A Level Gaze

2008-09-16T22:40:00.002-04:00

Carly Fiorina's Ego

Man, I love this. Carly can't admit that just about any egotistical blowhard can serve as a corporate figurehead, so she goes and trashes her boss:

Carly Fiorina, the former chairman of Hewlett Packard, and a senior economics advisor to McCain was asked by a local Missouri radio: "Do you think (Palin) has the experience to run a major company, like Hewlett Packard?"
"No, I don't," Fiorina replied, before adding. "But you know what? That's not what she's running for."
...
Asked later by the MSNBC news channel if she regretted what she had said about Palin's business acumen, Fiorina replied: "Well, I don't think John McCain could run a major corporation."

Running a corporation is orders of magnitude easier than running the United States government and managing our relations with each and every other country on the globe. CEOs can get away with gladhanding, yelling at managers, and occasionally making ill-advised mergers. They are taken seriously even after they are fired.

A president's daily decisions have the potential to affect millions of people, and he/she has final, unavoidable responsibility for all of them.

Regardless of what she believes, Carly's every breath for the last several months has been in the service of putting John McCain in the White House. Still, she just couldn't bring herself to say that an obviously-unqualified Sarah Palin is as good as she is. Better, even.

Even John McCain, king of the egotistical blowhards, doesn't pass muster. Fiorina's ego is a formidable thing.

2007-12-08T11:09:00.000-05:00

Sucker Trap

I had thought the Paulson Plan rather a poor deal for homeowners:

The basic outline is that loans are put into three segments:

1. Borrower appears (from fairly superficial analysis of the data, not any deep digging) to be eligible for a refinance. These borrowers are to be encouraged to refinance.
2. Borrower appears able to make payment at current rate, but appears (again, from fairly superficial analysis) to be unlikely to be able to refinance (generally because LTV is too high with FICO too low). These borrowers are eligible for the “fast-tracked” mod (the rate freeze) if they meet some FICO and payment increase tests.
3. Borrower appears unable to make payment even at current rate; these borrowers are presumed to be unable to refinance. They are not eligible for the “fast track” rate freeze mod; they may be eligible for some kind of work out, but it would have to be handled the old-fashioned fully-analyzed case-by-case way.

Which the inimitable Tanta further boils down to:

1. Not in default and default not imminent
2. Not in default and default reasonably foreseeable
3. In default or default imminent

As I mentioned in the previous post, the plan was specifically targeted to freeze the rates of only those homeowners who were at the very limit of their financial wherewithal, to squeeze the absolute last nickel out of them. As Tanta explained, there is a good reason for this: the securitization contracts specify that the terms of only those loans in imminent danger of default may be modified without (complex, expensive) renegotiation.

In an environment of decreasing prices, spiking inventory, and tighter credit, a provision that makes it barely possible for homeowners who bought at the top of the market to stay current on their mortgages is at best dubiously advantageous. Against the ability to stay in their homes would have to be weighed the fact that they would be overpaying for the privilege with the last of their financial resources. Unless their incomes increase significantly during the five years the Plan covers, they would be in much the same position in which they find themselves today: facing a significant payment increase they can't to afford. In the then-likely event of foreclosure, they would be left with nothing. If, instead, they just mailed the keys to their servicers now and walked away, they could then rent essentially the same houses for much less money, save the difference, and be in a position to make downpayments on rationally-priced homes when their credit ratings reset.

This looked like a bad enough deal considering what many thought to be the Plan's other major stipulation: that the loan-to-value ratio (LTV) of the first mortgage could be no less than 97%. As such, mortgagees facing hopeless levels of debt on their homes would be excluded from participation, and wouldn't be thereby tempted to prolong their impossible situations. However, as Mike Shedlock pointed out yesterday afternoon, that provision had been widely misread: the Plan covers only those with LTVs of more than 97%. That is, only those in the worst shape, many of them already owing more than the value of their homes, would "benefit".

In light of this clarifcation, the Plan can no longer be construed as possibly a good deal for certain people in very specific circumstances. It is, in Mish's very apt characterization, nothing more than a "sucker trap" that will ultimately ruin nearly every homeowner who participates in it.

2007-12-07T11:48:00.000-05:00

Felix Salmon Thinks I'm a Bad Person

Salmon Sez:

"If you're hoping to get a home [on] the cheap out of foreclosure, then maybe you're damaged."

My response:

Excuse me?

Real estate is overvalued. Those who, like me, did not buy for that reason will naturally wait for prices to come down before considering buying. Foreclosure is one means by which the the expected price reductions will be effected. That's how the market works. There is nothing normative about it.

I'm not going to buy a house until I find one that I like at a reasonable price. If that house is available as a result of foreclosure, so be it. *I* didn't cause the previous owners to buy more house than they could afford, nor did I scam them into signing an impossible mortgage. I strongly resent your characterization of those who hope to benefit from the coming rationalization of the real estate market as "damaged."

Just because I saw this train wreck coming and anticipate the availability on the market of decent housing I can actually afford doesn't make me some kind of ghoul. I might feel good that I haven't overextended myself, but that's my right. And it doesn't make me "damaged."

On the subject of what a good deal this plan is for everyone, I'd like to point out that the plan will give "relief" only to those who are already stretched to the limit. To the extent the plan is carried out, there will be that many more people stuck paying top dollar for a depreciating asset. Unless their incomes rise substantially, they won't be able to afford much else, and when the interest resets in five years, they'll be in the same boat they're in now: facing foreclosure.

Yeah, this is a great deal.

Update: Exclusive to ALG! Felix says he didn't mean it. See comments and judge for yourself.

2007-12-06T22:04:00.000-05:00

"Freedom requires slavery just as slavery requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with Master. Freedom and slavery endure together, or perish alone."

- ~~Mitt Romney~~

Also, read this.

2007-11-01T21:11:00.000-04:00

Ironically,

since 9/11 there hasn't been a dropoff in foreign tourism in New York City, where the attacks actually took place.

It's at places like Disney World, Graceland, and the Grand Canyon where they're getting the dirty looks.

2007-09-24T00:32:00.001-04:00

The Most Important Post You will Read This Year

Although this blog is basically moribund at this point, I feel an obligation to spread the word about this post by Karl Denninger by any and every means necessary. It is about the housing market, the credit markets, and the US economy in general.

Although I disagree fairly thoroughly with his politics, he is an extraordinarily sharp cookie when it comes to financial matters. And in this post, he cranks it up at least 3 notches.

An excerpt to whet your appetite:

If you think this housing market mess won't get that bad, you're very wrong. Well, at least the market says you're very wrong. Take a look at this; the CME now lists housing futures.... where you can place futures bets on the price of housing in major markets. Have a gander..... they don't see a bottom coming for years.

Now maybe you can tell me how we can have any "home equity withdrawals" to fund consumer spending if this view is correct? Oh, and by the way, these futures are of course priced in nominal dollars - add inflation and things get REALLY bad.

Ok, so what has really happened here up until now?

We need to identify this with some degree of confidence if we are going to figure out what's coming around the bend! Why? Well, I hear the rails singing and past experience tells me that this usually means you better get the hell off the tracks..... but am I right or wrong?

Let's postulate a few things from what we do know, because it has been published.

First, Bernanke pulled the safety pins out of the banking system when he waived the 10% affiliated capital limits. This was done for ONE bank back earlier this year, but just recently, he did it for four large primary banks. WHY? One can assume that their affiliated entities, which are the "trading" or "securities" arms of these organizations, were on the verge of collapse!

I urge you to read the whole post.

2007-05-31T23:25:00.000-04:00

These people have no credibility at all

The operational commander of US troops in Iraq on Thursday said officers are seeking local ceasefire deals with insurgents, after the deadliest month for American forces in two-and-a-half years.
Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, the number two US officer in Iraq, told reporters that about four-fifths of the militants currently fighting American forces were thought to be ready to join Iraq's political process.

Now who's getting close to terrorists?

This initiative reeks of desperation.

We're not going to offer the insurgents anything close to what they want in the longer term. They know it, and we know it, and in no case does any potential party to these agreements have the first reason to trust the other. Whatever 'agreements' we come to with the insurgents are going to be entirely of the moment, and will ultimately leave the situation on the ground unchanged.

After all the talk about how U.S. military might could "win" in Iraq, the very idea that the strategy going forward should be to engage with the people who have been shooting and (mostly) blowing us up is an insult. They're stabbing in the dark, and it is pathetically obvious.

2007-03-18T20:37:00.000-04:00

It's not quite that simple

Atrios puts forward the rudiments of his response to the mortgage crisis:

Essentially you need to make it possible for people to refinance, both by getting rid of prepayment penalties and strongly "encouraging" lenders who gave out a bunch of mortages they shouldn't have to renegotiate the terms in order to make repayment more realistic.

I know Mr. Black is an actual, like, economist, and I'm just some schmuck, but I think he's entering into some very dangerous territory with his prescriptions. We're only weeks away from this story jumping to the top of every newspaper, and politicians and rabble-rousers are going to be climbing all over one other with their "solutions" to this Grave and Serious Problem. Eschaton is very widely read (for good reason) by just about all of the lefty Establishment types. I'm worried they'll follow him up on it.

In my mind, I liken the situation to an auditorium full of people who have just discovered the exits are locked and there is a very powerful bomb in the room, which, for all the world, exactly resembles an M-80. Not a trifling problem, but a threat they think they can handle. In reality, it's going to completely blow out one of the auditorium's walls no matter what they do. If they don't do everything right, it will bring the whole building down on them.

If mortgagees are allowed to reduce their payments, a cascade of effects follows:

Payments to the investors who bought these loans will decrease. They will demand compensation. These costs will run to hundreds of billions of dollars, the bill ultimately falling on the U.S. taxpayer.
If interest rates on such a large part of the credit market are reduced to accomodate
mortgagees, the value of the dollar will decrease. Those holding dollar-denominated assets will see their values eroded. In addition to foreign central banks and investors, pension and mutual funds will be affected.
If the dollar goes down, inflation and interest rates will go up. In the long term, this will be good for manufacturing and exports, but the shorter term effects will be disastrous for the economy.
Financial markets price things according to the future. If they get much more than a whiff of any of this going down, prices of all kinds of assets are going to be marked to their future market value, and very, very quickly. The loss of value will be staggering.

Unfortunately, much of the above is probably unavoidable at this point, and throwing money at the problem will only postpone and worsen the inevitable.

I agree that people who were given loans they had no hope of repaying should get relief, but meddling in the markets, especially at a point where conditions are so far from equilibrium, is extremely dangerous.

A better approach would be to allow those (and only those) who were given clearly unrealistic mortgages to walk away from their obligations with no or significantly reduced penalties. This would include an exception in the bankruptcy laws (which need to be completely overhauled, anyway), and a reduction or elimination of the credit score penalty. It's not as though anyone will be trying to throw money at them anytime soon, anyway.

Such an strategy would split the hurt between the banks and those who bought the mortgages, and allow former homeowners to make a clean start without the mortgage monkey on their backs.

There is no silver bullet for this monster of a credit bubble; the contraction is going to work itself through the economy one way or another. Somebody is going to wind up holding the bag, and it shouldn't be the already overextended lower and middle classes. I violently object to saving the banks' bacon with what limited money consumers have left.

There are a lot of elected Democrats who carry the water of the financial industry, and this conflicts intrinsically with the interests of the vast majority of the American people. How the members of our new congressional majority react to the credit crisis will be a crucial litmus test of their commitment to our well-being.

In fairness to Atrios, he may know in his political savant's heart of hearts that some form of stupid populist tubthumpery is going to be adopted, and he's just trying to wear a path to the least harmful of them. In my naivete, I think it is important that we push for the best solution. He could very well be right.

2007-03-03T02:00:00.000-05:00

Mitt is a Buffoon

Josh, what I think you mean to say is that Mitt is feckless. He is unserious, a thoroughgoing opportunist.

People will sense this.

2006-10-12T21:43:00.000-04:00

Statistics Illustrated

Lindsay's got a great post up in which she lists some of the more prominent and ridiculous objections to the Johns Hopkins University-Lancet study that estimates that somewhere in the neighborhood of 655,000 Iraqis have died as the result of the American invasion.

I suspect some, maybe most, of the bloggers she enumerates know better, and are just trying to muddy the water to dilute the gut-wrenching horror they believe they helped precipitate. Many Americans, sadly, don't have much of a grasp of statistics, and, not wanting to believe their government has the blood of 655,000 men, women, and children on its hands, will fall for the argument that it's impossible to conclude such a thing from a mere 547 known deaths.

So, in the spirit of public service, here is an illustration I think will help:

Imagine that you are in charge of Best Buy's main warehouse. You're gearing up for the holiday season, and are receiving huge quantities of gadgets and gizmos. You have just received a million units of a hot new laptop that management thinks is going to be a huge seller this year. To keep expensive customer service and repairs to a minimum, you need to make sure the laptops aren't duds. This is especially important in the case of a new product with no track record.

You have 10,000 pallets of 100 laptops each. You instruct your crew to pick out 50 units, each from a different pallet, plug them in and boot them up. The guys extract the laptops, take them over to the testing area and get to work.

About 20 minutes later, one of the crew runs over to you, and says that smoke started coming out of one of the machines and that the guy who was working on it got a nasty shock. You think for a minute and ask him if the rest of the machines are running. "Yeah," he says, "the one that died was one of the first 10 we booted. It had been running about 15 minutes."

It could have been a fluke, right? Dud units are a fact of life in the electronics business. Besides, this is a lot of expensive inventory, and there would be no way to get more in time for the big rush. "Get everyone to a safe distance," you tell him, "and let's see what happens." Over the next half hour, three more laptops go up in smoke.

Well, you think, only 4 units died. Profit on these things is $200 each--$200,000,000 to the company's bottom line. Not to mention the hassle of shipping these things back to Taiwan and the fight to get reimbursed for the machines and for lost profits. Could take years. A headache like that could cost you your job.

On the other hand, though, if more than a small number of customers have these things die on them, it's going to be a customer service nightmare. That smoke has got to be toxic, and then there's the shocking. Both of those could expose the company to serious lawsuits. More than a few of those, and the hit to Best Buy's reputation would cost a lot more than $200 million.

So, how big a problem are you looking at?

You know that 4 out of 50 laptops were smokers. That's 8%. Out of a million, that's 80,000. If that many found their way into people's homes, Best Buy would go out of business. Hell, management would probably blame you. It's possible you could be charged with criminal negligence.

You're in charge. What do you do? Even if you don't know anything about statistics, it's obvious that the one thing you don't do is ship the laptops to the stores. And you know this from only four defective units.

The real number of smokers could be 80,000; it could be 140,000 or 3,000. It's even (extremely) remotely possible that it's only four. The more units you test, the closer you will get to knowing for sure. But, even from that first 50, there's enough to go on for you to singlehandedly put a huge dent in Best Buy's bottom line.

The moral here is that a lot can be inferred about populations from relatively small samples. The math that determines how reliably these samples predict larger populations is solid and has been exhaustively tested. It's still possible that something in the design of the survey caused the projection to be significantly off, but it isn't the math.

2006-10-05T22:38:00.000-04:00

Why Foleygate Won't Blow Over
(alt. Why The Press Corps Cares)

The children involved are rich. The predation didn't take place in Darfur, or at some trailer park off of I-59. The money crowd is just distraught that such a thing could happen to children. Possibly even their children.

Things like Abu Ghraib, they can blow over. This? Not so much.

2006-09-28T20:53:00.000-04:00

Disgusted

So they're really going to do it. Our 'elected' officials have agreed among themselves to revoke the Constitution.

If you doubt me, don't kid yourself: every constitutional protection can now be nullified with the application of a single magic word: terrorism. Since they don't have to actually provide evidence, the rules of evidence don't apply. Freedom of speech? Doesn't matter. Right to privacy? Doesn't apply. Right to an attorney? Does it matter? Bearing arms? It's obvious you were just going to use them for terror.

I can't believe the Democrats agreed not to filibuster in return for having their watery Habeas amendment considered. With a mere three days before the end of term that, with elections coming up, had no possibility of being extended, the Republicans would have had to let the bill drop. They had the power to derail the whole goddamn thing, and they completely pussed out.

Every time I think about the fact that the United States of America will soon be legally allowed to indefinitely imprison people without evidence, and with no recourse for the accused, I taste bile.

All of a sudden, idle talk about people leaving the country because of what the Republican leadership is doing has a real edge to it.

Update: the goddamn thing passed 65-34. I weep for my country.

Update 2: Avedon Carol has an illustration of the detainee bill's effects.

2006-09-16T12:32:00.000-04:00

Why McCain Won't Back Down

Updated - please see below

Last Sunday, Digby made a prediction about the three Republican senators standing in the way of Bush's drive to legalize torture:

My prediction: McCain, Graham and Warner sputter a little bit and then do the big el- foldo. The institutionalization of the American police state will proceed apace until Republicans are removed from power --- and probably beyond. This is the kind of genie that fights going back in the bottle every step of the way.

Now, I don't know whether Graham and Warner have the cojones to stand up to a White House in full roar with a crucial election coming up. In their case, Digby's probably right; they'd be happy with having seeded the notion that they're not Bush's puppets. At the end of the day they could say they had to fall into line for the good of the party. Maybe they even think they're doing their bit to show the public that all Republicans aren't gleeful sadists.

But there are two things that make me think McCain isn't going to budge (much). First, this guy has actually, himself, been tortured. Second, he's the Republican presidential front-runner for 2008, running on a long-cultivated image of integrity.

To a great extent, he owes his political career to his military background, especially the heroic suffering he endured in the course of serving his country. He has said many times that poor treatment of our captives could cause our soldiers to receive poor treatment in turn.

For the first time in five years, he has taken a public stand against the administration on a big issue, and I'll bet he put a lot of thought into doing so. Standing up against torture fits exactly into his political narrative, and is getting huge press. My guess is that McCain means to frame torture as a symbol of everything the administration has done wrong (and Congress signed off on) in the GWOT, and repudiate it all at one go.

If McCain were to cave at this point, any Democratic opponent would beat him senseless with his own spinelessness. By his own logic, he would be at best indifferent to torture of American servicemen in the future. Worst of all, he would be abandoning his most deeply held principle in favor of an evil he has looked in the eye and in the service of crass, political ass-covering. There's no way he would willingly go into 2008 with that kind of albatross around his neck.

Basically, it boils down to this: if he has any integrity, he won't knuckle under. If he is a rank opportunist, he can't knuckle under.

Update:

Of course Digby was right. Actually, it's worse than that--McCain didn't just fold, he helped push this thing through.

I waited to admit how utterly wrong I was in the vain hope that McCain would do something, anything, to make this better. When he voted against the Specter-Leahy amendment today, his capitulation was complete.

Words cannot convey the contempt I have for John McCain. He knew better, and he voted to destroy the country anyway. I wish I believed in hell.

2006-07-25T00:27:00.000-04:00

Continuum of Barbarity

Staying with Booman for a moment, I'd like to respond in very simple terms to Alan Dershowitz' argument that:

There is a vast difference — both moral and legal — between a 2-year-old who is killed by an enemy rocket and a 30-year-old civilian who has allowed his house to be used to store Katyusha rockets. Both are technically civilians, but the former is far more innocent than the latter. There is also a difference between a civilian who merely favors or even votes for a terrorist group and one who provides financial or other material support for terrorism.

As far as I remember, every Israeli citizen is obliged to give at least two years of service to the Israeli army. Where does that put them and their families on the "continuum of civilianity?" Does the esteemed Harvard Law professsor think that makes them fair(er) game? I doubt it.

2006-07-24T22:53:00.000-04:00

Assholes

From Gideon Levy in Ha'aretz (don't click just yet):

Collective punishment is illegitimate and it does not have a smidgeon of intelligence. Where will the inhabitants...run? With typical hardheartedness the military reporters say they were not "expelled" but that it was "recommended" they leave, for the benefit, of course, of those running for their lives. And what will this inhumane step lead to? Support for the Israeli government? Their enlistment as informants and collaborators for the Shin Bet? Can the miserable farmers...do anything about the Qassam rocket-launching cells?

...

Will the blackout...bring down the...government or cause the population to rally around it? And even if the...government falls...what will happen on the day after? These are questions for which nobody has any real answers. As usual here: Quiet, we're shooting. But this time we are not only shooting. We are bombing and shelling, darkening and destroying, imposing a siege...like the worst of terrorists and nobody breaks the silence to ask, what the hell for, and according to what right?

Levy was not talking about Lebanon. This piece appeared on July 3, nine days before the Hezbollah raid in which three Israeli soldiers were killed and two kidnapped, and which formed the pretext for the current Israeli action against Lebanon.

He was talking about Israeli actions against the residents of Gaza, which, coincidentally, have also been attributed to a kidnapping, that of Gilad Shalit by Palestinian militants on June 25. The response to the kidnapping included forcing 20,000 people from their homes, cutting off the electricity to another 750,000, taking a quarter of the Palestinian parliament into custody, and Israeli fighters buzzing the Syrian (!?) presidential palace.

Although heavy-handed, at least there was some kind of rationale behind these actions: for no reason, one of their own had been taken from them, and they were going to do whatever it took to get him back. Fair enough, no?

No:

The legitimate basis for the IDF's operation was stripped away the moment it began. It's no accident that nobody mentions the day before the attack on the Kerem Shalom fort, when the IDF kidnapped two civilians, a doctor and his brother, from their home in Gaza. The difference between us and them? We kidnapped civilians and they captured a soldier, we are a state and they are a terror organization. How ridiculously pathetic Amos Gilad sounds when he says that the capture of Shalit was "illegitimate and illegal," unlike when the IDF grabs civilians from their homes. How can a senior official in the defense ministry claim that "the head of the snake" is in Damascus, when the IDF uses the exact same methods?

Shalit's freedom could have been secured by the tried and true expedient of a prisoner exchange. The Gazans would not have had to be made to suffer (more), Hezbollah would not have been given the pretext to go on their kidnapping raid, and Lebanon would not now lay in ruins, 500,000 of her citizens refugees.

Israel does what Israel wants. But this time it should be known its pathetic fig leaf of a justification isn't worth the shit remaining in Ariel Sharon's decaying, war criminal bowels.

Left-wing blogger, signing off.

