Liberty Street

Liberty Street Has Moved!

2008-02-06T17:43:00.000-05:00

Liberty Street has moved from Blogger to Wordpress. The new address is http://libertystreet.wordpress.com/. All of the posts (all 2,919 of them) and comments (considerably less of those!) have been imported to Liberty Street at Wordpress -- and they all remain at Blogger as well. All of the posts and comments in other words are both at Blogger and Wordpress. The difference is that there will be no new posts here -- which means that this notice will stay on top ad infinitum.

A note of caution: I had to repopulate the blogroll manually, since only posts and comments can be imported. Some blogs were no longer at the address I had, or had not been updated in a very long time (like one or two years). I did not bring those over. But if I have inadvertently delinked any blog that is still alive and kicking, please let me know and I will put you back on immediately.

I am looking forward to "seeing" my current readers at the new site, and to meeting many new ones as well.

CNN - health insurance

2008-02-05T09:22:00.000-05:00

On CNN, Dr. Sanjay Gupta claims that 20% of those without health care in America earn more than $75,000 a year. No source for those figures was given.

Frankly, I'm dubious. All the folks that I know that do not have health insurance earn less than $30,000 / year.

This Happened in America

2008-02-03T21:36:00.000-05:00

A young woman in Ohio -- the victim of an assault -- was arrested, hogtied face down in a jail cell by seven police officers, female and male, strip-searched, and then left, completely naked, in the jail cell for six hours, using toilet paper to try and keep warm during that time. Raw Story reported this atrocity:

Hope Steffey's night started with a call to police for help. It ended with her face down, naked, and sobbing on a jail cell floor. Now, the sheriff's deputies from Stark County, Ohio who allegedly used excessive force during a strip search 15 months ago face a federal lawsuit, and recently released video won’t help their case.

Steffey's ordeal with the Stark County sheriff's deputies began after her cousin called 9-1-1 claiming Steffey had been assaulted by another one of their cousins. When a Stark County police officer arrived, he asked to see Steffey's driver's license. But instead of handing over her own ID, she mistakenly turned over her dead sister's license, which she contends she keeps in her wallet as a memento. That's when the situation became complicated.

The video below shows what happened. It is, I think, the most horrifying thing I have ever viewed. It's very hard to watch. I was shaking through most of it. The sound of Hope Steffey screaming and sobbing in terror and humiliation will stay with me for a long time.

John Cole:

Things are out of control when people can do things like this and think they are doing “the right thing.” Check their faces- an odd sort of professionalism, going through the motions pinning this defenseless woman to the ground and essentially raping her, and no one stops to think it is inappropriate for men to be in the room (not to mention against clear procedures). No one asks “why are we doing this?” No one asks “Why is this woman here” (she was the one who called for help- I bet she will not make that mistake again). No one asks why she needed to sit for hours naked, humiliated, hysterical, and alone in a cell for anyone to walk by and gawk at her in a completely vulnerable state. No one thought to give her a blanket or talk to her as she was covering herself in toilet paper to keep warm.

What is wrong with our system? What is wrong with the police that it is not a radical belief for me to think “I should probably cross the street, there is a cop walking down this side.”

The Political Cat draws a line between Hope Steffey's ordeal, and the police killing of an African-American woman a year later, allegedly in the course of a drug raid, also in Ohio.

During the course of the raid, they injured Wilson's year-old son, who was in her arms at the time. The child has since had his finger amputated as a result of the injury. Ms. Wilson's partner, 31-year-old Anthony Terry, was arrested and removed from the premises.

Obviously the common element in these two events is police brutality -- and that brutality is nourished and grows in the soil of indifference:

... If the officers who stripped Ms. Steffey had been punished immediately for their behaviour, it is possible that Ms. Wilson might be alive today. If police officers were given better staffing levels, better training, it is possible that Ms. Steffey's ordeal and the orphaning of the Wilson children would never have occurred.

And then there is this paragraph, in which Political Cat writes about the balancing act between understanding -- with empathy and compassion -- the difficulty and stress of police work, while at the same time not using that understanding as an excuse for abandoning accountability:

Law enforcement is a very tough job. Imagine yourself in the position of a cop, knowing that at any moment you could lose your life or limb or job because of one incorrect assessment, one second extra in making a decision. Understandably, cops get pretty fucked up after working a job like that day after day for years. The pressure on one's personal life, one's family life, one's relationships, has to be unreal. But that does not excuse the actions of those officers involved in either case. Ultimately, what it points to is an inability by these men and women with guns and badges to understand that people who are not white or male or do not have guns and badges are still people and should be treated humanely. We do not have to follow the precepts of the madman in charge who tells us that torture is OK, and humans have no innate rights. There is a better way. And most of all, law enforcement officers need to learn not to exercise inappropriate levels of force against others just because they can.

Well said. In fact, this being Blogroll Amnesty Day, and Political Cat being a smaller blog, and one I did not know about before finding the link on Memeorandum, I am going to add her to my blogroll.

Clinton Campaign Brings Push-Polling to California

2008-02-03T18:17:00.000-05:00

If you knew that Hillary Clinton was pushing people to vote for her under the guise of conducting legitimate telephone polling, would you be more or less likely to vote for her?

Ed Coghlan was just starting to prepare his dinner in the northern San Fernando Valley the other night when the phone rang. The caller was very friendly. He identified himself as a pollster who wanted to ask registered independents like Coghlan a few questions about the presidential race and all the candidates for Super Tuesday's California primary.

Ed, who's a former news director for a local TV station, was curious. He said, "Sure, go ahead."

But a few minutes into the conversation Ed says he noticed a strange pattern developing to the questions. First of all, the "pollster" was only asking about four candidates, three Democrats -- Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards, who was still in the race at the time -- and one Republican -- John McCain.

Also, every question about Clinton was curiously positive, Coghlan recalls. The caller said things like, if you knew that Sen. Clinton believed the country had a serious home mortgage problem and had made proposals to....freeze mortgage rates and save families from foreclosure, would you be more likely or less likely to vote for her?

Ed said, of course, more likely.

Every question about the other candidates was negative. If Ed knew, for instance, that as a state senator Obama had voted "present" 43 times instead of taking a yes or no stand "for what he believed," would Ed be more or less likely to vote for him?

"That's when I caught on," said Coghlan. He realized then that he was being push-polled. That malicious political virus that is designed not to elicit answers but to spread positive information about one candidate and negative information about all others under the guise of an honest poll had arrived in Southern California within days of the important election.

As Joe Gandelman points out, Clinton seems to be building a reputation for such underhanded tactics:

First, came the controversies about the innuendos about Senator Barack Obama, the apologies and the occasional resignation (after the info was thrust into the news cycle). Next came The Bill Clinton offensive and display of the race card. And now comes this L.A. Times’ blog report about push polling — again coming from supporters of Senator Hillary Clinton[.]
[...]
And the Clinton campaign? Did they immediately deny it and/or denounce it and say they not only had no part in it but they completely repudiate such tactics?
Phil Singer, the spokesman for the Clinton campaign. was contacted by e-mail last night. He answered that he was there. He was asked if the Clinton campaign was behind the push-poll, knew who was behind it or had any other information on it. That was at 5:27 p.m. Pacific time Saturday. As of this item’s posting time, exactly eight hours later, no reply had been received.

Silence is sometimes eloquent — particularly if it seems to be part of a distinct pattern.

We have been through eight years of lies, prevarications, corruption, and anti-democratic tactics. Hillary Clinton knows that she is seen by many voters as the establishment, business-as-usual candidate. If, knowing that, she still runs her campaign this way, what's she going to do if she becomes president?

It's Blogroll Amnesty Day!

2008-02-02T18:43:00.000-05:00

What is Blogroll Amnesty Day, you ask? It's an opportunity to blog about the value that smaller, non-A list blogs bring to the blogosphere, and to suit our actions to our words by linking to, and blogrolling, underrecognized blogs -- which for the purposes of B.A.D., are defined as blogs that get less traffic than our own blogs. So help yourself to a brioche and read up.

One of the great things about other bloggers' blogrolls is that you discover wonderful, intelligent, engaging, laugh-out-loud blogs you would most likely never have discovered on your own. Some of the blogs below I've known about for a while but just hadn't gotten around to blogrolling yet. Some I came across while searching on Truth Laid Bear or Technorati, and didn't know about before now. And still others I found by perusing bloggers' blogrolls.

Read. Link. Blogroll. It's the B.A.D. thing to do.

The Crone Speaks: CEPetro in a new incarnation, still much, much more than an average woman.

The Scientific Activist: "The truth isn't always black or white, but an informed public is an empowered one, so I won't shy away from the complex issues. Most importantly, though, The Scientific Activist takes on the people and obstacles standing in the way of the progress and proper application of science. Enemies of science, beware!" But for those who appreciate excellent writing and informed, intelligent commentary, enjoy!

Grammar.Police: Art, culture, grammar, and liberal politics all in one place.

Watching the Watchers: Did you know that John McCain has no objection to the U.S. occupying Iraq for the next century? You'll find out stuff like that here.

Brendan Calling: If you're a right-wing idiot, don't pick up the phone.

The Apostate: The apostate is a Pakistani woman raised Muslim in Saudi Arabia, now an atheist by belief and a paralegal by trade, living in California.

The Bilerico Project: group blogging on lgbtq issues, and more.

Bitch Ph.D.: What draws me to a blog is some mysterious combination of subject matter, attitude, writing style, and design. This one has all of the above. It's really good.

Bloggasm: Simon Owens' media blog, "with an emphasis on online media and journalism."

Blue Wren: Wren is a writer, "liv[ing] in a small mountain town with Mr. Wren, a psycho dog and a kingly cat." Or is that a kinky cat? She has gorgeous photographs of cats and her outdoor surroundings.

Mock, Paper, Scissors: This is really three separate blogs, interweaving satirical art with standard blog posting. The concept and the implementation of it blows me away. I've never seen anything quite like this blog before.

There are hundreds -- thousands -- more blogs equally as good as these 11, just waiting to be discovered and appreciated. The vast majority of blogs are small blogs. Just imagine how much more interesting and varied the blogosphere might become if we all link and blogroll five or six on a regular basis.

Just sayin'.

Every Hero Needs A Villain

2008-02-02T00:56:00.000-05:00

At least 91 people were killed today in two separate suicide bombings in Baghdad:

Two women described as mentally disabled and strapped with remote-control explosives — and possibly used as unwitting suicide bombers — brought carnage Friday to two pet bazaars, killing at least 91 people in the deadliest day since Washington flooded the capital with extra troops last spring.

Brig. Gen. Qassim al-Moussawi, Iraq's chief military spokesman in Baghdad, said the women had Down syndrome and may not have known they were on suicide missions, but gave no further details on how authorities pieced together the evidence. He also said the bombs were detonated by remote control.

The coordinated blasts — coming 20 minutes apart in different parts of the city — appeared to reinforce U.S. claims al-Qaida in Iraq may be increasingly desperate and running short of able-bodied men willing or available for such missions.

But they also served as a reminder that Iraqi insurgents are constantly shifting their strategies in attempts to unravel recent security gains around the country. Women have been used in ever greater frequency in suicide attacks because they often encounter less scrutiny by security officials.

The same folks who told us the surge worked because violence was down are now swearing up and down that the surge worked because violence is up again. In particular, they point to the fact that the suicide bombers were women with Down's Syndrome as proof that Gen. Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy is a success:

These attacks today are not the first time al Qaeda in Iraq has stooped to using female suicide bombers. They have been used several times, including twice earlier this month in Diyala.
This tells us several things.

First, it tells us that al Qaeda in Iraq recognizes that attempts to use male suicide bombers and vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs), their preferred method of suicide attacks for those seeking martyrdom, are no longer effective. These attacks fail because the combination of coalition military forces, Iraqi security forces, and neighborhood militias, known as "concerned local citizens" (CLCs) creating a security system that increasingly works, and makes it very unlikely that these preferred attacks will succeed. There is also some speculation that the influx of would-be foreign suicide bombers into Iraq is drying up.

Today's attacks also tell us that al Qaeda in Iraq is getting very desperate in seeking the high-casualty attacks that they so value. They were forced to scrape the bottom of the proverbial barrel, and use not only women (which they'd prefer to subjugate), but mentally disabled women at that, suggesting that finding willing volunteers is becoming ever more difficult.

These attacks today serve to show that al Qaeda in Iraq is not quite finished, but then, that is something we already knew. What is does show us is just how desperate they are to retain relevance in a war that is going very badly for them.

Far from today's attacks being a sign of the "surge" in Iraq failing, the extraordinary lengths al Qaeda was forced to take to carry out these attacks show that the "surge" and the COIN doctrine implemented by General Petraeus are working precisely as we'd hoped.

Is Bob Owen trying to tell us that he and his fellow war and more war supporters were hoping for the kind of attack that happened today?

Bryan at Hot Air is hoping that his "liberal readers" will now see that it was all those jihadis blowing up young women with Down's Syndrome in Iraq before 2003 that forced Pres. Bush to invade, and and that they will abandon their delusion that there were no suicide bombings at all until Saddam Hussein had been overthrown and the U.S. military occupation put in place:

I also bring all of this up in the hope that liberal readers might finally extract their craniums from their backsides and realize that whatever you think of Bush, he’s not the problem. He didn’t start the war and he’s not the cause of the jihad. Animals of the type who would blow up innocent mentally disabled women to kill scores of other innocent people cannot be reasoned with. There’s nothing to talk over with people like that. They live in a state of violent depravity that puts them beyond reason barring some massive change in their own minds. We infidels aren’t going to make that chance [he means "change"] by playing nice. We have to defeat them.

Libby Spencer tries to inject some rationality into the discussion:

... For the record, assuming it's true, I think it's just horrible that whoever was behind this latest disaster used Down's women to perpetrate the bombings but I don't see it as a sign of desperation. I see it as a sign of adaptation and a brilliant one at that. Perhaps Mr. Owens can educate me on how our troops are supposed to counter this new evil tactic? That would be helpful.

and gets this response, in comments:

A "brilliant sign of adaptation". You seem very eager to give cowardly fascist murderers who used helpless pawns praise. Why don't you just slap yourself in the head a few times for writing something that stupid.

The "conversation" continues in that vein. Apparently what we need to do is scream insults at the AQ terrorists and call them names. That's much more fun than facing the real problem (Libby, in comments):

... We've got a brass heavy, stationary military force fighting roving bands of nimble guerrillas. By the time we adapt to their tactics, they're already moving on to something new.

Election News

2008-02-01T19:29:00.000-05:00

MoveOn today endorsed Obama, after the organization's membership overwhelmingly chose him over Clinton:

In a resounding vote today, MoveOn.org Political Action's members nationwide voted to endorse Senator Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination for President. The group, with 3.2 million members nationwide and over 1.7 million members in Super Tuesday states, will immediately begin to mobilize on behalf of Senator Obama. The vote favored Senator Obama to Senator Clinton by 70.4% to 29.6%.

Senator Obama accepted the endorsement stating:

"In just a few years, the members of MoveOn have once again demonstrated that real change comes not from the top-down, but from the bottom-up. From their principled opposition to the Iraq war - a war I also opposed from the start - to their strong support for a number of progressive causes, MoveOn shows what Americans can achieve when we come together in a grassroots movement for change. I thank them for their support and look forward to working with their members in the weeks and months ahead."

The Nation quotes Eli Pariser, MoveOn's executive director:

"We've learned that the key to achieving change in Washington without compromising core values is having a galvanized electorate to back you up ... and Barack Obama has our members 'fired up and ready to go' on that front."

It makes sense that he would. Obama began his career as a community organizer.

Howie Klein was part of the 70.4%. I think he makes the essential point about Clinton with this comment: "As good a candidate [as] Hillary is, she still is very much a part of the Clinton Establishment which directly gave us the Bush Regime." Exactly.

Kyle Moore has mixed feelings about the MoveOn endorsement:

Like so many spoils up for grabs in the course of an election, this is a mixed bag. Against Obama is the fact that MoveOn doesn’t have the best image in the political world and especially during a general election will definitely be used against him to paint him as a “liberal”.

Yes, and there's something else to be said about that, too: Obama IS a liberal. That's not the kiss of death -- Michael Goldfarb certainty that it is, notwithstanding.

In fact, Steve Benen has noticed something interesting:

I’ve been thinking about some of the recent endorsements Obama has picked up.

From the more conservative side of the party:

* Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.)
* Former South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian

From the more centrist side of the party:

* Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.)
* Gov. Tim Kaine (D-Va.)
* Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D-Kan.)

And from the more liberal side of the party:

* Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.)
* Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.)
* Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.)
* MoveOn.org

Put it this way: do MoveOn.org members and Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska agree on much?

Ultimately, this may or may not amount to much. As I’ve said before, there’s little evidence that endorsements actually translate to votes. For that matter, Hillary Clinton has plenty of high-profile supporters of her own. Indeed, Maxine Waters’ backing helps show at least some support for Clinton from the liberal wing of the party.

But I heard a pitch from an Obama supporter a while back that stuck with me: He unites the left and divides the right, while Clinton divides the left and unites the right.

In light of the MoveOn endorsement, we can probably expect to hear this line quite a bit more. After all, I never quite expected to see a candidate successfully outflank Clinton from the left and the right.

There's A List Somewhere....

2008-01-31T20:28:00.000-05:00

I started laughing as soon as I saw the headline on Memeorandum -- even before I saw Steve Benen's first sentence:

ANOTHER AL QAEDA NO. 3.... Stop me if you've heard this one: al Qaeda's #3 man has been killed.

I Do Not Understand People

2008-01-31T09:26:00.000-05:00

I found this at the BooMan Tribune and certainly must agree that it is a dichotomy, especially a nation most of whose citizens profess to believe in this.

Once upon a time a wise man told us "Love your neighbor as you love yourself." Supposedly we are a nation which was founded in part on the moral and ethical teachings of this man, a nation many of whose citizens worship him as the Son of God. Yet we ignore his teachings. We love our pets. We feel sadness, even grief, and are moved to action at the sight of abused animals. We feel their pain. Why are so many Americans, even Christian Americans, so unable to transfer those same empathic impulses to their fellow human beings?

In addition to the ASPCA advert we have witnessed the very public humiliation and jailing of the popular athlete, Michael Vicks, lately of the Atlanta football team. We are sympathetic to four-legged animals when they suffer and it not their fault. Why can't we have the same feelings for our fellow humans when it is not their fault?

We have about fifty million (that's a five, followed by seven zeros as in 50,000,000) of our fellow citizens without health insurance. Abominable.

We need a single payer health care system, similar to Medicare, for the whole country. Period. End of comment.

Honesty, Such A Lonely Word

2008-01-29T21:02:00.000-05:00

Florida Republicans are up to their usual electoral shenanigans again.

Paul Kiel at TPMmuckraker passes along a reader's experience trying to cast a provisional ballot:

I voted in Lee County, Florida this morning - being in Southwest Florida, its a Republican stronghold in the state. The poll worker who opened the door for me advised "Just show your driver's license to the desk and you can vote." Only problem is that this is patently untrue, Florida providing for casting of provisional ballots and all. When I told the nice lady at the registration desk that I had lost my wallet and was going to cast a provisional ballot, she gave me the perplexed look of the uninformed. Fortunately, there was a gentleman at the "special services" desk who knew what to do and he got me on my way to voting. Then he told me that I had to "contact the supervisor of elections and provide proof of my right to vote or they will not count my ballot." Sigh. This also is not true in Florida - no proof is required if the only basis for casting the provisional was the lack of proper identification. The supervisor is suppose to run the driver's license number provided (which I gave them) against the state database and when they match the vote is counted.

I am fortunate enough to be both interested in the political process and fairly well educated. I can, however, imagine the very real possibility that such statements will lead a less informed voter to turn away thinking that her or she is not able to vote. There is, of course, nothing my experience to suggest anything but ignorance was the root cause of the misinformed statements of these poll workers. But when the general comes around next fall and we have these well-meaning yahoos speaking out of their asses like this it can become a real problem. Whether by design or by indifference, the result will be the same.

Kathleen Sibelius, the governor of Kansas, has endorsed Barack Obama.

Andrew Sullivan watched the SOTU against his better judgment:

I tried not to watch it and failed. It felt phoned in. The contrast between the banal cheeriness of the president's demeanor and the grave threats he faces was unsettling. It's good for a president to have some emotional resilience in that job. But Bush seems almost pathologically detached from any real understanding of the effects of what he says and does. If you're him, that's probably a good thing. If you're anybody else, it's horrifying.

King George the 43rd signed the FY 2008 defense authorization bill today, and then immediately declared four provisions in that new law to be nonbinding:

Bush’s signature yesterday came with a little-noticed signing statement, claiming that provisions in the law “could inhibit the President’s ability to carry out his constitutional obligations.” CQ reports on the provisions Bush plans to disregard:
President Bush yesterday signed the 2008 National Defense Authorization Act after initially rejecting Congress’s first version because it would have allegedly opened the Iraqi government to “expensive lawsuits.”
Even though he forced Congress to change its original bill, Bush’s signature yesterday came with a little-noticed signing statement, claiming that provisions in the law “could inhibit the President’s ability to carry out his constitutional obligations.” CQ reports on the provisions Bush plans to disregard:

One such provision sets up a commission to probe contracting fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another expands protections for whistleblowers who work for government contractors. A third requires that U.S. intelligence agencies promptly respond to congressional requests for documents. And a fourth bars funding for permanent bases in Iraq and for any action that exercises U.S. control over Iraq’s oil money.

In his “Memorandum of Justification” for the waiver, Bush cited his Nov. 26 “Declaration of Principles for a Long-Term Relationship of Cooperation and Friendship” between Iraq and the United States. This agreement has been aggressively opposed by both Republicans and Democrats in Congress as not only unprecedented, but also potentially unconstitutional because it was enacted without the agreement of the legislation branch.

Last but not least, here is a heartwarming story about supporting the troops.

Keep Huntin'

2008-01-29T10:58:00.000-05:00

I cannot add anything to this story at TPM.

The Blogosphere, Left and Right, Passes On a Misleading Quote With Zero Attempt To Check Out the Context

2008-01-28T18:01:00.000-05:00

Obama has gotten two more sterling silver endorsements: Teddy Kennedy and Toni Morrison. It's really annoying me that all the news articles and blog posts about the latter endorsement are repeating Morrison's comment in 1998 that Bill Clinton was "our first black president." What annoys me about it -- and actually, it's got me steamed, not just annoyed -- is that one news blog (ABC's Political Radar) dredges up the quote, and then, like good little parrots, everyone -- conservatives and liberals alike -- repeats it word for word: the same two sentences from an essay Morrison wrote for the New Yorker 10 years ago: "Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime."

The suggestion being made, of course, is that this somehow compromises Obama's chances in the presidential race because a famous black writer's approving, praiseful comments about Clinton being a "black" president will stir up white racism and raise the dread specter of racial identity politics.

Meanwhile, no one has gone back to take a look at the actual complete essay of which these two sentences are a part. Had anyone bothered to do this, it would have been clear that Morrison's comment did not refer to Clinton's policies, or to the kind of president he was.

Here is the entire paragraph in which those two sentences appear:

African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. And when virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President's body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and bodysearched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke? The message was clear "No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. You will be fired from your job, sent away in disgrace, and--who knows?--maybe sentenced and jailed to boot. In short, unless you do as we say (i.e., assimilate at once), your expletives belong to us."

"It" refers to the Monica Lewinsky scandal: Morrison is talking about the way Clinton was treated, by the media and the political establishment -- like a black man. And it made sense to many African-Americans that he would be treated as if he were black, because he had almost all the markers of a black person in this society: "... single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas." Black people identified with the humiliating treatment Clinton received -- specifically in the way his sexual life became public property -- because they identified with him -- with his background, with his personal history, with the basic details of who he was and the circumstances in which he was raised.

Barack Obama's biography is, in fact, sharply different from Clinton's in almost every way. The only significant commonality is that they were both raised by single mothers. Other than that, Obama was born in Hawaii and grew up there and in Indonesia. He never lived in the South. His mother was from Kansas; his father was African, from Kenya. His upbringing was middle-class; he did not grow up in poverty. He's not a Good Ol' Boy and his identity was not forged among Good Ol' Boys. There's no judgment attached to that for either Clinton or Obama -- it just means that they have next to nothing in common, biographically speaking, and Toni Morrison's having called Clinton "our first black president" has no implications whatsoever for Obama, should he be nominated and win the election, being in fact the first black president.

Obama, Kennedy, and Gorbachev

2008-01-27T15:17:00.000-05:00

Caroline Kennedy has endorsed Barack Obama for president, in an eloquent, movingly written op-ed in today's New York Times, "A President Like My Father":

Over the years, I’ve been deeply moved by the people who’ve told me they wished they could feel inspired and hopeful about America the way people did when my father was president. This sense is even more profound today. That is why I am supporting a presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama.

My reasons are patriotic, political and personal, and the three are intertwined. All my life, people have told me that my father changed their lives, that they got involved in public service or politics because he asked them to. And the generation he inspired has passed that spirit on to its children. I meet young people who were born long after John F. Kennedy was president, yet who ask me how to live out his ideals.

Sometimes it takes a while to recognize that someone has a special ability to get us to believe in ourselves, to tie that belief to our highest ideals and imagine that together we can do great things. In those rare moments, when such a person comes along, we need to put aside our plans and reach for what we know is possible.

We have that kind of opportunity with Senator Obama. It isn’t that the other candidates are not experienced or knowledgeable. But this year, that may not be enough. We need a change in the leadership of this country — just as we did in 1960.

I have sensed that same rare quality in Obama, although I have my doubts about whether it can withstand the cesspool of self-interest, corruption, and greed that has informed our political leadership for the last eight years. Even though the administration itself will be changing, I fear that much of the harm Pres. Bush has done to the infrastructure of democracy in this country has been institutionalized.

That said, the fact that Caroline Kennedy sees Obama as someone who can inspire Americans in the way that her father did makes me think that maybe he is. After all, who is more qualified to recognize Jack Kennedy's spirit in someone else than his daughter?

Reading Libby's post on CK's endorsement, I think she is struggling with the same mixed feelings:

Back when Acidman was alive I got into a bit of blog fight with some of his fans. He asked which president we would want to date. Actually, I think he put in more physical terms but the theme was who did we find attractive as a man. Rob, rest his soul, was as politically opposite to me as is humanly possible and so were most of his 'wimmen' as he called them. The women were flooding the comment section with heavy sighs over Bush and when I said JFK, they piled on with a vengence.

I emerged from the sea of claws unscathed by reminding them we were talking about physical attraction, not politics, and JFK is the only president I found attractive in that way. Hell, I was 12 years old when he died and I had a huge crush on him. But truthfully, he's the only president that inspired me as a leader as well. History tells us he was a flawed man, but he was so charismatic, when he told us to ask what we could do for our country, we wanted to answer his call and we did.

Today Caroline Kennedy's op-ed endorsing Obama is generating a lot of buzz. I don't think endorsements usually mean all that much, but this one, from our former little princess of Camelot, I think is huge. Caroline clearly inherited her father's eloquence and these sort of comparisons trump all the bought ads in the world.
[...]
For myself, I'm still finding it difficult to trust Obama, but I feel that way about all the candidates and since we're going to get stuck with one of them, his ability to inspire the electorate is his best selling point. POTUS is a unique position and no one can really predict how any man or woman will stand up to its rigorous job demands. Perhaps the best we can hope for, is to elect someone who can inspire a disengaged electorate to get involved. It certainly seems better to me than the cynical detachment we have now.

The victory speech Obama gave last night after his huge win in South Carolina certainly sounded Kennedyesque.

I did not travel around this state over the last year and see a white South Carolina or a black South Carolina. I saw South Carolina.

I saw crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children alike. I saw shuttered mills and homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from all walks of life and men and women of every color and creed who serve together and fight together and bleed together under the same proud flag.

I saw what America is and I believe in what this country can be. That is the country I see. That is the country you see. But now it is up to us to help the entire nation embrace this vision.

Because in the end, we're not just against the ingrained and destructive habits of Washington, we're also struggling with our own doubts, our own fears, our own cynicism.

The change we seek has always required great struggle and great sacrifice. And so this is a battle in our own hearts and minds about what kind of country we want and how hard we're willing to work for it.

So let me remind you tonight that change will not be easy. Change will take time. There will be setbacks and false starts and sometimes we'll make mistakes.

But as hard as it may seem, we cannot lose hope, because there are people all across this great nation who are counting on us, who can't afford another four years without health care, that can't afford another four years without good schools, that can't afford another four years without decent wages because our leaders couldn't come together and get it done.

Theirs are the stories and voices we carry on from South Carolina. The mother who can't get Medicaid to cover all the needs of her sick child. She needs us to pass a health care plan that cuts costs and makes health care available and affordable for every single American. That's what she's looking for.

The teacher who works another shift at Dunkin' Donuts after school just to make ends meet, she needs us to reform our education system so that she gets better pay and more support and her students get the resources that they need to achieve their dreams.

