Watching Those We Chose

A Modest Proposal *

2009-02-14T20:00:00.000-06:00

Government-sponsored homophobia in this country has now officially jumped the shark.

SHE WASN'T ASKED AND DIDN'T TELL.... Amy Brian, as a Kansas Army National Guard lieutenant, served honorably in Iraq. She was part of a convoy that was hit by an IED; she worked 12-hour shifts at Camp Anaconda; and her superiors asked her to narrate award ceremonies.

By all appearances, Amy Brian is the type of proud, patriotic American we would all want to wear the uniform. Upon returning home after a tour of duty, Brian was given a job reorganizing the Kansas Army National Guard's government purchase card program. Except now she's been discharged -- because someone found out Brian is gay.

SNIP

She joins nearly 12,500 other lesbian, gay and bisexual service members who have been discharged by the Pentagon from 1994 through 2007.

And in the New York Times, a Marine who served two tours in Iraq explains why he has changed his mind about DADT and now opposes it.

In addition, six years of war have clarified priorities. The battlefield has its own values, starting with courage. Sexual orientation falls somewhere below musical taste. What a person chooses to do back stateside, off-duty, in his own apartment is irrelevant in a fight. For months I lived with 12 other American advisers on an Iraqi outpost. There was a single pipe shower next to a hole that masqueraded as a sewer. But the reality of combat dominated personality quirks — nobody wondered about sexual orientation.

A 2006 poll of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans showed that 72 percent were personally comfortable interacting with gays. Bonnie Moradi, a University of Florida psychologist, and Laura Miller, a sociologist at the Rand Corporation, summarized the study this way: "The data indicated no associations between knowing a lesbian or gay unit member and ratings of perceived unit cohesion or readiness. Instead, findings pointed to the importance of leadership and instrumental quality in shaping perceptions of unit cohesion and readiness."

The other readiness argument concerns recruiting. To fill its swelling ranks, the military now grants one in five recruits waivers for disqualifications that run the gamut from attention-deficit disorder to obesity to armed robbery convictions. In a press conference last fall, Maj. Gen. Thomas Bostick, the head of Army recruiting, said the relevant question in considering such applicants was, "Does that person deserve an opportunity to serve their country?" That's exactly right. And to choose a felon over a combat-proven veteran on the basis of sexuality is defeatist. Ask any squad leader.

In the end, however, there is one factor that outweighs public opinion, troop morale and recruiting combined. The military is a dictatorship, not a republic. It is built to win in combat. Its strict codes of conduct ensure good order and discipline.

If "don't ask, don't tell" is rescinded, military leaders will ensure smooth compliance, as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, has said. Cohesion depends on leadership. Our troops will follow the lead of our combat-tested professionals who base their opinions on what a soldier brings to the fight, and little else.

So here's my proposal: reinstate the draft, expanding it to include both men and women, age 18 to 50, but restricting military service to homosexuals. Only homosexuals. No more heterosexuals in the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard, National Guard or Reserves. Bonus: no more inconvenient pregnancies in the all-gay Armed Forces!

Why stop at the military? Let's ban heterosexuals from the government benefits of marriage, too. Seriously, they've had it to themselves for 5,000 years and have completely fucked it up. Gay-only marriage can't possibly make it any worse, and might even improve it.

Gay-Only Adoption. No more subjecting orphans to the twisted values of so-called straights.

And I can't imagine someone barred from serving in the military, from state-sanctioned marriage, from adopting, passing an FBI background check for a federal job.

Think of the political campaigns! Spying on candidates, trying to get pictures of them embracing someone of the opposite sex, the interviews with tearful gay spouses, the denials of heterosexual perversions.

Certainly no more ridiculous than the self-defeating anti-gay idiocy we've got now.

* With apologies to Jonathan Swift.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic.

Senator Cornhole Does The Wall Street Shuffle

2009-02-14T17:16:00.001-06:00

It comes as no surprise to some of us that Texas' junior U.S. senator, John "Cornhole" Cornyn, is one of Congress' most servile right-wingers. But just how servile Sen. Cornhole is to the "repeal the New Deal" crowd on Wall Street wasn't quite apparent until the past week.

In an e-mail to Texas MoveOn members, MoveOn Executive Director Justin Ruben of Austin wrote:

You're not going to believe this.

In the midst of an economic crisis caused largely by Wall Street greed, our senator skipped this week's vote on the stimulus plan so he could meet with —- wait for it —- Republican donors from Wall Street.

Sen. John Cornyn wasn't just fiddling while Rome burned -— he was actually hanging out with the arsonists.

He showed us that congressional Republicans aren't fighting for their constituents who got laid off or watched their retirement savings disappear or lost their health coverage. They're just looking out for their big-money corporate friends.

Ruben went on to say that MoveOn mounted a radio ad campaign that has aired in a few Texas markets -- it's surprising that they could find any in this state -- and solicited for contributions to help fund the campaign. If you're interested in helping, visit MoveOn.org.

For more details on the kind of right-wing pond scum Sen. Cornhole was cavorting with Monday, instead of being in Washington for the cloture vote on the stimulus package, here's a link to Ben Smith's blog on Politico.

I have no doubt about how Sen. Cornhole would have voted had he been there -- against anything President Barack Obama advocates. But the point is, he was elected to represent Texans, not the Wall Street high-finance goons who are largely responsible for the nation's economic debacle.

Here's your special Valentine, Texans, direct from loving Sen. Cornhole his own self. Just goes to show that being a right-wing Republican means never having to say you're sorry.

But I'll say it -- Sen. Cornhole, you're sorry.

The New Anti-Americans

2009-02-14T15:47:00.005-06:00

Just objecting to President Obama's plan for saving the economy and the world is not enough to be anti-American. Even publicly hoping, as Rush Limpballs does, that President Obama fails in everything he does is not enough to be anti-American.

No, to be one of the New Anti-Americans, you must combine strong dissent toward our new President with a long record of condemning as anti-American all those who dissented against War Criminal, Constitution-Shredder and Traitor George W. Bush.

For all of us who spent the last eight years enduring verbal and even physical attacks because we dared to express our anti-war, anti-torture, pro-Constitution, anti-bush patriotism, Blue Girl has a rant that will make your heart soar.

I remember being one of the people who opposed this war from the outset. I remember a squareheaded asshole with a buzz cut pushing his bumper up against mine and trying to push me into traffic a few days before the war started because I had bumper stickers on my truck that said "No War On Iraq" and "Get Afghanistan Right" - when he sped away I saw his..."This time, Anti-War is Anti-American."

I remember being told by the dispatcher at the police department that I might should take those bumper stickers off my truck because "this is a pretty patriotic town."

I remember the armchair patriots I worked with there being shocked that a military person was against a war, and how they viewed me with suspicion after learning that.

I remember having my patriotism questioned, even though I was the one with a record of service to point to.

And all of my opposing positions were prefaced with "I hope I'm wrong because if I'm right and this fails, America fails, and that is the last thing I want to see happen."

Yet I'm anti-American and these assholes are the patriots?

Bullshit. They are traitorous, treasonous cowards, and they do not deserve the rights afforded them by the people like my husband, and elmo, and Rook and, to a lesser extent, me and everyone else who stepped up and took that oath to the Constitution and did so enthusiastically because we knew what was said therein.

They don't deserve the civil liberties that men and women like bmaz and grolaw fight every day to defend in court. They don't deserve the the protections of the law that my friend RW works within every day to protect society in her role as a prosecutor.

Fuck Rush Limbaugh.

Read the whole thing.

Cross-posted at Blue in the Bluegrass.

The Other Great Emancipator

2009-02-12T04:31:00.002-06:00

Four thousand miles away from a tiny log cabin in the Kentucky woods, another Great Emancipator was born 200 years ago today.

Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, corrected a 250-year-old injustice and set the nation on the path to the Inaguration of President Barack Obama.

But Charles Darwin freed human minds from the tyranny of religion, crowned two centuries of the Enlightenment, and ushered in the era of scientific reason.

So celebrate Darwin Day, and rejoice that our new President's vow to restore the primacy of science and facts honors both Great Emancipators.

House Stimulus vs. Senate Stimulus At A Glance

2009-02-10T17:03:00.002-06:00

Propublica has a fantastic side-by-side comparison of the original House stimulus bill and the abortion produced by the Senate "compromise."

Short version: to give big corporate welfare "tax cut" handouts to Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Pharma, Big Banks, Wall Street and all the other rich people who have been fucking over the middle class for the last thirty years, the Cowardly Democrats in the Senate agreed to make huge cuts in anything and everything that creates jobs by helping working families, including:

aid to states, health care, education grants, repairing and building schools, repairing and building roads, public transportation, renewable energy research, unemployment insurance, repairing the electric grid, improving water and sewer lines, affordable housing, mortgage relief, expanding broadband access, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum.

If you're not so rich that a global economic meltdown won't affect you, then you need to email or call your Congressional representatives right now and tell them to support restoring the House stimulus bill.

Click here for a quick way to send an email to your representatives, even if all you know is your zip code.

All that's at stake is your job, your house, your kids' future, and, you know, the world.

Fantasy Obama

2009-02-09T18:30:00.001-06:00

The Rude Pundit on how Fantasy Obama would conduct tonight's press conference on the stimulus bill.

As always, it's brilliant, dead-on and X-rated.

UPDATE, 5:30 a.m. Blue Girl live-blogged the press conference, and has has the full transcript as a bonus.

New GOP Rules for Discussing the President

2009-02-09T16:39:00.003-06:00

We're still trying to get used to the idea of Democratic nominee Barack Obama actually being President of the United States.

To help us get acclimated, the wingnut freakazoids have kindly provided criticism that follows the new GOP Rules for Discussing the President. Steve Benen explains.

DEPT. OF POTS AND KETTLES.... Either the president's conservative critics have very short memories, or they assume we do.

SNIP

The irony is almost overwhelming. A loyal Bushie, who heard his boss spend years engaging in shameless demagoguery (see "clouds, mushroom" and "uranium, from Africa") based on nothing but neocon fantasies, believes presidents have to keep their rhetoric in check and never forget to be "truthful." Sure, Blakeman, tell us another one.

Keep in mind, Obama's dire warnings about the economy are well grounded in reality. It's not "insane" to fear an economic collapse given the situation we're in. The president has a choice -- pretend the news isn't scary, or give honest assessments while vowing to act. Bush preferred the prior approach; Obama prefers the latter.

What's more, have you noticed the bizarre double-standards we've seen emerge in recent weeks?

When Bush uses over-the-top language to convince Americans about perceived security threat, he's being "presidential." When Obama issues dire warnings about the economy, he's being "pessimistic."

When Bush ignores the congressional minority, he's being "principled." When Obama engages the congressional minority but declines to give them what they want, he's being "partisan."

When Bush trashes constitutional norms, it's evidence of "seriousness." When Obama is in the Oval Office without a jacket, he's being "disrespectful to the presidency."

When liberals criticize Bush during a crisis, they're traitors who are aiding and abetting the enemy. When conservatives criticize Obama during a crisis, they are doing their patriotic duty.

Good to know.

Stop Going Nuts over Nut Allergies

2009-02-08T07:30:00.000-06:00

Perhaps the justifiable concern over the salmonella contamination in commercial peanut butter makes this a good time to address the wholly unjustified hysteria over faux allergies to peanuts, especially in children.

As someone who grew up on peanut butter and continues to consume it regularly, I am happy to bring you Salon's thorough debunking of the "peanuts will kill your children!" fear campaign.

In 2005, a 15-year old Canadian teenager named Christina Desforges kissed her boyfriend and died. Her death, reported around the world, was initially blamed on peanuts. Desforges was allergic to peanuts and her boyfriend had eaten peanut-butter toast hours before their deadly smooch.

Sudden death due to an allergic reaction to food is known as anaphylaxis. When you eat peanuts (or some offending food), you break out in hives, your face swells and your larynx constricts until you can no longer breathe, all in a matter of minutes.

Shocking. Tragic. Scary.

Desforges' story is the kind that has moved anxious parents, politicians and school board members to join a crusade against peanuts. Several states have passed laws mandating public schools be "peanut-free zones," and parents now hover over food labels with Draconian vigilance, checking and double-checking them for signs of peanuts. Could that knife that just cut the birthday cake have been in the vicinity of peanut butter?

Peanut-allergy panic has spread across the nation. In a recent essay, Harvard physician and sociologist Nicholas Christakis relates an incident in which a peanut was spotted on the floor of a school bus, "whereupon the bus was evacuated and cleaned (I am tempted to say decontaminated), even though it was full of 10 year olds who, unlike 2 year olds, could actually be told not to eat off the floor."

SNIP

But on closer examination, food allergies are not the epidemic we've been led to believe. FAAN's advocacy may have helped to create rules and laws that are based less on sound science than on a significant misrepresentation of facts. Ironically, by accepting these facts, we may be increasing our risk of developing food allergies.

SNIP

Facts ought to be stubborn. In the past, Munoz-Furlong has stated that one child dying from an allergic is too many. But Harvard doctor Christakis, again, puts things into perspective. "There are no doubt thousands of parents who rid their cupboards of peanut butter but not of guns," he writes, comparing the alleged 150 children and adults who died from peanut allergies to the 1,300 who die from gun accidents each year. He goes on to note that 2,000 kids drown each year. Indeed, the most common cause of death in kids is accidents. "More children assuredly die walking or being driven to school each year than die from nut allergies," Christakis writes.

SNIP

And what about Christina Desforges, the young girl who received the kiss from the peanut-contaminated lips of her boyfriend? She suffered from asthma and died of a severe asthma attack, likely triggered by smoke. A coroner reported that on the night she collapsed she had smoked marijuana and spent hours at a party where people were smoking pot and tobacco.

Read the whole thing.

Judo the Anti-Choice Thugs: Pledge a Picket

2009-02-07T06:11:00.008-06:00

Want an easy way to make freakazoid heads explode? Plus support an outrageously courageous woman providing unique health services to women in dangerous territory?

Then pledge a picket!

Dr. Susan Wicklund, whose 2008 book This Common Secret, detailed her life as an abortion provider, has just opened a clinic in Livingston, Montana. Even before it opened on February 2nd, the clinic was being picketed by opponents of abortion rights. In the mail below, Wicklund's co-author, Montana writer Alan Kesselheim, explains how you can turn their protests peacefully against them. (I've pledged $1 per picketer. That puts me in a slightly weird position: Do I hope lots show up so the clinic gets plenty of cash, or few show up so that I can save mine?)

If you want to pledge, e mail Martha_Kauffman@msn.com.

(Details after the jump.)

Dear Friends of Dr. Susan Wicklund:

As most of you know, Susan Wicklund has been hard at work trying to open a women's reproductive health clinic in the Bozeman/Livingston area. It has not been easy. It has taken several years. Deals have fallen through because word leaked out and landowners were intimidated by violent threats. Other potential arrangements have collapsed due to financial difficulties, political controversy, or simple logistics.

Despite the setbacks, Sue has persevered. On Monday, February 2nd, precisely sixteen years after she opened her Bozeman clinic, back in 1993, Mountain Country Women's Clinic again opens its doors, this time in downtown Livingston. It is a moment of triumph and satisfaction, achieved with the support of many people. It is also a moment of tension. Not only has Susan incurred significant personal debt in a very uncertain economy, but the usual voices of dissent are echoing in letters to the editor and in anti-choice picketers appearing on Main Street in Livingston, protesting the existence of Sue's legal services. Even before the doors opened, protesters walked the sidewalks outside. Also, even before the doors opened, women were calling Sue to make appointments.

The need for a compassionate, professional, and thorough women's clinic is as great as ever. Unfortunately, the strident voices against choice rise up as expected. The difference between 1993 and 2009 is that Sue Wicklund has friends. All of you on this mailing list, and many more friends and neighbors, support her cause. Many have volunteered in the past. Some have written letters of support. Others wish they knew how to help.

I propose to begin a Pledge-A-Picketer Campaign in support of Mountain Country Women's Clinic. The concept is simple, and it mirrors the grassroots style of the Obama campaign, during which many small contributions created a huge impact. Each of us signs on to donate, say, $1/picketer to Susan's clinic. If, over the period of a week, 17 picketers parade on Main Street, we each send a check for $17. It isn't much, but if $17 gets multiplied by 50 people, it comes to $850. If 100 people send in checks, we raise $1,700.

At the end of the week, Susan posts a sign on the clinic window. It might say, THANK YOU PICKETERS. THIS WEEK THE SUPPORTERS OF MOUNTAIN COUNTRY WOMEN'S CLINIC RAISED $850 IN THEIR PLEDGE-A-PICKETER CAMPAIGN. THESE FUNDS WILL HELP INDIGENT PATIENTS IN NEED OF OUR SERVICES. THE MORE YOU PICKET, THE MORE SUPPORT MCWC RECEIVES.

Many of us wish to help Mountain Country Women's Clinic. We wish we could confront the picketers face to face. Unfortunately, that sort of public disturbance is precisely what the anti-choice forces would love to foster. However, by turning their efforts against them we can help Mountain Country Women's Clinic serve patients, and deflate the energy of the protesters.

Susan Wicklund has agreed to keep track of picketers during her first week of operation. At that point we will contact all of you again with the numbers, and an address to send the check to. Even if you can only pledge .25/picketer, the cumulative impact of our efforts will still be significant. Also, I urge you to forward this message to any of your friends who might help support Sue's new clinic. If they would like to participate, they should contact Martha_Kauffman@msn.com and ask to be added to the list.

With Sincere Thanks, and In Solidarity,

Alan Kesselheim Co-Author of This Common Secret

I LOVE THIS! Go ahead, assholes: every day you picket that legal and necessary abortion clinic puts more money in the pockets of abortionists. Keep protesting. Bring all your friends and family, drag in strangers.

Make. My. Day.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic.

The Monuments of American Socialism

2009-02-07T05:43:00.003-06:00

Even if the "Socialism" that so terrifies the wingnut freakazoids had no record of accomplishment in the U.S., my guess is that most Americans, staring into the gaping maw of economic catastrophe, are willing to try anything, no matter what it's called.

But we don't have to wonder what Socialism might bring: the proof is still standing.

Socialism is apparently what is created when a president you do not like spends money on things of which you do not approve.

SNIP

Rather than publish another essay, though there have been some fine ones lately, about just what really happened during America's last episode of so-called socialism, we've opted to go to the visual record. As Marshall Auerback noted, in the process of modernizing the rural South and upgrading the infrastructure of America's largest cities, President Roosevelt's New Deal left behind a durable, physical and very visible legacy of schools and hospitals -- even aircraft carriers. (We'll leave discussion of Social Security and unemployment insurance for another time.) The following slide show gives a small sampling of the bricks-and-mortar achievements of red, white and blue "socialism."

Clck here to see the slide show.

Is A Capitalist Meltdown Upon Us?

2009-02-07T02:50:00.003-06:00

I'll only be 53 on my next birthday in late July, yet it already seems like I've lived a tiring amount of history. Only 20 years ago, the world saw the meltdown of Soviet-style communism -- and many observers, largely neo-conservatives, interpreted that as an ideological culmination, "the end of history." There was even an influential book written with that title. (Does anyone remember that author now? And, does he want to remember that book? Yeah, I know -- Francis Fukuyama.)

It appears that reversals of fortune can happen quickly. Now it looks like the allegedly venerable ideology of "free-market" capitalism is on the ropes, and in serious danger of going down. Who would have thought it?

Die-hard Marxists did. I've never been one of them, even as a long-ago radical all of 23 years old. I still know three people who have continued to call themselves Marxists in total defiance of dismissal or ridicule, and they are probably gloating a lot now. The economic train wreck they kept dogmatically predicting finally seems to be in front of us.

But even as America sleepwalked through our Second Gilded Age (circa 1981-2005), I grew skeptical of the Marxist vision. "Historical inevitability" always sounded like a religious tenet, without the pure superstition; and Marxism itself, a sort of quasi-religion for embittered atheists.

We should be as cautious about awarding hard-line socialists a victory here, as much as "we" (in the editorial sense) should have checked for our wallets the minute Reagan started talking about trickle-down and Phil Gramm started talking about deregulation. The past century should have taught us that the answer lies in between.

Starting with the excesses of laissez-faire: America has, for the past 30-ish years, seen the roller-coaster ride that happens with that sort of economic policy. An elite grows very rich, a minority near the bottom slips much further down, and most people tend to stagnate in the middle.

There are cycles of boom and bust. The booms are good for most people, but especially good for a few. The latter group inevitably forms a "Why Should I Have To Pay Taxes?" lobby and gets bonanzas from lawmakers eager to please. And since these are the people of ostentation and material success, their influence is great among fashionable "thinkers" of the day.

Now the big bust is upon us. It's a bit like 1933 all over again -- not as grim or total in devastation, but it's likely to get worse. President Barack Obama has warned us that this is so.

