During the Vietnam war a bootleg tape called “What the Captain Meant to Say” circulated among the press corps. It purported to be the recording of a press interview in which an Air Force pilot repeated puts his foot in it and a Public Affairs Officer repeatedly breaks in to clear up the mess. A sample from memory:

Pilot: We were trying to hit the Dim Sum Bridge, but we must have missed the son of a bitch by a good half mile at least.

P.R.O: What the captain meant to say was that his squadron cratered the approaches to the Dim Sum Bridge.

Along the same lines, here’s what our Pigmy President said five years ago tomorrow on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln:

“Major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” Bush said at the time … The “Mission Accomplished” banner was prominently displayed above him — a move the White House came to regret as the display was mocked and became a source of controversy …

“The banner should have been much more specific and said Mission Accomplished for These Sailors Who are on This Ship on Their Mission,” White House press secretary Dana Perino said Wednesday.

All right, let’s see you resist clicking on these two links, both of which are perfectly legitimate:

Number one: Thirty-five-year-old man holds breath underwater for 17 minutes, four seconds.

Number two: Sixty-nine-year-old man grows new finger, as shown on video.

New math from the Secretary of Defense:

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) — The U.S. Navy has temporarily added a second aircraft carrier in the Gulf as a “reminder” to Iran, but this was not an escalation of American forces in the region, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Tuesday …

“This deployment has been planned for a long time,” Gates said. “I don’t think we’ll have two carriers there for a protracted period of time. So I don’t see it as an escalation. I think it could be seen, though, as a reminder.”

It’s amazing how people who make a living, and an excellent one, doing something complicated and involved can at times seem utterly clueless about it. Take, for instance, several members of the Phoenix Suns at this for them unfortunate stage of their season.

The Suns, you’ll no doubt recall, are the run-and-gun team featuring Steve Nash, the sometimes floppy-haired anti-war Canadian point guard whose sensational passes as he pinballs around the court, plus his deadly three-point aim, have brought him fame, awards, and fans from many nations, but so far no championship. He seems a likable sort, if not particularly deep. The Wikipedia entry on him, for example, records his reluctance to do a lot of endorsements, and his wish to work with socially responsible companies, both quite admirable, as well as his longstanding relationship with Nike.

Last year, the playoff series between Nash’s Suns and their rivals the San Antonio Spurs, who’d already knocked them out of the playoffs twice in prior years, was a knock-down drag-out affair, not settling for mere arguments and posturing, but extending to hard fouls and rule violations resulting in suspensions.

In the end the Suns lost, and one Sun was so begrudging of his opponents’ victory that he’s sometimes satirized by the substition of “whiner” for “mire” at the end of his name. This year the networks seemed to play up that image in the broadcasts I saw, using as his stock photo a shot of him with arms out, palms up, and a look of disbelief on his face. The stock Spurs photos that shared the screen showed players making layups or snatching rebounds.

Despite his lack of the big ego common to basketball players (particularly West Coast point guards, not to mention anyone’s name, or call him by the name of the felony he committed), Nash’s skill as the quarterback of his team is beyond question. Late in last year’s series the Suns lost an extremely closely contested game. At one point late in that game occurred one of the hard fouls the teams exchanged; this one left Nash’s nose bleeding on the sidelines. Until they could staunch the bleeding and get some bandage to cover it, by rule he had to be off the court. During that period the Suns fell apart on offense, exhibiting a tenderfoot’s sense of stability and direction; and by the time Nash returned it was too late. To top it all off, his children’s godfather, Dirk Nowitzki, beat him for the individual trophy.

Nash was instrumental in transforming the Suns into one of the top teams of the Western Conference. He led the Suns to the Western Conference Finals in the 2004–05 season, and was named the league’s Most Valuable Player. He was named MVP again in the 2005–06 season, and missed out on a third consecutive MVP title to Nowitzki the next season. Named by ESPN in 2006 as the ninth greatest point guard of all time, Nash has led the league in assists and free throw percentage at various points in his career, although he has occasionally been criticised for his poor defence. He is ranked as one of the top players in league history for three point shooting, free throw shooting, total assists and assists per game.

Nash, who is married, is also heavily involved in charity and humanitarian work. His other interests include soccer and film-making. In 2006, Time magazine named Nash as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. On 28 December 2007 it was announced that Nash will receive Canada’s highest civilian honour, the Order Of Canada.

You can count on Time magazine to keep you informed about what’s really going on.

In the most recent offseason, the Suns were in conflict with four-time All-Star Shawn Marion. Like many offensive-minded players, he considered himself underused, in his case as the third option in the offense after Nash and Stoudamire; thus he expressed, somewhat explicitly, his desire to leave. Rather than lose him for nothing, the Suns decided to seek compensation for Marion by trading him, and a deal was cobbled together with the Miami Heat: Marion and Marcus Banks to Miami in exchange for Shaquille O’Neal. One might think from the respective records — Phoenix tied for fifth in the deep Western Conference at 55-27, Miami trailed the league by five games at 15-67 — that history’s verdict was in favor of Phoenix.

’Tis not so. After last year’s thrilling six-game series, this year the Spurs won four of the first five, and will get a few days to rest before the next round. How, Suns fans are no doubt asking, could this happen — we added the legendary Shaq to our A-list offense, yet we lost faster this year than last? Some of the Suns themselves seem uncertain as to the answers.

“We went up against a team that knows how to win,” Suns coach Mike D’Antoni said. “Every time we needed to close something out — a half or a game — they got the best of us. That’s why they’re the champions.”

A team that knows how to win? The Spurs finished one game ahead of the Suns for the season. But they knock the Suns out of the playoffs once again.

“They beat us with the intangibles,” said [Raja] Bell, who had 14 points. “They beat us with the little things. They beat us with the gamesmanship. They beat us with the attention to detail. The game plan. The commitment to doing all the little things to win games.

“That’s why they’re the champs. That’s why year-in and year-out no matter what people say about them they find a way to be right there in the mix and vie for a championship.”

What kind of training leads to improvement at the intangibles? In fact, how does one even know whether improvement is happening? Other than the the won-lost record, of course.

Here, note the quiet reference to the departure of Marion:

“Every year it seems like we always play the Spurs, and they beat us every single time,” [Amare] Stoudemire said. “As long as I’m here we’re going to break it sooner or later, because I’m tired of losing to these guys. I’m sick and fed up.”

Most telling of all, perhaps, are the words of the team’s leader, Nash.

“I think on paper we have more talent than they do. But I think their experience, their commitment and understanding of what they’re trying to do is greater than ours. Their ability to play together and make small plays on both ends of the floor is unsurpassed.”

Stock statements of self-belief, no doubt. But what I find striking is that other than one instance in the Wikipedia entry, the concept of defense didn’t arise, and the single use by Wikipedia was to note that Nash isn’t considered a good defensive player.

San Antonio, on the other hand, is consistently among the top two or three teams in the league in defense, as measured by statistics such as points allowed per game and opponents’ shooting percentage. They feature Tim Duncan, whose Shaq-supplied nickname is The Big Fundamental, but they also have some great outside shooters, some great lane penetrators, and most of all a team-wide commitment to play the real game: defense.

In basketball defense wins, over the long term, for a good reason. Shooting the ball is very much a touch sort of thing; there are good days, when you can throw up a hook with your off hand confidantly, and bad days, when you miss layups. Defense requires quickness, but it’s mainly effort and knowledge. If you’re willing to work, and you know what to do, you can be part of a team that plays excellent defense. Thus defense will be there when you need it if you’re willing to put in the energy, while your shooting touch can disappear at any moment and be gone for a quarter or so.

Steve Nash, a wonderful point guard on the offensive end, seems to me a more athletic version of his coach, Mike D’Antoni, whose style of play was similar: quick, good hands, excellent passer, good outside shooter (though not as good as Nash), middling defense. And relatively short, which means easy to shoot over.

It seems to me that Phoenix continues to do the same thing, expecting a different result. The idea that a team which is great on offense but so-so on defense might not be able to beat, in fact might be less talented than, a team that’s very good on offense and great on defense is beyond their horizon.

The Phoenixians have more talent because they run faster and jump higher; what else is talent about? Their announced strategy is to shoot the ball within seven seconds of touching it. (Presumably Shaq will take up a location in one half of the court and remain there.)

But there is talent also in the mind of the player who thinks, What is my opponent planning? How can I frustrate those intentions? How can I turn the situation to my advantage? There is talent in the hand that anticipates the shot and deflects the ball to a teammate. Most of all, there is talent in the team that dedicates itself to defending its own goal first and foremost. On a team, the big stars are comfortable with their own numbers for the year dropping, because the only number that really counts is going up: team wins.

The final series I look forward to is the Spurs and the Celtics. But the league will probably rig in the rapist.

Update: It appears that D’Antoni’s version of run and gun in the desert has come to an end. J.A. Adande at ESPN thinks the Suns will now admit the need for defense. I think they’ll find another fast-break coach and look for some players who are a bit faster, or can jump a bit higher.

