The Kang & Kodos Readers Brigade

Bank of America applies for patent for process that more effectively screws American workers

2008-05-09T10:41:00.002-05:00

And I wonder what all the labor union retirement fund managers who own stock in BofA are going to think about this?

BofA has filed a patent application for a method of finding which country a client would benefit most to outsource workforce to. The patent application titled Country Assessment includes the descriptor:

"A typical American employee demands a high salary, good benefits, a good work environment, vacation time, and other job-related perks such as reimbursement for higher education. These job-related perks are expensive and may not be cost-effective for the business entity. A business entity is forced to commit significant resources to employ an American work force and may often find that the demands of American employees far exceed the allotted budget."

Of course, BofA is entitled to file a process patent application for a country selection algorithm (though why such algorithmic patents are permitted in the first place is beyond me). But, it is a little ironic they continue to call themselves "Bank of America" while they are in the business of making it easier for American businesses to find workers overseas who don't demand such things as "a good work environment, vacation time, and ... reimbursement for higher education."

Way to go BofA!

Cow Pies

2008-01-16T08:49:00.000-06:00

Here's yet another reason why all Bush Administration statements should be considered false until proven otherwise by painstaking research and invetsigation, and why any claims that the surge is "working" should be subject to the same validation.

Shorter Jonah Goldberg

2008-01-11T16:46:00.000-06:00

Again, all of this 'going to the text' of what I've written and comparing it to the texts upon which I claim to have based my book, and pointing out the massive inconsistencies and vacuousness of my assertions is just missing the point. Which is that liberals are fascists, even though lots of fascist things are good, and liberals are no good at all. Or something.

We MUST read this book next!

Do Carbon Credits Equal Indulgences?

2007-12-15T07:30:00.000-06:00

http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/sightings/archive_2007/0111.shtml

"If those are rights, ...

2007-12-06T18:14:00.000-06:00

ladle me up some of them wrongs."

Slate has another excellent Dahlia Lithwik article, this one about the Supreme Court discussing the rights of prisoners of war.

http://www.slate.com/id/2179268/

Imagine that some American tourists went to Venezuela (or Cuba or ??) and got arrested for being regime change covert agents. The US government, and everyone else, says they were not. Chavez holds them for six years without describing the evidence against them and some of them can't even talk to a lawyer. He says he organized "status reviews" and he is satisfied that he needs to hold them for national security reasons. Would the US say, his procedures look pretty good, I guess those people need to be held? Or would the US say that he is a crazy dictator with a self-serving view of justice?

Of course, my hypothetical is not important if it is too different from the Guantanamo situation. What do you think? Is it relevant?

Life imitates a Mastercard commercial

2007-11-15T18:02:00.000-06:00

What union carpenters make in Washington, DC: $24 an hour.

What non-Union carpenters make in Washington, DC: $16 an hour.

What the carpenters union pays the homeless to walk picket lines, so the union carpenters can keep working at $24 an hour: $8 an hour.

Hypocracy of the carpenters union: Priceless.

Oh, Blackwater, keep on rollin'

2007-11-15T17:49:00.000-06:00

Not much activity here this past month, so I will kick start.

As you've read -- at least fourteen of the seventeen killed by Blackwater were unjustified murders, according to the FBI investigation. But there is no court of jurisdiction to try any of the "contractors" in. Can't do America. Can't do Iraq.

That ain't the part that is pissing me off so much, though. I am fairly numb to Bush and his toy soldiers at this point. Or maybe, if I think about the murders I get too upset, so I think about other aspects of the situation.

Why do we have so many contractors over there in the first place? Why aren't we fighting a military war with military?

Granted, I need some data to back up these assertions and I got no data - so this is mostly a conjecture post (which I freely admit), but run with me on this for awhile.

For several years in the mid 20-aughts the military was telling us they were meeting recruiting targets. (Notice that you've not read any stories about recruiting targets the past year or two - but you were reading lots for awhile.) It sounded fishy to me back then. I realize in 2001 (late) and 2002 there were likely lots of signups to fight the Taliban. But once we went into Iraq and Americans started dying, I bet that recruitment dried up.

It is my hunch the only way the military came close to recruiting targets in 04 and 05 was by setting the targets unreasonably low. (Which is a tough thing for someone outside J1 in the miliary to evaluate. [see my footnote]) So, perhaps they hit targets in 04 and 05, but they didn't get enough soldiers into the pipeline. And since we are not reading about hitting targets in 06 and 07 (here is one story I found), my guess is they can't even hit their low targets now.

This would explain why soliders are being asked to serve second and third terms in Iraq. This would explain why terms keep getting extended.

And this would explain why the military has to outsource. It makes sense for the military to outsource whatever roles it can to private firms who can pay more and hold looser reins. And that would explain why we have so many contrators over in Iraq wrecking (reeking?) havoc.

It also suggest that, even if there were a modicum of public sentiment for going into Iran, there is not miliary force from which to do it. And, if a real (not self created) problem broke out somewhere else in the world, we would be hard pressed to react effectively.
-----
[footnote] I dug up some very round numbers. In January 2004, there were about 500,000 in the US Army. The 2007 Washington Post article cited above said that the FY 2007 Army recruiting goal was 80,000. So, if the average length of service in the Army (figuring in casualties) is a little over six years, then they are maintaining size by hitting the 80,000 goal. Of course, this is just Army - and doesn't consider reserves. It also doesn't consider specific skills, officer count, and lots of other things. But it is a decent starting number. So, how long do you think the average service term is? Certainly some people are lifers, but don't many serve their two or four years and get out? And, even if the average term is over six years, are we rebuilding the army if we simply replentish at that rate? Could it be that the 80,000 recruiting goal does not meet needs, but a higher goal is not acheivable - so they won't set a goal they can't make?

It's Over

2007-10-15T14:06:00.000-05:00

Republicans wave the white flag and acknowledge that seeming to oppose universal healthcare is political suicide--a landmark shift and rare rhetorical victory for the Dems.

All that remains now is for the Democrats to implement some shitty, piecemeal plan that fattens their insurance industry contributors whilst pissing off Americans who thought that universal coverage meant universal coverage.

Iran

2007-10-15T09:14:00.000-05:00

Akbar Ganji, a leading Iranian dissident, weighs in on the effect of US saber-rattling on Iranian foreign and domestic policy. Hers' an excerpt:

A military attack on Iran would also yield terrible political consequences. It would foster the growth of fundamentalism in the region, which would be bad for the United States and other Western countries and even worse for the Islamic world. Fundamentalism—with its inhuman view of women, hatred of freedom and democracy, and denigration of human rights—is a significant factor in the underdevelopment of Islamic communities. Fundamentalists largely reject Western art, morality, philosophy, culture, and science, though they make an exception for technologies of violence. This narrow-minded view of some of humanity’s great achievements is particularly harmful to Muslims. But a military attack on Iran would reignite the conviction that the Judeo-Christian West, led by the United States, is assaulting the world of Islam, from Afghanistan and Palestine to Iraq and Iran; and it would encourage the view that fundamentalist methods are the best way to fight the non-Muslim invaders. Western governments must not equate the battle against fundamentalism with a battle against Islam—as President Bush does when he describes the “war on terror” as a “crusade,” or when he speaks of “Islamic fascism.” It not only isolates moderate and democratic Muslims; it also provides fertile ground for fundamentalists among them.

We can already see this dynamic at work. After the 1997 election of Mohammad Khatami as president of Iran, civil society, human rights, and political freedoms became the dominant concerns in Iranian political life. The current U.S. military threat has given the Iranian government a freer hand in repressing Iran’s budding civil society in the name of national security, provided a pretext to entrust key political posts to military and security officers, and so eclipsed democratic discourse that some Iranian reformists see themselves caught between domestic despotism and foreign invasion.

Those tax and spend Republicans

2007-10-14T08:30:00.000-05:00

I was reading the New York Times story this morning about embattled Congressional Republicans and noted the line about how "Republicans have been scrambling for a health care response at a time when they had hoped to be pounding Democrats over excessive spending and re-establishing their image as the party of fiscal restraint." And I thought how bogus.

That thought led me to thinking, I wonder where the data is to demonstrate that this point is bogus. So, thinking I was looking for raw data I could put into Excel and create my own graphs, I started Googling. It didn't take me long to find that someone had already done this work.

At right is federal taxation as percent of GDP sorted by year. Party leadership is at bottom. Blue is Democrat; Orange is Republican. Top row is President; middle is House; Bottom is Senate.

Next chart is federal spending as percent of GDP sorted by year. And the third chart is federal deficit as percent of GDP sorted by year. All three of these through FY 2004. I haven't independently confirmed data; I am trusting the presentation from http://traxel.com/deficit/

The most generous analysis of this data that taxing and spending is randomly distributed independent of who is running the store. But that is generous to the Republicans.

Actually, in defense of the Republicans, they fare reasonably well on the taxation side. They seem to want to tax us less. But the lower taxes have not halted their spending. The top ten spending years - across three different Presidential administrations have been Republican years in the White House -- seven of them with Republican Senates (tempering the counter argument that spending is something Congress does that the White House can't stop.)

And with low taxes and high spending, the deficit has been a disaster under the Republicans. Fourteen of the fifteen worst deficits in recent history have been under Republican Presidents, the lone Democrat entry on that list was Clinton's FY 93 budget that was pretty much inherited from the GWB administration (none of the top 14 Republican Presidential deficits were immediately inherited from a Democrat.)

The Republicans do a great PR job of labeling Democrats as "tax and spend", but only the "tax" part of the label has any potential legitimacy. Spending - and spending when there is no cash in the bank to pay for it - has been a Republican trait for quite some time now.

Rudy's Cellphone

2007-10-02T14:50:00.000-05:00

40 times?!!! What an unbelievable dickhead this guy is.

The Washington Monthly

RUDY'S CELL PHONE....John Fund writes in the Wall Street Journal about Rudy Giuliani's habit of taking phone calls from his wife in the middle of presentations:

Mr. Giuliani's deputy press secretary Jason Miller told me the NRA incident was definitely not a stunt. Instead it was a "candid and spontaneous moment" that would humanize the tough-guy former mayor with voters.

Nice try....The fact is that people inside the Giuliani campaign are appalled at the number of times their candidate has felt compelled to interrupt public appearances to take calls from his wife. The estimate from those in a position to know is that he has taken such calls more than 40 times in the middle of speeches, conferences and presentations to large donors.

....[Giuliani] admitted he had taken calls from his wife "before in engagements, and I didn't realize it would create any kind of controversy." That's hardly possible. Giuliani staffers say he has been warned over and over again that the phone calls are rude and inappropriate and have alienated everyone from local officials to top donors to close friends.

OK. I'm sitting here trying to figure out what to say about this. But what? It's obviously nuts, but nuts in what way?

First way: Rudy genuinely doesn't realize that taking a phone call in the middle of a speech is rude. But this suggests a lack of emotional intelligence so stunning that even I don't think Rudy is capable of it — and that's saying a lot.

Second way: He knows it's rude, but has somehow convinced himself that it's a political winner despite the repeated entreaties of his staff. I dunno. I guess it's possible.

Third way: He and Judy are literally so enthralled with each other that he can't stand to shut off the phone for even a few minutes. If he were 17 I might buy it. At age 63 it suggests codependency issues so severe he ought to be on medication.

Fourth way: Judy has told him in no uncertain terms that he'd better take her calls 24/7. Rudy is so terrified of her that he's given in on this.

Fifth way: He's so enormously full of himself that he doesn't think the ordinary rules of common courtesy apply to him. This strikes me as quite plausible.

Overall, this is one of the weirdest damn things I've heard in a long time. Does Rudy take calls during television interviews? On radio call-in shows? In meetings with his staff? Does Judy really require this level of emotional sustenance? What the hell is going on?

Accountability

2007-10-02T10:47:00.000-05:00

They say that data is not the plural of anecdote, and the dead-enders who still support this administration do not appear to be persuaded by either. Here are another couple of anecdotes about the Republicans' Culture of Accountability:

Parody Surge Hits Mil Contractors in Iraq

A few days ago the State Department released what it called a "first blush" report on the Blackwater incident in Baghdad, a report which largely exonerated the Blackwater personnel involved.

I noted at the time that "first blush" was something of an understatement since the report was based exclusively on statements the State Department took from Blackwater operatives on the scene. In other words, the Blackwater employees who did the shooting gave State an account that largely exonerated themselves. A truly shocking development.

But it seems that I was behind the curve on the level of caricature and self-parody that is the military contracting biz in Iraq these days.

The report was written out of the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security, the folks who hired Blackwater to provide security for US diplomats in Iraq. But it turns out that the State Department employee who interviewed the Blackwater folks and wrote the report, Darren Hanner ... well, he wasn't a State Department employee. He was another contractor from Blackwater.

So yes, you've got that right. We've now reached what can only be called the alpha and the omega of contracting accountability breakdown ridiculousness. We're outsourcing our investigations of Blackwater to Blackwater.

Still More Blackwater Goodness

Back in December, when a drunk Blackwater contractor blew away one of Iraqi VP Adel Abdul Mehdi's bodyguards, an official with State's Bureau of Diplomatic Security decided to low-ball the financial compensation for the man's family so as not to give an incentive for Iraqis to "try to get killed to set up their family financially."

The initial suggestion from Embassy personnel of $100,000 to $250,000 was lowered to $15,000 to the man's family.

--Josh Marshall

Parental Licensure Now

2007-09-28T09:05:00.000-05:00

I'm sure that the vast majority of single mothers with live in boyfriends don't engage in criminally neglectful behavior towards their children, but it doesn't take Charles Darwin to figure out that, in such a situation, the chances that a baby's welfare will be carefully looked after are significantly decreased (it just takes Charles Darwin to explain why).

And, "because Hillary is scarier" is a risky answer....

2007-09-22T09:40:00.000-05:00

From Guliani's pro-gun speech to the NRA the other day, as reported by Marc Ambinder

Giuliani said that MoveOn.org's ad criticizing Gen. Petreaus was out of bounds and hinted that the group should face some sort of sanction.

"They passed a line that we should not allow an American political organization to pass," he said. "We are at war right now, whether some people want to recognize it or not."

So not only is Guliani prostituting himself to the NRA, but he is willing to abandon the First Amendment in the name of faux patriotism.

He expects to pick up votes from moderates in the general election, why?

Ça Alors, Monsieur O'Reilly!

2007-09-21T15:43:00.000-05:00

It's bad enough when you have to listen to O'Reilly and his ilk talk in unctuous circles around the pre-enlightenment sentiments they'd really like to be expressing, but on those rare occasions when they're honest, c'est carrement incroyable!

"You know, I was up in Harlem a few weeks ago, and I actually had dinner with Al Sharpton, who is a very, very interesting guy. And he comes on The Factor a lot, and then I treated him to dinner, because he's made himself available to us, and I felt that I wanted to take him up there. And we went to Sylvia's, a very famous restaurant in Harlem. I had a great time, and all the people up there are tremendously respectful. They all watch The Factor. You know, when Sharpton and I walked in, it was like a big commotion and everything, but everybody was very nice.

And I couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it's run by blacks, primarily black patronship. It was the same, and that's really what this society's all about now here in the U.S.A. There's no difference. There's no difference. There may be a cultural entertainment -- people may gravitate toward different cultural entertainment, but you go down to Little Italy, and you're gonna have that. It has nothing to do with the color of anybody's skin....

O'REILLY: That's right. That's right. There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, "M-Fer, I want more iced tea."

WILLIAMS: Please --

O'REILLY: You know, I mean, everybody was -- it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn't any kind of craziness at all. "

Hold Your Horses, Vicente!

2007-09-21T10:50:00.000-05:00

I'm sure we'll be hearing about this for the next eight years from Sunday morning pundits, conservative radio hosts, and major news outlets, just like we heard the phony stories about Al Gore inventing the inernets, etc.

George Bush the Texan is 'scared of horses' By Alex Spillius in Washington

Last Updated: 3:55am BST 21/09/2007

President Bush may like to be seen as a swaggering tough guy with a penchant for manly outdoor pursuits, but in a new book one of his closest allies has said he is afraid of horses.

George W Bush saddles up,but where is the horse?

Vicente Fox, the former president of Mexico, derided his political friend as a "windshield cowboy" – a cowboy who prefers to drive – and "the cockiest guy I have ever met in my life". He recalled a meeting in Mexico shortly after both men had been elected when Mr Fox offered Mr Bush a ride on a "big palomino" horse. Mr Fox, who left office in December, recalled Mr Bush "backing away" from the animal.

''A horse lover can always tell when others don't share our passion," he said, according to the Washington Post.

Mr Bush has spoken of his fondness for shooting doves and cutting brush on his Crawford ranch in Texas, which he bought in 1999.

The property reportedly has no horses and only five cattle.

Mr Fox is the latest old friend to turn on Mr Bush as the US president faces a lonely final 18 months in office, derided for failures in Iraq and at home.

Donald Rumsfeld, his defence secretary until last November, asked recently if he missed the president, said flatly: "No."

Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, has attacked the Bush administration's economic policy at length in a new autobiography, accusing the Republican president of poor fiscal discipline and betraying the party's basic principles of low spending.
Asked for his reaction to criticism from former aides, the president replied: "My feelings are not hurt."

"We Support the Troops," in a nutshell

2007-09-20T15:58:00.000-05:00

Correct me if I'm wrong here. But by my calculation, more U.S. senators (72) voted today to condemn a newspaper ad attacking Gen. Petraeus than voted yesterday (56) to lengthen the time off troops get from the frontlines in Iraq, thereby reducing individual soldiers exposure to actual attacks. Am I missing something, or is that about right?

--David Kurtz

Greenspan's Inconvenient Truth

2007-09-15T18:29:00.000-05:00

Kevin Drum, over at the Washington Monthly blog notes that Bob Woodward has been reading Alan Greenspan's memoir. He writes:

ALL LARGELY ABOUT OIL....Bob Woodward plucks a sentence from Alan Greenspan's forthcoming memoir:
Without elaborating, he writes, "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."
Now that's a statement that could use some elaboration, isn't it? I guess Greenspan hasn't quite given up his Sphinx-like pose entirely.

(So what's Greenspan's point? I don't think he's suggesting that we invaded Iraq because we wanted to seize control of their oil fields and hand them over to ExxonMobil. More likely, he's making the unexceptional argument that we wouldn't care much about the Middle East in the first place if it didn't have all that oil. But it does, and our economy depends on it, and we long ago decided that protecting our access to that oil was an essential element of our national interest. The Iraq war, as Greenspan notes, is pretty obviously bound up in all of that.)

Drum bangs rather slowly, I think. The point (Woodward's and Greenspan's) is not that the Iraq war was influenced by oil (of course it was!) - as is all US Middle East policy. It is that Greenspan said it is politically incovenient to talk about it. That's the point that merits discussion.

It merits discussion because, as even Republicans and most warmongers acknowledge now, there were no WMDs and there was considerable intelligence and LOTS of other countries telling us there were no WMDs. But our administration wanted to go in anyway.

It merits discussion because not only are Chompsky and Finkelstein ridiculed for suggesting a bias in US Middle East policy, but even people like the Mearsheimer and Walt are being marginalized for their writing.

We should be able to talk about these things openly. There should be no elephants in the room. There should be no inconvenient truths.

No, it doesn't

2007-09-13T16:57:00.000-05:00

Whatever.

Boehner obviously didn't mean to imply that the blood shed was a small price to pay--by his actions he clearly thinks it is, but he must have already been formulating his answer to the money question when he stopped listening to Wolf (God knows I stop listening to Wolf all the time).

It's true that this is the kind of gotcha BS that is Republican bread and butter, but do we really need to do it too?

Bush listens to the General--General "ass-kissing little chickenshit"

2007-09-13T12:21:00.000-05:00

That's right, "an ass-kissing little chickenshit." Any moment, the wing-o-sphere will be ringing out with vicious condemnations of Admiral Fallon and the Navy he represents for "subverting the army as an institution," just as it has with attacks on MoveOn for questioning Petraeus's credibility in being tasked to deliver a report on the success of a strategy he came up with.

I don't know whether to credit the Right on this by observing that the inability to distinguish valid criticism of an individual from treasonous attack on the institution the individual represents, is merely an outgrowth of the "Great Man" theory of history that conservatives seem to incline towards, or whether to just chalk it up to typical, mindless, winger bullshit.

I'm sure Sexy Retard will help me decide.

Highlights:

WASHINGTON, Sep 12 (IPS) - In sharp contrast to the lionisation of Gen. David Petraeus by members of the U.S. Congress during his testimony this week, Petraeus's superior, Admiral William Fallon, chief of the Central Command (CENTCOM), derided Petraeus as a sycophant during their first meeting in Baghdad last March, according to Pentagon sources familiar with reports of the meeting.

Fallon told Petraeus that he considered him to be "an ass-kissing little chickenshit" and added, "I hate people like that", the sources say. That remark reportedly came after Petraeus began the meeting by making remarks that Fallon interpreted as trying to ingratiate himself with a superior.

That extraordinarily contentious start of Fallon's mission to Baghdad led to more meetings marked by acute tension between the two commanders. Fallon went on develop his own alternative to Petraeus's recommendation for continued high levels of U.S. troops in Iraq during the summer.

The enmity between the two commanders became public knowledge when the Washington Post reported Sep. 9 on intense conflict within the administration over Iraq. The story quoted a senior official as saying that referring to "bad relations" between them is "the understatement of the century".

Fallon's derision toward Petraeus reflected both the CENTCOM commander's personal distaste for Petraeus's style of operating and their fundamental policy differences over Iraq, according to the sources.

DemocRats

2007-09-06T16:38:00.000-05:00

The Poor Man Institute » The influence of Kos on the national Democratic party has perhaps been overstated

WASHINGTON, Sept. 5 — With a mixed picture emerging about progress in Iraq, Senate Democratic leaders are showing a new openness to compromise as they try to attract Republican support for forcing at least modest troop withdrawals in the coming months.
After short-circuiting consideration of votes on some bipartisan proposals on Iraq before the August break, senior Democrats now say they are willing to rethink their push to establish a withdrawal deadline of next spring if doing so will attract the 60 Senate votes needed to prevail.
Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, said, “If we have to make the spring part a goal, rather than something that is binding, and if that is able to produce some additional votes to get us over the filibuster, my own inclination would be to consider that.”

Carl Levin is to congressional pushback on pointless, grinding dead-end war as Britney Spears is to responsible motherhood.

Sure, make it a guideline, Carl. You know what, there’s every reason to trust the President when he says he might reduce troop levels, slightly, at some point in the future. When? Oh, well, is never good for you? But yeah, best not to go out on a limb and follow the course of action a majority of the country decided was important enough that they put you in the majority so you could enact it. Can’t be too careful.

Simple it may seem to you and I, but it takes a truly wily pathetic sycophant to understand the complexities of doing business in DC. Its wheels within wheels with Levin, man. That dude’s got the inside dope.

Assholes.

Pool Party!

2007-09-06T11:33:00.001-05:00

More and better ideas for the president to ignore.

Incidentally, I'm about halfway through the Greenwald book, and I'm finding it tough going. It's a bit reminiscent of some of my high school essays, where I would keep paraphrasing my own hypothesis ad nauseum to compensate for a lack of evidence.

I love Greenwald's blogging, but I'm beginning to wonder if this an example of an awkward transition from one medium to another (as when William Shatner partnered with Ben Folds on a pop album...). I find this weird because I don't think Greenwald necessarily lacks evidence that Bush has a Manichean worldview, but I also think it's the kind of contention that deserves maybe a chapter or two in a broader-themed book about how Republicans are 100% EVIL TO THE CORE, rather than an entire book.

Experts

2007-08-29T15:50:00.000-05:00

"Sometimes I think the so-called experts really are experts." - Jack Handey

I thought this New Yorker Article would be of interest given our recent discussions of expert opinion vs. mass emotion.

It's a Sexy Retard Hypocrisy Feeding Frenzy!

2007-08-29T11:37:00.002-05:00

The title of this post is not meant to be ironic. This is precisely the kind of thing that chaps S-Tard's ass, and with good reason--he must sometimes feel like the only politically-inclined white Christian male in America who isn't having gay sex in bathrooms, straight sex with hookers, or scamming Indian tribes out of their hard-won lobbying money (I'm not so sure about the last one, actually).

Anyway, here's the Good Senator on MTP in 1999 regarding Bill Clinton:

MR. RUSSERT: Larry Craig, would you want the last word from the Senate be an acquittal of the president and no censure?

SEN. CRAIG: Well, I don’t know where the Senate’s going to be on that issue of an up or down vote on impeachment, but I will tell you that the Senate certainly can bring about a censure reslution and it’s a slap on the wrist. It’s a, “Bad boy, Bill Clinton. You’re a naughty boy.”

The American people already know that Bill Clinton is a bad boy, a naughtyboy.

I’m going to speak out for the citizens of my state, who in the majority think that Bill Clinton is probably even a nasty, bad, naughty boy.The question issue now is simply this: Did he lie under oath? Did he perjure himself and did he obstruct justice? And that’s where we’re trying to go now in this truth-seeking process. And I hope we can get there. And then I’m going to have the chance to decide and vote up or down on those articles.

After we’re through with this impeachment trial, it’s collapsed, it’s gone, then the Senate will make a decision on if it’s a censure or not.

And here's a fantastic post from Glenn Greenwald on the evolving positions of our winger bloggers regarding gay bathroom sex.

Viet Nam is the new Iraq

2007-08-25T10:32:00.000-05:00

It's a wee bit intimidating that Jeff writes such erudite and articulate posts here. Mine won't be that. But here goes anyway...

What do the rest of you think about Number 43 doing a complete about face and now comparing Iraq to Viet Nam?

My take is that this is happening because Karl Rove left and now someone else is putting words into George's mouth. The history of war lesson this AWOL gave the VFW meeting on Wednesday not only was filled with questionable historical interpretations, not only was insulting to be telling the veterens about the wars they fought, but it was exactly the kind of thing Rove would have told Bush not to say.

And how can he possibly think telling the country we should have stayed the course in Viet Nam is going to bring any of the undecideds over to him?

KKRB

2007-08-23T15:45:00.001-05:00

Swimming against the current.

Individual Initiative

2007-08-23T09:56:00.000-05:00

Following up on our discussion last night about individual action, Abra emailed me the following question (my response follows):

ABRA: What about this as an example of people making individual steps that impacted society in a big way? The Danish people saved almost 100% of their Jewish population during the Holocaust, I think around 8,000 people, by sneaking them out of Denmark at night on fishing boats to another country that was not occupied by Germany, somewhere in Scandinavia I think it was.

JEFF: I think the difference I was failing to articulate last night is the difference between collective action in the face of clear and present dangers/challenges (which has accomplished amazing goals with dramatic social consequences, as in your example), and the hope that the cumulative effect of individual, non-coerced behavioral changes will be sufficient to deal with a problem whose causes and effects are so diffuse as to be almost imperceptible to most individuals. I'm obviously talking about global climate change here, but let me put it in terms that might elicit agreement from our libertarian friends (in principle, at least):

Most libertarians will compromise their commitment to total personal liberty when it comes to taxation to pay for military defense. By compromising on this point, they are in effect saying that

a) individuals are not sufficiently rational actors to be able to assess the value to themselves of national defense;
b) this irrationality will lead them to price that defense incorrectly (too low, presumably), and;
c) the potential consequences of underfunding national defense (invasion) are too catastrophic to society as a whole to rely on voluntary contributions to the state by citizens, or even on individual subscription to private security enforcement corporations.

So, when it comes to climate change, the same principle applies, and the only difference is that most libertarians don't view climate change as real, caused by humans, or as any kind of danger (I happen to think they're mostly putting the cart before the horse, and that their view of the science is skewed by their aversion to the proposed remedies, even though, as I suggest above, they can't really oppose the principle involved).

Collective action will obviously play an important part in the fight against climate change, but its main goal will be convincing policy makers to use the coercive power of the state to lower CO2 emissions through increasing CAFE standards, building more renewable power capacity/nukes, etc. I see an important difference between this type of collective action--which basically results from the failure of individual initiative to handle large, complex, long-term problems--and the kind Abra refers to above.

Dispatches from a Flat Earth

2007-08-22T15:37:00.000-05:00

I really haven't found any better example of the flawed approach to the climate change issue by denialists than the following little gem from the Heartland Institute website:

Scientific Smackdown: Skeptics Voted The Clear Winners Against Global Warming Believers in Heated NYC DebateWritten

Abstract: MIT scientist Richard Lindzen, University of London emeritus professor Philip Stott and physician turned novelist/filmmaker Michael Crichton trounced three prominent opponents in a March 14 public global warming debate sponsored by the Intelligence Squared debating society and distributed for broadcast by National Public Radio. A poll of hundreds of audience members in attendance showed an overwhelming majority believed in alarmist global warming theory before the debate, but by debate's end skeptics outnumbered alarmists.

I have not yet listened to the debate, but I invite you to consider for a moment a group of people who, on the one hand, claim that uninformed, pro-global climate change hysteria has hijacked the debate, while on the other, claim it as a victory for denialism when an audience full of non-scientists is swayed by a single debate (the pre-debate poll put at 57% to 30% the proportion of audience members believing that "global warming is a crisis," while a post-debate poll put the numbers at 46% to 42% believing it is not a crisis). Inasmuch as there is still a "debate" on ACC, this is how far outside of the realm of actual scientific inquiry it has moved.

Karl Rove: Brilliant Christ Figure

2007-08-15T18:38:00.000-05:00

This is genius. Karl Rove sacrifices himself and steps down from his White House post to save the presidency for the GOP the only way he still can: ensure that the moronic Democratic primary voters choose Hillary Clinton as their '08 nominee.

What better way to whip up support for Hillary among the same people that brought us John Kerry than to have the Great Doughy Satan himself making the media rounds, while attacking Hillary in a way that creates an "aura of inevitability" (forgive me) about her candidacy.

I think Rove's particular strategy over the past decade or so will prove to have damaged the GOP in the long run, but there's no denying that the man is a black belt campaigner and short term tactician.

The soft biggotry of no expectations

2007-08-01T10:01:00.000-05:00

I propose that the Republican Party adopt as its 2008 campaign slogan:

"But It's Not Technically Illegal in '08!"

U.S. Attorney Became Target After Rebuffing Justice Dept.
By Amy Goldstein and Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff WritersWednesday, August 1, 2007; Page A01

The night before the government secured a guilty plea from the manufacturer of the addictive painkiller OxyContin, a senior Justice Department official called the U.S. attorney handling the case and, at the behest of an executive for the drugmaker, urged him to slow down, the prosecutor told the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday.

John L. Brownlee, the U.S. attorney in Roanoke, testified that he was at home the evening of Oct. 24 when he received the call on his cellphone from Michael J. Elston, then chief of staff to the deputy attorney general and one of the Justice aides involved in the removal of nine U.S. attorneys last year.

Brownlee settled the case anyway. Eight days later, his name appeared on a list compiled by Elston of prosecutors that officials had suggested be fired.

Brownlee ultimately kept his job. But as Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales confronts withering criticism over the dismissals, the episode in the OxyContin case provides fresh evidence of efforts by senior officials in the department's headquarters to sway the work of U.S. attorneys' offices.

Justice Department officials said it was not unusual for senior members to weigh in on major criminal cases, and a spokesman, Dean Boyd, said the department "encourages healthy internal debate and discussion on complex cases like this one."

Several former federal prosecutors also said that defense attorneys routinely try to appeal to high-ranking department officials in an effort to derail prosecutions. Still, Brownlee and other former prosecutors said nighttime calls such as Elston's, coming just hours before the end of a long, complex case, are unorthodox, particularly when the department's criminal division already has signed off on a case.

Brownlee said the head of the criminal division had authorized him that afternoon to execute the plea agreement. In his testimony and in an interview afterward, Brownlee recounted that he asked Elston whether he was calling for his boss, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty, and Elston replied, "No."

"I told him to leave it alone, to go away," Brownlee said, "and he did."

But Elston's attorney, Robert N. Driscoll, said his client had telephoned Brownlee at the direction of McNulty, who that evening had received an appeal for more time by Mary Jo White, a defense lawyer representing an executive for OxyContin's manufacturer, Purdue Pharma. White is a former Manhattan U.S. attorney.

A Justice official, who spoke about internal deliberations on the condition of anonymity, also said McNulty had asked his chief of staff to place the call.

Elston was McNulty's top aide until he stepped down in June amid the controversy over the prosecutors' firings. McNulty also has resigned, effective Friday, becoming the sixth senior aide to Gonzales involved in the controversy to leave the department in recent months.

Brownlee -- who testified that he had not received negative performance reviews -- said that he was "concerned" about his name appearing on the firing list and that he spoke to McNulty about it. "He assured me that Mr. Elston was a good man," Brownlee said. "I had my own views."

In addition to assembling the Nov. 1 list of five prosecutors, including Brownlee, who were recommended for dismissal, Elston also played a controversial role in trying to quell the political uproar after the firings took place. Four of those prosecutors have told Congress that Elston warned them that Gonzales might criticize them in public if they spoke out about the circumstances of their removal.

Yesterday, Driscoll said on Elston's behalf that there was no connection between Brownlee's appearance on a firing list and the fact he had settled the case the next day in spite of Elston's call for more time. Driscoll said that the Nov. 1 list reflected recommendations his client had received from others in the administration, not his own views.

The OxyContin case arose from a four-year investigation into the marketing of a powerful drug that was, according to federal drug officials, a direct or partial cause of 146 deaths in 2000 and 2001 and possibly in 318 others during that period.

After the settlement agreement last fall, prosecutors in May announced a $635 million plea agreement with Purdue Pharma. Under its terms, the company entered a guilty plea to a single felony count, and three former officials pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges. The terms were criticized as too lenient, both by consumer advocates, such as Public Citizen's Health Research Group, and Arlen Specter (Pa.), the Senate Judiciary Committee's ranking Republican.