But history, with its entire lesson, should be heeded, and it seems like Obama is one who will do so.

There were very good reasons for the meltdown of the Soviet empire 20 years ago. Contrary to right-wing mythology, Reagan and his military buildup had little to do with it. Post-Soviet Russian economists recall the problems as internal, and any intellectually honest person knew what they were. There's no need for me to recite the litany here -- Americans heard it all for decades.

But, let's face it, die-hard socialists out there -- state-run enterprises have a poor track record. The employees seem to lack incentives to produce. Cooperatives tend to degenerate into personal conflict, power struggles and chaos. And as for the concentration of power in the hands of "vanguard revolutionaries" -- the horrors and enormities of that have been abundant just in the past century.

I don't think it's hard to argue for a sense of balance and measure. In America, it seems like the compromising wheeler-dealers -- the FDRs, the Trumans, the LBJs, the Ted Kennedys -- got more done for working Americans than any of our homegrown radicals ever did.

But there is little doubt that there's been a sea change, and it's been back toward socialist thinking. The Nobel Prize committees have not been known for their sympathy toward socialist-leaning economists, yet Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has more or less come out in favor of the nationalization of U.S. banks. That would be a major step toward socialism of some fashion. Why not? We've just given the bastards $700 billion in taxpayer money to keep them in business. Here's a link to the interview with Stiglitz.

And, it appears that such state power would be the only thing to force the shameless swine who run these enterprises to behave themselves. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., made a speech on the Senate floor about the Wall Street oinkers who had themselves awarded $18.4 billion in bonuses while their enterprises got in on the aforementioned $700 billion, because of reckless and disastrous mismanagement. Here's another link to reports on this issue, and to a video of McCaskill's speech. Be patient, the video seems very rough.

So, what should be the ultimate American destination, in an era of "capitalist" meltdown? The Swedes, with a hybrid socialist-capitalist system, don't seem to do badly, with avowed Socialists predominantly in power since 1929. Their booms are smaller, but so are their busts. Their people don't live in fear of homelessness or inability to afford basic health care. Right-wing humorist P.J. O'Rourke, when asked about the Swedes' seeming happiness with their stable system, said that they are all insane -- but that their insanity is distributed equally among the people.

It's a funny line. But there's nothing funny about facing a mortgage foreclosure, or about the welfare rolls shrinking even as joblessness is rapidly expanding. With a growing U.S. underclass, it may be time to take a second look at the socialist mind-set -- despite the old Marxist baggage. Nobody requires us to go to extremes.

Crossposted at Manifesto Joe.

One Click to Reach Your Elected Officials

2009-02-06T19:13:00.000-06:00

Want to demand your House representative or Senators take action, but don't know how to get an email address for them quickly? Rejoice! The Nation brings you the one-click Congress.

Just fill in your zip code, and the site immediately reveals your President, Senators and House Representative, with links to each one's email. You can click on one of The Nation's suggested email topics, like Hold War Criminals Responsible, or compose your own.

Use it tonight to tell Congress to pass the stimulus bill President Obama needs to save the country and the world.

"It's Not A Game!"

2009-02-06T16:47:00.002-06:00

As Josh says, this is "Exactly the case he needs to be making on TV and in some events around the country."

Here's the full speech.

Here's the transcript.

Obama Re-Constitutes

2009-02-06T05:48:00.002-06:00

A Tale of Three Prayer Breakfasts

2009-02-05T21:00:00.000-06:00

Three years ago, in 2006, Kentucky Governor Ernie Fletcher's "Prayer Breakfast" was an orgy of sectarian bigotry, a greasy "fuck you" to everyone who didn't share the speakers' narrow conservative Southern Baptism, an object lesson in why combining religion and government is history's worst idea.

This year, on the same day that invitations to Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear's "Prayer Breakfast" landed in state employees' email inboxes, The Economist brings us the latest lesson from President Obama, this one on how to do a "Prayer Breakfast" right, if you must do one at all.

I think the final proof that Barack Obama plans once and for all to elevate respect for Americans who don't practice a religion came at this morning's National Prayer Breakfast:

There is no doubt that the very nature of faith means that some of our beliefs will never be the same. We read from different texts. We follow different edicts. We subscribe to different accounts of how we came to be here and where we’re going next – and some subscribe to no faith at all...

We know too that whatever our differences, there is one law that binds all great religions together. Jesus told us to "love thy neighbor as thyself." The Torah commands, "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow." In Islam, there is a hadith that reads "None of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself." And the same is true for Buddhists and Hindus; for followers of Confucius and for humanists. It is, of course, the Golden Rule - the call to love one another; to understand one another; to treat with dignity and respect those with whom we share a brief moment on this Earth.

A notable repetition—not just once, rote, but twice, to let you know he means it.

As for that second passage, did Mr Obama just endorse a name for the group struggling to name itself? Some don't like "atheist" or "nonbeliever" because they are definitionally negative. The coinage of "Brights" has failed to catch on for the obvious reasons. But "humanist" has a nice, positive feeling, and a history.

Mr Obama went on to announce a White House of Faith-Based and Neighbourhood Partnerships. A Bushian thing to do? No, he continued:

The goal of this office will not be to favor one religious group over another - or even religious groups over secular groups. It will simply be to work on behalf of those organizations that want to work on behalf of our communities, and to do so without blurring the line that our founders wisely drew between church and state.

Interesting. I'm not sure if Mr Obama isn't trying a little too hard to please everyone here, but the fact that he is trying to please everyone—and remember that a major presidential candidate said not long ago that "freedom requires religion"—is striking.

Now that he is not doing backflips for Rick Warren, citing his favourite Bible verse in a "faith debate" or dodging conspiracies that he is a Muslim, Mr Obama is also free to say things like

I was not raised in a particularly religious household. I had a father who was born a Muslim but became an atheist, grandparents who were non-practicing Methodists and Baptists, and a mother who was skeptical of organized religion, even as she was the kindest, most spiritual person I've ever known. She was the one who taught me as a child to love, and to understand, and to do unto others as I would want done.

A few years ago, Daniel Dennett, an atheist philosopher, wrote
Politicians don't think they even have to pay us lip service, and leaders who wouldn't be caught dead making religious or ethnic slurs don't hesitate to disparage the "godless" among us. From the White House down, bright-bashing is seen as a low-risk vote-getter.

Not this White House.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

"Are These Folks Serious?"

2009-02-05T16:45:00.005-06:00

From the Huffington Post, "President Barack Obama says the time for talk on an economic recovery package is over and "the time for action is now." "

Speaking at the Energy Department, Obama made a fresh plea for the stimulus plan that the Senate is debating. He cited the latest bad economic news of jobless claims as another reason for quick action.

He said: "The time for talk is over, the time for action is now."

He also launched a shot at critics while talking about energy, questioning, "are these folks serious?"

Now, I read the other day that critics of this plan ridiculed our notion that we should use part of the money to modernize the entire fleet of federal vehicles to take advantage of state of the art fuel efficiency. This is what they call pork. You know the truth. It will not only save the government significant money over time, it will not only create manufacturing jobs for folks who are making these cars, it will set a standard for private industry to match. And so when you hear these attacks deriding something of such obvious importance as this, you have to ask yourself -- are these folks serious? Is it any wonder that we haven't had a real energy policy in this country?

For the last few years, I've talked about these issues with Americans from one end of this country to another. And Washington may not be ready to get serious about energy independence, but I am. And so are you. And so are the American people.

During his speech Obama also issued a strong critique of the GOP's economic policies, even though he didn't utter the party's name. He told the audience that:

In the last few days, we've seen proposals arise from some in Congress that you may not have read but you'd be very familiar with because you've been hearing them for the last 10 years, maybe longer. They're rooted in the idea that tax cuts alone can solve all our problems; that government doesn't have a role to play; that half-measures and tinkering are somehow enough; that we can afford to ignore our most fundamental economic challenges -- the crushing cost of health care, the inadequate state of so many of our schools, our dangerous dependence on foreign oil.

So let me be clear: Those ideas have been tested, and they have failed. They've taken us from surpluses to an annual deficit of over a trillion dollars, and they've brought our economy to a halt. And that's precisely what the election we just had was all about. The American people have rendered their judgment. And now is the time to move forward, not back. Now is the time for action.

Why the Senate Must Pass the Stimulus Bill

2009-02-04T21:00:00.001-06:00

First, check out USAToday's interactive map of how President Obama's stimulus bill will help your state.

Then, watch TPM's interview with an expert who explodes the repug lies about the bill containing too much spending.

There is so much fog and uncertainty -- much of it intentionally injected into the debate -- about the different moving parts of the Stimulus Bill. But some of the broad outlines are arresting and straightforward.

We're hearing all this talk about the staggering size of the bill. And it is a staggering amount of money. But according to Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the amount of demand that the financial crisis is pulling out the economy is likely to be between $1.1 and $1.2 trillion this year (and that is not a controversial estimate). The Stimulus Bill (which, remember, is $800+ billion over two years) would try to compensate for that drop off with about $400 billion of spending and tax cuts. How efficiently the money is spent, how quickly and so forth -- all very good questions. But judged in these terms you start to see how the real question is whether any bill of that size is enough.
David Kurtz and Baker discuss the issue in today's episode of TPMtv.

And finally, read Bob Herbert on the danger of not putting enough money into infrastructure projects immediately.

We have infrastructure spending in the Democrats' proposed stimulus package that, while admirable, is far too meager to have much of an impact on the nation's overall infrastructure requirements or the demand for the creation of jobs.

SNIP

The big danger is that some variation of the currently proposed stimulus package will pass, another enormous bailout for the bankers will be authorized, and then the trillion-dollar-plus budget deficits will make their appearance, looming like unholy monsters over everything else, and Washington will suddenly lose its nerve.

The mantra (I can hear it now) will be that we can't afford to spend any more money on the infrastructure, or on a big health care initiative, or any of the nation's other crying needs. Suddenly fiscal discipline will be the order of the day and the people who are suffering now will suffer more, and the nation's long-term prospects will be further damaged as its long-term needs continue to be neglected.

We no longer seem to learn much from history. Time and again an economic boom has followed a period of sustained infrastructure investment. Think of the building of the Erie Canal, which connected the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. Think of the rural electrification program, the interstate highway system, the creation of the Internet.

We're suffering now from both a failure of will and of imagination. I remember the financier Felix Rohatyn telling me, "A modern economy needs a modern platform, and that's the infrastructure."

History tells us the same thing.

And if you're still not persuaded, consider this: Mitch McConnell would give his left nut to kill the stimulus. What more reason do you need to support it?

Cross-posted at Blue in the Bluegrass.

KY Ice Storm: 769,000 Without Power, 25 Dead, $50 Million Spent

2009-02-04T16:46:00.004-06:00

RDemocrat at BlueGrassRoots reminds us that when you want visual evidence of what's going on in Kentucky, the Hillbilly's got it.

Jim Pence is one of the finest Progressives we have here in Kentucky. For quite some time now I have gone to his site, and his YouTube feed and laughed endlessly at some of the most creative political vids made in this whole country. His contributions to Democratic candidates, and the Democratic blogosphere in Kentucky have been immense.

However, I think this time he has even outdone himself. After getting my internet back up, I have been several places trying to get news on the tragedy here in Kentucky, and made my customary stop into hillbillyreport to check on what Jim had.

What I found was quite frankly the finest coverage available on the internet about the human aspect of this monumental event, and how it effected thousands of Kentuckians.

According to the Kentucky Public Service Commission, last week 769,353 Kentucky households and businesses suffered power failures.

At the peak of last week's massive ice storm, more than one-third of Kentucky electric customers were without power, according to new figures compiled by the Kentucky Public Service Commission (PSC).

Information gathered from all electric providers in the state show that 769,353 customers were without power at the worst of the storm, late on January 29. Kentucky has about 2.2 million electric customers. The outage affected 35.7 percent of them.
"These numbers simply bring into sharper focus what we already knew," Governor Steve Beshear said. "This is the worst disruption of essential services on record in Kentucky."

As of early today, 208,335 Kentucky customers remain without power.

But the real story is at the Hillbilly's place. Check it out.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

Strong Unions = Strong Economy

2009-02-01T05:10:00.003-06:00

The key component to the repugs' three-decade War on the Middle Class is the destruction of unions.

It's no coincidence that the strongest middle-class economy in American history co-existed with the strongest union membership. From World War II to the late seventies, more than a third of workers in the U.S. belonged to a union. That membership assured them the decent wage and benefits that allowed one salary to support a family in middle-class comfort: a house and yard in the suburbs, two cars, nice vacations, college education for 2.5 kids.

But an economy that expands the middle class contracts the rich. Corporate CEOs were only 10 or 20 times richer than their workers, instead of 100 or 1,000 times richer as they became after the repugs broke the back of unions.

Last week, President Obama took several long strides toward restoring a union-strong economy.

President Barack Obama signed a series of executive orders Friday that he said should "level the playing field" for labor unions in their struggles with management.

Obama also used the occasion at the White House to announce formally a new White House task force on the problems of middle-class Americans. He named Vice President Joe Biden as its chairman.

Union officials say the new orders by Obama will undo Bush administration policies that favored employers over workers.

SNIP

At the signing ceremony today, Obama said, "I do not view the labor movement as part of the problem. To me, it's part of the solution. You cannot have a strong middle class without a strong labor movement."

And to drive that point home, Teamsters President James Hoffa told reporters after the ceremony, "It's a new day for workers. We finally have a White House that is dedicated to working with us to rebuild our middle class. Hope for the American Dream is being restored."

If you need more ammunition to refute the union-bashers, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich at TPMCafe explains Why We Need Stronger Unions and How to Get Them.

Why is this recession so deep, and what can be done to reverse it?

Hint: Go back about 50 years, when America's middle class was expanding and the economy was soaring. Paychecks were big enough to allow us to buy all the goods and services we produced. It was a virtuous circle. Good pay meant more purchases, and more purchases meant more jobs.

At the center of this virtuous circle were unions.

SNIP

The way to get the economy back on track is to boost the purchasing power of the middle class. One major way to do this is to expand the percentage of working Americans in unions. Tax rebates won't work because they don't permanently raise wages. Most families used the rebate last year to pay off debt -- not a bad thing, but it doesn't keep the virtuous circle running. Bank bailouts won't work either. Businesses won't borrow to expand without consumers to buy their goods and services. And Americans themselves can't borrow when they're losing their jobs and their incomes are dropping.

Tax cuts for working families, as President Obama intends, can do more to help because they extend over time. But only higher wages and benefits for the middle class will have a lasting effect.

Unions matter in this equation. According to the Department of Labor, workers in unions earn 30% higher wages -- taking home $863 a week, compared with $663 for the typical nonunion worker -- and are 59% more likely to have employer-provided health insurance than their nonunion counterparts.

SNIP

Although America and its economy need unions, it's become nearly impossible for employees to form one. The Hart poll I cited tells us that 57 million workers would want to be in a union if they could have one. But those who try to form a union, according to researchers at MIT, have only about a 1 in 5 chance of successfully doing so.

The reason? Most of the time, employees who want to form a union are threatened and intimidated by their employers. And all too often, if they don't heed the warnings, they're fired, even though that's illegal. I saw this when I was secretary of Labor over a decade ago. We tried to penalize employers that broke the law, but the fines are minuscule. Too many employers consider them a cost of doing business.

This isn't right. The most important feature of the Employee Free Choice Act, which will be considered by the just-seated 111th Congress, toughens penalties against companies that violate their workers' rights. The sooner it's enacted, the better -- for U.S. workers and for the U.S. economy.

The American middle class isn't looking for a bailout or a handout. Most people just want a chance to share in the success of the companies they help to prosper. Making it easier for all Americans to form unions would give the middle class the bargaining power it needs for better wages and benefits. And a strong and prosperous middle class is necessary if our economy is to succeed.

Read the whole thing.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

The Crime of a Two-Tiered Justice System

2009-01-31T19:33:00.005-06:00

In the context of the vapors experienced by the Beltway fainting virgins at the prospect of prosecuting torturers and murderers for, you know, torturing and murdering, Glenn Greenwald brings us an example of the kind of justice Smirky/Darth and their minions should be receiving.

Homeless man gets 15 years for stealing $100

A homeless man robbed a Louisiana bank and took a $100 bill. After feeling remorseful, he surrendered to police the next day. The judge sentenced him to 15 years in prison.

Roy Brown, 54, robbed the Capital One bank in Shreveport, Louisiana in December 2007. He approached the teller with one of his hands under his jacket and told her that it was a robbery.

The teller handed Brown three stacks of bill but he only took a single $100 bill and returned the remaining money back to her. He said that he was homeless and hungry and left the bank.

The next day he surrendered to the police voluntarily and told them that his mother didn't raise him that way.

Brown told the police he needed the money to stay at the detox center and had no other place to stay and was hungry.

In Caddo District Court, he pleaded guilty. The judge sentenced him to 15 years in prison for first degree robbery.

Fifteen years for feeling remorseful about taking a hundred-dollar bill. By that logic, 4,200-plus counts of pre-meditated murder ought to get Dubya and Dick 10 or 12 lifetimes hanging from a hook in the ceiling by their scrotums.

Greenwald goes into shameful detail about the American criminal injustice system's ludicrous over-sentencing of the powerless and its passes for the powerful. But here's the point:

Under all circumstances, arguing that high political officials should be immunized from prosecution when they commit felonies such as illegal eavesdropping and torture would be both destructive and wrong [not to mention, in the case of the latter crimes, a clear violation of a treaty which the U.S. (under Ronald Reagan) signed and thereafter ratified].

But what makes it so much worse, so much more corrupted, is the fact that this "ignore-the-past-and-forget-retribution" rationale is invoked by our media elites only for a tiny, special class of people -- our political leaders -- while the exact opposite rationale ("ignore their lame excuses, lock them up and throw away the key") is applied to everyone else. That, by definition, is what a "two-tiered system of justice" means and that, more than anything else, is what characterizes (and sustains) deeply corrupt political systems. That's the two-tiered system which, for obvious reasons, our political and media elites are now vehemently arguing must be preserved.

Read the whole thing.

Progressive Progress in the Economic Stimulus

2009-01-31T13:00:00.001-06:00

As the Senate girds for battle over the repug-sabotaged economic stimulus, Talking Points Memo brings us a reminder of the progressive priorities that made it into the House bill and deserve saving in the Senate.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus just released a memo that offers a worthy counterpoint to our discussions today about the Republicans' baldly misleading message on the stimulus.

The Progressives have rounded up elements of their proposed $1 trillion stimulus that ended up making it into the Democratic leaders' final bill, in part or in whole. It's a list that's worth remembering while tax cuts seemingly dominate the airwaves.

The highlights of the memo are after the jump:

• Unemployment benefits (UI) extension. Cost = at least $12.7 billion

• Anti-hunger provisions

* SNAP - 20% temporary increase in maximum food stamp level above the FY2009 level for two years. Cost = approximately $24 billion and increase in funds for state food stamp administrative costs Cost= $250 million;

* WIC - increase funding to make up for shortfall not covered in the current Continuing Resolution. Cost = $450 million and increases for management information system and related infrastructure improvements. Cost = $50 million;

* School meals - provide a 15% increase in funding for breakfast and school lunch programs. Cost = $1 billion;

• Medicaid payments to states (FMAP). Cost = at least $15 billion

• LIHEAP assistance to provide low-income Americans relief from higher energy costs. Cost = at least $5 billion

• Job creation via down payment on rebuilding America's infrastructure and schools, starting with massive investment in commercialization of green technologies and related job training that promote environmental protection and energy independence. Cost = at least $100 billion

** In general:

• No funds for Iraq or Afghanistan wars and no funds for defense procurement.

• Prevailing wage to be paid for jobs created and upholding of Davis-Bacon Act

These are, of course, just a downpayment on the long list of repairs to the New Deal and Great Society needed after three decades of repug destruction.

But if these provisions remain in the final bill and President Obama signs it by Darwin Day, then I'd say we're well on our way to recovery.

Some Bucking Up For Us Hand-Wringers

2009-01-31T05:52:00.005-06:00

Bob Cesca at HuffPo reminds us that the repug rejection of the stimulus bill isn't the first time Barack Obama has seemed defeated, only to come roaring back in victory, and it probably won't be the last.

There's a killer web graphic that was created back in the post-Republican Convention days while everyone was writing spasmodic, breathless "Obama should [fill in the blank]" blog entries and "Oh crap! We're gonna lose!" newspaper columns.

SNIP

The web graphic is actually a photograph of Barack Obama from his Invesco Field acceptance speech. In it, he's looking directly into the camera with an expression of fierce determination on his face -- his teeth gnashed in an Eastwood snarl, his left hand gesturing as though he's kung fu fighting his way through an oversized cinderblock made of SlapChop-minced Republican skulls.

The large, white text superimposed at the top reads: "Everyone chill the fuck out." The text at the bottom exclaims: "I got this!"