The Maytag worker who's now competing with his own teenager for a $7 an hour job at the local Wal-Mart, because the factory he gave his life to shut its doors, he needs us to stop giving tax breaks to companies that ship our jobs overseas and start putting them in the pockets of working Americans who deserve it and put them in the pockets of struggling homeowners who are having a tough time and looking after seniors who should retire with dignity and respect.

That woman who told me that she hasn't been able to breath since the day her nephew left for Iraq or the soldier who doesn't know his child because he's on his third or fourth or even fifth tour of duty, they need us to come together and put an end to a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged.

So understand this, South Carolina. The choice in this election is not between regions or religions or genders. It's not about rich vs. poor, young vs. old. And it is not about black vs. white.

This election is about the past vs. the future. It's about whether we settle for the same divisions and distractions and drama that passes for politics today or whether we reach for a politics of common sense and innovation, a politics of shared sacrifice and shared prosperity.

There are those who will continue to tell us that we can't do this, that we can't have what we're looking for, that we can't have what we want, that we're peddling false hopes. But here is what I know. I know that when people say we can't overcome all the big money and influence in Washington, I think of that elderly woman who sent me a contribution the other day, an envelope that had a money order for $3.01 along with a verse of scripture tucked inside the envelope. So don't tell us change isn't possible. That woman knows change is possible.

When I hear the cynical talk that blacks and whites and Latinos can't join together and work together, I'm reminded of the Latino brothers and sisters I organized with and stood with and fought with side by side for jobs and justice on the streets of Chicago. So don't tell us change can't happen.

When I hear that we'll never overcome the racial divide in our politics, I think about that Republican woman who used to work for Strom Thurmond, who is now devoted to educating inner city-children and who went out into the streets of South Carolina and knocked on doors for this campaign. Don't tell me we can't change.

Yes, we can. Yes, we can change. Yes, we can.

But if Obama gets the nomination and then is elected president, we don't need him to be Kennedy, says Russ Wellen at Scholars and Rogues. We need him to be Gorbachev:

The first to make the “linkage [between Kennedy and Obama] explicit and [give] it official sanction,” according to the Telegraph of London was, Kennedy’s chief speechwriter and long-time associate, Theodore Sorensen.

“Mr Kennedy reached the hearts of voters,” said Sorensen. “And so does Obama.”

He gave short shrift to the “experience” question that dogs Obama. “Judgment is the single most important criterion for selecting a president. . .” which, Sorensen continued, Obama “demonstrated in his position against the Iraq war even before it started.”

It’s one thing when a non-politician who also happens to be Caroline Kennedy, weighs in with a New York Times oped this Sunday bearing the none-too-subtle title, “A President Like My Father.”
“I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them,” she writes. “I believe I have found the man who could be that president.”

But it’s another when experienced Washington hands like not only Sorensen but Gregory Craig, one of Bill Clinton’s impeachment lawyers, who might logically be expected to support Hillary, are swept away by Obama.

“The election of Obama will not only change the players in Washington,” Sorensen said. “It’ll change the game itself.”

Hold on there, old-timer. That’s light years beyond what the election of Kennedy, who was more of a walking, talking zeitgeist than a man with a plan, accomplished. In fact, what Sorensen is conjuring up sounds more like a new Mikhail Gorbachev.

If you're thinking, WTF? read the whole thing. Wellen's thesis is interesting, and it makes sense.

Thoughts of a Liberal

2008-01-27T09:39:00.000-05:00

It seems that military people, especially those of us that made a career of the military, are more conservative politically than the average person in the country. Once upon a time, long, long ago I was typical of that way of thinking. But for military people to complain about excessive regulation in the private sector is certainly confusing. There is no organization that has more rules and regulations than the military.

But the more I observed, the more I saw businesses with large advertising budgets sell shoddy and defective products and try and get away with it by acting all innocent. “What ? Us? We didn’t know.” One product that took a long time to get off the market was the Dalkon Shield.

From Wikipedia, “In 1970 the A.H. Robins Company acquired the Dalkon Shield from the Dalkon Corporation, founded by Hugh Davis, M.D. The Dalkon Corporation had only four shareholders: the inventors, Hugh J. Davis, M.D. and Irwin Lerner, their attorney, Robert Cohn, and a practitioner in Defiance, Ohio, Thad J. Earl, M.D. In 1971, Dalkon Shields went to the market, beginning in the United States and Puerto Rico, spearheaded by a large marketing campaign. At its peak, about 2.8 million women used the Dalkon Shield in the U.S. The aggressive marketing and defense of the Dalkon Shield intrauterine device-- despite the manufacturer's knowledge of safety problems --resulted in a huge scandal.”

A lot of women users of the Dalkon Shield died from using it. A lot more women suffered septic spontaneous abortions. Some children were born deformed. And the manufacturer knew of the problem, and it was easily corrected, before they sold the product.

I’m not talking about toys from China with lead in the paint or asbestos in floor tiles. What pisses me off is U.S. companies making products that they know are either defective or do not do what they are advertised to do. I don’t like excessive regulation any more than you but I also do not like big industry groups lobbying Congress with big bucks and campaign donations. Who do you think a congress critter is going to listen to, my individual letter or a lobbyist with campaign contributions.

We have the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), brought about approximately 100 years ago due to egregious conditions in the meat packing industry.

Again, from Wikipedia, “Sinclair's account of workers falling into meat processing tanks and being ground, along with animal parts, into "Durham's Pure Leaf Lard", gripped public attention. The morbidity of the working conditions as well as the exploitation of children and women alike that Sinclair exposed, showed the corruption taking place inside the meat packing factories.”

The Great Depression of the 1930s was caused by unbridled greed in the 1920s. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission (FDIC) are two of the regulatory agencies that were put in place in order to prevent another depression. The chipping away during the 90s of the regulations those agencies had put in place concerning banking and investments have led directly to the housing bubble and the current recession.

Lacking rules, regulation and enforcement, essentially allowing “the law of the jungle” or survival of the fittest, you end up with a king or a dictator or worse. I would prefer to live with a minimum of rules. But I willingly use seat belts in my car, have liability insurance on all my vehicles. I comply with city and county zoning laws. As a society, we seem to have no complaints.

I think it is a mistake to blame the public, the consumer, the victim for buying a product when the manufacturer knew the product was defective. Be it automobile tires, roll over protection on SUVs or baby cribs, no matter how many slick lawyers they hire, those manufacturers have a moral or ethical obligation to their customers as part of the social fabric that ties us all together.

Who Needs Common Sense When You Have the Ecology Narrative?

2008-01-26T21:49:00.000-05:00

I'm not an economist, but it just makes sense to me that if you're trying to stimulate a sluggish economy, you would want to put money in the hands of those most likely to spend it. But as Paul Krugman points out, once again ideology trumps common sense:

Aside from business tax breaks — which are an unhappy story for another column — the plan gives each worker making less than $75,000 a $300 check, plus additional amounts to people who make enough to pay substantial sums in income tax. This ensures that the bulk of the money would go to people who are doing O.K. financially — which misses the whole point.

The goal of a stimulus plan should be to support overall spending, so as to avert or limit the depth of a recession. If the money the government lays out doesn’t get spent — if it just gets added to people’s bank accounts or used to pay off debts — the plan will have failed.

And sending checks to people in good financial shape does little or nothing to increase overall spending. People who have good incomes, good credit and secure employment make spending decisions based on their long-term earning power rather than the size of their latest paycheck. Give such people a few hundred extra dollars, and they’ll just put it in the bank.

In fact, that appears to be what mainly happened to the tax rebates affluent Americans received during the last recession in 2001.

On the other hand, money delivered to people who aren’t in good financial shape — who are short on cash and living check to check — does double duty: it alleviates hardship and also pumps up consumer spending.
[...]
Why would the administration want to do this? It has nothing to do with economic efficacy: no economic theory or evidence I know of says that upper-middle-class families are more likely to spend rebate checks than the poor and unemployed. Instead, what seems to be happening is that the Bush administration refuses to sign on to anything that it can’t call a “tax cut.”

Behind that refusal, in turn, lies the administration’s commitment to slashing tax rates on the affluent while blocking aid for families in trouble — a commitment that requires maintaining the pretense that government spending is always bad. And the result is a plan that not only fails to deliver help where it’s most needed, but is likely to fail as an economic measure.

The words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt come to mind: “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.”

If you are a compassionate conservative, like David Brooks, however, the subprime mortgage crisis and looming recession are part of the "ecology narrative":

There is roughly a 100 percent chance that we’re going to spend much of this year talking about the subprime mortgage crisis, the financial markets and the worsening economy. The only question is which narrative is going to prevail, the Greed Narrative or the Ecology Narrative.

The Greed Narrative goes something like this: The financial markets are dominated by absurdly overpaid zillionaires. They invent complex financial instruments, like globally securitized subprime mortgages that few really understand. They dump these things onto the unsuspecting, sending destabilizing waves of money sloshing around the globe. Economies melt down. Regular people lose jobs and savings. Meanwhile, the financial insiders still get their obscene bonuses, rain or shine.

The morality of the Greed Narrative is straightforward. A small number of predators destabilize the economy and reap big bonuses. The financial system is fundamentally broken. Government should step in and control the malefactors of great wealth.

The Ecology Narrative is different. It starts with the premise that investors and borrowers cooperate and compete in a complex ecosystem. Everyone seeks wealth while minimizing risk. As Jim Manzi, a software entrepreneur who specializes in applied artificial intelligence, has noted, the chief tension in this ecosystem is between innovation and uncertainty. We could live in a safer world, but we’d have to forswear creativity.

The United States has generally opted for financial innovation. This has worked out pretty well. The U.S. has enjoyed 25 years of strong economic growth, in part because capital has been efficiently allocated to companies that can use it well.

Financial instruments like adjustable-rate and subprime mortgages have allowed millions of people to get homes they could not otherwise purchase, and research shows that most of these tools have been used intelligently.

Hedge funds have proliferated to help investors manage risk. These things exist precisely because investors want to smooth out volatility. In the old days, a blow to, say, the Texas economy could have dried up lending in Texas, but now funds flow globally, and money from one part of the world can shore up weakness in another.

Translation: Lenders will be protected from the adverse consequences of the risks they took in handing out mortgages to unqualified buyers who are losing their homes because they took a risk and now have to take personal responsibility for the adverse consequences.

Don't fret, dear heart. This is the way it has to be, because we cannot do anything that might put a crimp in "financial innovation":

When a new instrument enters the market, it takes a while before people understand and institutionalize it. Whether the product is high-yield bonds or mortgage-backed securities, there’s a tendency to get carried away.

In the first stage of this adolescence, investors look around and see everybody else making money off some new instrument. As Nicholas Bloom of Stanford notes: “They assume they are fine because they see everyone else buying it.” Individual bankers have a special incentive to get in on the ride because their yearly bonus is determined by how they do in the short term.

Then there’s a moment when people realize how stupid they have been. They’ve bought a pile of subprime mortgages without really knowing what they’ve purchased. The ratings agencies suddenly don’t look so reliable. The cycle of overconfidence becomes a cycle of underconfidence because nobody knows who is holding worthless paper.

Then, finally, maturity sets in. Those who have lost great gobs of money get fired. People still find the new product useful, but within parameters and with greater safeguards.

The lesson of the Ecology Narrative is that, in most cases, the market corrects itself. Maybe this year banks will change their pay structure so there’s not so much emphasis on short-term results. Maybe companies will change their boards to improve scrutiny over complex new instruments. In short, markets adapt.

In "most" cases. Eventually. Or not. But regardless, we mortals can do nothing to interfere with the process, because it operates on its own, without human intervention or action. It's simply part of the divinely ordained order of the universe.

Mister Leonard Pierce provides a beautiful illustration of "the American economy in its natural state."

The Smug and Self-Important, You Will Have Always With You

2008-01-26T19:39:00.000-05:00

That Aravosis post I linked to the other day, complaining that poor people are getting a rebate check and he's not? It's not there anymore. Pity. Just makes him look worse.

But never mind. Now there's another Scrooge Award winner -- Megan McArdle, who tells us that it's a good thing food stamps were cut out of Pres. Bush's "economic stimulus" package, because "The poor don't need more food":

1) The poor don't need more food. Obesity is a problem for the poor in America; except for people who are too screwed up to get food stamps (because they don't have an address), food insufficiency is not.

2) Food stamps only imperfectly translate into increased cash income, meaning that the poor will spend . . . more money on food.

3) If the increase in food stamps takes the form of expanded eligibility, rather than larger grants, the administrative issues and public outreach will delay your stimulus until well after it is no longer needed.

4) The limits on the type of goods available to food stamp consumers, and the growing season, mean that some (it's hard to say how much) of the food stamp spending will simply draw down perishable stocks rather than generating new economic activity. Eventually this will probably generate more economic activity, but probably well after your stimulus is needed.

5) The economy doesn't need a food sector more distorted by daft government programs than it already is. If you want to give money to the poor, give it to them. Even if they spend it all on drugs, it will hardly be much worse than spending it all on increasing their already astronomical obesity rates.

The next day, after much criticism from readers, McArdle followed up with this:

The mental model most Americans use for dealing with poverty is Dickens-with-a-hotplate. Thus the raging anger triggered by the statement--which has rich supporting evidence from places like the Census Bureau and the USDA--that however many and varied the needs of the poor may be, food is not among them. If you mentally equate poverty with hunger, then denying the hunger means denying the poverty.

But the poor don't need to be hungry to be poor. There is little to no systematic evidence that poverty-linked undernutrition--malnutrition caused by too little food intake--is an actual problem in America. "Food insecurity" numbers batted around by the FDA do not mean that people actually went hungry; they mean that people worried about going hungry, or changed their diet--usually by altering the composition of the diet, not by forgoing food--to avoid going hungry. But of actual sustained hunger, there is no evidence.

There is, on the other hand, a lot of evidence of obesity among the poor; their obesity rate is estimated at 36%, and the obesity rate among poor children seems to be about twice the rate among non-poor children. The poor people are eating more calories than they need. Yet we propose to stimulate the economy by giving the poor money that can only be spent on more food.

Becks at Unfogged, Tom at Just One Minute, and TBogg think McArdle needs to take the Food Stamp Challenge.

Hilzoy does McArdle's research for her:

"How Many People Lived in Food-Insecure Households?
In 2006, 35.5 million people lived in food-insecure households, including 12.6 million children.
Of these individuals, 7.7 million adults and 3.4 million children lived in households with very low food security.
Children’s food security is affected to some extent in most food-insecure households (see the ERS report, Food Assistance Research Brief—Food Insecurity in Households With Children). However, children are usually protected from substantial reductions in food intake even in households with very low food security. In 2006, 430,000 children (0.6 percent of the Nation’s children) lived in households with very low food security among children."

-- USDA: Food Security in the United States: Conditions and Trends

Gary Farber, in Hilzoy's comments section, writes that, in fairness, McArdle does make some good points:

Megan's point #1 is idiotic.

However, her other points are arguable, and I tend to think it's unfair to not equally note her #5:
5) The economy doesn't need a food sector more distorted by daft government programs than it already is. If you want to give money to the poor, give it to them. Even if they spend it all on drugs, it will hardly be much worse than spending it all on increasing their already astronomical obesity rates.

I don't understand how her post can be addressed and this point ignored; it seems to me to perhaps be a somewhat unfair reading, if she's willing to see a monetary stream instead of EBT cards.

I can agree with that -- although I have to say that the blatant contempt for poor people that drips from McArdle's point #5 might make her critics less willing to acknowledge the soundness of her point underneath the disdainful words.

News Below the Radar

2008-01-26T10:11:00.000-05:00

I cannot find a link to this so will give credit first. On page 7 of 26 Jan, Piqua Daily Call, Piqua, Ohio below the fold is the headline

Alcoa lays off 17 workers in Sidney

Sidney, Ohio is about 35 miles north of Dayton, Ohio

By Darrin Michael. Brown News Service (which a Google search did not find)

The story begins:

Alcoa Home Exteriors laid off 17 employees from its third shift rotation Thursday morning.

Bob Parker, general manager of Alcoa, Sidney Operations, anticipated that additional layoffs would occur with other shifts throughout Thursday’s work day.
. . .
“This will be the third time the company had layoffs this winter,” Parker said.
. . .
Parker says the layoffs are largely due to a decline in the housing industry.
. . .
The company makes vinyl and aluminum products used for the remodeling and construction of homes.

This type of action is happening everywhere. Small and uncoordinated but in total having a devastating effect on the economy.

And, I ask snarkily, $600 in June is supposed to do ‘what’ for these people? ? ?

Rules & Changed Rules

2008-01-26T08:53:00.000-05:00

First, you don't change the rules once the contest has begun. See here, here, here and here. Second, if you don't like the rules don't play the game. Leave the game, quit the contest.

I tell ya, the antics (could they be described as childish or just dead serious and underhanded ?) of both Clinton and Obama are driving me towards the only adult still in the Dem camp.

UPDATE: This at TPM.

Rebate Checks

2008-01-25T17:25:00.000-05:00

The I.R.S. is going to issue the rebate checks so says the NY Times. I hadn't thought of the extra strain processing all the outgoing checks when we are in the middle of the tax return season.

And then again, how is the gov't supposed to know who is married and how many kids they have and how much money s/he made in 2007.

Defense Cuts

2008-01-25T09:51:00.000-05:00

I did not know this. Mentally, I had been blaming Bill Clinton. I hereby apologize to Mr. Clinton.

The size of the cuts are stunning and alarming.

The Army took the largest cut, from 770,000 to 572,000-25.8 percent of its strength. The Air Force declined by 22.3 percent, the Navy by 14 percent, and the Marines by 9.7 percent.

I did not realize that there were so many more things to despise VP Cheney for.

Personal Fortune Trumps Personal Responsibility

2008-01-25T08:02:00.000-05:00

Isn't it interesting how having made "poor choices" never seems to lead to bad outcomes for the rich and well-connected?

I'm Not Poor; I Just Don't Have Any Money

2008-01-24T21:44:00.000-05:00

Get a load of this opening from the AP article about the tax rebate deal Congress did today:

With unprecedented speed and cooperation, Congress and the White House forged a deal Thursday to begin rushing tax rebates of $600 to $1,200 to most tax filers by spring, hoping they will spend the money just as quickly and jolt the ailing economy to life.

Rebates would be even higher for families with children.

EVEN higher? A one-time check for $600 is high? When you're unemployed and your benefits ran out months ago, and you're about to lose the roof over your head? Oh, wait. If you're that bad off, you probably don't have to pay taxes at all -- and that means your rebate check is $300, not $600: Even better! The less money you have, the smaller the amount on that check you receive, if you receive one at all. The logic works for me.

It gets even better. In order to get Republicans to agree to that measly $300 check for employed Americans who earn too little to pay taxes, the Democrats had to wave goodbye to extended unemployment benefits and increased food stamps.

This is what our government is willing to do for hurting Americans.

Meanwhile, some people who are unquestionably smart enough to know better are experiencing brain freeze:

According to AP, congressional leaders have reached a deal on those economic stimulus checks. And rather than being geared towards helping the economy, they're apparently geared towards redistributing wealth (that would be our wealth) to the poor. What a surprise. Folks in the middle (i.e, those who are not rich or poor) are screwed by the Democrats (and Republicans) yet again. Let me give you the details that just leaked, and again this may not be the final deal, but it sure sounds like it:
Families with children would receive an additional $300 per child, subject to an overall cap of perhaps $1,200, according to a senior House aide who outlined the deal on condition of anonymity in advance of formal adoption of the whole package. Rebates would go to people earning below a certain income cap, likely individuals earning $75,000 or less and couples with incomes of $150,000 or less.

That means that if you make $75,000 or more a year, no check for you. Forget that fact that you live in NYC or DC or San Francisco, where prices from property to food are outrageous. No, forget that. Some guy living in a mansion in Topeka making $74,999 a year will get his little gift from the US Treasury and you, living in NYC making $75,001 out of a 300 sq ft studio apartment will get nothing. How about my friend who bought an entire house in Baltimore for $275,000 when that would get you a very small studio in DC. I know someone who got an entire house in Ohio for $2000 a month when that would get you a one-bedroom apartment in DC. I have a friend who moved to North Carolina and got offered a bit over $75k a year. He said it was a king's ransom in NC. In DC, well, again, keep checking out those studios. And another friend has a 900 sq ft condo, and paid more for it than another friend's parents paid for their 6000 sq ft house.

That's because far too often the Democrats don't give a damn about anybody who isn't a minority or starving to death (both valid causes to be sure, but are they the ONLY causes out there?). If you're in the middle, you're on your own.

Well, John, I'm not a minority and I'm not starving to death -- but if it weren't for the food pantry, I sure would be very hungry most of the time. There are more difficult and stressful choices than the choices you and your friends must make between living in a 900-square-foot condo in D.C. or a 6,000-square-foot house in the suburbs. There's the choice I'm making, for instance -- between letting my rabbi or a social service agency help me with my rent month after month and feeling like I'm a lower form of life than an earthworm, and being evicted from my apartment and living on the street. You can understand why I might be less than sympathetic to your plaint that your $2,000 studio in D.C. could be a whole entire house if you lived in Ohio.

Cernig dubs Aravosis "John Avaricious":

When the Right moans about latte-sipping liberals, this is the kind of thing they mean.
[...]
I mean, wtf? The poor are getting so much help that they're now richer than middle-class jerks like Avaricious now? I'm here to tell you, from experience, that isn't the case. As for saying that aiding the poor is just as bad as aiding the rich...that's got to be the most stupid bit of false moral equivalence I've ever heard.

His commenters aren't being kind, in the main, with the most apposite being that now would be the wrong time to hold that AmericaBlog fundraiser. As Wolfrum at Shakes' Sis points out, the wingnuts will lap up this greedy rant. James at the Mahatma X Files gets closest to my own view. I am so far from agreeing with Avarosis that he's from a different dimension. If I ever accidentally link to or blogroll this latte-sipping leech from this day on, please bash me over the head until I come to my senses.

I won't go that far -- John's on my blogroll and I'm not going to take him off for one incredibly weird post -- but that said, I won't hide my disappointment in the callousness of someone who is usually sensitive and compassionate in the way he discusses the issues. He would never have made it to my blogroll in the first place if he hadn't been.

Bush's Negative Legacy :-)

2008-01-24T09:59:00.000-05:00

And from RawStory this item. A small group with a modest $8.5 million budget with a big idea.

Americans United for Change plans to undertake a yearlong campaign, spending the bulk of the money on advertising, to keep public attention on what the group says are the failures of the Bush administration, including the war in Iraq, the response to Hurricane Katrina, and the current mortgage crisis.

I find this line

"Framing his legacy helps us in the '08 elections, there is no doubt about that," Woodhouse said. "But our principal mission would be defining the failures of Bush and the ideology he represents."

"Defing failures ? ? " There is not enough ink in the world and not nearly enough trees in the world to make paper to list all of Bush's failures even one time.

Anyway, good for them. I'm glad to see someone do it.

Fairness - NOT

2008-01-23T17:00:00.000-05:00

From today's LA Times comes an easy to understand story. Anyone with any sense of fairness can see what the outcome should be. Those folks that profited from and had any hand in deceiving and/or misleading investors should be forced to pay back their ill-gotten gains.

I'll bet the justices had to work overtime to come up with this cock-a-mainy ruling.

And last year, a U.S. appeals court panel in New Orleans also rejected the Enron-related lawsuit. It ruled that Merrill Lynch and the other investment bankers had not directly deceived those who bought Enron's stock.

Lawyers for the investors appealed to the Supreme Court and urged the justices to say that all those who profit from deception should pay. That appeal was formally rejected in a one-line order this morning.

Actions do have consequences. In this case a second rate doofus of a President appointed Justices to SCOTUS.

JOBS JOBS

2008-01-22T12:40:00.000-05:00

Kathy posted about a solution to the economic problems facing this country. JOBS, JOBS and MORE JOBS. Well, I have some specific suggestions that neither President Bush, the Business Roundtable nor the Chamber of Commerce will endorse and the Democratic Congress will not even consider but will solve ALL of the fiscal woes afflicting our country.

Initiate public works programs similar to those that FDR started during the 1930s in his attempt to pull the U.S. out of the Great Depression. The three United States land management agencies controlling the most land are the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and the Department of Defense. These agencies have “deferred maintenance” requirements that run into the hundreds of billions of dollars. A public works programs that would hire 5 million people at a minimum of $15 an hour would solve a whole host of problems.

1. Most of these hires would be in relatively rural communities. The infusion of cash into rural communities would be eye-opening.
2. The $15 an hour pay would put a floor under the minimum wage. No more $7/hour cashier jobs at the local movie rental place and no more $7 hour for flipping burgers. I mean, really, minimum wage ? It’s not even minimum starvation wages. I know folks with two minimum wage jobs who still are not making it.

Eliminating all the deferred maintenance would not only pump a lot of money into the economy but it would have the real benefit of bringing all trails, foot bridges and a zillion other items up to snuff and make them safe for the using public.

How do we pay for all this? Well, first, I don’t really care how. Let’s get a program moving, then we can worry about how to pay for it. We could raise taxes on all those earning more than half a million a year. If you earn over $10 million a year, I don’t think a 70% tax rate is excessive.

Market Fears

2008-01-21T19:13:00.000-05:00

From today's NY Times I think these two grafs are significant

European banks continue to make unwelcome disclosures about write-downs of mortgage assets, even if the losses are not as dire as those reported by Citigroup or Merrill Lynch. Banks loans across Europe are being constrained, according to a recent survey by the European Central Bank.

German banks, in particular, are still haunted by the American subprime mess. WestLB’s troubles came a week after a German property lender, Hypo Real Estate, lost one-third of its market value after it disclosed higher-than-expected losses from the credit crisis.

Today the U.S. markets were closed. Expect a huge drop when they open on Tuesday.

Dang Liberal Media, Part 1,371

2008-01-20T21:33:00.000-05:00

Glenn Greenwald writes today about Michael Gordon's latest pro-war p.r. job:

The New York Times' Michael Gordon -- a long-time, vigorous proponent of both the Iraq War and the Surge while masquerading as a "reporter" (he was once publicly admonished for admitting his pro-Surge views) -- has an article today lambasting Democratic candidates for advocating an end to our occupation of Iraq. Citing pro-war arguments from both anonymous military officers and his standard list of pro-war Serious Experts (Michael O'Hanlon and Anthony Cordesman), Gordon argues that the Only Serious Option is to remain in Iraq for a long, long time, and any politicians who refuses to accept this is being -- for that reason alone -- irresponsible and Unserious.

After recounting all the embedded assignments he had with the military in Iraq, Gordon declares that "the generals and the politicians seem[] not to be talking about the same war[.]"
[...]
Gordon -- citing the pro-war O'Hanlon -- then goes on to detail what he perceives to be the serious flaws in the pro-withdrawal arguments of Clinton, Obama and Edwards[.]
[...]
To achieve the vaunted journalistic virtue of Balance, Gordon, almost as an afterthought, also criticizes the Republican candidates for being insufficiently specific about what they would do when remaining in Iraq, and criticizes Giuliani for using the term "victory." The theme of the article, however, is that the only Serious Option is to stay, and to stay for a long, long time.

Of course, as Glenn notes, the same right-wingers who criticize 'one-sided' reporting at the NYT and elsewhere when a journalist dares to go beyond the official transcript have nothing but praise for Gordon, who, they say, "really work[s] hard to get the Iraqi story right."

Glenn also links to a must-read op-ed in today's Washington Post by Andrew Bacevich, who contends that the "surge" has succeeded in the only way it was truly meant to succeed:

In short, the surge has done nothing to overturn former secretary of state Colin Powell's now-famous "Pottery Barn" rule: Iraq is irretrievably broken, and we own it. To say that any amount of "kicking ass" will make Iraq whole once again is pure fantasy. The U.S. dilemma remains unchanged: continue to pour lives and money into Iraq with no end in sight, or cut our losses and deal with the consequences of failure.

In only one respect has the surge achieved undeniable success: It has ensured that U.S. troops won't be coming home anytime soon. This was one of the main points of the exercise in the first place. As AEI military analyst Thomas Donnelly has acknowledged with admirable candor, "part of the purpose of the surge was to redefine the Washington narrative," thereby deflecting calls for a complete withdrawal of U.S. combat forces. Hawks who had pooh-poohed the risks of invasion now portrayed the risks of withdrawal as too awful to contemplate. But a prerequisite to perpetuating the war -- and leaving it to the next president -- was to get Iraq off the front pages and out of the nightly news. At least in this context, the surge qualifies as a masterstroke. From his new perch as a New York Times columnist, William Kristol has worried that feckless politicians just might "snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory." Not to worry: The "victory" gained in recent months all but guarantees that the United States will remain caught in the jaws of Iraq for the foreseeable future.

Which brings us back to Glenn's original point: that this is precisely what pro-war reporters like Gordon and neocons like Michael Ledeen believe should happen.

Read My Lips: No More Tax Cuts

2008-01-20T17:53:00.000-05:00

Bob Herbert has a novel solution to the economic crisis we're in -- JOBS:

... the way to put money into the hands of working people is to make sure they have access to good jobs at good wages. That has long been known, but it hasn’t been the policy in this country for many years.