The Associated Press looks on the bright side:

WASHINGTON — Soldiers who need special waivers to get into the Army because of bad behavior go AWOL more often and face more courts-martial. But they also get promoted faster and re-enlist at a higher rate, according to an internal military study obtained by The Associated Press.

The Army study late last year concluded that taking a chance on a well-screened applicant with a criminal, bad driving or drug record usually pays off. And both the Army and the Marines have been bringing in more recruits with blemished records.

This will come as no surprise to those who have studied Percival Christopher Wren’s seminal works on the subject of criminal recruitment. The novice may profitably begin with Beau Geste, Soldiers of Misfortune, and Flawed Blades: Tales from the Foreign Legion.

What less can you expect from a court once headed by a GOP hack who got his start by intimidating black and Hispanic voters in Arizona? Rehnquist would be proud of today’s ruling.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that states can require voters to produce photo identification without violating their constitutional rights, validating Republican-inspired voter ID laws.

In a splintered 6-3 ruling, the court upheld Indiana's strict photo ID requirement, which Democrats and civil rights groups said would deter poor, older and minority voters from casting ballots. Its backers said it was needed to prevent fraud…

The case concerned a state law, passed in 2005, that was backed by Republicans as a way to deter voter fraud. Democrats and civil rights groups opposed the law as unconstitutional and called it a thinly veiled effort to discourage elderly, poor and minority voters — those most likely to lack proper ID and who tend to vote for Democrats.

Maybe everybody else knew this already, but I’m damned if I did. More good news on energy, brought to you by the agribusiness lobby and the quadrennial bad joke known as the Iowa caucuses:

Conventional gas delivers more energy than a gallon that contains ethanol. If it’s a gallon of E-10, which is a blend of 10 percent ethanol and conventional gas now widely available in the Kansas City area, there’s an energy difference of about 3.4 percent.

Now that may not seem like much when you’re topping off the tank this week. But over the course of a year of normal driving, it would take an additional 40 gallons of E-10 to go the same distance as conventional gas. If they were both priced the same, it would mean an extra $120.

If it’s E-85, a blend containing 85 percent ethanol that can be used in specially equipped vehicles, the energy loss soars and more than offsets its lower cost, even though E-85 is about 60 cents per gallon less at retail than conventional gas.

Mileage can suffer by about 25 percent with E-85, according to AAA. Over the course of a year, that amounts to an extra 300 gallons of E-85 to go the same distance as when using conventional gas. That means an average household, when the total cost of conventional gas and E-85 are compared, would spend nearly $100 more per year for E-85…

Daniel Levy continues to strike me as one of the most intelligent and informed commentators on Middle East issues, and a good writer to boot. (And we sure need informed comment on these subjects.) Levy has another fine piece up, this time at TPM, about revelations, or perhaps “revelations”, at Thursday’s Senate and House intelligence committee briefing on the Israeli bomb strike on Syria last September. Of course the briefing was closed, so what we have is from the press conference that followed.

The whole story of the bombing raid has not, I expect, been told. Probably no one knows it. It’s unlikely that anyone in any country has a complete accounting for the actions and inactions of Israel, Syria, and the US, to begin with. It’s unlikely that Israel or the US know precisely what has happening in Syria, or that the Syrians fully understand Israel’s motivations. Certainly each of the three governments includes contending factions, about which more in a moment.

In such situations my instinct is to look to the most reliable sources. Like Seymour Hersh. He’s not right 100% of the time, and his predictions can be pretty pessimistic. But he understands and practices the art of investigative journalism, and as a result generally knows what he’s talking about. My guess is, therefore, that his February report on the raid is currently the best available.

One argument against things being as they seem is that no one’s explained themselves. Why didn’t Syria respond to what under most circumstances would be considered an act of war? Why didn’t it become a UN issue? And why was Israel so circumspect afterward? When it bombed the Osirak reactor in Iraq in 1981, says Hersh, “the Israeli government was triumphant, releasing reconnaissance photographs of the strike and permitting the pilots to be widely interviewed.” Not so this time.

Absent such data, inactions are being analyzed. In addition, pressures continue to be applied from multiple sides, thus causing some doubts about credibility of released information.

Whatever happened in Syria, what happened in Washington on Thursday could have been a propaganda effort. I mean, it’s not inconceivable.

…the evidence and photos, if they are to be taken at face value, were certainly impressive and convincing according to those who attended the briefing. Writing in the Washington Post, Robin Wright did add this note of caution: “The sole photograph shared with reporters depicting Syrian and North Korean officials together did not appear to be the Al Kibar reactor site.”

So how convincing is the evidence, really? Or perhaps more accurately, convincing to whom?

Levy proposes to break this problem into four questions. (One of the oddest features of TPM is the combination of high quality information with an apparent disinterest in typographical niceties such as spelling and punctuation, or in this case consistent capitalization.)

1. What were the Syrians up to and why?
2. Why now, and is it all about Matzah?
3. And If Now, Was It Wise?
4. Israel-Syria: Peace or War

There are those in the US — Levy mentions John Bolton’s Cheshire-cat smile at the press conference that followed the briefing — who would like, and therefore try to instigate, more conflict in the Middle East. Apparently life there has become boring.

Then there are those of us who fear that any more conflict added to an area with an existing surfeit of it would be unwise, and would create a world even less sane and much more dangerous.

In all three countries there are factions in the current governments ferociously opposing each others’ plans. And then there’s Iran, which may in the end be the real point made by those Israeli bombs.

Here in the US, the question is whether to start another war, to be known as Hopefully the Last Gasp of the Neocons. (The title for the sequel is still being debated.) Our government is by no means free of neocon influence. Despite never having been right, they keep insisting that theirs is the only view that makes sense, and they keep making alliances with people who see a profit to be made if they get their wish, a war on Iran.

Oddly enough, this Congressional briefing comes as Israel and Syria are said to be involved in what might turn out to be the forerunner of truly momentous negotiations. Syrian President Assad has reportedly said:

…direct negotiations need a sponsor and, unfortunately, this sponsor can only be the U.S. This is the reality of the situation. But the current administration has no vision and no will to support a peace process… perhaps with a future administration in the U.S., we would be able to speak of direct negotiations.

Why would he be interested in negotiations beginning January 21 of next year? Because Israel’s Ehud Olmert is said to be offering to withdraw from the Golan Heights in return for a peace agreement based on UN resolutions and on international criteria. Levy thinks this is happening right now in part because the Knesset is dispersed for the Passover holiday, so it’s impossible to offer a no-confidence resolution.

As he says,

So here is a delicious and rare moment of Israeli-Syrian agreement: we both want to talk, the nature of the Syria-Israel issue is that we both need US facilitation, the Bush Administration is not interested and so, we will have to wait.

One can only imagine the depth of the chagrin, verging on despair, such negotiations would produce among the neocons, their compatriots in Israel, and the Left Behind crowd. Anything but peace! How can we stop it? How about pretending there’s a nuclear reactor in Syria we have to bomb, at the same time proving that our technology allows us to evade Syrian, and thus Iranian, air defense?

Apparently Olmert was against the release of any new details on the raid. He’s trying not to provoke a possible future negotiating partner. Says Levy:

This is one more demonstration that the neocons who pushed for this have their own agenda — and to the extent to which it dovetails an Israeli agenda — it is the agenda of the opposition on Israel’s far-right and has nothing to do with actual Israeli security interests (or any logical reading of American interests for that matter).

There is still of course the question of why none of this was taken to the IAEA over the past seven months or before.

Perhaps it wasn’t taken to the IAEA because, according to Hersh, their experts already examined the evidence and concluded it was, in Mohammed ElBaradei’s words, “unlikely that this building was a nuclear facility.” It didn’t look like one in a lot of ways; for example, the main building was the right size horizontally but not vertically, and expected support and defense facilities were not nearby.

There are, it appears, factions in the US and in Israel, in both cases on the far right wing, that want war, and will try any trick they can think of to get it. But their time is running out; everyone’s aware of them; and I think the Joint Chiefs know the military can’t handle another war.

More of the Pigmy President’s legacy:

Despite more than 100 published studies by government scientists and university laboratories that have raised health concerns about a chemical compound that is central to the multibillion-dollar plastics industry, the Food and Drug Administration has deemed it safe largely because of two studies, both funded by an industry trade group.

The agency says it has relied on research backed by the American Plastics Council because it had input on its design, monitored its progress and reviewed the raw data.

The compound, bisphenol A (BPA), has been linked to breast and prostate cancer, behavioral disorders and reproductive health problems in laboratory animals.

Full article here:

VIENNA (Reuters) - Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and the government of President George W. Bush were to blame for the U.S. financial crisis, Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz said in a magazine interview.

“This man (Greenspan) has unfortunately made a lot of mistakes,” said former World Bank chief economist Stiglitz, according to a preview of the interview to be published on Monday in profil magazine.

