dumblifeofroots

Harnessing the awesome power of the word "clean"

2009-02-27T05:52:00.000-08:00

As a resident of the wonderful Commonwealth of Kentucky, where not-especially-large metro areas such as Lexington and Louisville have the largest carbon footprint in the country (#1 and #5, respectively), mainly on account of appalling sprawl and our old friend King Coal--both of the not-clean and the ... non-clean variety.

Meanwhile, not all that far from these metro areas Big Coal, with the enthusiastic cooperation of politicians of both parties, is decapitating mountains, turning precious topsoil into sludge, and destroying watersheds on a daily basis.

On the snarky side, ofI share this little ad, courtesy of the Coen Brothers:

For something more substantive on the subject, I love mountains isn't a bad place to start.

So, what is it that we're hopeful about again?

2009-02-22T06:06:00.000-08:00

Rights for detainees?? You're kidding, right?

I do not run around with Republicans, typically. My peer group tends to be tried and true Democrats. I was probably the only person in my county to pull the lever for Nader, and suffered all sorts of ribbing by blissed-out, high-fiving Obamamaniacs. In the wake of that, I thought I'd hold my fire for a time.

I squirmed a bit about the extrajudicial murders of Pakistanis a day into the new administration, but said nothing.

In honesty, I have pretty much written off Obama's diabolically inept efforts to slow the economy's accelerating descent into the abyss. He's a mainstream American politician. His campaign has been underwritten by the clowns who got us into this mess, and he has put some of the biggests miscreants in charge of "solving" it. So when Obama throws trillions down a hole for the bankers and some token billions for over-their-heads homeowners, I shrug. What could he do?

But, this latest abomination is a little shocking even to me. Raw Story is a little less mealy-mouthed than the wire services:

In a stunning departure from his rhetoric on Guantánamo Bay prison, President Barack Obama signaled Friday he will continue Bush Administration policy with regard to detainees held at a US airbase in Afghanistan, saying they have no right to challenge their detentions in US courts -- and denying them legal status altogether.

There was talk, and not just campaign promises, that the new administration would once more make the United States a nation ruled by laws. Alas, no.

"Yesterday's announcement that the Obama administration has not even considered departing from the very same unjust and inhumane policies of his predecessor, is an ominous sign that human rights and the rule of law are simply not a priority of this administration," the International Justice Network, who is counsel in all the cases under review, said to Raw Story in a statement. "We expected more from this President when he promised that we would not trade our fundamental values for false promises of security.

Personally, there's not a lot of ways left in which he can disappoint me. The one I'm watching:
"entitlement reform" and his "summit" of experts that will convene tomorrow.

Dance Partay! Special Corner Cleaners Edition

2009-02-20T04:59:00.000-08:00

First, the great Gainsbourg deadpans Chez les ye-ye, while his pal gets into it. Serge pulls a knife at some point, for reasons that are not apparent to me.

And here is one of my favorite (relatively) contemporary vids, the New Pornographers' "The laws have changed." Love the dance scene, and how the crowd's random thrashing suddenly becomes a choreographed number.

(Compare to the orginal dance party in Bunuel's "Simon of the Desert" (the last 3 minutes or so). Which is of course pretty great itself).

And finally. I find this vid, and this band, Sweden's Acid House Kings, strangely, hypnotically, soothing. Plus, the music is fantastically great, ever so tuneful, sweet and melancholy at the same time, like so much Scandinavian pop. I have no idea if there's some hidden context behind the twee sensibility. (Yes, she was doing the finger pistols at 1:25!)

Might they be closet deviants, like the Go-Gos, who in in their spare enjoyed a game that involved licking nasty toilet crannies?*

No idea. I don't really want to know. Just let me enjoy it.

_______
* This is a band who, according to drummer Gina Schock in the book Rock Confidential, used to play a game called "Corner Cleaners," which involved sucking filth off the floor of rest stop bathrooms. I am not kidding. And if you think wearing a schoolgirl outfit in a video is "racy," check out this quote from lead singer Belinda Carlisle about the former L.A. club Masque, in the same book: "I had sex at the Masque; everybody had sex at the Masque. You just did. It was great. Everybody was making out with each other in the bathrooms—lots of girls with girls. Everybody was on acid. My thing was acid or MDMA."
-Note on footnote: my googling only turned this factoid up in one place on the Net, in a cached page no less, so I thought I'd better paste it in before it disappears down the memory hole.

Horshack's Prophecy

2009-02-18T06:08:00.000-08:00

In a simpler time, a big laugh line on "Welcome Back Kotter" was that Arnold Horshack's last name means "the cattle are dying."

But how funny is it when the cattle aren't dying back in some mythic "old country" on a 70s sitcom, but in the most celebrated cow region on the planet, the Pampas of Argentina?

And how many of us know this is even happening, or wonder if it's not an isolated event?

Scour the papers as much as you like, no one has been connecting the dots between the extreme weather events from Australia to Iraq to Texas, or wondered whether this weather will be a complicating factor in the recovery that's we're constantly assured is just around the corner. Until Tom Englehardt has done us all this melancholy favor.