Big business and the federal government have worked hand in hand to squeeze the daylights out of working people, stripping them (in an era of downsizing and globalization) of much of their bargaining power while ferociously pursuing fiscal policies that radically favored the privileged few.

One-time rebate checks -- even when they are "as much as $800" -- and billions of dollars in additional tax breaks for businesses are not a solution for the millions of Americans who are struggling to pay rents, mortgages, utility bills, and car payments, and put food on the table every day. The solution is decent paychecks coming in every week or every other week.

There is no question that some kind of stimulus package geared to the needs of ordinary Americans is in order. But that won’t begin to solve the fundamental problem.

Good jobs at good wages — lots of them, growing like spring flowers in an endlessly fertile field — is the absolutely essential basis for a thriving American economy and a broad-based rise in standards of living.

Forget all the CNBC chatter about Fed policy and bargain stocks. For ordinary Americans, jobs are the be-all and end-all. And an America awash in new jobs will require a political environment that respects and rewards work and aggressively pursues creative policies designed to radically expand employment.

I’d start with a broad program to rebuild the American infrastructure. This would have the dual benefit of putting large numbers of people to work and answering a crying need. The infrastructure is in sorry shape. New Orleans comes to mind, and the tragic bridge collapse in Minneapolis.

The country that gave us the Marshall Plan to rebuild postwar Europe ought to be able, 60 years later, to reconstitute its own sagging infrastructure.

The New York Times points out, in an editorial, that tax breaks don't help people who don't pay taxes:

But in its embrace of the notion that relief means letting people keep their own money, the White House’s proposal excludes those who have no money to keep — about 45 million families earning too little to pay income taxes and to qualify for a rebate. Yet these are exactly the people who should be helped, not only because of their dire need but also because they would be most likely to spend quickly whatever assistance they got.

There are more effective and progressive ways to provide an economic stimulus. Democrats have suggested a flat tax credit for all workers, regardless of whether they pay income taxes. To help the worst-off Americans, they have proposed extending unemployment insurance and increasing food stamp benefits.

Better, but it's still only temporary pain relief, not treatment for the disease.

John Stewart, 1939 - 2008

2008-01-20T14:15:00.000-05:00

John Stewart, formerly of the Kingston Trio, died early yesterday morning in San Diego, CA.

Here's the link.

R.I.P.

Determination

2008-01-20T13:04:00.000-05:00

I am currently reading T.R. Fehrenbach’s “This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History.” The author speaks to both the origins and capacity of the Chinese soldier that fought the United States troops to a standstill and to the Vietnamese troops that did the same to the U.S. in the sixties.

For Lin Piao (Lin Biao, Wikipedia ) the military was not just a job but a way of life that he pursued for most of his life.

Commanding the Red Army's First Army Group, Lin defended the Jiangxi Soviet against Chiang Kaishek's Extermination Campaigns. During the Long March (1934-1935), Lin's unit formed a vanguard. While crossing the Dadu River, Lin was responsible for capturing the Luding Bridge, a truly heroic feat. In Yan'an, Lin headed the Worker-Peasant Red Army University.

In Vietnam, General Giap dedicated his life to defeating the Japanese, the French and then the United States.

What these two Generals and a significant portion of their troops had in common was that they were into the war for the duration. No four year enlistments, no 15 month deployments, no PXs, no fancy dinners on Thanksgiving. No sir-ree. In the mid-thirties Lin Piao led 20,000 troops on a 6,000 mile trek on foot averaging 24 miles a day avoiding the Chinese Nationalist army in pursuit.

There are a lot of striking similarities when one compares the U.S. experiences in Korea, in Vietnam and in Iraq. As opposed to the Roman legions that stayed for many decades in many foreign lands, America wants a quick solution.

Growing up in America means one finds a solution for the current problem and then goes on to the next problem and then to the next. American Revolution, War of 1812, American Civil War, settling the American West (forcing native Americans onto reservations) and on and on. And, “oh,” we don’t consider “racism” a problem. It is only a problem if it affects folks who are white and protestant.

The United States, as a nation, suffers from a ‘short attention span.’ We do not have the national fortitude for the long haul. Maybe we can call it the “TV Syndrome” where the hero solves the thorniest problem in less than an hour, in primetime, of course.

Basically, we do not have the national will to export “democracy” at the end of a gun and stay around until it may flower & grow. We do not want to deploy, not just the Army, but individual troops, to Iraq for a decade or more. We are not willing to ask our soldiers and sailors to dedicate their individual lives to the spreading of democracy.

Tyranny

2008-01-20T09:25:00.000-05:00

I picked this up somewhere and would like to give proper attribution, but cannot recall where I got it.

The Ten Truths of Tyranny

1) Any law the electorate sees as being open to being perverted from its original intent will be perverted in a manner that exceeds the manner of perversion seen at the time.

2) Any law that is so difficult to pass it requires the citizens be assured it will not be a stepping stone to worse laws will in fact be a stepping stone to worse laws.

3) Any law that requires the citizens be assured the law does not mean what the citizens fear, means exactly what the citizens fear.

4) Any law passed in a good cause will be interpreted to apply to causes against the wishes of the people.

5) Any law enacted to help any one group will be applied to harm people not in that group.

6) Everything the government says will never happen will happen.

7) What the government says it could not foresee, the government has planned for.

8) When there is a budget shortfall to cover non-essential government services the citizens will be given the choice between higher taxes or the loss of essential government services.

9) Should the citizens mount a successful effort to stop a piece of legislation the same legislation will be passed under a different name.

10) All deprivations of freedom and choice will be increased rather than reversed.

Telling the Truth and Saving a Life

2008-01-19T17:57:00.000-05:00

A Virginia lawyer publicly revealed prosecutorial misconduct in a 10-year-old death penalty case -- and thereby saved a man's life:

For 10 years, Leslie P. Smith, a Virginia lawyer, reluctantly kept a secret because the authorities on legal ethics told him he had no choice, even though his information could save the life of a man on death row, one whose case had led to a landmark Supreme Court decision.

Mr. Smith believed that prosecutors had committed brazen misconduct by coaching a witness and hiding it from the defense, but the Virginia State Bar said he was bound by legal ethics rules not to bring up the matter. He shared his qualms and pangs of conscience with only one man, Timothy G. Clancy, who had worked on the case with him.

“Clancy and I, when we were alone together, would reminisce about this and more or less renew our vows of silence,” Mr. Smith told a judge last month. “We felt that there was nothing that could be done.”

But the situation changed last year, when Mr. Smith took one more run at the state bar’s ethics counsel. “I was upset by the conduct of the prosecutor,” Mr. Smith wrote in an anguished letter, “and the situation has bothered me ever since.”

Reversing course, the bar told Mr. Smith he could now talk, and he did. His testimony caused a state court judge in Yorktown, Va., to commute the death sentence of Daryl R. Atkins to life on Thursday, citing prosecutorial misconduct.

Another nail in the death penalty's coffin.

The Right To Fly a Flag, Inviolable. Ownership Rights Over One's Own Body, Not So Much.

2008-01-19T16:39:00.000-05:00

Mike Huckabee tells white supremacists in South Carolina that people who don't want the Confederate flag displayed in public should have a flag pole shoved up their ass:

"You don't like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag," the former Arkansas governor told a Myrtle Beach crowd on January 17, referring to the Confederate flag. "If somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we'd tell them what to do with the pole. That's what we'd do."

It's fine and good, however, for Mike Huckabee, who isn't a woman and who isn't gay, to tell Americans who are women or gay, or both, what they can and cannot do with their bodies. In fact, he proposes to amend the U.S. Constitution to force women to bear children and to deny gays and lesbians the right to marry and create families.

Michele Bachman Is Proud That Americans Are Working Two Jobs and Never Seeing Their Families

2008-01-16T17:56:00.000-05:00

I'm not usually someone who has violent thoughts, but right now I'm thinking that I'd like to grab that choker of pearls around Michele Bachman's neck, and pull, with all my strength:

Today, Rep. Eric Cantor (VA), the chief deputy Republican whip in the House, unveiled his proposal to stimulate the economy. His legislation — the so-called Middle Class Job Protection Act — does nothing for the middle class. Instead, it reduces the corporate tax rate by 25 percent.

At a press conference today unveiling the stimulus proposal, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) justified the conservative plan to give tax breaks to corporations — instead of working Americans — by arguing that people actually like working long hours:

I am so proud to be from the state of Minnesota. We’re the workingest state in the country, and the reason why we are, we have more people that are working longer hours, we have people that are working two jobs.

Bachmann’s version of the American Dream is apparently working two full-time jobs and struggling to get by.

Mike Huckabee Wants the U.S. To Be a Christian Theocracy

2008-01-15T23:45:00.000-05:00

Mike Huckabee wants to "amend the Constitution" to align it with "God's standards."

"[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it's a lot easier to change the constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards," Huckabee said, referring to the need for a constitutional human life amendment and an amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

The Constitution, of course, does not mention God at all. The Constitution takes its authority from the people, not from God or any other religious authority.

So far, the few right-wingers who have even taken notice are responding in one of two ways.

There is the Rip Van Winkle response:

"[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards."
— Mike Huckabee, campaigning in Michigan last night.

This statement should shock every American to their very core. It is theocracy, pure and simple.

No shit, Sherlock! And where have you been for the past eight years while the religious right has been taking over the Republican Party?

Others are not troubled at the idea of amending the Constitution into a blueprint for Christian theocracy -- they just feel that Huck should use code language instead of explicitly religious language:

I don't have much of a problem with religion-based policy impulses. All of our impulses come from somewhere, after all, and I don't see why a religious person's core beliefs should affect his worldview less than my own secularist/humanist worldview. The left's insistence that only secular beliefs should impel policy stances is inconsistent but convenient in that it would, if accepted, lead to a secularist-only public polity.

However, I prefer such prescriptions to be couched in secularist terms. There are numerous reasons to be pro-life or pro-traditional-marriage that don't have much to do with religion. It's not deceptive, I don't think, to argue in terms of sound policy, without mention of God, even if, at root, it is a belief in God's will that ultimately leads one to embrace those non-religious rationales for one's positions.

Deceptive? Not at all. We can come up with better descriptors than that. How about... tactful?

Here and there, we even get hints that someone is maybe, at least, starting -- to get it:

... [I]t's really infuriating if you've had the experience — as I have — of being portrayed at various panels as part of the "American Taliban" for defending the purportedly Islamophobic efforts to root out Muslim terrorists. Part of my usual response, as a demonstration of how nuts this accusation is, focuses on the Taliban, their imposition of sharia (i.e., God's law), and the marked contrast to our system's bedrock guarantee of freedom of conscience.
Huckabee is made to order for the Left: his rhetoric embodies their heretofore lunatic indictment that we're no better that what we're fighting against. Let's "amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards"? Who needs to spin when the script speaks for itself? Where has Huck been for the last seven years? Does he not get that our enemies — the people who want to end our way of life — believe they are simply imposing God's standards?

"The Noxious Fruits of Hate Speech Laws"

2008-01-13T16:08:00.000-05:00

Glenn Greenwald has a superb piece on the chilling effects of Canadian and European hate speech laws, in the context of complaints filed against Ezra Levant, who published the Danish Mohammed cartoons in a right-wing magazine that he puts out, and Mark Steyn, for an article in Maclean's magazine that excerpted parts of Steyn's recently published book, America Alone.

I've written several times before about the oppressive, dangerous hate speech laws which are common -- increasingly so -- in both Canada and Europe, whereby the Government is empowered to punish as criminals citizens who express offensive or otherwise prohibited political views. But here is a visceral illustration of what these sorts of laws engender that ought to give great pause even to proponents of such laws.

Ezra Levant is a right-wing Canadian neoconservative who publishes Western Standard, a typical warmongering, pro-Likud journal -- a poor man's Weekly Standard for Canadian neocons. In February, 2006, he published the Danish Mohammed cartoons, which prompted an Islamic group's imam to file a complaint (.pdf) against Levant with the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission, charging Levant with "advocating hatemongering cartoons in the media," and the imam specifically accused Levant of "defaming me and my family because we follow and are related to Prophet Mohammed."

Rather than dismiss the complaint as a blatant attempt to punish free thought and free speech, the Alberta Human Rights Commission announced that it would investigate. To do so, they compelled Levant to appear before a government agent and be interrogated about the cartoons he published, his thoughts and intent in publishing them, and the other circumstances surrounding his "behavior." Under the law, the Commission has the power to impose substantial fines and other penalties on Levant.
The hearing was closed to the public -- only his lawyer and wife were allowed to attend -- but Levant insisted on recording the proceedings and was directed by the Commission not to publish the video, but he did so anyway. Here are the noxious fruits of hate speech laws: a citizen being forced to appear before the Government in order to be interrogated by an agent of the State -- a banal, clerical bureaucrat -- about what opinions he expressed and why he expressed them, upon pain of being punished under the law. ...

Glenn calls the video "stomach-turning," and it is -- but it's also a stirring experience to watch and listen to Ezra Levant's refusal to accept the premise of his interrogator's questions. One cannot help but admire and respect Levant's impassioned and uncompromising refusal to define his "intentions" in exercising his free speech rights. In fact, listening to his contemptuous rejection of the idea that his motives for publishing the cartoons are determinative of his right to publish them, I found myself thinking about Paul Robeson's famous response when he was asked, during his forced appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee, why he had not stayed in Russia (where he was treated like a human being for the first time in his life): "Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here, and have a part of it just like you. And no Fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?"

Now that's cognitive dissonance.

Iraq Says Saddam Supporters Can Return To Government; War Supporters Take Credit

2008-01-12T16:30:00.000-05:00

Iraq's parliament just passed a law reinstating former Baath Party members to their former government jobs.

And of course, the avatars of personal responsibility, honor, and honesty on the right are crediting this positive development to the Bush administration's escalation of the war:

This looks like progress to me. It's progress that wouldn't have come without lowering the violence and removing the provocations and depredations of al-Qaeda in Iraq. That wouldn't have happened at all had we not ramped up our efforts and taken a much more aggressive posture against the terrorists -- and the Sunnis would not have cooperated if we hadn't signaled so strongly that we intended to beat AQI and stick it out.

Cernig provides the reality check:

At last, the measure that many on the Left had always said was crucially important if Iraq was to reclaim long-term stability - undoing the Bush administration's incredibly stupid decision to ban any and all who had been Ba'ath Party members from holding posts in government - has passed unanimously in the Iraqi parliament, albeit with a slim majority of possible votes. Although everyone present voted for the bill, only 143 lawmakers out of 275 turned up.

And quoting the same paragraph from Captain's Quarters that I pasted above, Cernig writes:

Uh...no.

It's progress that wouldn't have come if the Sunnis of Anbar hadn't turned on AQI independently of and prior to the Surge, deciding that whatever else was happening AQ was bad for them. It's progress that wouldn't have come if the Awakening hadn't put together a cohesive 70,000 member militia army which could, should it wish to, create a de facto seperate state out of the Sunni heartlands and make anything the Green Zone's gravy train said or did redundant. The credit for ousting AQ and successfully pressuring the cental government goes entirely to the Anbaris and their Sunni sahwar friends in other areas. The most the Surge's commanders can truthfully claim is spotting what was going on then getting behind it and pushing with lots of money and guns. It's highly debatable whether any troops were actually needed at all.

Not to mention the fact that U.S. occupation authorities were responsible for de-Baathification to begin with, and we won't even bring up the fact that de-Baathification was a major cause of the insurgency -- without which there would have been no terrorist problem to take an "aggressive posture" toward.

But when everything negative that happens in Iraq is proof that the war is a good thing, and everything positive that happens in Iraq is proof that the war is a good thing, personal responsibility is really beside the point, isn't it?

Using Damage Control To Do More Damage

2008-01-12T15:34:00.000-05:00

BooMan astutely remarks that Hillary and Bill Clinton's attempts at damage control for recent controversial comments about Barack Obama actually seem designed to cause more damage -- and the MSM is not picking it up:

Carl Hulse and Patrick Healy's article in the New York Times, Clintons Move to Tamp Down Criticism From Blacks About Recent Comments, accomplishes precisely what the Clintons needed to happen. It's actually even better than they had any right to expect. First, it makes absolutely no mention of comments from Fmr. Sen. Bob Kerrey, New Hampshire chairman Bill Shaheen, supporter Andrew Cuomo, or anonymous Clinton advisers. It doesn't touch on Bill Clinton's patronizing use of the word 'kid' to describe Obama. All it addresses are two comments: Hillary's comments about MLK Jr., and Bill's comment about a fairy tale. [...] But the article does not fail to mention the two most harmful names for Obama's campaign...the names that instantly turn-off white voters and remind them why they don't like black complaints about racism [Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, Jr.].
[...]
Going hat in hand to Al Sharpton? Not that ambulance chaser again. Won't he ever stop seeing racism under every pillow and behind every curtain?
[...]
Do people even know that there is a Jesse Jackson Jr.? The prevailing sense is that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have once again made a mountain out of a mole hill and injected race into the debate when race wasn't even the issue.
[...]
Here is how it works. The Clintons push some racially sensitive buttons and elicit an emotional response. Then they go ~~apologize~~ explain themselves on the Al Sharpton radio show. The New York Times only covers the most innocuous of their comments. The result is that they remind voters that Barack Obama is not the post-racial uniter, but a typical black candidate, supported by serial whiners Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Nothing could undermine Obama's campaign more among the white vote, and the Clintons know it. And there is nothing, nothing, that Obama can do about it. If he complains, he only makes it worse. If he doesn't complain, these subtle allegations that he is a lazy, drug-dealing Muslim do damage all on their own.

Congratulations to the Clintons. You really are good at this campaigning thing. I'm so impressed.

Surge Proponents Are Getting Desperate, and Running Out of Places To Hide

2008-01-11T20:14:00.000-05:00

You might think that war enthusiasts would have a hard time explaining why, if the "surge" has worked so well, military commanders found it necessary to pound the region south of Baghdad with 20 tons of bombs in the space of 10 minutes.

But you would only think that if you did not know the simple rule of thumb the right uses to evaluate whether a given event in Iraq means the U.S. is winning the war: Anything that happens in Iraq means the U.S. is winning. Everything that happens is a sign that U.S. strategy is a success.

As Curt at Flopping Aces tells us, "Air Force F-16's and B-1 bombers" are "[a] rare sight over Iraq." Presumably, Curt thinks that's because there hasn't been a need for them -- what with the "surge" having worked so well, and Al Qaeda being on the run, and all. But that doesn't mean that a massive air attack now indicates that the surge hasn't worked as well as proclaimed. Quite the opposite:

We’re not talking about a run of the mill strike here folks. 40,000 pounds of explosives were dropped over a 10 minute period. Which tells us that while al-Qaeda is definitely on the run, the military isn’t just letting them recoup. We know our intelligence has gotten better since almost everyone hates AQ in Iraq now which would lead me to believe we killed lots of them in this strike. Which also begs the question, what the hell was al-Qaeda thinking bunching up like that?

Well, it doesn't mean AQI got pushed out of one place and just moved somewhere else. It means that "... Al Qaeda is running out of places to hide. That means what’s left of the group can’t spread out like they used to, and are forced to gather in what few sanctuaries they have left. That makes them easy to target and eliminate, which brings us to yesterday’s operation."

Isn't this the "last throes" argument? How many times have we heard that before?

If you have the stomach for it, take a look at the video of a bombing attack (not the current one) that accompanies Curt's post. Curt includes it as a gift to his readers, for their "viewing pleasure." I could only watch part of it. What kind of person gets pleasure out of watching a video like that?

Here is another, more thoughtful (in both senses of that word) commentary:

After shamelessly proclaiming from rooftops that situation is normalising in Iraq, the US administration would find it difficult to explain why it has to resort to “shock and awe” strategy even after five years of occupation of that country. As Firedoglake puts it succinctly, “That the insurgency — five years after ‘Mission Accomplished’ — is still powerful and entrenched enough to draw airstrikes of that size, that close to Baghdad, should tell Americans everything they need to know about how completely futile this war is.”
The Associated Press news story: “U.S. warplanes unleashed one of the most intense airstrikes of the Iraq war Thursday, dropping 40,000 pounds of explosives in a thunderous 10-minute onslaught on suspected al-Qaida in Iraq safe havens in Sunni farmlands south of Baghdad.

“The mighty barrage — recalling the Pentagon’s ’shock and awe’ raids during the 2003 invasion — appeared to mark a significant escalation in a countrywide offensive launched this week to try to cripple remaining insurgent strongholds.”

No one is bothered, and anxious to ask, that in such “shock and awe” brutal assaults how many innocent men, women and children are slaughtered. There are still dimwits who believe that such strategy can continue for another century!!! This reminds one of the old adage that aptly describes the dimwits…those who bring down the entire house to kill a mouse!!!

Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post, who knows a fiasco when he sees one, told Keith Olbermann that, “judged on the terms in which the president presented it, the surge has not worked. The purpose [of the surge] was to improve security, but to improve it to lead to a political breakthrough. ... And that political breakthrough has not happened.”

American Responsibility for Civilian Casualties in Iraq

2008-01-10T23:35:00.000-05:00

Writing in the context of the new World Health Organization estimate of Iraqis who died as a result of war-related violence in the first three years after the U.S. invasion, Matthew Yglesias asks a good question about civilian casualties: If you don't count them, how can you minimize them?

Further difficulties include the fact that many people have been displaced by the conflict and also I assume that some entire households have been wiped out. It remains noteworthy to me that while the US military insists that it takes measures to minimize the civilian death toll, it doesn't take any measures to quantify the civilian death toll, which makes it impossible to know what their measures accomplish. Step one in trying to increase blog traffic, for example, is to measure blog traffic.

TigerHawk, a war supporter, has an answer for those who think that 150,000 violent deaths in a discretionary war is too many:

The WHO report comes in the same week that the National Journal carpet-bombed the methodology of the now discredited Johns Hopkins study (apparently to some degree duplicated by the WHO).

Now, there will be those who say that the new estimate of 150,000 excess deaths is still too high a price for Iraqis to have paid for the removal of Saddam, even if it is 75% lower than the numbers used to bludgeon the Bush administration just before the 2006 mid-term elections. Big gun lefty blogger Hullabaloo had this to say:
But it remains 150,000 human lives, dead, senselessly, for an unnecessary war of choice. And that only goes up to June 2006, and the authors of the study admitted they were unable to reach certain areas that were "too violent."

Not to mention the 3,900-plus soldiers, including 9 in the last two days. And the numbers of wounded are incalculable.

All to remove a dictator who wasn't nearly as efficient at killing Iraqis.

Read that again, with feeling: "All to remove a dictator who wasn't nearly as efficient at killing Iraqis."

This, I think, reveals the vast gulf between supporters of the war and opponents. The Democrats believe that the United States is responsible for all excess deaths in Iraq following the 2003 invasion. After all, they reason, "but for" the American invasion these deaths would not have occurred. In this vision of the world, al Qaeda's inhuman car-bomb war and the sectarian fighting triggered by its attack on the Golden Mosque are predictable consequences of an American choice. The jihadis are not culpable for those deaths, because they would not have been moved to inflict them if the United States had not invaded in the first place. That is why, according to the left, all the excess deaths in Iraq are the fault of the United States war "to remove a dictator who wasn't nearly as efficient at killing Iraqis."

Apply that reasoning to other wars in history, and you can immediately see how fraudulent it is.

I think it's Tigerhawk's argument that's fraudulent. Take World War II as an example. It has been established many times over the last 60 years that Hitler was very much influenced in his decision to implement the Final Solution by the world's indifference to the fate of the Jews. Fighting a war against Germany did not in any way change that indifference -- and although Hitler and the Nazis committed the genocide, the indifference gave them the context in which they were able to do it.

Six million Jews were exterminated in World War II. Another way of saying that is that by May 1945, when the war in Europe ended, two-thirds of all the Jews who had existed in Europe before 1933 were dead -- one-third of the entire world Jewish population.

Clearly, World War II did not save those six million Jews from being murdered. But thousands of those Jews -- tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands -- could have been spared their horrible fates had the Allied countries -- most particularly Britain and the United States -- made any serious effort to save them. The truth is that the FDR administration deliberately ignored what was being done to the Jews, long after administration officials, including FDR himself, knew with 100 percent certainty exactly what that was.

"To kill the Jews," David S. Wyman wrote in The Abandonment of the Jews -- the definitive book on this subject -- "the Nazis were willing to weaken their capacity to fight the war. The United States and its allies, however,were willing to attempt almost nothing to save them."

The U.S. is responsible for the legitimacy of the wars it chooses to start, for the ways in which it chooses to fight them, and for the decisions it makes in the course of fighting them -- and that is true for any country that gets involved in war. As different as WWII and the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq are, that principle applies to both.

Casting Failure As Success, Part Two

2008-01-10T21:39:00.000-05:00

Here is more evidence of the administration seizing on the surge's failures and spinning them as signs of success:

In the year since President Bush announced he was changing course in Iraq with a troop "surge" and a new strategy, U.S. military and diplomatic officials have begun their own quiet policy shift. After countless unsuccessful efforts to push Iraqis toward various political, economic and security goals, they have decided to let the Iraqis figure some things out themselves.

From Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker to Army privates and aid workers, officials are expressing their willingness to stand back and help Iraqis develop their own answers. "We try to come up with Iraqi solutions for Iraqi problems," said Stephen Fakan, the leader of a provincial reconstruction team with U.S. troops in Fallujah.

None of the U.S.-established benchmarks for success in Iraq have been met, so the administration redefines that failure as the centerpiece of a new strategy to let Iraqis "develop their own solutions":

Although some progress has been made and legislation in some cases has begun to slowly work its way through the parliament, none of these benchmarks has been achieved. Nor has the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki taken over security responsibility for all 18 provinces, as Bush forecast it would. Last month's transfer of Basra province by British forces brought to nine the number of provinces under Iraqi control.

In explaining the situation, U.S. officials have made a virtue of necessity and have praised Iraqi ingenuity for finding different routes toward the same goals. Iraqis have figured out a way to distribute oil revenue without laws to regulate it, Crocker has often noted, and former Baathists are getting jobs. Local and provincial governing bodies -- some elected, some not -- are up and running.

The Iraqis "are at the point where they are able to fashion their own approaches and desired outcomes," Crocker said in an interview, "and we, I think, in part recognizing that and in part reflecting on where we have been over the last almost five years, are increasingly prepared to say it's got to be done in Iraqi terms."

Matthew Yglesias translates: "This, I think, is what's technically known as failing and giving up and then pretending that failing and giving up are part of a brilliant new strategy."

The Surge Is a Failure, and It's NOT All About Us

2008-01-10T18:08:00.000-05:00

"The Surge Worked" is the title of a nauseating editorial by John McCain and Joe Lieberman in the Wall Street Journal. They recite the usual nonsense about our troops "beating back Al Qaeda" and ending the sectarian violence, but what I find most sickening about this piece is how McCain and Lieberman use the failure to meet established goals as evidence of the surge's magnificent success, as well as the reason why the U.S. must stay in Iraq. [All emphasis is mine.]

Whereas, a year ago, al Qaeda in Iraq was entrenched in Anbar province and Baghdad, now the forces of Islamist extremism are facing their single greatest and most humiliating defeat since the loss of Afghanistan in 2001. Thanks to the surge, the Sunni Arabs who once constituted the insurgency's core of support in Iraq have been empowered to rise up against the suicide bombers and fanatics in their midst -- prompting Osama bin Laden to call them "traitors."

As al Qaeda has been beaten back, violence across the country has dropped dramatically. The number of car bombings, sectarian murders and suicide attacks has been slashed. American casualties have also fallen sharply, decreasing in each of the past four months.

These gains are thrilling but not yet permanent. Political progress has been slow. And although al Qaeda and the other extremists in Iraq have been dealt a critical blow, they will strike back at the Iraqi people and us if we give them the chance, as our generals on the ground continue to warn us.

In other words, everything you've just read is a lie. Political progress was the whole point of a "surge" to bring down the killing. Also, as clammyc notes in an excellent analysis at Booman Tribune, the reduction in violence is a failure on its own terms:

Let’s take a trip down memory lane to exactly one year ago and take Bush’s exact words from his speech announcing the escalation:
The most urgent priority for success in Iraq is security, especially in Baghdad. Eighty percent of Iraq's sectarian violence occurs within 30 miles of the capital. This violence is splitting Baghdad into sectarian enclaves, and shaking the confidence of all Iraqis. Only Iraqis can end the sectarian violence and secure their people. And their government has put forward an aggressive plan to do it.
So one goal (or the main military goal) was to get the violence in Baghdad down. By the end of April, violence was still raging in Baghdad, despite this escalation. And while violence in Baghdad decreased by October, it was still raging elsewhere. On top of this, the decrease in violence in Baghdad was due to the fact that Sunnis have been “cleared out” or “cleansed” from most Baghdad neighborhoods.

Even the one measure of reduced sectarian violence in Baghdad is an absolute failure because it comes at the price of the same segregation and sectarian enclaves throughout Baghdad that Bush decried in his speech. But what does that say for the other areas of Iraq?