The excerpts below come from a disturbing story in today’s Washington Post. What possible reason could Iran have to be “hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons?” Possibly because the warhogs in the White House, having demonstrated that our existing military is either too small or too mismanaged to pacify a hostile nation of 28 million, are now hell-bent on invading a hostile nation of 65 million?

As for Mullen, what is he, nuts? Navy and Air Force reservists are no doubt capable of killing large numbers of Iranian civilians from a safe distance, but not all 65 million of them. Who’s going to keep the survivors subdued once the shock and awe are over? Read the papers, Mullen. Suicides, epidemic stress disorders, revolving door troop rotations, recruiting felons. On and on. Get real, Mullen. Tell our pigmy president the truth for once, and then retire with honor.

Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said a conflict with Iran would be “extremely stressing” but not impossible for U.S. forces, pointing to reserve capabilities in the Navy and Air Force.

“It would be a mistake to think that we are out of combat capability,” he said at a Pentagon news conference. Speaking of Iran’s intentions, Mullen said: “They prefer to see a weak Iraq neighbor. . . . They have expressed long-term goals to be the regional power…”

In a speech Monday, [Defense Secrtary] Gates said Iran “is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons.” He said war would be “disastrous” but added that “the military option must be kept on the table, given the destabilizing policies of the regime and the risks inherent in a future Iranian nuclear threat.”

From the Charlotte Observer:

RALEIGH — The N.C. Republican Party says it will not back away from a planned TV ad that uses footage of Barack Obama’s controversial former minister, despite objections from the expected GOP presidential nominee, John McCain.

The ad, released Wednesday on the Internet, tries to link the minister to two Democratic candidates for governor, both of whom have endorsed Obama…

McCain called the ad “offensive” and said it “degrades our civics and distracts us from the very real differences we have with the Democrats.”

“From the beginning of this election, I have been committed to running a respectful campaign based upon an honest debate about the great issues confronting America today. I expect all state parties to do so as well,” McCain wrote in an e-mail to Republican chairwoman Linda Daves, asking her to pull the ad.

Actually that’s only part of the story, as Bad Attitudes has learned from a source within the McCain campaign who could not to be identified because he is not authorized to talk straight to the press. Here is the rest of McCain’s email:

Suck on this, you silly bitch. If that ad runs even one more time, the first day I’m in the White House your ass is grass and I’m the lawnmower. Your taxes will be audited from now until death do us part. Your body cavities will be searched every time you get so much as get near an airplane. I will veto any spending bill containing funds for North Carolina until such day as the North Carolina Republican Party drives you from the leadership post which you presently disgrace. And then I will burn down your garage and if it is is an attached one, so much the better. Are we clear now?

Bad Attitudes, for one, is not about to pull down such a shitstorm as this on our own head. Consequently we will do exactly what the Straight Talker wants us to do, which is to give Ms. Daves’ ad a little more out-of-state exposure:

In 1884 at the age of 28 Frank Harris was hired to run the Evening News, a London daily that was losing £40,000 a year.

As the paper was sold principally on the streets, Harris went to a 12-year-old newsboy for advice on what the public was buying. The boy showed him a competing paper’s lurid “bill” — the list of the day’s stories that newsboys displayed on their corners:

“I took the boy critic and a friend of his into my office and with the paper before us sat down to get out a new and sensational bill. Then I sent for the chief sub-editor, Abbott, and showed him the difference. To my amazement he defended his quiet bill. “It’s a Conservative paper,” he said, “and doesn’t shout at you.”

“The boy critic giggled. “You come out to sell paipers,” he cried, “and you’ll soon hev’ to shout!”

The end of it was that I gave the boy ten shillings and five to his friend and made them promise to come to me each week with the bills, good and bad. Those kids taught me what the London hapenny public wanted and I went home laughing at my own high-brow notions.

The ordinary English public did not want thoughts but sensations. I had begun to edit the paper with the best in me at 28; I went back in my life, and when I edited it as a boy of 14 I began to succeed. My obsessions then were kissing and fighting: when I got one or other or both of these interests into every column, the circulation of the paper increased steadily.

The resignation of [managing editor] Marcus W. Brauchli from The Wall Street Journal was less shocking, if only because Mr. Brauchli was appointed by the previous owners of the paper. Since he bought Dow Jones in December for $5.2 billion, Mr. Murdoch has moved swiftly to remake the stately paper, calling for shorter articles and more coverage of politics, culture and even sports — and fewer business articles on the front page.

“Plus ça change,” as the fella said, “plus c’est la même Scheiss."

If I were being honest, I would have to admit that now and then I teeter for a moment or two on the brink. Then I recall that I disagree with most of his announced positions on the matters most important to me, and I recover my balance.

After all, we can overestimate the importance of the occupant of the Oval Office. No doubt the character of the President colors the administration, and thus to some extent the American stage. But it seems to me that the President is an expression of the country, and can only do what the population allows. It’s true that Bush and Cheney initiated a war that most of us didn’t want. It’s also true that, unlike the current one, most US wars were popular at the beginning. I would argue that the biggest single factor in the difference is that people are generally better informed about the world than they used to be.

That may sound like a stretch. I mean, have you ever looked at a McGuffy Reader? Along with a bunch of socialization messages, some racial, some religious, some national, the Readers offered some decent literature, expecting quite a high level of reading accomplishment even in the lower grades. It’s as if they were trying to create thoughtful citizens of the world, or at least the weird world they believed in.

Nowadays we see the world as one big market under God, so we teach our children to be intelligent consumers. But our own actions make it a hard sell. We talk to them about the environment as we drive them to school in our SUVs. We teach them to coöperate and to share, but we invade other countries to steal their oil, and to generate opportunities for war profiteering by our most favored families. We tolerate grotesque inequities in wealth, education, and health care, yet we take pride in our classless democratic society. It’s this kind of stuff that muddles the minds of our kids and leaves them angry and vulnerable to odd theologies.

In the light, or rather fog, of the Zoroastrian dichotomy the dominant US religions incorporate, Americans often see candidates for office as avatars of the forces of Good and Bad. Indeed, one can argue that this problem has worsened in recent years as the parameters of political and religious thought have been stretched to extremes.

But a balanced view requires us also to weigh our technological and experiential advances in the balance. We transmit news around the world nearly instantaneously (though we edit it unmercifully). And people are more sophisticated about propaganda because of their lifelong familiarity with advertising. That doesn’t mean we generally notice it; but when we do, we can decode (most of) it.

As evidence for my “the President’s not so important” thesis, I offer the war in Iraq, in particular the beginning of it. What, you say, doesn’t the fact of the war happening in the face of world-wide protests prove the potency of the office? Yes, but that was never in doubt. Even before Walter Lippman manufactured consent, geostrategists understood the nature and importance of public opinion. And that understanding became quite explicit over time; take, for example (subscription required), Mao and Kissinger talking on Feb. 17, 1973.

Mao: We do not understand your affairs. Your domestic affairs, we don’t understand them. There are many things about foreign policy that we don’t understand either.

Kissinger: You have a more direct, maybe more heroic mode of action than we do. We sometimes have to use more complicated methods because of our domestic situation. But on our fundamental objectives we will act very decisively and without regard for public opinion. So if a real danger develops or hegemonic intentions become active, we will certainly resist them wherever they appear. And as the president said to the chairman, in our own interests, not as a kindness to anyone else.

Just in case you were confused about whose interests come first. Were you? If so, then you might want to consider what you probably already know about the history of the United States entering wars: namely, that popular enthusiasm for each one had to be ginned up, usually by employing various levels of falsehood and fable. Whether the war machine was channeled through William Randolph Hearst in 1898, Woodrow Wilson in 1917, FDR in 1940, or Lyndon Johnson in 1964 — and regardless of what you think about the justifications for those wars — the people were not demanding that the nation go to war. Perhaps this is the source of the general fear of rule by elitists: they keep sending our kids to some overseas conflict, the source and use of which we don’t understand.

There have never been such huge anti-war demonstrations before a war as our latest Middle East adventure provoked. The failure of those protests actually to stop the war was predictable; yet they were still useful, because they let the war machine know we’re paying attention. That may not sound like much, but in historical terms it matters.

History can be read as an attempt to set limits on the power of Thorsten Veblen’s leisure class. This task has consumed millions of lives so far in conflicts like the revolt of the English barons against King John, the Napoleonic wars, and the revolutions of 1848. The founders of the United States, rich white male owners of land, and in many cases slaves, were tired of paying for the instruments of their own subjugation. The civil rights movement was a similar revolt against a form of exploitation both longer in duration and more vicious in character. Likewise, the various attempts at gender equality intend to right wrongs perpetrated over millennia.

As we celebrate the bits of progress we’ve made in some areas, we simultaneously notice a consistent pattern of two steps forward and one step back. Sometimes failing even to reach that standard, we’re left playing whack-a-mole with the Seven Deadlies.