I find it interesting that Englehardt readily admits to having patched together his meditation, titled "Burning Questions: What Does Economic "Recovery" Mean on an Extreme Weather Planet?" from "Google University." (Previously, about a year ago, he asked another important question that no one was asking: Why don't journalists in Iraq look up?) In both cases, the guys who are paid to do it ain't stepping up.

Englehardt writes:

Now let me explain why I even bothered to write this piece. It's true that, if you're reading the mainstream press, each of the droughts mentioned above has gotten at least some attention, several of them a fair amount of attention (as well as some fine reporting), and the Australian firestorms have been headlines globally for weeks. The problem is that (the professional literature, the science magazines, and a few environmental websites and blogs aside) no one in the mainstream media seems to have thought to connect these dots or blots of aridity in any way. And yet it seems a no-brainer that mainstream reporters should be doing just that.
After all, cumulatively these drought hotspots, places now experiencing record or near-record aridity, could be thought of as representing so many burning questions for our planet. And yet you can search far and wide without stumbling across a mainstream American overview of drought in our world at this moment. This seems, politely put, puzzling, especially at a time when University College London's Global Drought Monitor claims that 104 million people are now living under "exceptional drought conditions."

What if, he wonders, this weather problem and the crisis of the world's economies dovetail in ways that are currently not being imagined?

We're now experiencing the extreme effects of economic bad "weather" in the wake of the near collapse of the global financial system. Nonetheless, from the White House to the media, speculation about "the road to recovery" is already underway. The stimulus package, for instance, had been dubbed the "recovery bill," aka the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and the question of when we'll hit bottom and when -- 2010, 2011, 2012 -- a real recovery will begin is certainly in the air.

Recently, in a speech in Singapore, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund, suggested that the "world's advanced economies" -- the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan -- were "already in depression," and the "worst cannot be ruled out." This got little attention here, but President Obama's comment at his first press conference that delay on his stimulus package could lead to a "lost decade," as in Japan in the 1990s (or, though it went unmentioned, the U.S. in the 1930s), made the headlines.

If, indeed, this is "the big one," and does result in a "lost decade" or more, here's what I wonder: Could the sort of "recovery" that everyone assumes lies just over a recessive or depressive horizon not be there? What if our lost decade lasts long enough to meet an environmental crisis involving extreme weather -- drought and flood, hurricanes, typhoons, and firestorms of unprecedented magnitude -- possibly in some of the breadbasket regions of the planet? What will happen if the rising fuel prices likely to come with the beginning of any economic "recovery" were to meet the soaring food prices of environmental disaster? What kind of human tsunami might that result in?

Happy Friday to y'all! Funny weather we've been having.

They didn't use cell phones. Case closed!

2009-01-31T07:02:00.000-08:00

Check out this image from the Guardian:

Photograph: Thierry Zoccolan/AFP/Getty Images

Must be a mighty fearsome threat to la Republique to bring 150 balaclava-clad, hyper-armed storm troopers out in force.

Right? Right. Well. Hm. The special forces, accompanied by an equally impressive media swarm, descended over Tarnac, a quaint village in central France, to arrest ... a group of young middle class idealists, including, according to the Guardian, "a Swiss sitcom actor, a distinguished clarinettist, [and] a student nurse."

It's not the most recent news item, and there has not been a lot of news since it happened, but, were it not for the attentions of the indefatigable Chris Floyd, I would have missed the story entirely, and have a feeling you out there might not have known about it, so here.

A summary:

From 'L'humanite in English:

They [many of the villagers] tell how a combined force of police, press and judiciary out of all proportion, had assembled in their town. 150 police, stationed as of 6h30 on the morning of 11 November, blocked all entry and departure from the village. The machine guns, helicopters, the attack dogs : "All that, to pick up a bunch of sleepy kids", adds Gérard, a businessman, his elbow on the counter of the grocery store, which had been searched that infamous day.
The event has reawakened some sombre ghosts, and the elders of the village don’t hesitate to evoke the times when the Gestapo would descend on their town. Similarity is no proof But everyone here has the same words on his lips : "They capture a guy from the ETA [the Basque separatist movement] practically with their hands in their pockets, but here they deploy an army, when four gendarmes would have sufficed ..."

The arrested, nine young people who had, among other things, revived the village's grocery and bar, to the delight of the villagers, were, in the words of the French Interior Minister, "'ultra-leftist-anarchist'" subversives, members of an 'invisible committee' plotting the violent downfall of capitalism." They may, or may not, have been involved in some acts of vandalism involved the TGV.

Regarding the train incident, the Independent asserts,

No one was hurt, or could possibly have been hurt in these escapades, except the attackers themselves. This was vandalism certainly and maybe politically motivated sabotage. The attacks caused enormous annoyance and heartache for thousands of passengers whose trains were blocked for several hours. But can such activities really be described as "terrorism"?