And another thing: I'm well and truly tired of right-wing warmongers in Congress and their lackeys in the media heaping praise on Gen. Petraeus and American troops for every development in Iraq they can point to as progress, and either ignoring Iraqis themselves or giving them patronizing pats on the head for deciding to work with the "great American troops" -- as here:

First, it is unknown whether the security gains we have achieved with the surge can be sustained -- and deepened -- after we have drawn down to 15 brigades. Until we know with certainty that we can keep al Qaeda on the run with 15 brigades, it would be a mistake to commit ourselves preemptively to a drawdown below that number.

As the surge should have taught us by now, troop numbers matter in Iraq. We should adjust those numbers based on conditions on the ground and the recommendations of our commanders in Iraq -- first and foremost, Gen. Petraeus, who above all others has proven that he knows how to steer this war to a successful outcome.

Every American should feel a debt of gratitude to Gen. Petraeus and the great American troops fighting under him for us. This gratitude is due not simply for the extraordinary progress they have accomplished in Iraq, but for what they have taught us about ourselves.

If the mismanagement of the Iraq war from 2003 to 2006 exposed our government's capacity for incompetence, Gen. Petraeus' leadership this past year, and the conduct of the troops under his command, have reminded us of our capacity for the wisdom, the courage and the leadership that has always rallied our nation to greatness.

As Americans, we have repeatedly done what others said was impossible. Gen. Petraeus and his troops are doing that again in Iraq today.

But how have Americans "done what others said was impossible" in Iraq? By "arming, bribing and paying off former insurgents" to get short-term, temporary reductions in violence so Gen. Petraeus and George W. Bush can look like they're "winning" the war.

Via Booman Tribune, AlterNet's Katie Halper wrote about this back in September when she interviewed Rick Rowley, a filmmaker who produced the video "Uncovering the Truth Behind the Anbar Success Story."

Embedded with the U.S. Army and Iraqi militias, Rowley shows us that the Sunni "freedom fighters" with whom the United States is now allied are not just insurgents who had been killing Americans but war criminals responsible for sectarian cleansing.

Rowley, and his co-producers David Enders and Hiba Dawood, are the only Western journalists to bring a camera into the refugee camp where the displaced Shiites recount being attacked, bombed and driven out by the very tribes Petraeus and Bush are hailing as heroes.

Rowley's report, which includes interviews with candid U.S. soldiers and footage of a military commander handing a Sunni leader a wad of cash, suggests the role of bribery and coercion in building alliances that serve short-term goals in Anbar province, but in the long run deepen a multisided civil war. ...

How can "the security gains we have achieved with the surge ... be sustained and deepened" when the means used to "achieve" those gains are by their very nature unreliable and unstable?

Philip Agee and Health Care in Cuba -- and the U.S.

2008-01-09T23:55:00.000-05:00

Philip Agee, the former CIA employee who wrote a book about the agency's work with Latin America's brutal dictatorships, died Monday night, in Cuba where he lived in exile. He was 72.

Ed Morrissey does not think anyone will miss him:

One can argue about the policies of the Nixon and Ford administrations in Latin America, but one cannot argue that Agee committed a despicable act by exposing American agents to lethal exposure. If people within these organizations dissent from the policies being pursued or believe crimes to have been committed, they have options outside of violating security. They can go to the Inspector General, or to Congress if necessary, if they want to go around the chain of command. Certainly, the Congress of the Nixon years was very unfriendly to the administration, and they would have been happy to hear from Agee and gather evidence of any wrongdoing.

This is certainly a reasonable and fair criticism, although consistency would require that Ed and his fellow conservatives show the same revulsion about the outing of Valerie Plame -- but consistency is a quality that does not exist in the conservative playbook.

But the most "deliciously ironic" part? The snide jabs about Cuba's health care system. None of the rightie bloggers who have commented on the Agee story miss their chance to connect Agee's death to the quality of medical care in Cuba.

Ed writes: "Now he's gone, well past his expiration date, and it looks like Cuban medical care helped send him on his way. That seems rather fitting, if long overdue."

Dan McLaughlin at Redstate: "Leaving aside the benefits to Mr. Agee of Fidel Castro's world-class health care system, ... "

Blackfive: "My parents taught me that if you can't say something nice about someone, you shouldn't say anything at all. That being the case, I will simply note the delicious irony of Philip Agee's passing at the hands of the great and exalted free healthcare in Cuba."

Yes, the irony is delicious -- especially so, given that on this particular day -- the same day Agee's death in Cuba from a perforated ulcer was reported -- two researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine reported the results of a study they did in which they tracked different countries' death rates from preventable diseases.

France is at the top of the list. The United States is at the bottom:

France, Japan and Australia rated best and the United States worst in new rankings focusing on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions in 19 leading industrialized nations, researchers said on Tuesday.

If the U.S. health care system performed as well as those of those top three countries, there would be 101,000 fewer deaths in the United States per year, according to researchers writing in the journal Health Affairs.

Researchers Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine tracked deaths that they deemed could have been prevented by access to timely and effective health care, and ranked nations on how they did.

They called such deaths an important way to gauge the performance of a country's health care system.

Nolte said the large number of Americans who lack any type of health insurance -- about 47 million people in a country of about 300 million, according to U.S. government estimates -- probably was a key factor in the poor showing of the United States compared to other industrialized nations in the study.

"I wouldn't say it (the last-place ranking) is a condemnation, because I think health care in the U.S. is pretty good if you have access. But if you don't, I think that's the main problem, isn't it?" Nolte said in a telephone interview.

In establishing their rankings, the researchers considered deaths before age 75 from numerous causes, including heart disease, stroke, certain cancers, diabetes, certain bacterial infections and complications of common surgical procedures.

Such deaths accounted for 23 percent of overall deaths in men and 32 percent of deaths in women, the researchers said.

France did best -- with 64.8 deaths deemed preventable by timely and effective health care per 100,000 people, in the study period of 2002 and 2003. Japan had 71.2 and Australia had 71.3 such deaths per 100,000 people. The United States had 109.7 such deaths per 100,000 people, the researchers said.

After the top three, Spain was fourth best, followed in order by Italy, Canada, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, Greece, Austria, Germany, Finland, New Zealand, Denmark, Britain, Ireland and Portugal, with the United States last.

Which means that Philip Agee would probably have survived had he been in the United States, because he probably could afford health insurance. But if he had been one of the 47 million Americans who don't have health insurance, chances are he would have been just as dead as he is right now, in Cuba.

The Fear of Female Tears

2008-01-09T19:50:00.000-05:00

I don't like Hillary Clinton's politics. I don't want her to be the Democratic nominee. I think she's the anti-change candidate. She doesn't want to get Americans' hopes up; she doesn't want to commit to the kind of change Obama is pushing; she is hoping that Americans will go for "experience" over inspiration and vision.

That said, I have to say I am disgusted with the way the media and large parts of the blogosphere have been treating Clinton. In three little words, she can't win. She is excoriated endlessly for being too cold, too stiff, too unapproachable. She should show her human side, her vulnerable side, her "feminine" side. And then, when she does exactly that -- responds with emotion when asked by a New Hampshire voter how she "keeps upbeat" on the campaign trail -- she is mocked, attacked, and accused of faking tears to get sympathy votes.

That's why, imho, assertions that Clinton won the New Hampshire primary because the women of New Hampshire "felt sorry" for her, or because seeing her cry made her seem more "human" are wrong. It wasn't the crying that influenced voters in her favor -- it was the reaction to the crying in the media. As Kevin Drum put it this morning, Clinton's "emotional moment ... was on virtually a continuous loop on every cable news channel in the country for the past 24 hours."

The first comment under Kevin's post makes the point even more bluntly: "... The idiots in the media who were quick to decree that she was 'cracking' and heading towards a meltdown in NH instead drove sympathetic voters to vote for her."

If the right-wing bloggers and the op-ed columnists and the newspaper editors and reporters had just written about Clinton's moment of vulnerability when it happened, and then dropped the subject instead of airing the video endlessly for the next 24 hours and pontificating on What It Meant, there would have been no need to push back against the misogynistic assault on the woman for the crime of letting down her guard for 60 seconds because of an unexpected personal question.

Bush Administration Claims Iran "Harassed and Provoked" Three U.S. Ships

2008-01-07T16:39:00.000-05:00

Can you say casus belli?

Five Iranian Revolutionary Guard boats "harassed and provoked" three U.S. Navy ships early Sunday in international waters, the U.S. military said Monday, calling the encounter a "significant" confrontation.

An Iranian official, however, said it was not a serious incident, the state-run news agency IRNA reported.

U.S. military officials said the incident occurred early Sunday morning in the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow shipping channel leading in and out of the Persian Gulf.

They said that as the USS Hopper, the USS Port Royal and the USS Ingraham were entering the Persian Gulf, five Iranian boats approached them at high speed and swarmed them.

The Iranian boats made "threatening" moves toward the U.S. ships and in one case came within 200 yards of one of them, the U.S. officials said.

The U.S. Navy also received a radio transmission that officials believe came from the Iranian boats. The transmission said, "I am coming at you. You will explode in a couple of minutes," the U.S. military officials told CNN.

When the U.S. ships heard that radio transmission, they took up their gun positions and officers were "in the process" of giving the order to fire when the Iranians abruptly turned away, the U.S. officials said.

After the radio transmission, one of the Iranian boats dropped white boxes into the water in front of the U.S. ships, the officials said. It was not clear what was in the boxes, the officials said.

No shots were fired, and no one was injured.

Lambert headlines his response: "Republicans Work from the Usual Playbook, Iranian "Attack" Reported Just Before Primary":

Obviously, as the world’s only remaining superpower, we need to react with total hysteria. ...

I find it perfectly plausible that the Iranians would announce their intentions to blow up a U.S. naval carrier in international waters, don't you? Of course, there are always skeptics:

With all the activity and tension in the area, it wouldn’t surprise me if somebody got too close to somebody else and nearly started something by accident. However, this part seems bizarre:
A radio transmission from one of the Iranian ships said, “I am coming at you. You will explode in a couple of minutes,” CNN reported, citing a U.S. official.

That seems like a weird thing for somebody to broadcast. If they are planning to, say, ram an explosives-packed boat into a ship, why announce it? If they are just cruising around, seeing how close people will come to a line, not actually planning to attack, why send a message like that? Until we hear more, I’m assuming this allegation is bullsh!t, a way to beat the war drums.

Which the wingnuts are already rushing to do ...

Undoubtedly, Iran wanted to test American resolve, but could not isolate a small enough vessel to pursue a similar mission. Instead, they basically did a probe to see how far they could go before provoking an armed response. This information could prove useful for Iran's terrorist partners in Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad in the Gulf and elsewhere. It looks suspiciously like a dry run for a repeat of the USS Cole bombing in Aden seven years ago.

This cannot be allowed to happen again. The next time patrol boats approach American vessels and threaten attack, one of them has to head to the bottom of the gulf. ...

... while indulging in gales of laughter at those silly liberals who say they are beating the drums for war:

How much do you want to bet that at least one lefty politician, colmnist, or lefty blogger will say this story doesn’t pass the smell test and accuse Bush administration “warmongers” of trying to “make up more stuff” about Iran in order to start a war with them?

Heavens, what a thought. This is a clear act of ~~provaction~~ provocation on Iran's part.

Of course, history has never been the Bush groupies' strong suit. The fact is, the U.S. has been trying to provoke war with Iraq for well over a year now. Last February, Newsweek reported that the Bush administration, which already had two aircraft carrier strike groups on their way to the Persian Gulf at the time, was planning to send a third one. Michael Hirsh and Maziar Bahari wrote:

... At least one former White House official contends that some Bush advisers secretly want an excuse to attack Iran. "They intend to be as provocative as possible and make the Iranians do something [America] would be forced to retaliate for," says Hillary Mann, the administration's former National Security Council director for Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs. U.S. officials insist they have no intention of provoking or otherwise starting a war with Iran, and they were also quick to deny any link to Sharafi's kidnapping. But the fact remains that the longstanding war of words between Washington and Tehran is edging toward something more dangerous. A second Navy carrier group is steaming toward the Persian Gulf, and NEWSWEEK has learned that a third carrier will likely follow. Iran shot off a few missiles in those same tense waters last week, in a highly publicized test. With Americans and Iranians jousting on the chaotic battleground of Iraq, the chances of a small incident's spiraling into a crisis are higher than they've been in years.

In the current incident, Iran claims the confrontation was a simple case of mistaken identity. That may or may not be true. But as Cernig points out, you don't have to believe Iran is being 100 percent truthful to recognize that it's very unlikely Iran's motives were as sinister as they are being depicted [boldface emphasis mine]:

Now, I don't believe for a second that the IRGC can't recognise "Navy cruiser USS Port Royal, destroyer USS Hopper and frigate USS Ingraham" from more than 200 yards. But I repeat that for [there] to be an ulterior motive behind this otherwise common incident, someone would have had to tell an IGRC boat skipper to make a very foolhardy radio call which the US has no transcript for. And I just don't believe that level of dumb machiavellism either. No, some out-of-order hotdog who will now find himself commanding the IRGC's bathtub on an icy mountain lake is a far more likely explanation.

"Yes We Can"

2008-01-06T14:45:00.000-05:00

I did not watch the debates last night, but the consensus seems to be that (a) Obama performed very strongly and did not make any mistakes that might have derailed his post-Iowa express train to the nomination; (b) Clinton held her own but was clearly on the defensive; and (c) Edwards was eloquent and acquitted himself very well, using a strategy of joining forces with Obama against Clinton. Opinion differs as to whether the motive behind what some see as madness on Edwards' part is to eliminate the weakest link before going after the strongest (Obama, right now), or whether it's to ride Obama's coattails.

Here are some money quotes:

Maha:

Right now most polls are saying that Clinton and Obama are tied in New Hampshire. And you know that if she wins by even one vote on Tuesday she’ll be re-crowned “Ms. Inevitable.”

But I wonder if that “inevitability” shtick isn’t part of her problem. It sent a subliminal message to rank-and-file Dems that you’ll take what the party gives you, and you will like it. But what the party has been giving us in recent years — well, for a long time, actually — hasn’t been all that wonderful. We put up with it because the other guys are worse. Maybe what happened at the 100 Club dinner is a dawning realization that “Hey, we don’t have to put up with it! We can demand something different!”

Josh:

In general, I think Obama's the winner tonight. I think Hillary made her case well. I think Edwards had the best debate. But the debate can only be understood in the context of the moment. Right now, Obama's on fire. The first post-Iowa polls show him picking up a big post-caucus bump. He needed to come off well. Not make any mistakes. And not let Hillary open up any strong line of attack against him. And I think he did each one of those things. Which means he gave some reassurance to those who might be hesitating to get on the bandwagon and didn't do or allow anything to happen which significantly changes the trend of the moment, which is moving heavily in his favor.

Steve Benen:

Folks can certainly draw their own conclusions about impassioned vs. shrill, but I was struck by something Clinton said, not just how she said it: “We don’t need to be raising the false hopes of our country.” Regardless of tone or theatrics, that’s really not a positive message, particularly with a group of voters looking to be inspired.

Shamanic:

Words are not action, this is true enough, but Americans as a people are, perhaps uniquely, susceptible to the influence of inspiration. When inspired to greatness, we are makers of miracles. In America, it is never wise to dismiss the visionary and the words that communicate his or her vision. Words are the only thing that have ever really mattered in this country; they are the keystone of our nation, the well of our dream of ourselves from which all action and all greatness radiates.

When I look at what's happening on the campaign trail in this election, I see a people hungry for a new and better dream of America, one that transcends the bitterness of the post-Vietnam era and gives my generation and the one that is following, at last, a vision for being one people again. I can't say how or if that trumps experience. But I know in my gut that Barack Obama is singing a necessary song about America, and that without the right words today, the actions of tomorrow will continue to fail us.

Joe Gandelman:

The time to go to the bathroom was when it was Richardson’s turn.

Creature at The Reaction:

Yes, Hillary, finally: a wom[a]n president would be a huge change. If only you hadn't tried to be so manly over war. ...

Bob Herbert:

There is no longer any doubt that the Obama phenomenon is real. Mr. Obama’s message of hope, healing and change, discounted as fanciful and naïve by skeptics, drew Iowans into the frigid night air by the tens of thousands on Thursday to stand with a man who is not just running for president, but trying to build a new type of political movement.

By midnight, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd had been chased from the race; John Edwards was all but literally on his knees; and the Clintons were trying, for the umpteenth time, to figure out how to remake themselves as the comeback kids.

Shake hands with tomorrow. It’s here.

Senator Obama’s victory speech was a concise oratorical gem. No candidate in either party can move an audience like he can. He characterized his stunning victory as an affirmation of “the most American of ideas — that in the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it.”

Barack Obama (via Matthew Yglesias):

Playing the Race Card -- IOKIYAR

2008-01-05T18:15:00.000-05:00

Jonah Goldberg fears that if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee, and doesn't win the election, blacks will riot en masse.

He doesn't say this in such a direct fashion, of course. Instead, he uses coded language to suggest that and then projects the white fear of black violence onto Democrats [emphasis mine]:

This is just a late Friday night prediction. But after reading this regrettable excess from Ezra Klein as well as all of the more reasonable but nonetheless hopeful, proud, idealistic and sincere sentiments of pride and well-wishing for Obama as the first serious mainstream black contender for the White House (some, but by no means all, of these sentiments shared by yours truly) , I think it's worth imagining a certain scenario. Imagine the Democrats do rally around Obama. Imagine the media invests as heavily in him as I think we all know they will if he's the nominee — and then imagine he loses. I seriously think certain segments of American political life will become completely unhinged. I can imagine the fear of this social unraveling actually aiding Obama enormously in 2008. Forget Hillary's inevitability. Obama has a rendezvous with destiny, or so we will be told. And if he's denied it, teeth shall be gnashed, clothes rent and prices paid.

Glenn Greenwald reminds us of the "social unraveling" that followed the results of the 2000 presidential election:

The last time I can recall a "certain segment of American political life" becoming "completely unhinged" and causing "social unraveling" in connection with a national election was this episode in Miami, during the 2000 recount:
The "bourgeois riot" celebrated by Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot helped stop the announced manual recount of the 10,750 undervote in Miami-Dade County. Instigated by an order from New York congressman John Sweeney to "shut it down," dozens of screaming GOP demonstrators pounded on doors and a picture window at elections headquarters. The canvassing board, which had already found a net Al Gore gain of 168 votes, reversed a decision it had made a couple of hours earlier to begin a tally of the undervote.
The mob gang-rushed a local Democrat carrying a blank sample ballot. They threatened that a thousand Cubans were on their way to the headquarters to stop the count. Several people were "trampled, punched or kicked," according to The New York Times. The canvassing board chair at first conceded that mob pressures played a role in the shutdown -- which cost Gore the 168 votes as well -- but later reversed his position. . . . .

Instead of condemning the Dade tactics, W. himself called the victory party that night to praise them, and Republicans invoked the specter of Jesse Jackson, who'd merely led peaceful protests outside election offices.
The "certain segment" creating "social unraveling" and blocking vote-counting in 2000 with their thug tactics wasn't quite the same as the "certain segment" which Goldberg and Reynolds are ominously warning will riot in the event of an Obama loss[.] ...

The photograph is priceless.

Here's what an Obama nomination would actually mean:

There's a prevailing sense that Obama is not as offensive to the right-wing GOP faction as other Democratic and liberal candidates in the past have been, or that he's less "divisive" among them than Hillary. And that's true: for now, while he tries to take down the individual who has long provoked the most intense hatred -- literally -- among the Right. But anyone who doesn't think that that's all going to change instantaneously if Obama is the nominee hasn't been watching how this faction operates over the last 20 years. ...

Clinton Derangement Syndrome-afflicted righties will need someplace to direct all that hatred:

If Obama wins the nomination for the Democrats, all of that will change, and it will change overnight. We will be regaled with long tales of madrassas, Obama’s first name will become Hussein, and everyone’s pets will be running around frothing from all the dog whistles. Obama is getting a free ride at the moment because of the intense, nutty, and 15 year old hate for the Clagina (in all honesty, I was a hater up until a few years ago when I realized cold and calculating competence is better than willful dishonesty and feckless incompetence). But if and when the queen is vanquished, all that venom will need a target, and that target will be Obama.

Racism aside, "... the real issue is that the breakdown of civil society is the perpetual wet dream of gun nut glibertarians like Reynolds. They imagine themselves guarding their horde of HDTVs and digital cameras with their ~~penis extenders~~ gun stash, heroically shooting the 'bad guys.' "

Is Obama The One?

2008-01-04T19:40:00.000-05:00

Lots of commentary and analysis on the results of the Iowa caucuses -- especially on the Democratic side.

David Brooks's column today is frankly admiring of Obama's accomplishment:

I’ve been through election nights that brought a political earthquake to the country. I’ve never been through an election night that brought two.

Barack Obama has won the Iowa caucuses. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to feel moved by this. An African-American man wins a closely fought campaign in a pivotal state. He beats two strong opponents, including the mighty Clinton machine. He does it in a system that favors rural voters. He does it by getting young voters to come out to the caucuses.

This is a huge moment. It’s one of those times when a movement that seemed ethereal and idealistic became a reality and took on political substance.

I never thought I'd say this about anything written by David Brooks, but you should read the whole thing.

A lot of people are noticing, and writing, the obvious (which doesn't mean it isn't a point worth making) -- that Obama's win is a clear statement of support for change over experience. Although Charles Peters makes a convincing case that it's too simplistic to cast the choice that way:

People who complain that Barack Obama lacks experience must be unaware of his legislative achievements. One reason these accomplishments are unfamiliar is that the media have not devoted enough attention to Obama's bills and the effort required to pass them, ignoring impressive, hard evidence of his character and ability.

Since most of Obama's legislation was enacted in Illinois, most of the evidence is found there -- and it has been largely ignored by the media in a kind of Washington snobbery that assumes state legislatures are not to be taken seriously. (Another factor is reporters' fascination with the horse race at the expense of substance that they assume is boring, a fascination that despite being ridiculed for years continues to dominate political journalism.)

Consider a bill into which Obama clearly put his heart and soul. The problem he wanted to address was that too many confessions, rather than being voluntary, were coerced -- by beating the daylights out of the accused.

Obama proposed requiring that interrogations and confessions be videotaped.

This seemed likely to stop the beatings, but the bill itself aroused immediate opposition. There were Republicans who were automatically tough on crime and Democrats who feared being thought soft on crime. There were death penalty abolitionists, some of whom worried that Obama's bill, by preventing the execution of innocents, would deprive them of their best argument. Vigorous opposition came from the police, too many of whom had become accustomed to using muscle to "solve" crimes. And the incoming governor, Rod Blagojevich, announced that he was against it.

Obama had his work cut out for him.

He responded with an all-out campaign of cajolery. It had not been easy for a Harvard man to become a regular guy to his colleagues. Obama had managed to do so by playing basketball and poker with them and, most of all, by listening to their concerns. Even Republicans came to respect him. One Republican state senator, Kirk Dillard, has said that "Barack had a way both intellectually and in demeanor that defused skeptics."

The police proved to be Obama's toughest opponent. Legislators tend to quail when cops say things like, "This means we won't be able to protect your children." The police tried to limit the videotaping to confessions, but Obama, knowing that the beatings were most likely to occur during questioning, fought -- successfully -- to keep interrogations included in the required videotaping.

By showing officers that he shared many of their concerns, even going so far as to help pass other legislation they wanted, he was able to quiet the fears of many.

Obama proved persuasive enough that the bill passed both houses of the legislature, the Senate by an incredible 35 to 0. Then he talked Blagojevich into signing the bill, making Illinois the first state to require such videotaping.

It sure would be nice to believe that Obama really is -- as the story of this bill makes him sound -- a uniter rather than a divider. We've all been burned many more times than once and are correspondingly shy. Still... there must be something there that's genuine, because how else did he get all those students and young and new voters to break the apathy habit and come out and vote for him?

Atrios pretty much expresses what I'm feeling:

In all my dealings with Obama people, as well as the man himself, there's always been this sense that they're constantly telling people, "Trust us. We've thought this through. We know what we're doing. It'll work. Yes we understand that you're uncomfortable with this, or that you think it's wrong, but really we know what we're doing."

And then those of us in the cheap seats think that there's no way all of those new/young voters show up to vote in Iowa, that Obama's inclusive rhetoric doesn't have the appeal he imagines, etc.. etc... And then he pulls it off. Maybe he does know what he's doing.

And here's the other thing. As I said to a co-worker today: Wouldn't it be soooo lovely to have a president who's smart, again? Just the thought makes me feel giddy.

It's Huckabee and Obama in Iowa

2008-01-03T22:08:00.000-05:00

Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama have won in Iowa.

Now more than ever, reporters need to ask Huckabee if he shares the official commitment of the Southern Baptist organization to converting Jews to Christianity.

"The Folly of the Administration's Attempts To Manage History"

2008-01-02T20:50:00.000-05:00

I haven't felt much like writing anything in the last couple of days, but this op-ed by Andrew Bacevich in the Los Angeles Times is too outstanding to let pass without note:

Viewed from a historian's perspective, the Bush administration since 9/11 has ransacked the past to conjure up comforting expectations for the future. President Bush excels in this exercise, expressing confidence that the "untamed fire of freedom" will one day soon "reach the darkest corners of our world." Yet as the assassination of Benazir Bhutto reminds us yet again, events refuse to play along. History remains stubbornly recalcitrant.

Bush would have us believe otherwise. History, he insists, "has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty." That direction, the president believes, tends toward peace, democracy and freedom for all humankind. America's purpose, assigned by the Author of Liberty, is to nudge history toward its intended destination. More immediately, America's ostensible aim since 9/11 has been to make the blessings of liberty available to the Islamic world. As democracy spreads there, the threat posed by terrorism will diminish. Such at least has been the assumption underlying Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom, the two wars begun on Bush's watch.

This strategy of militarized liberation has been fraught with contradictions, not the least of which has been the partnership forged between the United States and Pakistan. Bush has repeatedly declared Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf a valued and trusted ally. Since 9/11, the U.S. has provided Pakistan with at least $10 billion in aid, most of it going to the army. In hopes of ensuring Pakistani cooperation in the global war on terrorism, Washington has ignored that nation's record as perhaps the world's most egregious nuclear weapons proliferator.
[...]
At the beginning of his second term, Bush spoke confidently of the United States sponsoring a global democratic revolution "with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." Ever since that hopeful moment, developments across the greater Middle East -- above all, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and on the West Bank -- have exposed the very real limits of U.S. wisdom and power.

Now the virtual impotence of the U.S. in the face of the crisis enveloping Pakistan -- along with its complicity in creating that crisis -- ought to discredit once and for all any notions of America fixing the world's ills.

Bush dreamed of managing history. It turns out that he cannot even manage Pakistan. Thus does the Author of Liberty mock the pretensions of those who presume to understand his intentions and to interpret his will.

A New Year, A New Milestone

2007-12-30T11:30:00.000-05:00

Coming up early next year: The number 4,000.

Internet Behemoths and Children's Health

2007-12-30T11:18:00.000-05:00

God is not dead -- just renamed.

The Associated Press (and ten million mainstream news sources that picked up the story without adding any information or insights) reports that Pres. Bush signed legislation extending the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).

President Bush signed legislation on Saturday that extends a popular children's health insurance program after having twice beaten back attempts to expand it.

The extension of the State Children's Health Insurance Program is expected to provide states with enough money to cover those enrolled through March 2009. Bush and some Republican lawmakers say the program will serve those that it should: children from families who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but cannot afford private insurance.

"We're pleased that the program will be extended and that states can be certain of their funding," White House spokesman Tony Fratto said.

Many Democrats, with help from some Republicans, wanted to give the program a significant cash infusion and broaden coverage to an estimated 4 million more children.

An important point:

This is not the same bill that Bush vetoed twice. It does not expand SCHIP to cover those millions of additional children whose families cannot afford private health insurance. It merely renews the current statute. Obviously, this is a good thing, since Bush was holding children's health needs hostage to his demand that Congress rewrite the expansion bill. It means that states will now have the funds to cover children who are already qualified under SCHIP income guidelines. It does not mean that approximately four million additional children who do not now qualify will now be covered. They will not be.

It's important to be clear about this, because Think Progress's news item about this (as of 11:16 a.m., EST, on Sunday, Dec. 30) is titled "Bush Signs SCHIP Expansion." As several readers have noted in comments, this is false and very misleading; the editors over at TP need to correct that wording asap.

h/t Unpartisan.com.

A Moment of Clarity

2007-12-30T10:25:00.000-05:00

U.S. foreign policy desperately needs a dose of common sense. Swopa at Needlenose and Matt Yglesias provide it.

Via Cursor.

A Roundup of Roundups

2007-12-30T00:17:00.000-05:00

'Tis the season for superlatives. Here is a collection of end-of-year reflection lists.

The 2007 Golden Monkeyfist Awards, a compilation of the 10 best smaller progressive bloggers.

Jon Swift's Best Blog Posts of 2007 (Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves) and Bock the Robber's Blog Picks -- which latter I'm not sure is meant to be a Best of 2007 roundup, but since Bock was kind enough to include Liberty Street in his list, I'm including his Blog Picks in my Roundup of Roundups.