Two former Justice Department officials from Democratic administrations and one from a Republican administration said that headquarters officials sometimes called U.S. attorneys' offices to relay concerns from defense lawyers, particularly in sensitive cases where defendants had made elaborate presentations to avert indictment. Two weeks before the plea agreement, lawyers for Purdue Pharma and the former executives met with criminal division officials, including a McNulty aide, people involved in the case said.

Others said Elston's timing and message were atypical. "Normally, there's a lot of deference given to U.S. attorneys in matters of timing," said Michael R. Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general. "The kind of micromanagement that this suggests could easily have a chilling effect in some circumstances."

Would it have been different if Lucianne had been a stay-at-home mom?

2007-07-31T09:02:00.000-05:00

Wednesday, July 25, 2007
AFTER THE FARTING: JONAH GOLDBERG CONSIDERED.

At National Review, Jonah Goldberg says liberals are hypocrites. Oh, one asks wearily, pre-emptively shielding oneself from the spray of cracker crumbs that will accompany the reply, how so? Because

Liberals in the 1990s argued – sometimes with nuance, sometimes starkly – that the bright line for intervention was genocide... I am open to [John Derbyshire's] prediction that genocide may not be in the offing if we leave Iraq. Ultimately, none of us knows. But what I find fascinating is the growing acceptance among liberals – who are often quite strident about the need to intervene in Darfur, for example – that even if our departure results in genocide, that’s not reason enough to stay... For liberals to have supported Kosovo or who now agitate for intervention in Darfur on the grounds that America should put steel in the words “never again” to suddenly say that genocide largely caused by the US is irrelevant is astounding to me. And it won’t be forgotten. The next time liberals want to stop mass slaughter in country X where we have no interests, it will be pointed out to them that they abetted slaughter in Iraq when our vital national interests were involved.

In other words: liberals like to say they care about genocide, but they obviously don't, because they want to leave Iraq, which stands poised at the brink of genocide (or maybe doesn't, he isn't sure) thanks to the efforts of Jonah Goldberg et alia.

Goldberg is a little like a hostage-taker who, when seized after a ten-hour standoff, wants everyone to know that the hostage negotiator's arguments were really intellectually inferior to his own.

And I'm sorry, but whatever you think of the Kosovo intervention, Iraq makes Kosovo look like we gave everyone in Serbia ice cream and then flew them to heaven in a private jet.

I have a better way of preventing genocide in our client states, and stage one involves the removal of Jonah Goldberg and his colleagues from spheres of government influence via the election to government office of non-retards.

Digby

2007-07-27T10:01:00.001-05:00

Here's the whole thing. Here's a sample:

Thank God Joseph Heller and James Jones and Erich Maria Remarque and countless others aren't trying to write their books today. They'd be burned as heretics by a bunch of nasty boys and girls who have fetishized "the troops" into a strange form of Boy Band eroticism --- the empty, nonthreatening form of masculinity that the tweens use to bridge the scary gap between puberty and adolescence. Private Peter Pan reporting for duty.

The real men for them are the civilians on 24 torturing suspected terrorists for an hour each week, keeping the Lil'est Tough guys safe from harm with hard sadism and easy answers. That's where this wingnut war is really being fought. With popcorn.

Tim was right: Already the Worst President (and Administration) Ever

2007-07-24T12:11:00.000-05:00

This is pretty amazing (I mean that the War Street Journal has now joined the left-wing media conspiracy. Also, I should note for the record that the KKRB website complies with and exceeds the White House directive of mentioning George Bush's name at least three times on every page):

WANING INFLUENCE
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice finds that her star is fading
Joel Brinkley
Sunday, July 22, 2007

I remember the heady days for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

About 2 1/2 years ago, when she was new in office, I accompanied her on her first trip around the world, with stops in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, South Korea, Japan and China. Crowds gathered to see her limousine drive past; people whistled, waved and cheered. Interviewers routinely asked her whether she was planning to run for president. One TV reporter in India told her she was "arguably the most powerful woman in the world." She chuckled but did not exactly agree -- or disagree.

How things change.

A few months ago, she decided to write an opinion piece about Lebanon. She enlisted John Chambers, chief executive officer of Cisco Systems as a co-author, and they wrote about public/private partnerships and how they might be of use in rebuilding Lebanon after last summer's war. No one would publish it.

Think about that. Every one of the major newspapers approached refused to publish an essay by the secretary of state. Price Floyd, who was the State Department's director of media affairs until recently, recalls that it was sent to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and perhaps other papers before the department finally tried a foreign publication, the Financial Times of London, which also turned it down.

As a last-ditch strategy, the State Department briefly considered translating the article into Arabic and trying a Lebanese paper. But finally they just gave up. "I kept hearing the same thing: 'There's no news in this.' " Floyd said. The piece, he said, was littered with glowing references to President Bush's wise leadership. "It read like a campaign document."

Floyd left the State Department on April 1, after 17 years. He said he was fed up with the relentless partisanship and the unwillingness to consider other points of view. His supervisor, a political appointee, kept "telling me to shut up," he said. Nothing like that had occurred under Presidents Bill Clinton or George H.W. Bush. "They just wanted us to be Bush automatons."

Does that sound familiar? Earlier this month, former Surgeon General Richard Carmona told Congress that Bush administration officials had repeatedly tried to weaken or suppress important public health reports because they clashed with administration dogma. He said he was ordered to mention Bush three times on every page of his speeches. Floyd's experience shows that the same close-minded zealotry afflicting many departments of government under Bush has descended on the State Department, too. In effect, as Rice's power and influence has waned along with Bush's, intolerance and monomania have taken its place.

Rice did have her moment. But little came of it. Under her predecessor, Colin Powell, major foreign policy decisions were made at the White House or Defense Department. The neo-conservative heavyweights -- Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, among others -- set the policies in Iran and Iraq, North Korea and Israel.

Powell left frustrated. But Rice came into office with Bush's inarguable support; she wore their close relationship on her sleeve. And, for awhile, that worked for her. She called mini-summits on Iraq, Israel and other topics. Everyone showed up. In many countries, she met with the president instead of her bureaucratic counterpart, the foreign minister. Wherever she went, she was a star.

But what has she accomplished? Iraq has slid far downhill in the past 2 1/2 years. Iran is no closer to giving up its nuclear weapons than when she took office. Even though the Bush administration has done more than any other country to help the victims in Darfur, the carnage there continues unabated. Last week, the Sudanese government began bombing Darfur civilians again.

Relations with Russia, her area of speciality, have steadily worsened; a week ago, Russia dropped out of a key arms control treaty. Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, has evolved from an irritant to a menace as he moves to nationalize Venezuela's oil industry. Despite many visits to Israel and the Palestinian territories, she has had no appreciable impact on events there.

North Korea has shut down its nuclear reactor. That's an accomplishment. But I give most credit to Christopher Hill, the assistant secretary of state who continued pushing for a diplomatic solution even as administration hardliners disparaged his work. Hill despised them, and ultimately outlasted them.

From his new position at the American Enterprise Institute, John Bolton, the former U.N. ambassador, continues to call for "repudiation of the Feb. 13 deal" that Hill negotiated. But now Bolton is powerless.

Where does that leave Rice?

"I think there is nothing they can do now," Floyd argues. "It's too late. The negatives," primarily Iraq, "are too big. They take all the oxygen out of the room."

Joel Brinkley is a professor of journalism at Stanford University and a former foreign policy correspondent for the New York Times. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.

Oops!

2007-06-07T09:36:00.000-05:00

I guess those tax cuts didn't work after all.*

Yesterday, the BEA reported that U.S. GDP growth for Q1 2007 was a moribund .6% This was a revision downwards from the advance GDP forecast of 1.3% released a month ago. The revision was due to updated information that showed imports were higher than initially estimated. The last time GDP was this low was in Q1 2003, the tail-end of the last recession. (Source: GDP News Release)

*NOTE: I'm not actually claiming the tax cuts didn't work: I'm poking fun at the facile practice of taking a good/bad piece of economic news and crediting it to your favorite/most despised economic stimulus strategy.

Iran Commits Act of War, Part 5674

2007-06-07T07:52:00.000-05:00

From ABC News:

NATO officials say they have caught Iran red-handed, shipping heavy arms, C4 explosives and advanced roadside bombs to the Taliban for use against NATO forces, in what the officials say is a dramatic escalation of Iran's proxy war against the United States and Great Britain.

I think a great deal of the problems (certainly not all) we are having in Iraq are because of Iranian support. Now they are escalating on another front (Afganistan). If we are serious about dealing with Islamofacism we have to deal with Iran. They are just a different flavor of the Al Quada crazies. Even worse, Iran will have nukes in 5 years or so.

Greenland Melting

2007-06-06T12:57:00.000-05:00

This doesn't quite turn Oak Park into a beachfront community, but I'm begining to understand why NASA Big Cheese Michael Griffin called people “arrogant” for assuming that “this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings.”

If the sea level does rise enough to give me a lake view, I will, thereafter, also support the flat tax.

Why Congress Caved to Bush - by Pat Buchanan

2007-05-28T20:25:00.000-05:00

Sounds about right to me:

Why Congress Caved to Bush - by Pat Buchanan:

The antiwar Democrats are crying betrayal – and justifiably so.

For a Democratic Congress is now voting to fully fund the war in Iraq, as demanded by President Bush, and without any timetable for a U.S. troop withdrawal. Bush got his $100 billion, then magnanimously agreed to let Democrats keep the $20 billion in pork they stuffed into the bill – to soothe the pain of their sellout of the party base.

Remarkable. If the Republican rout of 2006 said anything, it was that America had lost faith in the Bush-Rumsfeld conduct of the war and wanted Democrats to lead the country out.

Yet, today, there are more U.S. troops in Iraq than when the Democrats won. More are on the way. And with the surge and retention of troops in Iraq beyond normal tours, there should be a record number of U.S. troops in country by year's end.

Why did the Democrats capitulate?

Because they lack the courage of their convictions. Because they fear the consequences if they put their antiwar beliefs into practice. Because they are afraid if they defund the war and force President Bush to withdraw U.S. troops, the calamity he predicts will come to pass and they will be held accountable for losing Iraq and the strategic disaster that might well ensue.

Democrats are an intimidated party. The reasons are historical. They were shredded by Nixon and Joe McCarthy for FDR's surrenders to Stalin at Tehran and Yalta, for losing China to Mao's hordes, for the "no-win war" in Korea, for being "soft on communism."

The best and the brightest – JFK's New Frontiersmen – were held responsible for plunging us into Vietnam and proving incapable of winning the war. A Democratic Congress cut off aid to Saigon in 1975, ceding Southeast Asia to Hanoi and bringing on the genocide of Pol Pot.

Democrats know they are distrusted on national security. They fear that if they defund this war and bring on a Saigon ending in the Green Zone, it will be a generation before they are trusted with national power. And power is what the party is all about.

Yet, not only does the situation in Iraq appear increasingly grim, with rising U.S. and Iraqi casualties, other shoes are about to drop that will reverberate throughout the region.

Support for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, with his war in Lebanon a debacle and his leadership denounced by a commission he appointed, is in single digits. Waiting in the wings is Likud super-hawk "Bibi" Netanyahu, the most popular politician in Israel, who compares today to Munich 1938 and equates Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with Hitler.

If and when Bibi comes to power, he will use every stratagem to provoke us into attacking "Hitler."

Also drumming for war on Iran are the floundering neocons and the Israeli lobby. Under orders from the lobby, Nancy Pelosi stripped from a House bill a stipulation that Bush must come to Congress for authorization before launching an attack on Iran.

With Democratic contenders reciting the mantra, "All options are on the table," and Iran defying U.N. sanctions, pursuing nuclear enrichment and detaining U.S. citizens, Bush has a blank check to launch a third war.

Lebanon is ablaze. Gaza is ablaze. The Afghan war is not going well. The Taliban have a privileged sanctuary. The NATO allies grow weary.

In Pakistan, the most dangerous country on earth – one bullet away from an Islamic republic with atom bombs – our erstwhile ally, President Musharraf, is caught in a political crisis over his ouster of the chief justice.

Presidents Musharraf in Islamabad, Karzai in Kabul and Siniora in Beirut, and Prime Minister Maliki in Baghdad, sit on shaky thrones. No one knows what follows their fall. But it is hard to see how it would not be crippling for America's position.

With such volatility in this crucial region of the world, with such uncertainty, it is easy to see why Democrats prefer to be the "dummy" at the bridge table and let Bush play the hand.

The congressional Democrats are cynical, but they are not stupid. If the surge works and U.S. troops are being withdrawn by fall 2008, they do not want it said of them that they "cut and ran" when the going got tough, that they played Chamberlain to Bush's Churchill.

And if the war is going badly in 2008, they know that the American people, in repudiating the party of Bush and Cheney, have no other choice than the party of Hillary and Pelosi and Harry Reid.

That is why congressional Democrats are surely saying privately of the angry antiwar left what has often been said by the Beltway Republican elite of the right: "Don't worry about them. They have nowhere else to go."

And that is why the antiwar left was thrown under the bus.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Same Old Story

2007-05-24T19:09:00.000-05:00

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall:

"Johnson: And we just got to think about it. I'm looking at this Sergeant of mine this morning and he's got 6 little old kids over there, and he's getting out my things, and bringing me in my night reading, and all that kind of stuff, and I just thought about ordering all those kids in there. And what in the hell am I ordering them out there for? What in the hell is Vietnam worth to me? What is Laos worth to me? What is it worth to this country? We've got a treaty but hell, everybody else has got a treaty out there, and they're not doing a thing about it.

Bundy: Yeah, yeah.

Johnson: Of course, if you start running from the Communists, they may just chase you right into your own kitchen.

Bundy: Yeah, that's the trouble. And that is what the rest of that half of the world is going to think if this thing comes apart on us. That's the dilemma, that's exactly the dilemma."

Of course, they were wrong. We turned tail and fled Vietnam (not to mention Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc.), and still defeated communism handily with no more of a sacrifice than the lives of a few million darkies who had the misfortune of living in questionable spheres of influence, and usually without an actual American finger pulling the trigger.

Why does George Bush hate America?

Education Discussion Starter Kit

2007-05-19T11:59:00.001-05:00

Here are some good education reform articles for the unitiated.

The first one says that reporters don't spend enough effort on the topics of unsupportive parents and variation in funding amounts. The second one talks about Daley supporting charter schools more aggressively that CPS schools, which I think is heavily driven by the desire to avoid teacher unions. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but it should be more transparent. The last page talks about the pros and cons of vouchers.

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/21_03/elep213.shtml
http://www.catalyst-chicago.org/news/
index.php?item=2196&cat=23
http://www.edspresso.com/2007/05/
may_1418_robert_enlow_vs_jay_m.htm

Give Me Liberty and Give Me Death

2007-05-18T09:00:00.000-05:00

There's a great article over at The American Prospect (you have to sign in to read, but it's free) comparing healthcare systems in the US, Canada, Great Britain, France, Germany, and the VA system here at home. Of the national systems, France performs the best, though the VA system gets two thumbs up as well:

What makes this such an explosive story is that the VHA is a truly socialized medical system. The unquestioned leader in American health care is a government agency that employs 198,000 federal workers from five different unions, and nonetheless maintains short wait times and high consumer satisfaction. Eighty-three percent of VHA hospital patients say they are satisfied with their care, 69 percent report being seen within 20 minutes of scheduled appointments, and 93 percent see a specialist within 30 days.

Critics will say that the VHA is not significantly cheaper than other American health care, but that's misleading. In fact, the VHA is also proving far better than the private sector at controlling costs. As Longman explains, "Veterans enrolled in [the VHA] are, as a group, older, sicker, poorer, and more prone to mental illness, homelessness, and substance abuse than the population as a whole. Half of all VHA enrollees are over age 65. More than a third smoke. One in five veterans has diabetes, compared with one in 14 U.S. residents in general." Yet the VHA's spending per patient in 2004 was $540 less than the national average, and the average American is healthier and younger (the nation includes children; the VHA doesn't).

This all sounds great, but, a la our last book selection, aren't lower costs, a seamless information system and better service too high a price to pay for the liberty we would sacrifice in doing away with our current free market system? For example, I'm in a new job now, and just switched insurance plans. Within two weeks I got three identical forms mailed to my house asking me to fill in all my treatment history information to make sure that the doctor's visit I had a few weeks back wasn't for a pre-existing condition that had existed for less than one year prior to the doctor's visit, even though no paperwork I filled out for the new insurance said anything about pre-existing conditions (in anything larger than 3.5 font, that is). So I filled out and mailed back the form twice, and then got a letter on Monday saying that, due to my failure to fill out and send back the form, my claims were being denied. But don't worry--I was on the phone yesterday for 15 minutes with the insurance company, and was able to fax them the info, and now I'm in the appeals process, which should only take about a month or so.