2006-07-12T22:03:00.000-04:00

In Defense of Silence

Josh Marshall linked tonight to a post by ennis at Sepia Mutiny that wondered why American bloggers had had so little to say about the terrorist bombings in Mumbai.

ennis wrote:

While trying to deal with the tragedy in Mumbai, I have been wondering what the coverage of the story tells us about ourselves.

I was not surprised by MSM coverage in America: poor in local papers, better in papers with a large desi population or those with an international audience. I was pleased to hear that CNN and CNBC had decent cable news coverage, perhaps because they’re well established in India.

What has baffled me, however, is the relative silence from the world of blogs. The blogosphere is supposed to be the cutting edge, far more advanced than the MSM, yet they’re spending less time on the story.

He goes on to detail what he believes to be the paucity of coverage the story has received in the larger blogs, and relates an email exchange he had with two of them:
I emailed the following question to three significant political bloggers:

No opinion on the Mumbai bombings?

I’m surprised. Many more have died than did in London a year ago, and the death toll is currently just a little under the death toll from Madrid. Yet the blogosphere is largely quiet. Why?

Here are the two responses I received:

The blogosphere tends to be relatively quiet on straight news like this, since it doesn’t provide much of a vehicle for opinion mongering. And in this case, it appears (so far) to be related to India-Pakistan tensions, rather than the broader Islamist movement. I suspect most Americans, at any rate, find that sort of uninteresting. [Kevin Drum]

I can’t speak for anyone else. But in my case often something of great consequence or human tragedy happens, but it’s not really clear that I have anything to add. Sometimes that gets read as lack of interest or concern. But it’s not. [Anonymous political blogger]

Although I hadn't been asked, I decided to give the answer a shot myself in comments:

I think the answer to your question is that American bloggers just don't know enough about the situation in India/Pakistan to have an informed opinion. Take, for example, "The Pakistani government supports Muslim separatists in Kashmir". I see statements to this effect scattered through the news coverage I read, but I don't have any way of verifying it. I don't know the reliability of the sources, the evidence upon which such a pronouncement is made, or enough about the history of the relationship to form any kind of solid idea of what is truly meant. It may be the case that Musharraf is arming, training, advising, and inciting the militants, but I have no real knowledge about it. I don't know how popular the separatists' cause and actions are in Pakistan. I don't know to what degree Musharraf's political support depends on his backing them. All I know is that the tensions between India and Pakistan have of late revolved largely around Kashmir. And, for all I know, it could be serving as a proxy for resentments dating back to 1947, the Raj, or before.

So, beyond "That's terrible", what am I to say about the Mumbai bomings? [sic]

I recently made an attempt to up my knowledge of affairs in South Asia by reading local, English-language newspapers and websites. For my trouble, I was thoroughly barraged with a plethora of people and acronyms of which I could make very little sense, that came from publications whose leanings I didn't know and from journalists whose reputations were a blank to me. I kept it up for a few weeks before giving up, no better informed than when I started.

Even with regard to Iraq, about which I've read literally thousands of stories from all manner of sources, there is very little I can say with any confidence, and almost all of that relates directly to US involvement there. I know we blew the hell out of Fallujia, that there are rival claims to Kirkuk, and that Sadr is the son of an eminent Shi'a imam. Oh, and that we had no business invading the country.

If you look at what is written in the American blogosphere about Iraq, you'll find that nearly all of it pertains to our having invaded, and the geopolitical implications that could arise therefrom. I daresay most of the latter is ill-founded (excepting, of course what Juan Cole has to say).

The upshot, from a long-lapsed blogger: Please don't construe the fact we haven't written much about the Mumbai bombings as disregard or disrespect. We just don't have anything intelligent to say about the subject, other than to repeat what we've read, heard, and seen from mainstream news outlets.

2006-03-13T13:41:00.000-05:00

Molly's Manifesto

I agree with all of this 100%:

Mah fellow progressives, now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of the party. I don’t know about you, but I have had it with the D.C. Democrats, had it with the DLC Democrats, had it with every calculating, equivocating, triangulating, straddling, hair-splitting son of a bitch up there, and that includes Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I will not be supporting Senator Clinton because: a) she has no clear stand on the war and b) Terri Schiavo and flag-burning are not issues where you reach out to the other side and try to split the difference. You want to talk about lowering abortion rates through cooperation on sex education and contraception, fine, but don’t jack with stuff that is pure rightwing firewater.

I can’t see a damn soul in D.C. except Russ Feingold who is even worth considering for President. The rest of them seem to me so poisonously in hock to this system of legalized bribery they can’t even see straight.

***

Every Democrat I talk to is appalled at the sheer gutlessness and spinelessness of the Democratic performance. The party is still cringing at the thought of being called, ooh-ooh, “unpatriotic” by a bunch of rightwingers.

Take “unpatriotic” and shove it. How dare they do this to our country? “Unpatriotic”? These people have ruined the American military! Not to mention the economy, the middle class, and our reputation in the world. Everything they touch turns to dirt, including Medicare prescription drugs and hurricane relief.

This is not a time for a candidate who will offend no one; it is time for a candidate who takes clear stands and kicks ass.

(Like Paul Hackett, maybe? But I digress.)

Please go and read the whole thing. It is everything the Democrats should be doing, condensed to 199 proof. Then please send the link to your friends, post it on your blogs, and do whatever it takes to get her ideas wider circulation.

2006-02-22T11:44:00.001-05:00

They Honestly Don't Care About Security

This morning, I heard a report on NPR (audio only) that made me think I might have been unfair to the Bush Administration in last night's post on foreign control of port security. The upshot of the report: the port managers are just "luggage handlers"; the Coast Guard and US Customs Service take care of all security. So, what would be the difference if a foreign company did the heavy lifting instead of an American one?

Fortunately Julia was around to set me straight:

Just to top off the sundae with a great big cherry, amongst the ports that Dubai would be taking over operations in are multiple C-TPAT ports. C-TPAT is an innovative program developed by the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11 to allow various companies involved in shipping, including port managers, to certify their own safety and avoid a good deal of even the current low percentage of materials shipped currently searched by Customs agents.

In her earlier post on the subject, Julia shows what her research on the subject turned up. Strangely, the Customs and Border Patrol C-TPAT fact sheet she linked to seems to have disappeared. The good news is that she was able to grab some of the highlights before it did:

* C-TPAT is a joint government-business initiative to build cooperative relationships that strengthen overall supply chain and border security.

* C-TPAT recognizes that Customs can provide the highest level of security only through close cooperation with the ultimate owners of the supply chain, importers, carriers, brokers, warehouse operators and manufacturers.

* Through this initiative, Customs is asking businesses to ensure the integrity of their security practices and communicate their security guidelines to their business partners within the supply chain.

And what are the benefits of the C-TPAT program?

* A reduced number of inspections (reduced border times)

* An assigned account manager (if one is not already assigned)

* Access to the C-TPAT membership list

* Eligibility for account-based processes (bimonthly/monthly payments, e. g.)

* An emphasis on self-policing, not Customs verifications

(emphasis added)

In short: the Bush Administration made an effort to shift more responsibility for port security to the private companies that manage ports and away from the Customs Service. If the administration had its way, the government of Dubai (along with those of China and Denmark) would have a great deal of responsibility for the security of these ports. At a time when we should be tightening security, our president is telling private port management companies that they should police themselves.

I feel compelled to offer my apologies to Brad DeLong for failing to remember his immortal axiom:

The Bush administration is not only worse than you imagine even after taking account of the fact that it is worse than you imagine, it is worse than you can conceivably imagine[.]

2006-02-21T22:54:00.000-05:00

If You Want a Job Done Right, Do It Yourself

I've listened enough to people saying that the UAE deal for the ports is bad because it involves Arabs. Please stop, it's not a good argument. There are Arabs with whom we have problems, but blanket statements like this are crap, even if 90% of the American public agrees with you. Farming out our port security would be a bad idea if we were hiring an army of Unitarian Terminator clones from Prince Edward Island. Security must come from the government. Failure to recognize this is what's wrong with this plan, and that's all that's wrong with it.

The port issue has nothing to do with the UAE. It has nothing to do with their being Arabs. It has nothing to do with their alleged ties to terrorists or terrorism. It has to do with the fact that They Are Not Us. I would feel the same way if we were entrusting the security of our ports to the English or the Japanese or the French, or any private American company, for that matter.

Why? Because the safety of our country is just not as important to any of them as it is (or should be) to the United States Government.

I don't care what Cheney and Rumsfeld tell you, security is the government's job, period. It's why governments exist in the first place. No nation that depended on mercenaries for protection has ever survived for long, and with good reason. However well the hired guns are paid, eventually they will decide to take over themselves, melt away from a threat they would rather not face, or just take the money and do a half-assed job. They simply cannot care enough. When it's the government's job, it's either protect the nation or be obliterated. That's the kind of motivation you want in your protectors, and nothing less is acceptable.

After the 9/11 attacks, the government hired and trained airport security personnel for exactly this reason. Private companies were simply not reliable enough.

I'm aware that the security of the ports in question is currently in the hands of a British company, and I'm not ok with that either. This might be the one place where I could see myself on the same page as the Bush Administration: we're in a post-9/11 world, in which our security, especially at the points at which we make the most contact with the rest of the world, has become deadly serious. The time for handing off our responsibilities to a company with the words "Steam Navigation" in its name has long since passed.

Entrusting the safety of our ports to a foreign entity might, I repeat, might, be acceptable if we were manifestly incapable of doing the job ourselves. But for a country that never tires of styling itself as the world's lone superpower, the very idea is a sick joke.

The fact that George W. Bush, after being president for over five years, is threatening to use his first veto on this issue is just icing on the cake. Everything he has touched has been a disaster. If he's stamping his feet and screeching about it, you know it's got to be a doozy.

2006-02-14T08:27:00.000-05:00

Dammit, Hackett!

(updated)

Get back in the race, you wuss!

You were going to take on the Republican and media establishments, and you cave to the craven, corporate-money Democratic leadership? What were they going to do, whine you to death?

After all that tough talk, you're going to go out complaining?

We need someone tough, and I'm afraid you're it. I thought you were about dragging politics out of the back rooms and putting real democracy front and center. You know, representing the people?

I believed in you, man. The nation needs you. You were willing to put your life on the line for your country. You can handle a Senate race.

p.s. Memo to Democratic Party leadership:

Dear Sirs;

Fuck You.

Sincerely,
David

UPDATE:

It seems the Law of Conservation of One Single, Solitary, Lonely Democrat Who Will Stand Up and Speak Truth and Sound Like He or She Means It has been invoked:

In what could be one of the most interesting campaigns for the U.S. House in 2006, The BRAD BLOG can now reveal that computer programmer turned electronic vote-rigging software whistleblower Clint Curtis is officially planning a run for the U.S. Congressional seat in Florida's 24th District.

The 24th Congressional District seat is currently occupied by Rep. Tom Feeney, the very man who Curtis has alleged once asked him to create a vote-rigging software prototype program back when both men worked for the software firm Yang Enterprises, Inc. (YEI) in Oviedo, Florida.

***

Curtis, formerly a "life-long Republican," became a self-described "Conservative Democrat" after his various disturbing dealings with Feeney and friends. He will be making his first public announcement about his intentions to form an exploratory campaign at a local Democratic party gathering at the Cocoa Civic Center in Brevard County this Wednesday evening.

***

Curtis who, unlike both Michaud and Feeney, has never participated in a political campaign before, will have his work cut out for him. But he's faced more daunting -- and terrifying -- fights in the past. His tireless years-long effort to hold accountable those who he sees as having committed wrong-doing against this country has not come at a small cost. But that struggle may serve him well in his "good vs. evil battle."

Curtis explains that he feels he has little choice at this point but to enter the battle, and in discussing it, he expresses a sentiment heard all too rarely from Democrats these days: "I am now convinced that fearing a loss is not a valid reason for never entering the fight."

Turkee can be sent here.

2006-02-13T13:41:00.000-05:00

A Leaderless Cult?

(updated, please see below)

As you already know, this post by Glenn Greenwald is a must-read, a powerful, by-the-numbers proof of what many of us have suspected for a long time: there is nothing more to Bush Republicans/conservatives than politics.

Glenn makes his point in a very clever and insightful way, through examples of how conservatives identify their enemies. Conservatives are slippery, nearly impossible to pin down and define. By turns they can be compassionate and torturers, government-drowners and pork-barrelers. Glenn's approach hits them where they haven't yet thought to camouflage themselves, and succeeds brilliantly.

I want to leave the personal issues to the side and examine a few of the substantive issues raised (unintentionally) by Alexandra’s post. It used to be the case that in order to be considered a "liberal" or someone "of the Left," one had to actually ascribe to liberal views on the important policy issues of the day – social spending, abortion, the death penalty, affirmative action, immigration, "judicial activism," hate speech laws, gay rights, utopian foreign policies, etc. etc. These days, to be a "liberal," such views are no longer necessary.

Now, in order to be considered a "liberal," only one thing is required – a failure to pledge blind loyalty to George W. Bush. The minute one criticizes him is the minute that one becomes a "liberal," regardless of the ground on which the criticism is based. And the more one criticizes him, by definition, the more "liberal" one is. Whether one is a "liberal" -- or, for that matter, a "conservative" -- is now no longer a function of one’s actual political views, but is a function purely of one’s personal loyalty to George Bush.

I mean to take nothing away from the brilliance of this post, but I think one point could use a bit of clarification. It's not about George W. Bush. I mean, it is now--he's the flag they rally 'round today--but it wasn't always thus. The same movement was in evidence 13 years ago, and it was aimed at Bill Clinton. There was no single charismatic leader at the center of the movement then, and I don't believe there is one now.

Or, if there is, it isn't George W. Bush.

I know that's not the point Glenn was trying to make, and, in what I hope is fairness to him, I don't think he intended to address it. I just want to help to propagate the idea that it is not Bush we're against, but the movement of which he's currently the figurehead.

UPDATE:

Of course, Glenn already knew this:

I don't believe that one instance of independent thought in five years proves or disproves much of anything. The fact that people cling tenaciously to [conservative opposition to the Miers nomination] as proof that there are residual flickers of independent thought left among Bush followers says alot in itself. I think and have argued that Bush followers are excessively loyal to their leader, not that they've been lobotomized into mind-controlled zombies of the type one sees in a science-fiction film.

But I will say this: one will see criticism of Bush when he doesn't defend the movement with sufficient vigor or extremity. If they perceive that the White House isn't attacking liberals with sufficient fervor, or that they're backing down and compromising too readily, they will urge a more resolute posture on behalf of themovement. That's all Harriet Miers was. They were unconvinced that she would be as reliably loyal as Bush thought she would be, and they wanted someone more reliable and dependable to the cause.

(linked from a quote of his own comment on a previous post)

It's pretty clear that Bush is the very antithesis of a movement leader: as soon as he deviates from the line taken by other people, he loses his legitimacy. He cannot think for himself, or take any substantive initiative. The movement leads him.

It should also be noted that apostasies committed against core conservative principles don't seem to faze the movement's constituents. Bush has increased the size of the Federal government, increased the defecit, reduced the autonomy of the states, taken measures to limit personal privacy, and even caused income taxes to rise by failing to reform the AMT. The chairman of the RNC is widely alleged to be a gay man, and the Vice President's daughter is a lesbian. About the only conservative taboos he hasn't broken pertain to gun control and abortion, neither of which he has been willing to be caught denouncing on the record.

These are the principles that animate voters, the hallowed "base" toward which all of Bush's actions are supposedly directed. If in practice he actually does little to advance their interests, we must conclude that said interests have nothing to do with the movement. The movement works for its own ends, and the base is seen as a bunch of useful idiots whose votes can be bought with empty, intolerant rhetoric and junior membership cards.

2006-02-09T13:13:00.000-05:00

Be Still, My Heart

Via Atrios, comes this reminder that true red-blooded Americans still exist:

It’s August 2, Election Day, and the lanky, blond, 43-year-old Marine has taken up position outside the polling place in Loveland, a burg on the outskirts of Cincinnati, flashing his toothy smile for the early risers. Hackett is dressed smartly in a blue shirt and striped pastel tie. His khaki pants hang loosely from his wiry, 180-pound frame.

“That’s low politics, punk!” a heavy-set man sneers as he marches toward the poll.
Hackett wheels around. “Pardon me?”
“You know, that radio ad that says, ‘You don’t know Schmidt.’” He’s talking about one of Hackett’s attack ads against Republican Jean Schmidt. The man spews a stream of epithets, and Hackett lets out a crybaby whimper: “Waaaaaaa!”
“What’s that, punk?” the big man growls.

A TV crew is setting up nearby, but Hackett doesn’t seem to care. “What’s your fuckin’ problem?” the candidate snaps. “You got something to say to me? Bring it on!” Hackett, all 6 feet 2 inches of him, is nose to nose with the heckler. “Problem?” he taunts. The man turns around and storms away.

“These guys in the Republican Party adopted this tough-guy language,” Hackett tells me, still steamed, an hour later. “They’re bullies. They’re offended when somebody takes a swing back at them.”

Wow, a Democrat who 1) believes something, 2) stands up for it, and 3) doesn't take any crap. This guy makes Dean look like Lieberman.

“I said it, I meant it, I stand by it,” he said when I asked if he regretted any of his comments. “Bush is a chicken hawk, okay? Tough shit.” As for the SOB barb, Bush “talks the tough talk. He should appreciate that.”

Every time I hear him say something like this, forceful and with conviction, I send him another $20. I hope 2006 is an expensive year. You too can help show America that being a Democrat doesn't mean you don't stand for anything.

2006-01-31T22:31:00.000-05:00

Can't we just let bygones be bygones?

Update: transcript now available, some additional material.

Toward the beginning of the SOTU, when Bush discussed the war, he obliquely referenced his critics, then dismissed them as useless. To paraphrase: "We've got a war to win. How on earth can you waste our precious time and energy talking about how we got here? Support the troops!"

Here's the bit that rattled my cage:

In the coming year, I will continue to reach out and seek your good advice. Yet there is a difference between responsible criticism that aims for success and defeatism that refuses to acknowledge anything but failure.

(APPLAUSE)

Hindsight alone is not wisdom. And second-guessing is not a strategy.

A sudden withdrawal of our forces from Iraq would abandon our Iraqi allies to death and prison, would put men like bin Laden and Zarqawi in charge of a strategic country and show that a pledge from America means little.

(APPLAUSE)

With so much in the balance, those of us in public office have a duty to speak with candor.

Members of Congress, however we feel about the decisions and debates of the past, our nation has only one option: We must keep our word, defeat our enemies and stand behind the American military in its vital mission.

First of all, note the rhetorical sleight-of-sledgehammer: any criticism = call for immediate withdrawal from Iraq. No, no, no. Not true. Stop saying that. Some people are actually capable of believing both that the administration should be held accountable for its actions and that we need to work out the best possible plan for our involvement in Iraq, all while maintaining the utmost reverence for the men and women who daily risk our lives on our behalf.

Bush has a lot to answer for. A majority of Americans "believe [Bush's] administration deliberately misled the public about Iraq's purported weapons program before the U.S. invasion in 2003" according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released last week. The stark, willful illegality of the NSA wiretaps grows more obvious by the day. We are holding prisoners with neither due process nor the protections of prisoner of war status. We torture many of them, and cause many others to be tortured. We've bombed and shot an untold number of civilians. We don't have proper equipment for our troops, many of whom are in harm's way long beyond the term of service to which they agreed. I could go on.

The assertion that even so much as a Congressional investigation into whether we were misled into war would meaningfully detract from our efforts in Iraq is absurd. It is more absurd coming from the head of an administration that insists that our armed forces and intelligence services are more than equal to the challenge in Iraq. It is still more absurd coming from the head of an administration that insists that the war does not meaningfully impair our ability to respond to serious security threats elsewhere in the world. It is especially absurd coming from a man who promised to bring accountability back to the executive branch on the back of the movement that impeached his predecessor over a blowjob.

I've got news for the administration: If we frog-marched the lot of you out of office and into Leavenworth for life, we'd still be able to finish the job in Iraq. Hell, we'd probably do a better job without you.

Imagine if the man who caused a huge toxic chemical spill through arrogant negligence said something like, "Look, we can go round and round about why this happened, but the fact is, we've got a lot of bodies to bury, and a lot of repairs to make. Don't you understand how serious this is?"

That's about as dumbfounded as I feel right now.

2006-01-17T21:45:00.000-05:00

Deserving of Wider Recognition

Left Coast Breakdown is a terrific blog. Go and read and laugh and snark and gnash.

2006-01-16T12:23:00.000-05:00

Why Feinstein Caved

Athenae is pissed. Senator Diane Feinstein, arguably one of the biggest liberals in national politics, seems to have dropped any meaningful opposition to Judge Samuel Alito's confirmation to the Supreme Court.

I do not see a likelihood of a filibuster," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif. "This might be a man I disagree with, but it doesn't mean he shouldn't be on the court.

Athenae writes:

ACTUALLY THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT IT MEANS, YOU USELESS PLASTIC HOOD ORNAMENT. You're a member of Congress. You're confirming him. If you disagree with the way he'd do his job, that's ground for denying it to him. Will somebody please get this woman a copy of that musty old document that begins "We the people ..." I think the salient points have slipped her mind.

Jesus tits. Is there anybody out there who can even IMAGINE a Republican saying this? Who can even imagine Republicans having to hunt around for REASON not to confirm a Democratic nominee? Who can even imagine President Kerry's nominee getting this far with a Republican Congress? They beat 'er bloody and leave her behind the Capitol dumpster, that's what they'd do to a Kerry nominee. Yet here we sit, saying we need a really good reason to oppose Alito.

Given the Democrats' spinelessness on the big issues of late, it is actually not all that surprising to hear them express such mushy, directionless acquiescence to the will of the right wing. In Feinstein's case, however, it marks a sea change. Last Monday, she was interviewed on Fox News:

HUME: Right, but would you consider someone who thought that Roe v. Wade was improperly decided by the court? Does that place that person outside the mainstream, in your view?

FEINSTEIN: Well, it depends. In my view, it does, and I'll tell you why. And that is because Roe could have been overturned 38 times. Precedent has been established. Women all over America have come to depend on it. An overwhelming majority of people support it.