I claim this is due to a fundamental advantage owned by one side in the Great American Class War, the single most taboo subject in our culture of free speech. That advantage consists of nothing more than an overt consciousness of the existence of the war.

As much as we strut our so-called democracy, we Americans struggle still with our own monarchical demons. As Bob Altemeyer tells us, there are plenty of people in the US today who pay lip service to the Constitution and the republic, and even convince themselves that they honor the principles, but would willingly coöperate with a heavily repressive government against their neighbors, according to their own responses about hypothetical situations. Many believe that what the country needs is a strong leader to force everyone to follow the rules (lots of Canadians think this too, it’s not just Americans).

How they reconcile this naïve faith in the strongman theory of government with professed beliefs in freedom and democracy is, to say the least, beyond the scope of this discussion. But Altemeyer’s work leaves no doubt that more of our neighbors fit this category than we might expect or hope. Not convinced? Consider how many Americans will vote for John McCain in November. Think of those who spent their day trying to get within cellphone-camera range of the Pope. High RWAs are everywhere; I still see, here in perhaps the ultimate Left Coast city, bumper stickers proclaiming the owner’s true President to be the no-longer-Presidential Charlton Heston.

The most hopeful aspect of Altemeyer’s data is that those students who arrive at his university classes are able to grow and to some extent transcend their limited viewpoints when their personal experience doesn’t fit with their preconceptions. This, really, is all one can hope from a human, it seems to me. We make models of the world. When we’re young, our models are pretty much mashups of stuff from adults we like and admire. As we grow up, we encounter mismatches between our models and the world around us. Then what? As long as we keep modifying our models, we’re okay; it’s when we begin to berate the world for not matching the model that we create trouble for ourselves and those around us.

Altemeyer’s data suggest that people, even those brought up in very conservative households more oriented toward tradition than thinking things through for yourself, do tend to modify their models when confronted with new information. Education, thankfully, does seem to impart some wisdom along with the socialization.

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again.

Which brings me, finally, to my central question. What is the source of, and where are the supply lines for, the sense of entitlement that oozes from the Clinton machine? As we see this new strain of activism arise among younger Americans, why are Clinton supporters moved to complain that Obama has brought so many into the party?

They make no secret of it ! They BRAG that this new party is made up of Newbies and Youngsters and Independents and CrossOvers from the other party.

Yeah, well, you certainly wouldn’t want to attract any new voters into the party; that would upset the apple cart, or more accurately the bribery trough (subscription again, sorry).

I plan to keep reminding people that I predicted Obama would win at least as long ago as May 2007. I still doubt I’ll vote for him, largely because I don’t agree with his policies.

But what I find particularly galling is the Clintonites’ apparent belief that the nomination is theirs by right. From Herself to Carville to Penn to bloggers, the Clinton folks somehow can’t seem to wrap their minds around the idea that line is being cut, that they might not get that chance at the wheel (or the trough) that they’ve striven and sacrificed and perhaps prostituted for.

How do they justify trying to show that Hillary would be leading if only the Democratic primaries were run like the Republicans? Why do they persist in thinking that the nomination is theirs by right, and anyone who fails to help them get it is cheating? Is it just that they think their time in line deserves the expected payout? Can they imagine actually caring about the country more than themselves? Can they even separate, in their hearts and minds, the country’s welfare from their own personal advancement?

I’ve come, I must admit, to a certain cynicism about establishment politics. The American system, like all others, is at root a cover for plutocracy. In reality, this is the only type of government, though there are many skins for it. The question is, who profits, who’s fooled, who’s angry?

It seems at this moment that the Clinton/DLC wing of the Democratic party would rather see McCain in the White House than Obama, would choose to be in charge of the flailings of a dying empire rather than contribute to the building of a new world. I hope that evaluation is wrong.

When I encounter some of the ravings of the Hillary crowd, the thought crosses my mind of climbing on the Obama bandwagon, just to drive the Clinton machine and the DLC crazy. But I admit I’d probably be hoping also that we’d recover the wheel of the Democratic party, a hope bound to be frustrated. At least, so says the omniscient TM.

In this one-size-fits-all analysis, Mr. Obama must be the new Dukakis, sure to be rejected by white guys easily manipulated by Lee Atwater-style campaigns exploiting race and class. But some voters who lived through 1988 have changed, and quite a few others are dead. In 2008, they are supplanted in part by an energized African-American electorate and the young voters of all economic strata who fueled the Obama movement that many pundits didn’t take seriously before Iowa. And that some still don’t. Cokie Roberts of ABC predicted in February that young voters probably won’t show up in November because “they never have before” and “they’ll be tired.”

However out of touch Mr. Obama is with “ordinary Americans,” many Americans, ordinary and not, have concluded that the talking heads blathering about blue-collar men, religion, guns and those incomprehensible “YouTube young people” are even more condescending and out of touch. When a Washington doyenne like Mary Matalin, freighted with jewelry, starts railing about elitists on “Meet the Press,” as she did last Sunday, it’s pure farce. It’s typical of the syndrome that the man who plays a raging populist on CNN, Lou Dobbs, dismissed Mr. Obama last week by saying “we don’t need another Ivy League-educated knucklehead.” Mr. Dobbs must know whereof he speaks, since he’s Harvard ’67.

Nothing new, but the Washington Post has assembled in one spot the ludicrous bungles which are the crown jewels of Bush’s domestic “war on terror.” For pathetic results like this we have let our constitution be gutted and our civil rights be trashed.

In the excerpt below, notice the practiced ease with which the FBI suggests to its befuddled suspect a scheme that would position the Bureau as terror’s number one enemy — something for Congress to think about, come budget time. Actually a terrorist with the brains of a zucchini would be smart enough put the hopelessly incompetent FBI at the top of his list of places not to bomb.

Batiste confided, somewhat fantastically, that he wanted to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago, which would then fall into a nearby prison, freeing Muslim prisoners who would become the core of his Moorish army. With them, he would establish his own country.

The FBI informant, under bureau guidance, refocused Batiste on what he said was bin Laden's plot — to bomb FBI offices in several U.S. cities.

This is the third installment of Church Basements, Andrew W.’s tales from the world of Alcoholics Anonymous

The five o’clock group in the church basement was small on Thursday; sleet and ice kept the numbers down. That was a good thing because Stanley was way out there, sharing about how his head was full of dark junk.

“I keep thinking about doing violence, killing people.” Stanley told us. “The only way to stop myself is to drink, that shuts my murderous thoughts down.” Gripping the sides of his chair, he screamed, “Can’t you help me? Oh God, won’t someone tell me what to do.”

The answer, really the only answer, was, “Call your sponsor every time you have those thoughts, and go to meetings even if it means spending most of your time in meetings.”

“How long did you spend drinking every day?” a voice chimed in, “Four, five, 10 hours, well, do the same in recovery. If you do that, the pain will ease and slowly those thoughts will go away.”

Very simple advice. It may work, though. Stanley comes to meeting every day, and he’s never again said that he will murder someone unless he has a drink to quell his demons.

JJ’s walleyes nearly popped out of his head when Stanley shared. He waved his weathered hand like an eager fourth grader dying to answer, his dirty cuffs waving like a surrender flag.

Mostly JJ talks gibberish, but a coherent thought bobs up from time to time. He’s got wet brain, the common AA phrase for excessive brain damage from too much booze or drugs, or both.

“Don’t, don', don’ don’ it, “ JJ stuttered before drifting slowly beyond reason. Like all of us, JJ is tolerated and understood as just another alcoholic. One who lost more of his mind than most, that’s all.

Loss of memory and concentration are common topics at AA meetings. JJ’s not the only one in my home meeting who’s incoherent. The other day Judy sputtered with rage because her husband had broken her anonymity:

“To my aunt, he told on me, told on me, told on me. She’s the one person I never wanted to know. He’s on the couch now.” A pair of girls, young addicts, giggled.

Judy has blond hair and sharp features, always color-coordinated in a place where matching socks are a novelty. She works as a perfume saleswoman in a New York department store. She’d be beautiful if it weren’t for the sad eyes, so common in church basements. Instead she’s striking, but the glimmer that must once have been there is gone.

Judy would share that she’s on a razor’s edge each day, never trusting that she would not pick up again when she’s out with the girls in Chicago. Meetings are nothing if not eclectic, but too much alcohol and other drugs are the common denominator. JJ and Judy belong together in the church basements where “more of anything and everything” is the most common problem.

Here’s the latest desperation measure, stinking as usual of flop-sweat, from President Pigmy. Hey, it worked for Reagan, didn’t it? No, wait a minute…

BAGHDAD — Trying to stem the infiltration of militia fighters, American forces have begun to build a massive concrete wall that will partition Sadr City, the densely populated Shiite neighborhood in the Iraqi capital.