Floyd's running commentary on the charges brought deserves to be read in toto. It's pretty withering. Les flics could always be holding back their good evidence (sure, they always do), but from what I can tell, the slim case against the accused rests on a book the "leader," Julien Coupat, might have been involved in writing, and, (as per the Guardian), the fact that Coupat "had allegedly been seen by police near a train line that was later vandalised," and that and his girlfriend "took part in a protest outside an army recruitment centre in New York. "

Apparently, the case of the "Tarnac Nine" is the hobbyhorse of the French Interior Minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, who "has been warning, publicly and privately, that Europe faces a grave threat from a new generation of 'ultra-leftist' terrorists" and, as Floyd points out, is part and parcel with Sarkozky's resorting to "the same kind of draconian 'anti-terrorist' laws that have been adopted by almost all the leading 'democracies' of the West to crack down on anyone who opposes the global corporatist-militarist ethos."

In the Independent account, one of the arrested (and later released) tells of a "surreal" line of police questions, including "Do you have orgies in your commune?" and that "Leaks from the police investigation suggest, darkly, that [the accused] avoided mobile phones because they wished to remain 'undetected."'

They didn't use cell phones!??? OMFG!!

Well, that settles it!

New Post!

2009-01-31T06:50:00.001-08:00

Central Kentucky has been smacked hard by a once-in-a-century ice storm. After two days of squatting with kind friends, we are back in our home with heat and water. Grateful for that, knowing many others are days away from either.

Digging out will be a summer-long chore--hundreds of trees destroyed or uprooted. With that workload looming, what better time to resume the blog after nearly two years?

Is this a great country or what?

2007-06-14T06:13:00.000-07:00

In the Guardian, Terry Jones takes a look at the "billion-dollar industry" of which Blackwater has only "scratched the surface"--killing, maiming, overbilling and suing. (Our media being what it is these days, it's not that well known a fact that Blackwater has sued the families of the contractors who were killed, burned and dragged through the streets of Fallujah a few years back. For ten million dollars!)

For a more complete look at this most appalling, yet perhaps most archetypal of Bush-era crony companies, you should definitely consult the work of Jeremy Scahill (here's a video
and here's the link to his book).

But for a funny but disturbing summary of the doings of Blackwater, the outfit that perhaps more than any proves Smedley Butler right, here is Mr. Terry Jones....

First you need your father to leave you a billion dollars or so, as happened to Erik Prince, Blackwater's founder. Then use the money to set up a company that specialises in shooting people. Of course, you say the company's vision is "to support security, peace, freedom and democracy everywhere". But your brochure is full of photos of men bursting into rooms with machine guns and shooting from helicopters - and it offers five sniping courses: basic military, advanced military, situation sniper, high angle (shooting people from rooftops) and, of course, helicopter.
Making money out of this sort of violence, no matter how you dress it up in idealistic language, can look a little morally dodgy, so it would be best if - like Erik - you were a born-again Christian and you donate pots of money to the Republicans. Since 1989, the Nation reports, Erik and his wife have given $275,550 to Republican campaigns, and $0 to the Democrats. A White House internship - something Erik did in the early 90s - could also provide enough friends in the right places. The odd no-bid contract, such as the one Blackwater got to guard Iraq's Coalition Provisional Authority, wouldn't go astray.
You should be comfortable with your friends making money. For example, you pay your security guards $600 a day, but bill the Kuwaiti Regency Hotel company for $815. Regency, according to the Raleigh News & Observer, bills defence services company ESS for another chunk of money. ESS sends the bill to Kellogg, Brown & Root, who add a percentage for their services and present the inflated bill to the Pentagon. Senator Henry Waxman says he's been trying in vain to find out what that bill is for two years.
We can again learn from Blackwater in how to keep expenses down. On March 12 2004, Blackwater signed a contract with Regency and ESS specifying that each security mission should have a minimum of "two armoured vehicles to support ESS movements". Blackwater had the word "armoured" deleted from the contract and saved $1.5m.
This had was an unforeseen payoff when four Blackwater operatives were sent into Falluja and both vehicles were overwhelmed by a mob. The men were killed and their mutilated bodies hung on a bridge. Now rather than damage Blackwater's reputation, this incident was to prove the company's making as the US military got behind it. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt vowed: "We will be back ... We will hunt down the criminals ... It will be precise, and it will be overwhelming." The result was that the US more or less destroyed the town.
The families of the four men decided to sue Blackwater to find out why they died - but the company can seek profit even in this situation: last Friday it was announced that Blackwater is suing the dead men's estates for $10m, according to the families' lawyers, "to silence the families and keep them out of court".
So there it is - more ways to make money out of Iraq than you or I would have dreamt of. And companies like Blackwater are showing us the way.

Read the whole piece...

The Pentagon's blank check

2007-06-07T08:23:00.000-07:00

We need a trillion to fight them islamofascist bastards!

Robert Dreyfuss' Financing the Imperial Armed Forces: A Trillion Dollars and Nowhere to Go but Up on the newly redesigned Tomdispatch.com paints a shocking picture of perhaps the most distressing element of our current national dysfunction--the inability of politicians of either party to say "no" to the hordes of profiteers and bureaucrats in, and serving, the nation's "defense" monolith.