They can have my "Disclosure and Exclusionary Past Condition Form #A-34G67D2/BLN" when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

The Big Blue Marble

2007-05-18T08:30:00.000-05:00

I read in the elevator today that a snow/ice area in the Antarctic the size of Planet Mundelein (which, for Earth-dwellers, is roughly the size of California) melted in 2005. But there's another side to the story that the leftist media won't tell you: a snow/ice area the size of Antarctica, minus an area the size of Planet Mundelein/California, did not melt in 2005, which proves conclusively that global climate change is not occuring (1980s), is occuring but is not human-caused (1990s), and is occuring but will have lots of unpredictable beneficial effects for America (2000s). Is there no relief from this liberal media bias?

In an unrelated story, apparently the ocean around the Antarctic has become saturated with carbon about a half century before the global left-wing scientific conspiracy planned to report such a phenomenon (or did it...), which means that the ocean has lost the capacity to absorb more atmospheric carbon.

If only the meager resources of the fossil fuel industry could compete with those of the scientific funding juggernaut, more people who are unable to publish in peer-reviewed scientific journals could get grant money to study this stuff and propose better, less alarming explanations.

Even Democrats Not This Bad

2007-05-08T10:38:00.000-05:00

I guess we have to give the democrats some credit. At least they didn't riot when Bush when both elections.

French police have arrested a total of 592 people across the country as bands of rioters protested conservative Nicolas Sarkozy's presidential election victory Sunday, French media reported.
The police said a total of 730 vehicles were torched and 28 police officers were injured in violent incidents from Sunday night to Monday morning. Police fought stone-throwing rioters with tear gas, but it was not clear how many rioters were injured, according to Radio France.

Let's just hope they don't get any ideas.

Next Book??

2007-04-23T15:49:00.000-05:00

I saw Hitchens' review of this book today.

The book is The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace by Ali A. Allawi.

This could be interesting. Hitchens' conclusion is that the problems in Iraq were inevitable. He thinks the US would have been drawn in at some point.

I think it's much easier in hindsight to see the signs of decay in the country. I knew there were problems in infrastructure and some ethinic tensions, but I certainly didn't appreciate the depth before the invasion.

Too Early?

2007-04-21T11:23:00.001-05:00

Maybe it is too early to discuss whether Bush is the worst US president ever, but the board has been a little quiet lately, so I will throw it up here. I say "yes" and here are some reasons.

-Using 9-11 to mislead people into invading Iraq.
-Using other means to mislead people into supporting the Iraq invasion (yellowcake, Feith's office, his Poland "we found them(WMD's)" statement).
-Performing too little preparation work for the Iraq occupation.
-Failing to establish police services during the early occupation (failing to create a "free society" as Sharansky might say).
-Failing to put sufficient military forces in Afghanistan.
-Failing to persuade other countries to put more military forces in Afghanistan.
-Failing to fire Rumsfeld and Gonzales for far too long (his PR person's "no wrongdoing" statement).
-Implying that people who criticize him are not patriotic.
-Using the extra-territorial status of Gitmo and secret prisons to avoid proper judicial controls (habeas corpus, access to representation).
-Apparently using torture frequently and lying about it.
-Failing to build more oil independence (his PR person's early "That's a big no." statement).
-Hiring people who intimidate scientists and distort science reports.

A Page From the Pro Global Disaster Crowd

2007-04-20T13:20:00.000-05:00

In the spirit of those who argue that global warming is a severe threat and is caused by man, here is one anecdotal case the proves the earth is cooling.

I know one piece of evidence does not prove a theory, but thats never stopped the scientifically illiterate from globbing on (see the stupid stories linking Katrina to global warming).

More Pushing a Rock Up A Hill

2007-04-19T14:37:00.000-05:00

More on my lonely jihad against the jihad against scientific reason, patients, and common sense.

I'm not sure why I have been posting so much about global warming recently. I guess I never thought or read much about it until recently. I think I am a skeptic at heart and when I see a sudden change in the conventional wisdom in a short period of time it sets off the alarms in my head. All of a sudden, in the past 6 months or so, the debate over global warming and the causes of it have been declared over. I have read enough that I am skeptical that the science is that solid. I haven't seen convincing proof that man's actions are causing warming. We don't know enough about the climate and how it works to say one way or another. The earth has been through warm periods before and no one blames man for those. I think when we discussed "Big Fat Liars" someone said that correlation does not prove causation to tear the book apart. I think this applies to what we know today with global warming.

The debate has become so political that the science is being obscured and even distorted. Scientist who question the orthodoxy get attacked and have funding pulled. The far left and radical environmentalists that are pushing this view have their own agenda that these scare stories advance (America's wealth is destroying the earth, the evil oil companies are destroying the earth, etc.)

I don't doubt the sincerity of most people who believe global warming is caused by man. Most people are not scientists and only know what is on the network news or the newspaper. Hell, I could feel really stupid in 10 or 20 years if this is proved to be true. My main point is we don't know enough today to say one way or another. I think its a mistake to assume we do and take potentially crippling costs to contain something we don't know is a threat.

Anyway, another article I found that I found interesting.

More on Causes of Global Warming???

2007-04-17T09:47:00.000-05:00

An interesting article in Newsweek.

Look at the credentials of the author, he's not some energy industry hack.

Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research has always been funded exclusively by the U.S. government. He receives no funding from any energy companies.

One great point among several:

Many of the most alarming studies rely on long-range predictions using inherently untrustworthy climate models, similar to those that cannot accurately forecast the weather a week from now.

I can speak from personal experience how difficult it is to have accurate models of complex systems. I have personally modeled thermal systems with 5 or 6 variables. I have seen the large impact a small mistake or bad assumption can have on the output. The climate has hundreds of variables, many of which scientists don't understand (like effect of water vapor in the air). It's impossible to to characterize a variable for a model if you don't understand it.

I hope nobody hurt themselves digging out from out April snow.

Also, was another book chosen and a date set for the next meeting. I was in Asia for the last meeting. What was the conclusion on Chomskey? Are we revoking his citizenship?

Thanks Google!

2007-03-28T21:53:00.000-05:00

For those of you who don't post--or don't post as often--on the blog because of the clunky manner in which it must be done, there's a great feature on Google Desktop. Once you've downloaded it, you'll see a little "Send to" dropdown list on the right side of the menu bar along the top. If you're reading an article you like about how Republican activists should be exempt from serving in Iraq, or how polls don't convey any useful information at all, or about some population, somewhere, finally electing a libertarian to higher office (just kidding), simply select all the text you want to post, click on the Blogger option on that dropdown menu , and voila, you've got yourself a post, with a link to the site automatically inserted (that's how I posted the Washington Monthly piece).

The Washington Monthly

2007-03-27T16:28:00.000-05:00

The Washington Monthly: "THE REPUBLICAN IMPLOSION....John Quiggin, commenting on that Pew poll that I highlighted the other day, offers an explanation for the Republican Party's cratering support:

Republican support is contracting to a base of about 25 per cent of the population whose views are getting more extreme, not merely because moderate conservatives are peeling off to become Independents, but also because of the party's success in constructing a parallel universe of news sources, thinktanks, blogs, pseudo-scientists and so on, which has led to the core becoming more tightly committed to an extremist ideology.

....The general liberalisation of thinking on social issues is unlikely to be reversed. Moreover, while American faith in military power bounced back after Vietnam, I doubt that the same will be true after Iraq. If you wanted a textbook lesson in why resort to violence is rarely a sensible choice, Bush's presentation of that lesson could hardly be bettered."

Even if Gore's a Hypocrite, He's Still Right

2007-03-26T12:22:00.000-05:00

From today's Wall Street Journal:

Writing on FindLaw, Columbia law professor Michael Dorf comes to Al Gore’s defense — sort of.

Dorf says critics who call the former vice president a hypocrite for living in a massive, energy-gulping mansion while bemoaning global warming may be on to something: “Making a 10,000 square-foot home more energy-efficient is a little like driving oneself to work in a hybrid gas-electric stretch limousine,” he writes.

He also doubts carbon offsets fully exonerate Gore or other gas-guzzlers, comparing them to papal indulgences: “In Catholic theology, sinners could reduce or eliminate their time in purgatory by repenting and earning ‘indulgences’ from the Church. … Forgiving the sins of the contrite is one thing; accepting bribes for a ticket to heaven quite another. If every person on Earth has a moral obligation to reduce his or her contribution to global warming, then Gore’s donations to green technology do not expiate his sins.”

But Dorf commends Gore for supporting the one thing that he thinks really might make a difference in the fight against global warming: a tax on carbon emissions. “When you drive a car, you pay for the cost of producing the gasoline but not for the cost to the health of the planet from the greenhouse gases it emits. You externalize that latter cost to everyone else, and as a result, you pay too little for gasoline and drive too much.” A carbon tax would solve that problem, Dorf writes.

Here's the entire article, worth a read. Regarding the deafening right-wing chorus denouncing Gore's hypocrisy, Dorf says, "If this criticism is meant to somehow discredit the film's central claim that global warming is an extraordinarily serious crisis that demands urgent action, then the skeptics are deliberately confusing the issue." I have not even seen an attempt to explain how the evil of Gore's hypocrisy can be quantified, let alone how the quantity of the evil he thus generates offsets any units of good he is producing.

Is the bar for hypocrisy one of zero-tolerance? Put another way: must Al Gore eat grasshoppers and honey, and travel by foot clothed in sackcloth and ashes in order to maintain credibility?

John McCain: Total Fucking Moron

2007-03-17T10:27:00.000-05:00

How the mighty have fallen:
Q: "What about grants for sex education in the United States? Should they include instructions about using contraceptives? Or should it be Bush’s policy, which is just abstinence?"

Mr. McCain: (Long pause) "Ahhh. I think I support the president’s policy."

Q: "So no contraception, no counseling on contraception. Just abstinence. Do you think contraceptives help stop the spread of HIV?"

Mr. McCain: (Long pause) "You’ve stumped me."

Q: "I mean, I think you’d probably agree it probably does help stop it?"

Mr. McCain: (Laughs) "Are we on the Straight Talk express? I’m not informed enough on it. Let me find out. You know, I’m sure I’ve taken a position on it on the past. I have to find out what my position was. Brian, would you find out what my position is on contraception – I’m sure I’m opposed to government spending on it, I’m sure I support the president’s policies on it."

Q: "But you would agree that condoms do stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Would you say: ‘No, we’re not going to distribute them,’ knowing that?"

Mr. McCain: (Twelve-second pause) "Get me Coburn’s thing, ask Weaver to get me Coburn’s paper that he just gave me in the last couple of days. I’ve never gotten into these issues before."
This went on for a few more moments until a reporter from the Chicago Tribune broke in and asked Mr. McCain about the weight of a pig that he saw at the Iowa State Fair last year.

More on Global Warming/Cooling/Not Changing Over Near Hurtleg's House...

2007-03-15T15:29:00.000-05:00

"… I should point out, in the interest of fairness, that Al Gore - who supposedly cares sooooo much about his precious environment - is HYPOCRITICALLY a CARBON-based lifeform - yes, CARBON, which can create CARBON DIOXIDE. HYPOCRITE!!!! So it evens out."

Lying Us into War

2007-03-13T22:29:00.000-05:00

Brigadiers have often come to verbal fisticuffs over the question of whether or not the Bush Administration's manipulation of prewar intelligence constitutes lying, per se. The Washington Monthly's blog has this to say on the matter of one of the main manipulations that was used to persuade the public into supporting an invasion:

CURVEBALL....Brian Ross of ABC News has uncovered a picture (though not the name) of Curveball, the Iraqi emigre who peddled the phony stories of mobile biological labs that ended up in Colin Powell's speech to the UN. Tyler Drumheller, former chief of European operations at the CIA, says the agency knew all along that the information was unreliable:

"We said, 'This is from Curveball. Don't use this,'" Drumheller says. Powell says neither he nor his chief of staff Col. Larry Wilkerson was ever told of any doubts about Curveball.

....Drumheller also says he met personally with the then-deputy director of the CIA, John McLaughlin, to raise questions about the reliability of Curveball, well before the Powell speech.

"And John said, 'Oh my, I hope not. You know this is all we have,' and I said, 'This can't be all we have.' I said, 'There must be another, there must be something else.' And he said, 'No, this is really the only tangible thing we have.'"

McLaughlin adamantly denies any such meeting or warning from Drumheller and also denies knowing that Drumheller had attempted to redact the Curveball portions of Powell's speech.

They knew Saddam didn't have a nuclear program. They knew he didn't have mobile bio labs. They knew he didn't have drones. They knew.

Conservapedia

2007-03-09T11:30:00.000-06:00

The Conservapedia is a fantastic addition to the ranks of Wikipedia-inspired sites, Wookiepedia and Jedipedia, as all three are compendia of information about worlds that don't really exist. The obvious difference is that most of the contributors to Wookiepedia and Jedipedia are probably aware of this fact.

The best thing about Conservapedia is probably this page, where Andrew Schlafly and his comrades complain about the liberal bias in Wikipedia. Much of the page is dedicated to lamenting the fact that creationism and Christianity are not viewed as appropriate topics of scientific discussion.

Since there is apparently no facet of science, culture, media, the arts, government, or anything else that isn't soaking with liberal bias, we should all look forward to the introduction of "conservametrics," "meteorconservatology," and "meconservatrical engineering," in order to challenge the left-wing bias in weights and measures, weather reporting, and auto component design and manufacture.

The War on Girl Scout Cookies

2007-03-08T16:45:00.000-06:00

Finally, FoxNews's resident Lying, Splotchy bully takes on the powerful anti-obesity lobby. Transcript reprinted here in its entirety.

BILL O'REILLY, HOST: In the "Back of the Book" segment tonight. A monstrous attack on Girl Scout cookies. And should obese children be scrutinized by the government?

With us now, Meme Roth, president of the National Action Against Obesity organization.

All right. Now, come on, the Girl Scout cookies. I like these cookies.

MEME ROTH, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL ACTION AGAINST OBESITY: I — they are delicious.

O'REILLY: Yes, and they raise $700 million a year selling these cookies because people like me like them. Now, do I look fat to you?

ROTH: I don't know, Bill. You don't look fat to me.
'REILLY: I mean, you know...

ROTH: Are you going to put a bathing suit on?

O'REILLY: No, I can't be — Melissa Etheridge, I don't want to offend Melissa. But do I look fat to you?

ROTH: You do not look fat to me.

O'REILLY: I am not fat. All right? Thirty-six-inch waist. I eat these cookies! Come on...

ROTH: OK, OK.

O'REILLY: And I like them!

ROTH: I like them, too. But let me tell you something. America likes them much too much.

This is an era of obesity. Two in three are overweight. And it's not that they can't do a bikini contest. They're sick. And our children, one in three, overweight. We can't — just because Girl Scouts are as American as apple pie, that doesn't make them beyond reproach.

O'REILLY: OK, but what you're talking about, a fascist state that says to people you can't eat cookies, you can't have ice cream, you can't have cake. And I'm telling you that it is the parental authority that should regulate what kids eat, No. 1. And, No. 2, it's over the line.

A couple of Girl Scout cookies, even though they're loaded with sugar, not going to hurt you or anyone else.

ROTH: So you went Mussolini on me. OK. Look, we don't want a civic organization whose mission is to make the world a better place, which is what the mission statement is for the Girl Scouts — we don't want civic organizations — and that's PTAs, that's churches, synagogues, anybody — using junk food as a fundraiser. Not now. Ninety years ago, cute idea. Today, not so much.

O'REILLY: See I think cookies make the world a better place. Because they're sweet. And that's a treat.

Now, if you're going to abuse the cookies and eat the box and get fat, that's on the parent. I agree with you there. But you're trying to intrude, I think, way too much.

I don't mind the calorie count listed in the restaurant. I think they should have it. If you want to eat a Big Mac, you should have right next to it here's how many calories you're going to have and from fat. I like that. I look at the box. I do. I want all of that stuff.

But I don't want somebody telling me the Girl Scouts can't sell cookies. I don't want that. That's not America. That's not freedom of choice. Come on.

ROTH: Well, I think — I think the message is the Keebler elves' mission statement: make money selling junk food. But when you're using young children as the front to sell $700 million, 200 boxes...

O'REILLY: People know what they're buying. People know that cookies are loaded with sugar.

ROTH: Is that the right message? Is that the right message?

O'REILLY: The message is freedom. If I want a cookie, I'm going to get a cookie. I don't want some piece of tofu from the Girl Scouts. I'm not going to buy it from them!

ROTH: All right. Well, you're not alone in your thoughts.

O'REILLY: We disagree.

Now, this overweight kid in England. Let's throw him up on the screen. Now, this is a different situation. He's 218 pounds as an 8-year-old kid. All right? And the mother is obviously a loon. And I don't mind the authorities going in and checking this, because I think there could be some abuse here. Because it's four times what — you have an 8-year-old. Is it a son or a daughter?

ROTH: My son is 8, yes.

O'REILLY: So you know. This is out of control. Now, this kid may have a medical condition. But the authorities — just like if the kid was starving and underweight, the authorities should go in. I have no problem with the authorities going in and looking at this kid.

Now, the English authorities did rule the mother can keep the kid. I guess there's no father in the house. But there's going to be supervision. That's fine. You know, I see that.