The construction, which began Tuesday night, is intended to turn the southern quarter of Sadr City near the international Green Zone into a protected enclave, secured by Iraqi and American forces, where the Iraqi government can undertake reconstruction efforts…

Too bad for the wingnut bloggers who jumped on the story like a chicken on a Junebug, but it was a hoax. Yale student Aliza Shvarts has not in fact “repeatedly impregnated herself and induced abortions that she videotaped for use in a senior art project.”

Still you’ve got to give Ms. Shvarts major weirdness points, even if she’s a Goody Two-Shoes compared to this Princeton scholar:

A science student of Mr. Silver’s once proposed impregnating herself with chimpanzee sperm. Mr. Silver convinced her it was a “horrible thing for her to do,” but his fictionalized account of the event became a book and a play.

…to figure this Bush program out. So the Headless Nail has done it for you:

The Bush administration is quietly but firmly trying to set in place the capability to monitor, intercept, and analyze all visits to federal government web sites. It's called the Einstein program, which no doubt has the old civil libertarian and FBI target spinning in his grave.

Once such a system is pounded into place, it becomes, like me, a headless nail in the bureaucratic machinery. Both of us are almost impossible to pull out. So here's what you have to look forward to:

If you visit any government web site, the government could monitor your visit, know all of the pages you have seen, and capture and analyze any information you send or receive — all in real time. It would be like having your very own Big Brother, looking over your shoulder at your very own screen.

And taking notes as you surf.

This program, known as “Trusted Internet Connection” would require that all federal agencies access the web through portals approved and controlled by the Department of Homeland Security.

At each portal, DHS would install an “intrusion detection system” — Einstein. Details about Einstein are sketchy, but it will capture at least all traffic flow, source and destination IP information, and data sent or received.

In all probability this electronic gatekeeper would allow Homeland Security to spy on government employees too, which will be handy for tracking down whistleblowers.

The ostensible reason for the program is, of course, protecting us against terrorist hackers. DHS officials won’t say much about how they will use this capability, so you’ll just have to trust them when they say that the “program is not intended to collect information that will be retrieved by name.” [italics added]

But then neither did the DHS intend to force airline passengers to remove nipple rings with pliers. Nevertheless that is exactly what its agents did to a woman in Lubbock last month. By the time even the best of intentions reaches the bottom rungs of a huge bureaucracy, the result can defy logic and common sense. To say nothing of common decency.

Although the Administration wants this program in place by June (unlikely for technical reasons), DHS has not provided the legally-required Privacy Impact Assessment for the project. So we don’t know what personal information will be collected, how it will be used, or what (if any) safeguards against spying on citizens will be required.

All government web sites are required to post privacy policies, and in my experience government webmasters take this responsibility seriously. Under the Bush plan, these protections would become meaningless, as DHS would position Einstein between the citizen and the government site.

Note that the Einstein program does not require the cooperation of any private partners (such as phone companies or ISPs) and is not subject to any routine judicial supervision — helpful if you want to avoid any embarrassing leaks or disclosures about how it is actually being used.

In summary, the Bush Administration proposes to acquire a powerful new domestic electronic spy network, and citizens are supposed to trust the good intentions of Bush's DHS and Justice officials that these powers will not be misused. Domestic political opponents, whistleblowers, and ordinary citizens who don’t want the government spying on their web visits will be forgiven for their skepticism.

The Headless Nail passes on this, from the Washington Post:

The House voted 238 to 179 yesterday to kill an Internal Revenue Service program that relies on private debt collectors to pursue scofflaws for back taxes.

Fourteen Republicans joined 224 Democrats in voting to shutter the two-year-old effort, which has the IRS on track to lose more than $37 million as it pays contractors to do what the government’s own tax experts say IRS agents could do more efficiently. Despite aggressive collection tactics, the contractors have brought in only $49 million in revenue, little more than half of what it has cost the IRS to implement the program.

Buck’s Social Security posting, below, sent me back in the archives first to April of 2003 and from there to a post from the gray, menacing dawn of the Bush misadministration. The latter was titled, Contrary to Published Reports, Social Security is Okay. For whatever historical interest it might have, here goes:

On Monday, March 19 of the year 2001, high officials of the Bush administration made it clear that the Social Security crisis was over.

In fact, as they announced at a press conference, Social Security was in better shape than ever before in its history. And it would be on solid ground until at least 2038, when the first of the baby boomers will be 92. Medicare was in good shape, too: its main trust fund wasn’t expected to run dry until 2029.

The news would have been a huge relief to the tens of millions of Americans who believe that little or no money will be left by the time they reach retirement age. But the information never got to those worried millions, or to anyone else except a few thousand news junkies and policy wonks. Television seems to have ignored the story completely. The major papers ran it, but in such a way that for most readers it remained hidden, like Poe’s purloined letter, in plain sight—

The Boston Globe gave it 658 words; the Chicago Tribune thought it was worth 488. The Washington Post ran it on page 5, the Los Angeles Times on page 9. The New York Times also printed it inside, under the gripping headline: “Trustees Extend Solvency Estimates for 2 Benefits.” The lead sentence in the Wall Street Journal was, “Medicare and Social Security, the big entitlement programs for elderly Americans, are still going broke, though more slowly.”

But here are some other possible leads — bearing an equivalent or greater relation to reality—that might have introduced the neglected little story:

“The public relations campaign to scare Americans into turning Social Security over to Wall Street yesterday had a dangerous and perhaps fatal collision with reality.”

Or, “The Bush administration today scrambled to discredit a report from its own officials that undermined the president’s campaign promise to ‘reform’ Social Security and Medicare. Far from needing reform, etc.”

Or, “Even after loading the dice by using what many economists consider to be overly pessimistic growth projections, the Bush Administration was nonetheless forced to conclude yesterday that both Medicare and Social Security would remain solid at least until the youngest baby boomer reaches retirement age.”

Or, “Record budget surpluses — the major justification for President Bush’s proposed $1.6 trillion tax cut — would disappear if economic predictions used by three of his top cabinet officers are accurate. So would any immediate threat to the stability of Social Security and Medicare.”

All these leads are supported by facts contained in the various stories. And all qualify as news under the dog-bites-man rule: a widespread assumption about the world turns out not to be true after all.

All of the stories were caused by a report from the secretaries of Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Services, joined by two outside experts. This report and the press conference called to announce it involved federal programs that touch the lives of virtually every American. Widely perceived as on the brink of bankruptcy, Social Security and Medicare prove to be in better shape than ever before — and by a considerable margin, too.

Then why did editors and reporters conclude that the report on the Social Security and Medicare trust funds deserved no better than what amounted to a collective yawn?

Might it have been because the stories were based on the fuzziest of numbers? Although the government may be obliged to pretend it can see decades into the fiscal future, does it follow that responsible journalists are obliged to take the pretense seriously? Of course not.

It would be unkind to dwell on past instances when the press regurgitated equally fuzzy figures with childlike trust, so let’s do it. For more than ten years, the press has been squawking like Chicken-Licken that the sky was about to fall on the whole baby boomer generation. Eventally “more people believed in UFOs than think they will ever receive Social Security.”

The widely-reported quote is from Peter G. Peterson, a former Secretary of Commerce under Richard Nixon and a leader for nearly 30 years in the campaign to destroy public confidence in Social Security. Mr. Peterson’s aim in raising his false alarm was to destroy Social Security. To do this, he proposed to gamble with the fund by diverting billions of dollars away from it and into the stock market. The suckers might win or might lose; the brokers, who would take the house cut off the top, could only win.

So successful had Peterson’s doomsaying been that it still lurks unexamined in the heads of journalists as well as most other economic illiterates. So editors and reporters were reading to believe the latest spin on the old story

After all, that spin was coming from the very people issuing the report. Most of them were members of the Bush cabinet, and it was in their interest to attack the very report they were obliged by law to issue. Like Peterson, Bush wanted Social Security to look broke so he could fix it—by putting billions of dollars from it into the stock market.

One trouble with this plan was that at the moment the thing that appeared to be the most badly broken was the stock market itself. Privatization of Social Security was starting to look about as smart as turning your life savings over to the purser on the Titanic.

Another drawback was that the president, in a striking display of cognitive dissonance, was telling us that the good times were over so we had better cut taxes. The logic was that this would allow us to pay down a little of our credit card debt, while at the same time getting rid of that pesky budget surplus that was looming over the economy. Or something.

At the same time Bush, by arguing for a tax cut spread over ten years, was implicitly predicting that the economy would remain strong enough so that lower taxes would still produce enough revenue to provide needed government services. In other words we could both have our cake and eat it, under the theory that had earlier produced President Reagan’s monumental deficits.

Anyway, Mr. Bush’s cabinet officers were in an uncomfortable position. They really thought — every true conservatives does, in the deep, secret bottom of his soul — that Social Security and Medicare were crackbrained communist schemes that should be terminated at once, and with extreme prejudice. But in a nation of fools, many of them unfortunately voters, wisdom cannot be said aloud. The rabble must be scared into doing what is best for it.