Therefore, because of the lapse of time, more than 30 years, because of the precedential values attached to it, I think it would be for many of us a very difficult thing to see somebody who you knew was going to overthrow Roe at this point in time. And I'm old enough to know what it was like back when abortion was illegal. I know what it's like to see young women commit suicide. I know what it's like to see them go to Tijuana. And I don't want to go back to those days.

So this is a very powerful question for me. And I represent those women out there. And this is a huge, huge population, and I...

HUME: So is that filibuster material for you?

FEINSTEIN: If I believed he was going to go in there and overthrow Roe, the question is most likely yes.

Feinstein clearly knows what the stakes are. I think she also knows that rank-and-file Democrats would form a solid wall behind anyone who would take dramatic, decisive action to protect women's right to abortion. I think she might even be aware that a fight specifically over this issue could be hugely beneficial to the Democrats, by galvanizing the base and splitting moderate Republicans from the right wing.

So what happened? On one hand, I don't believe the Republican leadership has any real intention of actually overturning Roe v. Wade, the issue that provides them with an army of fanatical footsoldiers, year in and year out. Perhaps someone has made the rounds and communicated this to the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, something along the lines of "Alito can't be seen as soft on Roe, or he'll get the Miers treatment. But he doesn't want to overturn it any more than you do." Having removed the big, electrifying issue from the equation, perhaps Feinstein didn't think the other issues were worth going to the wall over.

On the other hand, none of that should matter. What matters is what is happening where democracy takes place, in the public arena. Alito has said precisely nothing about any of the big issues. Even if every Democrat knows for a fact that Roe is in no jeopardy whatsoever, his refusal to meaningfully address the issue constitutes a political gimme, which everyone, left and right, expected them to exploit.

Don't our elected representatives have even one principle left? If not, don't they at least want to win?

2006-01-13T10:49:00.000-05:00

Food For Thought

This imagined conversation between George W. Bush and William Kristol over at Gotham Image takes on Bush from an interesting and unexpected angle, and carries it off beautifully. It's on the long side, but definitely worth a read.

2006-01-11T23:23:00.000-05:00

Closet Bigot

A heads-up to Lindsay Graham. If you're a closet bigot, the idea is that nobody knows you're a bigot. You hide the fact that you're a bigot. People who know you are unaware of the fact. When you are asked if you're a bigot, you deny it. If you were a member of a bigoted organization, you don't advertise the fact. Asking the question of an actual closeted bigot will get you a "no" by definition.

Just trying to help out.

2005-12-20T23:02:00.000-05:00

I Command You!

Go some money to digby.

He's worth it.

2005-12-19T08:03:00.000-05:00

The President Speaks:

It is true that Saddam Hussein had a history of pursuing and using weapons of mass destruction. It is true that he systematically concealed those programs, and blocked the work of UN weapons inspectors. It is true that many nations believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. And as your President, I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq.

Yet it was right to remove Saddam Hussein from power. He was given an ultimatum – and he made his choice for war. And the result of that war was to rid the world of a murderous dictator who menaced his people, invaded his neighbors, and declared America to be his enemy. Saddam Hussein, captured and jailed, is still the same raging tyrant – only now without a throne. His power to harm a single man, woman, or child is gone forever. And the world is better for it.

(Emphasis added)

Shorter GWB: "I'm responsible for the war. He started it."

2005-12-14T02:09:00.000-05:00

Public Service Announcement

Please remember Athenae for next year's Koufax Awards for this post. Thank you.

2005-12-14T00:21:00.000-05:00

Hacktacular Harris

Julia makes a very nice catch relating to the John Harris-Dan Froomkin contretemps here. It seems that the "conservative blogger" Harris used as a springboard to start this whole thing was the webmaster of the '04 Bush-Cheney campaign website.

It's interesting to note that Harris' attack is woefully short on specifics, that is, he doesn't so much have a problem with specific things Froomkin said in his column, as with the column itself. It's possible, given that White House Briefing functions largely as an aggregator of reporting and commentary about the administration, there could have been a problem with the links and citations rather than with the original content. But Harris doesn't cite anything concrete at all, not even articles or subjects that Froomkin didn't mention. All he does is wave the term "liberal" around threateningly, as though one column's having such a bias were an unpardonable offense in the paper that publishes George Will and Bob Novak.

Even as I watch the politics editor of the Washington Post openly carrying water for the Bush administration, I comfort myself with the knowledge that Dan Froomkin has nothing to worry about. If the Post were to try to make his life miserable, he could turn around and be a top-5 blogger within a week, just by doing what he's done all along. He'd probably make more money to boot.

2005-11-24T23:44:00.000-05:00

You Heard it Here First

or, Holy Crap, I Was Right!

Josh Marshall reports that disgraced FEMA head Michael Brown has plans to go into the emergency management consultancy racket.

Actually, from the quote it seems that Brown's actual angle may be providing not generic emergency response consulting services but rather consulting services to incompetents who've been saddled with emergency preparedness responsibility and fear becoming national laughing stocks when they turn mid-size disasters in to full-on catastrophes through gross mismanagement.

Back on 9/13, while musing on "Brown's Future," I warned of this very possibility.

He could have a come-to-Jesus moment in which he sees the error of his ways and becomes a motivational speaker for those afraid of making catastrophic errors. Assuming neither he nor his audience has any self-respect, that is.

That's pretty dead-on, except I don't think Jesus had anything to do with it.

Just the latest installment of that eerie prescience that keeps you coming back to A Level Gaze again and again.

2005-11-17T23:53:00.000-05:00

This is powerful stuff.

Murtha tells it exactly like it is. Oh, and he's mad.

It's been a while since we've heard anyone of any stature speak truth to power*, and this is a damned refreshing change.

*Excepting Robert Byrd, to whom no one listens.

2005-11-08T15:03:00.000-05:00

Bush's "Enemies ~~List~~ Database: How Illegal Is it?

From Capitol Hill Blue, this lovely little item:

Spurred by paranoia and aided by the USA Patriot Act, the Bush Administration has compiled dossiers on more than 10,000 Americans it considers political enemies and uses those files to wage war on those who disagree with its policies.

***

"How is that you think Karl (Rove) and Scooter (Libby) were able to disseminate so much information on Joe Wilson and his wife,” says one White House aide. “They didn’t have that information by accident. They had it because they have files on those who might hurt them.”

***

Those on the list include former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and his wife, former covert CIA operative Valarie Plame, along with filmmaker and administration critic Michael Moore, Senators like California’s Barbara Boxer, media figures like liberal writer Joe Conason and left-wing bloggers like Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (the Daily Kos).

***

The FBI issues some 30,000 national security letters a year to employers, credit bureaus, banks, travel agencies and other sources of information on American citizens. The Patriot Act also forbids anyone receiving such a letter to reveal they have passed on information to the federal government.

“Those letters helped us build files quickly on those we needed to know more about,” says a former White House aide.

***

The database of political enemies of the Bush administration is not maintained on White House computers and is located on a privately-owned computer offsite, but can be accessed remotely by a select list of senior aides, including Rove. The offsite location allowed the database to escape detection by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald during his investigation of the Valerie Plame leak. The database is funded by private donations from Bush political backers and does not appear on the White House budget or Federal Election Commission campaign reports.

Bushco had the good sense not to keep its enemies database on government-owned hardware. The article notes, however, that it "can be accessed remotely by a select list of senior aides, including Rove."

Obviously, maintaining such a list, unrelated to any official and legitimate executive-branch business, on government owned computers would be a misuse of resources. How would such use differ from the labor put in by these government employees while using the database remotely, possibly via government-owned computers? As you may remember from the Al Gore "no controlling legal authority" brouhaha, using government resources for political purposes is a no-no. Additionally, using federal law enforcement for purposes unrelated to, er, enforcing the law, is also a no-no.

The article mentions Joe Wilson and his wife in connection to the database, which brings to mind more, possibly much more important (and certainly more timely) questions:

1. Was classified information, such as Valerie Plame's employment history, sent to this private server?

2. Was the information contained there accessible to people without sufficient security clearances?

3. If so, are those who transferred the information from within the government to this server, and those who knowingly compiled and/or formatted this information for just such a purpose, presumed to be guilty of leaking the information? Or could they be accused only of negligence with classified information?

4. Does this "private server strategy" constitute obstruction of justice, insofar as it allowed government officials to conceal their activities (and, possibly, communications) relating to Wilson and Plame, possibly up to and including the use of federal law enforcement to obtain information about persons not under suspicion of illegal activities?

Just a little food for thought.

2005-10-30T12:14:00.000-05:00

Brooks: This Is All Libby's Fault

Thank God it wasn't cancer

"Senator Frank Lautenberg assented that Rove was guilty of treason. Howard Dean talked about a "huge cover-up." Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York said: "The C.I.A. leak issue is only the tip of the iceberg. This is looking increasingly like a White House conspiracy aimed at misleading our country into war.

"There is mounting evidence," Nadler continued, "that there may have been a well-orchestrated effort by the president, the vice president and other top White House officials to lie to Congress in order to get its support for the Iraq war."

One may wish it, but that doesn't make it so. We do know that the White House lied about who was involved in calling reporters. But as for traitorous behavior, huge cover-ups and well-orchestrated conspiracies - that's swamp gas.

As it turned out, Fitzgerald's careful and forceful presentation of the evidence was but a brief respite from the tide of hysterical accusations. Fitzgerald may have pointed out that this case is not about supporting or opposing the war; it's about possible perjury and obstruction of justice. But the Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid immediately ran out with some amorphous argument intended to show that this indictment indeed is all about the war. Ted Kennedy, likening Fitzgerald's findings to Watergate, insisted, "This is far more than an indictment of an individual," before casting his net far and wide. And Howard Dean, who doesn't fly off the handle but lives off it, grandly asserted that Fitzgerald's findings indicate that "a group of senior White House officials" ignored the rule of law.

The question is, why are these people so compulsively overheated? One of the president's top advisers is indicted on serious charges. Why are they incapable of leaving it at that? Why do they have to slather on wild, unsupported charges that do little more than make them look unhinged?"

Jesus, David, you're obtuse. Why can't we leave it at that? Why don't we start by doing the obvious: asking why Libby lied? It didn't happen in a vaccuum, you know. Working backwards, Libby was a conduit for the information that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent who got Joe Wilson sent to Africa. Why was that relevant? It wasn't, really, but the leak was designed to undercut Wilson's credibility. Why? Because he vehemently disputed the administration's claim that Saddam had the potential to get uranium from Niger as a part of a nuclear weapons program.

Why did that matter? Because Bush and Cheney were trying to convince the country that Saddam was a threat to us. Why were they doing that? Because they were trying to justify their proposed invasion of Iraq. All of this is beyond dispute. It happened. You were here the whole time, David. Libby didn't just decide on his own to out Plame for the hell of it.

If Saddam had had a dozen nuclear bombs made with uranium from Niger, what Libby did would still have been a crime. But here's the thing, David. There was no possible way he could have actually obtained the uranium, and it was obvious. The African uranium story was bullshit, and poorly-constructed bullshit at that. As soon as the documents behind the scenario saw the light of day, they were exposed as clumsy forgeries, yet the administration continued to push the story. Colin Powell lied to the UN, and Fearless Leader Bush lied to the nation in his State of the Union address. If they didn't know the uranium allegations were false, not to say impossible, plenty of other people in the administration did, not to mention the CIA.

It's possible the war would have happened even without the Iraqi nuclear weapons program flimflam, but as it actually happened, it was a crucial element of the administration's scenario. Wilson tore a hole in that scenario, and, according to the grand jury, Libby committed five felonies to undercut (and/or possibly punish) him.

Honestly, David, do you really believe Scooter did this all on his own initiative? Have you been paying attention? Invading Iraq was the main focus of the Bush administration for a long time. During Fitzgerald's investigation, it came out that Dick Cheney himself revealed Plame's status to Libby. Karl Rove helped spread the story to reporters. Whether or not these actions constituted criminal activity, they were indisputably part of a coordinated effort to discredit Joe Wilson and sell the Iraq war.

Naturally, then, you conclude that critics of the Bush administration have lost their grip on reality:

"The answer is found in an essay written about 40 years ago by Richard Hofstadter called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Hofstadter argues that sometimes people who are dispossessed, who feel their country has been taken away from them and their kind, develop an angry, suspicious and conspiratorial frame of mind. It is never enough to believe their opponents have committed honest mistakes or have legitimate purposes; they insist on believing in malicious conspiracies.

"The paranoid spokesman," Hofstadter writes, "sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms - he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization." Because his opponents are so evil, the conspiracy monger is never content with anything but their total destruction. Failure to achieve this unattainable goal "constantly heightens the paranoid's sense of frustration." Thus, "even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes."

So some Democrats were not content with Libby's indictment, but had to stretch, distort and exaggerate. The tragic thing is that at the exact moment when the Republican Party is staggering under the weight of its own mistakes, the Democratic Party's loudest voices are in the grip of passions that render them untrustworthy."

We're just making shit up because we feel disenfranchised? This isn't some air-filled conspiracy that hints at dire, ill-defined future events that may or may not come to pass. This is about a war that is actually happening now. Thousands of Americans have been killed or maimed. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died, and their blood is on our hands. If Wilson's story had gone unchallenged, this unnecessary war might have been averted and those people would still be alive.

It looks an awful lot like the Bush Administration led the country to war on the basis of information that many of its staff knew to be false. The CIA leak case is only one piece of a much larger whole, but it may be the loose thread that leads to the exposure of the rest. It's deadly serious, David, and we're going to keep at it.

2005-09-16T00:25:00.000-04:00

Brown Makes His Stand, Blames White House

The consensus about the Michael Brown interview story in today's NYT seems to be that he largely approved of the federal government's response to the disaster and largely laid the blame at the feet of the local governments. I have no idea where this idea comes from.

Brown was the head of the Federal Emergency Management Administrationan, an agency whose very existence is predicated on the idea that state and local governments can't handle everything. He wasn't the Director of the Federal Bitch the States Out for Not Doing Their Damn Jobs Administration.

Brown is not even at the surface of reproach, much less above it. Mayor Nagin and Governor Blanco each failed in deeply troubling ways. However, what comes through most strongly from the interview is the all too realistic depiction of a federal response that, well, wasn't.

FEMA has only 2,600 employees; its mission is planning and coordination. It has no stockpiles of emergency supplies, no troops, no fleets of buses, helicopters, or ships. It exists to augment the effectiveness of local, state, and especially federal resources by planning ahead and helping them to work together efficiently.

I don’t think Brown was prepared to handle a major disaster on his own, because he wasn’t supposed to. The problem came from the fact that he didn’t know he was on his own. His bosses were working on the situation in their own way, and he wasn’t in the loop.

Long before he resigned in disgrace, he had already been hung out to dry.

One more time, from the September 4th Washington Post:

Behind the scenes, a power struggle emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday [August 26], the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state's emergency operations center said Saturday.

Such a takeover, especially in advance of any actual disaster (Katrina didn't hit until the morning of the 29th), would have been completely unprecedented. Keep this in mind, it's important. Now, on to ~~today's~~ yesterday's interview:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 14 - Hours after Hurricane Katrina passed New Orleans on Aug. 29, as the scale of the catastrophe became clear, Michael D. Brown recalls, he placed frantic calls to his boss, Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, and to the office of the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr.

Mr. Brown, then director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said he told the officials in Washington that the Louisiana governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, and her staff were proving incapable of organizing a coherent state effort and that his field officers in the city were reporting an "out of control" situation.

"I am having a horrible time," Mr. Brown said he told Mr. Chertoff and a White House official - either Mr. Card or his deputy, Joe Hagin - in a status report that evening. "I can't get a unified command established."

Note that the "scale of the catastrophe" was only becoming clear to Brown on Monday the 29th. This was two-and-a-half days after the White House had leaned on Gov. Blanco to give up control of her state. Now, either the Bush Administration knew Katrina had catastrophic potential for Louisiana, or saw the storm as an opportunity for a power grab for its own reasons. Either way, Katrina was being taken very seriously at the highest levels of government.

Somehow, Brown didn't know this. From all appearances, he was watching the hurricane's progress and hoping for the best.

By the time of that call, he added, "I was beginning to realize things were going to hell in a handbasket" in Louisiana. A day later, Mr. Brown said, he asked the White House to take over the response effort.

Regardless of the original intentions, the Bushies must have by then made preparations--moved troops and supplies into position, at least--for the takeover. That is, unless they had planned to take the reins in Louisiana long distance from Washington. But Brown didn't know.

But Mr. Brown's account, in which he described making "a blur of calls" all week to Mr. Chertoff, Mr. Card and Mr. Hagin, suggested that Mr. Bush, or at least his top aides, were informed early and repeatedly by the top federal official at the scene that state and local authorities were overwhelmed and that the overall response was going badly.

A senior administration official said Wednesday night that White House officials recalled the conversations with Mr. Brown but did not believe they had the urgency or desperation he described in the interview.

Brown may or may not have cared about New Orleans or its people, but he certainly thought what happened to them was his responsibility. He knew what would happen to him as FEMA director if a federal emergency was mismanaged on his watch. He had to be desperate. And the White House was letting him, and New Orleans, twist in the wind.

Mr. Brown was removed by Mr. Chertoff last week from directing the relief effort. A 50-year-old lawyer and Republican activist who joined FEMA as general counsel in 2001, Mr. Brown said he had been hobbled by limitations on the power of the agency to command resources.

With only 2,600 employees nationwide, he said, FEMA must rely on state workers, the National Guard, private contractors and other federal agencies to supply manpower and equipment.

He said his biggest mistake was in waiting until the end of the day on Aug. 30 to ask the White House explicitly to take over the response from FEMA and state officials.

As FEMA director, Brown didn't have much authority unless and until it was given to him by Chertoff or the president, and that didn't happen until late on Tuesday, a day and a half after Katrina hit the city. Again, the Bushies had been prepared to take over New Orleans, lock, stock, and barrel more than three days earlier, but they hadn't given Brown anything to work with. Meanwhile, people were dying.

To add insult to tragedy, Bush's September 27 state of emergency declaration had already provided the legal go-ahead for full mobilization of all relevant federal resources. Brown (and possibly Chertoff) didn't know.

In Washington, Mr. Chertoff's spokesman, Russ Knocke, said there had been no delay in the federal response. "We pushed absolutely everything we could," Mr. Knocke said, "every employee, every asset, every effort, to save and sustain lives."

Uh, no.

By Saturday afternoon, many residents were leaving. But as the hurricane approached early on Sunday, Mr. Brown said he grew so frustrated with the failure of local authorities to make the evacuation mandatory that he asked Mr. Bush for help.

"Would you please call the mayor and tell him to ask people to evacuate?" Mr. Brown said he asked Mr. Bush in a phone call.

"Mike, you want me to call the mayor?" the president responded in surprise, Mr. Brown said.

Bush's people had been trying to strong-arm the governor into giving up authority over her state, and he was surprised he was being asked to call the mayor? Not that he should lean on him or anything.

On Monday night, Mr. Brown said, he reported his growing worries to Mr. Chertoff and the White House. He said he did not ask for federal active-duty troops to be deployed because he assumed his superiors in Washington were doing all they could. Instead, he said, he repeated a dozen times, "I cannot get a unified command established."

It looks like when the hurricanes hit Florida in 2004, Brown didn't have to call up the troops, line up the supplies, or get the money flowing, because that had already been done for him. That's why he "assumed his superiors in Washington were doing all they could." He'd been through this drill before, and that's how it worked. But not this time.

At the same time, the Superdome was degenerating into "gunfire and anarchy," and on Tuesday the FEMA staff and medical team in New Orleans called to say they were leaving for their own safety.

That night [August 30], Mr. Brown said, he called Mr. Chertoff and the White House again in desperation. "Guys, this is bigger than what we can handle," he told them, he said. "This is bigger than what FEMA can do. I am asking for help."

"Maybe I should have screamed 12 hours earlier," Mr. Brown said in the interview. "But that is hindsight. We were still trying to make things work."

How he expected to handle this kind of situation without the kind of serious federal help it was the purpose of his agency to provide is beyond me.

By Wednesday morning, Mr. Brown said, he learned that [US Army Lt. Gen. Russel] Honoré was on his way. While the general did not have responsibility for the entire relief effort and the Guard, his commanding manner helped mobilize the state's efforts.

"Honoré shows up and he and I have a phone conversation," Mr. Brown said. "He gets the message, and, boom, it starts happening."

Just like that, the army shows up and it starts happening. The green light is given, the resources are put into action, and the situation starts to get under control. Boom.

The Bushies let Brown face the fury of Katrina all on his own. That's what I got out of the interview, and I believe it's what he was trying to get across. He put it rather subtly early on in the interview: "I truly believed the White House was not at fault here." I added emphasis there; I wonder if he did.

With a lot of help from the TPM Hurricane Katrina Timeline. Credit where it's due.

2005-09-15T22:25:00.000-04:00

Can Bush's Ass Cash That Check?

From the speech:

Within the Gulf region are some of the most beautiful and historic places in America. As all of us saw on television, there is also some deep, persistent poverty in this region as well.

That poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action.

You know, Dubya, that applies just the same to poor blacks all over the country. It's that moral absolutism you are so fond of. America did wrong by just about all African-Americans. Do you mean to make things right for all of them? Are you going to undertake a historical national initiative to wipe out our shameful national legacy of racism? Are you going to come out in favor of true educational equality, quality medical care, meaningful affirmative action, and vigorous anti-discrimination enforcement?

That's a big check you wrote tonight, Mr. President. I look forward to seeing what happens at the bank when you hand it to the teller.

2005-09-14T09:40:00.000-04:00

Chertoff's Turn in the Grinder

Josh has a big, big post up which looks at at a very important Knight-Ridder article entitled "Chertoff delayed federal response, memo shows."

Although the article doesn't absolve Michael Brown from all culpability for FEMA's failures, it does distribute some of the blame higher up the agency food chain by pointing out that Brown had been waiting on his boss to give him full authority to act until 36 hours after the storm hit.

Even before the storm struck the Gulf Coast, Chertoff could have ordered federal agencies into action without any request from state or local officials. Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown had only limited authority to do so until about 36 hours after the storm hit, when Chertoff designated him as the "principal federal official" in charge of the storm.