As usual, the Democrats are nose and nose with the Republicans at the trough, and the two leading candidates are "supporting manpower increases in the range of 80,000 to 100,000 troops, mostly for the Army and the Marines"--numbers even larger than those called for by Dubya himself.

How astonishing are the budgetary numbers? Consider the trajectory of U.S. defense spending over the last nearly two decades. From the end of the Cold War into the mid-1990s, defense spending actually fell significantly. In constant 1996 dollars, the Pentagon's budget dropped from a peacetime high of $376 billion, at the end of President Ronald Reagan's military buildup in 1989, to a low of $265 billion in 1996. (That compares to post-World War II wartime highs of $437 billion in 1953, during the Korean War, and $388 billion in 1968, at the peak of the War in Vietnam.) After the Soviet empire peacefully disintegrated, the 1990s decline wasn't exactly the hoped-for "peace dividend," but it wasn't peanuts either.

However, since September 12th, 2001, defense spending has simply exploded. For 2008, the Bush administration is requesting a staggering $650 billion, compared to the already staggering $400 billion the Pentagon collected in 2001. Even subtracting the costs of the ongoing "Global War on Terrorism" -- which is what the White House likes to call its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- for FY 2008, the Pentagon will still spend $510 billion. In other words, even without the President's two wars, defense spending will have nearly doubled since the mid-1990s. Given that the United States has literally no significant enemy state to fight anywhere on the planet, this represents a remarkable, if perverse, achievement. As a famous Democratic politician once asked: Where is the outrage?

Neocons, war profiteers, and hardliners of all stripes still argue that the "enemy" we face is a nonexistent bugaboo called "Islamofascism." It's easy to imagine them laughing into their sleeves while they continue to claim that the way to battle low-tech, rag-tag bands of leftover Al Qaeda crazies is by spending billions of dollars on massively expensive, massively powerful, futuristic weapons systems.

As always, a significant part of the defense bill is eaten up by these big-ticket items. According to the reputable Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, there are at least 28 pricey weapons systems that, just by themselves, will rack up a whopping $44 billion in 2008. The projected cost of these 28 systems -- which include fighter jets, the B-2 bomber, the V-22 Osprey, various advanced naval vessels, cruise-missile systems, and the ultra-expensive aircraft carriers the Navy always demands -- will, in the end, be more than $1 trillion. And that's not even including the Star Wars missile-defense system, which at the moment soaks up about $11 billion a year.

By one count, U.S. defense spending in 2008 will amount to 29 times the combined military spending of all six so-called rogue states: Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. The United States accounts for almost half -- approximately 48% -- of the entire world's spending on what we like to call "defense." Again, according to the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, U.S. defense spending this year amounts to exactly twice the combined military spending of the next six biggest military powers: China, Russia, the U.K., France, Japan, and Germany.
....
And it's important to keep in mind that the official Pentagon budget doesn't begin to tell the full story of American "defense" spending. In addition to the $650 billion that the Pentagon will get in 2008, huge additional sums will be spent on veterans care and interest on the national debt accumulated from previous DOD spending that ballooned the deficit. In all, those two accounts add $263 billion to the Pentagon budget, for a grand total of $913 billion.

Then there are the intelligence and homeland security budgets. Back in the 1990s, when I started reporting on the CIA and the U.S. intelligence community, its entire budget was about $27 billion. Last year, although the number is supposed to be top secret, the Bush administration revealed that intelligence spending had reached $44 billion. For 2008, according to media reports, Congress is working on an authorization of $48 billion for our spies.

Again, when I first wrote about "homeland security" in the late 1990s -- it was then called "counterterrorism" -- the Clinton administration was spending $17 billion in interagency budgets in this area. For 2008, the budget of the Department of Homeland Security -- that mishmash, incompetent agency hurriedly assembled under pressure from uber-hawk Joe Lieberman (even the Bush administration was initially opposed to its creation) -- will be $46.4 billion.

To a rational observer, such spending -- totaling more than $1 trillion in 2008, according to the figures I've just cited -- seems quite literally insane. During the Cold War, hawks scared Americans into tolerating staggering but somewhat lesser sums by invoking the specter of Soviet Communism. Does anyone, anywhere, truly believe that we need to spend more than a trillion dollars a year to defend ourselves against small bands of al-Qaeda fanatics?

Read the whole thing...

Unhappy anniversary

2007-06-05T05:08:00.000-07:00

Tony Karon's "How the 1967 war doomed Israel" is simply terrific, tracing parallel tracks--personal and political--of post-"Six-day war" history (six days? It was over in one, but six sounds so much more biblical). Karon traces his own path from euphoria to disillusionment with Israel, alongside the growth of the "special bond" between Apartheid South Africa and the Jewish state:

South Africa and Israel became intimate allies in the years that followed the ‘67 war, with unrepentant former Nazis such as Prime Minister B.J. Vorster welcomed to Israel to seal military deals that resulted in collaboration in the development of weapons ranging from aircraft and assault rifles to, allegedly, nuclear weapons.