For one thing, the reports in question are an annual affair. The number of years till the projected insolvency of both funds went up last year, too, and had been going up since 1997. This year’s increase, consequently, sounded like old stuff.

In the third place, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, “when the programs finally reach their insolvency dates the government likely would have to slash benefits — a 30% cut in Social Security alone, according to the report — increase taxes, or both, officials said.” In 37 years, everybody better watchout. Officials say.

And the Journal says, “Many economists believe the programs represent a burden on all Americans that in the long run is untenable.” Many editors probably believe that, too. Certainly most publishers do.

From this point of view, then, the responsible course is to downplay a story which offers only false and temporary hope. The sad but unavoidable truth is that our reckless generosity toward the old, the helpless and the sick will lead, if unchecked, only to ruin. That this hasn’t happened in the 66 years of Social Security’s existence is a miracle that, in the conservative worldview, cannot possibly continue.

From Xymphora. What think?

I’m starting to think Obama is crazy like a fox. He keeps saying true but outrageous things which provoke Hillary and the Republicans into an over-the-top frenzy, so over-the-top in fact that it just emphasizes the truth of what he said. Once the smoke clears, Obama’s popularity goes up.

There has been an ongoing Great Depression in the rust belt and the mid-West since the late eighties (which has lifted in some farming communities due to the biofuel craze). People are bitter about it, and particularly bitter about how lying Clinton-era stats show how the 90s were the Golden Age, when their own communities were dying.

The Coasts, where people make money talking and manipulating intangibles, did well at the expense of the middle, where people used to make things. Having the mansion-owning Bi-Coastal elites feign outrage on behalf of the working classes makes people even more bitter.

Since the news has been so terrible lately, filled with reports of torture, death, foreclosure and financial disaster, all brought down on us by the Bush Administration, I’ve been loath to post anything lately, However, since there is good news out there, it’s time to post something to lift the spirits of progressives everywhere. This news from the financial pages of Yahoo, which really isn’t news unless you’ve not been paying attention to the details as I haven’t, should lift the spirits of young and old alike. Pass the word to your progressive politician. We don’t need no stinking Social Security “reform”

Reports that the Social Security system will soon run out of money have been greatly exaggerated.

As surely as day follows night, the annual report from the board of trustees of the OASDI fund (Old Age Survivors and Disability Insurance, otherwise known as Social Security) has brought forth alarms that the fund will run out of money in the not-too-distant future.

Although flush with cash now and over at least the next 10 years, the Social Security system is expected to gradually begin paying out more in benefits than it takes in from payroll taxes with the result that by 2041 its assets, in the words of the trustees, will be exhausted.

.......

For those who look at only the summary page, this conclusion is nothing new. Indeed, the trustees have come to the same conclusion every year, the only exception being the year the fund is expected to run dry.

Guess what? Under the actuaries’ low cost projection, the Social Security system never runs out of money.

That said, you might ask the question why this more realistic projection has escaped politicians from both major parties.

I don't know why, but I can only theorize that it's because they haven’t taken the time to read the entire report, which is available on the system’s Website.

John Adams (in Thoughts on Government, April, 1776) gets it all wrong:

Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.

The excerpt below is by Joe Bageant, the bard of Winchester, Virginia, and the author of Deer Hunting with Jesus. His fuse has been lit by the media tizzy over Barack Obama’s mostly accurate look at white working-class resentment. Read the whole essay here. (The photo below is not of Joe, but of the younger and more photogenic Larry the Cable Guy.)

In any case, Obama has proven you cannot even use the innocuous word bitterness in conjunction with the national lie of white American culture. In the officially sanctioned media lexicon, Blacks can be angry, disillusioned and even bitter enough to burn down Watts. But the white race, being blessed by a Christian god and divine providence, never harbor bitterness in their hearts. The reason the word bitterness has caused such horror is because what is really going on out there is the sprouting seeds of class animosity. And no candidate or pontificating media mugwump dares touch that one because they are in the class that benefits from our classist society.

Here I am again, back from one of my idiotic (to you, not to me) herpetological explorations in Georgia and the Carolinas. Meanwhile far more dangerous crawling things have been active elsewhere, I see by the papers. More on that later. Right now, for your semantic pleasure, a selection from Neil Postman’s 1999 book, Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century:

Twenty-three hundred years ago, educators devised a pattern of instruction whose purpose was to help students defend themselves against both the seductions of eloquence and the appeal of nonsense.

The pattern was formalized in the Middle Ages, and came to be known as The Trivium. It included logic, rhetoric, and grammar. This tradition survives among modern American educators in a truncated form: they teach the one subject among the three — grammar — that is the least potent, the least able to help students do what we call critical thinking. In fact grammar, which takes up about a third of the English curriculum in junior high school, is not even taught with a view toward helping students think critically. Indeed, it is difficult to know why grammar, as it is presently taught, is included in the curriculum at all.

Since the early 1900s, studies have been conducted to discover if there is any relationship between the teaching of grammar and a variety of language behaviors, such as reading and writing. Almost without exception the studies have found no positive relationship whatsoever.

Although the other two subjects, logic and rhetoric, sometimes go by different names today — among them, practical reasoning, semantics, and general semantics — I would suggest, whatever we call them, that they be given a prominent place in the curriculum.

These subjects are about the relationship between language and reality; they are about the differences among kinds of statements, about the nature of propaganda, about the ways in which we search for truths, and just about everything else one needs to know in order to use language in a disciplined way and to know when others aren’t.

With all the talk these days about how we are going through an information revolution, I should think that the question of what language skills are necessary to survive it would be uppermost in teachers’ minds.

I know that educational research is not always useful, and sometimes absurd, but for what it may be worth, a clear and positive relationship between the study of semantics and critical thinking is well established in the research literature. As with the absence of question-asking from the curriculum, the absence of semantics — the study of the relationship between the world of words and the world of non-words — is also something of a mystery, if not an outrage.

Dr. Hibbert: Now, a little death anxiety is normal. You can expect to go through five stages. The first is denial.

Homer: No way! Because I’m not dying! [hugs Marge]

Dr. Hibbert: The second is anger.

Homer: Why you little! [steps towards Dr. H]

Dr. Hibbert: After that comes fear.

Homer: What’s after fear? What’s after fear? [cringes]

Dr. Hibbert: Bargaining.

Homer: Doc, you gotta get me out of this! I’ll make it worth your while!

Dr. Hibbert: Finally, acceptance.

Homer: Well, we all gotta go sometime.

Dr. Hibbert: Mr. Simpson, your progress astounds me.

Frank Rich has been to see the latest Errol Morris film, “Standard Operating Procedure”. In fact he was part of a “goodly chunk of New York’s media and cultural establishment” at a Museum of Modern Art screening.

One thing that struck him was the contrast between the opulent setting and the subject of the film: torture committed with official complicity at the White House level. Do we really care about that, still? It all seems so 2005…

Rich thinks that George Voinovich, Senator from Ohio, points to the central issue.

“The truth of the matter,” Mr. Voinovich said, is that “we haven’t sacrificed one darn bit in this war, not one. Never been asked to pay for a dime, except for the people that we lost.”

This is how the war planners wanted it, of course. No new taxes, no draft, no photos of coffins, no inconveniences that might compel voters to ask tough questions. This strategy would have worked if the war had been the promised cakewalk. But now it has backfired. A home front that has not been asked to invest directly in a war, that has subcontracted it to a relatively small group of volunteers, can hardly be expected to feel it has a stake in the outcome five stalemated years on.

The original stakes (saving the world from mushroom clouds and an alleged ally of Osama bin Laden) evaporated so far back they seem to belong to another war entirely. What are the stakes we are asked to believe in now? In the largely unwatched House hearings on Wednesday, Representative Robert Wexler, a Florida Democrat, tried to get at this by asking what some 4,000 “sons and daughters” of America had died for.

General Petraeus replied in terms of national interest, apparently without irony. This is certainly not in Iraq’s national interest. It’s in our national interest, if you’re the sort who thinks that what’s good for ExxonMobile is good for the country. Personally, I’m not so sure. Prices at a gas station in Belmont I pass once a week have been ten cents higher each Friday; this week premium was $4.15, regular $3.95.

Which, I’m sorry to admit, hits most of us harder than the collective guilt of having allowed our officials to order our interrogators to torture people in the obviously ridiculous hope that some useful information could be gathered. And then done nothing about it when we caught them.

Or is it really that Americans feel justified in torturing people? Because after all we’re good. Thus, by definition, whatever we do had to be done. It’s not our fault torture was called for. It’s not our fault Iraq appears to be on the brink of chaos, just because we helped Saddam take over, then armed him, and finally attacked him as one in our string of endless enemies. It’s not our fault Iran hates us, just because we overthrew a duly elected government and substituted a repressive and brutal regime, which they finally managed to throw out. What, after all, should have been our preferred method? It’s not like we were going to leave them and their oil in peace; it’s not like we were going to consider their interests in any serious way whatsoever. What tools remain other than brutal repression?