***

Chertoff's Aug. 30 memo for the first time declared Katrina an "Incident of National Significance," a key designation that triggers swift federal coordination. The following afternoon, Bush met with his Cabinet, then appeared before TV cameras in the White House Rose Garden to announce the government's planned action.

Knight-Ridder's reporters did some fine reporting on this story, but got a significant piece of it wrong. Although Chertoff as DHS secretary had the power to fully mobilize federal disaster response resources, that power also resided with the president. From Page 7 of the National Response Plan (PDF, 2mb):

For Incidents of National Significance that are Presidentially declared disasters or emergencies, Federal support to States is delivered in accordance with relevant provisions of the Stafford Act (see Appendix 3, Authorities and References). (Note that while all Presidentially declared disasters and emergencies under the Stafford Act are considered Incidents of National Significance, not all Incidents of National Significance necessarily result in disaster or emergency declarations under the Stafford Act.) (emphasis added)

Bush declared a State of Emergency in Louisiana on August 26 and in Mississippi a day later, meaning that from that point forward, all FEMA resources could have been put into action.

But not by Brown. According to the Knight-Ridder piece, Chertoff's redundant declaration of an Incident of National Significance on August 30 also "designated [Brown] as the 'principal federal official' in charge of the storm." Until that point, he himself had had that role. However, as indicated by the fact that he felt the need to declare Katrina a Incident of National Significance, he wasn't aware of the powers and responsibilities he had. He'd had the power to act for four days and did nothing.

He didn't even know that he was supposed to take the initiative. From the K-R article:

That same memo suggests that Chertoff may have been confused about his lead role in disaster response and that of his department.

"As you know, the President has established the `White House Task Force on Hurricane Katrina Response.' He will meet with us tomorrow to launch this effort. The Department of Homeland Security, along with other Departments, will be part of the task force and will assist the Administration with its response to Hurricane Katrina," Chertoff said in the memo to the secretaries of defense, health and human services and other key federal agencies.

***

Chertoff's hesitation and Bush's creation of a task force both appear to contradict the National Response Plan and previous presidential directives that specify what the secretary of homeland security is assigned to do without further presidential orders. The goal of the National Response Plan is to provide a streamlined framework for swiftly delivering federal assistance when a disaster - caused by terrorists or Mother Nature - is too big for local officials to handle.

It appears Bush's handlers were looking to have him take credit for the federal response by having it credited to the "White House Task Force" rather than DHS or FEMA. This would make sense in light of Bush's reported determination not to repeat his father's failure to take Hurricane Andrew seriously enough in 1992. By taking ownership of the relief efforts he could turn the disaster to his benefit. It might have worked had he moved a lot more quickly.

Whether Chertoff's failure to put the federal disaster response machinery in operation was due to deference to Bush, his own ignorance, or a combination of both, it is nonetheless a failure of monumental proportions.

On a side note, the K-R article also features DHS spokesman Russ Knocke attempting to defend the federal relief efforts.

Russ Knocke, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, didn't dispute that the National Response Plan put Chertoff in charge in federal response to a catastrophe. But he disputed that the bureaucracy got in the way of launching the federal response.

"There was a tremendous sense of urgency," Knocke said. "We were mobilizing the greatest response to a disaster in the nation's history."

Knocke noted that members of the Coast Guard were already in New Orleans performing rescues and FEMA personnel and supplies had been deployed to the region.

Although this reflects very well on the CG, it's meaningless in terms of DHS/FEMA, because the very nature of the CG means it doesn't have to wait for authorizations before acting. There's no time for bureaucracy when a ship is in distress; the CG just goes out and tries to rescue people. Hiding behind these brave and tireless people is yet another craven and dishonest dodge on the part of administration officials.

2005-09-13T10:46:00.000-04:00

Brown’s Future

What’s next for newly-ex FEMA head Michael Brown? His future can’t be looking too rosy at the moment, and it doesn’t look like he has many options.

He was nominally in charge of the biggest governmental failure since the Bay of Pigs. He was unqualified to hold his position, and he lied on his resume.

I’d bet his agency’s success in handling the 2004 hurricanes in Florida was the result of quick action on the part of political handlers rather than anything Brown himself did. Even if he had been exemplary, the Katrina failures have rendered the rest of his tenure at FEMA meaningless.

Professionally, there really isn’t anything else to the man. Even a hiring manager at McDonald's might have trouble figuring out what to do with a 'horse lawyer.'

If he’s bravely taking the fall for Katrina on behalf of the rest of the executive branch, it won't exactly be easy to reward him for it. He will never be given another government job, and I don’t know that the VRWC's think tanks or foundations have any holes deep enough to bury him in. Any job he gets above the level of janitor is going to look like some kind of quid pro quo for keeping his mouth shut.

If Brown is ever going to get out of this hole, he’s going to need to find some way to even partially rehabilitate his reputation. But how?

Blaming the severity of the storm has already blown up in his face. In all too many cases, FEMA had the ability to help but did nothing or actively blocked others from helping. Blaming the Democrats for his problems won’t wash. If it had been possible to lay this thing at the door of local officials, Brown wouldn’t have been out of a job in the first place.

He could have a come-to-Jesus moment in which he sees the error of his ways and becomes a motivational speaker for those afraid of making catastrophic errors. Assuming neither he nor his audience has any self-respect, that is.

The simplest way out might be to offload some of the blame onto other administration officials. He could say the wrangling over jurisdiction that took place higher up the chain of command caused his superiors to hold off on acting. He could say that too much attention to the political angle of the situation delayed necessary authorizations. He could say that poor communication outside of FEMA hampered coordination of resources. He could say that he had expected a comparable level of support from the administration to that which he received in 2004 in Florida, but did not anticipate how much effect the fate of a critical swing state (governed by the president’s brother) had during an election year.

He could even write a book about it.

Other possibilities:

He could move to a remote cabin in the mountains and spend the rest of his days muttering incoherently to himself.

Some of Bush’s pals could give him a big bunch of money to shut his mouth, get lost, and stay lost.

He could turn up dead.

2005-09-11T10:57:00.000-04:00

Examples to the Contrary

I called bullshit on the "the administration's senior domestic security officials" who claimed that their disaster plans "failed to recognize that local police, fire and medical personnel might be incapacitated."

From 2002's Most Senior Administration Domestic Security Official, (and Bush 2000 presidential campaign director) Joe Allbaugh:

Even so, the prospect of a major hurricane hitting New Orleans was a FEMA priority. Numerous drills and studies had been undertaken to prepare a response. In 2002, Joe M. Allbaugh, then the FEMA director, said: "Catastrophic disasters are best defined in that they totally outstrip local and state resources, which is why the federal government needs to play a role. There are a half-dozen or so contingencies around the nation that cause me great concern, and one of them is right there in your backyard."

Bullshit.

2005-09-11T09:16:00.000-04:00

Katrina Changed Everything

If there is any one indicator of the impact Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath has had upon America's national discourse, it is the front page of the print edition of today's New York Times.

Above the fold, there are three stories and a large picture. Two of them have nothing to do with the terrorist attacks that took place here four years ago today. The third references them once, in relation to the federal government's failure to handle Hurricane Katrina's aftermath. There are no mentions in the three articles below the fold. Out of the page's 10 teasers, only three of them mention the topic, and one of them is primarily concerned with the hurricane.

The events of 9/11/01 shocked the nation and the world. Two of the most important civil buildings in the world were destroyed. A huge explosion tore through the heart of the world's most powerful military. The attacks spawned two wars, and a radical reorganization of America's foreign and domestic policies. Elections turned on which candidates voters believed would protect the nation better from such attacks in the future.

A mere four years later, the event's anniversary merits only footnotes on the front page of the nation's newspaper of record. Katrina changed everything.

2005-09-10T11:45:00.000-04:00

Shorter John Tierney:

In the wake of the devastating human tragedy caused by Hurricane Katrina, I can't understand why the Democrats would propose an independent investigation that can't be guaranteed to cover their asses politically. If they would just let the Republicans control everything, no unpleasant truths would be exposed, and everyone could go home happy.

2005-09-09T14:48:00.000-04:00

Power Grab Update

From the look of the NYT this morning, it looks as though Mick Arran might have been on to something. As is often the case, the juicy bits are buried between the lines, so a little dissection is in order.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 - As New Orleans descended into chaos last week and Louisiana's governor asked for 40,000 soldiers, President Bush's senior advisers debated whether the president should speed the arrival of active-duty troops by seizing control of the hurricane relief mission from the governor.

This is a red herring, a non-starter. Why would Bush's seizing control over the hurricane area "speed the arrival" of troops? Blanco had already asked him to send military help. I think that formulation may have been a telling slip of the tongue.

The debate began after officials realized that Hurricane Katrina had exposed a critical flaw in the national disaster response plans created after the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the administration's senior domestic security officials, the plan failed to recognize that local police, fire and medical personnel might be incapacitated.

As the Times makes abundantly clear, it seems that taking over from local authorities was the one thing the administration unambiguously was prepared for. Why would they have spent so much time and effort on it if they had assumed local authorities would have been adequate to the task? How much do you want to bet this is a complete fabrication and that examples to the contrary will be found spread out over dozens of disaster-recovery documents over the next week or two?

As criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina has mounted, one of the most pointed questions has been why more troops were not available more quickly to restore order and offer aid. Interviews with officials in Washington and Louisiana show that as the situation grew worse, they were wrangling with questions of federal/state authority, weighing the realities of military logistics and perhaps talking past each other in the crisis.

Blanco had been begging them to send help, as much as they could. To help her people. As it wasn't necessary for Bush to completely take over the situation in order for aid to be delivered, why would she be "wrangling" with the feds over power issues? Answer: because they were insisting on a takeover. Blanco wasn't the one bringing it up.

To seize control of the mission, Mr. Bush would have had to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the president in times of unrest to command active-duty forces into the states to perform law enforcement duties. But decision makers in Washington felt certain that Ms. Blanco would have resisted surrendering control, as Bush administration officials believe would have been required to deploy active-duty combat forces before law and order had been re-established. (emphasis added)

Again, as I'll get into in a bit more detail below, Bush's seizing control wasn't necessary for him to use the active-duty military to deliver aid. Also, the whole "felt certain that Ms. Blanco would have resisted surrendering control" is fishier than bouillabaisse. I'm guessing they had already been directly pressuring her to do so, and did not want to admit to so egregious a power grab. Finally, we see again the centrality of the Insurrection Act, which, in the absence of an actual, uh, insurrection, was the only means whereby the feds could have sidestepped local control. The central issue in New Orleans wasn't that law and order had broken down--of course it had; there was a catastrophic flood--it was the humanitarian nightmare of hundreds of thousands of people trapped without water, food, or medical facilities.

The fact that talk of martial law and the Insurrection Act caused available help to be withheld from the dispossessed and stranded is iteslf criminal, but also indicative of an overriding motive that had nothing to do with the welfare of these people.

While combat troops can conduct relief missions without the legal authority of the Insurrection Act, Pentagon and military officials say that no active-duty forces could have been sent into the chaos of New Orleans on Wednesday or Thursday without confronting law-and-order challenges.

This is bullshit, pure and simple. Do they mean to say that the biggest, baddest-assed force in the world can't be sent outside of martial law jurisdictions for relief purposes unless everyone there promises to be perfectly behaved? Aren't disaster areas, the site of most relief operations, themselves challenged in terms of law and order? Don't fights routinely break out in relief lines? That's assault, which is a law-and-order challenge. Give me a break.

But just as important to the administration were worries about the message that would have been sent by a president ousting a Southern governor of another party from command of her National Guard, according to administration, Pentagon and Justice Department officials.

Bullshit again. They didn't care about how it would have looked. In an emergency the size and scale of Katrina, the public would have approved of anything they thought would help. They didn't do it because it would have been blatantly illegal, and would have scared the crap out of every state politician in the country. Once it became clear there wasn't evidence of an armed revolution in the streets of New Orleans, they needed Blanco's permission for a takeover.

Officials in Louisiana agree that the governor would not have given up control over National Guard troops in her state as would have been required to send large numbers of active-duty soldiers into the area. But they also say they were desperate and would have welcomed assistance by active-duty soldiers. (emphasis added)

Is this BS, too? Where does it say Bush has to take control over the National Guard troops in order to send active-duty soldiers? Exactly how many troops would constitute a "large number"? How many could he have sent without seizing control?

By Wednesday, she had asked for 40,000 soldiers.

In the discussions in Washington, also at issue was whether active-duty troops could respond faster and in larger numbers than the Guard.

By last Wednesday, Pentagon officials said even the 82nd Airborne, which has a brigade on standby to move out within 18 hours, could not arrive any faster than 7,000 National Guard troops, which are specially trained and equipped for civilian law enforcement duties.

In the end, the flow of thousands of National Guard soldiers, especially military police, was accelerated from other states.

Why were they discussing who could get where faster on Wednesday? The enormity of the human tragedy that engulfed New Orleans was on every newspaper and television screen in the country. They should have sent everything they could find, or at least up to the 40,000 requested by Blanco. This shouldn't have required reflection, or legal niceties. People were in trouble, and it was the administration's duty to help. And of course the active-duty forces could have gotten there faster. They're "active" and "on duty." So they can get places fast.

In any case, they would have arrived a hell of a lot faster if they had been ordered to go.

But one senior Army officer expressed puzzlement that active-duty troops were not summoned sooner, saying 82nd Airborne troops were ready to move out from Fort Bragg, N.C., on Sunday, the day before the hurricane hit.

The call never came, administration officials said, in part because military officials believed Guard troops would get to the stricken region faster and because administration civilians worried that there could be political fallout if federal troops were forced to shoot looters.

So, "administration civilians" are admitting they didn't send available help to New Orleans because they were worried about "political fallout." Just like that. People suffered and died so the Bush administration could avoid "political fallout," and the Bush administration appears not to be shy about admitting it.

And why, exactly, would they have had to shoot looters? Aren't there priorities in life-and-death situations? Perhaps they could have worried first about feeding and rescuing people to save their lives, and then taken care of the breaking and entering. I don't know where it's written that looters have to be shot, and I don't know of many small bands of looters that would stand up against organized military force, but that's evidently how the thinking went in the Bush administration.

I don't know what's more inhuman: that they feel that people's lives are expendable in the name of politics, or that they were focused on the potential for looting over their responsibility to protect their own citizens. Perhaps the latter can be attributed to the time spent laying the groundwork for a takeover.

Aides to Ms. Blanco said she was prepared to accept the deployment of active-duty military officials in her state. But she and other state officials balked at giving up control of the Guard as Justice Department officials said would have been required by the Insurrection Act if those combat troops were to be sent in before order was restored.

More reverse-causality crap. Short of a full-on rebellion, whether the Act was invoked was Blanco's decision; it couldn't be used to force her to do anything. It could, however, have been involved as the price of a quid pro quo that got desperately needed aid to the huddled masses of New Orleans.

In a separate discussion last weekend, the governor also rejected a more modest proposal for a hybrid command structure in which both the Guard and active-duty troops would be under the command of an active-duty, three-star general - but only after he had been sworn into the Louisiana National Guard.

After any justification of invoking the Insurrection Act had passed, they were still trying to take over. As in so many other instances, when one rationale fails, the Bushies try another. A federal takeover was in no way necessary or legally mandated; they wanted it.

The Pentagon is reviewing events from the time Hurricane Katrina reached full strength and bore down on New Orleans and five days later when Mr. Bush ordered 7,200 active-duty soldiers and marines to the scene.

So it turns out they could send active-duty troops down to help? Even without taking over completely? Or does 7,200 fall short of the "large number" that would require the Act to be invoked? Or have they finally been dragged, kicking and screaming, to do the right thing by the fear of more political fallout?

The issue of federalizing the response was one of several legal issues considered in a flurry of meetings at the Justice Department, the White House and other agencies, administration officials said.

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales urged Justice Department lawyers to interpret the federal law creatively to help local authorities, those officials said. For example, federal prosecutors prepared to expand their enforcement of some criminal statutes like anti-carjacking laws that can be prosecuted by either state or federal authorities.

On the issue of whether the military could be deployed without the invitation of state officials, the Office of Legal Counsel, the unit within the Justice Department that provides legal advice to federal agencies, concluded that the federal government had authority to move in even over the objection of local officials.

Why were they discussing whether a military deployment could take place without a state invitation? They had already been invited. It was a non-issue, unless, perhaps as part of a deliberate strategy to confuse the issue, you're conflating "military rescue mission" with "complete federal takeover of a disaster area."

2005-09-07T09:17:00.000-04:00

Why FEMA Dithered: Power Grab?

This Mick Arran article over at Dispatches From the Trenches is an absolute must read. I don't know if it's 100% true or not, but it's the shortest path to an explanation I've seen for why FEMA sat on its hands and, in some cases, actively blocked, efforts to save the citizens of New Orleans.

According to the Washington Post:

Behind the scenes, a power struggle emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the state's emergency operations center said Saturday.

The administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. "Quite frankly, if they'd been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals," said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly.

A senior administration official said that Bush has clear legal authority to federalize National Guard units to quell civil disturbances under the Insurrection Act and will continue to try to unify the chains of command that are split among the president, the Louisiana governor and the New Orleans mayor.

Why might taking over be important enough to them that they'd let people die to do it? Arran explains:

1. Bush’s concern wasn’t centered on helping the starving and homeless refugees in New Orleans but on protecting private property in the suburbs from potential ‘looters’. The refugees were poor and black and the conservative view of them is that they’re all dangerous ‘rabble’—lazy, shiftless thieves; a mob.

2. Because his view is that the poor and black are little more than a mob, he was expecting an insurrection and wanted the authority to put it down by force.

3. Declaring martial law would give the Federal government total control of the city: the Army would be brought in to police it and—perhaps most important to this corporate president—the Federal government would have charge of all the rebuilding contracts, giving it $$$billions$$$ to hand out to its corporate sponsors.

4. There’s also the little matter of taking decisions about how and what to rebuild out of the hands of the people of New Orleans and putting them into the hands of people who see New Orleans as ‘Sin City’, effectively ensuring that New Orleans would never again be the Big Easy.

For my own part, I'd also add that it would give the feds the ability to limit press access to the city and classify information they didn't want out in the open, possibly on the grounds that it would reveal too much of our DHS infrastructure.

It makes sense of the Bush administration's repeated ~~insistence~~ lie that Blanco hadn't declared a state of emergency until Wednesday--it would give them ammunitition to take over for Blanco by blaming her for their own inaction.

Louisiana did not reach out to a multi-state mutual aid compact for assistance until Wednesday, three state and federal officials said. As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency, the senior Bush official said.

"The federal government stands ready to work with state and local officials to secure New Orleans and the state of Louisiana," White House spokesman Dan Bartlett said. "The president will not let any form of bureaucracy get in the way of protecting the citizens of Louisiana."

Finally, it provides a rationale for why the feds were pushing the 'armed looter' story so hard: it wasn't to blame the locals for what had happened to themselves; it was meant to be used to justify the invocation of the Insurrection Act and as a stick to beat Blanco into giving up control over the city because she couldn't secure it.

Here's how the Insurrection Act works:

Quelling Civil Disturbances: The Insurrection Act (10 U.S.C. § 331 et seq.)

State and local governments have primary responsibility for quelling rebellions (32 C.F.R. § 215.4(a).

The President may use the military (including the Federalized National Guard) to quell (1) civil disturbances in a State (upon the Governor's request), (2) rebellions that make it difficult to enforce Federal law, or (3) any insurrection that impedes a State's ability to protect citizens' constitutional rights and that State is unable to unwilling to protect these rights.

Before committing U.S. troops, the President must issue a proclamation for rebellious citizens to disperse, cease, and desist.

It doesn't take much of a stretch to see the feds' actions and statements as specifically tailored to invoke the Act. It's pretty damned obvious that if relief workers and the NG had been allowed into the city in a timely manner, order could have easily been restored without a complete federal takeover of the city.

As in Iraq, when the locals didn't follow the script and greet us with candy and flowers and coronate Ahmad Chalabi, there was no Plan B for New Orleans. DHS and FEMA didn't have any contingency worked out for the possibility that full martial law would not be imposed that would tell them to open the aid spigots. And there wasn't a way to quickly disseminate the new orders that wouldn't reveal that administration had dragged its feet. This further delayed relief, compounding the tragedy immensely.

I'd imagine there were a lot of people in the DHS/FEMA carrying out these bizarre orders who were not under the Bush political machine umbrella, and who are scratching their heads awfully hard about it. Perhaps some of them will come forward and tell the nation in the coming days and weeks exactly what went on that prevented them from saving the lives of their fellow citizens.

2005-09-06T10:06:00.000-04:00

Tierney's Double Standard

A lot of American conservatives cry for blood when a crime is committed. They want to deter potential criminals, and to simply punish the wrongdoers for what they've done.

I don't know whether the lack of federal response to Katrina meets the legal definition of a crime. I believe it does, but that will in time be determined by the relevant authorities. At the very least, however, it amounted to grave incompetence that directly contributed to the deaths of hundreds or thousands of people.

John Tierney doesn't seem to think the standard conservative reasoning should apply to a (republican) president and his administration:

Mr. Bush made a lot of mistakes last week, but most of his critics are making an even bigger one now by obsessing about what he said and did.

If your mother died because the nurse whose job it was to administer her medication failed to do so, you'd want to know why. You'd want her removed from her post so she wouldn't put any other patients at risk. You could very understandably wish to see her punished for her negligence. You could find yourself obsessing about the nurse, and no one would think it inappropriate or unnecessary.

Why is it that conservative principles never seem to apply to conservative politicians?

2005-09-04T11:42:00.000-04:00

Prediction

When the stories of the Katrina survivors are more widely circulated, if some really seriously big heads don't roll (and aren't kicked into smithereens), there will be riots across America. If the Rodney King verdict was jaywalking; the lack of response to Katrina is mass murder.

And lest anyone get the impression that there's a simple response to this situation, throwing Chertoff and Brown under the bus won't be nearly enough.

Read this for just a few of hundreds of counts that belong in the indictment.

2005-09-02T09:53:00.000-04:00

Putting "Race and Class" in Context

I keep hearing various folks in the post-Katrina media barrage talking about "race and class," and how they have influenced who has borne the brunt of this disaster.