The Bush Administration's Dumbest Legal Arguments of the Year. Ten doozies, chosen by Dahlia Lithwick at Slate.

Top Ten Myths About Iraq 2007 from Juan Cole, who has forgotten more facts about Iraq and the Middle East in general than George W. Bush ever knew or will know.

In Exiting Through the Door Marked 2007, Ann Althouse interweaves two New York Times lists about notable deaths in 2007 with a third list of 12 films (not exclusive to 2007) that speculate on the nature of the afterlife.

techPresident's Favorite Videos of 2007: The Candidates, an editors' favorites list of political videos made by the candidates.

Glenn Greenwald has Favorite Quotes of 2007, and Daniel Kurtzman at About.com: Political Humor shares his 20 Funniest Political Quotes of 2007.

Columnists and contributors at the Boston Globe give their candidates for the Most Overlooked Issues of 2007.

Chris Weigant gives us his 2007 McLaughlin Awards, Part 1 and Part 2.

New this year, Wired.com names the Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs of 2007.

End-of-year roundups of underreported stories is a category in itself. Here are a few I found:

Doctors Without Borders' 10th Annual Top 10 Most Underreported Humanitarian Stories of 2007.
Project Censored Top 25 Censored News Stories of 2007
Time's Top 10 Underreported Stories. (For people who cannot get enough of these kinds of lists, Time has 50 -- yes, fifty -- of them, in five different subject areas.)

Blogger Howard M. Friedman at Religion Clause lists the Top Ten 2007 Developments in Church-State and Free Exercise of Religion

The Washington Post lists its 10 Most Popular Opinions of the Year (meaning, the most popular opinion pieces written by its columnists).

Timothy Karr's offering, at Huffington Post, is the Ten Worst Telco Moments of 2007.

And last, for some perspective: Bad Astronomy Blog's Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2007. Enjoy, and have a wonderful, liberating, inspirational 2008.

Pakistan on Bhutto, Huckabee on Pakistan, Kristol at the NYT

2007-12-29T14:11:00.000-05:00

It's looking more and more like the Pakistani government is trying to deflect attention from questions about possible involvement in Benazir Bhutto's assassination -- or even taking active steps to cover up such involvement:

As I write this post, India’s leading TV channels are showing video clips of the alleged assailants firing from the revolver at Benazir Bhutto. And the news agency AP reports: “An Islamic militant group said Saturday it had no link to Benazir Bhutto’s killing and the opposition leader’s aides accused the government of a cover-up, disputing the official account of her assassination.

“Bhutto’s aides said they doubted militant commander Baitullah Mehsud was behind the attack on the opposition leader and said the government’s claim that she died when she hit her head on the sunroof of her vehicle was ‘dangerous nonsense’.

“Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton called for an independent, international investigation into Bhutto’s death — perhaps by the United Nations — saying Friday there was ‘no reason to trust the Pakistani government’.

To give a further twist to the entire mystery, Pakistan government did not carry out the post-mortem on Benazir Bhutto’s body. The government now explains that it was not done at the request of Bhutto’s husband. It is unbelievable that in a crime that has international ramifications, and all the potential of turning into a major controversy, the Pakistan government conveniently overlooked basic legal requirements and allowed the burial to take place. Thus fuelling supicion that Musharraf regime is attempting a cover-up.

Every time Mike Huckabee opens his mouth and says anything about foreign policy, he has to pry his foot out:

In discussing the volatile situation in Pakistan, Mike Huckabee has made several erroneous or misleading statements at a time when he has been under increasing scrutiny from fellow presidential candidates for a lack of fluency in foreign policy issues.

Explaining statements he made suggesting that the instability in Pakistan should remind Americans to tighten security on the southern border of the United States, Mr. Huckabee said Friday that “we have more Pakistani illegals coming across our border than all other nationalities, except those immediately south of the border.”

Asked to justify the statement, he later cited a March 2006 article in The Denver Post reporting that from 2002 to 2005, Pakistanis were the most numerous non-Latin Americans caught entering the United States illegally. According to The Post, 660 Pakistanis were detained in that period.

A recent report from the Department of Homeland Security, however, concluded that, over all, illegal immigrants from the Philippines, India, Korea, China and Vietnam were all far more numerous than those from Pakistan.

In a separate interview on Friday on MSNBC, Mr. Huckabee, a Republican, said that the Pakistani government “does not have enough control of those eastern borders near Afghanistan to be able go after the terrorists.” Those borders are on the western side of Pakistan, not the eastern side.

Further, he offered an Orlando crowd his “apologies for what has happened in Pakistan.” His aides said later that he meant to say “sympathies.”

He also said he was worried about martial law “continuing” in Pakistan, although Mr. Musharraf lifted the state of emergency on Dec. 15. Mr. Huckabee later said that he was referring to a renewal of full martial law and said that some elements, including restrictions on judges and the news media, had continued.

Mr. Huckabee’s comments on the situation in Pakistan were not the first time he has been caught unprepared on foreign policy matters. Early this month, after the release of a National Intelligence Estimate concluding that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003, Mr. Huckabee said that he was not familiar with the report, even though it had been widely reported in the news for more than 30 hours.

You're supposed to do better than this if you want to be president of the United States. Then again, two terms of George W. Bush has significantly lowered the bar.

The New York Times is apparently about to give William Kristol (aka The Grinning Deathhead) a coveted weekly columnist slot starting in the new year:

Recently cast off from Time magazine, presumably for writing shallow, predictable tripe, the Weekly Standard’s William Kristol is getting a promotion of sorts.

The Huffington Post has learned that, in a move bound to create controversy, the New York Times is set to announce that Bill Kristol will become a weekly columnist in 2008. Kristol, a prominent neo-conservative who recently departed Time magazine in what was reported as a “mutual” decision, has close ties to the White House and is a well-known proponent of the war in Iraq. Kristol also is a regular contributor to Fox News’ Special Report with Brit Hume.

If the report is accurate, and Kristol is joining the Times’ roster, this is an embarrassment from which the paper of record will not soon recover. If Kristol were merely wrong about matters of national significance, this decision would merely be a mistake. But in recent years Kristol has become far more — gone are the “soothing tones” that made him a mainstay on the DC cocktail circuit, replaced with a bitter, sycophantic belligerence.

Over the summer, when Kristol started blaming American liberals for Khmer Rouge’s crimes, and arguing that the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam also created the conditions for the Islamist revolution in Iran in 1979, I started wondering if Kristol actually believes his own nonsense. Except, as Jonathan Chait explained, it may not matter: “Kristol’s good standing in the Washington establishment depends on the wink-and-nod awareness that he’s too smart to believe his own agitprop. Perhaps so. But, in the end, a fake thug is not much better than the real thing.”
True, except now, one of the world’s most prestigious news outlets has apparently given this thug space on the most valuable media real estate in existence.

Steve Gilliard, Jr.: 1964-2007

2007-12-29T13:21:00.000-05:00

Matt Bai has an appreciation in the New York Times Magazine section about Steve Gilliard, Jr., the much-loved and admired political blogger who died earlier this year:

Steve Gilliard was born into this Harlem and took it all in, but he wouldn’t find his voice on the corners. He was quiet, bookish, overweight. He won entrance to an elite high school, where he passed his time reading obscure military histories, then studied history and journalism at New York University. He found his true calling, though, on the Internet. In 1998, when he was 34, Gilliard joined a new site called NetSlaves.com, whose blogger-reporters chronicled the misadventures of the new high-tech work force, and there he discovered his own kind of incendiary oration. It was by the dim light of a computer screen, rather than on the sunlit corners of Harlem, that Gilliard took to expertly excoriating the moneyed establishment.

By 2003, Gilliard had become one of the first official “guest bloggers” on Daily Kos, then on its way to becoming the most influential of the new liberal political blogs, where he informed his indictments of the Iraq war with detailed references to the British occupation of Mesopotamia. Eventually he created his own site — “Steve was a big personality, and it was clear he needed his own stage,” Daily Kos’s creator, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, later wrote — and became one of a small group of early political bloggers with his own devoted following (and a self-sustaining, if modest, income from ads). On Gilliard’s “News Blog,” along with the partisan attacks on Republicans that made him a hated figure on the conservative blogs, he specialized in applying history to the present day, which made him an unusual and distinctive voice. In 2004, he banged out a remarkable 37-part series, the equivalent of about 200 typed pages, chronicling the foibles of European colonialism.

Bai's piece is short and well-worth reading in full. Even more remarkable, though, is the blog post that led me to Bai, by Jesse Wendel:

God, I miss Gilly.

Every day, every week.

There's a tendency to put the dead up on pedestals. It isn't like that.

I'll be writing an article, reading a comment, talking to Hubris, Sara, LM or Jen... and suddenly Gilly is there, so real, so present, so alive.

He always knew what to say, what to post, and his writing came from his heart.

Jen told me earlier this month I'd written something which was the most Gilly-like thing I'd ever done, that she could hear his voice... and I burst into tears. Couldn't stop crying for almost ten minutes.

He guides us every day. We write, because he gave us space on The News Blog to grow and develop. In our talking with him, what of ours he posted or didn't, he taught us all editorial judgment.

Now The New York Times has recognized the worth of this good man, with an article in the Sunday Times Magazine in "The Lives They Lived" series. I encourage you to go read the entire article.

I did not have the privilege of knowing Steve Gilliard, Jr., personally, or even of being familiar with his blog. That is my loss. But through pieces like Jesse's, I can get a sense of the kind of person and writer he was, and his work and life can continue to inspire. That is a kind of immortality, and I hope that the many bloggers and other friends and relatives for whom Steve's death is a deeply personal loss can take comfort from that.

More Benazir Bhutto Coverage

2007-12-28T23:57:00.000-05:00

The uncertainty over who killed Benazir Bhutto and how has been building all day. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security put out a bulletin this morning that Al Qaeda had claimed responsibility for the assassination, but the sourcing seems to be a bit shaky:

... [S]uch a claim has not appeared on radical Islamist Web sites that regularly post such messages from al Qaeda and other militant groups.

The source of the claim was apparently Italian news agency, Adnkronos International (AKI), which said that al Qaeda Afghanistan commander and spokesman Mustafa Abu Al-Yazid had telephoned the agency to make the claim.

"We terminated the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat [the] mujahadeen," AKI quoted Al-Yazid as saying.

According to AKI, al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri set the wheels in motion for the assassination in October.

One Islamist Web site repeated the claim, but that Web site is not considered a reliable source for Islamist messages by experts in the field.

The DHS official said the claim was "an unconfirmed open source claim of responsibility" and the bulletin was sent out at about 6 p.m. to state and local law enforcement agencies.

The official characterized the bulletin as "information sharing."

Uh huh. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the explanations for exact cause of death are multiplying:

Mystery shrouds the death of former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto. In an explosive revelation, Pakistan's Interior Minister Hamid Nawaz on Friday said that Bhutto did not die of bullet wounds.

Nawaz said that Bhutto died from a head injury. At least seven doctors from the Rawalpindi General Hospital – where the leader was rushed immediately after the attack – say there were no bullet marks on Bhutto's body.

The doctors have submitted a report to the Pakistan government in which they say that no post-mortem was performed on Bhutto’s body and they had not received any instructions to perform one.

“The report says she had head injuries – an irregular patch – and the X-ray doesn’t show any bullet in the head. So it was probably the shrapnel or any other thing has struck her in her said [sic]. That damaged her brain, causing it to ooze and her death. The report categorically [says] there’s no wound other than that,” Nawaz told a Pakistani news channel.

According to the Times of London:

The Pakistan Government tonight claimed that Benazir Bhutto did not die from bullet wounds, as previously thought, but from hitting the sunroof of her campaign vehicle.

The dramatic statement came as the murdered political leader's funeral drew to a close and the violence that has convulsed the country since her death intensified.

The interior ministry said at a press conference that video of Ms Bhutto's last moments and an examination by doctors had shown that Ms Bhutto died apparently accidentally, as a suicide bomb blast went off at her political rally in Rawalpindi last night, killing around 20 people. No full post mortem examination had been carried out at the request of Ms Bhutto's husband, it was reported.

Brigadier Javed Cheema, a ministry spokesman, said Ms Bhutto had died from a head wound after smashing against the sunroof’s lever as she tried to shelter inside her car. "There is no evidence of any foreign element in her body," Brigadier Cheema said. "No bullet hit her, nor any splinters hit her. Unfortunately, it was to be that way.

"I wish she had not come out of the roof top of her vehicle."

Agence France Presse has more of that quote:

"If she had not come out of the vehicle, she would have been unhurt, as all the other occupants of the vehicle did not receive any injuries," ministry spokesman Brigadier Javed Cheema said.

Bhutto's political associates disagree:

...Ms Bhutto's lawyer and a senior official in the PPP, Farooq Naik, rejected the Government's claim as "baseless".

"It is a pack of lies," he said.

"Two bullets hit her, one in the abdomen and one in the head.

"It was a serious security lapse."

Well, this is fairly transparent, motivationally speaking: If Bhutto essentially killed herself by hitting her head on the car's sunroof, then it's really a moot point whether Musharraf gave her enough protection or not.

Griff Witte and William Branigin have a wide-ranging article in today's Washington Post about the assassination and its consequences, both immediate and possible future. [Well, it was Witte and Branigin, but now it's just Witte, and the article has shrunk to three screens from five -- methinks it's being edited as I blog.] Anyway, I was particularly struck by this passage, on (original) screen 4 -- which I found particularly ironic in light of the massive unrest that has followed Bhutto's assassination (which Witte described earlier in the article):

The Bush administration had played a key role in brokering the agreement between Musharraf and Bhutto that enabled her to return to the country Oct. 18. Officials in Washington had hoped that an alliance of the two moderate leaders might create a robust political force to counter rising extremism in the country.

Obviously, the plan failed. But what I find so bitterly ironic is that the Bush administration actually succeeded in achieving precisely the result that bringing Bhutto and Musharraf together was supposed to prevent.

And, as Robin Wright and Glenn Kessler reported in a separate WaPo piece today, the consequences of Bhutto's return to Pakistan and her assassination are likely to be worse than if the U.S. had not tried to diddle with the internal workings of a country it knew nothing about:

For Benazir Bhutto, the decision to return to Pakistan was sealed during a telephone call from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice just a week before Bhutto flew home in October. The call culminated more than a year of secret diplomacy -- and came only when it became clear that the heir to Pakistan's most powerful political dynasty was the only one who could bail out Washington's key ally in the battle against terrorism.
[...]
"The U.S. came to understand that Bhutto was not a threat to stability, but was instead the only possible way that we could guarantee stability and keep the presidency of Musharraf intact," said Mark Siegel, who lobbied for Bhutto in Washington and witnessed much of the behind-the-scenes diplomacy.

But the diplomacy that ended abruptly with Bhutto's assassination yesterday was always an enormous gamble, according to current and former U.S. policymakers, intelligence officials and outside analysts. By entering into the legendary "Great Game" of South Asia, the United States also made its goals and allies more vulnerable -- in a country in which more than 70 percent of the population already looked unfavorably upon Washington.

Bhutto's assassination leaves Pakistan's future -- and Musharraf's -- in doubt, some experts said. "U.S. policy is in tatters. The administration was relying on Benazir Bhutto's participation in elections to legitimate Musharraf's continued power as president," said Barnett R. Rubin of New York University. "Now Musharraf is finished."

Bhutto's assassination also demonstrates the growing power and reach of militant anti-government forces in Pakistan, which pose an existential threat to the country, said J. Alexander Thier, a former U.N. official now at the U.S. Institute for Peace. "The dangerous cocktail of forces of instability exist in Pakistan -- Talibanism, sectarianism, ethnic nationalism -- could react in dangerous and unexpected ways if things unravel further," he said.

But others insist the U.S.-orchestrated deal fundamentally altered Pakistani politics in ways that will be difficult to undo, even though Bhutto is gone. "Her return has helped crack open this political situation. It's now very fluid, which makes it uncomfortable and dangerous," said Isobel Coleman of the Council on Foreign Relations. "But the status quo before she returned was also dangerous from a U.S. perspective. Forcing some movement in the long run was in the U.S. interests."

It wasn't in Bhutto's long-term interests, though, was it? Not that the Bushies are accepting any blame or responsibility:

Xenia Dormandy, former National Security Council expert on South Asia now at Harvard University's Belfer Center, said U.S. meddling is not to blame for Bhutto's death. "It is very clear the United States encouraged" an agreement, she said, "but U.S. policy is in no way responsible for what happened. I don't think we could have played it differently."

So is the administration's finger-pointing at Al Qaeda part of a strategy to deflect blame? Scarecrow at Firedoglake thinks, maybe:

With the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the general consensus seems to be that the Bush Administration's policies in Pakistan and central Asia are in a shambles, but that has not stopped the Administration's least credible agency from leaking stories blaming the murder on al Qaeda. Even if that's true, responsibility is a broader concept.

Dropped right in the middle of the New York Times lead story on yesterday's tragic killings is this:
On Thursday evening, officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin to local law enforcement agencies informing them about posts on some Islamic Web sites saying that Al Qaeda was claiming responsibility for the attack, and that the plot was orchestrated by Ayman al-Zawahri, the group’s second-ranking official.

One counterterrorism official in Washington said that the bulletin neither confirmed nor discredited these claims. The official said that American intelligence agencies had yet to come to any firm judgments about who was responsible for Ms. Bhutto’s death.

The likelihood that extremists associated with al Qaeda could be responsible seems accepted by several sources -- see e.g., Tariq Ali, writing for the Guardian. But no official investigation has occurred and no one has explained the security breakdown despite repeated warnings. Apparently no autopsy was performed to confirm whether the gun reportedly found near the suicide bomber was the murder weapon. [CNN reporting this a.m. Bhutto was killed by shrapnel.]

In the face of suspicions about possible complicity by the Musharraf regime, and without knowing what happened, our FBI and DHS are giving unverified reports to US media in which al Qaeda takes responsibility. It may be true or false, but we have been conditioned to believe it, so it may be enough to divert attention from reports like this Times article:
The assassination of Benazir Bhutto on Thursday left in ruins the delicate diplomatic effort the Bush administration had pursued in the past year to reconcile Pakistan’s deeply divided political factions. Now it is scrambling to sort through ever more limited options, as American influence on Pakistan’s internal affairs continues to decline. . . .

The assassination highlighted, in spectacular fashion, the failure of two of President Bush’s main objectives in the region: his quest to bring democracy to the Muslim world, and his drive to force out the Islamist militants who have hung on tenaciously in Pakistan, the nuclear-armed state considered ground zero in President Bush’s fight against terrorism, despite the administration’s long-running effort to root out Al Qaeda from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

[...]
The Bush Administration did not kill Benazir Bhutto; someone else did that. But it appears the Administration convinced her to go back to Pakistan to save a risky policy foolishly built on a despised, repressive military dictator to fight the US "war on terror." Now a courageous woman is dead, another nation is in chaos, the US is further discredited, it can't account for billions in military aid, and we still have an administration that remains a menace to everyone's security as long as they remain in office. But the Administration wants us to believe that only al Qaeda is responsible.

Pretty disgraceful. But Ralph Peters goes the White House one better. Not content with refusing to accept responsibility for Bhutto's murder, Peters actually tells his readers her death is good news for Pakistan:

FOR the next several days, you're going to read and hear a great deal of pious nonsense in the wake of the assassination of Pakistan's former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto.

Her country's better off without her. She may serve Pakistan better after her death than she did in life.

We need have no sympathy with her Islamist assassin and the extremists behind him to recognize that Bhutto was corrupt, divisive, dishonest and utterly devoid of genuine concern for her country.

She was a splendid con, persuading otherwise cynical Western politicians and "hardheaded" journalists that she was not only a brave woman crusading in the Islamic wilderness, but also a thoroughbred democrat.

In fact, Bhutto was a frivolously wealthy feudal landlord amid bleak poverty. The scion of a thieving political dynasty, she was always more concerned with power than with the wellbeing of the average Pakistani. Her program remained one of old-school patronage, not increased productivity or social decency.

Educated in expensive Western schools, she permitted Pakistan's feeble education system to rot - opening the door to Islamists and their religious schools.

During her years as prime minister, Pakistan went backward, not forward. Her husband looted shamelessly and ended up fleeing the country, pursued by the courts. The Islamist threat - which she artfully played both ways - spread like cancer.

But she always knew how to work Westerners - unlike the hapless Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who sought the best for his tormented country but never knew how to package himself.

Military regimes are never appealing to Western sensibilities. Yet, there are desperate hours when they provide the only, slim hope for a country nearing collapse. Democracy is certainly preferable - but, unfortunately, it's not always immediately possible. Like spoiled children, we have to have it now - and damn the consequences.

In Pakistan, the military has its own forms of graft; nonetheless, it remains the least corrupt institution in the country and the only force holding an unnatural state together. In Pakistan back in the '90s, the only people I met who cared a whit about the common man were military officers.

Americans don't like to hear that. But it's the truth.

Bhutto embodied the flaws in Pakistan's political system, not its potential salvation. Both she and her principal rival, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, failed to offer a practical vision for the future - their political feuds were simply about who would divvy up the spoils.

From its founding, Pakistan has been plagued by cults of personality, by personal, feudal loyalties that stymied the development of healthy government institutions (provoking coups by a disgusted military). When she held the reins of government, Bhutto did nothing to steer in a new direction - she merely sought to enhance her personal power.

Now she's dead. And she may finally render her country a genuine service (if cynical party hacks don't try to blame Musharraf for their own benefit). After the inevitable rioting subsides and the spectacular conspiracy theories cool a bit, her murder may galvanize Pakistanis against the Islamist extremists who've never gained great support among voters, but who nonetheless threaten the state's ability to govern.

It goes on like that. And in this case you don't need to read the whole thing. This is enough to tell you what Ralph Peters is.

If you're looking for a good round-up, Swaraaj Chaujan has one here.

Benazir Bhutto, 1953-2007

2007-12-27T22:20:00.000-05:00

I have been on nonstop go the whole day, so I have not been able to read much of the coverage of Benazir Bhutto's assassination. But I gather from this terse commentary by Josh Marshall that it became election fodder rather quickly. Paul Krugman states (what should be) the obvious: It's not about you.

This is who it's about:

In the chaos the confusion after the assassination, the site was littered with pools of blood. Shoes and caps of party workers were lying on the asphalt, and shards of glass were strewn about the ground. Pakistani television cameras captured images of ambulances pushing through crowds of dazed and injured people at the scene of the assassination.

Farah Ispahani, a party official from Ms. Bhutto’s party, said: “It is too soon to confirm the number of dead from the party’s side. Private television channels are reporting 20 dead.” Television channels were also quoting police sources as saying that at least 14 people were dead.

At the hospital where Ms. Bhutto was taken, a large number of police began to cordon off the area as angry party workers smashed windows. Many protesters shouted “Musharraf Dog.” One man was crying hysterically, saying his sister had been killed. Dozens of people in the crowd beat their chests and chanted slogans against Mr. Musharraf.

Nahid Khan, a close aide to Ms. Bhutto, was sobbing in a room next to the operating theater, and the corridors of the hospital swarmed with mourners.

Juan Cole gives us some of the political and historical context:

The Pakistani authorities are blaming Muslim militants for the assassination. That is possible, but everyone in Pakistan remembers that it was the military intelligence, or Inter-Services Intelligence, that promoted Muslim militancy in the two decades before September 11 as a wedge against India in Afghanistan and Kashmir. The Pakistan People's Party (PPP) faithful will almost certainly blame Pervez Musharraf, and sentiment here is more important than reality, whatever the reality may be. The PPP is one of two very large, long-standing grassroots political parties in Pakistan, and if its followers are radicalized by this event, it could lead to severe turmoil. Just a day before her assassination Benazir had pledged that the PPP would not allow the military to rig the upcoming January 8 parliamentary elections.

Pakistan is important to US security. It is a nuclear power. Its military fostered, then partially turned on the Taliban and al-Qaeda, which have bases in the lawless tribal areas of the northern part of the country. And Pakistan is key to the future of its neighbor, Afghanistan. Pakistan is also a key transit route for any energy pipelines built between Iran or Central Asia and India, and so central to the energy security of the United States.

The military government of Pervez Musharraf was shaken by two big crises in 2007, one urban and one rural. The urban crisis was his interference in the rule of law and his dismissal of the supreme court chief justice. The Pakistani middle class has greatly expanded in the last seven years, as others have noted, and educated white collar people need a rule of law to conduct their business. Last June 50,000 protesters came out to defend the supreme court, even though the military had banned rallies. The rural crisis was the attempt of a Neo-Deobandi cult made up of Pushtuns and Baluch from the north to establish themselves in the heart of the capital, Islamabad, at the Red Mosque seminary. They then attempted to impose rural, puritan values on the cosmopolitan city dwellers. When they kidnapped Chinese acupuncturists, accusing them of prostitution, they went too far. Pakistan depends deeply on its alliance with China, and the Islamabad middle classes despise Talibanism. Musharraf ham-fistedly had the military mount a frontal assault on the Red Mosque and its seminary, leaving many dead and his legitimacy in shreds. Most Pakistanis did not rally in favor of the Neo-Deobandi cultists, but to see a military invasion of a mosque was not pleasant (the militants inside turned out to be heavily armed and quite sinister).

The NYT reported that US Secretary of State Condi Rice tried to fix Musharraf's subsequent dwindling legitimacy by arranging for Benazir to return to Pakistan to run for prime minister, with Musharraf agreeing to resign from the military and become a civilian president. When the supreme court seemed likely to interfere with his remaining president, he arrested the justices, dismissed them, and replaced them with more pliant jurists. This move threatened to scuttle the Rice Plan, since Benazir now faced the prospect of serving a dictator as his grand vizier, rather than being a proper prime minister.

With Benazir's assassination, the Rice Plan is in tatters and Bush administration policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan is tottering.

So much for U.S. influence in the world after seven years of war and military occupation and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Afghans, and Americans killed in the name of a "global war on terror" in which Pakistan was supposed to be a key ally.

Predictably, U.S. officials are calling Al Qaeda "a likely suspect" in the assassination, but Pakistanis are blaming Musharraf, and the truth (which probably will never be known) could be a complicated mixture, since Musharraf was not above using his ties to Islamists to protect his own power:

The main suspects in the assassination are the foreign and Pakistani Islamist militants who saw Ms Bhutto as a Westernised heretic and an American stooge, and had repeatedly threatened to kill her.

But fingers will also be pointed at the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, (ISI) which has had close ties to the Islamists since the 1970s and has been used by successive Pakistani leaders to suppress political opposition. Ms Bhutto narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in October, when a suicide bomber struck at a rally in Karachi to welcome her back from exile.

Earlier that month two Pakistani militant warlords based in the country’s northwestern areas had threatened to kill her.

One was Baitullah Mehsud, a top militant commander fighting the Pakistani Army in South Waziristan, who has ties to al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taleban. The other was Haji Omar, the leader of the Pakistani Taleban, who is also from South Waziristan and fought with the Afghan Mujahidin against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Ms Bhutto said after the attack that she had received a letter, signed by someone claiming to be a friend of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, threatening to slaughter her like a goat. But she also accused Pakistani authorities of not providing her with sufficient security, and hinted that they may have been complicit in the Karachi attack.

She indicated that she had more to fear from unidentified members of a power structure that she described as allies of the “forces of militancy”.

Analysts say that President Musharraf is unlikely to have ordered her assassination, but that elements of the Army and intelligence service stood to lose money and power if she became prime minister. The ISI includes some Islamists who became radicalised while running the American-funded campaign against the Soviets in Afghanistan and were opposed to her on principle. Saudi Arabia is also thought to have frowned on Ms Bhutto as being too secular and Westernised and to have favoured Nawaz Sharif, another former Prime Minister.

One of Bhutto's closest friends and advisers, Husain Haqqani, is convinced Musharraf is responsible:

After an October attack on Bhutto's life in Karachi, the ex-prime minister warned "certain individuals in the security establishment [about the threat] and nothing was done," says Husain Haqqani, a confidante of Bhutto's for decades. "There is only one possibility: the security establishment and Musharraf are complicit, either by negligence or design. That is the most important thing. She's not the first political leader killed, since Musharraf took power, by the security forces."

Haqqani notes that Bhutto died of a gunshot wound to the neck. "It's like a hit, not a regular suicide bombing," he says. "It's quite clear that someone who considers himself Pakistan's Godfather has a very different attitude toward human life than you and I do."

As for what comes next: Haqqani doubts that Musharraf will go forward with scheduled elections. "The greatest likelihood is that this was aimed not just aimed at Benazir Bhutto but at weakening Pakistan's push for democracy," he says. "But the U.S. has to think long and hard. Musharraf's position is untenable in Pakistan. More and more people are going to blame him for bringing Pakistan to this point, intentionally or unintentionally. It's very clear that terrorism has increased in Pakistan. It's quite clear that poverty has increased in Pakistan. ... anti-Americanism might come in, as people say, 'You know what, why should we support this [pro-U.S.] regime that has not delivered anything to us?'"