This war has lasted so long that Americans, even the bad apples of Abu Ghraib interviewed by Mr. Morris, have had the time to pass through all five of the Kübler-Ross stages of grief over its implosion. Though dead-enders like Mr. McCain may have only gone from denial to anger to bargaining, most others have moved on to depression and acceptance. Unable to even look at the fiasco anymore, the nation is now just waiting for someone to administer the last rites.

Here's a skill we’ve all developed by now, but too often get rusty on: looking for the unsaid.

Take this article in the New! and Improved! Wall Street Journal, “Washington Takes On the Mortgage Mess”. Thank God someone’s doing something.

What started as a slump in home building and rising delinquencies on dodgy mortgages has evolved into a financial crisis and a likely recession. U.S. authorities are scrambling to respond.

Last week, the administration said the Federal Housing Administration may guarantee mortgages for up to 100,000 homeowners, many of whose homes are now worth less than they owe on their mortgages.

In addition, the Senate passed a package of measures including a tax credit for buyers of foreclosed properties, funds to state and local governments to buy and rehabilitate foreclosed homes, and tax breaks for home builders. The bill’s prospects in the House and the White House are uncertain.

Okay, I know I’m not educated in the ways of haute finance, but doesn’t the Senate’s package focus on help for buyers of foreclosed houses and the construction industry? I mean, a hundred thousand mortgages guaranteed when projections mention four million defaults? If so, why are the sellers hurting more than the buyers? They were making out like bandits, you should pardon the expression, during the boom and now they’re not, so the relative gap is significant, that’s certainly true. But they’re not on the street, like the people who fell for the subprime scam.

The Journal, personfully struggling for identity in the Murdoch era, tries to focus the blame on the consumer for borrowing too much, and on the government for not co-signing the loans, with the following questions.

1. “Did government contribute to the housing crisis?”
2. “What steps has the government taken to expand its support for housing since the crisis began?”
3. “What other steps are in the works?”
4. And of course the critical issue: “Will these programs boost home sales or prices?”

Okay, so an attentive person would have considered that an adjustable-rate mortgage begun at a time of historically low interest rates had essentially only one likely future. Can’t go down, won’t stay here forever, what’s left?

But here we are, and the question now is, who benefits from the public largesse? The less perspicacious who fell for a financial scam? Or the financial corporations who perpetrated that scam?

I’m betting on the latter.

There are many positives about the British political system as compared to the one we use in the US. Perfect example: in the British system, the Democrats could cast Joe Lieberman out of the party, no matter what he calls himself. Not that they would, but it would be possible.

Since JoeMentum had the last laugh, it’s particularly fun to catch ’em on the little stuff. Like when his campaign claimed that supporters of Ned Lamont had instituted a denial-of-service attack on, or DOSd, his website on the eve of the primary election.

When the Web site went down on Aug. 7, 2006, the Lieberman campaign asserted it had been hacked in “a coordinated attack by our political opponents.”

But the F.B.I. saw it another way.

“The server that hosted the joe2006.com Web site failed because it was overutilized and misconfigured,” the newspaper said the F.B.I. wrote. “There was no evidence of (an) attack.”

The Lieberman campaign workers probably caused the site to crash themselves, to judge from the report. The campaign site was configured to allow only 100 e-mail messages an hour, but when that limit was exceeded many times on the day before the primary, the site crashed, according to the report.

Yet the campaign did not realize that at the time, and said it had been the target of what is known as a denial-of-service attack, in which a server is purposely crippled by a flood of data.

It all sounds reasonable to me. If I’d been a Lieberman groupie, I might have figured that he wouldn’t be a big email recipient.

But at least I would have checked the basic stuff before accusing my opponent of dirty tricks. Perhaps it’s this that keeps Lieberman at the top of the list of Democrats Republicans Love.

Just think, if Al Gore had had the run of the White House kitchen all this time, we might have been stuck with JoeMentum invading Iran.

Just finished listening to Bush regurgitating his customary gobbets of misinformation about his -- and unfortunately our -- open-ended military occupation of Iraq against the expressed wish of most Iraqis and most Americans. Same-old, same-old, except for two things.

First off, by now even the talking heads of TV have figured out that it might be part of their professional responsibility to point out, immediately following another presidential eructation, the lies of which it is composed. At least on CNN, they did just that.

Second, at one point Bush said that failure to fund his miscarriage of a war would “lead to massive humanitarian casualties.” Tough times ahead for all you humanitarians, but then of course you already knew that.

A query from Don Heiny:

Wonder if they were able to pry anything from Chuck Heston’s cold, dead fingers?

The New York Times is upset that Bush insists on installing one of his loyal Torture Boys, Steven Bradbury, in a key Justice Department job. The Times thinks Big Torture Boy should throw Little Torture Boy under the bus so that the Senate Democrats will stop stalling all his other appointments:

At this point, according to a review by Politico.com, the election commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Mine Safety and Health Review Commission, the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board and the National Labor Relations Board do not have enough members to do their jobs. Scores of federal judgeships are vacant. The Council of Economic Advisers is down to one adviser.

This is bad for the country. Mr. Bush should withdraw Mr. Bradbury’s nomination, replace him at the Justice Department with someone committed to upholding the law and take Mr. Reid’s offer. The president’s hyperpartisanship and my-way-or-the-highway arrogance is now close to paralyzing his own administration.

Actually no, this is not bad for the country. It is good for the country. To say otherwise is to imagine that the country is run by political appointees, and will immediately run aground if their wise leadership disappears.

Not quite. In some cases the vacancies will be filled by lower-ranking GOP appointees, hacks who will be more or less identical to the hacks Bush is currently blocked from installing. In others, career bureaucrats will step in. This is infinitely preferable to Option A, above.

Anything that tends to keep the hands of Bush appointees away from the levers of government is good for the country. Good, good, good. If Bush had never made a single appoinment and every department had been run for the past seven years by career bureaucrats serving in an acting capacity, think what the nation and the world would have been spared.

Rumsfeld, just to name a few.

I am not so completely clueless as never to have heard of the Obama Girl. But until recently I was clueless enough not to know who she was or what she did.

Now I find that she is a kid from Hazelton, a town in Pennsylvania that is about as hard as scrabble gets. And here is what she does:

From the New York Times:

BAGHDAD — The American military has charged a contractor with assault in a case that may emerge as a major test of the military’s legal jurisdiction over civilians who accompany the armed forces into the field, military officials and legal experts said Friday.

The charge was made under expanded authority that the United States Congress provided the military to crack down on contractor abuses. It is the first time since 1968 that a contractor has been charged under military law…

The contractor in the coming case, Alaa Mohammad Ali, was working as an interpreter at a combat outpost near Hit, a town in Anbar Province.

Didn’t you just know that the first guy they tried out the new law on would be a Canadian from Iraq named Mohammad?

…BADATTITUDES.COM, barely used but beautifully maintained by previous owner, a little old blogger from Connecticut. This just in:

A US man has sold the domain name pizza.com for $2.6 million after maintaining the site for just $20 a year since 1994.

Chris Clark, 43, accepted the offer from an anonymous bidder after a week-long online auction…"It will make a significant difference in my life, for sure," he said.

In my opinion the single greatest issue arising from the immoral and inept and illegal Bush/Cheney misadministration is the blowback likely to be generated by the disasters we’ve wreaked around the world. We’ve made enemies of literally millions of people in Iraq alone; five million refugees, internal and external, plus a million dead, and who knows how many lives and bodies left shattered, most of them not initially predisposed to despising us. An economy and social structure in ruins; existing political instabilities exaggerated throughout the region; American and Israeli strength increasingly intertwined, and thus suspicion and guilt increasingly collective in nature.

How will Americans process that knowledge?

My guess is they’ll start with denial, but that river ain’t flowin’. We try to follow our beloved President down the cherry-blossom path, but like him we keep finding ourselves bewildered and deserted. Dana Milbank lists the countries whose governments have changed hands in one sense or another as polities around the world reject the Cheney approach. Spain, Italy, Poland, Japan, Britain, and Australia have all substituted Bush doubters for the Bush promoters who helped, or at least didn’t complain about, the war.

Bush’s pariah status has turned his Coalition of the Willing into a retirement community and given the president an unusual role in the domestic affairs of other countries. In Australia, one of Rudd’s predecessors as Labor leader, Mark Latham, got the top job after describing Bush as “the most incompetent and dangerous president in living memory.” He further described members of Howard’s government as a “conga line of suckholes” to Bush.

Howard, in turn, expressed a view that al-Qaeda terrorists would be praying for a 2008 victory by Democrats in general and Barack Obama in particular.

Bush enjoyed this mutual affection. “I can tell you, relations are great right now,” he said last year in Sydney, which was all but shut down by security measures needed to keep him safe.