On one hand, I'm cheered that, at long last, the gatekeepers of our public discourse have seen fit to address the issue of poverty. The same bunch who couldn't pause for a moment's breath in their last few weeks of their hideously absurd coverage of rich, white, missing Natalee Holloway (during a war, no less) are actually talking about the tragedy of poverty and the inhumanity of the stark inequality that so often lies beneath the visible surface of this "richest country in the world."

On the other hand, I want to tell them to shut the fuck up.

It's almost as if they're under some kind of compulsion to come to the wrong conclusions. Here's a story that writes itself--they merely need to stand next to it and let the facts osmose through them and it's the very soul of journalism--and they just can't let it happen without screwing it up.

What's wrong with the phrase "race and class"? Aren't the people trapped in the intensifying chaos and devastation of New Orleans, the people dying from lack of water and medical attention, aren't they largely poor and black?

The fact that Katrina has brought class out in the open is hugely beneficial and long overdue. There are a lot of things we can do to help raise up all Americans, that will help people now and in the future. Maybe now, forlorn as that hope might be, we as a country can start down the road of full citizenship and dignity for all of us.

But if you're going to talk about race, then you'd better be ready to talk about the legacy of slavery, the KKK, Jim Crow, and the effects of generations of institutionalized and informal discrimination. You'd better be ready to talk about how the families of most blacks in this country started out with nothing and have since been blocked again and again from accumulating more by the pure blind hatred of (some) whites, very often with the acquiescence and active participation of government. You'd better be ready to talk about how racism is still a powerful, living force in America today.

You can't just wink at the issue. You can't use just the word "race" and assume everyone knows what you're talking about, because a lot of people don’t or won’t admit it. They'll just go and paint it with their own happy interpretations of history where there's nothing to regret, nothing to redress. They’ll conclude that these people were too lazy or stupid to get out of town, even after the mayor declared a mandatory evacuation. They’ll conclude that these people had the option to save money for emergencies but simply didn’t because they're irresponsible. (You know, because they're black.)

Poverty--class--is the only immediate reason these people they didn't have the means to leave the city following the "mandatory" evacuation, and it would have applied equally to anyone regardless of color. In this context--in the context of New Orleans, of Katrina, and of the horrifying suffering of the people left behind to suffer and die--in this context, race is only relevant if it explains why they were poor to begin with. If you mention race but do not talk explicitly about why it's connected to poverty, then people are going to come to their own conclusions as to why you brought it up, and some of them are going to come up with some very ugly answers.

2005-08-11T09:09:00.000-04:00

George W. Bush, Sociopath

Bush tried to bullshit a grieving mother whose son died in Iraq. Right to her face.

From The O'Reilly Factor:

Kesterson: So actually, you know, it did come about. They put me into a cubicle by myself, took everything away from me. I also came prepared with a letter to give to the president about how I felt about the war and, you know, the loss of my son, my only child for a cause that I thought, you know, was not worthwhile at that point in time.

And so president Bush came marching in, to make a long story short, came marching in to the room, got right in my face, eyeball-to-eyeball, nose-to-nose this close, toe-to-toe and he said, "I'm George Bush, President of the United States, and I understand you have something to say to me privately.' And I said, 'Yes, I do respect the office of the presidency of the United States, but I want to tell you how it feels to lose your only child in a cause that you don't believe in, in an unnecessary war. And, you know, we talked about it from there just like you and I are talking about. [Emphasis added.]

O'Reilly: Was he respectful to you?

Kesterson: Yes, yes was. But he did, you know, come at me a few times with trotting out, 'Delores, do you realize we've been attacked on 9/11?' Who doesn't [realize that]?

The level of disrespect Bush showed Dolores Kesterson is staggering. When he was trying to sell the Iraq war to the international community, he talked about WMDs, about Saddam's aggressive and brutal history, and about the possibility of remaking the countries of the Middle East into stable democracies. He didn't try to connect Iraq with 9/11 because he knew it was false, and no nation would expend money and manpower in support of a lie.

When it was possible he would get called on it, he actually bothered to stick to plausible justifications. When he was alone in a cubicle with a defenseless, utterly devastated, woman, he didn't. After all, what could she do for him? She wasn't worth the trouble. Why should he waste his beautiful mind on her?

He thought he could slide on out of the room with a simple, crude, and deeply dishonest rhetorical question. Did he for a moment consider that she might have tried to make sense of why her only child had died? That she might be in the 90+ percent of the literate population of the world that knew Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11? Did he really believe he could put this one over on her?

I guess so, or it just didn't matter. The leader of the free world had the unfathomable gall to look into the eyes of a grieving mother and lie to her face about why he put her son in mortal danger. That's not glib, shallow, or (most charitably) ignorant. It's sociopathic. The man has no business sharing the society of decent people, much less being the leader of the free world.

2005-08-05T16:41:00.000-04:00

Everyone's an Oracle

From The Housing Bubble:

"[Demos research associate] Silva worries that if housing prices flatten out or decline, some newer homeowners who have built up little equity, could find themselves 'upside down', owing more than their houses are worth. And, if interest rates rise, homeowners with adjustable rate mortgages may not be able to keep up higher payments or sell the house for what they paid. Foreclosures could spike and the supply of homes for sale soar. That could send real estate market into a tumble."

"'That's the scenario I'm most afraid of,' said Silva, 'and it's one that few economists acknowledge.'"

(emphasis added)

Dear Economists,

Please stop telling us only what we want to hear and then wondering amongst yourselves why we make so many dumb investment decisions. One of the core principles of your worldview is that market participants have enough information upon which to base their purportedly rational decisions. A lot of that information is supposed to come from the likes of you. If you fail to provide it, then any prognostication you do that assumes rational actors becomes worthless. If you share what you know, then we make better decisions, and you make better predictions. It's win-win.

I realize that a lot of you work for private concerns that would prefer that the average schmuck is ignorant or, better yet, misinformed, about economic conditions. I could get angry with each of you personally, but I realize that somebody's going to do it, and it might as well be you pigs. No hard feelings.

As for the rest of you, only one of you is the Chairman of the Board of the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States of America, and only a handful more of you are heads of the regional banks. Among your colleagues, it is only they who have the stature to materially and consistently affect the markets with their pronouncements such that they must be purposely gentle and vague with them, lest they upset the delicate balance of the economy.

Compared to them, the rest of you are nobodies (exceptions listed to the left) who seriously need to get over yourselves. Individually, your piddling little publications don't move interest rates a tenth of a basis point or generate $10 worth of consumer spending. Together, however, your silence has allowed millions of people making $50,000 per year believe it makes sense to buy $400,000 houses with interest-only loans in a no-wage-growth environment in which rates are set to skyrocket.

If your kids were in the that situation and wanted to buy that house, you'd spare no effort to talk them out of it. What about the millions of your countrymen who are headed down the greased rail toward bankruptcy? Do you have something against them? Do you hate America?

Please, just do your jobs.

Thank You,
David

2005-07-18T13:56:00.000-04:00

Priorities

Boy, Bush sure knew the facts when he was selling the Iraq War. Never mind that his own CIA was telling him that his yellowcake assertions were unfounded, that the UN inspections team had found no evidence of WMDs, and that no links had been found between Saddam Hussein's government and the perpetrators of 9/11. In the absence of sure evidence, Bush went with his gut feeling. It was good enough for him, and it should be good enough for us.

But now, it's not just the lives of thousands of Americans, tens of thousands of Iraqis, or hundreds of billions of US taxpayers' dollars at stake. But this time it's important. It's his good buddy Karl Rove's future in the balance, and he wants to wait for all the facts before asking his pal if he broke the law.

Well, I understand that. Karl's future is obviously a bigger national security concern than taking the fucking country to war under knowingly false pretenses. There are some issues where it's important to be as sure as possible before going forward. Thank god my president knows the difference.

2005-07-17T11:19:00.000-04:00

United States of America: Terrorism Supporter

A joint Saudi-Israeli (!) study has found that the foreigners fighting against the US occupation in Iraq are motivated by the invasion itself. Reading that, I thought 'yeah, yeah, tell me something I didn't know.' And then they did: the mujaheddin who fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan were bad guys!

Out of the 154 [foreign] fighters [in Iraq] analyzed, only a handful had past associations with terrorism, including six who had fathers who fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, said the report, compiled by the Global Research in International Affairs Center in Herzliya, Israel.

Since when were the Islamic mujaheddin who fought against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan considered "terrorists?" We helped fund them. We helped train them. We helped arm them. We provided them crucial intelligence. We organized a boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics because we strongly believed the Soviet invasion was illegitimate.

So now those who put their lives on the line, with our help, are to be regarded as "terrorists?" At the time, they were eulogized by none other than Saint Ronald Reagan as "the true voice of the Afghan people..." As of April, 2004, our friend and ally Hamid Karzai addressed them as "Mujahedin heroes."

Obviously, something has changed. Perhaps 16 years' worth of sober reflection has brought us to the conclusion that the Soviets were in fact justified in their invasion of Afghanistan, and our misguided efforts to counter it amounted to supporting terror. Perhaps our invasion of Iraq was in part an attempt to make up for our past mistakes. Indirectly, it's a reasonable conclusion because we currently consider terrorists those who are fighting against the invaders of their own country and in support of their co-religionists and fellow Arabs.

Or maybe it's just more politically convenient Newspeak. We have invaded a sovereign country, and thereby sparked a massive uprising that has drawn foreign help against what they clearly see as imperialist aggressors. It suits our purposes to cast those who fight against us as evil terrorists. However, the existence of so close a parallel, in which we were instrumental participants on the other side, puts the boldfaced lie to our righteous self-justifications. Far more galling has to be the fact that our then-allies, now-enemies have been steadfast in their adherence to their principles. As for us, Oceana has always been at war with the Mujahedin.

2005-07-12T23:34:00.000-04:00

A question for Republicans:

What would George W. Bush have to do to lose your support? Check all that apply.

[ ] - Forget to leave the seat down

[ ] - Leave hair on the soap

[ ] - Kick a puppy

[ ] - Sleep with best friend's wife

[ ] - Drown a sack of cats

[ ] - Burn down a house containing a woman and three children

[ ] - Lie to the American public to facilitate the invasion of another country that winds up costing 1,700 lives, 200 billion dollars, tens of thousands of minds and limbs, and the respect and support of every civilized people on the planet

[ ] - Launch a nuclear strike on Peoria

[ ] - Eat 10,000 babies per day

[ ] - Destroy the earth

2005-07-12T12:05:00.000-04:00

"Source" vs. "Criminal"

While talking about the Rove/Plame/Cooper/Miller situation to a co-worker, she kept saying that, regardless of what happened to Plame/Wilson as a result of the leak, and regardless of Rove's motivations, it was a Bad Thing that journalists could be legally compelled to give up their sources. After a number of attempts to explain why the pressure on Cooper and Miller was entirely justified, I came upon the following example:

Let's say you're a reporter interviewing Karl Rove in his office. He points to the corner behind you in which there is a baby with a small bomb attached to it, and says "This is completely off the record, but if I were to say a certain word, beginning with the letter x, that bomb would go off and kill that baby." You ponder for a moment what possible use there could be for voice-activated baby-killing bomblets, and then Rove blurts out, "Xylophone." Boom. Dead baby.

You get up to leave, shaken and horrified, and at the door Rove winks at you and says, "Remember, off the record."

For whatever reason, Rove doesn't hide the body or interfere with the evidence in any way. As the days go by and you are trying to decide what to do, the FBI announces they're 100% sure that: the bomb was in fact of a well-known type that can only be triggered by saying a specific word; that there was in fact a baby attached to it; and that the baby was killed by the explosion. In other words, that a murder had definitely been committed.

Very soon thereafter you are visited by FBI agents, who say that you are known to have been in Rove's office at the time the explosion took place. Do you tell them what happened, or are you obligated to keep what Rove said in confidence?

She got it then. The mere fact that the Plame leak involved words passing from a governmental official (or anyone, for that matter) to a reporter is not sufficient by itself to make the communication subject to journalistic privilege. What Rove is alleged to have said to those reporters is every bit as much of a crime as blowing up that baby. It's every bit as much of a crime as taking out a gun and shooting someone. There is no journalistic privilege that pertains to a reporter who witnesses a crime.

I know this topic has been done to death, but, in the spirit of Plame Made Simple, I thought I'd do my bit to cut through some of the bullshit that Rove's defenders in the administration and the press have kicked up over the issue.

The part I don't get is that the press itself fails to understand the distinction between source and criminal. Everywhere you turn, someone is lamenting the chilling effect Plamegate will ultimately have on freedom of the press. Unless freedom of the press is about enabling anonymous criminals to break the law in in front of reporters, there should be no effect from this case whatever.

One of journalists' main jobs is to expose criminal activity, especially in the government. Journalistic privilege exists to a great extent to protect whistleblowers from retribution while at the same time enabling the press to bring out evidence of wrongdoing. Reporters make use of thousands of confidential sources every day. Apparently many of them do so without even knowing what a source is.

2005-06-29T00:29:00.000-04:00

Shameless

How can Bush say:

"I thank those of you who have re-enlisted in an hour when your country needs you. And to those watching tonight who are considering a military career, there is no higher calling than service in our Armed Forces. We live in freedom because every generation has produced patriots willing to serve a cause greater than themselves. Those who serve today are taking their rightful place among the greatest generations that have worn our Nation's uniform. When the history of this period is written, the liberation of Afghanistan and the liberation of Iraq will be remembered as great turning points in the story of freedom."

when he was a draft-dodger? He got bumped to the front of the get-out-of-Vietnam line, demonstrably because he didn't want to go to war. He didn't join the Texas National Guard because he wanted to serve in the Texas National Guard (not to mention the fact that he didn't even bother to show up for duty).

How can he look military families in the face as he thanks them for shouldering the burdens of defending America? He gives them the clumsy sleight of hand where he turns Iraqis into Al Qaeda, and then he tells them that the clusterfuck in Iraq is going according to the plan that he lied to them to implement.

If one of my kids had died in Iraq, I'd want to want to slap that look off his face with the dress-uniformed corpse of my dead child. "Look, this is real *smack!* This is what you've done with your war of choice! My son *smack!* is dead! Now stop the platitudes and give me the real story, or I'll stuff this corpse down your throat."

2005-06-28T09:33:00.000-04:00

Sigh

Well, George, which is it? What you told Tony Blair earlier this month at your summit meeting, or what you're going to say tonight in your big speech?

To Blair:

Tony Blair was warned that war-torn Iraq remains on the brink of disaster - more than two years after the removal of Saddam Hussein - during his summit with President Bush in Washington earlier this month.

To the American people:

Tomorrow, the President will also talk about the strategy for success. He will talk in a very specific way about the way forward. There is a clear path to victory. It is a two-track strategy: there is the military and political track. On the military front, it's important to continue training and equipping the Iraqi security forces so that they're able to defend themselves, and then our troops can return home with the honor that they deserve. And then there is the political track. The Iraqi people are showing that they're determined to build a free and democratic and peaceful future, and we must continue to do all we can to support them as they build a lasting democracy.

The terrorists are failing...

And every step of the way, these terrorists have failed to stop the progress on the political front. They have failed to stop the Iraqi people from moving forward on holding elections and electing a representative government. They have failed to stop the Iraqi people from signing up to serve in the security forces. And they failed to stop the transfer of sovereignty just one year ago, as well, on the time schedule that was outlined.

...so we're negotiating with them

Last night it was revealed that American officials have held secret face-to-face talks with Iraqi insurgents in a bid to diffuse the violent opposition in the country.

Why does Bush think he can keep throwing our boys into the wood-chipper without even bothering to keep his story straight and without any pretense that he knows what he's doing? Why does he think the British can handle the truth but we can't?

Links via Juan Cole

2005-06-04T13:28:00.000-04:00

Decent Living Standards Are So 20th Century

As the economic security of the American middle class grows more and more tenuous, some people have been saying that living standards in Europe are better than ours. Europeans take six weeks off a year and don't have to worry about going bankrupt when they get sick. If they lose their jobs, they don't wind up homeless. When they retire, they get guaranteed pensions they can actually live on.

Oh yeah? Well David Brooks says their system is failing, and they'll all be broke and disillusioned before long. Who do they think they are, anyway?

Thomas Friedman laughs at the stupid French voters who don't want to give up their living standards. They should have approved the EU constitution and started to take their medicine.

Knuckle down, Europe. Quit your whining. You're going to have to work longer hours, give up your vacations, your medical care, and retirement benefits. The Chinese and Indians can do your jobs better and cheaper, and Capital is going to drop you like a warm bag of shit. Ha ha, stupid Europeans. Get over yourselves. You have no human dignity.

Ok, fellas, just keep telling the proles that. I'm sure you'll convince a lot of them. As things get worse and worse, they'll just bend over and take it, like the good little sheep they are. They won't vote this whole crowd out on their asses. They won't demonstrate. They won't put restrictions on the corporations they themselves built taking their money out of their countries. Nope, nothing like that has ever happened.

Oh, wait, it's always happened. When people's livelihoods are threatened, they take action.

Jesus, how stupid do these two think people are? Europeans know that the Indians and Chinese earn barely a fifth as much as they do. Even if they give up all of their perks, labor in the developing world is still going to be much cheaper than theirs. Brooks and Friedman tell them that this is what's coming, and that nothing can, will, or should be done about it. Great message, guys.

And all this talk about how Europe is living a pipe dream doesn't really do much to advance the unstated but obvious premise that everything's hunky-dory here in the good ol' US of A. It's not going to take Americans very long to figure out that, even with our expensive* and for shit medical system, our piss-poor minimum wage, our inadequate and precarious pensions, our near-total absence of labor protections, and our long working hours, even we're way more expensive than Chinese and Indian labor. Looks like we're going to have to work a lot harder, too, and at the end of the day, we'll be making a lot less money, no matter what.

Nowhere in any of this pedantic blather is there any mention of anything we should be doing to increase the value of our labor and protect our standard of living. Nope, in Washington, we're busy cutting government investment in research and education, two of the main reasons we had an advantage over other countries in the first place. Unfettered capital, and its complete disregard for social welfare, has to have its way. Um, and we need smaller government.

If this is the new Republican talking point, I say let them run with it. They're doing our work for us.

*Hey David, how well do we stack up against Europe per capita GDP-wise after you take into account how much more we spend on medical care than they do? How about after you put a value on all of those extra days off? I'm just saying.

Update: Avedon Carol at The Sideshow got there first.

2005-06-03T21:55:00.000-04:00

Two Analogies

I saw these over at Steve Gilliard's, in the comments to this post. They deserve an (ever so slightly) wider audience.

Steve:

This war has been as bad, if not worse, than we predicted.

Mainly because most of [the war supporters] still try to find the diamond in the turd and there is none. Just more shit.

And this utter gem from BrianOC:

A good analogy is if you and a buddy set out at your buddy's instigation to "beat the living crap" out of someone. However when you've both got the guy down and are pummelling your victim, your buddy pulls out a gun and finishes him off.

The buddy is Bush, you are the Pro War Democrat, and you are *both* going down for murder. (And all your whiny excuses about how your buddy told you it was just going to be an honest beating aren't going to save you)

In the post itself, Steve makes a point that all concerned would do well to think about: We can't save Iraq, and we can't salvage our involvement there. I'm not sure I agree with his pick-up-and-get-out-now recommendation, but the idea that we're accomplishing something worthwhile there is ludicrous.

We invaded the country based on a series of lies. We killed a lot of innocent people there. We tortured and sexually abused a bunch more. Through lack of planning and follow-through, we caused their infrastructure to be ravaged and their national treasures plundered. We are damaged goods, and we look worse to the Iraqis every day this clusterfuck of an occupation drags on.

We tell the Iraqis that we're working towards a day when we'll leave and they can take care of themselves and everything will be wonderful. They must think we're crazy. As soon as we leave, there will be a civil war, and quite possibly a war war if Turkey and Iran decide they don't like the way things are going.

Why are we so proud of what we have in America? Because our founders reinvented government, and through two hard centuries of slow progress, which included a civil war that nearly destroyed us, we made this nation into something to be admired and emulated. We had an advantage, though: we started from scratch.* With the possible exception of Egypt, Iraq has more millenia of brutal precedent and built-up grudges than anywhere else in the world. It's not going to change overnight.

Saddam is an unrepentant thug who visited unspeakable suffering upon his people. Now there is more suffering, and it is our doing. There is the almost inevitable prospect of much worse to come.

We've been irresponsibly meddling in Iraq's affairs since 1990, when Reagan-Bush I Iraq ambassador April Glaspie thoughtlessly said to Saddam " We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait." Nothing we've done there since has done a damned bit of good, for the Iraqis** or for us.

Maybe it's time we finally learned our lesson.

*Even we began with a healthy dose of ~~genocide~~ ethnic cleansing, though...

**Excepting the Iraqi Kurds, to whom we have given the most heartbreaking gift of all, false hope. Once we leave, Turkey will crush them utterly.

2005-06-01T11:01:00.000-04:00

Toil and Trouble

Garance Franke-Ruta really misses the point about the housing bubble:

There's been plenty of talk over the past week about "froth" in the real-estate market, much of it very general and a lot of it irrelevant to most local markets, which tend to more closely resemble middling Tampa or Phoenix than super-hot spots like San Francisco or West Palm Beach. Consequently, all this bubble talk can't be taken too seriously -- what really matters are the regional fundamentals, which too few people pay attention to.

Yes, some markets are more overheated than others, but everyone should be very concerned about what is happening in the housing market, and not just because of those who are currently having problems. Franke-Ruta's focus is completely wide of the main issues.

Let's pay attention to who's really getting hurt in this market, eh? As Richard Yamarone, director of economic research at Argus Research, told The New York Times, "What does it matter if a 'professional home flipper' gets burned in a housing downturn?'

Well, it matters, because all the non-flippers will also get burned, and will, in many cases find their outstanding debt far outstrips the real value of their homes. It matters because financial institutions will tighten credit restrictions beyond recognition, making loans of all kinds much more difficult to come by (and, not incidentally, shrinking the pool of potential homebuyers, further reducing prices). It matters because everyone across the homeowning spectrum will be and feel poorer, which will dampen the consumer spending that has kept the American economy afloat for the past several years. It matters because of the huge pressure that will be brought to bear on the government to bail out profligate lenders and unlucky (ill-informed) homeowners with higher taxes at the same time as the economy is stagnating or worse. It matters because a rapid enough popping of the bubble has the potential to push the U.S. (and world) economy into a full-blown depression.