Sure enough, two months later, we watched as this liberal African American man with the noble yet politically unusual name "Barack Hussein Obama" defied the odds and won red states like Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Indiana and the commonwealth of Virginia.

Fade out the roaring crowds at Grant Park. Dissolve to late January.
The economy continues to creep nearer to the crumbling ledge of yet another Depression -- if it isn't there already. And yet the Republicans who very nearly shoved us over the ledge are prancing around as if their collective Reaganomics don't stink.

SNIP

Their political audacity, while never surprising, always seems to confound expectations and defy logic. Having relegated themselves to the status of a regional, minor party due to their unserious, fear-mongering wedge politics and well-documented record of disastrous policy-making, they remain so hubristic as to crap their cages and demand a seat at the Big Boy Table, as if they're the majority party in Congress -- as if they somehow earned an equal voice in this thing by way of their awesome record on the economy.

They haven't. It's only due to the magnanimity of the president that they haven't been completely steamrolled on this recovery bill. Magnanimity which, by the way, isn't nearly as plentiful or renewable as the Republicans might think.

SNIP

Altogether, it might appear as if the Republicans are using their ridiculousness as a means of duping the president -- hectoring him into capitulation and therefore allowing the recovery bill to be sabotaged with their taint. And when the sabotaged bill fails to help the economy, they'll blame the president. David Sirota outlined this strategy the other day, and while events might seem to point in this direction from time to time, there isn't much evidence to indicate that President Obama is naïve enough to be flimflammed by these very obvious Republican political tricks. Put another way, if you and I can spot the scams, I'm sure he can too. Though, it's important that the Republicans think they can sucker punch the president the same way they've sucker punched Senator Reid over and over.

The president's "I won" remark indicates that there's a limit to both his benevolence and his tolerance for Republican silly season hackery. "I won" means that he won't be played and he won't be taken advantage of. But the Republicans have miscalculated and misinterpreted the president, believing that "bipartisanship" means Democratic capitulation. Save for a few concessions in an otherwise massive spending bill, President Obama isn't calling for any half-and-half bipartisan compromise on this or anything else so far. His process with the Republicans is all about attaining some civility in the tone of the debate -- not caving. There's a difference. And in that process, the president is looking increasingly presidential as his style is contrasted against the smallness of the Republicans.

Recent history has proved that the president's Chess Match style will require a little more patience than we're accustomed to in order to see the endgame -- to see how this all plays out. And while it's crucial to keep a clear eye and critical mind, there's a lot of comfort in that web graphic from last September. Chances are: he's got this.

Read the whole thing.

President Obama Makes His First Bill A Great One

2009-01-30T18:27:00.002-06:00

As Salon's Joan Walsh recommends, watch this all the way to the end. This is what classy looks like.

President Obama Is Too Nice to Kentucky

2009-01-29T21:00:00.000-06:00

President Barack Obama is a much better person than I could ever be. If the Democratic governor of a Democratic-registered state that had nevertheless voted overwhelmingly for my republican opponent in the last election begged me for help to get his backward state out of an emergency they had basically created themselves, I would not have been this nice:

President Barack Obama last night approved Gov. Steve Beshear's request for an emergency Presidential Disaster Declaration that will expedite assistance to people in need across the commonwealth.

"President Obama called me last night to express his concern about the plight facing our state and many of our people. I appreciate the president's quick response to our request for a disaster declaration," Gov. Beshear said as he traveled throughout Western Kentucky to meet with local officials and survey damage to the region. "We will move quickly to bring power generators, communications equipment and debris removal equipment into the region to help restore power and protect our people in their time of need."

No, indeedy, I would not have been nice at all. I would have said something like this:

"Well, Steve, I see the mess you're in and it certainly is a nasty one. But I notice Kentucky had almost exactly the same mess six years ago, and its Democratic leaders made all kinds of promises about burying power lines to make sure this never happened again. Kentucky didn't keep a single fucking one of those promises, did it, Steve? Nope, it sure didn't. And here you are, in a shit hole any idiot could have predicted would happen again with the next ice storm.

"I really would like to help you, Steve, but I've got these Congressional republicans, including four house members and two Senators with KY next to their names, raking me over the coals for wanting to give money to people who don't deserve it. You know, people who promise to do better but don't, people who waste the opportunities they're given to improve themselves. I would just have a hard time explaining to Mitch and Jimbo and Eddie and Hal and Geoff and Brent why I'm helping that notorious welfare queen Kentucky when we all know she's never going to change her behavior.

"And even if I didn't care what the republicans thought, I've got the actual Democratic majority in Congress that would throw a hissy fit if I gave federal emergency status to a state the majority of whose registered Democrats voted just three months ago to re-elect the obstructionist, evil republican minority leader in the Senate.

"So you have my sympathy, Steve, but my hands are tied. See if you can't get your state to sit up straight and fly right for a while, and maybe elect a few actual Democratic candidates next year, then we'll see about letting you have a little money. Until then, you're on your own."

As a Kentuckian with no electricity since Tuesday and no hope of getting any in the foreseeable future, I am grateful that President Obama did not turn his back on the sure-to-be-ungrateful Commonwealth. But I wish he had found some way of using the Declaration to cudgel some sense into our state's so-called leaders.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

No Such Thing as a Power Outage

2009-01-29T18:24:00.003-06:00

I love it when the universe delivers an engraved, personal invitation to me to rant about a pet peeve.

There is no such thing as a power "outage." It's a power failure. When the power fails, that's a power failure.

Decades ago, power company public relations hacks fooled, lied, pressured and threatened newspapers into calling power failures "outages." Power "failure" sounded way too much like the truth: the power failed. The power company is not omnipotent; it can fail, and does fail - far too frequently. Can't have people thinking that. They might start wondering why they're paying way too much money for something that often fails.

The power didn't "out," like a gay teenager. It failed. Fail, failed, failure. Failure, Failure, FAILURE.

It's especially a power failure when the power fails more than 607,000 people in Kentucky - an all-time record for the state.

The failure is not just of the utility companies, but also of the Public Service Commission, the General Assembly and the Governor, who all FAILED to prevent this catastrophe by forcing the utility companies to bury the power lines.

Although many individuals and entitites share this failure, it remains a failure. A power failure.

Do NOT let anyone get away with using the out-word.

It's a power FAILURE.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

First KY Stimulus Project: Bury Power Lines

2009-01-29T06:56:00.005-06:00

There are 500,000 people - 1/8 the entire population - without electricity in Kentucky this morning. Temperature is 25 degrees, dropping into the teens by Friday night.

They are without power - the light switch kind and the political kind - for one reason, and it's NOT the weather.

They are without power because 90 percent of the electric lines in this state are swinging naked 20 feet in the air, taunting giant tree branches that take every opportunity to rip those smart-ass suckers right out of the grid.

I've lived in this state more than 40 years, and every year it's the same refrain: Bury the power lines! It's too expensive! All you silly people who expect the lights to go on in return for the outrageous utility bills you pay: FUCK YOU!

Ice storm, heavy snow, tornado, hurricane remnants, suicide squirrels - overhead power lines are begging for catastrophe, and catastrophe is what we've got.

No, I don't think the taxpayers should cover the cost of something Kentucky Utilities, Louisville Gas and Electric, and all the rural cooperatives should have paid to do decades ago.

I think Kentucky should get stimulus money to bury all the lines, do it ourselves, then force the companies to reimburse us.

Every dime. Plus 10 percent interest per year for the 60 years they've been putting off burying the lines themselves.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic.

Why Obama Can Never Please the Repugs

2009-01-28T17:53:00.005-06:00

Because, as the Rude Pundit explains so clearly, the repugs are motherfuckers, and it's ridiculous to expect them to do any other than fuck their mothers.

We don't know what Barack Obama actually said to Republican members of Congress in his closed-door meetings with them yesterday regarding his stimulus plan. But we do know one thing for sure: it accomplished nothing. This is the way it's gonna go, and if you've paid attention at all, you know the steps: Obama will concede shit and Republicans will ask for more (even though they already got more tax cuts than anyone fucking needs), Obama will concede more shit and Republicans will ask for more (even though they're gonna get the family planning funding taken out), Obama will concede more shit and Republicans will ask for more, and then when the vote comes, Republicans will vote against it, saying that no one listened to them and fuck that Obama for lying about bipartisanship. Yet the legislation will have passed in a watered down form from the deep infrastructure and other spending so desperately needed to, you know, create jobs, which will, you know, create taxable income, which will, you know, help actually pay for shit some day.

Obama better know a simple fact: they fucking hate him. Right now, Obama represents the fact that everything they believed was a complete failure. For making that clear to the American people, they fucking despise him. They hate his majority, they hate his coattails, they hate that all over the country people are supporting his ideas. Republicans have nothing right now, which means they have nothing to lose by trying to drag Obama into their pit of shit. They'll smile and say it was a good conversation, but they're waiting in the back halls of the Capitol to fuckin' shiv Obama and laugh while he bleeds. And try to force Americans back into their crooked arms.

That's the thing about motherfuckers. You can tell them, "Okay, you can fuck your mothers, but only for an hour a day." They might agree, but sure as you're reading this, the second they walk away, they will...well, by now, you know.

Obama's damn near the smartest sumbitch in the country right now, and a hell of a poker player. So I still hold out hope that Obama does know this, and that he is giving the repugs rope so that at the last minute, after they reject even his most generous overtures, he can whip the real stimulus legislation out, get it passed by the dems, sign it and tell the repugs to fuck off and die.

Eeek! The Guantanamos Are Coming!

2009-01-27T10:00:00.001-06:00

Jon Stewart completely demolishes the fainting-virgin panic over closing Guantanamo.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Guantanamo Baywatch - The Final Season

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Cratering economy puts even Habitat homes out of reach

2009-01-27T06:15:00.004-06:00

You know the economy is completely in the toilet when applications for low-cost, no-interest-loan Habitat homes are down.

From the Bowling Green (KY) Daily News:

They just want to help people get homes - but a plunging economy has made that task more difficult for local Habitat for Humanity officials.

"We are in the business of helping people have homes," said Don Ritter, secretary of the board and chairman of the family selection committee. "We really want to help them have a home, that's what we're about."

The number of qualified applicants for a Habitat home plummeted last year, leaving Habitat officials searching for local residents who can apply.

"We are desperately wanting to get applications," Ritter said. "We're trying to find people who might possibly qualify for a home."

When Ritter began working with the family selection committee about five years ago, about 25 people applied for a Habitat home. Last year, the organization received just four applications.

"And this is the part that hurts," Ritter said. "They all failed the test."

To receive a Habitat home, applicants must meet three basic qualifications: They must need a home; they must be willing to help construct their home; and they must be able to make payments on the home.

"These are not giveaway homes," Ritter said. "These are homes people purchase with a non-interest loan from Habitat."

The ability to purchase a home is one qualification some might lack in the midst of rising unemployment.

"The economy, I'm sure has been hurting us some," Ritter said, "and it's probably getting worse."

SNIP

But the local branch is not the only Habitat organization suffering from a lack of applicants.

Mendoza said he contacted Habitat's state executive director, who said others are experiencing a decrease in applications, and neighboring organizations are "going through the same issues," he said.

SNIP

The city recently donated five lots to Habitat, and the organization is eyeing a few prospects, who hopefully will apply, Mendoza said.

"Right now is a perfect time to buy," he said. "People are just holding back."

What Do You Want on Your License Plate?

2009-01-26T16:55:00.003-06:00

Ralph Long, the go-to blogger on the Kentucky General Assembly, has a suggestion for defusing the latest attempt by freakazoids to turn Kentucky into a Talibantastic theocracy.

Regarding two house bills that say precisely the same thing (why isn't legislative redundancy at least a misdemeanor carrying jail time?):

AN ACT relating to motor vehicle license plates. Create a new section of KRS Chapter 186 to establish an In God We Trust license plate as an alternate standard issue license plate; set forth design characteristics and eligibility standards; amend KRS 186.240 to conform; EFFECTIVE January 1, 2010

Long writes:

And finally under the redundant, why are they wasting time on this again, classification we have the burning need to change automobile license plates.

Here’s a suggestion, let’s allow anyone to put anything they want on a motor vehicle license plate, as long as the person is willing to pay for the plate. Kentucky can be the Café Press of state license plates.

Yes! Make mine read: "In the Flying Spaghetti Monster We Trust." Or "Put Not Your Faith in Invisible Sky Wizards." Or "My Physicist Can Beat Up Your God."

Long concludes: "I'm sure this idea will offend someone, freedom of speech usually does."

If I may add for the Constitutionally-impaired: it's not freedom of speech if people who disagree with it don't have access to the same forum. A bumper sticker reading "Steve Beshear is a Repug-Fellating Coward" is free speech. A license plate reading "In God We Trust" is government establishment of religion.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic.

Advice For Obama About Iraq: Voices From The Past

2009-01-25T02:36:00.002-06:00

President Barack Obama has made clear that, while he isn't going to do anything rash, he intends to make a clean break from many Bush administration policies, and in particular those regarding the Iraq war. That sounds like great news to me.

But, I'm a believer in history, and in the lessons of context that it teaches. It's a good idea to listen to voices of experience, from the past, and Obama should heed them. Here are a couple:

"If you're going to go in and try to topple Saddam Hussein, you have to go to Baghdad. Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that's current there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that government going to have if it's set up by the United States military when it's there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?"
Then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, in 1991.

"Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in 'mission creep,' and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq ... Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different -- and perhaps barren -- outcome."
Former President George H.W. Bush and former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, in their book "A World Transformed" (1998).

It all seems a bit confusing. But I am hopeful that President Obama is a student of history and can learn from it. Clearly, our rulers of the past eight years have been astonishingly oblivious to its lessons.

Not a Miracle: Science, Training, Experience and Unions Trump the Sky Wizard

2009-01-24T09:15:00.003-06:00

mir·a·cle
1: an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs
2: an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment
- Merriam-Webster Dictionary

The near-perfect ditching of Flight 1549 last week and the almost casualty-free rescue of its passengers and crew was not a miracle. Nope, not even by that second definition.

Rather, it was perfect vindication for those of us who put our faith not in invisible sky wizards, but in science and technology, big-government regulation, union-demanded training and experience, professionalism and humanity.

Rachel Maddow opened her show the day after the "crash" emphasizing just this reality.

It is good fortune and individual skill and heroism and pluck that explains yesterday‘s happy ending, but it is also testament to us having some good systems and some good institutions in place—to mitigate damage, to maximize people‘s options in worst-case scenarios, to ensure that people who could encounter worst-case scenarios are trained to deal with them, to respond quickly, to avoid panic.

These systems, professional accreditations, regulations, code enforcement, disaster preparedness, training, equipment, you know what this stuff is? This is the backbone of our national resilience—our ability to handle the unexpected, to be ready for worst-case scenarios, to react with speed and intelligence, to be able to react effectively when disaster strikes.

This type of resilience does not happen on its own. It is the product of us investing in being resilient as a nation and communities. And that kind of investment is often overlooked, it‘s taken for granted until something like this incredibly dramatic story happened like it did yesterday, until an airplane blows out two engines over the Bronx somewhere and winds up gliding just barely over the George Washington Bridge and coming down safely into a New York City river.

So, as all of the inevitable and necessary “what went wrong” investigations get underway now, it may also be smart and useful to look at what went right yesterday. What we can learn from what happened. How we can use those lessons to become a more resilient country.

Her guest, Stephen Flynn, a retired Coast Guard officer, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of "The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation" elaborated:

And all of this basically suggests how important it is that we think about being prepared as a society and investing in the kinds of things that we must have when things go wrong, because they do go wrong from time to time. What a contrast this was—wasn‘t it—between the president, last night, giving a speech, taking credit for seven years of keeping us safe from another act of terror, there‘s no question that that‘s a good thing.

But all the things that we saw on display in New York harbor yesterday were not things that we‘ve been investing at the federal level. And we haven‘t spending a lot of time building the local capability. We haven‘t spent a lot of time informing citizens of what to do when thing go wrong. We haven‘t done the kinds of training, and in some cases, regulation we need to make sure that things that are really critical in our society bend but don‘t break when things go wrong from time to time.

Slate's "Ask the Pilot" Patrick Smith provides a probable tick-tock of the crash, emphasizing the crew skills that made a "miracle" unnecessary.

I'm rather uneasy at calling them heroes. Nothing they did was easy, but on the whole they did what they had to do, what they were trained to do, and what, we should hope, most other crews would have done in that same situation. I reckon Sullenberger and Skiles would readily admit as much. Not out of false modesty but out of due respect for their colleagues everywhere. It was not heroics that saved the day; it was, to use a word I normally dislike, professionalism.

And remember this:

Captain Sullenberger, First Officer Skiles and the three flight attendants are all members of strong, independent unions. Captain Sullenberger was the chair of the Airline Pilots Association's safety training committee. He also had served many times on accident investigation teams deployed by the National Transportation Safety Board, a federal government regulatory agency.

So the next time somebody bitches about big unions and big government, tell them that the 150 people on Flight 1549 have the power of unions and the power of federal government regulation to thank for their lives.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

Detainee Released by Bush Then Attacked U.S. Embassy

2009-01-23T21:00:00.000-06:00

You read that right. A terrorist released from Guantanamo two years ago at the order of then-president George W. Bush later bombed an American embassy.

The emergence of a former Guantanamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda's Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Obama signed Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year.

The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the United States Embassy in Yemen's capital, Sana, in September. He was released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists before resurfacing with Al Qaeda in Yemen.

As Steven Benen notes:

I get the idea behind reports like these -- Guantanamo has housed some dangerous folks, and if we let them go, they'll do dangerous things. Therefore, we better not let them go, and Obama should rethink all of his recent announcements.

Except, the evidence doesn't match the conclusion. Obama isn't saying that he wants to just open the Gitmo doors, he saying he wants to review the pending cases and present evidence against the bad guys as part of a legal process. Ali al-Shihri returning to al Qaeda isn't evidence of a flawed Obama process, it's evidence of a flawed Bush process. Why did Bush let a dangerous guy this guy go? Did Bush's team not consider, I don't know, bringing charges against him before setting him free?

The same is true with the incessant media fascination with the 61 former Guantanamo Bay detainees who've since become alleged terrorists. First, the confirmed number is 18, not 61. Second, even that number isn't considered entirely reliable.

And third, again, the argument about how this relates to Obama is flawed. As Atrios noted, it wasn't Obama's policy that led to their release. The administration created this nightmare at Guantanamo, which was supposedly necessary for U.S. national security. What do we have to show for the former president's efforts? A series of bad guys who went free, and many more bad guys we'll struggle to prosecute because the Bush administration broke the law and tortured them.

As John Cole noted, "The moral of this story is not the danger for Obama going forward with his Gitmo decommissioning, the moral is that when venal, shallow, small men are given unfettered power and authority, they do incompetent, stupid, and evil things."

Glenn Greenwald takes the argument further.

All of this is pure fear-mongering -- the 2009 version of Condoleezza Rice's mushroom cloud and Jay Rockefeller's "we'll-lose-our-eavesdropping-capabilities" cries. Both before and after 9/11, the U.S. has repeatedly and successfully tried alleged high-level Al Qaeda operatives and other accused Islamic Terrorists in our normal federal courts -- in fact, the record is far more successful than the series of debacles that has taken place in the military commissions system at Guantanamo. Moreover, those convicted Terrorists have been housed in U.S. prisons, inside the U.S., for years without a hint of a problem.

SNIP

Both pre- and post-9/11, there are numerous other individuals who have been convicted in U.S. civilian courts of various acts relating to terrorism inspired by Islamic radicalism, including many alleged to be high-level Terrorists, who are now serving sentences inside the U.S., in U.S. prisons. Moreover, terrorists accused of being members of Al Qaeda and affiliated groups have been successfully tried in the regular courts of other countries -- including Britain and Spain -- and currently sit in those countries' regular prisons, without a whiff of a problem.

If it were really the goal of Terrorists to attack American prisons where their members are incarcerated and if they were actually capable of doing that, they already have a long list of "targets" and have had such a list for two decades. If U.S. civilian courts were inadequate forums for obtaining convictions of Terrorism suspects, then the above-listed individuals would not be imprisoned -- most of them for life -- while the Guantanamo military commission system still has nothing to show for it other than a series of humiliating setbacks for the Government. As is true for virtually every fear-mongering claim made over the last eight years to frighten Americans into believing that they must vest the Government with vast and un-American powers lest they be slaughtered by the Terrorists, none of these claims is remotely rational and all of them are empirically disproven.

SNIP

The crime for which Omar Abdel Rahman was convicted and for which he's currently serving a life sentence in Colorado is the February 26, 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, of which Rahman was the alleged "mastermind." That terrorist attack took place just seven weeks after Bill Clinton was inaugurated, but after that attack -- to use the Beltway parlance -- Clinton kept us safe, for the rest of his presidency. No more foreign Terrorist attacks on the Homeland. It wasn't until Clinton left the Oval Office and George Bush became President were Islamic Terrorists able to strike the Homeland again.