ROTH: Yes, it was time for intervention. That intervention should have come at least 100 pounds ago, though. You and I both know that once you gain weight, it's nearly impossible to lose it and keep it off. Ninety-five percent...

O'REILLY: Kids can lose it.

ROTH: No, no. Are you kidding? Are you kidding? The outlook for that child is grim.

O'REILLY: I could get that weight off that kid in six months.

ROTH: Yes, but he won't be able to keep it off.

O'REILLY: Sure he would.

ROTH: No. He's — no. Absolutely. Let's wager a bet. Let's wager a bet. Five bucks...

O'REILLY: If you wanted to — if you wanted to...

ROTH: Twenty — 20 years ago from now, that child will be tremendously overweight. We should have intervened much sooner, because up until the age of 5 or 6 you are adding fat cells. And those are the same fat cells you have your entire life. You get a little bit more at puberty, but that is it. Those fat cells...

O'REILLY: I think it's a psychological thing at that age. I think that this kid, you know, for whatever reason, his mother is feeding him this stuff. And I think you're right, it's hard, but I wouldn't give up on the kid.

ROTH: But physiologically he is altered. He will have that 218 pounds screaming at him for the rest of his life to gain back.

O'REILLY: I am a little more hopeful if they can get him into some kind of program.

ROTH: Yes, absolutely. What we want to do is even if he maintains too high a weight, we want to make sure that he's exercising, moving his body, so he doesn't have as many side effects.

O'REILLY: Right. No cookies for you tonight. Thanks for coming in.

One Flew into the Cuckoos' Nest

2007-03-07T16:00:00.000-06:00

Seriously, why not sign the picture?

Hey Faggots!

2007-03-07T12:48:00.000-06:00

I'd like to take this opportunity to flip-flop on my past refusal to put an Ann Coulter book on the readings list. In the wake of her most recent PR triumph, it's clear to me that she truly is the best that conservatism has to offer in the field of pop-political writing. Not being familiar with her oeuvre, however, I'll leave it up to her fans among the Brigadiers to cherry pick from what is undoubtedly a list of stellar literary accomplishments.

If we're not up for Ann just yet, and in view of the flurry of recent postings and comments on global cooling (I mean, it's pretty cold today anyway), perhaps we could finally read Bjorn Lomborg's "The Skeptical Environmentalist." It's true that Lomborg is not a climate scientist, and that he has noted "I am not myself an expert as regards environmental problems," but let's just grant that the right's bench on this issue is not all that deep, and leave it at that.

Piling On

2007-03-07T10:56:00.000-06:00

I guess this is why the global warming crowd has tried to change the debate by calling the 'problem' climate change and not global warming.

Now the hysterical world is ending chicken littles can use any random anecdotal story about severe weather to prove their point. It's a clever strategy. They are never wrong. Any news story about the weather helps them. If its 72 and sunny, there is no story and no one thinks about the weather. Win, Win.

Now give me more grant money so I can continue to scare the hell out of everyone!

The weather has been random, unpredictable, and often violent for thousands of years. I don't think it has gotten any worse in the past 20.

Oscar Worthy?

2007-03-07T10:26:00.000-06:00

I wonder if this will get nominated next year? I would not put any money on it.

Human Caused Warming ??

2007-03-02T12:59:00.000-06:00

Amazing. Humans pollute so much it has spilled over to Mars. We must be stopped!!

Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet's recent climate changes have a natural—and not a human- induced—cause, according to one scientist's controversial theory.
Earth is currently experiencing rapid warming, which the vast majority of climate scientists says is due to humans pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Mars, too, appears to be enjoying more mild and balmy temperatures.
In 2005 data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide "ice caps" near Mars's south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row.
Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun.
"The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both Earth and Mars," he said. Abdussamatov believes that changes in the sun's heat output can account for almost all the climate changes we see on both planets.

Stories like this are why I am still skeptical about human caused global warming. The environment has cycled between warm and cool periods for thousands of years.

As I have said before, there are other valid reasons to cut CO2 output (quality of air breathed, less dependence on oil from the middle east, etc), but I have trouble buying into the hysteria that we are all going to die in 20 years.

Saddams

2007-02-23T13:19:00.000-06:00

I didn't support the US decision to turn Saddam Hussein over to Iraqis for prosecution due to the lack of a coalition goverment acting in the interest of a whole Iraq. Consequently, Saddam was executed and as a result, a new breed of extremism surfaces...

It is a typical nondescript village - like many others - in the northern Indian state of Bihar.

It consists of unplastered brick houses, dusty lanes, thatched structures and dirt-laden children with no shoes and running noses.

There appears to be little running water or other infrastructure.

But there is one thing about the village of Lakhanow - and other settlements in the area - that makes them strikingly different.

Sunni Muslims

Ejaj Alam - a small-time civil contractor in his mid-30s - provides the answer: he has decided to re-name his three-year-old son.

Instead of being called Majhar Alam, Mr Alam has opted to call the boy Saddam Hussein in honour of the former Iraqi leader who was executed on 30 December.

God willing one day our village will be full of Saddam Husseins

What is more, the child will not be the only Saddam Hussein in the neighbourhood. There are more than 20 other Saddam Husseins in Lakhanow alone.

Local people say there are more than 100 Saddam Husseins in 27 adjoining villages dominated by mostly Sunni Muslims.

There is even a family with one son called Saddam Hussein and a younger sibling called Osama Bin Laden.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that all the children bearing the name of Saddam Hussein were born after the first American war with Iraq in 1991.

Before the war, the name Saddam Hussein was hardly used at all, says Mohammed Nizamuddin, whose grandson was born in 1991 and is called Saddam Hussein.

'Miscalculations'

And, now after the recent high-profile and much photographed execution of the Iraqi leader, the villagers of Lakhanow have decided to name all the new born baby boys after him.

"This is our way to pay tribute to our leader. We want to carry on his legacy here at least in our village," said Ejaj Alam.

"God willing one day our village will be full of Saddam Husseins."

Other villagers feel equally passionate about the issue.

"George Bush can hang one Saddam Hussein but we will create an army of Saddam Husseins. Let him come to our village and see how Saddam Hussein can never be executed," local leader Ayub Khan said.

There is no talk here of the former Iraqi leader's appalling human rights record, no mention of the people he murdered and no references to his numerous "miscalculations". All that is brushed aside by the Saddam Hussein personality cult.

Close to the village is the only private school, Dini Academy, where almost 100 Saddam Husseins come to read, write and know more about the former Iraqi leader.

"It was during the Gulf War we came to know about the bravery and valour of the Iraqi president who mustered courage to defy American diktats," Mr Nizamuddin said.

'Great leader'

The villagers make no secret of the fact that the American president is not their most admired personality.

Most argue that Saddam Hussein has been "immortalised" following his execution.

Many may have only scant knowledge of who Saddam was, but that does not stop them believing propaganda which confers him with almost God-like status.

So what do the new Saddam Husseins think about their name changes? The signs are that they have been told what to think from an early age.

Most say they want to emulate the Iraqi leader

"I feel extremely proud being named Saddam Hussein. He was a great leader, a lion who took on the might of America and became a saviour of the weak," said one "Little Saddam" born in May 1993.

"I too would like to be like the Iraqi president and die a death like him."

Another Saddam - born in May 1992 - says proudly that he "will try and live up to name of the great warrior".

Yet another calls Saddam Hussein a "dear leader".

The eldest Saddam Hussein in the village - born soon after the first Gulf war - appears the most vociferous.

"I owe a great debt to my father for naming me after our revered leader. It was only after his execution, when news and photographs appeared in the newspapers that I came to know how great he was," he said.

On the day of the execution, all the Saddam Husseins of the area congregated in the village mosque to pray for his soul.

Then they staged a procession and burnt effigies of George Bush.

But there is one problem in having so many Saddam Husseins, says villager Mohammed Hassan Abbas.

"In the playground we have Saddam Hussein running after Saddam Hussein, behind Saddam Hussein who is ahead of Saddam Hussein but too far from Saddam Hussein... it can all get a little confusing," he said.

Clinton vs Obama - SMACKDOWN!

2007-02-22T12:53:00.000-06:00

Slate summarizes the recent imbroglio between Hillary and Barack:

Maureen Dowd quoted former Clinton supporter David Geffen as saying a variety of unkind things about the former first couple. "Everybody in politics lies, but they [the Clintons] do it with such ease, it's troubling," said the media mogul, who hosted a fund-raiser for Obama Tuesday.

The Clinton campaign immediately called for Obama to disavow Geffen's remarks and return his money. Obama's communications director, Robert Gibbs, responded sharply in a statement, saying "We aren't going to get in the middle of a disagreement between the Clintons and someone who was once one of their biggest supporters. It is ironic that the Clintons had no problem with David Geffen when he was raising them $18 million and sleeping at their invitation in the Lincoln Bedroom."

The Clinton campaign shot right back: "I would have thought that a campaign trying to change our politics would have disavowed those comments and moved on," said Clinton communications director Howard Wolfson.

By Slate's estimation, Clinton comes out ahead on this one. The Obama campaign's tartly worded reply, as well as their refusal to disavow Geffen and his comments, belies Obama's alleged high-mindedness, and shows that he is a hypocrite who will sink to gutter politics. I haven't followed this non-event religiously, but I gather that's the overarching theme of the media coverage.

I don't read it this way at all. The Clinton camp baited Obama by issuing an ultimatum; if Obama HAD denounced Geffen's comments, he would have been sinking to the Clinton campaign's level by even acknowledging this. Candidates can't be held accountable for the comments of their donors. If this were the case, Obama would have to hire a full time staff of people just to disavow comments. Gibbs's comment was frankly fantastic and right on the money. This is the way that politics works, and besides, I haven't heard Obama say anything about how he would conduct his campaign that would preclude his campaign manager from having made such a comment.

I guess they are saying she "won" because her camp was able to turn this negative comment about Clinton into a negative about Obama. I agree, the Clintonites are pretty shrewd at playing on the public's dislike of hypocrisy; but they should be very, very careful, as this knife cuts both ways.

And trim the hedges while you're at it

2007-02-16T12:23:00.000-06:00

WaPo's Dana Milbank recounts the shenanigans in the House debate on Iraq this week, and unearths this doozy:

Fortunately, Ric Keller (R-Fla.) was on hand to restore gravity to the debate. He spoke about lawn care as a metaphor for Iraq:
"Imagine your next-door neighbor refuses to mow his lawn and the weeds are all the way up to his waist. You decide you are going to mow his lawn for him every single week. The neighbor never says thank you, he hates you, and sometimes he takes out a gun and shoots at you. Under these circumstances, do you keep mowing his lawn forever?"

Wha...? I've spent my entire lunch break trying to translate this metaphor into English. Maybe there's something lost in the translation from Florida Republicanese to metaphor.

Is Iraq supposed to be the neighbor, who is supposed to thank us for the great job we did mowing their lawn?

Observation:

2007-02-15T23:10:00.000-06:00

It would be a whole lot cooler if bin Laden dressed in a green spandex jumpsuit with question marks all over it and wore a bowler.

Question:

2007-02-14T15:57:00.000-06:00

The "Pelosi asked for a 757" meme, though thoroughly discredited by now, will continue to be repeated as gospel by winger radio hosts, cable news jockeys, and bloggers into the forseeable future, and will therefore bleed into the popular press to some degree as well. I can think of several examples of this phenomenon: BS stories about Al Gore claiming to have invented the internets, or been the model for "Love Story," or discovered Love Canal ; about outgoing Clinton staffers vandalizing the White House; about John Kerry faking injuries to get medals.

I assume there are some examples of left-wing fabrications about Republicans that live on in spite of a lack of evidence, but none comes to mind.

Anyone?

Rush to Judgement

2007-02-12T09:14:00.000-06:00

As one of the right leaning bloggers taunted for being long absent I thought I would do a quick post. I have to make it quick since as an imperialist, capitalist, exploiter of the working class I have to get back to cracking the whip and stealing from the poor.

I find it absurd the declaration that it is settled science that global warming is caused by manmade greenhouse gasses. The left decries the politicization of science, when in fact that is what they have done.

Read this article in the London Times online:

The small print explains “very likely” as meaning that the experts who made the judgment felt 90% sure about it

In scientific terms this is a huge whole. Activists are rounding up to make their case.

...The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999.

That levelling off is just what is expected by the chief rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse gases do. After becoming much more active during the 20th century, the sun now stands at a high but roughly level state of activity. Solar physicists warn of possible global cooling, should the sun revert to the lazier mood it was in during the Little Ice Age 300 years ago.
Climate history and related archeology give solid support to the solar hypothesis. The 20th-century episode, or Modern Warming, was just the latest in a long string of similar events produced by a hyperactive sun, of which the last was the Medieval Warming.

...But more than 10 years have passed since Henrik Svensmark in Copenhagen first pointed out a much more powerful mechanism. ...

...He saw from compilations of weather satellite data that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars....

....The only trouble with Svensmark’s idea — apart from its being politically incorrect — was that meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be involved in cloud formation. After long delays in scraping together the funds for an experiment, Svensmark and his small team at the Danish National Space Center hit the jackpot in the summer of 2005.
In a box of air in the basement, they were able to show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming through the ceiling stitched together droplets of sulphuric acid and water. These are the building blocks for cloud condensation. But journal after journal declined to publish their report; the discovery finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society late last year.

I believe there has been some change in the temperature of the earth, but I am far from convinced it is from manmade causes. I am not convinced that this isn't any more than the normal temperature cycle the planet has gone through over thousands of years. It was less than 30 years ago that Time Magazine declared a new Ice Age on its covers. I have seen arguments that the data many of the sharp rises in temp recently has to do more with methodology and equipment than actual changes. Is it all based on the suns activity? I don't know and I don't think anyone else does for sure either.

Are there reasons to reduce carbon emissions besides the chicken littles screaming the sky is falling and the world as we know it will be dead in ten years? Yes. Air quality, energy efficiency, and energy independence are all good reasons, but lets be honost in the debate.

(I apologize for this being a very unfocused post, I just don't have time to edit it, must get back to exploiting the sick and infirm).

Republicans Are Liars

2007-02-09T14:46:00.000-06:00

For Immediate Release

February 8, 2007

As the Sergeant at Arms, I have the responsibility to ensure the security of the members of the House of Representatives, to include the Speaker of the House. The Speaker requires additional precautions due to her responsibilities as the leader of the House and her Constitutional position as second in the line of succession to the presidency.

In a post 9/11 threat environment, it is reasonable and prudent to provide military aircraft to the Speaker for official travel between Washington and her district. The practice began with Speaker Hastert and I have recommended that it continue with Speaker Pelosi. The fact that Speaker Pelosi lives in California compelled me to request an aircraft that is capable of making non-stop flights for security purposes, unless such an aircraft is unavailable. This will ensure communications capabilities and also enhance security. I made the recommendation to use military aircraft based upon the need to provide necessary levels of security for ranking national leaders, such as the Speaker. I regret that an issue that is exclusively considered and decided in a security context has evolved into a political issue.

Global Climate Change - Stage 2

2007-02-09T11:36:00.000-06:00

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross identified the following stages of grief:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

When it comes to global climate change, most on the right are still in stage one, though signs are appearing--such as this letter to the Washington Times--that stage two is on the horizon:

Cool reception

Let's grant (if just for the sake of argument) that environmental scientists have proved that Earth's ideal average temperature was reached about a century ago and that the temperature is rising because of human activity ("Just the facts," Op-Ed, yesterday).

The truth remains that these scientists have no expertise to judge whether government can be trusted with the power and resources to "combat" global warming. Nor can these scientists tell us how a free market likely would deal with global warming's consequences.

Contrary to widespread belief, environmental scientists can legitimately say nothing about whether, or how, to respond to global warming.

DONALD J. BOUDREAUX
Chairman
Department of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax

My geographer friend Shane responds:

Now would be the perfect time to give these people an island of their very own.

Do it right, though, via plebecite. As an economist -- not an ethicist -- they wouldn't really have the standing to resolve whether it would be "good" or "bad" to employ democratic power to such an end.

Contrary to widespread belief, economists can legitimately say nothing about whether or not they should be deported to aquatic death camps. They could only say definitively that such a program expresses an aggregate preference.

Jewish Anti-Semitism

2007-01-31T12:36:00.000-06:00

So it has now come to the point where being an anti-Zionist makes you anti-semitic. This point was probably reached some time ago, but now it's official: if you are even just wrestling with the notion of Zion, you are, in the view of the American Jewish Committee, a racist.

From the New York Times:

An essay the committee features on its Web site, ajc.org, titled “ ‘Progressive’ Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism,” says a number of Jews, through their speaking and writing, are feeding a rise in virulent anti-Semitism by questioning whether Israel should even exist.

David A. Harris, the executive director of the committee, writes that those who oppose Israel’s basic right to exist, “whether Jew or gentile, must be confronted.”

Tony Judt, a historian at New York University, said “the link between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is newly created,” adding that he fears “the two will have become so conflated in the minds of the world” that references to anti-Semitism and the Holocaust will come to be seen as “just a political defense of Israeli policy.”

