sartorial decision. Windsor knot or four-in-hand? Blue or red?
Here's where everybody came out on lapel flags. The photo coverage of the debate shows that only Joe Biden decided to wear one. The other seven -- Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, Bill Richardson, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and Chris Dodd — went without.
Of course you'd expect that from a bunch of surrender monkeys, wouldn't you? So let's turn to the Republicans, tough-talking patriots to a man. Their first debate came a week later in Simi Valley, California. And sure enough, Tommy Thompson, Tom Tancredo and Rudy Giuliani, nonveterans all, were careful to pin on their flags.
Wait a minute, though. Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Sam Brownback, Jim Gilmore, Duncan Hunter, and Mike Huckabee all left their little flags back home on the bureau. And so did John McCain. Hmm.
By May 15, at the Columbia, South Carolina Republican debate, Tancredo had stopped wearing his flag. By June, Democratic candidate Joe Biden had deflagged as well.
The only candidate of either party who chose to add a flag in the course of the campaign was Bill Richardson, who flagged up toward the end of the summer. With Biden's flag gone by then, Richardson had become the only Democratic candidate to wear a flag in the debates.
On the Republican side Tommy Thompson continued to wear his flag till the bitter end, which came in August when he placed sixth in the Iowa straw polls. The empty Thompson slot was filled the following month by Fred. The lobbyist/actor picked up Tommy's banner, so to speak, and was still wearing it in January when he, too, dropped out.
Rudy Giuliani, who probably wears a flag to bed, dropped out a week later after racking up a pathetic 15 percent of the vote in the Florida Republican primary.
Do we see a subtle pattern emerging here? Every presidential candidate of both parties who ever wore a lapel flag during the debates, even as briefly as Biden, bought himself a one-way ticket to Palookaville.
And every major party candidate who remains viable today — John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — has seldom if ever been spotted with a flag in his or her lapel.
Don't think the press hasn't been noticing, either. To this day there has been a steady drumbeat of silence in the media over the flagless-ness of Huckabee's, Clinton's and McCain's lapels.
Nor would Obama's disrespect have made news if only he had thought to point the finger at everyone else still in the race when a TV reporter posed his trivia question back in October. But instead he gave an honest if incomplete answer.
Obama said he had worn a pin after 9/11 but stopped once he began to notice, and here I paraphrase wildly but no doubt accurately, that most of the people still wearing lapel flags were assholes.
On the evidence of the campaign so far, Obama wasn't the only one who noticed.
Clinton, Huckabee and McCain, we may say with confidence, would wear anything or even nothing at all if they thought it would help them win the nomination. Then why, when it came to miniature flags, did the three join Obama in opting for nothing?
Dosed with Pentothal, each would most likely come up with a variant of the answer Obama had hinted at: that lapel flags no longer signify simple patriotism, but something that you don't want sticking to your fingers these days..
For these past six years and more, men with those bright little flags apparently riveted to their lapels have fed the voters a daily diet of fear, secrecy, lies, and a cruel war with neither point nor end.
No sensible politician would want to march under this tiny, metallic banner. Just look at all the fallen stars who did.
The crisis call did not come at 3 a.m. It came much later in the morning and our leader's reaction was to continue reading to the children, then to go to ground instead of leading and calming the nation, and only then belatedly to deplore the attack that killed some 3,000 Americans on that clear September day.
Next he asked all Americans to support a counterattack by shopping, following which he invaded a country that had nothing to do with the attack on us.
It’s worth remembering what the GOP's president really did and did not do as the Republicans are set to run an Iraq War enabler to succeed him. Meanwhile the Democrats are wavering between two candidates, one of them another Iraq enabler who, like her rival (as well as Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Reagan, Carter, etc.) and like herself, has little foreign policy experience.
Things aren’t as bad as you thought. Once again, they’re worse. This excerpt is from James Fallows’s look back at the Hart-Rudman Commission which, as few now alive remember, predicted in early 2001 that terrorism would be our greatest national security problem.