One has the sense that Bush et al. don't have the slightest clue how to handle these dark forces that it never occurred to them for one second they might be messing with blind.

Andrew Sullivan:

What we are witnessing in the Islamic world is something we should learn to be somewhat reticent about. There is so much we do not know - and what we do know suggests a period of extreme and dangerous instability we will have only limited capacity to affect, if at all. A Bhutto deal with Musharraf meant a rational, sane option for Pakistan to Western diplomatic minds. But this world is a darker, more irrational place than we know. And these convulsions will surely continue. It may be that our attempt to fix the situation has only made it worse. Which would not be the first time, of course.

Won't be the last, either.

Screw the Old People

2007-12-27T14:02:00.000-05:00

This is how our government takes care of its own people:

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said Wednesday that employers could reduce or eliminate health benefits for retirees when they turn 65 and become eligible for Medicare.

The policy, set forth in a new regulation, allows employers to establish two classes of retirees, with more comprehensive benefits for those under 65 and more limited benefits — or none at all — for those older.

More than 10 million retirees rely on employer-sponsored health plans as a primary source of coverage or as a supplement to Medicare, and Naomi C. Earp, the commission’s chairwoman, said, “This rule will help employers continue to voluntarily provide and maintain these critically important health benefits.”

Maha notes the Orwellian spin:

Let us pause and reflect upon Ms. Naomi C. Earp’s words. In fact, I was so taken with what Ms. Naomi C. Earp said that I went to the EEOC web site for more. ...

There Barbara found the following press release:

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) today announced the publication of a final rule allowing employers that provide retiree health benefits to continue the longstanding practice of coordinating those benefits with Medicare (or comparable state health benefits) without violating the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA). The regulation, which safeguards retiree health benefits, was published in today’s Federal Register and is available on the EEOC’s web site at www.eeoc.gov.

“Implementation of this rule is welcome news for America’s retirees, whether young or old,” said Commission Chair Naomi C. Earp. “By this action, the EEOC seeks to preserve and protect employer-provided retiree health benefits which are increasingly less available and less generous. Millions of retirees rely on their former employer to provide health benefits, and this rule will help employers continue to voluntarily provide and maintain these critically important benefits in accordance with the law.”

The EEOC proposed the rule in response to a controversial decision in 2000 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Erie County Retirees Association v. County of Erie. The court held that the ADEA requires that the health insurance benefits received by Medicare-eligible retirees be the same, or cost the employer the same, as the health insurance benefits received by younger retirees. After the Erie County decision, labor unions and employers alike informed the EEOC that complying with the decision would force companies to reduce or eliminate the retiree health benefits they currently provided – leaving millions of retirees aged 55 and over with less health insurance, or no health insurance at all.

And thus continues the Bush administration's grand tradition of using language to pervert meaning:

Because health care costs are ballooning, the burden of providing health insurance for retirees is too much for many businesses to bear — no doubt this is true — so the EEOC says it’s OK for the companies to cut the retirees loose and let them fall back on Medicare. But because Bushies are Bushies, they can’t just come out and say it that way. Instead, they crank out some Orwellian doublespeak pretending this is all for the retirees’ own good.

John Cole sees this as "... another piece of evidence [...] that we will be moving to single-payer in the next deade or so, simply because big business wants this (and would argue they need it) in order to survive. ... At this point, it almost has a feel of inevitability about it." I think John is being way too optimistic about this country's capacity for common sense.

Top Ten Myths About Iraq

2007-12-26T20:28:00.000-05:00

Juan Cole gives us his Top Ten Myths About Iraq 2007 (paraphrased):

The surge is responsible for the drop in violence.
Iraq is now "calm" and Iraqis want Americans to stay, even if grudgingly.
The northern part of Iraq is calm and thriving economically.
The Sunni leaders who are being paid by the U.S. military to fight Al Qaeda are reconciling with Iraqi Shiites and the Shiite central government.
Slowly but surely, Iraq is meeting U.S.-imposed benchmarks for progress.
Iraqi women have been liberated by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent U.S. occupation.
Iran was supplying deadly explosive material to Sunni extremists.
The surge stopped the sectarian violence in Baghdad.
Religious and political reconciliation has begun and is making progress.
The American electorate has lost interest in Iraq and no longer considers it a top issue.

Needless to say, Prof. Cole has his detractors -- Andrew Sullivan calls it "clinical denial":

For some, the war is over, victory has been achieved, and the only task now is to elect a new Decider to conduct a victory parade. Sadly, this seems to me to be verging on clinical denial. There is no question that General Petraeus, for the first time, has instituted a competent, if ad hoc occupation, by doing pragmatic deals in local areas and regions, constructing massive walls in Baghdad to keep warring sects apart, effectively bribing other areas with new investments and providing sufficient troops in some places to maintain a lull in the massive bloodletting that the US invasion unleashed. But in the next few months, the troop levels will be reduced, or the US military will be broken. They key to sustaining a national peace in Iraq is some level of sectarian integration in the police and army, some reconciliation between national Sunni and Shiite political parties, some resolution of the remaining trouble spots in the north, such as Kirkuk, and some kind of political leadership able to reach across the bloody divide. It is very hard to see any of these things happening.

Civilizations

2007-12-26T16:35:00.000-05:00

If you love to read just for the sake of or the possibility of learning some neat out of the way and totally unexpected knowledge, I have just the book for you.

About two years ago I was given this book as a Christmas present. “Man on Earth: A Celebration of Mankind” by John Reader, Perennial Library, Harper & Row, Publishers.

A 255 page volume, the author profiles twelve, here-to-fore-to-me-unknown, societies that currently exist in a variety of places from the equator to the Arctic Circle. India, Africa, Bali, Switzerland and more. Entertaining, enlightening and hard to put down.

Boxing Day

2007-12-26T10:53:00.000-05:00

Today, 26 Dec is known as Boxing Day in most United Kingdom Commonwealth of Nations countries, including, of course, our neighbor to the north, Canada. According to Wikipedia Boxing Day's origins are as follows:

Boxing Day is a traditional celebration, dating back to the Medieval Ages, and consisted of the practice of giving out gifts to employees, the poor, or to people in a lower social class. The name has numerous folk etymologies[3]; the Oxford English Dictionary attributes it to the Christmas box; the verb box meaning: "To give a Christmas-box (colloq.); whence boxing-day."

I do not know the appropriate salutation for Boxing Day, but I wish it to you on this Boxing Day.

Congress "Recognizes" Christianity as Having Special and Particular Importance, Above Other Religions

2007-12-24T23:59:00.000-05:00

Here is a resolution that passed the House on Dec. 11, with broad bipartisan support. The only reason I know about this is because it was posted in the Off-Topics section of a gymnastics forum that my daughter frequents, and she told me about it. I don't recall seeing any mention of this endorsement of one particular religion in any news outlet, at all.

H. Res. 847: Recognizing the importance of Christmas and the Christian faith
Whereas Christmas, a holiday of great significance to Americans and many other cultures and nationalities, is celebrated annually by Christians throughout the United States and the world;
Whereas there are approximately 225,000,000 Christians in the United States, making Christianity the religion of over three-fourths of the American population;
Whereas there are approximately 2,000,000,000 Christians throughout the world, making Christianity the largest religion in the world and the religion of about one-third of the world population;
Whereas identify themselves as those who believe in the salvation from sin offered to them through the sacrifice of their savior, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and who, out of gratitude for the gift of salvation, commit themselves to living their lives in accordance with the teachings of the Holy Bible;Whereas Christians Christians and Christianity have contributed greatly to the development of western civilization;
Whereas the United States, being founded as a constitutional republic in the traditions of western civilization, finds much in its history that points observers back to its Judeo-Christian roots;
Whereas on December 25 of each calendar year, American Christians observe Christmas, the holiday celebrating the birth of their savior, Jesus Christ;
Whereas for Christians, Christmas is celebrated as a recognition of God's redemption, mercy, and Grace; and
Whereas many Christians and non-Christians throughout the United States and the rest of the world, celebrate Christmas as a time to serve others: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That the House of Representatives--
(1) recognizes the Christian faith as one of the great religions of the world;
(2) expresses continued support for Christians in the United States and worldwide;
(3) acknowledges the international religious and historical importance of Christmas and the Christian faith;
(4) acknowledges and supports the role played by Christians and Christianity in the founding of the United States and in the formation of the western civilization;
(5) rejects bigotry and persecution directed against Christians, both in the United States and worldwide; and
(6) expresses its deepest respect to American Christians and Christians throughout the world.

Since Liberty Street is a mid-tier blog, and this is a very important issue, any bloggers reading this who share my outrage over Congress endorsing religion in general, and the Christian religion in particular, might want to write about it. I'm not asking for a link back; I'm just asking that other bloggers who might be higher profile than I am write about this resolution, because it is now the official position of the United States government.

I have linked to the text of the resolution, above. It's at GovTrack.US -- click here.

Under Rug Swept

2007-12-24T23:23:00.000-05:00

Matthew Yglesias has a delicious response to Bruce Bartlett's complaint about Matthew's earlier post on Bartlett's book:

No, no, no! I don't think the history should be swept under the rug at all. What I think is that the history reflects well on present members of the Democratic Party. The political views of the Southern Democrats were unconscionably evil, and the corrupt bargain national Democratic Party figures struck with them was a terrible thing. But in a series of intense political battles, the Democratic Party eventually broke decisively with that heritage, prompting breakaway segregationist campaigns in 1948 and 1968 and eventually leading the bulk of the white supremacist constituency to drift to the Republican Party.

The significance of the history of race in America -- and of the centrality of the Democrats' corrupt bargain with white supremacy to American political history -- really shouldn't be minimized. But what it shows is that the Democratic Party's decision to embrace the civil rights movement and the Republican Party's decision to embrace opposition to civil rights has been integral to the Republican Party's political successes toward the end of the 20th century.

God's Basic Training

2007-12-24T18:14:00.000-05:00

The Christianization of the U.S. military has been written about before, but there is growing evidence that the problem goes far beyond individuals being harassed to convert, as serious as that is. Fundamentalist groups like Campus Crusade for Christ are actually engaged in creating an identification between militarism and radical right-wing Christian theology:

For US Army soldiers entering basic training at Fort Jackson Army base in Columbia, South Carolina, accepting Jesus Christ as their personal savior appears to be as much a part of the nine-week regimen as the vigorous physical and mental exercises the troops must endure.

That's the message directed at Fort Jackson soldiers, some of whom appear in photographs in government issued fatigues, holding rifles in one hand, and Bibles in their other hand

Frank Bussey, director of Military Ministry at Fort Jackson, has been telling soldiers at Fort Jackson that "government authorities, police and the military = God's Ministers," Bussey's teachings from the "God's Basic Training" Bible study guide he authored says US troops have "two primary responsibilities": "to praise those who do right" and "to punish those who do evil - "God's servant, an angel of wrath." Bussey's teachings directed at Fort Jackson soldiers were housed on the Military Ministry at Fort Jackson web site. Late Wednesday, the web site was taken down without explanation. Bussey did not return calls for comment. The web site text, however, can still be viewed in an archived format.

The Christian right has been successful in spreading its fundamentalist agenda at US military installations around the world for decades. But the movement's meteoric rise in the US military came in large part after 9/11 and immediately after the US invaded Iraq in March of 2003. At a time when the United States is encouraging greater religious freedom in Muslim nations, soldiers on the battlefield have told disturbing stories of being force-fed fundamentalist Christianity by highly controversial, apocalyptic "End Times" evangelists, who have infiltrated US military installations throughout the world with the blessing of high-level officials at the Pentagon. Proselytizing among military personnel has been conducted openly, in violation of the basic tenets of the United States Constitution.

Perhaps no other fundamentalist Christian group is more influential than Military Ministry, a national organization and a subsidiary of the controversial fundamentalist Christian organization Campus Crusade for Christ. Military Ministry's national web site boasts it has successfully "targeted" basic training installations, or "gateways," and has successfully converted thousands of soldiers to evangelical Christianity.

Military Ministry says its staffers are responsible for "working with Chaplains and Military personnel to bring lost soldiers closer to Christ, build them in their faith and send them out into the world as Government paid missionaries" - which appears to be a clear-cut violation of federal law governing the separation of church and state.

"Young recruits are under great pressure as they enter the military at their initial training gateways," the group has stated on its web site. "The demands of drill instructors push recruits and new cadets to the edge. This is why they are most open to the 'good news.' We target specific locations, like Lackland AFB [Air Force base] and Fort Jackson, where large numbers of military members transition early in their career. These sites are excellent locations to pursue our strategic goals."

Mikey Weinstein, the founder and president of the government watchdog organization the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, whose group has been closely tracking Military Ministry's activities at Fort Jackson and other military bases around the country, said in an interview that using "the machinery of the state" to promote any form of religion is "not only unconstitutional and un-American but it also creates a national security threat of the first order."

A six-month investigation by MRFF has found Military Ministry's staff has successfully targeted US soldiers entering basic training at Lackland Air Force Base and Fort Sam Houston, with the approval of the Army base's top commanders.

"I've said it before and I will say it again," Weinstein said. "We are in the process of creating a fundamentalist Christian Taliban and somebody has to do something to stop it now."

The above article was published on Friday. Yesterday, a Daily Kos diarist, Troutfishing, seriously ruffled some right-wing feathers when he posted, side by side, two photographs from the above-quoted article: the first photo showed a Hamas suicide bomber holding an automatic weapon in one hand and the Koran in the other; the second photo showed two U.S. Army recruits in basic training at Fort Jackson, SC, holding rifles and, in the same hand, held against the rifles, copies of the Bible. [After being viciously assailed for "attacking U.S. troops," Troutfishing chose to separate the photographs, keeping the one of U.S. soldiers at the top and moving the photograph of the Hamas suicide bomber farther down the page. He says, right at the top of the page, that the other photograph is further down -- and it's clear from the context that he separated the photos to defuse the situation -- but despite that, Charles Johnson chose to see it as "a cowardly move to disguise the Kos mindset."]

The right-wing commentary was predictably one-note, framing the issue entirely as one of implied equivalence between Islamic terrorists and Christians in the U.S. military. The DK post that accompanies the photographs is impressive: lengthy, thoughtful, and nuanced. But Charles Johnson and his pals dismiss the article as "a long exercise in crackpot moral equivalence that compares US troops holding Bibles with a Palestinian female suicide bomber holding a Koran."

In truth, the issues raised in Troutfishing's post are considerably more complex and serious than a simple comparison between Islamic suicide bombers and U.S. troops. One sentence from the opening of the post says it all: "You might call the image, to the right [of the two Army recruits holding rifles and the Bible] the ghost of Christmas future."

Indeed. The message here is not that Hamas terrorists and American soldiers are the same. In a way, it's the opposite: Troutfishing is telling us that a narrow, fundamentalist Christian agenda, being injected into our military from outside it, is forcing our soldiers into a role they were never meant to assume -- that of religious warriors in a modern-day Crusade between Christianity and Islam. Here is the entire passage in which that opening sentence appears [emphasis mine]:

You might call the image, to the right, the ghost of Christmas future. Let me suggest a productive frame for the picture which depicts a parallel that is both real but which has not yet fully emerged as a dominant dynamic.

The dynamic is that of religious war, a phenomenon that has an old and evil history especially in the Middle East.

But, that future - religious war - does not have to prevail. It is a danger as long as there are US troops in Iraq, because US troops in basic training, as detailed in a new Military Religious Freedom Foundation report, are being indoctrinated in the ideology of religious war[,] and the cultivation of the mentality of religious war, between Christianity and Islam, is exactly what many leaders on the American Christian right and Islamic religious extremists including those of Al Qaeda want more than anything - to provoke a full blown religious war between Islam and Christianity.

If you think this is crazy, Troutfishing lets us hear it from the horse's mouth.

I doubt the lgf crowd read this far, and even if they did, the last thing they are prepared to do is formulate an intelligent response:

... [M]y point wasn't to stigmatize American soldiers but, rather , to underline the fact that they are being taught a theology of war and that there is ugly precedent for the teaching of the theology of war, within the Christian tradition, that goes back all the way to the First Crusade.
[...]
Indeed, Gary Bussey's course, taught at Fort Jackson [see Truthout article], was advertised with a flyer using imagery that's evocative of the Crusades especially given that the parent organization behind Bussey's ministry is named Campus Crusade For Christ.

The use of the word "crusade", to describe evangelical campaigns aimed at religious conversion, is endemic to contemporary Christianity and especially on the American Christan right. But that invocation of the historical Crusades is deeply anti-Semitic in light of what the Crusaders did ; in the first Crusade, as described below, the Crusaders, upon breaking through the defenses of the city of Jerusalem, slaughtered the Jews and Muslims living in that city. They hacked those defenseless civilians apart with swords, and burned them alive as well, so that the streets of Jerusalem were filled with blood.

Evangelical campaigns might not, some would argue, be inherently anti-Semitic but use of the word "crusade" as a term for evangelical conversionary campaigns is deeply, inherently anti-Semitic in the most accurate, comprehensive sense : it is both anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim.
[...]
Soldiers in basic training at Fort Jackson are being taught theological justification for killing. ...
[...]
The soldiers shown in the photo, who are being indoctrinated in the ideology of religious war, are no more at fault than the young female Hamas member in the photo. Those truly at fault for any resulting strife and violence are the people who are doing the indoctrination.
[...]
The American soldiers-in-training in the image were photographed as the graduating class of a course, taught by a "military ministry" of Campus Crusade For Christ, entitled "God's Basic Training." ...

So they were not just soldiers who happened to be Christians -- they were graduates of a class in fundamental Christian theology. They had been actively recruited and indoctrinated with a very specific, extreme, apocalyptic, fanatical form of fundamentalist Christian belief by an outside organization that has as its goal the transformation of the U.S. military into a religious army against anyone who is not Christian.

And that brings us back to those two photographs. The caption below the photos at Truthout says that the photos "show how the infiltration of fundamentalist Christianity in the US military is starting to mirror Islamic fundamentalism." And that's why the photographs were placed side by side. Not to diss American soldiers or compare them to terrorists; not to attack Christians or soldiers' or anyone's personal religious beliefs. That photograph is not about Christian religious belief. If it were, you would not be seeing new Army recruits holding up rifles and bibles together. Is that a normal association for Christians? Rifles and bibles? Do Christians routinely carry around a rifle with their bible? Is that a standard symbol of Christianity, a rifle? You know, like when you see a cross, you think, Christian. When you see a rifle, do you think, Christian? Obviously, there is a message intended in creating an association between the rifle and the bible. Obviously, those Army recruits are holding their rifles and their bibles together for a reason. How can anyone look at a photograph like that and not get the point: that these American soldiers are meant to be part of a Christian religious war against Islam? You'd have to be either blind or willfully malicious to see it as anything else.

Let's Compare Apples to Oranges

2007-12-24T13:47:00.000-05:00

Bruce Bartlett is the author of a new book about the Democratic Party's "buried past" of racism. In the WSJ Opinion Journal today, Bartlett hawks this theme:

In his new book, "The Conscience of a Liberal," New York Times columnist Paul Krugman makes a strong case for his belief that the political success of the Republican Party and the conservative movement over the past 40 years has resulted largely from their co-optation of Southern racists that were the base of the Democratic Party until its embrace of civil rights in the 1960s. A key piece of evidence for Mr. Krugman is that Ronald Reagan gave his first speech after accepting the Republican presidential nomination in 1980 near Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. In the course of this speech, Reagan said he supported "states' rights." Mr. Krugman says this was code declaring his secret sympathy for Southern racism.

Others, including Mr. Krugman's Times colleague David Brooks and Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, have come to Reagan's defense, denying that he was a racist or had any racist intent in his 1980 speech. That's fine but unlikely to change the minds of those like Mr. Krugman who are determined to smear the Republican Party with the charge of racism, and who are adept at finding racist code words like "law and order" by Republicans that are completely convincing to liberals and Democrats in support of this accusation, even though they are invisible to those with no political ax to grind.

However, if a single mention of states' rights 27 years ago is sufficient to damn the Republican Party for racism ever afterwards, what about the 200-year record of prominent Democrats who didn't bother with code words? They were openly and explicitly for slavery before the Civil War, supported lynching and "Jim Crow" laws after the war, and regularly defended segregation and white supremacy throughout most of the 20th century.

Following are some quotes from prominent Democrats largely drawn from my new book, "Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past." Even with the exclusion of all quotes that contain the N-word, it is clear that many of the Democratic Party's most important historical figures have long made statements that reduce Reagan's alleged transgression to a drop in the ocean. If we are going to hold him and his party accountable for a single mention of states' rights, then the party of those listed below is far more culpable in promoting and defending racism.

It's difficult to know what Bartlett thinks he's proving by quoting Thomas Jefferson and other 19th and early 20th century Democrats on race. The Republican Party did not even exist until 1854, and did not become the party of choice for Southern white racists until the second half of the 20th century. As Matthew Yglesias points out, this is common knowledge for anyone who is reasonably well-informed:

... As everyone with any awareness of American political history knows, for about 100 years starting in the mid-19th century, the Democratic Party was the vehicle of choice for the white supremacist agenda that dominated the politics of the white south and that vast majority of the leading villains in the story of race in America were Democrats. That said, starting in the New Deal, the Democrats also became the preferred party of urban northern African-Americans and white liberals. That created a lot of intra-party tensions which played out over the next 30-40 years and resulted in a decisive victory for the racial liberals.

Meanwhile, in a parallel development, "new right" insurgents -- most of whom were, like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, opponents of civil rights legislation -- took control of the Republican Party. During this time, the white south became the electoral base of the GOP, while the much-shrunken Dixie faction of the Democratic Party became biracial. I don't think there's anything about this history that would upset modern-day Democrats -- obviously, Abe Lincoln and the GOP was the right way to go in the 1860s and Woodrow Wilson's record on racial issues was terrible but that was all quite a long time ago.

Bartlett (or an impersonator) responds in Matthew's comments section:

Joe McCarthy's sins are pretty old new, too. But that doesn't stop liberals from dredging them up time and time again. It's a rare year when there isn't a major new book about McCarthy or a Hollywood film about him.

Matt's reaction is exactly what I expected from the left. Since the history cannot be denied they will sweep it under the rug as old news--and boring news at that. But considering the recent flap about Reagan's Philadelphia, Mississippi speech in 1980, I don't think liberals can dismiss my argument without also dismissing their own efforts to use 27 year old speeches to damn the Republican Party for racism. They can't have it both ways. Either history matters or it doesn't.

History matters. So does intellectual honesty:

I think you're completely missing Matt's point. Matt is not sweeping the shameful history of the Democratic party under the rug, he is pointing out that between that history and the present there is a difference-making series of events, i.e. the Democratic party ceased being the party of white supremacists, and the GOP became the home of the white south. The new version of the Democratic party was, in other words, decisively different from the old. Corresponding to this is the fact that you will be hard pressed to find a Democrat who would defend its old white supremacism.

In contrast, Reagan's 1980 speech is very much continuous with the present-day Republican party. Indeed, Reagan is probably the most commonly viewed recent hero in the Republican party. And I ask you: have Republicans as decisively rejected the past embodied in Joe McCarthy as Democrats have rejected their white supremacist past? That is, I have never met a Democrat who was prepared to defend the Democratic party's old white supremacist agenda. In contrast, it is not difficult to come across prominent defenses of Joe McCarthy among Republicans, is it?

And another thing: What buried past?

Can a fact that's presented in great detail in any high school American history book really be considered buried? I know that people complain about the way we teach history, but most schools do in fact cover the frigging Civil War.

Lessons Learned

2007-12-23T22:37:00.000-05:00

Things I've learned from reading conservative blogs:

One 60-inch flat screen tv in the living room of a black woman living in public housing means that 37 million Americans living in poverty "expect others to do everything for them, including subsidize their very existence."
If you are a "known activist who lives in the projects," you cannot be poor.
Poverty is "generational" but wealth is not. Or, put another way, the tendency of poverty to continue through generations is an indication of social pathology, but the tendency of wealth to continue through generations is not.
"Generational" poverty is the fault of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" legislation -- even though the poverty rate declined significantly in the 1960s (Kennedy, Johnson), went up steadily in the 1980s (Reagan), started to decline again between 1993 and 2000 (Clinton), and has gone up every year since 2000 (Bush 43).
If you do your research -- meaning, if you read your local newspaper and the writings of Thomas Sowell -- you will see that most poor people are lazy leeches. More research than that, however, is not a good idea -- you might start to bump into facts, and that would create certain... problems.

Two Wealthy Candidates with Very Different Attitudes Toward Wealth

2007-12-23T18:58:00.000-05:00

David Leonhardt has an interesting article in today's New York Times about two extremely wealthy presidential candidates -- John Edwards and Mitt Romney -- and the radically different views they have about their success and the obligations it implies:

By the final weeks of 1984, well before either turned 40, John Edwards and Mitt Romney had already built successful careers. But the two men were each on the verge of an entirely new level of financial success.

Mr. Edwards, then making a nice salary as a lawyer at a small North Carolina firm, spent early December staying at the Inn on the Plaza in downtown Asheville. Scattered around his room were documents relating to his first big malpractice case, a lawsuit filed by a man named E. G. Sawyer, who used a wheelchair after his doctor had overprescribed a drug. On Dec. 18, at the courthouse opposite the hotel, a jury awarded Mr. Sawyer $3.7 million.

In Boston, Mr. Romney had risen to become a vice president at Bain & Company, an upstart management consulting firm, and had been chosen to run a spinoff investment firm known as Bain Capital. He spent the end of 1984 flying around the country — in coach class, to save money and to show his investors how serious he was about turning a profit — visiting companies and deciding whether to invest in them.

In the decade that followed, Mr. Edwards would win one big verdict after another, and Mr. Romney would oversee a series of hugely profitable investments.

Like thousands of other Americans in a global, high-technology economy in which government was pulling back and wealth was being celebrated, Mr. Edwards and Mr. Romney used talent, hard work and — as both have suggested — luck to amass fortunes. They became a part of a rising class of the new rich.

Whether this class is a cause for concern — whether it deserves some blame for the economic anxiety felt by many middle-class families — has become a central issue in the 2008 presidential race. And Mr. Edwards and Mr. Romney are basing their candidacies in large measure on the very different lessons each has taken from his own success.

“Some people come from nothing to being wildly successful and their response is, ‘I did this on my own,’” Mr. Edwards said in an interview. “I came to a different conclusion. I believe that I did work hard, and I think people should work hard, but I think my country was there for me every step of the way.”

Today, he added, “the problem is all the economic growth is going to a very small group of people.”

Mr. Romney, by contrast, talks about the ways that his experiences at Bain showed him how innovative and productive the American economy can be and, particularly, how free markets can make life better for everyone.

“There is a model of thought among the Democrats — that the amount of money, the amount of wealth in a nation, is a fixed amount,” he said in an interview. “And that if Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are making a lot of money, that just means somebody else is not able to make as much. That happens to be entirely false.”

The two men represent a clear divide between the Democratic and Republican parties over whether the government should redistribute more wealth, from the rich downward, now that economic inequality is greater than it has been since the 1920s.

Income inequality is not about "somebody else" not being "able to make as much" as Bill Gates or Warren Buffet -- or Mitt Romney or John Edwards. But of course it plays much better to frame the issue this way than it does to accurately state the true problem, as Arthur Herzog, Jr., and Billie Holliday did almost 70 years ago, much more lucidly than I ever could.

The "free market" does not have a satisfactory answer to that old news -- which is why we continue to get shallow, misleading analyses like this one:

Romney came from greater wealth, as his father was an executive at the American Motors Corporation. But Romney made his personal fortune on his own and did it much in the same way that Edwards made his fortune; through lots of talent, lots of hard work and again, not a little luck (as Jefferson noted, the harder one works, the luckier one tends to get). I might doubt--as I have in the past--whether Romney, a very bright man, is as intellectually engaged in politics as he was in business. But there is no doubting the fact that Romney was indeed tremendously intellectually engaged in business and that degree of intellectual engagement helped win him the wealth he now has.

These two life stories help buttress Romney's argument that wealth is not a zero sum game. Power--especially political power--may well be a zero sum game but wealth and economic prosperity is a different matter entirely. Edwards could have gotten a lot of respect by pointing to his life story and making an optimist's argument to the electorate to the effect that if he could rise to the great financial heights he has achieved, anyone could. Sure, he would probably segue from that into making claims regarding how big government would help in the effort, but at the very least, he would be speaking to people's hopes and not to their fears.

Instead, he chooses to play the class warfare game and tell the electorate "watch what I say and pay no attention whatsoever to the nature of my life story as I talk about wealth and prosperity distribution in America." His own life story belies his populist claims and enhances Romney's case.

Except that it doesn't, because Edwards knows that he didn't become wealthy entirely on his own -- that talent and hard work were only part of the reason for his success, and not even the largest part. If talent and hard work were the major factors behind Edwards' success, what would that say about the vast majority of Americans who will never know that level of success? That they are lazy and untalented?