Leave it to a historian (and Tony Judt is a good one) to point out a slippery slope. I think his point has credence: the "you're either with us or against us" mentality is outrageously polarizing, and completely throws the whole Marketplace of Ideas out the window.

Letting the Marketplace of Ideas weigh in on this one is telling:

Michael Posluns, a political scientist at the University of Toronto, wrote, “Sad and misbegotten missives of the sort below make me wonder if it is not the purpose of mainstream Jewish organizations to foster anti-Jewishness by calling down all who take from their Jewish experience and Jewish thought a different ethos and different ways of being as feeding anti-Semitism.”

A bit of a rhetorical stretch, but not unreasonable. Meanwhile:

Shulamit Reinharz, a sociologist who is also the wife of Jehuda Reinharz, the president of Brandeis University, wrote in a column for The Jewish Advocate in Boston: “Most would say that they are simply anti-Zionists, not anti-Semites. But I disagree, because in a world where there is only one Jewish state, to oppose it vehemently is to endanger Jews.”

So while Professor Posluns calls out the Jewish community to self-examination for their "all or nothing" stance, Mrs. Reinharz demands Zionism be redefined to be synonymous with Jewishness. Slippery slope, indeed.

It's really a shame Abra doesn't check this blog, as I am sure she has some choice thoughts on the subject. I myself (in case you could not tell by my comments) think it is dangerous and ridiculous, and consider this to be the latest symptom of our knee-jerk culture of instant offense - where any remarks critical of Jews brand the interlocuter that worst of all epithets, the ANTI-SEMITE. Questioning the wisdom of Zionism is not like denying global warming or believing in phrenology. But to hear Shulamit Reinharz tell it, you are ACTUALLY PUTTING JEWISH PEOPLE IN DANGER by promulgating these very ideas.

Now THAT'S dangerous.

Speaking of Hugh Hewitt...

2007-01-29T19:08:00.000-06:00

As regular readers of the poor man already know, Hugh Hewitt beat out several worthy adversaries for the site's Chickenhawk of the Year contest, with this brazen contention on his so-called show:

Time Baghdad correspondant Michael Ware: Let’s look at it this way. I mean, you’re sitting back in a comfortable radio studio, far from the realities of this war.
Hugh Hewitt: Actually, Michael, let me interrupt you.

MW: If anyone has a right…

HH: Michael, one second.

MW: If anyone has a right to complain, that’s what…

HH: I’m sitting in the Empire State Building. Michael, I’m sitting in the Empire State Building, which has been in the past, and could be again, a target. Because in downtown Manhattan, it’s not comfortable, although it’s a lot safer than where you are, people always are three miles away from where the jihadis last spoke in America. So that’s…civilians have a stake in this. Although you are on the front line, this was the front line four and a half years ago.

Sending 800,000 privileged youths to the front lines may be more in keeping with the Powell Doctrine, but it would be so much more satisfying to see HH confronted with the realities of combat - for that matter, with reality in general.

Hewitt also figures in Mark Helperin edging out a very competitive field (including Fred Barnes and Victor Davis John Jacob Jingleheimer Hanson) to hoist the poorman's Fluffy Award, for egregious unrestrained and unwarranted ass-licking. As Gleen Greenwald eloquently recounts, Helperin, after being savaged on Hewitt's terrible show for his wicked liberal upbringing, debases himself by obsequiously kowtowing to HH, begging him to take back his (outlandish) contention that Helperin is a (gasp!) liberal. The whole thing would be bad enough if Helperin was another stain on the right-wing infotainment stuporhighway; but since he is instead the Political Director of notorious pinko media outlet ABC News, I have to agree with Greenwald here:

I really question whether someone who has obviously made it such a high priority to obtain a very personal form of right-wing absolution can possibly exercise appropriate news judgment. If Halperin is willing to expend this much time and energy and shower Hewitt with such gushing praise -- and if he's willing to make such a public spectacle of himself when doing so -- all in order to convince Hewitt that he isn't liberal, won't that goal rather obviously affect Halperin's news coverage? Isn't there something extremely unseemly about the political director of ABC News engaging in such an intense campaign to win the approval of one of the most blindly partisan, extremist Bush followers in the country?

What a douchebag.

Speaking of which: here's a link I'd tag as NQSFWBAWAL (Not Quite Safe For Work But Absolutely Worth A Look): Hot Chicks with Douchebags. It's the kind of brilliant website that makes me wonder: How exactly did people make sense of the world, in all its rampant douchebaggery, before the internet?

One view of Biblical "contradictions."

2007-01-25T22:31:00.000-06:00

http://www.markdroberts.com/htmfiles/resources/gospelsreliable2.htm#oct1105 I had heard this fellow on the Hugh Hewitt show but found him this evening while doing a web search for the discepencies in the "date of Jesus' death" mentioned by Jeff at what is, again, the finest house in all of the Red Suburbs. Should Biblical contradictions interest you, what do you think of this Mark Roberts fellow?

An Even bigger Asshole than Sullivan

2007-01-15T16:39:00.000-06:00

http://www.amazon.com/Conservative-Soul-How-Lost-Back/dp/0060188774/sr=8-1/qid=1167849030/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-4858594-8715357?ie=UTF8&s=books I am not worthy of you, Mr Burroughs. I am a card carrying member of the Moose Club, so I must be some Blatz drinking lunatic who would find Hegel confusing and would spurn a Chicago style pizza because it doesn't taste white enough for me. The mere act of reading Ann Coulter prevents me from either rational thought or proper erectile function. If only I were smart enough to understand Sullivan, surely I would agree with him. Again I say, what an unbelievable asshole. "If you are a member of the Elks Lodge, this isn't for you?" Has this horse's ass ever been to an Elks' Lodge? Apparently the only fraternity this fellow cares for has it's meetings in bath houses.

War Bloggers

2007-01-09T14:09:00.000-06:00

Over the last few months I haven’t been paying much attention to the winger warbloggers, because 1) I consider them to be, in the words of the veep, “just a few dead-enders” with an inexplicable loyalty to a failed regime, and 2) because the few times I have visited, the sour grapes have been so overwhelming that they crowded out even the minimum amount of serious policy discussion that occurs there in the absence of a bloody election fight.

But I went over to Redstate.com yesterday to see what was on the minds of the loyal opposition, and I really had a hard time believing my eyes. The post is entitled--get this--“Dems Seek To Ensure Defeat As President Bush Plans Victory,” and here are a few choice selections:

President Bush has been hard at work reorganizing his security team and seeking advice and ideas from a wide variety of sources on how to achieve victory in Iraq.

I'll get back to the President's thorough review of war strategy in a minute, but first, think about how the Democrats have responded to the President Bush's careful review of our war strategy. There is no other way to describe it: the Congressional Democratic leadership is trying to ensure defeat.

It is disappointing, but not surprising, that the Democratic leaders wouldn't demonstrate the common sense to listen to how we can achieve victory in Iraq before telling the world we must accept defeat and withdraw, or "redeploy," as the Democrats phrase it.

President Bush has been gathering advice from leaders here, leaders in Iraq, and allies globally. He has gone through this effort to find common ground, as he says, "not for the good of the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, but for the good of the country.

Our security and the future of a vital region of the world depend on victory in Iraq. It's too bad Democratic leaders won't even listen to how it can be achieved.

I hate to use the word “objective” in political discussions; it’s usually applied, as a rhetorical trick, to something utterly subjective in order to lend it weight and credence. But these statements are as objectively those of a madman as the lunatic ravings of Baghdad Bob when he claimed that US troops were committing suicide at the gates of Baghdad.

Reading him, you almost feel at a loss for words; the questions that arise in response to this childlike profession of faith are so numerous and urgent that you want to vomit them all out simultaneously. You want to sneer at and ridicule the insincere innocence of his tone, but then, being a decent person, you say to yourself “He can’t really write crap like this and not believe it, can he?” and so you’re forced to conclude that the innocence is real, and then your skin begins to crawl and your head begins to hurt, and, oh boy, here come those vomitous questions again…

However, you recover your composure and settle your stomach with some delicious Vernor’s (Michigan’s Own!) ginger ale, and jot down the following simple question, based on the following unambiguous information (which, not being very well read yourself, you steal from one of the bloggers who actually knows what he’s talking about):

The big talk this past week, and probably the centerpiece of Bush's announcement (to take place Wednesday night), is the "surge"—20,000 additional U.S. combat troops to be deployed to Baghdad, as part of a classic strategy of "clear, hold, and build." This means swooping a lot of troops into a particular area (a town, a village, a neighborhood, whatever), clearing it of insurgents (i.e., killing or capturing them), and leaving behind enough troops or police to maintain order so that reconstruction can take place—while other troops move on to clear, hold, and build in the next troubled area on the list.

Petraeus and his co-authors discussed this strategy at great length in the Army's counterinsurgency field manual. One point they made is that it requires a lot of manpower—at minimum, 20 combat troops for every 1,000 people in the area's population. Baghdad has about 6 million people; so clearing, holding, and building it will require about 120,000 combat troops.

Right now, the United States has about 70,000 combat troops in all of Iraq (another 60,000 or so are support troops or headquarters personnel). Even an extra 20,000 would leave the force well short of the minimum required—and that's with every soldier and Marine in Iraq moved to Baghdad. Iraqi security forces would have to make up the deficit.”

The question is: how does what the president is going to propose even approach a serious strategy if it utterly fails to meet the Army’s own minimum standards for troop strength in such a scenario? Does this sound like a familiar refrain to any of you? And even if he wanted to get serious about the surge, where would he find these several hundred thousand extra troops? There is nothing leftish about asking these questions, but the warbloggers have staked their shredded reputations on slavish devotion to their man-child king, so even attacking him from the right is apparently out of the question for many of them.

If you don't like the science, there's always slander

2007-01-05T12:38:00.000-06:00

Global Warming Denier Michael Crichton Fictionalizes Critic as Child Rapist
By Paul Kiel - December 14, 2006, 11:45 AM

The battle between anti-global warming activists and their critics is frequently uncivil. Name calling, put downs, you name it, they fling them.

But this marks a new threshold, I think.

This March, Michael Crowley wrote a cover story (sub. req.) in The New Republic hitting blockbuster novelist Michael Crichton's very public denials that global warming was a proved phenomenon.

That was the last he'd heard from Crichton until he picked his latest novel, Next. Here's what he found:

Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers. Crowley was a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. ...

It turned out Crowley's taste in love objects was well known in Washington, but [his lawyer]--as was his custom--tried the case vigorously in the press months before the trial, repeatedly characterizing Alex and the child's mother as "fantasizing feminist fundamentalists" who had made up the whole thing from "their sick, twisted imaginations." This, despite a well-documented hospital examination of the child. (Crowley's penis was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler's rectum.)

In an article posted to the New Republic's Web site today, Crowley responded:

The next page contains fleeting references to Crowley as a "weasel" and a "dickhead," and, later, "that political reporter who likes little boys." But that's it--Crowley comes and goes without affecting the plot. He is not a character so much as a voodoo doll. Knowing that Crichton had used prior books to attack very real-seeming people, I was suspicious. Who was this Mick Crowley? A Google search turned up an Irish Workers Party politician in Knocknaheeny, Ireland. But Crowley's tireless advocacy for County Cork's disabled seemed to make him an unlikely target of Crichton's ire.

And that's when it dawned on me: I happen to be a Washington political journalist. And, yes, I did attend Yale University. And, come to think of it, I had recently written a critical 3,700-word cover story about Crichton. In lieu of a letter to the editor, Crichton had fictionalized me as a child rapist. And, perhaps worse, falsely branded me a pharmaceutical-industry profiteer.

WTF?

2007-01-05T08:47:00.000-06:00

From the January 2 edition of NBC's Nightly News with Brian Williams:

MIKLASZEWSKI: Administration officials told us late today that President Bush has now all but decided to surge those additional combat troops into Baghdad to try to get control over the violence there, and only then could they accelerate the turnover of territory to Iraqi security forces. Fact is, they're just not up to the task yet.

The plan would also throw more U.S. money at Iraq for reconstruction and a jobs program. Now, interestingly enough, one administration official admitted to us today that this surge option is more of a political decision than a military one because the American people have simply run out of patience and President Bush is running out of time to achieve some kind of success in Iraq. And while this plan will clearly draw some stiff opposition up on Capitol Hill, the president is expected to announce it a week from today.

A New Day Dawns

2006-12-28T09:25:00.000-06:00

The American people, however well intentioned, may not have been able to bring democracy to Iraq, but it looks like they may have begun to bring democracy back to Washington, D.C.

One of the great bits in this article is the description of Republicans' reaction to the Democrats' return of daylight to the legislative process:

"But Republicans are hoping Democrats stick to their guns and allow the minority a stronger voice on legislation. The opposition leadership said it would take the opportunity to put forward initiatives that could be potentially troublesome for newly elected Democrats in Republican-leaning districts who within months will have to defend their hard-won seats."

It's not that I expect Republicans to be sincerely contrite, or to view this as an opportunity to make laws that are more in line with what the American people want rather than what K Street wants, but I did expect them to insincerely express some fraternal desire to serve the commonweal, at least for a while. Instead, their first instinct is announce a strategy of highlighting wedge issues and focusing on the outcome of the 2008 legislative elections.

And by the way, what's up with Gerry Ford doing an interview with Bob Woodward in which he criticizes the war, but won't allow it to be released until after death--his death, that is, not the deaths of about a thousand servicemen he presumably felt should have been avoided? The Republican idea of public service has certainly taken a beating during the last couple of decades.

Right Place, Right Time

2006-12-27T14:40:00.000-06:00

This David Sirota column on Rahm Emanuel is right on target. It's too bad that jackasses like Emanuel continue to plague the party with their mush-mouthed quest for the ever elusive "center," but hacks, like poverty, will always be with us. My New Year's wish is that Rahm's very fortuitous but entirely coincidental association with the 2006 winning slate of Democrat legislators will be unable to keep the DLC wing of the party from its date with the dustbin of history.

Mere Facts Cannot Stop the Hero Worship Machine

You really can never underestimate the ability of power-worshipping Beltway journalists to fabricate out of whole cloth an entire storyline just to make them feel close to Serious People they perceive to be Important. As an example, see this story on Rahm Emanuel in GQ by Ryan Lizza - a person working hard to carve out his own slice of American history as a "reporter" more infatuated with hero worship than any of his predecessors:

"Rahm explains that both Diane Farrell, the challenger to Republican Chris Shays in Connecticut, and Ron Klein, the challenger to Clay Shaw here in Florida, have moved "five points on Iraq." "The most motivated voters are Iraq voters," he tells his fellow congressmen. "You get a twofer: One is the issue of Iraq, and two is that a lot of their guys have made statements supporting Bush. So you also get the rubber stamp. I want to finish this campaign zeroed in on Iraq. They say terrorism, we say Iraq. They say stay the course, we say change."

Ah yes, Rahm was leading the fight for Democrats to make Iraq a major issue in the campaign, right? What a genius - except for those little things called "facts" which are ignored because they might get in the way of Lizza's lips reaching Emanuel's ass. Those facts would show that as recently as less than a year ago, Emanuel was demanding Democratic candidates go totally silent on the war. You can see here, here and here for a little review of these facts - as reported widely by the media at the time.

But, no - the hero creation machine must grind on, whether it means laying waste to actual, serious journalism or facts.

Why is any of this important? Because to understand the past is to understand the present - and a distortion of what actually happened in the election is a way to ignore what voters actually wanted.

By any objective analysis, Rahm Emanuel was the beneficiary of being in the right place at the right time. His targeting and rejection of the 50-state strategy proved to be a fairly horrific failure - many of his most highly-touted candidates lost, and he didn't put resources into some of the races that ended up being the closest Democratic losses in the country. Put another way, Democrats won in spite of Rahm's targeting and - as this blog post shows - also in spite of his critical early advice on the issue that swung the election. I mean, this is a guy who was the architect of NAFTA and yet is now taking credit for an election where Democratic candidates' opposition to NAFTA provided the margin of the new congressional majority.

Yes, Rahm raised a lot of money. But his real "success" was happening to be chairman of the DCCC at the same time the Republican Party was ravaged with corruption scandals, and plagued by a high-profile colleague who made gay sexual advances on young boys. The Democratic Party not winning the election under the circumstances would have made Rahm into the political equivalent of Bill Buckner.

But make no mistake about it - had Bill Buckner fielded that routine grounder and made the out in Game 6 in 1986, that moment would not have gone down as some unbelievable and overachieving play, it would have gone down as the absolute minimum someone should have done in that situation. And had Buckner batted .185 and made other errors throughout the rest of the series, he would not have been handed the MVP had he only successfully fielded that routine ground ball.

Similarly, that Rahm happened to be head of the DCCC in 2006 doesn't make him the MVP of the 2006 election (or, as Lizza froths, the Kingmaker of the Democratic Party) - and it certainly doesn't negate the simple truth that this man did much within his power to lose the election, thanks to his generally unprincipled hackishness on most major issues including, of course, war and peace. No matter how much the Ryan Lizzas of the world inevitably translate their own personal need to feel loved by Serious People, the very clear facts show that this election was not some validation of Rahm Emanuel, his lack of ideology, or his self-serving Clintonite comrades now pathetically trying to retain their relevance. It was exactly the opposite - a rejection of those factors, because Democrats won in spite of them.