The commission was wrong, of course. Our greatest national security problem lurked in the West Wing of the White House — and also, it turns out, back in the vice-presidential mansion at Number One Observatory Circle.
At the first meeting, one Republican woman on the commission said that the overwhelming threat was from China. Sooner or later the U.S. would end up in a military showdown with the Chinese Communists. There was no avoiding it, and we would only make ourselves weaker by waiting. No one else spoke up in support.The same thing happened at the second meeting — discussion from other commissioners about terrorism, nuclear proliferation, anarchy of failed states, etc, and then this one woman warning about the looming Chinese menace. And the third meeting too. Perhaps more.
Finally, in frustration, this woman left the commission.
“Her name was Lynne Cheney,” Hart said. “I am convinced that if it had not been for 9/11, we would be in a military showdown with China today.” Not because of what China was doing, threatening, or intending, he made clear, but because of the assumptions the Administration brought with it when taking office. (My impression is that Chinese leaders know this too, which is why there are relatively few complaints from China about the Iraq war. They know that it got the U.S. off China’s back!)
This just in from Judy in Canada:
Hello. all you friends south of the border. Paul and I were so disgusted at the news that our Rove-aping nasty prime minister, Harper, managed to give Obama problems at a critical moment in his campaign that Paul stayed awake most of the night stewing about it.I was so shocked by the coverage it was getting that I wanted to write all the Sunday talk show types and tell them that Harper in no way represents the majority of Canadians. His is a minority government far to the right of 65% of the population.
He’s a roll-up of Bush, Cheney and Rove. Puts out awful attack ads, sets new foreign policy that makes most of us cringe, refuses to get serious about climate change. But worst of all, we’ll have a tough time getting rid of him because the Opposition is made up of four parties — and the Liberals, the largest and the most centrist, with a progressive leader, are still struggling among themselves after a long divisive leadership race 18 months ago.
So that’s the frustration we’re feeling here today as we as we realize that Harper is every bit the malicious bully we’ve thought and more. We’re ready for change we can believe in! And we share the concerns about NAFTA. How about co-operation on fair trade? That would be nice. Here are two stories that illustrate the way our PM operates.
With all due respect to rising tides...
What I know of history seems to fit the proposition that power hierarchies thrive on secrecy and information management, while populist reforms tend to wither and petrify without the sunshine of open exchange.
In that light the court decision in the Wikileaks case is an encouraging sign in a couple ways.
First, the existence of a site that posts documents that governments and corporations would prefer to hide has in a sense been affirmed as within the law. But it wasn’t just a victory for the First Amendment; the judge was impressed by the argument that the information was already being mirrored in a variety of countries around the world, so publication could no longer be enjoined. The geekosphere is crowing about the impotence of government as against our beloved and all-providing internet. And people in government and corporate bureaucracies who occasionally find opportunities to inform the public have an outlet to help them do that, one that’s survived its first court test.
Second, the whole legal contretemps brought a lot of attention to Wikileaks, a relatively new site happy for the news coverage, whose mission statement begins:
Wikileaks is developing an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. Our primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations. We aim for maximum political impact. Our interface is identical to Wikipedia and usable by all types of people. We have received over 1.2 million documents so far from dissident communities and anonymous sources.We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies. All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people. We believe this scrutiny requires information. Historically that information has been costly — in terms of human life and human rights. But with technological advances — the internet, and cryptography — the risks of conveying important information can be lowered.
Wikileaks opens leaked documents up to stronger scrutiny than any media organization or intelligence agency can provide.
That will help. If we read the documents.
It doesn’t require an extensive search to find an example of power heirarchies and information management: we don’t have single-payer health care like all the other so-called grown-up countries because private industry is making huge profits by failing to keep us as healthy as citizens of other countries who pay a lot less. And even with all that money we pay, our health-care system makes more errors than other countries experience, our record-keeping and coördination is worse, and more of us go without health care for economic reasons. Long story short: our health-care system is so far from being the best in the world that the opposing position can only be maintained for ideological reasons. I expect our system’s the best advertised, though.