Therefore, using the reasoning of Bush followers everywhere, this means that Clinton's counter-terrorism policies -- i.e.: trying accused Terrorists in civilian courts and incarcerating them in U.S. prisons -- have been proven to be extremely effective in keeping us safe (since, as any beginning student of Logic will tell you: if A precedes B, then it means that A caused B -- as in: A = "waterboarding, torture and GITMO," and B = "no Terrorist attack on U.S. soil from 2002-2008"). Using that same "logic": A = "trying Terrorists in civilian courts and imprisoning them in the U.S.," and B = "no foreign Terrorist attacks in the U.S. from February, 1993 through the end of the Clinton presidency

Smirky/Darth, their accomplices and their apologists are desperate to prevent people from discovering just how much danger their Excellent Iraq Adventure placed the nation in, and uncovering the full extent of their crimes.

It's now obvious that every argument - every argument - made in defense of the bush maladministration is at best deluded and more likely a pack of lies.

Don't let them get away with it.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

Saving Lives Instead of Destroying Them

2009-01-23T17:09:00.003-06:00

This afternoon, President Obama cancelled a bush maladministration policy that cost lives in numbers to rival the six-figure casualties of the Iraq clusterfuck.

The "global gag rule" reversed by Obama did far worse than its usual description of "denying funds to organizations that mention abortion."

The rule, in actual practice, forced rural health clinics that served impoverished families in Africa, Asia and South America to close down altogether. One raped 11-year-old saved from a lethal pregnancy put at risk all the life-saving vaccinations and medications and surgeries needed by the thousands served by a single clinic.

This is why the claims, even on the left, that Smirky's "AIDS policy" was one good thing to his credit, are utter bullshit.

If rural clinics in Africa closed for lack of funding that Bush withheld because the clinics distributed factual information about birth control, abortion and using condoms to prevent HIV transmission, then Smirky's "AIDS policy" was not saving people, it was killing them.

The "Mexico City" policy prohibits US dollars and contraceptive supplies from going to any international family planning program that provides abortions or counsels women about their reproductive health options. The policy isn't about money going to pay for abortions. Even those groups that use only private funds for abortion services -- where abortion is legal -- are barred from assistance. This is money going to family planning programs. [...]

[N]ot only are organizations that provide or counsel about abortion services affected; those that dare to take part in a public discussion about legalizing abortion are also affected (hence the name "global gag rule").... This policy has nothing to do with government-sponsored abortions overseas. Ten years before the gag rule was in place the law strictly prohibited that. This policy is about disqualifying prochoice organizations from receiving US international family planning funding.

Under Bush's policy, organizations that play a vital role in women's health are forced to make an impossible choice. If they refuse to be "gagged," they lose the funding that enables them to help women and families who are cut off from basic health care and family planning. But if they accept funding, they must accept restrictions that jeopardize the health of the women they serve.

The most tragic ramifications have been felt in the developing world. In Kenya, for example, two of the leading family planning organizations have been forced to shut down five clinics dispensing aid from prenatal care and vaccinations to malaria screening and AIDS prevention. Kenya's experience is common, according to "Access Denied," a report on the impact of the global gag rule on developing nations. Researchers found that programs for rural communities and urban slums have been scaled back by as much as 50 percent. As a result more women are turning to unsafe abortion -- a leading cause of death for young women in much of Africa -- because they lack access to family planning information and essential contraceptive supplies.

As Steve Benen noted earlier, "In the 1990s, the United States helped lead on international family planning, promoting sustainable development, empowering women, and saving lives. If Obama acts today to end the gag rule, we can again."

Any policy that directly results in people not receiving life-saving health care is not just ineffectual. It's homicidal. Or in this case, genocidal.

That goes for abstinence-only "education" and the pope's edict that it's better to die of AIDS than use condoms. Pure, unadulterated genocide.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ...

Real Bipartisanship

2009-01-23T05:16:00.002-06:00

The indispensable Rude Pundit explains how bipartisanship should work in the Obama era. (Warning: X-rated)

Well, of course Barack Obama took the oath of office again. The man knows who he's dealing with: the petulant little fucks of the right who will do anything they can to invalidate his presidency.

SNIP

Here’s what bipartisanship meant to Republicans: let’s say a Republican and a Democrat are stuck on a desert island. The Republican knows how to survive in the wild, the Democrat knows how to build a raft. They need each other, right? They’re stuck there, and while they may hate each other, they gotta work together or they’re gonna die on the island. While the Democrat is, you know, building the raft, the Republican is gathering coconuts, keeping the fire lit, you know, that kind of shit. It’s all nice and cooperative. And then, when the raft is done, the Republican slits the throat of the Democrat, eats his flesh, drinks his blood, and uses his bones and his clothes for a sail. Bye-bye, island.

Here’s the Rude Pundit's deal: we’ll be bipartisan if you apologize. Not just an eye-rolling “We’re sorry.” Not good enough. We each need to come up with a way for Republicans to apologize. For the Rude Pundit, it’s simple. Blow jobs. He wants to get blow jobs from Republicans. Every time he meets a Republican, he wants to just point at his cock and have them nod, get on their knees. And blow him.

I'll take public professions of belief in and support for evolution, gay marriage, secular humanism, abortion on demand, drastic measures to reverse global warming, and the prosecution of George W. Bush for Desertion of his Military Post in a Time of War.

How do you want repugs to demonstrate bipartisanship?

Read the whole thing.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

The Nobel Peace Prize for Pete Seeger

2009-01-22T16:48:00.008-06:00

I had the privilege, many years ago, of seeing Pete Seeger in concert. I even heard him sing the same "forbidden" verses of "This Land is Your Land" that he sang for Obama's Inauguration. And yes, the crowd back then - dirty fucking hippies all - wept as we sang along, because it was the Reagan Era, and Pete reminded us of the values we thought were gone.

Now that peace and social justice are coming back into style, Peter Rothberg at The Nation writes that it's time to honor one of the movement's last living legends.

This past Sunday, Pete Seeger became the oldest person to perform publicly as part of Barack Obama's inauguration festivities.

Singing the "greatest song about America ever written" (Bruce Springsteen's words) before 500,000 people and tens of millions more on television, the 89-year old legend crooned two little-known verses of his friend Woody Guthrie's 1940 patriotic standard, "This Land is Your Land" -- one about Depression-era poverty, the other about trespassing on private property -- restoring the song to its former glory over the sanitized version that ruled for so many years.

Watch the performance:

Seeger has been an inimitable ambassador for peace, social justice and the best kind of patriotism over the course of a remarkable lifetime. As a prominent musician his songs have engaged people, particularly the youth, to question the value of war, to ban nuclear weapons, to work for international solidarity and against racism wherever it is practiced, and to assume ecological responsibility.

A particular hero to the civil rights movement on whose behalf he worked so tirelessly, Seeger made his first trip south at the invitation of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1956, and returned in '65, again at King's personal invitation, to join the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Amid the tension and heat, Seeger went from campfire to campfire when the march stopped for the night, raising people's morale with rollicking sing-alongs of new freedom songs.

One of the seminal political events in his life, and the one which solidified his intent to make actively combating racism a lifelong pursuit, was the 1949 Peekskill race riots. In this short video, Seeger recounts his experiences:

Without doubt the most influential folk artist of the past century, Seeger deserves at least one more moment on the world stage -- at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Norway. The prize is only bestowed on the living. Although still spry, Seeger turns 90 on May 3. And, as writer and activist Peter Drier writes on the Huffington Post, a Nobel Peace Prize would be "a fitting and much-deserved final tribute for the world's preeminent troubadour for peace and justice" and would serve as important recognition for the many progressive causes to which Seeger has lent his name.

To advance the idea, a new campaign has begun in earnest to persuade the American Friends Service Committee -- which is entitled to put forward submissions -- to enter Seeger as its nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize 2009. Join the cause by signing the petition asking the AFSC to nominate Seeger by the February 1 deadline and check out nobelprize4pete.org for more info on how you can help.

Dishonoring 9/11 Victims at Guantanamo

2009-01-21T17:10:00.007-06:00

President Obama's order to suspend the ludicrous "military commissions" at Guantanamo came just after a heart-wrenching scene that illuminates just what torture George W. Bush has inflicted - not on detainees, but on the families and loves ones of those who died on 9/11.

Following Monday's hearings, the Office of the Military Commissions held a press conference with several 9/11 family members, who had reportedly been selected by lottery to travel to the base to attend the hearings. Visibly angry, and holding up large photographs of their relatives who died on 9/11, they appealed to President Obama to keep Guantánamo open.

"Today we were in the presence of true evil," said Donald Arias, who lost his brother Adam in the attack on the World Trade Center. "Mr. Obama needs to reexamine his decision and keep these tribunals going."

Joe Holland, who lost his son in the World Trade Center, trembled with rage as he took the podium.

"My name is Joe Holland and I lost my son in 9/11," he said. "When I said I was coming down here, people asked me what they could do. I said, 'Write a letter to Obama saying that this place should stay open.'"

When journalists asked Holland about the possibility of trying the 9/11 suspects in federal court, he replied, "No, right here, at Guantánamo," then excused himself from the podium as he fought back tears.

One of the most horrific acts committed by George W. Bush is the cruel trick he played on the loved ones of 9-11 victims.

In their names, he justified a "war on terror" that has accomplished nothing but increase global terror and make this nation far more vulnerable to terrorist acts.

In their names, he bungled the search for bin Laden, allowing the actual 9/11 criminal to escape and remain free for more than seven years.

In their names, he launched an illegal war against one of bin Laden's greatest enemies, thus giving great aid and comfort to the person who killed their loved ones.

In their names, he authorized torture that made it impossible to try and convict bin Laden's captured confederates.

In their names, he did nothing to assuage their loss, but instead everything to ensure that no one actually responsible would ever pay for the crime of 9/11.

If you must write to Obama on behalf of the loved ones of the victims of 9/11, then write to demand he prosecute the people in the recent maladministration who have spent the last seven years desecrating their memories.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic.

If Only They Had Seen This

2009-01-21T05:20:00.003-06:00

Talking Points Memo has been posting readers' take on the inauguration of President Obama. This one hit me hardest.

From TPM Reader MJ ...

As an African-American, there is, of course, a sense of pride, but its certainly one tempered by a sense of loss.
I still remember the stories from 2004, when the Red Sox won the World Series, and Bostonians...one of the first things they did was go to Cemeteries and lay Red Sox hats and gear over the graves of loved ones. It was a way of saying "even though you are not here, you are a part of this" and "we want you to be a part of this.

That's an almost silly demystification of the incredibly complex feelings that most African-Americans are going through right now. Black people will not be laying Obama hats on gravesites. And note that I said going through, as if to suggest a sense of survival or endurance.

There is joy, no doubt. You're seeing it on the TV right now. Inevitably thoughts turn to those not here, about the African-Americans who actually walked the walk, the ones who marched, the ones who suffered under not just the lash of Jim Crow, but the lash of actual slavery, even if their faces and the names remain lost to us in time. Those are the people who inevitably deserve this moment the most, to see that their sacrifice, their pain, produced the America we were told about, but never quite could believe in.

The distance between that America, and the America we actually live in dissolved in a flash, and most African-Americans, myself included, are still not certain what that means. That's why one of the first things that so many people did was call relatives, call family, just call other black people. We went out to find meaning in each other, in each other's loss. We did this because there were so many people we couldn't call, couldn't talk to.

"So and so would have loved to have seen this..."

"Could you imagine if so and so had been alive to see this??"

But the joy is real. The sense of pride and pain that are so much a part of this day is why the joy is so palatable. We are celebrating for so many others. It's why if you watch CNN right now, you see people in the crowd already dancing in the streets (Martha Reeves and the Vandellas).

In the end, though, this is an American moment, no matter you came to it, even if you didn't vote for its existence. I wish there was something pithy or poetic I could say that could wrap this up in fine style, but the enormity of the task that lay before us saps both words and strength. I'll let the final word be the President Elect's.

Obama Must Prosecute Bush War Crimes

2009-01-20T21:00:00.000-06:00

Keith Olbermann's Monday night Special Comment:

Here's the transcript.

In Case You Missed It

2009-01-20T18:22:00.000-06:00

Media Czech has the transcript.

While Watching Inauguration, Thoughts Of A Long-Dead Sibling

2009-01-20T16:44:00.000-06:00

My only sibling, a sister, was killed in an auto accident in 1981, only three weeks after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president. Today, while watching the inauguration of Barack Obama, I thought of her, and what she would think about America today if she's been watching this on some fourth-dimension TV set.

"An African-American president, in 2009? I thought it would take a century," I can almost hear her say. Then, during the parade, "They're a great-looking couple. Listen to the screams -- it's like Elvis came back from the dead. ..."

"Joe Biden? I remember that young smart-mouth from back in the Seventies. He was still in the Senate last year, and now he's vice president? Unbelievable."

I felt sad that my big sister, who would have been pushing 55 now, didn't live to see this day.

I also felt great pride in America, more pride than I've felt in a very long time.

After 28 mostly depressing years, it really is, at last, "morning in America." I hope you can see us now, Sis.

That's all.

Oaths Have Consequences

2009-01-19T13:34:00.005-06:00

In the eight years since Dubya committed perjury when he swore to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America, we seem to have forgotten that the Presidential Oath of Office is not an introduction to a speech, but a legal, enforceable oath.

Through eight years of dictatorial rule by an imposter placed in office by a judicial coup, we've forgotten that the president has actual duties he must fulfill or be removed from office and prosecuted for malfeasance.

Hilzoy explains how the Oath of Office binds Barack Obama to constitutional duties ignored by Smirky/Darth and why those duties give him no choice but to prosecute George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales and their whole mob organization for war crimes.

Some Facts For Obama To Consider

(1) According to Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, the President "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed".

(2) According to Article VI of the Constitution, "This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land".

(3) The United States is a party to the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

(4) As Dahlia Lithwick reminds us, the Convention Against Torture not only prohibits torture, it imposes a set of affirmative obligations on its parties.

SNIP

It seems to me that these facts imply that if Barack Obama, or his administration, has reasonable grounds to believe that members of the Bush administration have committed torture, then they are legally obligated to investigate; and that if that investigation shows that acts of torture were committed, to submit those cases for prosecution, if the officials who committed or sanctioned those acts are found on US territory. If they are on the territory of some other party to the Convention, then it has that obligation. Under the Convention, as I read it, this is not discretionary. And under the Constitution, obeying the laws, which include treaties, is not discretionary either.

On Thursday, Eric Holder, Obama's nominee, for Attorney General, stated categorically in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, countless television cameras, the FSM and everybody:

"No one is above the law."

That doesn't just mean that neither the new president nor any member of his administration may break the law or undermine the Constitution. It means they have the affirmative duty to enforce the law, including international treaties.

Failing in that duty - breaking his Oath of Office - in the name of "moving forward" or "bipartisanship" or "changing the tone" or getting 80 votes for the economic stimulus is a crime in and of itself for which brand-new President Obama would deserve impeachment.

Not prosecuting Bush war crimes is not an option.

Read the whole thing.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

Because It's Still Not Over

2009-01-18T17:00:00.002-06:00

And because we must swear eternal vigilance against every form of bush-worship rationalization over the facts of history:

There’s one final myth about this President that the Rude Pundit would like to put to rest: George W. Bush is not a man you would want to have a beer with. No, not because if you saw him in a bar, you'd react like you had gone on the sex offender registry in Dallas and discovering that a guy who fucked babies in his basement was now living in the downstairs apartment. It's that, despite any feints at finding him charming, he is not, in his soul, a kind or decent person.

SNIP

The Rude Pundit doesn't drink with irredeemable dickheads, with self-righteous balls of fuck who think their very existence demands your respect and attention, with privileged cockmongers who can't manage even a moment of self-awareness.

SNIP

Yet we can't just bury this presidency alive in the cold, cold ground and have a picnic on the earth above it, joyously toasting as it screams and claws and tries to get free before it inhales dirt, gags, vomits, and dies horribly, not knowing why it deserved such an awful fate. No, alas, no.

Because the reason I will unreasonably hate this man, these men, these women, as human beings, and not just for ideologies and actions, is because neither I nor most of you will live to see the day that all their hurt is healed.

Read the whole thing.

"The resilience of our democracy"

2009-01-18T09:25:00.006-06:00

I have long been among those who warned that Smirky/Darth will not give up power willingly. Their many crimes, known and unknown, made it essential that they create some kind of national emergency to suspend the election or overturn its results.

They'll attack Iran, we said. They'll fake an attack from North Korea. They'll do anything, except accept a peaceful transfer of power, especially to a Democrat.

In this, as in so many things, Barack Obama has proven himself more of a believer - more faithfully American - than the rest of us.

Together, we know that this is a time of great challenge for the American people. Difficult days are upon us, and even more difficult days lie ahead. Our nation is at war. Our economy is in great turmoil. And there is so much work that must be done to restore peace and advance prosperity. But as we approach this time-honored American tradition, we are reminded that our challenges can be met if we summon the spirit that has sustained our democracy since George Washington took the first oath of office.

Addressing the nation that day, Washington explained his decision to serve, saying, “I was called by my country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love.” This Tuesday, we can reaffirm our own veneration and love for our country and our democracy. We can once again provide an example to the world, and move forward with a renewed sense of purpose and progress at home.

Read the transcript.

"A small, small man"

2009-01-18T07:58:00.004-06:00

Hilzoy reviews Smirky's 2000 Inaugural address and reflects on what it means today.

He's a small, small man, who ought to have spent his life in some honorary position without responsibilities at a firm run by one of his father's friends. Instead, he ruined our country, and several others besides. He wasted eight years in which we could have been shoring up our economy, laying the groundwork for energy independence, making America a fairer and better country, and truly working to help people around the world become more free. Instead, he debased words that ought to mean something: words like honor, decency, freedom, and compassion.

To this day, I do not think he has the slightest conception of the meaning of the words he took in vain.

Sometimes, when I write things like this, people think I am trying to excuse Bush -- as though I cannot condemn him unless I take him to be a scheming leering monster. I disagree. I think that when someone who is not mentally incompetent gets to be Bush's age, if he has no conception of the meaning of honor or decency, he has no one to blame but himself. And to say of a person that he does not understand those things -- that he could stand before the nation and speak the words Bush spoke in 2000 with so little sense of what they meant that it's not clear that we should count him as lying -- is one of the worst things I think it's possible to say about a person.

Read the whole thing.

KDP Can't Wait to Lose Jim Bunning's Seat in 2010

2009-01-18T06:05:00.000-06:00

Kentucky Senator Jim "Non-Compos Mentis" Bunning's seat would be an easy pickup for the dems in 2010.

Would be, that is, if the Kentucky "Democratic" Party lived on the same planet as the Democratic Party that elected Barack Obama in a historic landslide and gained eight Senate seats.

But the Kentucky "Democratic" Party managed to lose not only the presidential race to a republican ticket that lost Indiana, not only a U.S. Senate seat to a very vulnerable Mitch McConnell, but also every single congressional, state house and state senate race without a democratic incumbent.

In fact, the KDP has not lost this huge in the entire history of the state party.

Here on Reality Planet, that would have resulted in the mass resignations/firings/public executions of every party official and central committee member and a radical overhaul of the party machinery.

What do you think happened on Planet Kentucky-Democrats-Are-Worthless? Exactly. The same idiots who turned a 2-1 registration advantage into Unprecedented Failure are feverishly planning a rerun for 2010.

At BlueGrassRoots, Rdemocrat notes Lt. Governor Dan Mongiardo's recent gesture toward announcing his run, and considers him the likely front-runner, along with Sixth District Congressman Ben Chandler

Besides his 0-and-1 record against Bunning, Dr. Dan has several handicaps: liberal democrats won't vote for him because we have never forgiven him - and never will forgive him - for sponsoring the 2004 gay hate constitutional amendement. Conservative democrats won't vote for him because they still think he's gay, despite or possibly because of Mongiardo's recent marriage to a girl 25 years younger than him. Forget beating Bunning; Dr. Dan won't survive the primary.

The Democratic primary is likely to be the most crowded in decades. Page One Kentucky insists that the leading Democratic candidate is Attorney General Jack Conway, and they're probably right, but the list gets long after that: Auditor Crit Luallen, Lt. Col. Andrew Horne, House Speaker Greg Stumbo, Sixth District Congressman Ben Chandler, Third District Congressman John Yarmuth, Perennial Losing Candidate Bruce Lunsford, Loser to Lunsford Greg Fischer, disgraced former Lt. Governor Steve Henry, defeated former House Speaker Jody Richards, and possibly my auto mechanic.

Among those, Luallen would absolutely make the best Senator, but even the pleas of a million desperate Democrats will not persuade Luallen to run. She passed up easy election to the Governor's Office in 2007, proving she's not interested in higher office.