Better Than Average

2006-12-21T17:37:00.000-06:00

Here is a better than average Jon Stewart video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikCwD_zANpU

While here is a better than average article on Obama:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/
la-oe-tomasky21dec21,0,6791695.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail

Enjoy.

Orwell

2006-12-18T11:46:00.000-06:00

Here's the Orwell essay I mentioned.

Also, here's my kid's blog.

I confirm that the next meeting will be at my place in Oak Park on January 18 at 7:00 PM. I'll send out a reminder closer to the date.

ISG Report

2006-12-08T08:58:00.000-06:00

"Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals." (pp.94-95)

That pretty much summarizes the Bush administration, doesn't it?

It's interesting to contrast this subgroup of old CFR Republicans with the current faction in power. Never has it been more obvious what a bunch of immature, idealistic college sophomores the neo-cons are.

Getting rid of them

2006-12-04T19:17:00.000-06:00

This is the way to make progress
on Iraq. First get rid of the people
who voted for it, then make the
tough decisions (go in deeper?
ask for help? hunker down?
go just-over-the-horizon?
something else?) All of these
options will be more likely to
succeed because of the election.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2006/12/03/
AR2006120301108.html

Jose Padilla's Root Canal

2006-12-04T10:35:00.000-06:00

I'm grateful our government has taken it upon themselves to abolish this man's rights as an American citizen in the name of my safety. Bravo!

"Organic" Pepsi

2006-11-20T13:09:00.000-06:00

If there is anyone out there who still naively believes the Whole Foods corporation is looking out for your health and welfare by providing you with exclusively organic, small-farm, and local food choices, you've been left in the dust:

To compete with the homespun, lifestyle-oriented companies that appeal to the Whole Foods consumer, Pepsi is creating wholly new startup brands for the chain that bear no telltale trace of their corporate lineage and are supported with very little marketing,” wrote Ad Age reporter Stephanie Thompson. (Thompson quoted an executive close to PepsiCo who noted that the company believes Whole Foods consumers like the discovery of things not tarnished by mass marketing.)

"Organic", and everything it implies about food's provenance and the sustainability of its production, has been appropriated by the giant food corporations it was designed to circumvent. It doesn't matter what tricks you employ to avoid it, such as eschewing food products that are "tarnished by mass marketing". Pepsico's Marketing Department is already at least one step ahead of you.

What to do with all that power?

2006-11-10T13:12:00.000-06:00

I was discussing with a hawkish colleague today the consequences for Iraq of the Democratic electoral victory. He was all gloom and doom, positing all the catastrophic changes the "Democrat Party" will make to our [non-existent] Iraq Strategy. I really wonder what there is to worry about: the President prosecutes this war, and the Congress really can't affect how he does that. Theoretically the checks and balances in our system would keep the Administration in line, and legislators are responsible for oversight, appropriations, etc. But in reality, Bush just sort of does what he [Rumsfeld] wants, and sends the bill to Congress. Who in turn passes it on to the next generation.

So the Dems are catching a lot of flak for their [as-yet unvoiced] intentions to probe and investigate the way we got into the war. A large part of me questions the wisdom of this; while digging up the bodies may palliate the liberal bloodlust, it really doesn't give any cohesive structure to what we do about Iraq NOW. It just seems like petty revenge to me.

Then I read this, and I realize that this Congress really has its work cut out for it:

Democrats: Eager to bring accountability back into government? Here's a suggestion. Find out what happened to the nearly $9 billion dollars of Iraqi oil funds and reconstruction cash missing in action since the beginning of the war.

In the aftermath of the invasion, planes filled with shrink-wrapped bundles of $100 bills were flown into Baghdad. Wondering how much money fits into a plane? "It was $2 billion a flight, and I know of at least six flights," Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, told the BBC. Waiting at the airport for the planeloads of greenbacks was David Oliver. Head of the CPA's finance department, he handed much of this money over to the Iraqi provisional government. After that the paper trail grows colder. According to Mr. Bowen, some it found its way into the pockets of Iraqi politicians.

When asked by a reporter where the money went, Oliver replied he didn't know and didn't care. "Billions of dollars of their money disappeared, yes I understand, I'm saying what difference does it make?" In his defense, Oliver insists there were unexpected and pressing emergencies in the war's aftermath, with little time for accounting procedures. But early warnings had been issued by groups like Iraq Revenue Watch about the potential for mismangement and corruption. These were ignored.

If we fail to hold our government to account for our past failures, we are doomed to repeat them. Only by digging up the bodies can we prevent others from being buried. To the Democrat Party, I say: Get 'em.

Absolut Delusion

2006-11-09T14:56:00.000-06:00

MrConservative, one of the regular commenters over at "Blog of the Year" PowerLine, wrote the following sua culpa following the treacherous behavior of the American people on Tuesday. I've inserted my observations:

The greatest consequence, however, is our national security. Even though the squishy middle will not want to be more vulnerable to terrorist attack, the consequences of their vote will be that it is more likely.

This is probably true (not that America will be more vulnerable, but that more attacks may come). If you read the "One Percent Doctrine" or some of the other exposés that look closely into the intelligence communities' efforts to combat terrorism, it's pretty clear they (the intelligence communities) think that al-Qaeda 1) prefers Republicans because their foreign policy galvanizes the pissed-off Muslim masses, and 2) believes that Americans can pretty reliably be scared into voting for Republicans, or reverse psychologized into it (again, see bin-Laden's crude-but-effective video stunt prior to the 2004 elections). If these two observations about al-Qaeda are correct, it seems likely that they will attempt more terrorist strikes, particularly if they stand to lose the incredibly effective scapegoat of America in Iraq.

The leftists will see that terrorist surveillance programs are history.

No, only the extra-constitutional warrantlessness of the Bush approach will be history. I challenge anyone to demonstrate how getting retroactive warrants from the FISA court will damage our surveillance programs.

Aggressive interrogation of terrorists will cease.

I'm not convinced that the Democrats have the balls to stand up against torture, but if they do, more power to them.

Iraq’s future looks bleak.

Indeed, following the Democratic takeover of the House and Senate, the candy and flowers may now give way to IEDs and interfactional butchery.

Iran’s ascension looks secure. (This is tragic. The mullahs grip on power is tenuous at best. A leftist American tilt will strengthen them.)

The first two premises were basically guaranteed when the neocons colluded with pro-Iranian double dealers to dupe us into carrying out Tehran's geopolitical objectives in Iraq. The last two are just wishful thinking on MrConservative's part.

Our allies in the war on terror will doubt our resolve. They will be looking to cut a deal with the terrorists as a matter of survival.

Who could he possibly be referring to here (by the way, the Baker Report is likely to suggest the US do just that)? All of our Middle Eastern "allies in the war on terror" have been cutting deals with terrorists all along. The few Europeans and Asians who remain in the "coalition" can probably survive in a Republicanless world, even in the face of an active international terrorist campaign emboldened by stupid and incompetently executed Bush policies.

Israel will be exposed. North Korea will be emboldened just when they have blinked. The list goes on and on.

The list doesn't actually go on and on, which is precisely when idiots like MrConservative usually write that it does. The Republicans haven't been at all successful in covering Israel, or in solving its problems, which are largely of its own making. And North Korea? Is he really suggesting that Republicans have finally maneuvered Kim Jong Il into a corner by doing nothing while he developed nukes? What would the next piece of strategery be? Luring them across the DMZ and trapping them in Seoul?

So Glad That It's All Over

2006-11-08T10:08:00.000-06:00

"All slander all the time eventually collapses of its own foul weight." Would that this were true...

From today's WSJ.

What makes our politics so sensationally awful is not just the amount of money spent denigrating the category and the profession, but the equally stunning amount of energy that is expended by party apparatchiks to amplify the negative in news-media coverage of politics. And the news media are only to happy to comply. The truth is they can't get enough of it.

The net effect of this constant and unrelenting assault on politicians and the political process is voter resignation and ultimately a kind of doomed acceptance. It must be true. They must all be hypocrites, fools, thieves and scoundrels. They're talking about themselves, after all. It's $1 billion of self-portraiture.

A general rule of politics is: It's not the action, it's the reaction. The reaction to the onslaught is aversion; qualified, capable people avoid politics and the political process at all costs, thus diminishing the talent pool. The New York Republican Party was unable to recruit a qualified candidate for state comptroller, even though the race was there for the taking, because they literally couldn't find a qualified candidate to run. Nor could the Republican Party find a qualified candidate for the U.S. Senate in Connecticut. No sensible person would do it. Part of corporate advertising contains a subtextual message; come work for us, we're in an exciting business. We're growing and it will only get better. The subtextual message of political advertising is: You'd be crazy to get involved. It's bad and it's only going to get worse.

One would think that the major parties would grasp the concept that they are destroying the very profession they purport to love, and act accordingly. In the midst of all these negative messages, one would expect to find a broad, thematic campaign that aspired to something bigger than "he voted for toxic waste dumps and against your unborn child." When the Labour Party in Britain finally got tired of losing elections to Maggie Thatcher's Tories, they hired the best advertising minds in that nation to relaunch the Labour Party brand. The results were impressive. Tony Blair rose to power and rules to this day.

But in America, the major parties don't ever think in broad, national terms. They're all tactics and no strategy. They don't advertise themselves at all. Instead, they spend the hundreds of millions of dollars they raise microtargeting supposedly single-issue voters and bombarding them with negative messages about the opposite party's alleged disdain for those concerns. Put more simply, they send you junk mail you don't open, and leave robo-calls on your answering machine that you immediately erase.

Ultimately, the reaction to this ceaseless negative barrage, if it continues unchecked, will be the rejection of both major political parties. As more and more people are repulsed by the political process, their number will at some point reach a critical mass. Americans share two overriding beliefs: Tomorrow will be a better day and the idea of America is fundamentally important. That critical mass will eventually embrace a party of hope and mission. A new political party that speaks to those beliefs will emerge. The alternative, after all, is a new record every two years -- $2 billion of negative advertising, then $4 billion, then $8 billion. All slander all the time eventually collapses of its own foul weight.

Merry men of the cloth

2006-11-03T11:46:00.000-06:00

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20061103/D8L5IM680.html I want to go on record as having disliked this fellow long before his little trysts became public. Earlier, he and a bunch of other buffoons went on a campaign to save the environment for "our children and our Lord," as if somehow God needed climate controlled megachurches to save His creation from global warming. Yet and still, there seems to be something about the role of pastor that makes it more likely (by no means probable) that they will commit sexual indiscretion. Of the churches with which I have been involved, four have had some history of the pastor committing adultery with someone. Not the world's best batting average. At the same time, stories about righteous and kind pastors are not nearly as prevalent as they should be: a whole lot of Christians are not only spreading the Gospel but feeding hungry people, and that without indiscretions.

Secretary of Offense

2006-10-27T19:19:00.000-05:00

"You're looking for some sort of guillotine. This is difficult. BACK OFF."

In other news, I don't know what's worse - that people pretend to have "sexsomnia" and actually expect us to believe it, or that Reuters/ABC News Online pretend to engage in "journalism" and actually expect us to believe it.

'Sexsomniacs' puzzle medical researchers

Researchers are struggling to understand a rare medical condition where sufferers unknowingly demand, or actually have, sex while asleep, New Scientist magazine reports.

Research into sexsomnia - making sexual advances towards another person while asleep - has been hampered as sufferers are so embarrassed by the problem they tend not to own up to it, while doctors do not ask about it.

As yet there is no cure for the condition, which often leads to difficulties in relationships.

"It really bothers me that I can't control it," Lisa Mahoney told the magazine.

"It scares me because I don't think it has anything to do with the partner. I don't want this foolish condition to hurt us in the long run."

Most researchers view sexsomnia as a variant of sleepwalking, where sufferers are stuck between sleep and wakefulness, though sexsomniacs tend to stay in bed rather than get up and walk about.

While sleepwalking affects 2 to 4 per cent of adults, sexsomnia is not thought to be as common a problem, according to Nik Trajanovic, a researcher at the sleep and alertness clinic at Canada's Toronto Western Hospital.

But an Internet survey of sexsomniacs carried out in 2005 that drew 219 reliable respondents concluded it was more prevalent than medical case reports alone might suggest.

"Most of the time sleep sex occurs between people who are already partners," Mark Pressman, a sleep specialist at Lankenan Hospital in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, told New Scientist.

"Sometimes they hate it," added Mr Pressman of the reactions of sexsomniacs' partners.

"Sometimes they tolerate it. On rare occasions you have stories of people liking it better than waking sex."

With no cure, addressing triggering factors - stress or sleep deprivation - can help.

Meanwhile Mr Trajanovic is devising a procedure for diagnosing sexsomnia in legal cases where sufferers have been accused of sexual assault.

40 PERCENT?????

2006-10-24T21:04:00.000-05:00

I am still baffled that there are so many people
who think that invading Iraq was a good
move. According to this website, about
40% of Americans think so:

http://www.pollingreport.com/iraq.htm

Can someone enlighten me? Are they
watching or reading something I am not?
Are they not watching or reading anything?
What am I missing?

The Deniability Presidency

2006-10-24T11:19:00.000-05:00

Bush sat down yesterday with CNBC "Money Honey" Maria Bartiromo, who asked him if he used Google.

According to CNBC’s unofficial transcript, he replied: “Occasionally. One of the things I’ve used on the Google is to pull up maps. It’s very interesting to see that. I forgot the name of the program, but you get the satellite and you can — like, I kind of like to look at the ranch on Google, reminds me of where I want to be sometimes. Yeah, I do it some.” He added: “I tend not to email or — not only tend not to email, I don’t email, because of the different record requests that can happen to a president. I don’t want to receive emails because, you know, there’s no telling what somebody’s email may — it would show up as, you know, a part of some kind of a story, and I wouldn’t be able to say, `Well, I didn’t read the email.’ `But I sent it to your address, how can you say you didn’t?’ So, in other words, I’m very cautious about emailing.”

I guess I see what he's saying - if he had an e-mail address, he'd be so bombarded with messages he couldn't possibly read or respond to all of them. Wouldn't it be better, though, if he just did like all famous people with this problem, and have some auto-reply saying "sorry, I can't possibly read or reply to all of the messages I receive, but thanks for writing"? The way he puts it (or "puts" it - only Mayor Daley can deliver a less scrutable response to a direct question), he comes off as though the reason he doesn't e-mail is because it's just another form of "gotcha," any any engagement with the media or his constituency via this medium leaves him liabile, a paper trail may implicate him, etc etc. I don't mean to imply that this is not a valid concern; but there are ways around this as well.

By refusing to communicate via e-mail, Bush further isolates himself from the real world. But I guess it's promising that he ocassionally uses "the Google."

Civil War?

2006-10-21T13:02:00.000-05:00

Is France in the middle of a civil war and nobody will say it? We saw the riots break out almost a year ago in the suburbs by young muslims. I didn't realize how much of the unrest was still going on. From the Timesonline in London is this:

The figures are stark. An average of 112 cars a day have been torched across France so far this year and there have been 15 attacks a day on police and emergency services. Nearly 3,000 police officers have been injured in clashes this year. Officers have been badly injured in four ambushes in the Paris outskirts since September. Some police talk of open war with youths who are bent on more than vandalism.

Fifteen attacks a day, this doesn't sound much better than Baghdad. Maybe the US needs to send more troops to Paris, also. I had heard comments in passing that there was still unrest in Paris from time to time, but had no idea it was of this magnitude.

Why isn't this a much bigger story? We are seeing the beginning of a conflict that is going to spread across Europe in the coming years. The Dutch are afraid to show a stupid cartoon because they fear riots. Theo Van Gough was murdered for making a film critcal of Islam. (I think this last paragraph is leading into another bigger topic that I don't have time to consider fully, but is a very serious issue for the future of enlightened western culture).

Wow.

2006-10-17T12:04:00.000-05:00

This is from the Times Online, and it's pretty amazing stuff if true. Both Baker Commission options mentioned here imply the complete negation of the Bush Administration's raison d'être: to defeat terrorism with all sticks and no carrots. Bush & Co. have bet everything on the proposition that the politicians and statesmen of the last 3,000 years, who have slowly and incrementally built the science and art of diplomacy, are idiots, and that only they understand the true nature of reality.

In political terms, the "Stability First" option could be a little more palatable for Republicans, since "Redeploy and Contain," from what little is said here about it, appears to be nothing less than the wholesale acceptance of the Murtha Plan. All the carping chickenhawks will have to either choke down their "cut and run" crow, or identify a microscopic distinction between the Baker and Murtha phrasings to justify their support for it.

Either way, it appears that, if November is the bloodbath some are predicting, the Republican establishment will take George Bush across its knee. We can expect a very dejected cheerleader-in-chief for the next two years.