Certainly there are other influences pushing the debate away from government-managed health care. The philosophical position that the federal government shouldn’t manage things has a lot of supporters, and it’s a philosophy with some sense. I too prefer to minimize government activity, and to keep as much of what must be done local as is reasonable.
Still, there’s more that needs to be done at the federal level than defense and air traffic control. The overall superiority of federal single-payer health care in the real world has been demonstrated in other countries; the study I just cited considered Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany, plus the US, the only country without government-run health care. We’ve seen it work here in the proto-socialist Medicare program as well, which everyone nowadays knows is more efficient than the private health-care industry.
Universal single-payer averages the risks and costs across the greatest number and the most accurate cross-section, namely everyone. Expenses can be spread out over larger bases, and reduced by high-volume shopping techniques. Results include a higher level of care overall and somewhat more controllable costs, but perhaps most importantly a system focused on getting and keeping people healthy, rather than on maximizing profit for parent corporations.
If the goal of single-payer is obvious, the path toward that goal is less obvious; the opposition will be fierce, and extremely well funded. I kind of like the two-pronged attack on the problem, prong one creating a single-payer Medicare-like system, and prong two providing a framework for private industry to compete against the government through private hospitals, HMOs, insurance, and all the familiar tools. Citizens can choose either system. Let the market decide, and may the best system win.
The realization that government could have a positive impact on our health care seems to have sunk into the American consciousness quite broadly. Despite the nearly complete absence of reporting on successes of single-payer systems from major US media outlets, Americans have heard of this, and they understand that Medicare works. They know you can’t count on the government, but how much less can you count on the insurance company? Which one has an inherent direct interest in screwing you?
It kinda depends on what we want. If keeping the population healthy is the goal, universal single-payer is the method. If insurance companies are built into whatever health plan this country designs, then the point of the plan will be to profit them.
But even more it depends on what we’re willing to fight for.
Whoever we vote for in the primary or the general election, we should pressure all our elected representatives to create a decent health care system like everyone else has. They won’t be able to do it against entrenched opposition without an overwhelming push from below.
Truly amazing stuff. Go here to see what this is all about. Thanks to Asher Pavel for the link.
Late last month I reprinted (reposted?) a piece of mine that originally ran at Salon.com. I argued that Obama shouldn’t be slammed for borrowing words from another man’s speech, since political oratory has the same relationship to plagiarism that life forms have to carbon. As an example, I gave a line I once wrote for Mondale which has since been lifted thousands of times: "In Reagan's America, a rising tide lifts all yachts."
I just now got around to reading all the responses on Salon.com, and I’m glad I did. The 43rd and last comment rewarded me with one of those surreal flashes where for a moment you wonder whether it’s you or the other guy who just got off the space ship:
Jerome Doolittle was a late arrival (by at least 21 years) to the rising tide metaphor: JFK used it in a speech in Arkansas in 1963: "As the income of Michigan rises, so does the income of the United States. A rising tide lifts all the boats and as Arkansas becomes more prosperous so does the United States". The phrase is also attributed in Wikipedia to Sean Lemass, Irish prime minister, 1959-1964.What's odd is Doolittle's change of words from "boats" to "yachts". A yacht is a symbol of lavish discretionary income, while a boat is a neutral object. A rising tide that lifts all yachts suggests a tide that favors the rich—or does so to my ear, at least. In 1984, Doolittle lit on what was already a cliche — and seriously weakened it in the attempt to make it his own.
From Reuters. I’m guessing that Stiglitz knows a little something about economics, since he won the Nobel Prize for it. (On the other hand Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize and what he knows about peace could not only fit in the barrel of a gun, but did.)
Meanwhile, the U.S. government is severely underestimating the cost of the war, Joseph Stiglitz and co-author Linda Bilmes write in their book, "The Three Trillion Dollar War" (W.W. Norton), due to be published on Monday…To illustrate how the money could be spent elsewhere, Bilmes cited the annual U.S. budget for autism research — $108 million — which is spent every four hours in Iraq. A trillion dollars could have hired 15 million additional public school teachers for a year or provided 43 million students with four-year scholarships to public universities, the book says.