Chandler and Yarmuth are rising rapidly in the Democratic Congress and probably won't sacrifice that for a chance to be a Senate rookie.

Stumbo just beat Richards in a Speaker's race he had no chance to win, reminding us never to count Greg out of anything.

Lunsford, Fischer, Henry and Richards would run on pure ego, but losing huge has yet to deter any of them.

I have a soft spot for Horne, who would have beaten Mitch McConnell last year if he hadn't withdrawn from the primary under pro-Lunsford pressure from the DSCC and Governor Beshear.

I like Jack Conway, but the reports that he's the favorite of the same people who dumped Horne for Loser Lunsford worry me.

And if the RNC does succeed in pushing Bunning out of the race in favor of Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson, all bets are off.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

Bush Legacy: Eight Years in Eight Minutes

2009-01-17T17:08:00.003-06:00

Friday night, Keith Olbermann covered the Bush Legacy as only Keith can.

What a revoltin' development this is!

2009-01-17T15:20:00.001-06:00

So much for delaying the inevitable until I get past fifty, let alone sixty.

In April, I am having a total knee replacement on the right side.

The injections have ceased to be effective enough to justify continuing with that treatment strategy, given the inherent risks to kidneys, bones, and the endocrine system that are part of the bargain when corticosteroids are used for a prolonged period of time.

In reality, when it comes to orthopedic problems, there are only five avenues open to your physician - casting, physical therapy, pain medication, ignore the patient, or operate - and after that, another simply doesn't exist. In the case of my knees, there is only one that will help. Putting my knees in casts won't do anything, so scratch that. Physical therapy won't do anything to correct the bone damage from all the years of wear and tear that have led to the osteoarthritis that is impacting my quality of life. Prolonged pain medication? No thank you. My goal in life is to avoid anything that can lead to a perforated bowel. I have had knee surgery nine times already, and I have taken a boatload of opiates in conjunction. I am also a supremely competent medical lab professional. I know exactly how that stuff works. I can explain the mechanism to the satisfaction of the state board of healing arts, and I know what the side effects can be. I know that I don't have the gene for addiction, but I am not immune to developing a habit of use - no one is, regardless of genetics - and I have weaned off them before and can tell you flat out that it is not pleasant. I assume that since you are reading this, you have some idea of what a stupid move it would be to ignore me - the doctor who will perform the surgery knows I am not one who will stand for being ignored. He has worked a trauma or two with me - in fact, he was in the bay the day I physically picked up and moved a resident who ignored my warnings and kept getting in my way and moved him out of my way. And he had a good six inches height and 60 pounds on me. He never got in my way again, tho.

That leaves us with one option, the only one that will help...surgery to replace the diseased joint.

I have known for several years that it was coming to this, but I have been stalling. I can count on getting maybe 20 years out of the first set and ten to fifteen out of the second. Each time the surgery is done, you lose an inch of bone on either side of the new joint, and I am not a tall, willowy, long-legged fawn of a woman. I am a 5'4" well-muscled athletic body type. I don't have a runway models physique, I am built more like a figure skater with boobs. In other words, I don't have a whole hell of a lot of bone to spare. I can do it twice, and after that...

I was originally scheduled to have bilateral replacements four years ago, and I bailed at the last minute. I lost confidence in the physician, the practice and the hospital where the surgery would be performed. And hey, in four years, we have gotten better at doing the procedure and made improvements in the replacement parts.

There is a lot of stuff to do in the next six weeks, and since my ISP has gone the way of the transgressor, I am getting a head start. I will be working on getting new internet service come Monday, but for now, the weekend calls, and we are blissfully kid-free.

Carry on without me, I'll be back asap.

Why Didn't the Curse Get Bush?

2009-01-16T16:41:00.005-06:00

A piece in Slate speculates on how George W. Bush escaped the Curse of Tecumseh.

The history, at least, is straightforward enough. Starting with William Henry Harrison, elected in 1840, eight American presidents elected at 20-year intervals have died (or almost died) in office. Harrison caught a cold and expired after just a month as president, the shortest tenure ever. Everyone knows what happened to Abraham Lincoln, elected in 1860. James Garfield, elected in 1880, lasted four months before Charles J. Guiteau, upset about not receiving an ambassadorship, shot him. William McKinley, re-elected in 1900, was shot by anarchist Leon Czolgosz. Warren G. Harding (1920) and Franklin D. Roosevelt (1940) died of natural causes. And the circumstances of John F. Kennedy's death, like those of Lincoln's, are well-known.

So what of this Tecumseh guy? In 1811, Harrison, commanding about 1,000 troops, defeated some American Indians in the Battle of Tippecanoe. Depending on who tells the tale, either Tecumseh, the defeated chief, or his brother, the prophet-cum-medicine man Tenskwatawa, issued a spiritual fatwa on the head of Harrison, predicting his death as president and then the deaths of presidents elected every two decades thereafter.

It concludes that Bush may have broken the curse which was, in any case, severely bent by Ronald Reagan's survival of an assassination attempt in 1981.

I disagree.

Personally, I never wanted to see Smirky/Darth assassinated, as such events tend to create martyrs out of the most undeserving victims. But if Bush had succumbed slowly, painfully and publicly of some horrific venereal disease I probably wouldn't have mourned much.

No, Smirky didn't break the curse. The curse didn't apply to him because he wasn't elected in 2000 - he was put in office through a judicial coup d'etat. The man who actually was elected president in 2000 never served in the office, and therefore the curse didn't apply to him, either.

If the curse is real, whoever's elected in 2020 is still at risk.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

Bush's Final Days, Part 4: Doo-fus! Doo-fus! Doo-fus! ...

2009-01-16T02:52:00.001-06:00

Get those extended-forearm salutes up, loyal subjects. Il Doofus has spoken, ostensibly for the last time.

I have to admit that, in his Thursday night farewell address to the nation, Bush and his speechwriters put the best possible face on myriad historic disasters. (See attached video of some of the speech, from MSNBC.) It almost made the manure palatable. Fortunately, not everyone's memory is that short. (See second attached video.)

During the debates on Bush's role in history -- like, is he the worst U.S. president of all time? -- there were comparisons made with presidents who were generally regarded as ineffectual. Such officeholders would be Ulysses S. Grant, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and a couple of others.

I can't find who it was, but one historian said that being ineffectual was never Bush's problem. Il Doofus, he explained, has really been quite effective -- at pursuing disastrous policies. Over and over. And over again.

And then, I will add, proclaiming them successes.

It's past 11, but here's the film anyway:

Now, for equal time, here's Scotty McClellan on Keith Olbermann's MSNBC Countdown show, at long last being something resembling an honest man.

Four days to go. That's all.

Quote of the Day

2009-01-15T22:00:00.001-06:00

The Rude Pundit on Wednesday, at the end of a post on Cheney's "Torture? What Torture?" tour:

For so very long, torture had stayed out of the mainstream media. Once John McCain and Barack Obama declared they would both close Guantanamo, the issue was off the table for the duration of the campaign. Now that the Obama administration is coming in and members of the House and the Senate are threatening to investigate the Bush White House's actions, now that Obama had to put up or shut up on Gitmo, all of a sudden the media is treating the issue like it matters, like somewhere, hidden in a deep, dark place is this curled up, frightened little American soul and we're trying to figure out how to coax it out of the corner, wondering if we have earned the right to hold out our hands and say, "Come on out. It'll be okay."

Don't Believe the Lies: Court did NOT Absolve Bush

2009-01-15T16:59:00.005-06:00

The overarching lie used to falsely justify all of George Bush's domestic crimes, war crimes and treason is that of unlimited presidential authority.

Never mind Article One Congressional powers, never mind Separation of Powers, never mind Constitutional limits on the executive, for eight years it's been "because I'm the president and I said so!"

Thus he justified: breaking treaties, ignoring bin Laden and allowing 9/11, launching an illegal invasion, wiretapping and spying on innocent citizens, torture, rendition, detention and every other way he could imagine to shred the Constitution and shit diarrhea all over the remnants.

Now Smirky/Darth's slimy apologists are claiming a FISA Court decision has endorsed Bush's "if the president does it it's not illegal" theory.

Bullshit, as Steve Benen explains.

There's been some talk today that the FISA court has endorsed the notion that the president has the authority to engage in warrantless wiretaps. That's not what happened today, and the details matter.

SNIP

The decision has nothing to do with the president's inherent authority, and everything to do with Congress' ability to shape surveillance law, giving the White House far more authority than it was previously allowed.

Put another way, the case was about the legality of the Protect America Act. It cleared the court's examination. But as A.L. explained, this doesn't lend "credence" to the administration's legal arguments at all.

Quite the contrary. From the moment the NSA program was first disclosed in December of 2005, the issue has always been whether the president has the "inherent authority" to disregard a statute like FISA that purports to place restrictions on his ability to conduct surveillance of Americans. The Bush administration claimed it had such powers, despite overwhelming legal authority to the contrary. When Congress passed the Protect America Act, it statutorily authorized the President's subsequent surveillance activities, assuming he stays within the rather wide confines of that law. The court here has merely upheld Congress's prerogative to pass such a law.

There's nothing here that lends any credence whatsoever to claims of law-breaking authority made by the Bush administration over the last few years.

Several far-right blogs insisted today that Bush has been "vindicated" and was "right all along." That's simply not what happened.

Read the whole thing.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

What the Pentagon Defines as Terrorism

2009-01-15T05:36:00.001-06:00

It's a damn good thing the Pentagon is keeping track of what those detainees released from Guantanamo get up to after they get back home.

Some of them are ungrateful, recidivist and unrepentant enough to perpetrate vicious acts of terror like this one:

What the DoD actually counted as their "return to the fight" was-- I hope you're sitting down -- the fact that one of them published op-ed in the New York Times. Here is part of his ~~act of war~~ column:

"I learned my respect for American institutions the hard way. When I was growing up as a Uighur in China, there were no independent courts to review the imprisonment and oppression of people who, like me, peacefully opposed the Communists. But I learned my hardest lesson from the United States: I spent four long years behind the razor wire of its prison in Cuba.

I was locked up and mistreated for being in the wrong place at the wrong time during America's war in Afghanistan. Like hundreds of Guantanamo detainees, I was never a terrorist or a soldier. I was never even on a battlefield. Pakistani bounty hunters sold me and 17 other Uighurs to the United States military like animals for $5,000 a head. The Americans made a terrible mistake.

It was only the country's centuries-old commitment to allowing habeas corpus challenges that put that mistake right -- or began to. (...) Without my American lawyers and habeas corpus, my situation and that of the other Uighurs would still be a secret. I would be sitting in a metal cage today. Habeas corpus helped me to tell the world that Uighurs are not a threat to the United States or the West, but an ally. Habeas corpus cleared my name -- and most important, it let my family know that I was still alive.

Like my fellow Uighurs, I am a great admirer of the American legal and political systems. I have the utmost respect for the United States Congress. So I respectfully ask American lawmakers to protect habeas corpus and let justice prevail. Continuing to permit habeas rights to the detainees in Guantanamo will not set the guilty free. It will prove to the world that American democracy is safe and well."

Well, now we know why Smirky/Darth fought so hard to eliminate the 800-year-old principle of habeas corpus: It's a terrorism tactic.

If only King John had known.

Celebrate the Inauguration With a Day of Service

2009-01-14T16:55:00.003-06:00

So you can't get to D.C. for the Inauguration of a Lifetime. You can, however, honor the star of that event by responding to his request that you join him on Monday for a Day of Service in your own community.

Click here to find a Martin Luther King Day volunteer service event in your community.

I used it to search for volunteer service events within 50 miles of my rural Kentucky home and got a list of 60 from a wide variety of organizations.

Find an event near you, and get this administration started off right.

Destroy the Village to Save It

2009-01-14T05:36:00.002-06:00

TPM picks up the latest evidence that Mitch McConnell is making the fatal error of thinking President-Elect Obama is stupid.

Republicans roll out new plan to revive the economy by destroying Social Security ...

Mr. Obama has told Republicans he is open to suggestions, and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said his conference would urge Mr. Obama to consider a two-year suspension of payroll taxes to benefit individuals and corporations.

Mr. McConnell said Senate Republicans were intensely interested in the idea, which was presented at their own weekly lunch by Lawrence B. Lindsey, who was President Bush's top economic adviser from 2001 to 2002, and John H. Makin, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.

If Mitch McConnell and the rest of the repugs had to choose between destroying terrorism and destroying the New Deal, they'd pick the latter in a heartbeat.

The Nightowl Newswrap

2009-01-14T00:42:00.001-06:00

Oh, Honey! We are anything but bored! You and the rest of the cast of the Wasilla Hillbillies took care of that! Sarah Palin mulled a cask of whine to go with the cheese that's been aging since McCain picked her ignorant ass and lashed out at 'bored, anonymous, pathetic bloggers who lie' in her latest histrionic screed against the media. How rude of her to turn on Red State and the rest of her fan-boys like that.

Not that she couldn't handle the job, or at least grow into it...after all, she's whip-smart Pentagon Spokesman Geoff Morrell gave Michelle Obama a hell of a promotion today in a press briefing. He committed a slip of the tongue and announced her as a nominee for Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. Reaction from the assembled press corps prompted an immediate correction.

Obama sets the rules President-elect Obama told his former colleagues that if Congress passes a resolution blocking release of the second half of the financial bailout funds he will veto it. Until today, an Obama veto of a so-called disapproval resolution had been discussed as a theoretical possibility. But the promise made to the Democratic caucus represents a firm stand on behalf of an extension of the $350 billion in Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) funds. The original TARP legislation required the president to specifically request the second half of the funds. Congress then has fifteen days to disapprove of the request or else the money is dispersed. If Obama vetoes the disapproval, Congress would need a two-thirds majority to override that veto to prevent the money from being spent. "I was glad that he said that," said Lieberman, an independent who still caucuses with Democrats, of the veto threat. "He made an appeal," he said, arguing that Obama "really needs this extension of the TARP money."

They will kick and fuss for a day and a half, but it's a common error Obama's nominee to be Treasury Secretary had an error on his taxes when he worked for the IMF and had to pay self-employment taxes. The taxes have been paid, and there are no remaining issues to be resolved. Here I feel I must insert a personal anecdote. I did the taxes for my husband for the five years he owned and operated a residential contracting company after he left the Air Force. I made the same errors he did three years running, and the CPA who lived down the block and checked my work didn't catch them either. I had to make the same correction, both to an employees taxes that I underpaid and our own self employment taxes. The person at the IRS office in Mission, KS (who was pleasant, affable and helpful, by the way) told me it happens all the time. Soooo...

Howler monkeys who lose their minds over Doug Lute keeping his gig need to keep it away from me He is exactly the guy we want. He is staying in his position, but the mission changes as does who he will be answering to. Without telling tales out of school, just let me say that Doug Lute (and his wife) are two of the finest people who ever trod the sod of this planet, and he is a man we want in that position, and I am not saying any more, but I won't be entertaining any trashing of him or the decision to keep him, either. You have no fucking idea the debt this country - this world - owes that man.

Say it with me now: "charm offensive" So Barack Obama went to dinner at George Will's house tonight for dinner with Will, David Brooks and Bill Kristol. Good. I have a hunch that if any swaying of opinion was done, it was him swaying them. Or at least making it more difficult for the conductors of the wingnut chorus to find their tempo.

Again with the much ado about nothing When 49 of the 50 Attorneys General got together and looked at the actual incidents of internet sexual predation of minors, they discovered that the problem has been waaaayyyy overblown. Bullying among peers, both online and off, is a much more serious problem. "This shows that social networks are not these horribly bad neighborhoods on the Internet," said John Cardillo, chief executive of Sentinel Tech Holding, which maintains a sex offender database and was part of the task force. "Social networks are very much like real-world communities that are comprised mostly of good people who are there for the right reasons."

Good! It strokes Dick Cheney's fur the wrong way that he New York Times won Pulitzers for exposing the unconstitutional violations of civil liberties that his administration routinely engaged in.

The Right Way to "Move Forward"

2009-01-13T22:00:00.001-06:00

edger makes the case for pushing Obama hard to name a special prosecutor for Bush/Cheney war crimes and treason.

Yesterday George Will, of all people, was comparing Obama refusing to prosecute Bush and Cheney to Ford pardoning Nixon.

If a far right crazed wingnut can get it right, why can't the rest of us?

This comparison is one that we can use to good effect, but only if we do it continuously and loudly.

He's got the evidence, the passion, Jane Hamsher and The Petition.

Read the whole thing, then, in the immortal words of Blue Girl: Sign the fucking petition already!

Bush, Katrina and revisionist history

2009-01-13T17:05:00.001-06:00

Yesterday in the current occupants final presser he said something in defense of the federal response in the aftermath of Katrina that set me off. Getting defensive, he said "Don't tell me the federal response was slow when there was 30,000 people pulled off roofs right after the storm passed."

What. The. Fuck?

Never mind the warnings before the storm that were ignored. Never mind that hurricanes don't materialize out of nowhere like earthquakes, or even tornadoes and an evacuation could have and should have been mounted before the storm made landfall.

I am trained in mass casualty response. I sat in Kansas City watching that storm move toward New Orleans and got more and more apprehensive about what was about to happen. I remember looking at my husband and saying "Holy shit. That storm has latched onto the loop current and it isn't going to track away. NOLA is fucked. It's below sea level, and I'm afraid the levies won't hold. They haven't been properly maintained for years."

I watched. I waited. Nothing happened. The storm bore down. The storm made landfall. Still...nothing. Then my worst fears came to pass. The levies failed.

And still there was no response.

That stuff, I have been in a slow boil over since late August 2005. No new outrages there.

What pisses me off is the revisionist nature of the quote I cited.

Does he really think that we didn't read the Conyers report? Does he think we won't remember that the Coast Guard never got the orders to mount the rescue efforts? Those people were rescued because one man, Vice Admiral Thad Allen, commander of the Coast Guard Air Station New Orleans, put his ass and his career - and potentially his liberty - on the line and sent his people in without orders.

Those people were not rescued because of anything Chertoff or Bush or Brownie did. They were rescued in spite of those useless fools because one honorable man lived up to his oath of service, even though doing so put him in personal jeopardy. He committed an act of insubordination and could have been busted out of service and lost everything - but he did the right thing anyway.

Remember his name.

Remember what he did.

And when they trot out their revisionist crap, remind them what really happened.

Simple Answers to Stupid Questions

2009-01-13T16:30:00.004-06:00

It's going to be tough enough for the next few years fighting the already widespread lies about Smirky/Darth's true legacy to the nation and the world. The last thing we need is pseudo-progressives doing the wingnuts' work for them by publishing fake critiques that perpetuate the bushies' lies.

Granted, Jake Weisberg has been for years one of the most gullible and least insightful "journalists"on the subject of Smirky/Darth, the Iraq clusterfuck, the War On A Noun and destructive repug idiocy in general, but this really takes the cake.

As George W. Bush once noted, "You never know what your history is going to be like until long after you're gone." What I think he was trying to say is that, over time, historians may evolve toward a more positive view of his presidency than the one held by most of his contemporaries.

No, what he actually was saying is "as I have done for my entire life, I'm going to escape accountability, not to mention punishment, for my many war crimes and acts of treason."

At the moment, this seems a vain hope. Bush's three most obvious legacies are his decision to invade Iraq, his framing of a global war on terror after Sept. 11, and the massive financial crisis. Each of these constitutes a separate epic in presidential misjudgment and mismanagement.

No, the Iraq clusterfuck, delcaring war on a noun to justify torture and shredding the Constitution, and destroying the economy are not, by any stretch "misjudgment and mismanagement." They are major crimes and acts of treason.

It remains a brainteaser to come up with ways, however minor, in which Bush changed government, politics, or the world for the better. Among presidential historians, it is hardly an eccentric view that 43 ranks as America's worst president ever. On the other hand, he has nowhere to go but up.

No, there's a long, long fall to the eternal damnation Smirky has richly earned. After he's arrested, tried, convicted and imprisoned, spent decades getting his anus dry-reamed with a barbed dildo by the family members of dead American soldiers and marines, and become a curse in the mouths of former supporters who blame him for the complete distruction of the republican party, THEN we can talk about whether he has anywhere to go but up.

In a different sense, however, Bush's comment has some validity to it.

No, nothing Smirky says has "validity" except in the sense of incriminating evidence.

We do not know how people will one day view this presidency because we, Bush's contemporaries, don't yet understand it ourselves.

No, those of us with functioning reasoning capacity and an ounce of personal and professional integrity understand it perfectly well. It's only sniveling apologists like Jake Weisberg who pretend they don't understand.

The Bush administration has had startling success in one area—namely keeping its inner workings secret. Intensely loyal, contemptuous of the press, and overwhelmingly hostile to any form of public disclosure, the Bushies did a remarkable job at keeping their doings hidden for eight years.