US panel to propose Iraq policy U-turn
By Devika Bhat

A high-level panel set up to advise the White House on Iraq is to propose radical changes to US policy including the large-scale withdrawal of US troops, it has been reported.

The commission, which is headed by James Baker, the former Secretary of State under the first President Bush, will recommend two options which would effectively represent reversals of US policy.

One of these, called "Redeploy and Contain", would see the phased withdrawal of US troops to bases outside Iraq where they could be deployed against terrorist organisations anywhere in the region.

Another alternative, titled "Stability First", calls for continuing to try to stabilise Baghdad and boosting efforts to bring insurgents into politics, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. Under this option, Iraq’s neighbours, Iran and Syria, would be brought in to help end the fighting.

The ten-member commission, called the Iraq Study Group, will release its recommendations in the coming months. It was set up by Congress but has been endorsed by President Bush.
Apart from Mr Baker, who is one of the Bush family's closest political allies, other members include Lee Hamilton, former Congressman, who also served as co-chairman of the commission investigating the September 11 attacks, Sandra Day O’Connor, retired Supreme Court of Justice, and Leon Panetta, a Californian Democrat who was President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff.

It is unclear how willing Mr Bush is to change his strategy, which centres around improving security in Baghdad, training Iraqi security forces, and pushing the Iraq government to find political agreement amongst rival groups. The President has insisted on more than one occasion that the US will not leave Iraq "until the job is done", but last week he also said in a news conference that he was open to ideas.

When the panel was formed in March, it was hoped by some administration officials that it would produce a bipartisan endorsement of existing policy. But as sectarian violence in Iraq has worsened, there have been increasing calls for the White House to rethink its policy, with even senior Republicans saying that changes are necessary.

While refusing to comment directly on the report in the LA Times, White House officials have been eager to make clear in recent weeks that while they intend to look seriously at the panel’s recommendations, there was no obligation for the President to follow them. "We’re not going to outsource the business of handling the war in Iraq," said Tony Snow, the White House spokesman.

Crucially, a third option on Iraq, entitled "Stay the Course, Redefine the Mission", appeared to gain less interest from the panel according to the LA Times, with members reportedly agreeing that change had to be made.

"It’s not going to be ‘stay the course,’" the newspaper quotes one participant as saying. "The bottom line is, (current policy) isn’t working. There’s got to be another way."

Mr Baker has hinted in recent weeks that the report would recommend changes, some of which the White House would not necessarily welcome. "There’ll probably be some things in our report that the administration might not like," he said in a television interview last week.
"Our commission believes that there are alternatives between the stated alternatives, the ones that are out there in the political debate of 'stay the course' and 'cut and run,' " he added, also implying he had considered the option of reaching out to Iran and Syria.

"I personally believe in talking to your enemies," he said. "Neither the Syrians nor the Iranians want a chaotic Iraq ... so maybe there is some potential for getting something other than opposition from those countries."

Another participant, speaking anonymously, revealed that the commission was also considering whether the US should threaten the Iraqi government that it would withdraw troops unless its performance improved.

But yesterday in a telephone conversation, Mr Bush told Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, that he had no plans to pull forces out of the country, insisting that the US would continue to stand strong despite the daily violence which has plagued the nation.

A rise in American casualties in recent weeks, as communal violence spirals ever more out of control, has served only to boost the likelihood that the President will face increasing pressure to change his policy. At least 58 Americans have died in Iraq in the first two weeks of October, a pace that, if continued, would make the month the worst for coalition forces since 107 US soldiers died in January 2005.

Hitchens on Foley

2006-10-16T11:32:00.000-05:00

Is it really a surprise that Hitchens is nonplussed by Masturgate? One of my favorite things about the way Hitch writes is that he masterfully conveys lewdness without being obscene.

From todays' Wall Street Journal.

When I finally took a look at what we are all now doomed to call the "sexually explicit" emails between Rep. Mark Foley and the young male page, I found that I had an immediate difficulty in following the exchange. The congressman's side of the correspondence was denoted by his online name, while the page's name was asterisked to protect the innocent, but they both seemed to be talking about the same thing, or things. And it read for all the world like a chat between two dirty-minded adolescent boys. How often do you do this or think about that? How long is it? Material of that kind or "stuff like that," as we might say. Perhaps I have become jaded, or perhaps I lack some crucial moral element, but I could not see what was criminal about it, and I laughed when I read the solemn announcement from the FBI, promising to investigate whether an email could possibly have crossed an interstate line and thus aggravated the gravity of the offense. Our guardians never sleep . . .

The case would perhaps be altered somewhat if Mr. Foley had been the boy's teacher, or employer, or even priest. But pages are volunteers who are not on any one person's staff, and cannot be hired or fired by individual politicians. Neither coercion nor bribery was involved, as in the priestly scandals, which were quite often instances of actual rape. And the boy in this case was obviously a very knowing one, whose virginity was somewhere in his past. Indeed, it was Mr. Foley who seemed like the juvenile, or perhaps the case of arrested development. In what sense, then, does this constitute public business?

If there had been a sexual relationship between man and boy, it would almost certainly be illegal (as it would not have been if it were between man and girl) but there is no persuasive evidence that there was any sexual relationship. Indeed, it looks to me as if the email equivalent of phone-sex was the very thing that the wretched congressman was after, and probably the most he was likely to get. The youngster seemed able to look after himself, and to "turn" the conversation whenever it became too needy. It was all a bit sad and a bit sordid, but in the scale of things, no hanging matter or federal case.

I suspect that the hugeness of the current fuss must have something to do with our uneasy and only half-acknowledged awareness that the age of innocence is long over by the time that most of our children have turned 16. And this is why the Foley giveaway was contained in his ostentatious political activity in respect of the protection of minors. Have we not learned by now that the propensity of politicians to rave on about morality is often in direct proportion to their hypocrisy on the point? "Why dost thou lash that whore?" is the pertinent question asked of the lasher in "King Lear," and the answer comes plainly -- he hotly wishes "to use her in that kind" for which he whips her.

Anyone who has studied the fate of leading gay-bashers in American politics will know that the danger-signs are there from the start. Set your watch, and sure enough that fervent campaigner will be arrested kneeling abjectly on the men's-room floor. If the campaigner is an evangelist for purity and abstinence, he is booked to keep an early and certain date in a dreary motel, beseeching a drab hooker with an expired MasterCard.

Another free laugh, therefore, is provided by all the pompous talk about when exactly Mr. Foley's colleagues began to worry that his contents might be under pressure. Never mind the possible earlier emails, or signs of excessive interest in the problems of the pages. They should have known that Mr. Foley was a gay man in the closet, of course. And they should have taken alarm at the very first moment that he began to orate about sex-offenders and children. But the crucial word, here, is "closet." As long as a proper outward show of denial was made, Mr. Foley could as well have been asked to open the House's daily prayer session.

He has of course made himself even more contemptible by emitting easy babble about a hitherto unsuspected battle with "addiction," like a cuttlefish blowing off ink, and by alluding to a possible nasty moment in the woodshed with a man in holy orders. (If he does not come forward and say who that priest was, he is withholding evidence of a crime -- which really is against the law.) But the deafness, as well as the dumbness, of his party leadership is the truly extraordinary thing. It seems that the only offense of which he can possibly be accused, by the speaker of the House, is that of election-season indiscretion. In other words: How inconvenient!

Whether one is a stern defender of the present so-called "age of consent," or inclined to take a more relaxed view of dirty talk among males of all ages, or appalled at double-standards being applied for years to moralizing mediocrities, or merely concerned with that elusive thing the dignity of Congress, one has the right to expect more seriousness from the speaker than that. I am among the vast majority of people who never understood how Dennis Hastert got his job in the first place, or indeed how he has justified hanging onto it, and who would not really notice or care if he resigned it now. However, the speaker does have it in his power to do one decent thing before his term is up -- which is to get out while he can still save a rag of his integrity. There might be a person left in the world who believes that Mr. Hastert would have taken the same lenient or lazy view if Mr. Foley had been a member of the opposite party, but innocence on that level would actually be more sinister than cynicism. To add that the same would be true of Democrats if the situation was reversed is to say no more than we already -- from the forgiveness of numerous past "peccadilloes" -- have come to expect.

For a "peccadillo," Mark Foley is gone from politics already. And a huge public holiday has been taken from the serious matters that confront the electorate. But before the waters close over this scandal, and before the next one surfaces, I would still like to know what crime was committed in this instance, and who if anyone was the victim. We like to think that we "learn" from such episodes, but I cannot think of any lesson that can be derived from this latest spasm of righteous indignation.

Are conservatives more charitable?

2006-10-14T09:37:00.000-05:00

Here is an interesting article about charity.
Apparently liberals don't give as often to
charity as conservatives, even if only
nonreligious causes are counted. As the
article says, this probably has something
to do with forming habits. One issue it
doesn't mention is whether liberals choose
nurturing-style careers (education, social
work, etc.) more than conservatives, which
might be where people display their charity
impusles.
http://www.policyreview.org/oct03/brooks.html

Stephen Colbert has America by the Ballots

2006-10-13T12:20:00.000-05:00

A long, excellent portrait of one of America's funniest men. This gem from the press corps dinner still cracks me up:

Don’t pay attention to the approval ratings that say 68 percent of Americans disapprove of the job [Bush] is doing. I ask you this: Does that not also logically mean that 68 percent of Americans approve of the job he’s not doing?

Colbert should consider joining Rumsfeld's speech-writing staff.

North Korea: One More Problem Swagger Can't Solve

2006-10-12T10:52:00.000-05:00

Great column by former SecDef William Perry on Bush's failure to formulate a North Korea policy.

It appears that, like most narcissistic assholes, Kim Jong Il's central motivator is a craving for respect from those he considers to be his peers. Therefore, he's just going to keep on trucking towards weaponized nukes until he gets that respect. That's why the Agreed Upon Framework worked for a while (and by "worked" I mean slowed development, because there was and is no other option), and why isolating North Korea hasn't worked. It's a repugnant choice to make, but when you're the Bush administration and you have no more credibility or cards up your sleeve, why do you think the latter option is better? In every case, Bush defaults to talking tough, regardless of whether it's likely to accomplish anything.

My plan is to quietly evacuate the entire South Korean peninsula one night under the cover of darkness, then strike Pyong Yang hard and fast the next morning while Kim Jong Il is sipping his breakfast cognac out of the bellybutton of a Swedish movie star. It won't work, you say? You're right, but it's a lot more fun to think about than six party talks, and everyone knew those weren't going to work either.

Lou Dobbs Is A Moron

2006-10-11T16:17:00.000-05:00

The following Lou Dobbs column defies accurate description because the modifier "irrelevant" is simply too small, weak and impotent to do it justice. Even preceding it with the adverb "utterly" would be a woefully inadequate effort ("woefully" is better, but still way off).

Sentiments like this are part of that grand American tradition of potemkin intellectualism, whose practitioners (like Ross Perot back in the 90s) have no idea how to solve our problems, and so don a phony everyman posture, stick a stalk of wheat folksily between their lips, and make some vacuous pronouncement like, "Well, it seems to me we oughta throw all the bums out! Yessir, every last one of 'em, and return some common sense back to governin'."

Guess what Lou? As long as there's TV, the middle class won't rise up off the couch, let alone rise up against their lobbyist oppressors. And those "wedge issues" wielded so skillfully by Republicans and Democrats alike (please...) really matter to people (notice he leaves abortion off the list--I guess that might indicate that it's a "real" issue to him).

I agree that all the lobbyists should be shot and both parties should be squeezed until they're squeaky clean, but enough already of this ridiculous fantasy whereby the glorious middle class can accomplish this by sheer will.

And all this, just to sell a crappy book.

Dobbs: Middle class needs to fight back now

POSTED: 11:35 a.m. EDT, October 11, 2006

Editor's note: Lou Dobbs' commentary appears every Wednesday on CNN.com

NEW YORK (CNN) -- I don't know about you, but I can't take seriously anyone who takes either the Republican Party or Democratic Party seriously -- in part because neither party takes you and me seriously; in part because both are bought and paid for by corporate America and special interests. And neither party gives a damn about the middle class.

Our country's middle class is not just collateral damage in what has become all-out class warfare. Political, business and academic elites are waging an outright war on working men and women and their families, and there is no chance the American middle class will survive this assault if the dominant forces unleashed over the past five years continue unchecked.

They've accomplished this through large campaign contributions, armies of lobbyists that have swamped Washington, and control of political and economic think tanks and media. Lobbyists, in fact, are the arms dealers in the war on the middle class, brokering money, influence and information between their clients our elected officials.

Yet in my entire career, I've literally never heard anyone in Congress argue that lobbyists are bad for America. In 1968 there were only 63 lobbyists in Washington. Today, there are more than 34,000, and lobbyists now outnumber our elected representatives and their staffs by a 2-to-1 margin.

According to the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, from 1998 through 2004, lobbyists spent nearly $12 billion to not only influence legislation, but in many cases to write the language of the laws and regulations.

Individual firms, corporations and national organizations spent a record $2.14 billion on lobbying members of Congress and 220 other federal agencies in 2004, according to PoliticalMoneyLine. That's nearly $6 million a day spent to influence our leaders. We really do have the best government money can buy.

But as I discuss in my new book, "War on the Middle Class," what if we all resolved that we would not permit either the Republicans or Democrats to waste their time and ours with wedge issues? Both parties love to excite their bases by focusing on wedge issues like gay marriage, the pledge of allegiance, school prayer, judicial appointments, gun control, stem cell research and welfare reform.

Each of these wedge issues is important in varying degrees to large numbers of us, but none of them rises to the level of urgency or the requirement of immediate change in public policy.
These issues are raised by both political parties to distract and divert public attention from the profound issues -- like educating our youth, economic inequality and the war against radical Islamic terrorists -- that affect our daily lives and the American way of life. Imagine the consternation in Washington if both parties had to contend with a national electorate whose political affiliation had dramatically changed within a matter of weeks or months.

In both Republican and Democratic administrations, Congress has passed and sustained billions of dollars in royalty payments and subsidies to big oil companies; pushed through a corporate-written, consumer-crippling bankruptcy law; embraced the death of the estate tax; approved every free trade deal brought to a vote; and supported illegal immigration for the sake of cheap labor.

The party strategists and savants are telling us that fewer Americans will turn out to the polls than ever before, disgusted by a disgraced former congressman. But we don't have to wait for the midterm elections to begin to engage in our new political life.

There's something all of us could do that would have an immediate impact and send a powerful message to both corporation-dominated political parties and to our elected officials in Washington. Our so-called representatives in both parties have been working against the interests of the middle class for so long that they take our votes for granted, or they take advantage of the fact that a sizable number of us don't vote at all.

So what if a majority of us decided once and for all to walk into our town and city halls all over the country and change our party affiliation from Republican or Democrat to independent? What if that sizable number of us who don't vote at all decided to register as independents? For the first time in decades, working middle-class Americans might just get the attention of our elected officials in Washington.

Our middle class has suffered in silence for far too long, and it cannot afford to suffer or be silent much longer. Hardworking Americans have not spoken out about their increasingly marginalized role in this society, and as a consequence they've all but lost their voice.

Without that strong, clear and vibrant voice, all the major decisions about America and our future will be made by the elites of government, big business and the dominant special interests. Those elites treasure your silence, as it enables them to claim America's future for their own.
I sincerely hope that we will find the resolve to face these challenges to our way of life, and we do so soon. George Bernard Shaw said, "It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid."
I'm stupid enough to be absolutely sincere in the hope that middle-class America will awake soon and take action.

The Kang & Kodos Readers Brigade

2006-10-10T20:36:00.000-05:00

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/blackeyedpeas/myhumps.html

This is what is wrong with America today. Never in US history would someone sing a song devoted to their ass.

2006-10-06T10:40:00.000-05:00

Just as the re-election of W. in 2004 was a huge victory for al-Qaeda (remember that amateur-yet-effective bit of reverse psychology bin-Laden pulled in his pre-election video by seeming hostile towards Bush and indifferent towards Kerry?), here's one more indication that W. is playing into the hands of America's current world-historical enemy:

From How Al Qaeda views a long Iraq war:

"The most important thing is that the jihad continues with steadfastness ... indeed, prolonging the war is in our interest," says the writer, who goes by the name Atiyah. The letter, released last week, was recovered in the rubble of the Iraqi house where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, former leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, was killed by a US bomb in June.

Would Kinky Friedman have prevented 9/11?

2006-10-05T16:35:00.000-05:00

Daniel Shaviro apparently thinks so, as would have just about any other administration or potential administration you care to name (note the conspicuous absence of U.S. Grant on the list...).

Given the seriousness of the warnings, it is plausible that any of the above-named actual or hypothetical Administrations would have paid attention. Likewise, would any of them, if invading Iraq, have done absolutely no planning for the occupation whatsoever? And then made absolutely no effort to succeed, such as by bringing in competent staff rather than political hacks? Again, this is a wildly unique Administration. The resistance to making any inquiry into the al Qaeda threat is completely consistent, however, with how they've acted on other occasions before or since. They never pay attention to information that doesn't fit their biases, even when it is in their interest to do so.