Pejman Yousefzadeh's assertion that "these two life stories help buttress Romney's argument that wealth is not a zero sum game" is utterly illogical. What about everyone else? If the life stories of two fabulously wealthy Americans support the argument that such wealth is attainable for anyone, what do 37 million Americans (in 2006) who are living below the poverty line tell us? Or the millions of Americans who are falling out of the middle class? What do they tell us about the certainty of wealth for anyone who is talented and hard-working?

The inconvenient truth is that the "free market" is not free, and "prosperity" in the U.S. economy as it exists today is a zero-sum game in which, as Maha notes, those who create the wealth benefit the least from it.

I’d like to point out that ordinary working people created most of that wealth. Inequality doesn’t grow because the wealth are somehow more deserving and working stiffs less so; it grows because the wealthy are able to control the wealth distribution system to their advantage. The role of government is not to take money away from the rich to give to the poor, but to keep the wealthy from gaming the system.

Back in February, NPR had a 7-part series in which Uri Berliner examined the "Haves and Have-Nots: Income Inequality in America." In his introduction to the series, Berliner provided some insight into how those who already have most of the nation's wealth keep getting ever more of it, to the detriment of everyone else.

Insight #1: Stock options are better than paychecks, especially in a flat-wage economy.

To get a sense of how the very wealthy have prospered over the past generation, consider this: The share of total income going to the top-earning 1 percent of Americans went from 8 percent in 1980 to 16 percent in 2004.
[...]
One reason: gains in the stock market. Affluent people own more stocks, and executives are often paid in stock or stock options. So when the market does well, their wealth accelerates quickly. ...

During the same 10-year period, American workers became among the most productive in the rich, industrialized, world. But the growth in their wages, when adjusted for inflation, was spotty at best.

Insight #2: Job insecurity is rising and employer-provided benefits are vanishing.

For people in the broad middle class, the economic picture over the past decade has been mixed. Unemployment has been low and inflation largely contained. But behind those reassuring trends, you'll find a lot of volatility in labor markets — what economists call "churn." In short, there's more hiring and firing going on.

That churn had led to new opportunities for many workers, but caused hardship and anxiety for many others. Add to this the fast-rising cost of health care and the decline of employer-paid pensions, and you understand why many middle-class families describe themselves as financially squeezed. Low-income Americans, of course, are financially squeezed as well, only more so.

Insight #3: Increasingly rarefied skill sets, more outsourcing, weaker unions.

New technology has made many jobs obsolete, while creating dramatic opportunities for wealth in computers, finance, and media and entertainment. Global competition has done the same. As middle-class assembly-line jobs vanish, and routine white-collar work gets outsourced overseas, the value of education and special skills rises. The power of unions continues to decline.

And how does the ordinary Joe or Josie pay for another certification or degree every few years when there is barely enough money to pay the rent?

The fight is fixed.

It's Christmas Time in the (Tent) City

2007-12-22T20:35:00.000-05:00

A tent city is growing in the suburbs of Los Angeles:

Between railroad tracks and beneath the roar of departing planes sits "tent city," a terminus for homeless people. It is not, as might be expected, in a blighted city center, but in the once-booming suburbia of Southern California.

The noisy, dusty camp sprang up in July with 20 residents and now numbers 200 people, including several children, growing as this region east of Los Angeles has been hit by the U.S. housing crisis.

The unraveling of the region known as the Inland Empire reads like a 21st century version of "The Grapes of Wrath," John Steinbeck's novel about families driven from their lands by the Great Depression.

As more families throw in the towel and head to foreclosure here and across the nation, the social costs of collapse are adding up in the form of higher rates of homelessness, crime and even disease.

QandO is enraged that Dana Ford, the Reuters reporter who wrote the above, does not mention until the fifth paragraph that none of the current residents of this tent city are there because of foreclosure. Somehow, that invalidates the entire article. Under a headline reading, "Foreclosures Send Homeless To Tent City?" McQ huffs, "Or maybe they don't. Another classic of media dissembling."

Tent city. U.S. housing crisis. Grown from 20 to 200 residents. "The Grapes of Wrath". Great depression. Foreclosure leads to higher rates of homelessness.

Or does it:
While no current residents claim to be victims of foreclosure, all agree that tent city is a symptom of the wider economic downturn. And it's just a matter of time before foreclosed families end up at tent city, local housing experts say.

Or put another way, everything in the first few paragraphs is apparently a crock of crap.

Yes, 200 people are living in a tent city because they love the great outdoors.

In an update, McQ links to two liberal bloggers (Brilliant at Breakfast's Jill, and Libby at Newshoggers), declaring, "Of course, dependable as dawn, the usual suspects swallow the nonsense hook-line-and-sinker and predictably blame it on Bush." What's interesting is that, in Jill's post, McQ ignores this paragraph, which immediately follows her quote from the Reuters article:

The housing bust is part of it, but so is the spiralling cost of health care, a dwindling job base as more companies outsource jobs [that] pay a living wage, and the crushing debt that this president will be leaving us.

And he ignores what Libby says about her Christmas shopping experience:

The traffic was horrendous and I found the parking lots 75% full, but nonetheless it wasn't difficult to find a convenient spot. The stores were also relatively crowded but people were looking, not buying. I've never overheard so many people debating on whether they wanted to spend quite so much on some item, even when it was on sale. And the sales were astounding. I've never seen such price slashing before Christmas Day. But the selections were spare. Stores definitely tightened up their inventories this year. It took me four stores to find a suitable ornament.

Most telling on the state of Christmas sales this year, was the speed at which I sailed through the checkouts. Despite the crowds, people weren't buying much. There were a dozen people ahead of me at the most crowded store and I got to the cashier in less than a couple of minutes. Last year at the same store it took close to a half an hour in a similiarly long line. But what really struck me was the dispirited mood of the people. The atmosphere was grimly determined rather than carelessly festive.

I was particularly struck by the conversations Libby overheard, because it reminded me of a conversation I overheard in a supermarket the other day. A couple near me were discussing which credit card to put the groceries on (which ones are too near their credit limits?), and debating over what to buy. The woman said to her companion, "You haven't gone grocery shopping for a long time. You don't know how much things cost." I used to think it was just me, but lately I've been noticing more and more of these debates: decisions over which brand to buy, how many to buy, whether you should buy a couple of individual rolls of toilet paper instead of the six-pack or the eight-pack, whether you should skip the box of Kleenex or the roll of paper towels, because you can use toilet paper if you sneeze or spill something, whether you really need that box of cereal since you still have instant oatmeal you can eat for breakfast, examining every brand of dog or cat food on the shelves to see if there's one that's even cheaper, and on and on.

The problem is not just foreclosures due to lenders making risky loans. The problem goes far beyond that. The problem is that people cannot pay their living expenses, and their housing expenses, and their medical expenses because of sharply rising costs in these areas -- because food is becoming prohibitively expensive, and because rents are ridiculously high, and because we're in a flat job market where even if people have jobs, those jobs don't pay enough to make ends meet, and because people are losing their health insurance and can't afford to buy private health insurance. Whether the 200 or so people living in that tent city in California are there because the bank foreclosed on their houses, or whether they are there because they can't find a job or a place to live and they have nowhere else to go, the problem is an economy that forces people into such desperate situations, and a presidential administration that simply does not care.

Thoughts or Reflections from an Old Mind

2007-12-21T06:35:00.000-05:00

I came across this on my travels through the blogosphere. I think

7. Politics without principle

is particularly apt, seeing what we've been saddled with for the last seven years.

Check all seven out and see how they apply to your life.

Happy Solstice.

Christmas in New York -- Don't Try It If You're a Foreigner

2007-12-20T23:57:00.000-05:00

A young Icelandic woman goes on holiday with some girlfriends to enjoy Christmas in New York City, and instead is detained for 24 hours -- held incommunicado; not allowed to contact an attorney, family, or friends; put in a jail cell; handcuffed and shackled; asked intrusive personal questions; forced to undergo a medical examination; photographed and fingerprinted, twice; and finally put on a flight back to Iceland and told never to return to the United States (as if she would!).

And why?

Because on a previous trip to this country, 12 years ago, she overstayed her visa by three weeks.

Eva Ósk Arnardóttir's account of her ordeal is here.

Via Matthew Yglesias, who read about it at The Daily Dish.

The Statute of Limitations on Compassion: Two Years

2007-12-20T23:26:00.000-05:00

Michelle Malkin linked today to an article in the Houston Chronicle about the disastrous situation that Katrina survivors who were uprooted from their destroyed neighborhoods and moved to Houston are facing in that city, two years after the hurricane. The former New Orleans residents, most of them either poor, elderly, or disabled, or some combination of these, have been dealing with a series of changing rules and requirements for assistance; arbitrary, bureaucratic decision-making; and confusion and inefficiency caused by the folding of the FEMA program into the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development:

On a rainy afternoon two days before Thanksgiving, Dawn Haynes was driving when she spotted the family of five sitting on the steps of Gospel Baptist Church.

Three adults and two children were huddled under an awning, clutching luggage and looking lost. Mystified, she stopped her car. They told her they were former New Orleanians and that the family had been evicted from its northwest Houston apartment after losing federal housing assistance. Haynes was shocked.

''I haven't thought about the people from Hurricane Katrina being homeless before, until I came across this family," said Haynes, who lives in Acres Homes and has helped place Brenda Hickman and her family in various motels.

This is not rare. More than two years after Hurricane Katrina transplanted thousands of New Orleanians into Houston, the lives of the most vulnerable — the unemployed and working poor — are starting to unravel. Once kept afloat on federal rental assistance, these families are losing their benefits and are ending up on Houston's streets, activists and social workers say. The families are going from cheap motel to cheap motel or doubling up in other people's homes, sleeping in armchairs or on floors. Those lucky to have transportation are living in their cars.

''We have gone from pillar to post," Hickman said. ''I can't see myself living on the streets." The 59-year-old was disqualified from rental assistance after she broke up with her husband who was designated as the head of the household — thus, the sole recipient for FEMA rental assistance.

In the last month, a second displacement of hundreds of people has become more pronounced as the process of transferring the FEMA program to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development got under way. The shift between the two agencies has not been seamless with many local landlords, who accepted FEMA money before, opting out of the program that will require tenants to start contributing to their rent payments March 1. So far, 48 landlords representing 68 properties have said no to the HUD program, said Spurgeon Robinson, the director of Harris County's Disaster Housing Assistance Program, or DHAP.

This has forced hundreds of households with no money to scramble to find security deposits and to move on again.

The majority of transplanted Katrina evacuees in Harris County, an estimated 100,000, are not on federal housing assistance and have moved on with their lives, but there is a small minority of people who still are struggling, community activists say.
[...]
The reasons why families have been landing on the streets are multiple, said Dave Dretcher, a director at Stay Connected, a program set up by Neighborhood Centers Inc. to help Katrina and Rita evacuees.

Some have been disqualified because their households have changed: Familial ties have been severed or down-and-out relatives have moved in.

"If mom and daughter were living together before the storm, they should be living together right after the storm," Dretcher said. "The way FEMA sets up a household was defined by the family situation before the storm — not after."

Many of these families are poor with senior citizens and the disabled on fixed incomes. Half can't find full-time jobs and get paid less than $15,000 a year, according to the Texas Low Income Housing Information Service. Also, county officials said 48 percent of their DHAP clients are unemployed.

Social workers and HUD housing inspectors also are finding families who have been living in cramped quarters. In one example, Priscilla Mercadel, her daughter and her seven grandchildren were packed in a one-bedroom apartment in north Houston after FEMA disqualified the daughter from rental assistance.

Of course, Michelle Malkin being who she is, she uses this story as an opportunity to express her sympathy -- for the residents of Houston who are bashing the Katrina survivors:

What’s most interesting is not so much the story, but the reaction to the story. The piece has garnered more than 700 comments so far, with heated debate over the limits of compassion.

Malkin then quotes a few of the comments -- including one that expresses shock at the callousness of most of the responders -- and then opens it to her readers, not one of whom has a kind word to say. In fact, most of them don't seem to have read the same article that I did. If they had, and possessed a reasonable level of intelligence and common sense, it would (or should) be clear why this relatively small number of Katrina survivors have been having so much trouble: the requirements for assistance are confusing, contradictory, often arbitrary, and subject to change without notice or proper communication. In many cases, people don't know what they are eligible for or entitled to. Many people have been placed in apartments that are completely inappropriate for their needs -- usually much too small -- which leads to a constant crisis mode in which aid recipients have to spend all their time trying to find other housing they can afford, fighting eviction, trying to keep their families together, and so on. Most of these people are poor and unskilled, and the job market is not exactly exploding with opportunities for them. And to add to all that, FEMA is in the process of transferring the entire hurricane assistance program to another government agency, which creates even more chaos and opportunities for exhibitions of incompetence.

However, reasonably intelligent, compassionate readers with common sense are not Michelle Malkin's demographic -- hence we see comments like these:

"So 2 years of free rent and they didn’t save a penny for housing? Ridiculous, but that’s what entitlement breeds."

***

"I prefer to be a firebuilder. Like we say in the team room, 'Build a man a fire, warm him for a night. Set a man on fire, warm him for life.' "

***

"It’s been two years. I’m sorry for what happened, but in that entire time none of these people considered getting jobs - even minimum wage jobs - and putting money away?

No. They wanted to latch on to the public teet and live off *our* tax dollars.

I bet if our apartment building burned to the ground right now, in two WEEKS time we’d be living someplace else, paying rent, and working to rebuild our lives. You know…being INDEPENDENT."

***

"two years free rent; and they didn’t think about how they were going to exist beyond this? yes, exactly entitlements do not cause an individual to strive beyond getting the next check or freebie. when will the government ever learn? or maybe they do want them to be in this dependent state forever?" [...]

They didn't have two years of free rent, moron.

More on Bashmilah

2007-12-19T22:26:00.000-05:00

Amy Goodman has an interview with Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah, the Yemeni man who was abducted by Jordanian officials, tortured, handed over to the C.I.A., held without charges for 19 months in several secret locations, and brutally tortured before being released in May 2005 -- still with no charges filed against him.

Via Cursor.

The Pentagon Has Good News: Hatred for U.S. Occupation Transcends Religious and Ethnic Differences

2007-12-19T22:11:00.000-05:00

Here are the first two paragraphs of a Washington Post article by Karen DeYoung:

Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of "occupying forces" as the key to national reconciliation, according to focus groups conducted for the U.S. military last month.

That is good news, according to a military analysis of the results. At the very least, analysts optimistically concluded, the findings indicate that Iraqis hold some "shared beliefs" that may eventually allow them to surmount the divisions that have led to a civil war.

Care to run that one by us again?

Blogger reaction is ... bemused:

... i[s] this silly, implausible spin or is this project being overseen by idiots? There's just no way you could construe widespread, cross-sectarian belief that the departure of US forces is crucial for national reconciliation as supporting a policy of a decades-long American military involvement in Iraq.

You very well might characterize this as "good news" since it indicates that there's at least some chance that a program of withdrawal would boost political reconciliation, but it's certainly not "good news" for the policy we're actually pursuing.

Andrew Sullivan wonders: "So we can leave now?"

If this is the good news ...

We'd hate to see the bad news[.]

We're not the only ones to notice something of, well, a discordant note in a Washington Post article about Iraq today. Reporter Karen DeYoung leads her story off by writing, "Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of 'occupying forces' as the key to national reconciliation, according to focus groups conducted for the U.S. military last month."

Now, it seems to us as if that might be considered a bad sign. But according to DeYoung, that's not how the U.S. military sees it. "That is good news, according to a military analysis of the results. At the very least, analysts optimistically concluded, the findings indicate that Iraqis hold some 'shared beliefs' that may eventually allow them to surmount the divisions that have led to a civil war."

Prometheus 6 declares, "I haven't heard anything so desperate since I stopped clubbing."

Dan Fogelberg

2007-12-18T22:28:00.000-05:00

I just now saw Chief's post about Dan Fogelberg. I knew he had prostate cancer, and that it was terminal, but I didn't know he had died until just a few minutes ago.

I loved Dan Fogelberg's music. His music had a sweetness and a warmth and a compassion -- a humanity -- that drew me in completely. There are no words to describe my feelings. He was my generation -- born the year after I was. His songs reflected the sensibilities and the values that I grew up with.

It is so sad, so incomprehensible, and so unfair that a person like Dan Fogelberg left the world so many years before he should have. I am glad for him that he was surrounded by love in his last moments -- and it's fitting, because he put a lot of his love out into the world.

Chief referred to Fogelberg's famous song, "The Leader of the Band." He wrote that song for his father, who was a musician, and inspired his son to become one, too. But in a very real way, Chief is right that Fogelberg was the leader of the band, too. He saw the way he wanted to go, and he wasn't afraid to follow his dreams. All of us -- not just his fellow Americans, but all human beings -- are better off for that.

Goodbye, Dan Fogelberg, and rest in peace. Your voice and your presence will be sorely missed.

Swinging the Jesus Bat for Votes

2007-12-18T21:46:00.000-05:00

Steve Benen deconstructs Mike Huckabee's new ad instructing Americans to forget about the presidential campaign and go "celebrate the birth of Christ."

I’ve done some cursory digging, and asked a few knowledgeable friends, and there’s no record of any major-party presidential candidate every mentioning Christ in a TV ad. That includes TV preacher Pat Robertson, who ran for the Republican nomination in 1988 (and came in second in the Iowa caucuses).

Purely at face value, what’s the harm in a presidential candidate wishing voters a merry Christmas? Nothing. Is there something wrong with an evangelical Christian, who worked as a Baptist preacher, remembering the “reason for the season”? Nope.

But there’s quite a bit more to this ad than that.

First, Huckabee is playing a little game. He’s running this ad in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, lamenting ads “about politics,” while hitting a political note — targeting evangelical voters and the Fox News crowd with heavy-handed religious rhetoric. As Michael D. put it, “They’ll see Huckabee as the person who’s not afraid, like so many candidates are, to come out and say ‘Happy Birthday, Jebus.’”

Second, it’s hardly a stretch to think Huckabee is being intentionally provocative. By becoming the first candidate to reference “Christ” in a TV ad, Huckabee is hoping a) that the media finds the spot newsworthy and gives his ad lots of free airplay; and b) that religious minorities, secularists, and advocates of church-state separation raise a fuss, which would only make him more popular with the GOP’s religious right base.

Third, the ad is rather crass. Not to get too Book of Matthew on Huckabee, but Christ’s name, for the devout, isn’t supposed to be used as a campaign talking point. As I understand it, the faithful don’t perceive the birth of the Big Guy as being about scoring points a few weeks before the Iowa caucuses.

And finally, the whole thing seems to be terribly gratuitous. Does Huckabee really need to go there? Are there still evangelical voters in the early primary/caucus states who don’t know about Huckabee’s religious background? He’s presented himself as a “Christian leader,” he’s explained his belief that he’s God’s anointed candidate, and he’s taken his obligatory shots at Mitt Romney’s faith. Now, he’s talking about Christ in a TV ad.

Way to swing the Jesus Bat at the electorate, Mike.

Chris Dodd Distinguished Himself; Clinton and Obama Disgraced Themselves

2007-12-18T20:58:00.000-05:00

Bob Kerrey is a lying slimebucket. Instead of stating that Barack Obama "attended a secular madrassa" in his youth, which is a brazen and bald-faced falsehood, he could legitimately be criticizing Obama for campaigning in Iowa on the day that Chris Dodd was, as BooMan puts it, "...working his heart out on the Senate floor to protect the rule of law and our civil liberties. ..."

Oh...wait...no, he could not have done that, because the candidate HE is supporting was out there in Iowa herself, telling people that she "had never been through a process more grueling" (linked from Booman) to convince the Des Moines Register to endorse her for president.

And adding insult to injury:

All three Senators [Biden was campaigning in New Hampshire] said they support Dodd and oppose retroactive immunity, and all three let Dodd do all the work while they campaigned at his expense.
[...]
Edwards and Richardson are not senators and couldn't vote or help filibuster. But Clinton, Obama, and Biden all disgraced themselves today. They all dishonored themselves today. When the FISA bill is brought up again in January it will be right in the midst of the primaries. The progressive wing of the Democratic Party will harshly punish a repeat of this cowardly day.

New Jersey Has Opted for Civilization, Not Barbarity

2007-12-17T23:16:00.000-05:00

Not quite as dramatic as what's been going on today in the Senate, but still wonderful and thrilling news: Today, New Jersey's Gov. Jon Corzine signed the bill on state execution that was passed last week, thus making it official: New Jersey has repealed the death penalty.

The Leadership of Sen. Chris Dodd

2007-12-17T23:10:00.000-05:00

Note from Kathy: While I was still writing this post, Harry Reid announced that he was taking the FISA bill off the schedule for this session; it will now not come up again until sometime in January. This is a huge victory for Americans and for the Constitution, and an awesome tribute to Chris Dodd's tireless, passionate advocacy for accountability and the rule of law. Apparently, it was Dodd's threat to filibuster the bill if it came up for a vote that changed Reid's mind. Amazing what leadership, principle, and spinal fortitude will do.

The bipartisan betrayal of the Constitution proceeds apace:

The Senate on Monday voted 76-10 to move forward with legislation overhauling the rules of electronic surveillance, although it may take awhile to resolve policy disputes over the bill.

Senators who oppose granting retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies that allegedly cooperated with the Bush administration’s warrantless snooping earlier this decade failed to block consideration of the bill. But they could still run out a 30-hour clock on the motion to proceed to the bill, which would rewrite the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Harry Reid won't let that happen:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid , D-Nev., said he and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell , R-Ky., agree there is no need to use all 30 hours, but he said several senators wanted to speak on the measure before agreeing to proceed to the legislation.

Cernig gives us the names of The Magnificent Ten.

Think Progress has Dodd's speech on the Senate floor, transcript and video. Stand-out excerpt:

“Trust me.” It is the offer to hide ourselves in the waiting arms of the rule of men. And in these threatened times, that offer has never seemed more seductive. The rule of law has rarely been so fragile.

“It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger…from abroad.” James Madison, the father of our Constitution, made that prediction more than two centuries ago. With the passage of this bill, his words would be one step closer to coming true. So it has never been more essential that we lend our voices to the law, and speak on its behalf.

On its behalf, we say to President Bush that a nation of truly free men and women would never take “trust me” for an answer, not even from a perfect president — and certainly not from him. […]

Text of Russ Feingold's speech is here. Stand-out quote:

In America, we understand that if we happen to be talking to a criminal or terrorist suspect, our conversations might be overheard by the government. But I don’t think many Americans expect the government to be able to listen in to every single one of their international communications with people about whom there are no suspicions whatsoever.

Kyle Moore can't believe that Spencer Ackerman still believes Harry Reid has good intentions. I was struck by what Kyle writes here, because I had read Spencer's comment earlier, and I had the same reaction as Kyle:

Since ascending to Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid has proven there is no fight he is not willing to back down from, no motion from the administration for which he would not roll over and bare his belly. In fact, Reid and Speaker Pelosi have only reinforced their role as congressional Keystone Kops, always brandishing their billy clubs and gnashing their teeth, but in the end always outfoxed and outdone by their masked rivals on the other side of the aisle.

Today we see yet another reason why Harry Reid is so terribly unfit to serve as the Senate Majority leader.

On the Senate floor, Senator Chris Dodd spoke passionately and eloquently about his convictions regarding the FISA bill which would grant retroactive immunity to telecommunication companies that were complicit in the Bush administration’s illegal spying on American citizens. Indeed, as Dodd refuses to believe the president when he says, “trust me,” I find myself not only in agreement with him, but directing that same sentiment to the Democratic leadership as well as those who voted for cloture such as Chuck Schumer and Diane Feinstein.

But I particularly fault Harry Reid who seems to have either duped TPMmuckraker’s Spencer Ackerman, or else I’m losing the sarcasm built in to the following paragraph:
One Senator who read those documents, Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), has already said in a recent speech that the legal basis for the program spelled out in the documents made him “increasingly dismayed and amazed.” They amount, in Whitehouse’s view, to a legal doctrine for presidential lawbreaking. Maybe Reid, who’s said he opposes retroactive immunity, is pushing a gambit to kill the telecom immunity provisions of the surveillance bill through the disinfecting power of sunlight.

Unfortunately, if Spencer’s being serious, I can’t agree. Not with Reid’s track record of late. Aside from folding on every important fight that has come his way, Glenn Greenwald points out that Reid has shown he plays favorites, just for the wrong side.

Via Steve Benen, Feingold's Myths and Facts about retroactive immunity, and his statement about Harry Reid's obstructionism.

Pale Rider at Blue Girl, Red State, does a little liveblogging, and gives us a little compare and contrast:

Let's remember that Senator Feingold and the equally impressive Senator Chris Dodd are working their asses off to hold on to the most basic freedoms that Americans seem to have forgotten they were entitled to. Feingold is ready to challenge the intelligence community--DNI McConnell in particular--and he should be given our support. When it comes time to find people with the courage to lead, these men should be considered at the forefront of their profession. While their colleagues stuff money in their pants and laugh at the American people, these men are doing the good work we need them to be doing. We need new leadership in the Senate, today more than ever. When Joe Lieberman can endorse John McCain and still hold his Senate seniority and his perch as Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which is all based on his years serving as a Democrat, NOT an Independent, then there is no reason to keep the current Senate leadership. None.

In the age of Fear, these two men are pillars of Knowledge. You kill Fear with Knowledge, plain and simple.

Matt Stoller explains the 60 Vote Argument:

I'm watching C-Span 2 on the FISA bill, and there was an interesting argument between Harry Reid and Chris Dodd about whether Dodd's amendment should require 60 votes. Reid's argument was that the Republicans will filibuster anything that doesn't get 60, so a supermajority is effectively the real rule of the Senate. Of course, it was Reid's choice to made the Intelligence version of the bill and not the Judiciary version the base bill. This means that retroactive immunity requires 60 votes to strip out instead of 60 votes to insert. This is such bad faith from the Majority Leader.

Chris Bowers rants.

The dictatorship defenders, l'etat c'est moi crowd, and Constitution shredders are pleased.

The Leader Of The Band Has Died - R.I.P. Dan Fogelburg

2007-12-17T18:53:00.000-05:00

Dan Fogelburg (1951 - 2007) has died of prostate cancer at age 56. I do not know the history of the disease in Dan Fogelburg, but I do know that the tests (PSA & colonoscopy) are standard and routine. All men should have them done regularly.

And you ladies, don't forget your mammograms ! !

UPDATE : Here is a link to Dan Fogelburg's web site. Dan leaves an urgent plea for all men. READ IT !!

The Constitution: Are You For It or Against It?

2007-12-17T12:33:00.000-05:00

Sen. Chris Dodd is starting a filibuster today to support the U.S. Constitution against those in the Bush administration who would eviscerate it. Scarecrow at Firedoglake has details:

Sometime today, Chris Dodd will take the floor in the US Senate and begin talking -- a filibuster -- and what he has to say touches on the most important issues facing this country. The immediate topic will be a bill to provide retroactive immunity to telecom companies who violated the law by helping the Bush Administration illegally spy on Americans. But the larger issue is whether Congress will ever hold a lawless executive branch responsible for its criminal behavior.

Senator Dodd will not be alone; a handful of Democratic Senators -- including Russ Feingold and Ted Kennedy -- will be there to support him, and for those who promised to help, this is the time. They have to help him because their party's so-called leadership has failed, again, in an all too familiar pattern of ineptitude and enabling.

Dodd and friends know how important it is to stop the atrocious Intelligence Committee bill, a bill that in addition to granting the telecoms immunity, does far too little to repair the damage Congress did last August to the 4th Amendment, individual liberty and privacy when they passed the dishonestly named Protect America Act (PAA).

But these few Democrats will not be enough to stop this travesty, and the question is: who will be there to help them? They need help, our help, the media's help and the help of every Senator and Representative who still believes in the Constitution's principles of accountable government and civil liberties. Those principles have been gravely damaged by a lawless Administration and a cowardly Congress, and it is long past time to stand up to this withering, unending assault on the Constitution.

Names and contact information for the 14 senators who have promised to support Dodd are below the post.

Additional: Glenn Greenwald posts on Harry Reid's continuing efforts to carry the administration's water.

The Blackwater Massacre: New Testimony By Eyewitnesses

2007-12-17T10:20:00.000-05:00

Last Friday, Salon published an updated account of the massacre of 17 Iraqi civilians by Blackwater security guards. The article is based on testimony given to representatives of the U.S. law firm that is filing suit against Blackwater on behalf of the victims. Here is what one of these survivor-witnesses told the legal team:

For Khalaf, a 38-year-old Iraqi, Sept. 16 started like many other sunny summer workdays. He donned his police uniform -- a white shirt, navy trousers and hat -- and headed to Baghdad's busy Nissour Square. By 7 a.m. he was out in the street, directing the flow of traffic coming from the multi-laned Yarmouk access road into the square. When he spotted four large all-terrain vehicles with guns mounted on top, he did what he always did. He stopped traffic and cleared the area for what he knew, from the tell-tale sign of the two accompanying helicopters, to be a security firm's convoy.

At first, this seemed completely normal for the totally abnormal world of Baghdad in September 2007. "Convoys are common," explained Khalaf. But this convoy made an unexpected U-turn, drove the wrong way around the one-way square, stopped in the middle of it and started shooting. Fifteen minutes later, 17 Iraqi civilians were dead, dozens more wounded, and a white sedan that had been engulfed in flames contained two bodies charred beyond recognition.