No, it's been pretty fucking obvious to most of us for at least three years exactly what is and has been going on in the overlowing toilet that used to be the White House, despite the efforts of the repug dupes and cowardly transcribers of the Village to pretend otherwise.

Probably the biggest question Bush leaves behind is about the most consequential choice of his presidency: his decision to invade Iraq.

No. This question was answered in Ron Suskind's 2004 book, in which Smirky/Darth started planning to invade Iraq about 35 seconds after the Inauguration.

When did the president make up his mind to go to war against Saddam Hussein?

January 20, 2001. And it was never a "war." It's an illegal invasion.

What were his real reasons?

Dictatorial power. He admitted as much when he said his father didn't get re-elected because he ended the Gulf War instead of keeping it going forever.

What roles did various figures around him—Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice—play in the actual decision?

For pity's fucking sake, Weisberg, have you read nothing but Harry Potter for the past five years? Shit, even that repug tool Woodward managed eventually to document all of this.

Was the selling of the war on the basis of WMD evidence a matter of conscious deception or of self-deception on their part?

Again, read a fucking book. To name just one, Fiasco proves irrefutably that it was deliberate deception.

Bob Woodward, Ron Suskind, and I recently debated in Slate the issue of how much we really know about Bush's biggest decision. Woodward, the author of four inside accounts of the Bush administration, believes that we do know the most important facts. He argues that Bush decided to invade Iraq in January 2003, that the reason was 9/11, and that Bush himself was the real decision-maker. Suskind and I argued that we don't know really how, when, or why the decision was made—though we suspect it was much earlier. By the summer of 2002, administration officials and foreign diplomats were hearing that Bush's course was already set.

Wrong. January 2001, as Suskind himself documented. What kind of pharmaceuticals were distributed at this "debate?"

The disputed dates and details go to the most interesting larger issues about what went wrong during the Bush years.

No, they don't, and no, they aren't disputed, except by tools, apologists and accomplices.

Did Bush's own innocence and incompetence drive his missteps?

He's neither innocent nor incompetent, and they aren't missteps. He's a psychopath, and what he did are high crimes and acts of treason.

Or was it the people around him, most importantly his vice president, who manipulated him into his major bad choices? On so many issues—the framing of the war on terrorism, the use of torture, the expansion of executive power—it was Cheney's views that prevailed.

Darth's evil does not absolve Smirky's eager treason. To say Cheney "manipulated" him is like saying I "manipulated" my dog into eating his favorite snack.

Yet at some point, perhaps around the 2006 election, Bush seems to have lost confidence in his vice president and stopped taking his advice.

So what and who cares? These are Smirky's crimes and treason, from beginning to end. Darth has his own crimes and treason for which he must pay. Stop trying to muddy each with the other.

To reckon with the Bush years, we need to understand what went on between these two men behind closed doors.

Oh gag. I just ate.

Yet despite some superb spadework by journalist Barton Gellman and others, we know very little about Cheney's true role. We have seen few of the pertinent documents and heard little relevant testimony. Congressional investigations and litigation have shed only the faintest light on Cheney's role in Bush's biggest blunders.

Wrong, irrelevant and stop calling murder and treason "blunders."

The same is generally true of Bush's most important political relationship, with Karl Rove, and his most important personal one, with his father. Only with greater insight into these connections are we likely to be able to answer some of the other pressing historical questions. To what extent was Bush himself really the driver of his central decisions? How engaged or disengaged was he? Why, after governing as a successful moderate in Texas, did he adopt such an ideological and polarizing style as president? Why did he politicize the fight against terrorism? Why did he choose to permit the torture of American detainees? Why did he wait so long to revise a failing strategy in Iraq?

Bleeding baby jeebus. Smirky has done everything to acquire power, authority and popularity without work, responsibility or accountability. He is engaged to the extent required by acquire power, authority and popularity without work, responsibility or accountability. He was NOT a successful governor, but merely a repug with a famous name in a repug state, who knew just enough to avoid offense in a constitutionally weak office. He showed his true self as president because the office permitted him to do so. He politicized terrorism, encouraged torture and ensured we'd never get out of Iraq because all those things acquired power, authority and popularity without work, responsibility or accountability.

It seems unlikely that the memoirs in the works from Rove and Rumsfeld will challenge Bush's repeated assertions that he was not only in charge but in control. As for the president himself, we're unlikely to get much: Bush has a poor memory and is too unreflective to have kept the kind of diary that would elucidate matters. In time, however, other accounts are sure to emerge. Congressional investigations will shed new light. Declassified documents and e-mails may paint a clearer picture.

Was this written five years ago? C'mon, Jake - there are dozens, if not hundreds, of books out there that have answered every one of these questions over and over and over again. Pretending this is all still a mystery makes you look like a tool or an idiot.

Once the country is rid of Bush, perhaps we can start developing a more nuanced understanding of how his presidency went astray. His was no ordinary failure, and he leaves not just an unholy mess but also some genuine mysteries.

Don't you listen to your own Fearless Leader? Smirky doesn't do nuance. There is no nuance. There is no mystery. It's as obvious as a five-buck whore.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

Bush's Final Days, Part 3: On Katrina Response, Stunningly Delusional

2009-01-13T04:07:00.000-06:00

Il Doofus held his final D.C. press conference Monday, and used the occasion to try to rewrite history per the events of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. People who were paying attention back then remember this as a turning point in public perception of Bush. He certainly wasn't exposed as incompetent for the first time, but that time was somehow most telling. FEMA's resources had been slowly gutted over years, and he had put unqualified political hacks in charge of a crucial agency.

Here's video from last night; and mind you, this is coming through the MSM looking glass. From Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN:

Another thing to remember is the role of the National Guard during natural disasters such as hurricanes. Because the U.S. has relied heavily upon Guard troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Guard wasn't exactly prepared to respond to a disaster as incredible as Katrina. Let's take a trip back to 2005, courtesy again of the MSM:

And, long after the initial destruction, things just didn't seem to get much better in New Orleans or surrounding parts of the Gulf Coast:

Now -- here's what Il Doofus had to say to the Washington press corps in his final conference with them, as reported by The Associated Press:

"Don't tell me the federal response was slow when there were 30,000 people pulled off roofs right after the storm passed. ... Could things been done better? Absolutely. But when I hear people say the federal response was slow, what are they going to say to those chopper drivers or the 30,000 who got pulled off the roof?"

Well -- judge for yourself. Delusional, or just a common liar?

Be a Patriot: Challenge Obama

2009-01-12T22:00:00.001-06:00

Kai Wright at The Root explains why Obama can't be the new Lincoln until dissenters force his hand.

We all know by now that Barack Obama fancies himself a modern Abe Lincoln. Few people begrudge the national pride Lincoln's memory evokes, so Obama can be forgiven for his repetition of the comparison—the grand Springfield, Ill. campaign launch; the team of rivals; the Lincoln inaugural Bible.

But as we prepare to swear in our 44th president, at least one memory of the Lincoln era has been entirely unwelcome: the vocal, progressive dissent that drove the Great Emancipator to earn his name.

Lincoln's political stance was as neutral on slavery as it was steadfast on restoring the national union. "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave," he wrote in 1862, "I would do it." As other commentators have pointed out, that uncomfortable historical reality should remind us that the political pragmatism in which Obama is now draped has its limits; moderation is too easily confused with acceptance of deep injustices.

There is, however, an additional lesson to be learned from Lincoln's reluctance to end slavery: that meaningful dissent is essential for democratic change, no matter who is president.

From the Civil War's start, abolitionist rabble-rousers clamored for more lasting goals than mere preservation of the Union. Frederick Douglass incessantly cajoled Lincoln, whom he called "a brave man trying against great odds to do right." He demanded Lincoln to declare that emancipation was an explicit aim of war. He saw no conflict between the abolitionists' clear alliance with the president and their need to demand more of Lincoln.

Sadly, there's little appreciation for Douglass' brand of political tough love today.

Disappointed with Barack's inaugural invitation to freakazoid homophobe Rick Warren? Pissed that Obama's being nice to Congressional repugs? Furious the president-elect's "stimulus" plan has tax cuts instead of a minimum wage hike?

Then stop yelling at your significant other and kicking your dog; make your voice heard where it can join with other progressive voices to push Obama left.

At Change.gov you can send Obama your own ideas or vote for other people's ideas. Thousands of people vote every day to move issues and suggestions up on the priority list.

But whether Obama and political pundits want to hear from progressives is beside the point. History proves that those of us who want to see the purported mainstream broadened cannot afford to sit out the Obama revolution.

SNIP

It could be that Obama gets this, too. Perhaps he believes the clamor for progressive government must come from outside of the White House; maybe he's cloaking himself in centrist robes to create cover for bold reforms. After all, many of the stimulus-plan details he's floated so far are nothing short of precedent shattering. I certainly hope that's the case.

But Hillary Clinton had this much right during her primary bid: Hope's not enough to beat back decades of right-wing entrenchment. We're all going to need to think less about Lincoln and more about Douglass, who put it this way, when rejecting Lincoln's insistence that unity trumps justice, even as a practical matter: "We have pursued that middle path. It is compromise, and by it we have reached the Civil War with all its horrid consequences. The question is shall we start anew with the same old path?"

Speak now, or forever hold your peace.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic.

Barry at Ben's

2009-01-12T16:57:00.001-06:00

Man, I'm movin' to D.C. Is this cool or what?

What does the president-elect order on his first Saturday afternoon since moving into town? A chili dog and cheese fries.

Barack Obama dropped in Saturday afternoon for a bite to eat with Washington's mayor, Adrian Fenty, at Ben's Chili Bowl, the venerable diner in Washington's U Street district.

Obama said it was his first time visiting Ben's Chili Bowl and "it was terrific." The expectation is that Obama _ already at ease in big cities from his time in Chicago _ will venture into town more than President George W. Bush, who rarely made forays into unofficial Washington.

After Obama's motorcade wandered through the U street district, passing the African-American Civil War Memorial and a flea market selling shirts that bear his face, he and Fenty surprised the restaurant around lunchtime. Patrons shrieked with delight and surprise as they saw his face. A mother blushed as Obama held her baby in his arms. The president-elect and the mayor moved slowly through the restaurant's crowded rooms, shaking hands and getting pictures taken with patrons.
Still, they came there to eat. "Where the food at?" he finally asked the counter staff, drawing laughs from them and nearby patrons.

He and Fenty ordered a house specialty, a Chili Half-Smoke _ a quarter-pound half pork and beef smoked sausage on a steamed bun with mustard, onions and chili sauce _ along with a big helping of some cheese fries.

They found a small table. They had the popular food. They even chatted it up with nearby customers at their tables. But something was still missing: the shredded cheese. Obama yelled for some _ "not the Velveeta" kind, he said _ and it was quickly delivered.

Word must have gotten out he was in the area: After Obama and Fenty had their meal and left the building, dozens of people who had lined up before security barriers cheered him on as walked toward his motorcade.

Bush's Final Days, Part 2: Shoulder Massages And Instant Nostalgia

2009-01-12T15:21:00.002-06:00

One of the stated purposes of my blogging is to remind everyone that Bush isn't really from Texas. Not that our bragging rights down here have ever been all that great, but it would be good for the rest of the country to know that not all genuine Texans are that dumb.

This was originally posted April 2, 2008. It's a concise reminder of how Bush, that Yale and Harvard grad with the frat-rat manners and oilfield-trash affectations, embarrassed Texas, the nation, and most of all, himself. And this was just one of many examples.

There's been a news report that German Chancellor Angela Merkel does not plan to attend the opening ceremony of the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing because of China's human rights record.

George W. Bush, the report said, plans to be there. It's my theory that Merkel isn't going to show because she doesn't want another of those shoulder massages like Bush gave her a couple of years ago at the G-8 Summit.

I wonder, did he call her Merkie-Merk? -- MJ (That's all.)

What Henry Ford Knew

2009-01-11T17:58:00.012-06:00

"An underpaid man is a customer reduced in purchasing power. He cannot buy. Business depression is caused by weakened purchasing power. Purchasing power is weakened by uncertainty or insufficiency of income. The cure of business depression is through purchasing power, and the source of puchasing power is wages." - Corporate Titan Henry Ford, 1926.

As Congress begins the dirty job of negotiating a stimulus plan to save the economy, the Hightower Lowdown reminds us of the barbed-dildo reaming Congress just gave American workers.

But the ongoing bailout battle is no longer about economics. It's about class in America.

Republican lawmakers, backed by a raucous chorus of right-wing pundits and corporate lobbyists, have turned Motor City's economic woes into an excuse for launching a mendacious and pernicious assault on America's hard-working, highly skilled, unionized working families--and on the middle-class ideals that they embody.

SNIP

... while Congress squawked about the blue-collar crowd's relatively paltry request, it had totally caved in to the banking elite, who did not request money but demanded it. Lawmakers meekly rushed out $700 billion for them, a taxpayer gimmie nearly 30 times larger than the one Detroit was seeking. What plan did the bankers present? What explanation did they give of how they'd spend our money?

None. They simply dispatched their designated consigliere, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (formerly the reigning prince of Goldman Sachs), to hand Congress a three-page ultimatum. It contained not a single specific or promise of results. It was, in effect, a hold-up note.

But that $700 billion was just for openers. It has not been widely reported, but the total Wall Street bailout--counting government loans, stock purchases, debt guarantees, and backdoor handouts by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve--is nearly $8 trillion. That's eight followed by 12 zeroes!

What have we gotten for this gargantuan giveaway? Zip.

SNIP

This is a flagrant usurpation of Congress's constitutional power and a kleptocratic transfer of public wealth by executive fiat. Yet it was met with barely a meow from lawmakers.

Roar of the kitties
Oh, but what tigers some of the congressional kittens became when Detroit showed up!

Right-wing senators from the South and West were suddenly baring claws and hissing furiously that to get aid these supplicants had to restructure their businesses in accordance with government dictates. These congressional onetime free-market holy rollers made a demand that was specific and blunt: Whack your unions.

SNIP

In fact, it's not wages that burden the auto companies--it's the skyrocketing cost of health care in America. Japanese, Korean, European, and other carmakers don't pay this cost because their countries have national health care for all, financed by taxpayers. Curiously, none of the senators who now profess to be outraged by American labor costs have stepped forward to support universal health care in our country, which would drastically improve the global competitiveness of all of our industries.

There's one more number that union-busting senators don't mention: 10%. That's the share of a made-in-Detroit car's price tag that goes to cover all labor costs, including health care, pensions, etc. That's it. Ten percent. In short, labor is nowhere near the financial burden it's portrayed as being. To the contrary, unionized workers bring award-winning productivity to the industry. They are assets, not liabilities. Meanwhile, 90% of what we consumers pay for cars goes to bankers, bondholders, investors, executives, suppliers, dealers, and a myriad of others who are part and parcel of every vehicle we drive. The senators could force UAW members to work for free, but that would not begin to solve the industry's financial problems.

SNIP

Speaking of pay, am I the only one who thinks it's ridiculous to hear senators chastise working families over earnings? Come on-Corker, DeMint, Kyl, and the others who're throwing hissy fits about UAW wage levels are drawing nearly three times as much from us taxpayers in base pay, plus getting platinum-level health care, golden pensions, and all sorts of senatorial perks. And, unlike autoworkers, senators don't have to have any real skill, do any heavy lifting, or produce any products.

Yes, these union workers make a good living--but what exactly is wrong with that? Indeed, they're a tremendous American success story. UAW members define our country's middle-class ideal. They can afford to buy homes (and cars), send kids to college, take vacations--and pay taxes, including those that cover salaries and benefits for U.S. senators.

Sustaining, expanding, and extending such a vibrant, productive middle class ought to be the top goal of economic policy makers. Yet, too many Washington officials keep pushing in the opposite direction, constantly pursuing a cheap-labor America that enriches the few at the expense of our nation's true economic strength. They are doing the bidding of a corporate elite whose only industrial idea of the past 30 years has been to kick labor in the shorts.

SNIP

(What Henry Ford said 82 years ago) remains true today. Middle-class wages are the lifeblood of the American automobile industry... and of the American economy.

(I've been a Lowdown subscriber for the entire 10 years it has existed, and a Jim Hightower fan for years before that, so I hope Jim will forgive me for excerpting such a huge chunk of his January 2009 subscriber-only issue. As for the rest of you, a yearly subscription to the Lowdown is only $15, and a bargain at twice the price. Subscribe today.)

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

How Bush Unwittingly Helped Bin Laden's Plan To Wreck U.S. Economy

2009-01-11T10:17:00.000-06:00

"We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy."
---Osama bin Laden, 2004 videotape statement.

"The past eight years of imperial overstretch, hubris and domestic and international abuse of power on the part of the Bush administration has left the U.S. materially weakened financially, economically, politically and morally. Even the most hard-nosed, Guantanamo Bay-indifferent potential foreign investor in the U.S. must recognize that its financial system has collapsed."

---Willem Buiter, London School of Economics, 2009.

Contrary to what George W. Bush would have us believe, Osama bin Laden does not hate America for its freedoms. Nor has bin Laden ever harbored ambitions of destroying America in a military confrontation.

No, actually, what bin Laden has long sought is to diminish America's standing in the world by wrecking our economy. Bin Laden believes this is possible because he saw first-hand how the Soviet Union met its demise.

As bin Laden said in a 2004 statement, "We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat."

It's clear that the main goal of the 9/11 attacks was to provoke the U.S. into a costly war in Afghanistan that would drain our treasury and ultimately weaken the main lever of America's global power and influence: the U.S. dollar.

Unfortunately for America, after 9/11, Bush took bin Laden's bait. As bin Laden put it himself in 2004, Al-Qaeda found it "easy for us to provoke and bait this administration."

In fact, bin Laden succeeded beyond his wildest dreams in provoking America into not one, but two disastrous and ruinously expensive wars that have done untold damage to America's global standing, as well as our economic power.

Eight years after the 9/11 attacks, America's economy is in the worst shape it has been since the Great Depression. But the damage is actually far worse than that. As bad as things were in the 1930s, few people then seriously expected the dollar to collapse or for America to become a bankrupt nation. Now, such forecasts are increasingly common.

It's becoming frightening clear that the U.S. dollar is now teetering on the edge of a cliff. For all of the economic misery of 2008, the dollar managed to avoid a steep collapse in value. But it's increasingly likely that in 2009, the East Asian nations that hold trillions of dollars in U.S. debt will finally start off-loading their assets. And when they do, the dollar will crumble in value.

The destruction of the dollar's value will mean an end to America's reign as the world's sole superpower. Once upon a time, such a scenario was embraced only by an alarmist fringe of commentators who weren't taken seriously. But these days, more and more mainstream respectable observers now believe this will be America's fate in the near future. Even Warren Buffet, the wealthiest man on earth, has said the U.S. is at risk of becoming a "sharecropper’s society."

How Bush Took Bin Laden's Bait

During the Soviets' disastrous war in Afghanistan, bin Laden saw first-hand the devastating effects that imperial overstretch can have on a nation's economy. Clearly, that costly fiasco played a role in the ultimate demise of the Soviet Union.

The 9/11 attacks were meant to provoke the U.S. into a similarly costly and debilitating war. And in this, it succeeded beyond bin Laden's wildest dreams, as Bush proceeded to launch not one, but two disastrous wars. (That one of these wars was against the secular state of Iraq, headed by bin Laden's old nemesis, Saddam Hussein, was the icing on the cake).

The 9/11 attacks presented a series of challenges to George W. Bush. The challenges were clear: kill or capture bin Laden and destroy Al-Qaeda.

Eight years later, it's difficult to comprehend just how much Bush has utterly failed to meet this challenge. Bin Laden remains a free man. Al-Qaeda remains intact and is still as lethal as ever. And the Taliban are back and growing in strength.

On the other hand, America is a profoundly different nation than the one that existed before 9/11. We're now a country that is widely despised, feared and hated around the world. We're a vastly weaker nation, economically, than we were before 9/11. America's debts have mushroomed to fantastic levels that threaten the nation's economic security.

About the only thing future historians will remember about Bush's presidency is that he presided over the beginning of the end of the American empire. And it's clear that his bungled response to 9/11 was a key factor in America's ultimate demise as a superpower.

It's this last point that is especially noteworthy. Bin Laden realized early on that his ragtag group of Al-Qaeda fighters could never defeat the U.S. militarily. And horrific as they were, the 9/11 attacks by themselves were a mere pinprick on the overall American economy.

For bin Laden to succeed, he needed the unwitting cooperation of George W. Bush. And that's exactly what bin Laden got, with Bush's disastrous, bungling response to the 9/11 attacks.

Stimulus: Too Much is Nowhere Near Enough

2009-01-11T07:49:00.000-06:00

We've had a good time lately reciting the nearly endless list of conservative republican failures. Is there anything these chumps can't fuck up? Is there anything they've ever been right about?