Finally, any discussion of "the [real estate] fundamentals" that doesn't take into account the cheap money made available through historically low interest rates and absurdly lax lending controls isn't going to explain anything. If foreclosures are at record levels now, while rates are at rock-bottom and prices continue to rise, what's going to happen when conditions go south?

(For those interested, a thorough overview of the U.S. real estate situation is available here.)

2005-03-22T23:29:00.000-05:00

"What a terrible thing it is to lose one's mind. Or to not have a mind. What a terrible waste that is."

Matthew Yglesias' fascinating thought experiment, in which his higher brain function is nefariously swapped with that of Terri Schiavo, inspires me to take a new perspective on the pro-life mind.

Their religion tells you that your true worth is in your soul, that your body is only the source of sinful impulses that should be resisted, that your body is evil. When your body has finally broken and died, the important bit, the only bit that is actually you, goes to heaven or is punished eternally.

Isn't it interesting, then, that they spend so much of their time defending the dignity of the part that isn't important? They go on and on about the dignity of the unborn fetus (which, in nearly all of the cases that animate them doesn't even have a cerebral cortex), and they go on and on about the goggle-eyed ragdoll that is Terri Schiavo. Although people with functioning cortices die in their millions around the world for preventable reasons, this crowd gets itself whipped up over empty shells.

Maybe, as their actions to preserve Schiavo would seem to suggest, the soul is released from the body the latter dies. Wouldn't it be tragic for her if the world worked in accordance with their theology? Her soul, still in its mortal state, would be still alive, chained to that useless body, unable to express itself or even sense the world around her. If they're right, I can't think of any nonsadistic reason they might have for wanting her to persist in this state.

2005-03-18T07:54:00.000-05:00

Blind Cruelty = B.C.

I just wanted to add to Matthew Yglesias' eminently sound rebuke of Eugene Volokh's case for retributive cruelty a few small observations.

Matthew is correct in the pragmatic sense, that official sanction for the carrying out of such impulses is detrimental to societal unity by fostering a culture of grudge-holders. It would also tend to the enshrinement of martyrs, the existence of whom would likely act as levers for disaffected groups to legitimize their beliefs. It is instructive to look to the aftermath of the Ruby Ridge and Waco incidents, neither of which was a sanctioned, purposeful action on society's behalf, and yet contributed to the belief on the part of Timothy McVeigh and others that blowing up a federal building was a reasonable response. Carrying this line of thinking to its logical extreme, I wonder how far the ideas of a certain Jewish carpenter's son would have spread had the Romans quietly killed or imprisoned him.

I'd also like to suggest that followers of that martyred individual who advocate such forms of punitive retribution find another religion. I mean, that's the whole point, that in the face of such treatment, you're supposed to overcome your natural impulses toward revenge and strive to love one another, even unto one's enemies. If you don't even aspire to this, you can in no sense account yourself Christian.

2005-03-16T21:52:00.000-05:00

Social Security Debate

Tanner's earring. Catches the light, huh?

Last night I saw the Paul Krugman-Michael Tanner-Josh Marshall Social Security debate at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, and wanted to jot a few things down while they're fresh in my mind.

The title of the debate was "Social Security: Is it Really a Crisis?" It was very loosely structured as moderated by the rather unbecomingly partisan (our side, of course) Vered Mallon. Also, it wasn't very clear what Josh Marshall was doing there--nominally, he was there as some kind of political analyst, yet Krugman repeatedly apologized for going into "numbers" and "economics." Structurally, the whole thing on the left side of the issue seemed muddled, and the two-on-one (three, if you count Mallon) setup seemed gratuitous, given Krugman's mere presence.

There was nothing muddled about the Cato Institute's Michael Tanner's role, however. He was there to advocate privatization of Social Security, to pooh-pooh the idea that true add-ons have any merit, and to contradict himself as much as possible. Well, the last bit was my impression. It may not have been intentional.

The debate began with Tanner admitting up front that privatization had nothing to do with the solvency of Social Security. This was both smart and stupid: smart, because Krugman would have utterly embarassed him, and stupid, because he then didn't have any reason for being there. He kept alluding to the financing problems the system would have to deal with: when it was going to go broke, how much it was going to cost the government to deal with it, the number of retirees, etc., but always in the context of the need for privatization, so he had to stop short of making his point. Krugman never let the point slide, relentlessly characterizing privatization as an ideological preference, rather than a practical necessity.

The debate format allowed Krugman to get up to speed and really flesh out his arguments, as opposed to the over-the-top catch phrase-laden performances he sometimes gives on television. I overheard one of a trio of early 20-something guys behind me suggest to his friends that if they had a game where they drink every time Krugman bashes the Bush administration, everyone would be drunk in 10 minutes. By my count, they wouldn't have finished their first beer by the end of the debate.

He repeatedly hammered home the point that Social Security is an insurance plan that allows Americans to share the risks of death, injury, and poor lifetime earnings. If that's not the democrats' main talking point going forward, it should be.

I almost wanted to feel bad for Tanner. I mean, going toe-to-toe in a debate with a Nobel-worthy scholar in front of a hostile audience is the worst kind of gig. But he was a standard-issue drone, insensitive to having his glaring logical inconsistencies and outright contradictions pointed out to him, self-importantly cheesy, and visibly dishonest. He may have believed in in some greater purpose that was served by the things he said, but Krugman repeatedly pointed out instances where Tanner had said multiple mutually exclusive things, and it never fazed him. He just kept on beating the same old tired drum.

In his introduction, Tanner claimed that a poll released that day had indicated that 54% of Americans favored private plans. I could see Krugman ask Marshall whether such a poll existed (given that the most recent polls show about a 35% approval rating), and both of them shaking their heads and shrugging in turn.

Josh said he thought the privatization debate was (paraphrasing--hand cramps) about as close to dead as you can get. It was never a good idea, and the Republicans pushed it because they bought their own spin and thus were completely blinded to what the general public would think of it.

Curiously, Tanner didn't even reply to Josh's persuasive case that the ultimate aim of the privatizers was the complete dismantling of Social Security. He made some weak claim that disability benefits, as they exist now, were a part of every plan, but that was it. He didn't deny he wanted to get rid of the program. I don't know if he was saving himself for Krugman, or if he just couldn't make himself say the words.

There was an interesting back and forth between Tanner and Krugman on the subject of whether or not Social Security recipients were supplicants to the government. Somehow, with 4% of their income going into private accounts and 8% into traditional Social Security, according to Tanner, workers would be transformed from beggars into proud individualists. Krugman drily dismissed him.

Tanner made a lot of noise about the inheritability of private accounts, and, unfortunately, neither Paul nor Josh explicitly made the point that inheritability would really only mean something if you die before you're 65. Krugman did do a great job of explaining how Bush's plan works, he just didn't counter the inheritability argumant effectively.

The best moment of the night had to be when Krugman invoked the notion of moral equality, when one doesn't have to defer to others merely because of their wealth. The mere fact of knowing that you can support yourself gives you dignity and standing in society. Once that's gone, equality becomes impossible.

2005-03-13T12:23:00.000-05:00

Price Indexing for the People?

(Please note: I'm no economist. I have somewhat of a general grasp of how things work, but that's it. So the following is just noodling, and if I happen to get something right, it's probably by accident.)

Andy Xie of Morgan Stanley has an interesting hypothesis (scroll down), that China's size, fast growth rate, and functionally limitless pool of labor will make it a fundamentally different influence on the developed world economy of the future than previous arrivistes such as Japan and South Korea:

When a small economy like South Korea begins to develop, it is quite reasonable to assume that its prices (e.g., wages, property prices, or the cost of a haircut) will rise to the same levels as in developed economies. South Korea has a population of fewer than 50 million. If it invests to join the global economy, global demand will be met by Korean supply at the margin. As South Korea’s labor force is less than 5% of the OECD labor force, it will reach full employment quickly -- and the extra global demand will pull up its wages to international levels. Rising wages will cause inflation, and asset and goods prices will also converge towards international levels.

The price trends in China will be very different from those in Japan or South Korea at similar stages of development, in my view. China’s labor force is bigger than the OECD labor force. When it can make a product more cheaply than others can, even if all the production of that item relocates to China, its wages will not increase. China has developed remarkable strength in light manufacturing. Already, many products are made mostly in China (e.g., shoes, toys, PCs). China’s exports have quintupled in the past decade and reached 35% of GDP last year. But the wages at the coastal export factories have barely changed in the past decade.

The challenge is that the size and growth of China’s underemployed labor force limit its bargaining power. China had a population of 1.3 billion and a labor force of 760 million in 2003, according to official statistics: 256 million were employed in cities, 153 million were employed in non-agricultural activities in rural areas, and 325 million worked in farming. I believe a conservative estimate would put excess labor at 150 million. China created 9 million jobs last year when the economy was overheating. The labor surplus is likely to remain for the foreseeable future.

...

In summary, the global financial markets are speculating in China-related assets, in the belief that Chinese prices will rise to OECD levels. I believe that OECD prices are more likely to fall towards Chinese levels.

This idea takes its place alongside recent wage trends in the United States (and, possibly, the rest of the developed world, although I don't know enough about it to say), which has of late experienced flat or slightly negative real wage growth in an expanding economy. This has variously been attributed to companies arrogating to themselves productivity gains that have historically gone to labor, globalization (see China and India), weak labor organization, and the destruction and withering away of labor-friendly regulations, among other factors.

With none of these trends looking likely to reverse themselves any time soon, it's difficult to see where real wage growth in the U.S. is going to come from in the future.

On top of this, the U.S. economy is looking ripe for a big interest rate hike, further currency depreciation, and a massive squeezing-out of investment in favor of debt service. In other words, inflation is coming.

All of this is prelude to a reexamination of a central liberal tenet in the Social Security debate: that indexing benefits to prices instead of wages, as the Bush administration advocates, is a Bad Thing. If the above-noted trends continue, workers in the abstract could find themselves better off under price indexing if wage growth slows or stops in an increasingly inflationary environment. If wages are flat and inflation high, the current system of wage indexing would provide progressively lower and lower payments to retirees.

Of course, in the real world, there will be a huge temptation on the part of an increasingly straitened federal government to game inflation numbers, and any significant rise in SS benefits relative to inflow (and the balance of the non-SS budget) would eventually necessitate higher taxes or benefit cuts. Maybe continuation of wage indexing is the pragmatic course, not because it would provide SS beneficiaries with higher payouts, but the reverse, which would tend more toward the system's future solvency.

I don't know which would be the better course to follow, or favor any particular approach, but I haven't seen this idea mooted in the SS debate, and think it's worth a look by those better informed than I.

2005-03-12T14:57:00.000-05:00

Attack of the Imaginary Naysaying Racists

Last Thursday, Bush said of those opposed to his Social Security plan “They say certain people aren't capable of investing. … Sounds to me like a certain race of people living in a certain area.” It's the exact same formulation he used last April 13 in defending the Iraq war's then-emerging new justification:

Some of the debate really center around the fact that people don't believe Iraq can be free; that if you're Muslim, or perhaps brown-skinned, you can't be self-governing and free. I strongly disagree with that. I reject that, because I believe that freedom is the deepest need of every human soul, and, if given a chance, the Iraqi people will be not only self-governing, but a stable and free society.

Instead of talking about this problem that has these characteristics, and therefore needs to be fixed in this way, his appeal is to the fact that (mythical) people say his chosen 'solution' cannot possibly succeed (for appallingly stupid reasons), while neglecting to respond to the arguments his critics have made. Which leaves only an appeal to a general, undifferentiated desire to see Bush have his way. The very idea that someone out there would try to frustrate poor George's plans by saying they're impossible, well, that's just unfair, even if no such thing was ever said.

The whole argument hinges on the idea that what he's trying to do is unquestionably right and good. Oh, and, as I pointed out the first time around, on racism:

It's about getting the words "different," "color," "brown," "white," and "Muslim" out in the open. They're not like us. It's nothing we don't already know, but the repetition in the context of the possibility of having democratic government is useful to Bush. Setting up a dichotomy between white democracies (are we, really?) and brown dictatorships/theocracies is a rhetorical device that equates the supposedly neutral "white" with the unquestioned good of democracy. Nice trick, that.

(I should have added that it would be interesting to hear his analysis of what went on behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, when all of those nice, white folks lived under totalitarian regimes.)

What is being said is that certain people, poor people, aren't currently capable of investing because they don't have any money to invest. That's true regardless of what "race" they are, or the "area" in which they live. It's interesting to note that, in Bush's mind, 'poor' resolves to 'people of a different race living in certain areas.' It makes plain that he takes for granted that the assumed race for all Americans is white, and that other races can be assumed to live in other 'areas.' Given that Bush has repeatedly made reference to blacks getting a raw deal under Social Security, it's apparent which 'race' he's talking about.

Independent of all other considerations, yes, it would be nice to see the poor, of whatever race, able to take advantage of the benefits of investing enjoyed by their wealthier fellow citizens. As Bush has vastly reduced the burden of taxation on investment income relative to wage income, it's practically a moral mandate that the poor be allowed to share in the benefits. However, under his proposed private accounts, effective taxation is vastly higher than on any other form of income: all principal and interest, up to 3% above inflation, merely replaces a like portion of the previous level of defined benefits.

Under his proposal, the entire "investment" scheme is tightly scripted and controlled: people decide how much of their Social Security contributions, up to 4% or $1,000/year, they would like to put into private accounts, and into which of a few very conservative options they'd like this money to go. Does Bush really mean to take the idea that blacks can't handle these simple decisions seriously to the extent that he feels he has the duty to go before the American people and say it ain't so?

He's the first one, the only one, to even allude to this line of 'reasoning.' He doesn't address any of the actual objections to privatization, i.e., that it does nothing to fix the system's finances, that many people could find themselves worse off because of it, that it would force huge amounts of additional borrowing, that it has the potential to seriously distort financial markets, etc., this argument must be what he imagines his opponents are thinking. As such, it says a lot more about how his own mind works than it does about those of his opponents.

2005-03-08T23:08:00.000-05:00

By Degrees

So we win Social Security but lose bankruptcy. Is that victory? Winning Social Security only leaves us where we were. It doesn't make anything better. Our side held the line against a deadly serious assault, and then we caved on the principle of human dignity. I'm disgusted, and joining the faction against these craven 'democrats' being elected to anything again, ever. Ok, well, at least president.

We're becoming a banana republic right before my eyes. Nothing made it out of debate into the press. Theoretically, it's possible to get yourself into a debt that it's impossible to work off under this bill. More likely, those who declare bankruptcy will find their economic growth severely stunted, in the service of usurious creditors.

It's ironic that those who trumpet the ownership society are paving the way to a debtor nation.

2005-02-23T07:45:00.000-05:00

One Meeelion Dollars

MyDD relates some of the hopeless bs that is the Social Security debate, and points to this proposal from former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill:

To move away from Social Security's chronic funding problems, O'Neill suggests that the government put $2,000 in a special investment account for every newborn American. The government would invest $2,000 more each year until the child reaches 18.

The money would be invested in a conservative index of stocks and bonds and couldn't be touched until retirement. The investment would grow at a compounded rate, meaning that as the value of assets in the account grows, profit would be reinvested so the account would grow even more. Without adding a single cent beyond compounding after the child turns 18, he or she would retire at age 65 with $1,013,326 in the account, O'Neill reckons.

"If you do the arithmetic, the $1 million would provide an annuity of $82,000 a year for 20 years," O'Neill said in an interview.

O'Neill assumes a 6 percent annual return on investment. He calls that figure conservative since it represents the worst performance to date of any 25-year cycle on Wall Street.

Sounds pretty good, right? Let's run the numbers. Assuming an inflation rate of only 1%, in 2075 the $82,000 annual payment becomes $43,099 in today's dollars. A rate of 2% drops it to $22,505, and 3% (the historical average since 1900) to $11,674. And those annual payments are worth less and less every year. Continuing the projection, at rates of inflation of 1%, 2%, and 3%, respectively the payments at age 85 would be worth between $34,898,$14,724, and $6,157 annually.

Also, don't live past age 85, because O'Neill's annuity money runs out then. Or play it safe at 65 with a lifetime annuity and get a much lower annual payment.

In the bargain, O'Neill proposes getting rid of Medicare, presumably because millionaire retirees will be able to afford to pay for it themselves. What's medical care going to cost in 65 years? Health care costs are currently going up by more than 6% per year. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that, in 2090, $6,157 per year in today's dollars is going to cover approximately squat. If medical care continues to outpace inflation, it won't even cover that.

Edit: Today's children will be 85 in 2090, not 2070.

2005-02-12T11:59:00.000-05:00

Shorter David Brooks:

I spend all of my time shilling for a president whose sole motivation is to create and nurture an aristocracy in America by ripping off the proles. Discovering that I rank no higher than lance-polisher is a bitter, bitter thing.

2005-02-05T13:20:00.000-05:00

Juan Cole Brings the Pain

This has to be the best takedown of a prominent wingnut I've ever seen. I haven't been much on the Jonah Goldberg beat much, but he's one of the worst. Reading this made my teeth hurt, it was so sweet.

2005-02-04T07:41:00.000-05:00

SS Personal Accounts: Don't Worry, You'll Get What You Have Coming to You

Geez, what a bunch of whiners we Democrats are. Of course retirees will get back every penny of principal they put in and every penny of interest they earn on the proposed private accounts. I'm ashamed for the Left when I hear people say the Republicans are going to illegally take away people's savings.

They're going to take away some of your regular Social Security contributions, equal to every penny you put in and every penny of the first 3% of interest you earn on the proposed private accounts, plus inflation. Democrats can pretend that it's the same thing all they want, but it's not. Listening to them, you'd think that putting away $2 and and getting back $1 was some kind of bad deal, or something.

2005-02-01T11:06:00.000-05:00

Bush’s Slime-Drenched Magnanimity

or, Doing the Right Thing for Sleazy Reasons

$250,000 military death benefit proposed

In response to those of us who opposed the Iraq war in part because of the suffering certain to be visited on our armed forces, the pro-war crowd was fond of saying that soldiers had no cause to complain. They knew they could be sent to war, even an unjust war, when they signed up, and they knew what the deal would be if something happened to them. That's what they agreed to. The soldiers took their chances and lost. The government should owe them nothing. Aside from the fact that Congress never declared war on Iraq, and therefore this invasion was illegal, the argument does have some merit.

So why would the government sweeten (ugh!) the deal now? Perhaps because the soldiers had been sent to fight an war of choice under false pretenses and their deaths were unnecessary in every sense of the word, and this administration knew they would be from the beginning? Because the public has now turned against the war and they feel the need to try to limit their political exposure? Yes, on both counts.

If this is a good idea now, if this is the way to do morally right by the families of the deceased, then it should have been the right thing to do from the beginning. Making the payment retroactive does not change the fact that the policy of the U.S. military was to pay $12,420 to the families of soldiers killed in combat zones. During the first Gulf War, the payment was only $3,000, and you didn’t see politicians climbing all over themselves trying to raise it.

Are they going to try to tell us that after 1,400 Americans paid the ultimate price that something finally clicked and George saw the light? Why not after the first body bag? Why not after the 10th? The 100th? The 1,000th? As a country, we unfortunately have plenty of experience losing soldiers in wars, and yet nobody ever came up with the idea of paying families of the dead more than 10 years' worth of the average soldier's salary. I submit that it wasn't because we were stupid or immoral then. In this case, coming from those who manipulated the country into this war, it amounts to an admission of wrongdoing: you don't make restitution for something you haven't done. Paradoxically, if this were genuinely a just war, if we had really invaded Iraq to defend ourselves, increasing these payments more than twenty-fold would never have occurred to anyone.

To make an important distinction: I am not against this proposal. If I were a member of Congress, I would vote, without hesitation, to approve it, and encourage my colleagues to do likewise. I think the families of those killed in this senseless war deserve everything the government can do for them. Although this is the right thing to do, this is not a principled action; it is sheer cynical calculation of the highest order, and that stinks to high heaven. You don’t do the right thing to make people like you; you do it because it’s right. Surely the party of moral crusaders, the party of values, principles, and ideology understands that.

To reiterate, if this is the morally right thing to do--and I believe that the families of those who make the ultimate sacrifice for their country deserve more than a mere pittance from the government that put them in harm’s way--it should have been our policy from the beginning, not done subject to the whims and vagaries of public opinion. And for those who held the position that, because they signed up for whatever might happen during their terms, our soldiers deserved not the least consideration for whatever fates might await them in this adventure to turn around and offer their families this blood money as if they were somehow being magnanimous makes my blood boil.

While we’re at it, we should pay special attention to what these ghoulish bastards propose to do for the thousands who have been blinded, deafened, maimed, lost limbs, and/or sustained brain damage, who may well never be able to work or lead normal lives again. If it's right to pay blood money to the families of the dead, logic and fairness dictate that those who have been broken should get something as well.

Update: As it turns out, they probably won’t get much. Avedon Carol over at The Sideshow points me to an article at Democratic Underground (by way of Heart, Soul and Humor) entitled "Pentagon Says Veterans' Benefits "Hurtful" to National Security." With a nod to South Knox Bubba, all I can say is "Ok, then."

The slow rate of VA spending growth enforced by Bush and the congressional Republicans over the last four years won't cover growing deferred benefits, such as education, housing, retirement, health care and so on, promised to current service members or that are supposed to be available for new enlistees.

Slow spending growth isn't even the biggest immediate problem for vets. In the last two years, Bush ordered the closing of several VA hospitals in different parts of the country, pushing waiting lists for medical services for veterans as high as six months for about 230,000 vets. These closings followed in the wake of the congressional Republican's concerted drive in 2003 to cut $15 billion from VA spending over the next ten years.

And, since his razor-thin victory over Senator Kerry and his claim of "political capital" to rule as he sees fit, President Bush, according to an Associated Press story about a leaked White House Budget Office memo, plans to slash veterans' health care benefits by over $900 million and veteran's housing programs by $50 million in 2005 alone.