"It was a horror movie," said Khalaf, describing the aftermath of the now notorious Blackwater shootings.
[...]
Khalaf recounted the events of that day to a hushed room of lawyers with laptops. He watched, he said, as the Blackwater convoy made the U-turn toward the street where he stood directing traffic. As the convoy stopped, Khalaf watched as a large man with a mustache standing atop the third car fired several shots in the air. Khalaf turned back toward the Yarmouk road to see what might have spurred the shooting and heard a woman yell, "My son! My son!" He ran three cars back to a white sedan to find a woman holding a young man slumped over and covered with blood.

The man was Ahmed, a 20-year-old medical student at the top of his class, and the woman his mother, Mohasin, a successful dermatologist and mother of three.

"I tried to help the young man, but his mother was holding him so tight," said Khalaf. "I raised my left arm high in the air to try to signal to the convoy to stop the shooting," he said, thinking that it would respond to such a gesture by a police officer. He described how he crouched by the car, his right arm reaching inside, his head out and left arm up in the air, signaling to the convoy, his gun secure in its holster. Then the mother was shot dead before his eyes.

The shooting then turned heavier, Khalaf said, his eyes red-brimmed and serious. He hid behind the police traffic booth, but shots came directly at him, hitting the adjacent traffic light and booth's door, and he fled back across Yarmouk road to safety behind a hill. Along with a few hundred others, he stayed there as the chaos unfolded, watching as the helicopters circling above the street started shooting at those below.

Fifteen minutes later, the four-car convoy continued around the square and drove away. Amid the wreckage, colorful clouds billowed into the air from the convoy's parting gift -- multicolored smoke bombs.

In remarks prepared for delivery before a congressional hearing in October, Blackwater chairman Erik Prince claimed company guards "returned fire at threatening targets," including "men with AK-47s firing on the convoy" and "approaching vehicles that appeared to be suicide car bombers." Prince's prepared testimony also asserted that one of the vehicles had been disabled by the "enemy fire" and had to be towed. And he contended that the helicopters never fired on those below. (These remarks were never actually delivered; the Department of Justice launched an investigation the day before the hearing and asked the committee not to discuss the details of the Sept. 16 incident. Prince's remarks were subsequently reported in the Washington Post.)

But the accounts of Khalaf and others contradict each of Prince's assertions. Khalaf, who was there before the shooting began, said he never saw anyone fire on or approach the convoy. He watched as all four cars drove away as the 15-minute shooting spree ended, and huddled in fear as the helicopters began firing. He thought the helicopters would start spraying those who were hiding behind the hill for safety from the street-level threat.

Khalaf's observations are backed up by official accounts, including leaked FBI findings, which concluded that at least 14 of the 17 shooting deaths were unjustified, and statements by military officials disputing Blackwater's claim that its guards had been fired upon or under any sort of attack. The Iraq government's own investigation found no evidence that the guards had been provoked or attacked, and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's spokesperson called the shootings "deliberate murder."

NPR is the only major news outlet, to my knowledge, that has published anything about these latest eyewitness accounts.

What Part of "No Religious Test for Public Office" Is Hard To Understand?

2007-12-16T16:31:00.000-05:00

Frank Rich's column today is about Lawrence O'Donnell's rant against Mitt Romney's Mormonism on The McLaughlin Group:

This campaign season has been in desperate need of its own reincarnation of Howard Beale from “Network”: a TV talking head who would get mad as hell and not take it anymore. Last weekend that prayer was answered when Lawrence O’Donnell, an excitable Democratic analyst, seized a YouTube moment while appearing on one of the Beltway’s more repellent Sunday bloviathons, “The McLaughlin Group.”

Pushed over the edge by his peers’ polite chatter about Mitt Romney’s sermon on “Faith in America,” Mr. O’Donnell branded the speech “the worst” of his lifetime. Then he went on a rampage about Mr. Romney’s Mormon religion, shouting (among other things) that until 1978 it was “an officially racist faith.”

That claim just happens to be true. As the jaws of his scandalized co-stars dropped around him, Mr. O’Donnell then raised the rude question that almost no one in Washington asks aloud: Why didn’t Mr. Romney publicly renounce his church’s discriminatory practices before they were revoked? As the scion of one of America’s most prominent Mormon families, he might have made a difference. It’s not as if he was a toddler. By 1978 — the same year his contemporary, Bill Clinton, was elected governor in Arkansas — Mr. Romney had entered his 30s.

The answer is simple. Mr. Romney didn’t fight his church’s institutionalized apartheid, whatever his private misgivings, because that’s his character. Though he is trying to sell himself as a leader, he is actually a follower and a panderer, as confirmed by his flip-flops on nearly every issue.

I agree with Rich's assessment of Romney's character. There is no lack of reasons to shrink in revulsion from Romney's belief system (or the belief systems of any of the Republican candidates, for that matter). That said, I don't think his religious affiliation should be, in and of itself, one of those reasons. Personally, I am more offended by the idea that religious belief, or lack of religious belief, should have any place at all in a presidential campaign. I share Thomas Jefferson's view that religion is an entirely private matter that has no legitimate place in public policy or governance. I don't care what a candidate's religious beliefs are, and I don't want to know, either. I care what the candidate has said and done in public life -- what policies and legislation he supports, what his philosophy of governance is.

With that caveat, however, if the Republican candidates are going to hype and hawk their personal religious backgrounds as qualifications for high office, then I don't see why Romney's religious background should be exempt from that scrutiny. But neither should anybody else's. If Romney is to be expected to explicitly distance himself from Mormonism's racist history, shouldn't Mike Huckabee be expected to do the same for the racist history of Southern Baptists? Shouldn't he be expected to tell us whether he agrees with the Southern Baptist Convention's explicit and repeated calls for its pastors and lay members to missionize [i.e., convert] the Jewish people in the United States and worldwide? Southern Baptists are the largest Protestant movement in the United States. I certainly would want to know if the president of the United States shared his religion's stated goal of inducing Jews to reject Judaism and convert to Christianity. That's kind of an existential issue for me.

There's an enormous inconsistency in who gets asked to "explain" or justify their religion, and who does not. It's not just Romney the Mormon candidate, or Huckabee the Southern Baptist, or Rudolph Giuliani the Catholic, candidate, either. It's also candidates with Christian or Jewish backgrounds versus candidates with Muslim backgrounds or Muslim connections, imagined or real.

A couple of days ago, I quoted Mark I., a contributor at Redstate who believes that Islam is not "equal to" Judaism or Christianity -- that "[t]he practice of Islam in some parts of the world includes violence against unbelievers and apostates," and therefore "[a] Muslim candidate must ... distance himself from more radical elements in his religion to remain viable, and justifiably so, while a Christian or Jewish one does not."

That sort of religious bigotry is nothing new. It existed in Thomas Jefferson's day, too -- big time. Which is why Jefferson and the other Founders felt it so essential to include the "no religious test" clause in Article VI of the Constitution: "... no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

I say we start taking it seriously again.

Nineteen Months Inside C.I.A. Secret Interrogation Center

2007-12-16T01:21:00.000-05:00

"Whenever I saw a fly in my cell, I was filled with joy. Although I would wish for it to slip from under the door so it would not be imprisoned itself." -- Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah

Bashmilah is a Yemeni man who was imprisoned, interrogated, and brutally tortured for 19 months within the C.I.A.'s gulag of "black hole" sites. He was never charged with a crime.

The CIA held Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah in several different cells when he was incarcerated in its network of secret prisons known as "black sites." But the small cells were all pretty similar, maybe 7 feet wide and 10 feet long. He was sometimes naked, and sometimes handcuffed for weeks at a time. In one cell his ankle was chained to a bolt in the floor. There was a small toilet. In another cell there was just a bucket. Video cameras recorded his every move. The lights always stayed on -- there was no day or night. A speaker blasted him with continuous white noise, or rap music, 24 hours a day.

The guards wore black masks and black clothes. They would not utter a word as they extracted Bashmilah from his cell for interrogation -- one of his few interactions with other human beings during his entire 19 months of imprisonment. Nobody told him where he was, or if he would ever be freed.

It was enough to drive anyone crazy. Bashmilah finally tried to slash his wrists with a small piece of metal, smearing the words "I am innocent" in blood on the walls of his cell. But the CIA patched him up.

So Bashmilah stopped eating. But after his weight dropped to 90 pounds, he was dragged into an interrogation room, where they rammed a tube down his nose and into his stomach. Liquid was pumped in. The CIA would not let him die.

Bashmilah also received psychological counseling at various points -- but not out of kindness:

On several occasions, when Bashmilah's state of mind deteriorated dangerously, the CIA also did something else: They placed him in the care of mental health professionals. Bashmilah believes these were trained psychologists or psychiatrists. "What they were trying to do was to give me a sort of uplifting and to assure me," Bashmilah said in a telephone interview, through an interpreter, speaking from his home country of Yemen. "One of the things they told me to do was to allow myself to cry, and to breathe."
[...]
It may seem bizarre for the agency to provide counseling to a prisoner while simultaneously cracking him mentally -- as if revealing a humanitarian aspect to a program otherwise calibrated to exploit systematic psychological abuse. But it could also be that mental healthcare professionals were enlisted to help bring back from the edge prisoners who seemed precariously damaged, whose frayed minds were no longer as pliable for interrogation. "My understanding is that the purpose of having psychiatrists there is that if the prisoner feels better, then he would be able to talk more to the interrogators," said Bashmilah.

Realistically, psychiatrists in such a setting could do little about the prisoners' deeper suffering at the hands of the CIA. "They really had no authority to address these issues," Bashmilah said about his mental anguish. He said the doctors told him to "hope that one day you will prove your innocence or that you will one day return to your family." The psychiatrists also gave him some pills, likely tranquilizers. They analyzed his dreams. But there wasn't much else they could do. "They also gave me a Rubik's Cube so I could pass the time, and some jigsaw puzzles," Bashmilah recalled.

Bashmilah was released in May, 2005:

Bashmilah, who at age 39 is now physically a free man, still suffers the mental consequences of prolonged detention and abuse. He is undergoing treatment for the damage done to him at the hands of the U.S. government. On Friday, Bashmilah laid out his story in a declaration to a U.S. district court as part of a civil suit brought by the ACLU against Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a subsidiary of Boeing accused of facilitating secret CIA rendition flights.

Bashmilah said in the phone interview that the psychological anguish inside a CIA black site is exacerbated by the unfathomable unknowns for the prisoners. While he figured out that he was being held by Americans, Bashmilah did not know for sure why, where he was, or whether he would ever see his family again. He said, "Every time I realize that there may be others who are still there where I suffered, I feel the same thing for those innocent people who just fell in a crack."

There's much more to this article than what I can reasonably quote here, and I urge you to read all of it.

If the moral arc of the universe really does bend toward justice, there is a day of reckoning coming for the people who are responsible for the evil that was done to Bashmilah and so many others. First in the docket, obviously, should be George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld. But the line is much longer than that, and doubtless it will be even longer by the time that day comes.

The last words here should be Bashmilah's -- and if you can read them without tearing up, you're stronger than I am:

On May 5, 2005, Bashmilah was cuffed, hooded and put on a plane to Yemen. Yemeni government documents say the flight lasted six or seven hours and confirm that he was transferred from the control of the U.S. government. He soon learned that his father had died in the fall of 2004, not knowing where his son had disappeared to, or even if he was alive.

At the end of my interview with Bashmilah, I asked him if there was anything in particular he wanted people to know. "I would like for the American people to know that Islam is not an enemy to other nations," he said. "The American people should have a voice for holding accountable people who have hurt innocent people," he added. "And when there is a transgression against the American people, it should not be addressed by another transgression."

Satire That Is So Good It's Not Even Satire

2007-12-15T20:52:00.000-05:00

Anyone who is confident enough about his talents as a satirist to name his blog "Jon Swift" had better also have the talent to back it up.

And this Jon Swift does. Earlier this week, Jon tipped his hat to the brave souls on the right -- you know, the ones who tirelessly champion Western traditional civilized values against the barbarian Muslim hordes -- in the matter of Jamie Leigh Jones, who says she was gang-raped by several Halliburton/KBR contractors and then locked in a shipping container for over 24 hours.

Rusty Shackleford at The Jawa Report, Curt at Flopping Aces and former humor blogger Ace of Spades (who recently won the Weblog Award for Best Conservative blogger) are three of the most respected conservative bloggers in the blogosphere. They will stop at nothing to protect America from terrorists. If they gave medals for bravery in a war you are not actually fighting in, these guys would win hands down.

A recent story sorely tested their dedication to the war effort, but all three stepped up to the plate and showed just how far they are willing to go to defend America. Jamie Leigh Jones, a contractor for Halliburton/KBR, says she was gang raped by her co-workers, locked in a shipping container and threatened by her bosses. She was finally rescued by the State Department after she got word to her father who contacted Republican congressmen Ted Poe. If true, the story makes Halliburton/KBR look really bad and the fact that a Republican congressman and the State Department got involved lends some credence to her story. But Shackleford, Curt and Ace did not let that stop them from reflexively defending the military contractor and accusing this woman of being a liar in order to support the war effort. They saw that there was something fishy about the story, besides the fact that it is bad PR for Halliburton/KBR.

Although Shackleford, Curt and Ace don't know anything about the case other than what they have seen on the Internet, they apparently do read mystery stories. Anyone who has read detective novels knows that when all the evidence seems to be pointing one way, you can be sure that what the evidence is telling you is the exact opposite of the truth. Usually, the detective reveals this twist at the end, but Shackleford, Curt and Ace decided to skip right to the last chapter instead of waiting to see what other evidence comes out before drawing any conclusions. Ace, quoting his doppelganger the Church Lady, says Jones' story is "too convenient." Curt, who supports actor Fred Thompson for President, says it sounds "too movie like." Shackleford, no doubt wrinkling his brow and rubbing his beard thoughtfully as the wheels spin in his brain, if he has one (a beard, that is), writes, "It's perfect. Too perfect."

Indeed, if the terrorists wanted to undermine the war effort and destroy Western Civilization as we know it, this would be the perfect way to do it. Find an intelligent, attractive young woman to claim she was gang raped by contractors who work at the Vice President's company, and then get a Republican congressman and the State Department to back up part of her story. It's brilliantly evil and almost foolproof! There was just one thing these clever terrorists didn't count on: bloggers like Shackleford, Curt and Ace who would see right through their fiendish plan.

Some people, however, are just impossible to satirize, because the satirized reality and the actual reality are exactly the same. Here is Jon, writing satirically:

Unfortunately, there are a lot of credulous people out there even on the right. Chris Jones at Red State says he believes her story and is outraged. He doesn't mind if Halliburton/KBR employees rape and murder Iraqis, but he absolutely puts his foot down when it comes to raping Americans. That is going too far. ...

And here is Chris Jones, writing seriously:

Over two years later, the Justice Department has brought no criminal charges in the matter. Legal experts say Jones' alleged assailants will likely never face a judge and jury, due to an enormous loophole that has effectively left contractors in Iraq beyond the reach of United States law.

I have been a strident defender of allowing contractors to be immune from prosecution in Iraq. I don't really lose any sleep over Blackwater having to shoot one or more people for whatever reason.

Immunity for "contractor on Iraqi" crime is one thing, but I never considered that immunity would extend to "contractor on contractor" crimes. Or more specifically "American on American" crimes. Shooting an Iraqi in a war zone is one thing, but American contractors gang-raping a 20-year old American woman is f*cking outrageous.

Okay, are you attempting to scrape yourself off the floor? Wait! Here is the next paragraph but one:

The honest to god truth is that regardless of sleeping quarters, American contractors should act like professionals rather than a bunch of rabid animals. It's this kind of crap that brings dishonor and shame to everyone who's over there trying to do good work.

When satire is as good as that -- and yet isn't satire at all -- how can anyone top it?

Hat tip to Crooks and Liars.

Baseball and Steroids

2007-12-15T20:27:00.000-05:00

The Mitchell Report on the use of steroids by major league baseball players was released Thursday the 13th of December in the afternoon. Here is a link to the report in PDF format courtesy of ESPN. On Thursday evening I commented here.

Now it is well over two days later and neither the baseball commissioner nor any team owners have made a peep about this. Or if they have, I have not been able to find any news of it thru Google searches.

Is baseball going to treat Senator Mitchell's report as a non-event, thereby hoping it will go away? That tactic of ignoring the problem and it will go away will just not work. The sports media and especially ESPN is going to stay on this story like stink on shit. Baseball is making the same mistake that most organizations make in this situation. Because baseball is becoming less and less relevant to the American public, the powers that be need to address this head on in order to get the public's confidence back.

The Many Sides of Sen. Lindsay Graham

2007-12-15T15:42:00.000-05:00

Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC), questioning Brigadier General Thomas W. Hartmann, the military's legal adviser at Guantanamo Bay, at a Dec. 11 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

Graham: "One of the issues facing this country is waterboarding. Gen. Hartmann, do you believe waterboarding violates the Geneva Convention?"

Hartmann: "I was asked that earlier, Senator, and with regard to this entire issue, we start with the following premise: Torture is illegal in the United States."

Graham: "We have a downed airman in Iran. We get a report that the Iranian government is involved in the exercise of waterboarding that downed airman, on the theory they want to know when the next military operation may occur. What would be the response of, what should be the response of the uniformed legal community regarding the activity of the Iranian government?"

Hartmann: "I'm not equipped to answer that question, Senator."

Graham: "You are."

Hartmann: "I will tell you the answer to the question that you asked me at the beginning, Senator. And that--"

Graham: "You mean you're not equipped to give a legal opinion as to whether or not Iranian military waterboarding, secret security agents waterboarding downed airmen is a violation of the Geneva Convention?"

Hartmann: "I am not prepared to answer that question, Senator; I am prepared--

Graham (interrupting, in a disgusted voice): "Thank you, I have no further questions."

Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC), Dec. 14, explaining why he blocked an amendment to an intelligence activities authorization bill that would bar the CIA from using any interrogation methods prohibited by the Army's field manual on interrogation. The field manual does not permit the use of waterboarding, mock executions, and other forms of torture.

"I think quite frankly applying the Army field manual to the CIA would be ill-advised and would destroy a program that I think is lawful and helps the country." [...]

Europe's Loss of Christian Faith in the 17th Century Caused the Holocaust. Yep.

2007-12-15T00:10:00.000-05:00

Another whackjob joins The Corner:

... One grave consequence of post-war Europe's loss of faith is its approaching demographic extinction. The Italians are on pace to be as dead as the Romans. The Russians are headed there even faster. Can you be free if you don't exist? Or even worse, if you end up under Islamic law?

I'd also point to pre-war Europe, whose loss of religious faith (it's not like it started in 1960 — try 1660) had ghastly ideological consequences — Communism, German National Socialism — that led to countless deaths.

Matthew Yglesias remarks, drily, "Basically, the decline in religious fanaticism represented by the English Restoration in 1660 and the end of Oliver Cromwell's theocratic regime led directly to Nazism."

No More State-Sanctioned Killing in New Jersey

2007-12-14T21:38:00.000-05:00

I am a New Jerseyan. And today I am even more proud than I usually am to tell people that I live in New Jersey. Because today -- or rather, yesterday, but I found out today -- New Jersey became the first state in the United States in forty years to ban the death penalty. Technically, the bill is not law yet, because although the New Jersey legislature has passed it, Gov. Corzine has not yet signed it. But he will, very shortly. And when he does, my state will have yet one more reason to celebrate how blessed we are to live in a state as progressive and forward-thinking as this one is.

I love New Jersey.

Short Libbed

2007-12-14T20:57:00.000-05:00

Andrew Sullivan is amazed "to watch Rich Lowry and Charles Krauthammer begin to panic at the signs of Christianism taking over the Republican party," and John Cole asks, "Where the hell has Lowry been the last decade?"

Someone named "Mark I" at Redstate thinks that voters should keep asking the candidates questions about their religious beliefs, but the candidates should stop answering them. Mark also tells us that it's a mistake to conclude that religious tests are inherently bad.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that it seems to be based upon the assumption that all religions are equal. This is clearly not true. Modern mainstream Christianity and Judaism are not prone to violent suppression of non-adherents. The jury is still out on Islam. The practice of Islam in some parts of the world includes violence against unbelievers and apostates. A Muslim candidate must therefore distance himself from more radical elements in his religion to remain viable, and justifiably so, while a Christian or Jewish one does not.

Similarly, some religions have rituals that are just bizarre. Would a snake handler deserve no scrutiny of his beliefs if he were an otherwise credible candidate for office? What about a Pentecostal? Would it be out of bounds to ask the candidate if he/she ever spoke in tongues? A Satan worshipper? No questions? A wiccan?

I guess it was lucky for 18th and 19th century Americans that Thomas Jefferson didn't engage in this line of reasoning. If he had, no avowed Christian -- Protestant or Catholic -- would have been able to attain public office, given what had been going on for two centuries and more at the time Jefferson was born.

McQ hails "another sign of progress" in Iraq: oil production is up. Well, I can understand McQ's excitement. After all, he's still all aglow from his American Petroleum Institute-subsidized oil country junket. Oh-- that reminds me. I have to figure out a way to get to work on Monday -- my gas tank's empty and I won't have the $32 or so bucks to fill it with $2.83 cents-a-gallon gas (at Citgo -- Exxon and Shell and BP are at least a dime a gallon higher) until payday.

Dan Froomkin reports that Pres. Bush is planning to veto the torture-banning legislation currently in the House. Not that the United States tortures, of course -- but still, at some point we might have a need for "forcing detainees to be naked, perform sexual acts, or pose in a sexual manner; placing hoods or sacks over detainees' heads or duct tape over their eyes; beating, shocking, or burning detainees; threatening them with military dogs; exposing them to extreme heat or cold; conducting mock executions; depriving them of food, water, or medical care; and waterboarding." On the other hand, maybe not.

The Congressional Budget Office has come out with their latest figures on income inequality. Here's how bad it is: In the two-year period 2003-2005, the growth of the income gap resulted in $400 billion dollars moving from the bottom 95% of the population to the top 5%. Bernstein's money quote: "If this is the ownership society at work, I think we need to have a serious talk with the owners."

But of course the owners don't care. It's not them suffering and going without. Apropos of which, this New York Times article from November 26 is about the growing supply and demand problem that food pantries are having. In a few words, the demand is skyrocketing and the supply is shrinking:

Food banks around the country are reporting critical shortages that have forced them to ration supplies, distribute staples usually reserved for disaster relief and in some instances close.

“It’s one of the most demanding years I’ve seen in my 30 years” in the field, said Catherine D’Amato, president and chief executive of the Greater Boston Food Bank, comparing the situation to the recession of the late 1970s.

Experts attributed the shortages to an unusual combination of factors, including rising demand, a sharp drop in federal supplies of excess farm products, and tighter inventory controls that are leaving supermarkets and other retailers with less food to donate.

“We don’t have nearly what people need, and that’s all there is to it,” said Greg Bryant, director of the food pantry in Sheffield, Vt.

“We’re one step from running out,” Mr. Bryant said.

“It kind of spirals,” he added. “The people that normally donate to us have less, the retailers are selling to discount stores because people are shopping in those places, and now we have less food and more people. It’s a double, triple, hit.”

The Vermont Food Bank said its supply of food was down 50 percent from last year. “It’s a crisis mode,” said Doug O’Brien, the bank’s chief executive.

For two weeks this month, the New Hampshire Food Bank distributed supplies reserved for emergency relief. Demand for food here is up 40 percent over last year and supply is down 30 percent, which is striking in the state with the lowest reliance on food banks.

“It’s the price of oil, gas, rents and foreclosures,” said Melanie Gosselin, executive director of the New Hampshire Food Bank.

Ms. Gosselin said household budget squeezes had led to a drop in donations and greater demand. “This is not the old ‘only the homeless are hungry,’” she said. “It’s working people.”

Lane Kenworthy, a professor of sociology and political science at the University of Arizona, agreed, saying: “The overall picture is that household incomes are kind of stuck. There’s very little way to increase income, and most people have a very heavy debt load. Any event that increases your costs is really, really troublesome, because you’re already stretched thin.”

I feel like I should be wearing one of those advertising signboards around my neck, saying, "Ask me about this."

Housing - Credit - Crisis

2007-12-14T08:52:00.001-05:00

Not wanting to appear to disagree with my esteemed colleague, I have found a slightly different take on the reasons behind the current actions by the Fed and the Treasury.

I found this link on Mahablog. The second graf says it all

The ticking time bomb in the U.S. banking system is not resetting subprime mortgage rates. The real problem is the contractual ability of investors in mortgage bonds to require banks to buy back the loans at face value if there was fraud in the origination process.

The next graf sums it up.

And, to be sure, fraud is everywhere. It’s in the loan application documents, and it’s in the appraisals. There are e-mails and memos floating around showing that many people in banks, investment banks and appraisal companies - all the way up to senior management - knew about it.

We all know someone who got some kind of home loan in the last six or so years, where something was inflated, but everyone walked away happy. Fraud in the origination process is not going to be difficult to prove. Once you get one domino to fall, the rest will tumble willingly.

Maha's piece ends with

It is truly amazing that right now everyone in the country is deferring to Paulson and the heads of Countrywide, JPMorgan, Bank of America and others as the best group to work out a solution to this problem. No one is talking about the fact that these people created the problem and profited to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars from it….

The whole article that Maha quotes can be found here.

Another Traditional Journalism Stuffed Shirt Feeling Threatened by Bloggers

2007-12-14T07:44:00.000-05:00

A University of Georgia journalism professor named David Hazinski has ~~an opinion piece~~ a screed in today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution, titled "Unfettered 'citizen journalism' too risky." Patronizing and arrogant doesn't begin to cover it.

You're beginning to get a lot more news ... from you.

It ranges from the CNN YouTube debates to political blogs to cellphone video of that sniper who opened fire at an Omaha Mall. These are all examples of so called "citizen journalism," the hot new extension of the news business where the audience becomes the reporter.

Supporters of "citizen journalism" argue it provides independent, accurate, reliable information that the traditional media don't provide. While it has its place, the reality is it really isn't journalism at all, and it opens up information flow to the strong probability of fraud and abuse. The news industry should find some way to monitor and regulate this new trend.

The premise of citizen journalism is that regular people can now collect information and pictures with video cameras and cellphones, and distribute words and images over the Internet. Advocates argue that the acts of collecting and distributing makes these people "journalists." This is like saying someone who carries a scalpel is a "citizen surgeon" or someone who can read a law book is a "citizen lawyer." Tools are merely that. Education, skill and standards are really what make people into trusted professionals. Information without journalistic standards is called gossip.

But unlike those other professions, journalism — at least in the United States — has never adopted uniform self-regulating standards. There are commonly accepted ethical principals [sic] — two source confirmation of controversial information or the balanced reporting of both sides of a story, for example, but adhering to the principals [sic] is voluntary. There is no licensing, testing, mandatory education or boards of review. Most other professions do a poor job of self-regulation, but at least they have mechanisms to regulate themselves. Journalists do not.

First things first. Shouldn't a journalism professor know how to spell the word "principles" when he's talking about standards, and not the occupant of the office you're sent to when you get into trouble in school? I mean, if he's going to lecture bloggers about fact-checking and substantiation, seems to me the least he can do is fact-check and substantiate his own spelling against a dictionary.

Moving on to the meat of Hazinski's complaint, about "journalistic standards" and "substantiating citizen-contributed information," I refer you to this Dec. 8 blog post by the excellent albeit unbought journalist/blogger, Dave Neiwert, about the manner in which the Washington Post's ombudsman, Deborah Howell, responded to reader complaints about a Nov. 29 piece by Perry Bacon that misreported persistent -- and false -- rumors that Barack Obama is a Muslim. Here is a brief quote:

The Washington Post's ombudsman, Deborah Howell, could be found whining in her column today about the meanies who seem to be upset about the paper's misreportage of rumors surrounding Barack Obama's Muslim background:
Hamilton said, "Reasonable people can disagree on this. But the people I have heard from are not reasonable. What I find especially disheartening is the idea that our motives are simply assumed to have been malicious."

This is the new world mainstream journalists live in, one that will continue to be explored in this column.

What people like Howell, and Hamilton, and a whole horde of their mainstream-media cohorts, just don't seem to get is that this "new world" is a world they made.

The profession of journalism has a real problem: at its highest and most powerful levels, its practitioners have become immune to anything resembling real accountability -- and their abuses are piling up because of it. Abuses are nothing new, but neither is some modicum of accountability; yet nowadays, when they happen at powerhouses like the Washington Post and the New York Times and CNN, no one is held accountable.

They keep running the same congenitally wrong pundits, keep churning out the same Village mentality reporting, and most of all, they keep pretending that their bad, misleading, and false reportage really is nothing important. Sure they make a few mistakes, but hey, they're just trying to do their job -- because, after all, facts are just a matter of opinion, right?

Their consumers have just about had enough of it. Obviously, the perpetrators never like being called out, but if they're looking for someone to blame, the mirror is a good place to start.