No, of course not. But in the current discussion of the economic stimulus we see the results of the repug's singluar post-Reagan success:

They've convinced the nation and the world that government spending is bad.

Even when government spending is patently necessary, obviously the only way to avoid utter disaster, the discussion is not "on what" and "how soon" but "how little can we get away with."

How about a five-year moratoriam on the word "deficit?" Because all those times that repugs were mendaciously proclaiming "deficits don't matter," they were accidentally telling the truth.

As James Galbraith explains in his new book, the economy-destroying policies of the last thirty years have actually proven that cutting taxes and spending almost always causes inflation and/or recession, and raising taxes and spending almost always causes economic growth without inflation.

And the worst thing any government can do is spend public resources propping up capital markets (Wall Street) at the expense of workers in the real economy.

Sound familiar?

By letting concern about deficits shrink his stimulus plan while the U.S. economy is literally disintegrating for lack of public spending, President-elect Obama is ensuring the stimulus - and thus his presidency - will fail.

Paul Krugman, Concience of the Economy:

"I don't believe it's too late to change course, but it will be if we don't take dramatic action as soon as possible. If nothing is done, this recession could linger for years."

So declared President-elect Barack Obama on Thursday, explaining why the nation needs an extremely aggressive government response to the economic downturn. He's right. This is the most dangerous economic crisis since the Great Depression, and it could all too easily turn into a prolonged slump.

But Mr. Obama's prescription doesn't live up to his diagnosis. The economic plan he's offering isn't as strong as his language about the economic threat. In fact, it falls well short of what's needed.

SNIP

The bottom line is that the Obama plan is unlikely to close more than half of the looming output gap, and could easily end up doing less than a third of the job.
Why isn't Mr. Obama trying to do more?

SNIP

Whatever the explanation, the Obama plan just doesn't look adequate to the economy's need. To be sure, a third of a loaf is better than none. But right now we seem to be facing two major economic gaps: the gap between the economy's potential and its likely performance, and the gap between Mr. Obama's stern economic rhetoric and his somewhat disappointing economic plan.

Krugman explains that the economy is currently falling about $2 trillion short of what it should be producing. Obama's $775 billion plan, with its $300 billion in counter-productive tax cuts, offers about 20 percent of what's needed.

John Judis at The New Republic pleads for a World-War-II-sized stimulus.

I am not suggesting that the United States start a world war in order to solve the world's economic problem. But I am suggesting a strategy that could be called the fiscal equivalent of war.

It would consist not merely of updating or repairing the nation's infrastructure, but in undertaking massive new investments that would expand the scope of American industry, and address other urgent problems in the process: global warming, over-reliance on petroleum, and the need to revive America's domestic manufacturing capabilities--not just to provide jobs, but also to provide tradeable goods that can reduce the country's current account deficit.

... Are we not at some point going to have to go beyond repairing roads and bridges in our conception of public spending and public works, and contemplate the kind of ambitious industrial expenditures that the country made on war production in 1941?

I still believe that Obama is playing a long and deep game, several steps ahead of Senate repugs. But I'm with Jane Hamsher who explains why Obama inspires confidence but the stimulus plan doesn't.

Go to change.gov and tell Obama that $2 trillion on real, job-creating stimulus is the bare minimum required.

And if he still insists on throwing a bone to irrelevant and undeserving repugs, he can say "You were right: deficits really don't matter."

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic.

Three Decades of doing the right thing: Missouri Senate Bill 40 turns 30

2009-01-10T17:30:00.000-06:00

Ronald Reagan was wrong.

Government isn't the problem. In fact, good government can be the solution by doing things that are responsive to the needs of the citizens it exists to serve, and in so doing have a positive impact and make lives better. Missouri Senate Bill 40 is an example of what good government can do, without a lot of fanfare.

Most people, unless they have a family member with a developmental disability or they are employed in the education field, get to go through their lives without giving a first thought to SB 40, let alone a second...but for those it has served, it is a blessing.

Missouri SB 40 was passed law in 1978 and, as per tradition, became law the start of the next year, and in spite of all the good it has done, it would likely not even make it out of committee in today's republican-controlled legislature, because it levies a tax to provide funding for residential, vocational and other programs and services that serve special needs persons and their families throughout the state.

I was in high school in one of this states poorest and most rural communities when the law was passed, and so I am old enough to remember life before PL 94-142 and SB 40. I remember a handful of families with special needs kids my age and older who never went to school a day in their lives, never developed even the most rudimentary of social skills, but instead lived their lives sequestered and hidden, seldom seen. Other babies never came home from the hospital, but were institutionalized at birth, and only discussed in hushed, tragic tones. I don't fault the families - they were told that was what was best for the children, because the services to meet their needs didn't exist at the community level.

One thing I can say with certainty. In virtually no instance were those children well served.

And it took acts of legislation to get us, as a society, to do the right thing. I am all for self-reliance, at least in my own life. But some problems require community efforts. And SB 40 is a community effort done right. May it last another thirty years.

Crossposted from Show Me Progress

Bush's Last 10 Days, Part 1: Recipe For Fiscal Disaster

2009-01-10T15:13:00.003-06:00

As the countdown to Bush as ex-"president" begins, it might be good to put into context why some Americans, even some U.S. historians, regard Il Doofus as the worst "president" of modern times.

The federal deficit for the current fiscal year is being projected at $1.2 trillion. That's more than the entire national debt was at the time Jimmy Carter left office in January 1981.

The Congressional Budget Office report lays much of the blame for this spike on lower tax revenues due to the recession, and on $400 billion spent to bail out Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and various financial institutions amid the mortgage crisis. Bush policies did a great deal to contribute to all of the above, but that's another post. For now, let's stick to the budget.

The deficit for fiscal 2007-08 was about $455 billion, consistent in real dollars with what was being run annually during the Reagan and Bush I presidencies. It's not too shocking, until you consider that Bush II inherited what had been the largest surplus the federal government has ever run, some $230 billion in fiscal 1999-2000, from departing President Bill Clinton's administration.

Onward.

The surplus decreased to $158 billion during fiscal 2000-01, which Bush presided over some of. Bush apologists have tried to make an end run out of this, saying that declining revenues due to a briefly sour economy were responsible. They've also pointed out that the Clinton surpluses occurred even though federal tax cuts were passed in 1997, an apparent argument for supply-side policies.

That's fair enough, up to a point. But by 2001-02, the federal government was in the red again, and that continued year after year until the aforementioned $455 billion deficit was reached. How did this happen?

Bush spent the first months of his presidency pushing tax bonanzas, mainly for his rich friends, through the Congress, along with scraps from the rich man's table for the rest of us, amounting to $300 per person. His economic plan basically rolled back the relatively modest Clinton tax increases on the wealthy, passed by the narrowest of margins in 1993.

Students of fiscal policy know that it's anything but simple, but a few policy effects during this administration seem clear. It didn't take long to turn surpluses into deficits, and arguments that this isn't related to tax policy are, at the very least, unconvincing.

Then, after 9-11, Bush the "decider" decided to take the country to war(s). The first one, in Afghanistan, seemed and still seems like a defensible action, despite the toll on the Afghan people. The second, the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, was in hindsight clearly elective. Aside from being an act of aggression, it turned out to be one of the most expensive mistakes a U.S. administration has ever made.

According to a July 2008 update, military operations alone in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost $872.6 billion. Some $661.1 billion of that was for ops in Iraq. Source: Congressional Research Service data.

Even conservatives need to put this into perspective. Would Winston Churchill have held fast to big tax cuts for the wealthy during an expensive war, and even have audaciously pushed for more such cuts?

George W. Bush did. And in so doing, the U.S. was set up, and knocked down like bowling pins, for the $1.2 trillion annual deficit we now face. Now tell me that, as a "president," this buffoon didn't suck great big green ones, with warts on them. His decisions were consistently the worst that could have been made, and yet he stubbornly continues to defend them. I don't think future generations will find his defense convincing.

No Enthusiasm for the Truth

2009-01-10T05:16:00.008-06:00

What we really need, of course, is Smirky, Darth, Rummy, Wolfie, Feith, Yoo, The Mustache, Gonzo, Tenet, and all their minions frog-marched into federal court and prosecuted for War Crimes and Treason.

What we might have to settle for is a fact-finding body like the 9-11 Commission.

Now it appears we won't even get that.

It happens more often than you might think on Capitol Hill: a new bill is announced by a congressional office, with little fanfare and fewer co-sponsors than it deserves but a purpose so abundantly sensible that the plan cries out for more attention.

Such is the case with H.R. 104, a bill introduced on Tuesday by House judiciary committee chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and nine other lawmakers. The measure would set up a National Commission on Presidential War Powers and Civil Liberties, with subpoena power and a reported budget of around $3 million, to investigate issues ranging from detainee treatment to waterboarding to extraordinary rendition. The panel's members would hail from outside the government and be appointed by the president and congressional leaders of both parties.

Sounds like a great idea. In fact, it sounds a lot like Senate armed services committee chairman Carl Levin's (D-MI) proposed interrogation-policy commission that has been kicking around since 2005. So why does such a good bill only have 10 co-sponsors?

The answer is complicated -- and neither House Speaker Nancy Pelosi nor Majority Leader Steny Hoyer have returned my calls to talk about it. But I'd wager that it has a lot to do with the Democratic majority's desire to turn the page on the Bush years and begin pressing on with an Obama agenda designed to showcase its ability to govern. Nothing wrong with that.

But as the stimulus plan and financial regulation and health care reform and a host of worthy issues takes up the oxygen in Washington over the coming months, who will make sure that accountability for past misdeeds gets as much attention as current achievements? Who will shed more sunshine on the debacles of the Bush years?

There's support in the House for it (although not yet, it appears, from leadership). There's a constituency in the Senate for it, and inside the Obama camp. Does anybody think that this sleeper bill will get so much as a hearing in any of the three separate committees it's been referred to?

A commission, particularly one that goes beyond mere fact-finding to actual public confessions along the lines of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, is the absolute bare minimum required by an ostensible democracy to deal with criminal behavior by its highest officials.

Although the South African commission succeeded in preventing civil war after the end of apartheid, it failed to achieve genuine justice.

Most believed that justice was a prerequisite for reconciliation rather than an alternative to it, and that the TRC had been weighted in favour of the perpetrators of abuse.

"Justice was a prerequisite for reconciliation." Precisely. The consequences of failing to achieve justice, of allowing perpetrators to escape punishment, are always more severe than any political repurcussions of making criminals pay for their crimes.

And the proof is in the history books.

Because Nixon got away with illegal wiretapping and domestic spying, Reagan and 41 got away with Iran/Contra.

Because Reagan and 41 got away with Iran/Contra, Smirky-Darth is getting away with Treason and War Crimes.

Because Smirky-Darth get away with Treason and War Crimes, what will the next repug who snatches the presidency get away with?

We're half an inch away from being a lawless banana republic.

The key is not how law-abiding the Obama administration is; the key is whether the Obama administration upholds the Rule of Law for everyone, even former presidents.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

The Nightowl Newswrap

2009-01-10T00:07:00.000-06:00

Ummm...sociopaths are never fazed by anything so no one should be too terribly surprised that the Blagojevich is 'unfazed' by his impeachment this morning in the Illinois House of Representatives on a vote of 114 for and 1 against. He insists that he is the wronged party. "The causes of the impeachment are because I've done things to fight for families," he insists. The Illinois House of Representatives, you see, is sporting wood for him because he undertook efforts to improve health care and cut property taxes. At least that is his story, and he is sticking to it.

This country needs a First Nana and we are getting one. Michelle Obama's mother, Marion Robinson, will be taking up residence in the White House when her daughter, son-in-law and granddaughters move in on January 20. Good for her, and good for them! During the presidential campaign, she was the rock in that family. She has always been involved in the raising of her granddaughters, and became their primary caregiver while their parents were on the campaign trail.

I hope this works out so one of the last vestiges of my childhood lasts a bit longer The lease on the Rainbow Room, the legendary restaurant atop Rockefeller Center, has been canceled after the Ciprianis, the family of restaurateurs that operates the Rainbow Room fell behind in the rent. Tishman Speyer Properties, the landlord at Rockefeller Center, told the Cipriani company today that the lease was being terminated because the company had failed to pay millions of dollars in rent since September. Under the terms of the lease, the Ciprianis have three days to get out. As this saga involves the Ciprianis, you know that it isn't going to end there...they have already won a rent-gouging dispute in arbitration, and they are pledging a public tussle that will definitely be worth the price of admission. The style section of the Times just got a lot more interesting.

This looks interesting. Might as well go ahead and bookmark it. The New York Times has a new commentary blog, Room for Debate, that will feature commentary by experts who will discuss news and issues. They kicked it off with a forum on unemployment and workplace anxiety, and it looks promising.

Hearst puts the Post-Intelligencer on the auction block Seattle's oldest newspaper was put up for sale today, saying that if a buyer isn't found within the next 60 days, the paper will either close down completely or become an internet-only entity. Hearst's statement was blunt: "In no case will Hearst continue to publish the P-I in printed form following the conclusion of this process." Hearst has owned the P-I since 1921, and the paper has had operating losses every quarter since 2000. It lost a staggering $14 million last year alone.

I suspect a whooping cough outbreak would change attitudes here So many parents in Ashland Oregon refuse to vaccinate their children that researchers are willing to pay them $50 to spew their hippie-dippy bullshit for a couple of hours. I could save the researchers a lot of time and money...these people are fucking crazy. But I have an idea for salvaging something from the exercise in futility...sell the list of participants to a psychological researcher who is studying conspiracy theories and group psychosis.

Let the freakshow begin!

2009-01-09T12:10:00.000-06:00

Popcorn futures are through the roof!

Via The Scorecard at Politico:

Two Republican operatives close to former Sen. Jim Talent say he is likely to run for the Missouri Senate seat of retiring Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.).
One Republican operative close to Talent said that he has been "itching to run" since losing to Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) in 2006, and is eager to make a political comeback.

Itching to make a comeback? That ought to come as news to political observers in this state. I mean, I watch politics, and as a rule, if someone is 'itching for a comeback' there is an inkling of it. You tend to see their names in the news now and then, for starters. And they don't, as a general rule, go to work as lobbyists in a climate where lobbyists enjoy standing on a par with porn publishers and tobacco executives.

The wingnut-on-wingnut violence that is going to transpire in the republican primary is going to be brutal. If it was a movie, Dan Glickman would slap a NC-17 rating on it.

The Nightowl Newswrap

2009-01-08T23:27:00.002-06:00

Kit Bond threw the chessboard in the air this morning with the unexpected announcement that he will not seek reelection to his United States Senate seat in the 2010 midterms. The comment thread that accompanies the post at the link are what you really need to read.

And if you are interested enough in Missouri's Senate race to read that thread you will undoubtedly want to read my friend Clark's rundown of what the coming race looks like as of today.

A line I wish I had written comes from Kos blogger Devilstower, who came up with this gem when writing about Bond's decision to retire: Podiums everywhere will feel safer, knowing that they're not going to be subject to Bond's red-faced pounding.

Why the hell doesn't Howard Dean get the appreciation he deserves? Hey! National Dems! You won two cycles because his ideas were the right ones, you fucking ingrates. And I'll tell you now...if you morons revert back to acting like we need to kiss your ring, we'll tell you to get bent and win elections all by yourselves. Fuck me over again, assholes, and see first hand that the easiest thing in the world for me to do is...nothing. And by the way...every time they ask me for money, they will get a return envelope with no donation, but a note saying "No Fifty State Strategy? No fifty dollar donation! I sent my red-state donation to DFA instead, where it will support candidates who support me."

This is hilarious Dick Cheney appeared before the congress to read the results of the electoral college vote to into the record. Just as he was about to move on to other business, Nancy Pelosi jumped out of her seat and started clapping, leaving Cheney standing there looking like he had just bitten into something nasty.

I knew this was out there...it had to be I just hadn't seen it yet. Here is the scoop...there is no contingency that the Air Force doesn't have a flow chart for, it's just what they do. So when I stumbled across the counter-blogger flow chart at Wired today, I damn near doubled over laughing. Look, I love the Air Force and wouldn't take it out of my personal history for anything. I have had a great life and the Air Force has been a huge part of it. But I ain't ate up, but I know ate up when I see it, and there is a whole lot of the Air Force that sure as hell is. Let me give an example...In 1983, when we were billeted at Davis Monthan, the base was getting ready for a visit by a potentate (I think it might have been Nancy Reagan, but I can't say so with absolute certainty) and in the pre-visit spit-shining, the grounds crews fanned out and pruned every orange off of every orange tree on the base lest a tree drop fruit and litter the ground and offend our distinguished guest. Lets face it...It doesn't get much more ate up than bringing the fruit trees into compliance with AFR 35-10.

Max Boot won't stay gone Sweet Jesus, the only neocon with a worse track record than this douchebag is Bill Kristol, another gigantic tool who won't slink away to molest decent folk no more. Yet there he is, at the new Foreign Policy website, pissing and moaning over the lack of respect that the loathsome, criminal even, 'Bush Doctrine' receives. In an piece plaintively titled Whatever Happened to Preemption? he whines for nearly 2000 words that the United States should attack not just Iran, but Pakistan as well, to go after nuclear facilities.

But it looked so good on paper! Biofuel alternatives to manufacture petrol-based alternatives to power aircraft have been slow to yield up promising results. Jeff Gazzard of the Aviation Environment Federation raises serious questions about the safety and viability of aviation biofuels touted by the likes of Virgin Atlantic and, just this week, Continental. He says the push to develop them is at least in part corporate greenwashing by an industry desperate to appease its critics. "For us, the jury is still well and truly out as to whether either synthetic or biofuels are yet capable of being either entirely fail-safe for aviation use or environmentally sustainable in the longer term," Gazzard writes in his report, Bio-Fueled or Bio-Fooled

Gonzo blames a down economy for his continuing unemployment Yeah. That'w why his ass can't find a job. The fact that he is an incompetent doofus who undermined the very Department of Justice have nothing to do with his pariah status.

*****

I had some problems with my google account that kept me locked out of the blog for the last several weeks. I have no idea how I fixed it, but apparently while I was dinking around with settings and stuff earlier today, I did something right.

Relief workers in Gaza take casualties

2009-01-08T23:24:00.001-06:00

A United Nations relief worker died today after Israeli troops attacked a relief convoy clearly marked and carrying the UN flag as it moved toward the Erez border crossing to pick up humanitarian aid to be distributed to the people trapped in Gaza. The convoy was moving during the agreed to three-hour lull in the fighting that has been set aside for relief efforts to be carried out, and the movement had been coordinated with and green lighted by Israeli liaison officers.

A second equally coordinated and marked medical convoy that was dispatched to retrieve the body of a UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) worker killed in an earlier attack came under small-arms fire as they attempted to retrieve the body of their fallen compatriot in Gaza City.

"This is heartbreaking... a very, very difficult decision for us to take," UNRWA Director of Operations in Gaza John Ging told a news conference at UN Headquarters in New York, speaking by video link from Gaza. "The population here are in a dreadful state and really need our help at this point but we have also a responsibility to our staff, and eager as they are, and believe me they are, we cannot fly in the face of the security situation."
While UNRWA is perfectly prepared for reasonable risks in a conflict zone, "added to those is the fact that we cannot rely on firm commitments given by the Israeli side, carefully coordinated with them, green lights given to move... specifics provided, carefully coordinated throughout, and to have the Israeli forces on the ground firing at and now hitting aid workers."
He said the movement of all staff would be suspended until UNRWA could be assured of their safety, and UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes told the same news conference: "We are seeking those assurances... We're talking very urgently about how we can make better arrangements, more reliable arrangements to avoid these incidents on the ground which we simply cannot see repeated. Otherwise we simply won't be able to do our job."
Mr. Ging said Israel was investigating the Erez incident, which came two days after Israeli shelling near an UNRWA school killed 40 people and injured more than 100. Israel said it was returning fire from the area of the school. UN officials stressed there were no Hamas or other militants inside the school.
On today's second incident, which occurred during Israel's stated daily three-hour lull in fighting, Mr. Ging said he had received no credible explanation from Israel as to how "the green light turned into three rounds" of light arms fire. Asked how he could be sure that Israel was responsible for the incidents, he said the Israelis had not so far disputed the cases.
"The headlines are that we desperately need a full and immediate ceasefire in Gaza to enable the civilian population to be protected and helped and that need is becoming more desperate by the hour," Mr. Holmes said, stressing that most of the Strip was without power, although some fuel was getting through, and 20,000 people were in UN shelters.
He added that the Israeli lull, which the UN has called totally insufficient, allowed residents to get food supplies, access medical services, get to the dead and wounded in buildings, bury the dead and dig out more bodies from the rubble. Meanwhile rocket fire into Israel continued. He cited credible Palestinian reports that the death toll had now reached 758, of whom 257 were children and 56 women, with 3,100 wounded of whom 1,080 are children and 452 women.
He referred to "absolutely horrifying" accounts that the International Red Cross had reached bombed houses in Zaitoun, finding 12 dead people and four children alive next to their dead mother on mattresses in one, and 15 wounded in another, noting that what was particularly shocking was that a nearby Israeli team must have been aware of the wounded, yet did nothing.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon condemned the incidents and called for an immediate cease fire. In a statement issued by his spokesperson, he noted that four United Nations relief workers have been killed in the two week old conflict. Think about that. The United Nations and their relief agencies have taken casualties that rival those of Israel.