The whole article is a must-read, especially for anyone out there who thinks the Bush administration gives a rat's ass about veterans and their families.

Further Update: Keeps getting better and better. Salon's War Room reports today that not only is this a new idea for Bush, but it's one his administration had previously opposed. Beyond that, in 2003, the administration objected raising the death benefit from $6,000 to $12,000. They did not think it was a good idea, let alone necessary. Now, they'll try to use the issue to show us how moral they are, and how deeply they feel the pain of those who've lost loved ones in Iraq and Afghanistan. What filthy souls they have.

2005-01-28T09:39:00.000-05:00

One Soul at a Time

I am very gratified to see an actual instance of a formerly intolerant wingnut showing signs of meeting the rest of the world at least halfway. It's a double-bonus that it was Jesus what done it:

Jesus was tolerant and loved everyone - especially the poor and outcasts. As a couple of other letters pointed out, I now see that in some ways Jesus Himself was not very like a modern conservative and that has me thinking. I also see that all who are religious have equal rights and no religion can be held above the others, whether in school or anywhere else.

This lady blasted "Christianity" through a bullhorn, and yet was surprised to find that Jesus had been peace-loving and mild. In fact, his signature act, allowing himself to be crucified, was the ultimate expression of meekness.

Why didn't she know that already? You can't be a Christian if you don't know that.

2004-12-23T11:45:00.000-05:00

Blood-Soaked Strawman

Gee, Tom, I thought you were some kind of expert in foreign affairs. Didn't you know that "tiny minorit(ies) who want to rule [their countries] by force" are prevalent in most of the world, especially in the Middle East? Didn't you know that the governments of Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran all take this form? Didn't you know that they have always taken this form? Why did you expect post-Saddam Iraq to be different? Please include your sources.

Was it unthinkable that, faced with the prospect of a government dominated by the Shi'ites whom they had brutally oppressed for decades, some Iraqi Sunnis might try everything in their power to derail the process?

Do not be fooled into thinking that the Iraqi gunmen in this picture are really defending their country and have no alternative. The Sunni-Baathist minority that ruled Iraq for so many years has been invited, indeed begged, to join in this election and to share in the design and wealth of post-Saddam Iraq.

That's very nice, except that no one is saying that, Tom. It's really simple: the insurgents think they can wind up with a better deal by derailing the elections. Is this really the best the nation's most widely read Mideast expert can do, to label the insurgents evil, so that America is good by implicit contrast?

As the Johns Hopkins foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum so rightly pointed out to me, "These so-called insurgents in Iraq are the real fascists, the real colonialists, the real imperialists of our age." They are a tiny minority who want to rule Iraq by force and rip off its oil wealth for themselves. It's time we called them by their real names.

Let me get this straight, Tom. We invade and occupy a sovereign nation, and it's the insurgents who are the colonialists and imperialists? I'm no famous, feted, highly paid expert, like you, Tom, but I think you're just the tiniest bit full of shit. Nobody, and I mean nobody, outside of the insurgents themselves, thinks they're justified in what they're doing. They're killing people. They're evil. Everyone knows this. It's not news. Take your straw man and shove it, Tom.

Does the fact that our stated objective is to ensure free and fair elections in Iraq absolve us from everything we've done wrong in Iraq? Does it justify our indiscriminate bombing, our attempts to set up a Chalabi-led kleptocracy, our dissolving the Iraqi Army, and all the other manifestations of short-sightedness, callousness, greed, and brutality Iraq has endured since the invasion? Is that how it works, Tom?

Indeed, they haven't even bothered to tell us otherwise. They have counted on the fact that the Bush administration is so hated around the world that any opponents will be seen as having justice on their side. Well, they do not. They are murdering Iraqis every day for the sole purpose of preventing them from exercising that thing so many on the political left and so many Europeans have demanded for the Palestinians: "the right of self-determination."

One more time, Tom: the fact that the insurgents are bad does not thereby make us good. Maybe if you get that sentence tattooed backwards on your forehead, it might sink in as you read it every time you have the gall to look at yourself in a mirror.

We took it upon ourselves to change the course of Iraqi history. As Colin Powell said, we own what happens there as the result of our actions. World opinion is clearly relevant to us, and it's not critical of our actions because of any regard for the insurgents. It's anti-U.S. because we lied to get the war started, handled it abominably, and in all likelihood made things worse in Iraq and the Mideast. The evil that is the Ba'athist insurgency is a direct result of our actions in Iraq. The blood of those election workers is also on our hands.

You are right about one thing, Tom: the vast majority of our soldiers are making noble sacrifices. But they're not the bringing-freedom-to-the-oppressed kind of sacrifices, they're The Charge of the Light Brigade kind.

2004-11-05T00:20:00.000-05:00

Nothing to See Here, Move Along

Over at Ethel the Blog, I found linked this county-by-county list of Florida votes, which includes party registration percentages and calculates the percent of the expected vote for each party by multiplying the total number of votes cast by the percentage of party affiliation. Some of the results are very surprising:

County V_Rep V_Dem V_Ttl %Reg_R %Reg_D Tot_Registered
Calhoun 3,780 2,116 5,961 11.9% 82.4% 8,350
Hardee 5,047 2,147 7,245 26.7% 63.8% 10,399
Liberty 1,927 1,070 3,021 7.9% 88.3% 4,075
Madison 4,195 4,048 8,306 14.9% 79.5% 11,371

According to this, we're supposed to believe that Calhoun County, that has an 82-12% Democratic voter registration advantage, somehow went for Bush by 64-35%. Perhaps Hardee County, with a 64-27% Democratic majority, preferred Dubya by 70-30%. Or Liberty County, where Democratic voter affiliation is 11 times more common than its Republican counterpart (88-8%), chose Bush by 64-36%.

My favorite is Madison County, where voters built a bridge to the Republican party by selecting Bush 51-49%, despite an 80-15% Democratic majority and a population that is 40.3% Black.

For about 2 minutes, I imagined posting this and becoming an instant blog superstar. I'd show everyone the obviously bogus numbers from Florida, the results would be nullified, and Kerry would be president. And he'd owe it all to me, ME! Mwahahaha, etc.

Just to make sure, and to further highlight the divergence from expected voting behavior, I looked up the 2000 Florida county election results. Each of the four counties I highlighted for looking suspicious had voted for Bush-Cheney in 2000 by significant margins. There goes the Pulitzer.

Maybe there's something different about small-county Floridians that causes them to vote for Republican presidential candidates. Or maybe there's something very wrong with these registration and/or voting numbers. Unfortunately, it's probably the latter.

Edit: I can't figure out how to make the spaces entered in the post editing window show up in the final post for the election figures. If anyone knows how to do that in Blogger, I'd be much obliged if someone would drop me a note via e-mail or in comments. Thanks.

2004-11-04T20:00:00.000-05:00

Now They Fucking Tell Us

The soldiers, who belong to two different units, described how Iraqis plundered explosives from unsecured bunkers before driving off in Toyota trucks.

The U.S. troops said there was little they could do to prevent looting of the ammunition site, 30 miles south of Baghdad.

"We were running from one side of the compound to the other side, trying to kick people out," said one senior noncommissioned officer who was at the site in late April 2003.

"On our last day there, there were at least 100 vehicles waiting at the site for us to leave" so looters could come in and take munitions.

"It was complete chaos. It was looting like L.A. during the Rodney King riots," another officer said.

He and other soldiers who spoke to The Times asked not to be named, saying they feared retaliation from the Pentagon.

These guys were there, they witnessed and lived with this clusterfuck. Day in and day out, they faced the very real prospect of being blown to hell by the bombs, missiles, and explosives they had watched being driven off into the countryside. They cleared their throats and went back to work, and didn't care enough to speak up about it until until 18 months later. No wonder other countries don't want to mess with us. We're crazy.

There was a presidential election a little while back where one of the candidates, the guy who started the war and endorsed its strategy, was claiming the other candidate would make America less safe. It was his biggest issue. His incompetent underlings created a situation where we couldn't, or wouldn't, secure a known arms depot containing thousands upon thousands of tons of weapons. In. a. fucking. war. zone. Wait, make that two humongous arms depots. I don't know what to call a military command that fails even to plan to secure known munition dumps during battle except dangerously incompetent and unfit to lead.

That LA riots image would have torn right through the heart of Bush's strong leader persona and given Kerry the presidency. It came two days too late. I can't stand it.

2004-11-03T23:22:00.000-05:00

Fighting Fire With Water

Eric Alterman says:

The problem is just this: Slightly more than half of the citizens of this country simply do not care about what those of us in the “reality-based community” say or believe about anything.

They don’t care that Iraq is turning into murderous quicksand and a killing field for our children. They don’t care that the Bush presidency has made us less safe by creating more terrorists, inspiring more anti-American hatred and refusing to engage in the hard work that would be necessary to make a meaningful dent in our myriad vulnerabilities at home. They don’t care that he has mortgaged our children’s future to give trillions to the wealthiest among us. They don’t care that the economy continues to hemorrhage well-paying jobs and replace them with Wal-Mart; that the number without health insurance is over forty million and rising. They don’t care that Medicare premiums are rising to fund the coffers of pharmaceutical companies. They don’t care that the air they breathe and the water they drink is being slowly poisoned and though they call themselves conservatives, they even don’t care that the size of the government and its share of our national income has increased by roughly a quarter in just four years. This is not a world of rational debate and issue preference.

It’s one of “them” and “us.” He’s one of “them” and not one of “us” and that’s all they care about. True it’s an illusion. After all, Bush is a millionaire’s son who went to Yale and Harvard and sat out Vietnam, not even bothering to show up for his cushy National Guard duty, and succeeded only in trading on his father’s name and connections in adult life. But somehow, they feel he understands them. He speaks their language. Our guys don’t. And unless they learn it, we will continue to condemn this country and those parts of the world it affects to a regime of malign neglect at best—malignant and malicious assault at worse.

There's something cultlike about the devotion of a lot of Bush's admirers, and he encourages it. He does not claim to have any specific skills or expertise; he's a man of negligible achievement who was somehow called to lead. He claims to receive instructions from God's own mouth. He has said that, as president, he feels no obligation to answer for himself to anyone. It often seems that he believes himself to possess some form of divine right.

And people go along with it.

If he does something wrong, it's not really wrong. If it is, it's not his fault. If he doesn't understand something, it's not important. His manifest failures of thought and speech are never taken for signs of incompetence. His incompetence is never pertinent. He makes no mistakes and regrets nothing.

The left is never going to move these people as easily and effectively as George W. Bush does unless we start our own cult and defeat his cult in cult-to-cult combat. Sounds painful and degrading. As an alternative, I suggest we look into mass deprogramming.

2004-11-03T14:07:00.000-05:00

Save Us From Ourselves!

When the confetti and rent clothing have settled and been swept away, the inaction of moderate Republicans will be revealed to be one of the pivotal keys to the 2004 election results. To those of us with keen eyes, their dismay at Bush administration and House leadership has long been evident and widespread. On the wider stage, however, it was never enunciated worth a damn.

Dozens of high-ranking military officers are quietly on record as oppposing the Iraq war, the strategy and tactics employed, and/or the number and provisioning of troops assigned to the task. But the American public voted without knowing this.

Nearly every economist worth a damn believes that Bush's fiscal policies are a train wreck waiting to happen. Some of them have gently hinted as much in papers and petitions that nobody, least of all themselves, ever bothered to publicize. Aside from (that shrill communist) Paul Krugman, Donald Luskin got more press than the rest of them put together. The American public voted without hearing about this.

Hardly anyone with an actual basis for credibility thinks Bush's plan to privatize Social Security is beneficial, much less workable. The word never got out. While the fair and balanced media yammered and dithered without ever stating that 1+1-1 can in no possible universe equal 2, sane Republicans stared at their shoes. The American public voted believing there wasn't much difference between the two candidates.

The way election dynamics work is that, when there's a really awful president, people defect from his party in a visible way. John Kerry saying Bush is a disaster is so much electioneering bushwah without at least some visible support from the other party. And we got none.

The moderates figured that if it was obvious to them, it had to be positively white-hot to the Democrats and independents, whose high turnout would carry the day and keep them from having to make the difficult decision to tell the truth. But they figured wrong, and Kerry's appeals to facts were swamped by Bush's appeals to base instinct and prejudice, both of which require no external reinforcement.

The image that sticks with me is that of John McCain during an interview with Dan Rather at about 7:30 election night. He's clearly gritting his teeth as he repeats the toneless mantra: "I support President Bush," even as he acknowledges, but can't bring himself to voice opposition to, Bush's failed and stupid policies.

These people, who sleep in the same bed with the gang that made an art form of repudiating rationality as a political device, bet on the rationality of the American electorate and lost badly. For their trouble, the best they can look forward to is to sullenly go along with the New Nutjob Diktat with their skins intact. I doubt they'll get it.

2004-11-02T00:20:00.000-05:00

It Can't Happen Here

While we listened this morning to NPR's recapping of the Ohio and South Dakota voter intimidation rulings, my girlfriend expressed a very keen insight: "what would we think if this was happening in another country? The ruling party has people going to polling places to challenge and intimidate voters. It would be so obvious the election was bogus." A half-second's reflection told me she was absolutely right.

For all of the handwringing over the legitimacy of this year's Venezuelan referendum, we never saw partisans of Hugo Chavez openly challenging the elegibility of likely opposition voters. If we had, U.S. neocons would have been screaming for military intervention to remove him from office.

If there had been evidence that former Turkish prime minister Tansu Ciller's brother had deliberately attempted to purge Islamists from voter registration rolls, there would have been riots in the streets, and foreign policy wonks worldwide would have been tsk-tsking over Turkey's crooked democracy and the EU would have washed its hands of them.

It's an open secret here that high voter turnout favors Democrats generally, and especially in the presidential race. In one sense, it could be said that any Republican presidential victory, given the manifest and continuing preference for their opponents, is somehow illegitimate. However, because voting is not mandatory, the winner is the one who gets more actual votes, case closed.

I can accept this without question. Although I loathed them both, I had no problem with Reagan and Bush I taking office; they both won beyond a reasonable suspicion of shenanigans, and I had to shut up and deal. Fair enough.

What must foreigners think of our democracy in light of Jeb Bush's attempted purge of eligible black voters? What must they think in light of the Republican recruitment and deployment of poll challengers in Ohio and elsewhere? What must they think of Republican operatives conspicuously writing down license plate numbers of Native Americans in South Dakota?

They must think that America's democracy is rigged, that it's a sham. They must think that the side controlling the government is cheating and that the will of the public is being subordinated to that of the rich and the powerful. They must think that the United States of America no longer lives by the principle that everyone is equal and has the right to be counted. They must think that representative government here is dead or dying.

Why don't we think that here? Isn't it obvious?

The fact that we may get enough votes this time to overcome this creeping anti-democratic cancer absolves us of nothing. If we do not make ourselves heard on this issue, we'll deserve what we get.

2004-10-30T01:25:00.000-04:00

Cui bono?

Not to sound too much like a conspiracy nut or anything, but, regardless of the direct effect that bin Laden's sudden appearance may have had on the electorate, the tape does give the Bush campaign some desperately-needed breathing room from the explosives story.

I'm just sayin', is all.

2004-10-29T10:04:00.000-04:00

Why Did the IAEA Bother?

I know there's an election coming up, and a lot of important things going on, but this post doesn't really address any of it. It's just a dumb question that I can't help asking:

Having been worried in the face of the Republican counterspin that the explosives story might lose its legs, I posted below that the connection between the explosives and nuclear proliferation was the best angle to keep the story moving forward. But this morning, I read, from no less than weapons inspections Numero Uno David Kay, that the RDX and HMX are not considered WMDs, and their loss is not a nuclear proliferation issue.

Why did the IAEA even bother with the stuff? Why did they single it out of all the other weapons at Al Qaqaa for inspections and seals? It doesn't add up.

2004-10-26T11:26:00.000-04:00

It's the Nukes, Stupid!

While I applaud Josh Marshall's tireless exegesis of the timing and shifting explanations of the looted explosives story, I believe the effort misfires on the administration's greatest culpability: this stuff can be used to make nuclear weapons.

Anchoring the credibility and relevance of all the administration's talk about WMDs was always the specter of Saddam's bomb. That's why they had Condi and Colin shred their reputations over easily-disproven nuclear connections with aluminum tubes and yellowcake. The uncertainty surrounding Iraqi WMDs became a solid thing in the public mind from which America had to defend itself only when nukes were added to the equation.

By our unilateralist approach to the invasion of Iraq, we arrogated to ourselves responsibility for Iraq, and especially for the WMDs or components thereof which (we are told) prompted us to act in the first place. These explosives were a known quantity, in a known location, having been quarantined by the International Atomic Energy Agency back in 1991, and confirmed to persist there not long before the invasion.

Administration officials have attempted to obscure the supreme importance of the loss of the explosives by listing all the other munitions the coalition forces have found and destroyed. They have attempted to elide responsibility for oversight of the explosives by claiming they had already been looted by the time we arrived on the scene. Even if that is the case, it is inexcusable.

It is an admission that those in charge of the invasion failed in their oversight of a known nuclear component at a time when we had unquestioned air superiority and at least enough intelligence capability to detect the 40 or so trucks that would be required to move the stuff. Any activity going to or from Al Qaqaa should have prompted immediate U.S. air strikes, if the administration was at all doing the job it had told us it needed to do.

The fact that the HMX and RDX also happen to be ideally suited for use in guerilla attacks against our soldiers widens the catastrophe of the loss, but it also works to equate the explosives with the more conventional weapons and ordinance which we never had a prayer of entirely neutralizing. But that is not the point.

The point is that this stuff was special because it could be used to make nuclear bombs. It was specifically tracked by weapons inspectors because it was special. It was checked on by the invading force because it was special. And, because it was special, there is no excuse why, before, during, or after the invasion, this stuff was left unsupervised for even a minute.

If they had time and resources to guard oil installations, that only makes things worse for the administration. The world can survive a minor spike in oil prices and pipelines can be rebuilt. Nuclear explosions are forever, and they're more likely now because of this collossal fuck-up.

Once this crucial fact is firmly established in the media, and only then, should we say, "and, by the way, this stuff is probably being used right now to blow the arms, legs, and heads off of the good men and women of the United States armed forces."

2004-10-20T10:41:00.000-04:00

Iran Endorses Bush

The head of the security council of Iran, a member of the "Axis of Evil," a massively repressive Islamic fundamentalist state that is widely believed to be pursuing nuclear weapons, a proven sponsor of terrorism, and a nation which several of Bush's most influential neoconservative advisors have advocated invading for the purpose of regime change, has endorsed the candidacy of incumbent Republican George W. Bush for president.

Why? Is it because Bush's adventure in Iraq has left us with insufficient forces to pose a realistic threat to the Khameni government? Is it because Bush's mismanagement of Iraq has virtually ensured Iran a much wider sphere of influence in the region without costing the latter so much as the price of a bullet? Is it because Bush's energy policies will ensure that American oil consumption will remain high and contribute to strong worldwide demand for oil? Is it because Bush's hardheaded unilateralism has alienated those countries that might otherwise commit resources to forcing the Iranians to improve their human rights situation?

Only the mullahs know for sure.

via Pandagon

2004-10-19T14:48:00.000-04:00

Bush: Fundamentalist Iraq Government OK

Bush was asked during an interview with the The Associated Press how he would react if Iraqis someday freely voted into power an Islamic fundamentalist government. Bush replied, "I will be disappointed, but democracy is democracy."

Sigh. At least he's facing the reality that he doesn't have much choice in the matter. By having presided so long and exerted so much control over Iraq, what happens next is entirely our responsibility. At the same time, Bush cannot afford to be seen by imperialism-wary Arabs appointing a puppet government. And he's desperate to get US troops out of the country as soon as possible, so he isn't going to invest the time or diplomacy required to lay the groundwork for an effective government. Iraqis have essentially a free pass to do anything they like, and Bush can't say a damn thing about it. And whatever they wind up doing, we'll own it.

All of the above has got to be obvious to everyone even slightly paying attention to Iraq, even Bush. But for the life of me, I can't figure out why he's saying so out loud. There are an awful lot of things that are already going very wrong in Iraq, but the administration isn't exactly emphasizing them. Instead, our attention is being diverted to Iraq's future, which will be democratic and wonderful.

An Islamic fundamentalist government, once "elected," will be nothing remotely approaching a democracy. Inherent in the defenition of such a government is an elevation of some points of view and a delegitimization of others. Pluralism is incompatible with fundamentalism; such a government in Iraq will represent only one of the country's three main subgroups, almost certainly the Shi'a. In the eyes of the government, at least 40% of the population will be seen as heretics at best, infidels at worst. Given such divisions, the only way to maintain order and prevent the country from splitting would be the imposition of brutal repression.

Aside from all that, countries whose governments are founded on received truth aren't very good at educating their people, or retaining the educated people they've already got. Islamic fundamentalists have awful records when it comes to the treatment of women. They're not good at economic policy. And such a government in Iraq will inevitably be anti-American.

Bush has to know better than to shoot his mouth off on the subject of Iraq's future, and even less can I believe that Bush's handlers picked now as a good time to manage expectations in Iraq downwards. The only remotely plausible explanation I can think of is that this is a ploy to get more international boots on the ground, as France, Germany, Russia, etc. don't want to see another nutjob government in the Middle East, and we can't be counted on to manage anything right anymore. The only problem with that strategy is that any move to commit forces in Iraq would be political suicide for just about every government in the world. What is he up to, then?

via The Agonist

2004-10-01T15:05:00.000-04:00

Googlebomb Opportunity

George W. Bush = Elmer Fudd

He'll get those wascawy weapons of mass destwuction, too. Or maybe the gun blows up in his face repeatedly, I forget how it ends.

Inspiration here.

via catch.com by way of Atrios

2004-10-01T10:29:00.000-04:00

I've Seen His Soul, But I Can't Pronounce His Name

I did a double-take last night when I first heard Bush refer to Russian president Putin as "Vladimer" (rhymes with 'Lattimer'). Afterwards, I replayed that portion of the debate, and there it was, unmistakably wrong, twice in a row.