Relations are perhaps not quite so great now, but Bush put on a brave face as he welcomed Rudd to the White House Friday. He called the 50-year-old premier a “fine lad” and even praised Rudd’s decision to pull out of Iraq. “I always like to be in the presence of somebody who does what he says he’s going to do,” Bush reasoned.

Rudd, touched by Bush’s manner, said he was designating the president as “an honorary Queenslander,” after the prime minister’s home state.

Will international hostility toward us decrease, as we flush the Bush presidency down the memory hole at top speed while people around the world continue to suffer from our latest war of aggression? Probably it will; there seem to be signs in international polls that the current political campaign has helped our image abroad, if only in showing a lot more engagement by Americans than the world has recently seen from us, and in reminding us all that the nightmare will soon end.

Now the question is, what do we do about it? By “it”, I mean the whole shebang. The Bush wars and the disasters they’ve created, not confined to Afghanistan and Iraq. The loss of honor involved in the revelations of systematic and institutionalized torture. The direct assaults on privacy and civil liberties. And perhaps most disgusting and frightening of all, the attempts to rob us of our most basic American right, to cast a vote that counts toward the decisions we as a nation must make.

If at this transitional moment we succumb to the ease of the remote and switch to another channel, we’ll miss a tremendous opportunity. We could recoup a large amount of the global goodwill that flooded our way after 9/11 if we were to repudiate the conduct and aims of the previous presidency. This to my knowledge the US has never done, but we need to make explicit public record that Bush, Cheney, et.al., violated both the letter and the spirit of our national institutions, and many cases our laws as well.

By default, those institutions will remain in their current configurations, ready for use by the next occupant of the Oval Office. Doubtless, the three most likely occupants will all employ the office with greater reverence for tradition and international coöperation than the current one. But will the next President agree to make warrantless wiretaps illegal? Or will we just agree to define “warrant” and “wiretap” so that whatever we’re currently doing is now okay?

The real question is whether the November election will bring the US to a realistic operating posture with respect to the rest of the world. We no longer dominate. We never should have tried. We can still lead by example, if we admit our mistakes and try to fix them. Or we can hunker down and wait for the incoming, hoping to be raptured.

Our esteemed colleague Neddie thinks that “a visit to a hair salon must be something like a trip to a cathouse.”

Again, the receptionist asked me that rather intensely uncomfortable question: Is there anyone in particular I’d like to “see”?

Now, for me, a haircut from a sexy babe in stylish black clothing is a rather, how do we say, erotic experience. It is, I’ll admit here and now, the closest thing I get in my life to permission to perv out a little bit. From the shampoo, her fingers massaging my scalp with foofy shampoo, to the cut itself, as she leans in very close to get just the right angle and a pert breast brushes my back, her breath and perfume mingling with the fruity hair-care-product smell of the place, as, in the mirror, all the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo: The whole thing serves to put rather unwholesome thoughts into the Jingo cranium.

And I don’t think I’m alone in this dirty little secret.

I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but I recommend this post for some thigh-slappin’.

I offer up for what it’s worth, and you’ll notice I’m not charging for it, my candidate for the bottom half of the McCain ticket. He is shown at the United Nations, holding up a vial which does not contain anthrax so that the world would tremble at the thought of how many people could be killed by a little vial like that if it did in fact hold anthrax. Remember Anthrax and how much fun we all had with it? What ever happened to old Anthrax anyway?

For fans of Howard Zinn, it’s enough to know he’s written something.

When I was bombing cities in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and France in the Second World War, the moral justification was so simple and clear as to be beyond discussion: We were saving the world from the evil of fascism. I was therefore startled to hear from a gunner on another crew — what we had in common was that we both read books — that he considered this “an imperialist war.” Both sides, he said, were motivated by ambitions of control and conquest. We argued without resolving the issue. Ironically, tragically, not long after our discussion, this fellow was shot down and killed on a mission.

In wars, there is always a difference between the motives of the soldiers and the motives of the political leaders who send them into battle. My motive, like that of so many, was innocent of imperial ambition. It was to help defeat fascism and create a more decent world, free of aggression, militarism, and racism.

The motive of the U.S. establishment, understood by the aerial gunner I knew, was of a different nature. It was described early in 1941 by Henry Luce, multi-millionaire owner of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, as the coming of “The American Century.” The time had arrived, he said, for the United States “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit, and by such means as we see fit.”

This is the second installment of Church Basements, Andrew W.’s tales from the world of Alcoholics Anonymous:

“I fucking will not do it. They want me to work out and I refuse!” She raised her bony arms above her head and slammed both hands smack on the table. The seen-it-all old timers and cynical young addicts, new to the rooms, startled to attention.

She had had a hip replaced recently, the speaker went on to explain, and the doctors wanted her to work out an hour a day.

“My son of a bitch of a husband is trying to make me go, but I’ll be damned if I will,” she said, tears rising in her eyes. “I’ll bite his balls off, that’s what I’ll do, and he knows I can.”

So began the meeting in one of the wealthiest communities in a midwest state. The tall woman ranted on, finally petering out. “That’s all,” she said quietly.

The others murmured the usual, “Thanks for sharing,” and moved on to more sharing by less tortured souls.

That bright March morning in the basement of St. David’s, the drunks and addicts of Alcoholics Anonymous were gathered to exorcise their demons by telling grim tales of degradation and renewal.

The stories left unspoken, you wouldn’t want to hear. Those addiction histories that are related are enough to give a clear glimpse into an alcoholic’s private hell. The tall woman’s hell was burning hot that day, and she had spoken out of fear that she might, as we say, “drink over it.”

Church basements are home to a communal confessional that sometimes frightens, but more often relaxes. The listeners can usually “relate to that.” Measured against the most dismal stories they can rejoice in their own progress.

A strange kind of closeness evolves, reminding all that they are on the lip of a precipice: one slip, and they will fall. But if they hold onto each other there is a chance of recovery and a spring awakening.

It continues to impress me how much the Bush administration does to inspire emotions that do Americans proud.

For example, consider the swift and courageous action the Secretary of the Treasury proposes to take in the face of impending national financial doom. Does it extend a friendly help-up to those who encountered an offer they couldn’t refuse and moved into a house they couldn’t afford? No; that would involve us in what the faithful call a moral hazard. You might think that involved things like war profiteering, torture, and high-level corruption, but you’d be wrong.

Moral hazard is the prospect that a party insulated from risk may behave differently from the way it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk. Moral hazard arises because an individual or institution does not bear the full consequences of its actions, and therefore has a tendency to act less carefully than it otherwise would, leaving another party to bear some responsibility for the consequences of those actions. For example, an individual with insurance against automobile theft may be less vigilant about locking his car, because the negative consequences of automobile theft are (partially) borne by the insurance company.

Or for another example, a Wall Street firm might bet fifteen or twenty times the value of the farm on black, knowing that if it comes up red, sympathetic taxpayers will supply the diff. Hey, no prob, you guys buy the first round next time.

Perhaps the government will decide to regulate the activities of the people who have stolen so much, making sure they can’t repeat their profitable scam?

Bush’s move, while a good start and potentially capable of getting bipartisan support, fits more closely with the pattern he has established since they took over Congress in 2006: a near freeze on new regulations unless and until the legislative or scientific ground gives way beneath him, at which point he launches savvy, preemptive moves to limit the scope of any new regulatory power.

As Everett Dirksen — a man I admire at least for his name, which I share, and his voice, which Stephen Colbert would be sampling if Dirksen were still on the Hill — may or not have said, a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.

But if this whole thing sinks like a lead balloon, don’t blame the president! He is officially not putting his political capital behind this one.

White House press secretary Dana Perino made that clear yesterday.

Q. “Dana, is the President’s goal to get this passed and in place before he leaves office?”

Perino: “I think we’ll have to see. I think if there is — it’s a big attempt, but this President doesn’t shy away from big challenges — and also, if necessary, actions in order to address problems. And this is something, if you’ve looked at some of the coverage, that Secretary Paulson has been working on this package for about a year.”

By contrast, Bush continues to insist that a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians is possible before the end of his term. So file the Paulson plan as somewhat less likely to come to fruition than Middle East peace.

That’s comforting. At least we’ve got our best people on it.

From the Wikipedia:

The Banality of Evil is a phrase coined in 1963 by Hannah Arendt in her work Eichmann in Jerusalem. It describes the thesis that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths but rather by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.

From an article in the Washington Post about John Yoo’s long concealed memorandum:

“If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network,” Yoo wrote. “In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch's constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions.”

Interrogators who harmed a prisoner would be protected by a “national and international version of the right to self-defense,” Yoo wrote. He also articulated a definition of illegal conduct in interrogations — that it must “shock the conscience” — that the Bush administration advocated for years.

“Whether conduct is conscience-shocking turns in part on whether it is without any justification,” Yoo wrote, explaining, for example, that it would have to be inspired by malice or sadism before it could be prosecuted.

Kurt Vonnegut:

So it goes.