Blunt's New Job

2009-01-08T18:40:00.002-06:00

The Damage

2009-01-08T17:12:00.001-06:00

Salon has a great article quantifying the damage done by the Smirky/Darth maladministration.

After a couple of presidential terms, mismanagement in every area of policy -- foreign, domestic, even extraterrestrial -- starts to add up. When George W. Bush entered the White House in January 2001, he inherited peace and prosperity. The military, the Constitution and New Orleans were intact and the country had a budget surplus of $128 billion. Now he's about to dash out the door, leaving a large, unpaid bill for his successors to pay.

To get a sense of what kind of balance is due, Salon spoke to experts in seven different fields. Wherever possible, we have tried to express the damage done in concrete terms -- sometimes in lives lost, but most often just in money spent and dollars owed. What follows is an incomplete inventory of eight years of mis- and malfeasance, but then a fuller accounting would run, um, somewhat longer than three pages.

The numbers - on Iraq, the economy, Katrina, the environment, the military - start in the billions and rapidly reach the trillions.

Those are numbers literally beyond human comprehension. The article's devastating specifics, however, serve as both a weapon against revisionist history that paints Dubya as a success, and a tool in the current debate over the economic stimulus bill.

Read it and use it.

Correcting the Revisionism: No, Virginia, Dubya's Not a Hero

2009-01-08T13:00:00.000-06:00

Being nice to the retarded kid who's moving out of town is one thing: flaying history and reality alive in an attempt to make the retarded kid sound like Einstein is something else entirely.

The indispensable Rude Pundit catches it and exposes every criminal lie.

You remember how, right after the 9/11 attacks, we were all scared shitless and the White House was telling us to stick our heads between our legs and kiss our asses good-bye because brownish people were going to fuck our shit up with their exploding shoes and nuclear suitcases o' doom? ... You remember all that? That sense of panic and imminent demise? Yeah, well, fuck you, 'cause you're wrong. It was actually a serene time.

At least according to Admiral Mike Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs, who, during Tuesday's military parade in "appreciation" of President George W. Bush, said in his lubricious hummer of a speech, "After this nation was attacked by a rising evil, the same evil which later murdered many others in places like London, Madrid, Islamabad and Mumbai, you quickly led us from the grip of fear to a serenity of purpose and unity of action - serenity well beyond our dreams on September 12th, when all thought further attack was not only likely, but gravely imminent. And through your vision, a new national security was rendered to reach our enemies where they hid and trained and celebrated deadly crimes."

Now that's some motherfucking historical revisionism: the man who pogo-sticked around the country on September 11, 2001 like a hyperactive toddler on the run from the boogeyman actually was achieving some kind of Zen state of retarded enlightenment that allowed him to clear his head and pronounce, "I'm gonna attack a country that had nothing to do with those planes." Seriously, this is like a rapist-murderer being honored for his belief in safe sex.

This crap has just started. Every move President Obama makes will be met with a fairy tale of how the heroic and divine Dubya handled a much greater difficulty so brilliantly, every setback met with fantasies of how every bad thing could have been avoided if only the perfect 43 were still in charge.

Dismissing it as the ravings of the criminally insane will only allow the poisonous meme to survive and thrive, until it is enshrined in our grandchildren's textbooks.

Don't wait until it's too late. Fight the historical revisionism wherever you find it. Memorize and repeat this mantra:

George W. Bush is a war criminal who shredded the Constitution, ruined the military, smashed the economy, accelerated environmental collapse and damn-near destroyed the country.

Read the Rude One's whole rant. X-rated.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

'Mister Roberts': A Wonderful Allegory On Fascism

2009-01-08T03:27:00.001-06:00

Have you ever worked for a boss who seemed more than a bit like Mussolini?

The American classic Mister Roberts (novel, 1946, followed by the Broadway play in 1948 and the movie in 1955) would have to strike a familiar chord if you have. "Fascists" live and work all around us, every day. It's a state of mind. All that most of them lack is the opportunity to practice it on a grand scale.

The fascist in Mister Roberts is Capt. Morton, played most memorably on screen by the late James Cagney. (See the attached trailer.) Morton, the captain of a cargo ship operating in the Pacific during World War II, doesn't kill anybody. But what authority he exercises is that of a six-bit tyrant, so he's toxic to a lot of human spirits.

The guy who actually runs the crew and the ship is Lt. Doug Roberts, portrayed in a signature performance on stage and screen by Henry Fonda. He's a good intermediary between the inept swine of a captain and the crew below, but he's bored and anxious to actually get into the fight during the waning days of the war.

I've seen the film version of Mister Roberts a few times, and it reminds me of employment situations, time after time. Ultimately, it's fun to watch -- but it drives home the sad point that there are plenty of Mortons out there, basically just cancers festering on or near the tops of businesses or government agencies. There's an exchange in which Capt. Morton gets to explain to Roberts how he came to his malignant point of view. (" 'Hey, boy -- my friend seems to have thrown up on our table' ... I took it. I took it for years. Now I don't have to take it no more!' ")

What the novel, play and film depict is a microcosm of what tragically takes place from time to time among nations, on a broad and murderous macro scale. Most of us have known several Mortons -- and potential Mussolinis.

Here's an old-fashioned trailer, from 1955 -- in Cinemascope.

They Don't Just Disappear

2009-01-06T17:04:00.005-06:00

Let's hope this is just the first of many stories about the tortured innocents released far too late from Gitmo.

After Mr. Iqbal was picked up in Jakarta and interrogated for two days, American officials generally concluded that he was a braggart, a “wannabe,” and should be released, one of the senior American officials in Jakarta said. “He was a talker,” the senior American official said. “He wanted to believe he was more important than he was.”

There was no evidence that he had ever met Osama bin Laden, or had been to Afghanistan, the two senior American officials said. But in the atmosphere of fear and confusion in the months after Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Iqbal was secretly moved to Egypt for further interrogation, said one of the senior American officials.

SNIP

In Lahore, Mr. Iqbal wants to return to teaching the Koran. “It’s easy for the United States to say no charges were found,” he said. “But who is responsible for the seven years of my life?”

Read the whole thing.

Crossing the Line

2009-01-06T05:03:00.002-06:00

The veterans at They Gave Us A Republic call our attention to Israel's use of white phosphorous in Gaza.

For the iron-stomached, Elmo has the horrific details of what white phosphorous does.

Still not sold on the fact that this is an atrocious act? Well, put your little brain in the grunt's boots who has to walk up on a mother with her three or four children cuddled in a torturous tangle. The Grunt- he has a wife and three kiddos (13,8 and 3) of his own. Do you know what the first thought that comes into his head is as he looks at their bodies, charred to the bone in spots, with faces frozen in demonic horror?

He pictures that being HIS family. Congratulations Mr. Grunt and thank you for serving! You win a mind-fuck for life!!!

There is not a good excuse for decimating a neighborhood with Willie Pete. And spare me the using it as concealment crap. Liars.

Hearts and minds, baby. Hearts and minds.

Cross-posted at Blue in the Bluegrass.

I Pay Taxes So You Can Afford to Farm

2009-01-04T10:43:00.000-06:00

Have you seen the latest smart-ass bumper sticker?

"I Farm, You Eat"

Leave aside the outrageous arrogance of the claim, the condescension toward everyone who does not farm, the fallacy that what most Kentucky farmers grow ends up in Kroger's produce department.

Consider instead how deformed and dysfunctional American agriculture has become in the century since the sentiment on that bumper sticker was literally true.

I come from a long line of small farmers, most of whom toiled long before the advent of federal subsidies and perverse incentives forcing farmers to fall hopelessly in debt and poison their own land to compete.

Corporate agri-business and their congressional and DoA lackeys have done a superb job of fucking over family farmers six ways from Sunday.

Those family farmers need legal, regulatory, scientific and marketing help to survive.*

But the best way to get that help is to make a compelling case for rational, economically and environmentally sound farming.

Snide, contemptuous insults don't help.

*And no, ag-giant apologist Tom Vilsack, DoA Secretary-nominee, ain't gonna do it.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

Repug Solution to Budget Crisis: Soak the Middle Class

2009-01-03T13:00:00.001-06:00

It's not often that corporate-owned repugs come right out and admit that what they really want is income redistribution.

That is, redistribute the last pennies of the poor and middle class from them to the already too rich.

But some Kentucky repug lawmakers are out, loud and proud about their determination to re-create the feudal economy of the 13th century.

Amid the financial worries and talk of state shortfalls, some House Republicans are suggesting that now is the time to eliminate the state’s corporate and individual income taxes.

Not only that, but they’re also calling for dropping the sales tax from 6 cents to a nickel on every dollar of goods purchased.

So how will taking away all that revenue stabilize the shaky status of the state’s coffers?

The legislation drafted by Reps. Bill Farmer of Lexington and David Floyd of Bardstown would replace the income tax by spreading the sales tax to a host of services that are currently exempt, including plumbing, roofing and other contracting work, and some consulting work.

Brilliant! Absolutely fucking brilliant.

Because, of course, income and corporate taxes, minimal as they are, fall more heavily on the wealthy than the middle-class. And the sales tax, of course, takes a far greater percentage of income from the poor and middle-class than it does from the rich.

Vastly expanding the items subject to the sales tax while eliminating income and corporate taxes will create a giant vacuum cleaner, sucking money away from the middle-class and depositing it in the bank accounts of the rich.

Before you know it, everyone earning less than six figures will be economic sharecroppers, feudal serfs barely surviving on the crumbs that fall from the corporate lord's table.

While we're all weak from hunger, illness and despair, we won't even notice when the congressional servants of the plutocrats take away our rights to vote.

Congratulations, Rep. Farmer, on your plan. It's perfect!

Cross-posted at Blue in the Bluegrass.

Why the Biggest Obstacle to Fixing the Economy is Religion

2009-01-03T08:49:00.000-06:00

When the oh-so-"moderate" evangelicals whom President-elect Obama is working so hard to please turn on him and attack his efforts to repair and modernize the social safety net, don't be surprised.

Order this copy of Free Inquiry and read the print-only article by Gregory Paul: The Big Religion Questions Finally Solved.

In that article, Paul demonstrates why the relgious must oppose social advancements like progressive taxation, universal health care, strong unions and free public education or else face their own extinction.

Because in every industrialized nation on the planet, low levels of economic disparity, high middle-class economic security and a strong social safety net correlate strongly with widespread secularism.

In other words, the more dysfunctional a society is, the more religious it tends to be.

Analyzing numerous large surveys of world populations, Paul finds:

Among the first world's 19 prosperous democracies, all but the United States have adopted pragmatic, progressive and secular socioeconomic policies that maximize the financial security of the middle class (that is to say, the majority of citizens.)

In most first-world countries, it is hard to lose middle-class status - no western European or Australian goes bankrupt due to overwhelming medical bills. These high levels of financial security, lower levels of income disparity, and more modest rates of societal dysfunction reduce personal stress levels to the degree that middle-class majorities in western Europe, Canada and Australia feel secure and comfortable.

This security and comfort being achieved, the number of citizens who feel the need to seek the aid and protection of supernatural deities has sunken to historic lows and citizens abandon their former churches in droves.

In addition, comprehensive governmental social assistance programs displace much of the faith-based charitable complex that churches have historically used to extend their influence over the lay population.

Moreover, secular societies tend to favor other pragmatic social policies such as extensive sex-education and domestic violence intervention that further surpess societal dysfunctions.

The popular secularization these pragmatic policies induce is accidental, but nonetheless the effect is so powerful that is has occurred in every progressive first-world democracy. it has occurred despite the absence of a large-scale organized atheistic movement and has yet to be reversed in any country by a major religious revival.

Wonder why "religious leaders" so admantly oppose economic support programs that would help their own congregations? Because they know, at least subconciously, that the greatest threat to religion is a strong, successful, secure society.

To thrive, or even survive, religion needs a frightened, insecure population and a weak, incompetent government that drives people to seek succor in religion.

So when Rick "I have unlimited compassion for the poor and sick" Warren exhorts his congregation to fight Obama's economic stimulus plan and universal health care, read Paul's article and you'll understand why.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

50 Wasted Years

2009-01-01T07:51:00.000-06:00

Imagine how the last half-century would have been different if Allen Dulles had not freaked out on New Year's Day 1959.

If instead of isolating Cuba, Dwight Eisenhower had heard echoes of our own revolution in Fidel Castro's overthrow of the despicable dictator Batista.

If he had said, hey, instead of handing a gift to Krushchev, why don't we try to co-opt this Fidel fella for ourselves?

If in April 1961 JFK had told the Bay-of-Pigs CIA to go fuck itself and made lemonade by cancelling the embargo and making Cuba a trading partner.

If instead of ensuring Cuba became the last, humiliating reminder of our idiotic "Commies? Eeek!" policy we had made Cuba the first example of our "we support popular movements" policy.

Yeah, yeah, Cold War, Mafia, Goldwater, blah, blah, blah.

The truth is that for 50 years, the United States' policy toward Cuba has been that of a 14-year-old boy afraid to strip in the locker room.

Barack Obama won Florida, which should be all the evidence anyone needs that the fanatic anti-Castro old-timers in Miami have lost their political clout.

President-elect Obama can drop trou and cancel the embargo sure that it will goose the economy without political harm.

Sure, too, that finally acting rationally toward Cuba will be a quick, easy, cost-free way to show the world that real Change has come to America.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic.

2008's Most Valuable Progressives

2008-12-31T17:07:00.001-06:00

The Nation's John Nichols has an intriguing list of the Year's Most Valuable Progressives.

Progressives had more to celebrate in 2008 than in any year since the Supreme Court got into the business of stealing elections. The jubilant mood is dampened, of course, by the fact of a country is stuck in two military quagmires, ravaged by the most fearsome economic downturn in at least a half century and suffering from a serious case of Constitutional degeneration. Perhaps we have not yet reached an ideal champagne moment. But there is still good reason to toast the year's MVPs – Most Valuable Progressives.

A couple of obvious picks, but several surprises, including some I am ashamed to say I never heard of, and one personal favorite (can you guess which?)

Read the whole thing.

What/who are your choices for Most Valuable Progressives of 2008? Tell us in comments, and include some overlooked local valuable progressives.

Cheney Not Merely Evil, He's A Confessed War Criminal

2008-12-28T18:36:00.002-06:00

Now that Christmas is over, so is my brief spirit of holiday forgiveness. Some things are unforgivable. "Vice President" Dick Cheney is one of those things.

It's obscene that this man isn't in prison by now, let alone that he's still in office. It's not a mystery, though. The abilities of, and inclination for, investigation of the executive branch for high crimes and misdemeanors have been greatly diminished.

Cheney has essentially admitted that he lied the U.S. into the Iraq invasion, which resulted in over a million deaths. So he's now a confessed mass murderer.

Here's video of Keith Olbermann on this subject, plus the vicious beating of the shoe-throwing Iraqi journalist. (So much for nation-building.)

In this second video, also from Olbermann's Countdown on MSNBC, constitutional law Professor Jonathan Turley indicates that not only Cheney, but Il Doofus himself, could perhaps be vulnerable to prosecution for war crimes in their authorization of waterboarding. Cheney has just about flatly confessed:

I'll be blunt. I understand it's going to be hard to get a lot of people excited about bringing this rogues gallery to justice in coming years. Memories are short. Also, the vast majority of people who were victims of these policy decisions were brown-skinned and not Americans.

But, to quote Professor Turley, what has been undermined in the past eight years has to do with who we are, as Americans. The Obama administration should put prosecutions of this kind on a burner, even if it has to be a back one.

Not Too Late To Make A Difference This Year

2008-12-26T16:34:00.001-06:00

That's it. I am sick and fucking tired of wingnut freakazoids getting credit for being "charitable" when all they're really doing is paying protection money to their churches, whose clergy use it to buy cocaine and secret abortions.

When a supposed liberal like Nick Kristof falls for the lie, it's gotten out of hand.

We liberals are personally stingy.

Liberals show tremendous compassion in pushing for generous government spending to help the neediest people at home and abroad. Yet when it comes to individual contributions to charitable causes, liberals are cheapskates.

Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, "Who Really Cares," cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an even greater disproportion: average annual contributions reported by conservatives were almost double those of liberals.

Bullshit. Utter, complete, unadulterated bullshit.

Dig down into those studies and you'll find - oops!, sorry, not so much.

Rich people - conservative and liberal - tend to give money to education (private colleges they want to get their kinds into as legacies), museums/arts (fancy new wings named after the donors) and research (more personalized construction.)

Religious people of all persuasions give to their religious organizations, which spend the vast majority of that money on administrative salaries and building maintenance. Doubt it? Drive past Southland Christian Church in Lexington and tell me you think that fancy ten-building campus looks like a charitable organization.

Non-religious, non-rich conservatives don't give jack shit to anybody. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, bitch, and don't whine that you're barefoot!

Non-religious, non-rich liberals, granted, tend not to give much to charity, either, but here's the difference between them and their conservative counterparts: liberals make their contribution by pushing for pro-labor, pro-worker, pro-job, pro-family, pro-health care government policies that help large numbers of people in ways private charity simply cannot.

George H.W. Bush's ridiculous "Thousand Points of Light" was the perfect example. All the charities in the country together could not replace a single government program to help poor people, like even the minimal Food Stamp Program.

And if you think I'm making excuses for myself, here's my own charitable record: I give to what I consider real charities - those who help those who cannot help themselves. Local food banks, homeless shelters, drug rehab for single mothers, family planning, victims of war and disease. I have gradually increased the amount over the years, until last year I gave three percent of my gross income. This year, with so many in need, I jumped it to four percent. Not much, but finally more than the national average.

Don't get me wrong; I do it out of pure selfishness. My favorite part of the holidays is making the list of charities I will donate to, figuring the total amount I will donate, dividing it up among the charities (making sure everybody gets at least a little more than they got last year), and writing out each check. I like to send a holiday card with it, so the organization can tape the card up on the door to show off their donors.

They always send a letter of thanks. Yes, it's required by the IRS, but the local charities almost always add a little hand-written personal note.

It is absolutely the greatest feeling in the world to know that someone in need is getting a meal, a home, medicine because of you.

There aren't enough church recreation centers in the world to match that.

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic ....

Celebrate Ten Days of Newton

2008-12-25T06:27:00.000-06:00

It's 26 days until we inaugurate a President who genuinely values science, so let's begin the countdown by celebrating the 366th birthday of the scientist upon whose discoveries all our science and technology rest: Sir Isaac Newton.

In the New York Times, Olivia Judson explains the calendrical reasons why Newton needs 10 full days of celebration.

Some years ago, the evolutionist and atheist Richard Dawkins pointed out to me that Sir Isaac Newton, the founder of modern physics and mathematics, and arguably the greatest scientist of all time, was born on Christmas Day, and that therefore Newton's Birthday could be an alternative, if somewhat nerdy, excuse for a winter holiday ...

Yet things are not so simple. It turns out that the date of Newton's birthday is a little contentious. Newton was born in England on Christmas Day 1642 according to the Julian calendar — the calendar in use in England at the time. But by the 1640s, much of the rest of Europe was using the Gregorian calendar (the one in general use today); according to this calendar, Newton was born on Jan. 4, 1643.

Rather than bickering about whether Dec. 25 or Jan. 4 is the better date to observe Newton's Birthday, I think we should embrace the discrepancy and have an extended festival. After all, the festival of Christmas properly continues for a further 12 days, until the feast of the Epiphany on Jan. 6. So the festival of Newton could begin on Christmas Day and then continue for an extra 10 days, representing the interval between the calendars.

SNIP

Newton does not seem to have been a pleasant man. He feuded with several of his professional colleagues, most famously Robert Hooke and Gottfried Willhelm Leibniz; he was reclusive and secretive and seems to have formed few lasting friendships. But he was also a genius, and his work laid the foundations of our modern understanding of the world. He is a man to celebrate.

In honor of Newton's Birthday festival, I therefore propose the following song, to be sung to the tune of "The Twelve Days of Christmas." For brevity, I include only the final verse. All together now!

On the tenth day of Newton,
My true love gave to me,
Ten drops of genius,
Nine silver co-oins,
Eight circling planets,
Seven shades of li-ight,
Six counterfeiters,
Cal-Cu-Lus!
Four telescopes,
Three Laws of Motion,
Two awful feuds,
And the discovery of gravity!
Happy Newton, everybody!

Merry Newton!

Cross-posted at They Gave Us A Republic.