Many have put forth the argument that Bush's famous battles with his native tongue amount to simple misstatements, not failures of intellect or evidence of igorance, but that explanation just doesn't work on this one. Maybe that theory explains Bush's announcement that he was trying to "love [Iraq widow Missy Johnson] as best as I can," but not here.

Bush is supposedly good friends with the guy--he has to have heard it properly pronounced hundreds of times--and he can't even get his name right.

This tells us a couple of things. First off, Karen Hughes miscalculated when she assumed Bush knew how to pronounce the name, and so didn't bother to write it out phonetically for him. Second, maybe they're not such great friends, after all. Third, maybe he's even dumber than commonly believed; everyone knows how to pronounce 'Vladimir.' It's common knowledge. Does Bush know anything not specifically drilled into him by his handlers?

More generally, Kerry kicked Bush's butt. His performance put the lie to all the negatives Rove & Co. have been trying to stick him with. Flip-flopper? Weak? Irresolute? Not leadership material? He was as steady as an oak. He hammered Bush and his record again and again with substantive criticisms for which the latter had nothing resembling answers, much less excuses.

If there were a war, and you had to pick one of these two to lead it, the choice would be easy. Kerry went on the offensive, and stayed there. Bush couldn't figure out what direction to take with his answers. He hesitated and seemed to lose his train of thought. He seemed to strike out blindly, giving answers to questions that weren't asked. He looked irresolute and anxious and perturbed.

Imagine Bush giving orders to a platoon, talking like he did during the debate. It would be a wonder if half of them didn't desert. Kerry was at the other end of the spectrum. He positively oozed leadership. He was forceful without looking fanatical. He knew what he wanted to accomplish and how to go about doing it. And then he did it, not with platitudes and gimmicks, but with substance and force.

It's telling that Kerry convincingly won on the only topic where voters had consistently favored Bush. This is by no means a reason to be complacent, only to know that this race is very, very winnable.

2004-09-30T23:58:00.000-04:00

Bush Pulling a Gore?

I'm watching C-SPAN's replay of the split-screen debate. I just heard Bush give a biig sigh before responding to a very effective Kerry point. Did anyone Tivo the debate? Were there more sighs? Could we stuff this down their throats?

2004-09-28T11:11:00.000-04:00

Incomplete Elections Fine, Says Brooks

Just look what happened in El Salvador:

Conditions were scarcely better in 1984, when Salvadorans got to vote again. Nearly a fifth of the municipalities were not able to participate in the elections because they were under guerrilla control. The insurgents mined the roads to cut off bus service to 40 percent of the country. Twenty bombs were planted around the town of San Miguel. Once again, people voted with the sound of howitzers in the background.

Yet these elections proved how resilient democracy is, how even in the most chaotic circumstances, meaningful elections can be held. They produced a National Assembly, and a president, José Napoleón Duarte. They gave the decent majority a chance to display their own courage and dignity. War, tyranny and occupation sap dignity, but voting restores it.

The elections achieved something else: They undermined the insurgency. El Salvador wasn't transformed overnight. But with each succeeding election into the early 90's, the rebels on the left and the death squads on the right grew weaker, and finally peace was achieved, and the entire hemisphere felt the effects.

I mention this case study because we are approaching election day in Afghanistan on Oct. 9. Six days later, voter registration begins in Iraq. Conditions in both places will be tense and chaotic. And in Washington, a mood of bogus tough-mindedness has swept the political class. As William Raspberry wrote yesterday in The Washington Post, "the new consensus seems to be that bringing American-style democracy to Iraq is no longer an achievable goal." We should just settle for what John Kerry calls "stability." We should be satisfied if some strongman comes in who can restore order.

The people who make this argument pat themselves on the back for being hard-headed, but the fact is they are naïve.

They've got things exactly backward. The reason we should work for full democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan is not just because it's noble, but because it's practical. It is easier to defeat an insurgency and restore order with elections than without.

Brooks seems to think the citizens of Afghanistan and Iraq would be well served if things turn out as well as they did in El Salvador following their incomplete elections. Would they?

By Brooks' own reckoning, 75,000 people died in El Salvador's civil war, most of them after the elections to which he refers. El Salvador's population in 1984 was 4.7 million. If things go as well for Iraq, only 413,718 more people will have to die. If Afghanistan is lucky enough to repeat El Salvador's success, only 464,897 more will die.

Of course, El Salvador's fledgling democracy had a little help from its American friends. In the interest of democracy and stability, I'm sure we'd be willing to be as gracious with Afghanistan and Iraq.

US officials say that President Bush senior's policies set the stage for peace, turning El Salvador into a democratic success story.

However, it took more than 70,000 deaths and mass human rights violations, before peace was reached.

Archbishop Romero's murder is a good example.

It was, according to declassified US documents and other witnesses, carried out by Salvadorean police intelligence agents on the orders of Major Roberto D'Aubuisson.

He was at the time running the army's intelligence war and went on to found the right-wing Arena party which is in power in El Salvador today.

No-one was brought to justice and for the next decade, when President Bush's father was heavily involved in Salvador policy, the same police agents would be at the centre of US funded efforts to wipe out left-wing guerrillas.

To defeat the rebels, the US equipped and trained an army which kidnapped and disappeared more than 30,000 people, and carried out large-scale massacres of thousands of old people women and children.

And if history continues to repeat itself, each country can look forward to a future government headed by a party founded by the murderous thug responsible for most of the killing in the first place. See? Incomplete elections work just fine.

2004-09-10T09:32:00.000-04:00

Bush's Service - The Big Picture

The paperwork released by CBS on Wednesday have generated a lot of controversy. Are they real or forged? If they're real, then what do they mean? What new information is contained in them?

However, the bit that's getting the most attention, and which is potentially most damaging to Bush, is something that was already undisputed public knowledge: He failed to report for his physical examination, and, in doing so, disobeyed the order of a superior officer.

When you're required to get a flight certification physical in the Texas National Guard, your superior officer doesn't ask you politely to go see the nice doctor, if you've got time. No, as in all things military, they order you to do what they want you to do. You do it at the time and in the manner specified, or it's your ass.

The debate over the documents' authenticity could keep up until well past the election, but the fact remains that Bush committed the military equivalent of a felony, and, if standard procedure had been followed, would have been court-martialled and punished. This would be no less true if John Kerry had forged the CBS documents himself.

Instead of the whole smokescreen of speculation about the documents' provenance, it'd be nice to see the press going after the big issue: did Bush commit a crime, and, if so, why wasn't he punished for it? The answer to the first question, at least, seems easy enough to find.

2004-09-09T09:51:00.000-04:00

White House Prefers Reaction to Preemption

Over at First Draft, Holden's gaggle obsession brings to light a little exchange, in which Scott McClellan explains why the president supports the renewal of the assault weapons ban without actually, uh, supporting it.

Q The assault weapons ban expires in just a few days. Can you list for us the many things the President might be doing to encourage Congress to send him the bill that he said he would sign?

MR. McCLELLAN: The President's views have been made very clear, and the best way we can reduce crimes committed with guns is to strictly enforce our laws. And prosecutions under this administration are up. I think it's -- well, it's more than 60 percent -- I think 68 percent over the previous administration. That's the best way to crack down on crimes committed with guns. That's an important issue here in terms of the assault weapons ban. He's made his views very well-known.

***

Q What is he doing to actively make sure -- is he doing anything to make sure he --

MR. McCLELLAN: The President doesn't set the congressional timetable.

Q No, but he can lobby for it.

MR. McCLELLAN: Congress sets the timetable. And the President's views are very clear.

Q Has he made any calls or anything to encourage this to happen?

MR. McCLELLAN: What we've continued to do -- because this issue does go to the issue of crimes committed with guns, as well -- and what we've continued to do is step up our efforts to prosecute crimes committed with guns and strictly enforce our laws. And that's the best way we can deter violence committed with guns.

(Emphasis added)

In addition to saying that, although the assault weapons ban is irrelevant to the president's strategy to reduce gun violence, he supports it anyway, McClellan also announced a huge shift in White House philosophy: preemption is not the best way to deal with potential violence; punishing those who commit violent acts after the fact is.

Maybe the administration learned something from the disaster in Iraq, in which WMD program-related activities were held up as sufficient justification for our full-scale invasion of the country. If so, the change would go a long way toward explaining our actions with regard to WMDs in North Korea and Iran.

On the other hand, it could just be a cynincal abandonment of principle for the benefit of the gun lobby.

2004-09-03T10:54:00.000-04:00

Bush By the Numbers

Here's a great numerical rundown of the Bush administration by Graydon Carter. Some tidbits:

14 Number of Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) agents assigned to track down 1,200 known illegal immigrants in the United States from countries where al-Qa'ida is active.

$3m Amount the White House was willing to grant the 9/11 Commission to investigate the 11 September attacks.

$0 Amount approved by George Bush to hire more INS special agents.

$10m Amount Bush cut from the INS's existing terrorism budget.

$50m Amount granted to the commission that looked into the Columbia space shuttle crash.

***

$2bn Estimated monthly cost of US military presence in Iraq projected by the White House in April 2003.

$4bn Actual monthly cost of the US military presence in Iraq according to Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld in 2004.

$15m Amount of a contract awarded to an American firm to build a cement factory in Iraq.

$80,000 Amount an Iraqi firm spent (using Saddam's confiscated funds) to build the same factory, after delays prevented the American firm from starting it.

***

$3.29 Average amount allocated per person Nationwide in the first round of homeland security grants.

$94.40 Amount allocated per person for homeland security in American Samoa.

$36 Amount allocated per person for homeland security in Wyoming, Vice-President Cheney's home state.

$17 Amount allocated per person in New York state.

$5.87 Amount allocated per person in New York City.

***

95 Percentage of foreign goods that arrive in the United States by sea.

2 Percentage of those goods subjected to thorough inspection.

$5.5bn Estimated cost to secure fully US ports over the Next decade.

$0 Amount Bush allocated for port security in 2003.

$46m Amount the Bush administration has budgeted for port security in 2005.

***

50 Percentage of screened workers at Ground Zero who now suffer from long-term health problems, almost half of whom don't have health insurance.

78 Percentage of workers at Ground Zero who now suffer from lung ailments.

88 Percentage of workers at Ground Zero who Now suffer from ear, nose, or throat problems.

22 Asbestos levels at Ground Zero were 22 times higher than the levels in Libby, Montana, where the W R Grace mine produced one of the worst Superfund disasters in US history.

There's tons more, go check it out.

via Metafilter

2004-09-01T22:19:00.000-04:00

Dick.

(live)

He looks good. Moves well, good color, fwiw.

Here comes the edwards blow. Matthew got it. Big Media Insider Matt.

Roosevelt twice in two speeches. Hmm.

I totally fricking rock.

Public schools. they are a key to see that every child yadda yadda. Nothing on the charters, the vouchers, religious schools (the one area in which faith-based enterprises has done some considerable good), nothing.

The Bush tax cuts are working. Nothing on the defecit.

Health care, George is working on it. Right. And tort reform is going to get it all solved. How much money are we talking about, here? Hasn't anyone added up the numbers and said even complete tort reform wouldn't make a meaningful dent in medical expenses?

Did I mention I had a new granddaughter?

9/11 -

"We are in a war we did not start." You're talking about Iraq? You can't be serious.

The terrorists never had the slightest inkling that we'd lose the will to defend ourselves, Dick. They were hoping we'd tear ourselves apart in the process. That's the whole point. I figured you'd know that.

"Gathering threat," one that merited full-scale war but had no capabilities.

One wonders what Libya was paid for its cooperation.

Yes, he shut down the network that supplied nuclear stuffs to Iran and Libya. But he didn't know it was there in the first place. And he should have.

Oh, yes, the <$1billion that somehow got spent (out of $18 b allocated), on rebuilding the schools and the roads. Somehow, everyone over there says it's worse off than before we got there.

Why would the repubs consider this the most important election in our history? Projection again?

V. polite applause re: Kerry's service.

Ok, here we go:

Kerry made the wrong calls on national security. Would support military action only via UN sanction. In the 1980s he opposed Reagan's defense initiatives. In 1991, he opposed Gulf War I. Post 9/11, he talked about leading a more sensitive war on terror (like he didn't say the same thing).

Kerry declared he'd forcefully defend America after it had been attacked. Wasn't that exactly what GWB did? He even went overboard about it. Nobody's got anything good to say about either Afghanistan or Iraq these days. Sheesh.

The $87B again. LOL, they're chanting "flip-flop." Joy. Maybe it really is all they've got.

He's calling out Kerry for neglecting American troops and their families? That's pretty rich.

A senator can be wrong for 20 years without consequence to the nation. But a president always casts the deciding vote. Hmm... So, when things are wrong, it's the president's fault, then?

That's right, keep beating on the flip-flop. You all look childish.

A man with a heart for the weak, vulnerable, and afflicted, who apparently likes them so much he wants to increase their numbers.

W's a man who calls evil by its name. It's Lester.

Uh, no. You're not going to win Massachusetts, even if they do have some very dumb cops in the Boston area.

Also, Bush wakes up early because he's a saint.

Thank you. Goodnight.

2004-09-01T20:07:00.000-04:00

On Flip-Flopping

I'm watching Romney speak, and he's really hammering the flip-flop thing, even though it is not a very effective attack. Each of their successive attack narratives is being shot down right after it leaves the gate. This is the only thing they've got, and it doesn't really move people.

Bush has a delectable smorgasbord of policy reversals in his record, and on some very important issues. The Kerry campaign just can't be too stupid to take advantage of this. They just can't.

The republicans are not where they want to be at this stage of the campaign. Sure, they're probably holding onto a couple of bullets for the end, but they must have been hoping to be convincingly saddling Kerry with three or four negatives by this point. If the only one they can come up with doesn't move the polls, they're having trouble.

2004-09-01T15:20:00.000-04:00

Counterspin Central: Like a Chiropractor for Your Brain

Hesiod's back (for now, at least), and has posted a helpful translation of the Gropinator's 'you know you're a republican when' schtick.

He also dropped this tiny little bomb about where Hastert's latest Soros slur came from.

2004-09-01T09:00:00.000-04:00

Who's an Economic Girly Man?

Someone who doesn't believe in our invincible economy, that's who.

Aired March 20, 2001 - 7:30 p.m. ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

BILL PRESS, CO-HOST: Tonight, charges that President Bush is talking down the economy.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: You know better than me that our economy is slowing down.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PRESS: And talking up an energy crisis.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BUSH: We got a problem with energy in America.

***

BUSH: Americans are hearing, and some feeling, the economic slowdown.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BUSH: We got a issue with our economy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BUSH: Our economy is beginning to sputter.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

2004-08-31T21:49:00.000-04:00

Da Goils

"We love you [Grandma], but you're not very hip."

Barbara's much better spoken.

They're dying. Just dying.

Oh well. Mom's up soon.

2004-08-31T21:31:00.000-04:00

Rod Paige Speech

No one applauded at (roughly) "I was at college when Brown vs. Board happened." A democratic convention would have given a standing ovation. I'm just sayin', is all.

Oh, and John Kerry is not a "Johnny come lately," I'm pretty sure.

I can't figure out why they put him up there in the first place. It's not like he has any credibility.

2004-08-31T10:07:00.000-04:00

Apples and Oranges

The Congressman's votes against gay rights no more made his private, consensual sexual life a legitimate public issue than Bill Clinton's pro-feminist issues stances made his tomcatting a legitimate public issue.

Mark Kleiman believes that Ed Schrock's gay private life isn't "a legitimate public issue." Normally, I'd wholeheartedly agree, but given Schrock's stridently anti-gay voting record, I'm not so sure.

I can look past a politician who misrepresents himself, especially if he's hiding the fact that he is a member of a unjustly discriminated-against minority. However, when, perhaps to cover himself, he's advocating discrimination against that same minority, it becomes reprehensible. If Schrock was saying that one's consensual sexual conduct should be legally relevant (to be fair, I cannot find anything where he explicitly does), I don't see how his own can or should be somehow priveleged.

And, if Schrock was making the gay sex in Virginia before June 2003, he was breaking the law, which certainly merits public scrutiny.

By the way, I am unable to figure out how "tomcatting" and feminism are directly opposed to one another in the same way as are "gay" and "anti-gay." Bill's affair(s) did not constitute discrimination against women or their interests. There is nothing intrinsically inconsistent about a feminist philanderer.

2004-08-30T18:38:00.000-04:00

Real Time News

Wow. Just got word directly from the mouth of Kos--what an inversion of the entire blogging/internet paradigm--that Virginia Congressman Ed Schrock--Pat Robertson's congressman--is resigning effectively immediately. One can only presume that this action was precipitated by blogger Michael of Blogactive. First congressman brought down by a blogger. A red letter day!

2004-08-30T18:11:00.000-04:00

The Tank

I finally made it to Blogger Ground Zero, at least outside of the convention. It's not much of a place, but it's somehow commensurate to the capital investment required to put a blog together.

And, as soon as I walked in, I got to see Kos, and to meet Atrios. If nothing else happens tonight, this counts as a success.

It's quite a heady atmosphere. I'll try to put something intelligent together worthy of the presence of such a brain trust.

The better posts will go to The American Street, while the personal-type stuff will go here.

2004-08-30T10:55:00.000-04:00

Shorter Katherine Q. Seelye:

"John McCain and Rudy Giuliani will give speeches in praise of President Bush at Madison Square Garden tonight as the first part of a quid pro quo that each of them believes will enhance his standing with the GOP and his chances to be the party's nominee in 2008. Neither man has any integrity whatsoever, and no one should believe a word they say."

2004-08-28T11:55:00.000-04:00

Shorter David Brooks:

"Mark Souder (R-IN) is a human being and a Republican. In fact, rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, the Republican party is wholly comprised of human beings, amongst whom past divisions are now yielding to concerns about, and opposition to, their own policies."

Slightly longer:

Then in 1994, he ran for Congress himself, and in that great Republican year, won. He immediately behaved in ways that defy the stereotypes. He's worked with members of the Black Caucus to steer federal scholarship money to urban kids. He voted against three articles of Bill Clinton's impeachment - he thought Clinton's behavior was immoral but not impeachable. He was one of the House Republican leaders of an unsuccessful coup against Newt Gingrich.

Actually, Souder did think Clinton should be impeached. He voted yes on the third of four impeachment articles, that Clinton had obstructed justice (it passed).

The fact is, the Republican Party is less riven into ideological camps than it used to be, and the issues that used to divide it, like abortion, are less salient. Now fundamentalists, moderates, libertarians and old-fashioned Main Street types all express the same sort of concerns: about the need to win the war and anxiety that we're not fighting it properly; about the need to restore fiscal discipline and the anxiety about egregious Republican pork-barrel spending. Across the party, there is a great deal of admiration for Bush's core instincts, but a belief that his administration has not performed that well.

In short, ideological disputes have been replaced by problems of governance. Old coalitions are breaking down. New ones have not yet formed. We media types love to report about rifts in Republican ranks. But most of those clichés are obsolete.

Republicans are more united these days, unlike the bad old days when they fought tooth-and-nail over a woman's right to choose. All they fight about now is their own overspending habits and inability to get anything right in Iraq. Souder's in the thick of it, this year voting with only 46 other House members, including Tom DeLay, Dennis Hastert, and Katherine Harris, 100% in support of President Bush.

Our eternal gratitude is due to Mr. Brooks for another in a long line of content-free, yet still misleading, columns.

2004-08-27T11:38:00.000-04:00

Not Qualified for the Job

There's a lot of interesting stuff in this NYT interview with Bush, stuff like he didn't know anything about a White House report concluding that greenhouse gasses, including CO2, are the only likely explanation for recent global warming patterns, that he might have "miscalculated" when it came to conditions in Iraq, that Kerry had been truthful about his record in Vietnam, etc., etc.

There's a lot of meat for our side in the interview. But what caused the bottom to drop out from under my jaw was this:

Mr. Bush also took issue with Mr. Kerry's argument, in an interview at the end of May with The New York Times, that the Bush administration's focus on Iraq had given North Korea the opportunity to significantly expand its nuclear capability. Showing none of the alarm about the North's growing arsenal that he once voiced regularly about Iraq, he opened his palms and shrugged when an interviewer noted that new intelligence reports indicate that the North may now have the fuel to produce six or eight nuclear weapons.

He said that in North Korea's case, and in Iran's, he would not be rushed to set deadlines for the countries to disarm, despite his past declaration that he would not "tolerate'' nuclear capability in either nation. He declined to define what he meant by "tolerate.''

"I don't think you give timelines to dictators,'' Mr. Bush said, speaking of North Korea's president, Kim Jong Il, and Iran's mullahs. He said he would continue diplomatic pressure - using China to pressure the North and Europe to pressure Iran - and gave no hint that his patience was limited or that at some point he might consider pre-emptive military action.

"I'm confident that over time this will work - I certainly hope it does,'' he said of the diplomatic approach. Mr. Kerry argued in his interview that North Korea "'was a far more compelling threat in many ways, and it belonged at the top of the agenda,'' but Mr. Bush declined to compare it to Iraq, apart from arguing that Iraq had defied the world community for longer than the other members of what he once called "the axis of evil.'' Nor would he assess the risk that Pyongyang might sell nuclear material to terrorists, though his national security aides believe it may have sold raw uranium to Libya in recent years.

(Emphasis added)

The guy who killed almost 1,000 of his fellow citizens and tens of thousands of Iraqis, who shredded decades' worth of diplomatic capital, and who got us into a quagmire that could well sap our strength for years to come, for the express purpose of removing from power a dictator he erroneously claimed to have weapons of mass destruction and the desire to distribute them to terrorists, "opened his palms and shrugged" at the prospect of a dictator of a country with which we are technically in a state of conflict who actually has nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, and who has distributed nuclear weapons technology to at least one known terrorist. (whew!)

He's like "regular folks," who don't have the first idea what to do about North Korea, all right. Thing is, it's his fucking job to deal with the biggest threat in the world. That's why we have a president. We need a leader, or at the very least, someone who takes this kind of thing seriously.

And, George, you're on record giving timelines to a dictator. That's how we got into Iraq, remember? Or are you admitting the whole "let weapons inspectors in or else" thing was bullshit and you were going to invade no matter what? Did you lie to us, George?

This needs to be in a Kerry ad, stat.