Karon also examines some "facts on the ground" in 1947/8, which don't come before the eyeballs of most Americans:

The Partition Plan awarded 55% of the land to the Jewish state, including more than 80% of land under cultivation. At the time, Jews made up a little over one third of the total population, and owned some 7% of the land. Moreover, given the demographic demands of the Zionist movement for a Jewish majority, the plan was an invitation to tragedy: The population within the boundaries of the Jewish state envisaged in the 1947 partition consisted of around 500,000 Jews and 400,000 Arabs.
Hardly surprising, then, that the Arabs of Palestine and beyond rejected the partition plan.
For the Arab regimes, the creation of a separate Jewish sovereign state in the Holy Land over which the Crusades had been fought was a challenge to their authority; it was perceived by their citizenry as a test of their ability to protect their land and interests from foreign invasion. And so they went to war believing they could reverse what the U.N. had ordered on the battlefield. For the Jews of Palestine in 1948, a number of them having narrowly survived extermination in Europe, the war was a matter of physical survival. Although in the mythology, the war pitted a half million Jews against 20 million Arabs, in truth Israel was by far the stronger and better-organized and better-armed military power. And so what Israel called the War of Independence saw the Jewish state acquire 50% more territory than had been envisaged in the partition plan. The maps below describe the difference between the Israel envisaged by the UN in 1947 and the one that came into being in the war of 1948.

But maps don’t convey the disaster that befell the Palestinian Arabs in 1948. The war also allowed the Zionist movement to resolve its “demographic concerns,” as some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs found themselves driven from their homes and land — many driven out at gunpoint, the majority fleeing in fear of further massacres such as the one carried out by the Irgun at Dir Yassein, and all of them subject to the same ethnic-cleansing founding legislation by passed the new Israeli Knesset that seized the property of any Arab absent from his property on May 8, 1948, and forbade the refugees from returning.

Run that last part past virtually any American, even a highly educated one, and you're sure to get either puzzlement or downright denial. This kind of thing is more in the mainstream discourse than basic facts...

Chris Hedges also has a good analysis of the appalling anniversary, and Tom Segev has an interesting meditation on "What if Israel had turned back?" in the Times today.

I will add that the "comments" section on the Karon blog is also well worth reading and spectacularly well-behaved, lacking in the nasty flame-throwing crap you see elsewhere whenever this subject is raised. Hope I don't jinx it by saying that....

Surely they're not lying this time

2007-06-04T11:03:00.000-07:00

"You're all trying to destroy me!"

In "Unreasoning hysteria as the default condition," Arthur Silber offers some hilarious, insightful, and ultimately just sad commentary on the latest "fearsome plot that might have, maybe, perhaps, in some other world subject to significantly different scientific laws, resulted in the Destruction of All the Universes for All Time Forevermore The End Period (and You and Everyone You Know Will Be Dead, Too!)."

It's been four days after the big announcement that Muslim Terrorists Were Prevented from Blowing Up JFK Airport, so the drill is a familiar one. After a couple of days in which mainstream sources were wetting themselves in the fear and titillation of yet another Evil Plot Foiled, we all know now that the truth wasn't quite so exciting. The "plan" wasn't exactly "operational"--in fact it was "less than mature," according to the Times, and once again, there was a critical, highly motivated informant in the middle of it all ("a convicted drug trafficker, ... his sentence ... pending as part of his cooperation agreement with the federal government." Hmm.)

As Scott Horton puts it in "I don’t believe ‘em for a second":

Every time this happens, it turns out that the whole damn thing was either made up by the state out of thin air, the idea to do something violent came from the undercover FBI informant or the “truth” was tortured out of the guy.

There’s no al Qaeda in America. As always, the biggest threat to our lives and liberties is the national government of the United States. Now you know how the rest of the world feels.

Partial list of bogus domestic terrorism plots “busted” by the Federal Cops since 9/11 (all the false warnings are too numerous to mention.):

Lackawanna Six
Detroit
Virginia Paintball guys
The tortured Abu Ali
Jose Padilla
Lodi, California
Miami plot against the Sears Tower
New York subway tunnels
New York subway station
“Liquid explosives” plot on UK to US flights
Ft. Dix Six

But, I’m so sure we can believe them when they tell us to be frightened about a plot at JFK!

What, just because there has not been a single case where they have actually busted domestic terrorists since 9/11?! Surely they’re not lying this time!

Anyway, what a surprise, eh? A plot not what it was drummed up to be.

But not everyone views such Keystone Cops routines with the same degree of skepticism, if any. In fact, there are people out there who jump on every one of these silly cases (not entirely silly, since "enhanced interrogation" and long, Kafkaesque stretches in various prisons are surely in store for the plotters), as proof--proof once again--that "Muslim men" are trying to KILL US ALL. Or as Andrew McCarthy (no, not THAT Andrew McCarthy) put it in the National Review Online, the JFK "plot" is more proof that

War is about breaking the enemy's will. Having laid bare the sorry state of our brains and our guts, jihadists are now zeroing in on the will's final piece: our hearts.

.... They know there's a war out there. Not just Iraq or Afghanistan, but Dar al Islam and Dar al Harb — jihadists versus civilization. Global. For us to win, it will not be enough to stabilize Baghdad, sow democracy and empower moderates. It's about breaking the enemy's will, as they are working feverishly to break ours.

That "abject, ludicrously disproportionate hysteria" is what Silber's talking about when he references an apt monologue from "the climactic breakdown in a genuinely awful Joan Crawford melodrama, after Crawford has slurped up five quarts of cheap scotch and can now only burble incoherently:

You're all trying to destroy me! You're all against me, you bastards! You broke my heart, and now you want to kill me! But I won't let you, do you hear me? I won't let you! I'm going to live, damn you, I'm going to LIVE!
At which point, the sobbing, screaming, disheveled, thoroughly pathetic Ms. Crawford falls to the floor in a dead faint, completely undone by her own self-willed and self-created histrionics.

Silber doesn't entirely play this for cheap laughs, merited though they are. He examines the underlying "psychological disturbance" of ejaculations like McCarthy's, and comes around to discussing Robert Jay Lifton's thoughts on "superpower syndrome" and its oh-so-fragile underlying psychology. He also, interestingly, brings the voice of Cho Seung-Hui into the mix and concludes

It is the perspective and the policies offered by people with views like McCarthy's that have brought us to where we are today, just as they were a crucial part of what led to 9/11. Now, as the solution which will save the United States, the world, and all the universes unto eternity, they demand that we eliminate every conceivable enemy for all time, that we rearrange other countries around the globe as we determine is required on the basis of our sole unappealable judgment, and that we impose our will on all of creation.

As I have said before, their belief system reduces very simply to this:
America is God. God's Will be done.
But that is not the solution, McCarthy. That, and you, are the problem, and a very terrible one it is -- and not just for us, but for the entire world.

Read the entire piece...

Update: Nora Ephron's How to foil a terrorist plot in seven simple steps is a very funny take on all of this. Not to give it away, but here are steps 3 through 5:
3. The fact that you do not know any actual terrorists should not in any way deter you. Necessity is the mother of invention: if you can find the right raw material -- a sad, sick, lonely, drunk, deranged, disgruntled or just plain anti-American Muslim somewhere in the United States -- you can make your very own terrorist.

4. Now the good part begins. Money! The FBI will give you lots of money to take your very own terrorist out to lots of dinners where you, wearing a wire, can record yourself making recommendations to him about possible targets and weapons that might be used in the impending terrorist attack that your very own terrorist is going to mastermind, with your help. It will even buy you a computer so you can go to Google Earth in order to show your very own terrorist a "top secret" aerial image of the target you have suggested.

5. More money!! The FBI will give you even more money to travel to foreign countries with your very own terrorist, and it will make suggestions about terrorist groups you can meet while in said foreign countries.
Read the whole thing...

True American Hero

2007-06-01T18:34:00.001-07:00

Matt Taibbi, God bless him, does it again, this time to Mr. 911.

Taibbi is so good at this kind of savage, but fair, profile of American pols, he should be verbalized -- as in "he taibbi'd him" or "he gave him the full taibbi." That's so much better than "fisking," which never really made sense, even at the time. Now, far from that immediate post-911 American righteousness/victimology moment, it makes no sense at all.

A footnote, at any rate. For contemporary first-rate evisceration, we must look to Taibbi, whose first foray into the genre, a brilliant takedown of Tom Friedman, it must be said, occurred in an atmosphere where the Times columnist was still somewhat respected. It wasn't like an Andrew Sullivan smelling blood in the zeitgeist and joining the chorus savaging anyone (Fisk, Barbara Kingsolver) who dared question the unleashing of untold (and still unfinished) carnage on the basically defenseless populations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

After Taibbi's piece, in the New York Press, mind you, it became O.K. to say "I always thought Tom Friedman was an idiot, but was sort of afraid to say so."

Not that anyone needs to be hesitant about expressing disgust at the Rudy monster. Most Americans hate the little creep, but it takes a Taibbi to pick out the perfect details that demonstrate just WHY we hate him, and should fear him.

From "Giuliani: Worse than Bush" in Rolling Stone:

Rudy Giuliani is a true American hero, and we know this because he does all the things we expect of heroes these days -- like make $16 million a year, and lobby for Hugo Chávez and Rupert Murdoch, and promote wars without ever having served in the military, and hire a lawyer to call his second wife a "stuck pig," and organize absurd, grandstanding pogroms against minor foreign artists, and generally drift through life being a shameless opportunist with an outsize ego who doesn't even bother to conceal the fact that he's had a hard-on for the presidency since he was in diapers. In the media age, we can't have a hero humble enough to actually be one; what is needed is a tireless scoundrel, a cad willing to pose all day long for photos, who'll accept $100,000 to talk about heroism for an hour, who has the balls to take a $2.7 million advance to write a book about himself called Leadership. That's Rudy Giuliani. Our hero. And a perfect choice to uphold the legacy of George W. Bush.

Yes, Rudy is smarter than Bush. But his political strength -- and he knows it -- comes from America's unrelenting passion for never bothering to take that extra step to figure shit out. If you think you know it all already, Rudy agrees with you. And if anyone tries to tell you differently, they're probably traitors, and Rudy, well, he'll keep an eye on 'em for you. Just like Bush, Rudy appeals to the couch-bound bully in all of us, and part of the allure of his campaign is the promise to put the Pentagon and the power of the White House at that bully's disposal.

Rudy's attack against Ron Paul in the [South Carolina Republican] debate was a classic example of that kind of politics, a Rovian masterstroke. The wizened Paul, a grandfather seventeen times over who is running for the Republican nomination at least 100 years too late, was making a simple isolationist argument, suggesting that our lengthy involvement in Middle Eastern affairs -- in particular our bombing of Iraq in the 1990s -- was part of the terrorists' rationale in attacking us.

Though a controversial statement for a Republican politician to make, it was hardly refutable from a factual standpoint -- after all, Osama bin Laden himself cited America's treatment of Iraq in his 1996 declaration of war. Giuliani surely knew this, but he jumped all over Paul anyway, demanding that Paul take his comment back. "I don't think I've ever heard that before," he hissed, "and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th."

It was like the new convict who comes into prison the first day and punches the weakest guy in the cafeteria in the teeth, and the Southern crowd exploded in raucous applause.
....Then there's 9/11. Like Bush's, Rudy's career before the bombing was in the toilet; New Yorkers had come to think of him as an ambition-sick meanie whose personal scandals were truly wearying to think about. But on the day of the attack, it must be admitted, Rudy hit the perfect note; he displayed all the strength and reassuring calm that Bush did not, and for one day at least, he was everything you'd want in a leader. Then he woke up the next day and the opportunist in him saw that there was money to be made in an America high on fear.

For starters, Rudy tried to use the tragedy to shred election rules, pushing to postpone the inauguration of his successor so he could hog the limelight for a few more months. Then, with the dust from the World Trade Center barely settled, he went on the road as the Man With the Bullhorn, pocketing as much as $200,000 for a single speaking engagement. In 2002 he reported $8 million in speaking income; this past year it was more than $11 million. He's traveled in style, at one stop last year requesting a $47,000 flight on a private jet, five hotel rooms and a private suite with a balcony view and a king-size bed.

While the mayor himself flew out of New York on a magic carpet, thousands of cash-strapped cops, firemen and city workers involved with the cleanup at the World Trade Center were developing cancers and infections and mysterious respiratory ailments like the "WTC cough." This is the dirty little secret lurking underneath Rudy's 9/11 hero image -- the most egregious example of his willingness to shape public policy to suit his donors. While the cleanup effort at the Pentagon was turned over to federal agencies like OSHA, which quickly sealed off the site and required relief workers to wear hazmat suits, the World Trade Center cleanup was handed over to Giuliani. The city's Department of Design and Construction (DDC) promptly farmed out the waste-clearing effort to a smattering of politically connected companies, including Bechtel, Bovis and AMEC construction.

The mayor pledged to reopen downtown in no time, and internal DDC memos indicate that the cleanup was directed at a breakneck pace. One memo to DDC chief Michael Burton warned, "Project management appears to only address safety issues when convenient for the schedule of the project." Burton, however, had his own priorities: He threatened to fire contractors if "the highest level of efficiency is not maintained."

Although respiratory-mask use was mandatory, the city allowed a macho culture to develop on the site: Even the mayor himself showed up without a mask. By October, it was estimated, masks were being worn on site as little as twenty-nine percent of the time. Rudy proclaimed that there were "no significant problems" with the air at the World Trade Center. But there was something wrong with the air: It was one of the most dangerous toxic-waste sites in human history, full of everything from benzene to asbestos and PCBs to dioxin (the active ingredient in Agent Orange). Since the cleanup ended, police and firefighters have reported a host of serious illnesses -- respiratory ailments like sarcoidosis; leukemia and lymphoma and other cancers; and immune-system problems.

"The likelihood is that more people will eventually die from the cleanup than from the original accident," says David Worby, an attorney representing thousands of cleanup workers in a class-action lawsuit against the city. "Giuliani wears 9/11 like a badge of honor, but he screwed up so badly."

When I first spoke to Worby, he was on his way home from the funeral of a cop. "One thing about Giuliani," he told me. "He's never been to a funeral of a cleanup worker."

Indeed, Rudy has had little at all to say about the issue. About the only move he's made to address the problem was to write a letter urging Congress to pass a law capping the city's liability at $350 million.

Did Giuliani know the air at the World Trade Center was poison? Who knows -- but we do know he took over the cleanup, refusing to let more experienced federal agencies run the show. He stood on a few brick piles on the day of the bombing, then spent the next ten months making damn sure everyone worked the night shift on-site while he bonked his mistress and negotiated his gazillion-dollar move to the private sector. Meanwhile, the people who actually cleaned up the rubble got used to checking their stool for blood every morning.

Now Giuliani is running for president -- as the hero of 9/11. George Bush has balls, too, but even he has to bow to this motherfucker.

Read the whole piece...

Bacevich: "The people have spoken, and nothing of substance has changed"

2007-05-28T07:21:00.000-07:00

Andrew Bacevich, writing in the Washington Post on Sunday, offers a moving reflection on his personal loss and the wider tragedy of American politics.

It's a Memorial Day message that goes well beyond the meaningless platitudes we're accustomed to hearing on this holiday. A as despairing as it is, gives me hope that a figure such as Bacevich, with a distinguished military record and impeccable conservative bona fides, could have the courage to speak so forcefully about the meat grinder chewing up bodies in the background as we go about our holiday weekend rituals of golf, barbecue and mowing lawns.

Still, I don't think this eloquent and melancholy piece will come close to converting the remaining Republican faithful, and more important, the "leaders" of both parties and America's corporate media. (Where is our Walter Cronkite????) Bacevich admits as much, and frets heartbreakingly over how he has "done nothing." That couldn't be further from the truth.

Echoing perhaps the misguided search for turning points indicating the possibility of victory in Iraq, I can only express a faint hope that Bacevich's message, there for all to see on the op-ed page of the nation's paper on a Memorial Day weekend, will serve as a turning point in moving America's sentiment against this war, and against the horrible infrastructure that makes all such wars possible and inevitable. It's a faint hope, but it's all we've got.

Here's the core of Bacevich's piece, which should of course be read in full.

Not for a second did I expect my own efforts [in opposing the Iraq war] to make a difference. But I did nurse the hope that my voice might combine with those of others -- teachers, writers, activists and ordinary folks -- to educate the public about the folly of the course on which the nation has embarked. I hoped that those efforts might produce a political climate conducive to change. I genuinely believed that if the people spoke, our leaders in Washington would listen and respond.
This, I can now see, was an illusion.
The people have spoken, and nothing of substance has changed. The November 2006 midterm elections signified an unambiguous repudiation of the policies that landed us in our present predicament. But half a year later, the war continues, with no end in sight. Indeed, by sending more troops to Iraq (and by extending the tours of those, like my son, who were already there), Bush has signaled his complete disregard for what was once quaintly referred to as "the will of the people."
To be fair, responsibility for the war's continuation now rests no less with the Democrats who control Congress than with the president and his party. After my son's death, my state's senators, Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, telephoned to express their condolences. Stephen F. Lynch, our congressman, attended my son's wake. Kerry was present for the funeral Mass. My family and I greatly appreciated such gestures. But when I suggested to each of them the necessity of ending the war, I got the brushoff. More accurately, after ever so briefly pretending to listen, each treated me to a convoluted explanation that said in essence: Don't blame me.
To whom do Kennedy, Kerry and Lynch listen? We know the answer: to the same people who have the ear of George W. Bush and Karl Rove -- namely, wealthy individuals and institutions.
Money buys access and influence. Money greases the process that will yield us a new president in 2008. When it comes to Iraq, money ensures that the concerns of big business, big oil, bellicose evangelicals and Middle East allies gain a hearing. By comparison, the lives of U.S. soldiers figure as an afterthought.
Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.'s life is priceless. Don't believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier's life: I've been handed the check. It's roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month.
Money maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics. It confines the debate over U.S. policy to well-hewn channels. It preserves intact the cliches of 1933-45 about isolationism, appeasement and the nation's call to "global leadership." It inhibits any serious accounting of exactly how much our misadventure in Iraq is costing. It ignores completely the question of who actually pays. It negates democracy, rendering free speech little more than a means of recording dissent.
This is not some great conspiracy. It's the way our system works.
In joining the Army, my son was following in his father's footsteps: Before he was born, I had served in Vietnam. As military officers, we shared an ironic kinship of sorts, each of us demonstrating a peculiar knack for picking the wrong war at the wrong time. Yet he was the better soldier -- brave and steadfast and irrepressible.
I know that my son did his best to serve our country. Through my own opposition to a profoundly misguided war, I thought I was doing the same. In fact, while he was giving his all, I was doing nothing. In this way, I failed him.

Them violent Mooslems

2007-05-23T19:05:00.000-07:00

Cursor.org is, for me, one of the Net's greatest treasures. It's so good in a meta way that I often overlook how important it is. It's as good a collection of suggestions for further reading as you're likely to find--and on good days, it's a whole lot more. One of today's (May 23) summaries is a classic of concision and makes a strong (but ultimately depressing) point at the same time.

After a Pew Research survey finds that U.S. Muslims are 'Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream,' that they are 'in line with U.S. values,' and that they "lean toward the Democratic Party, six to one," the Washington Times headlines its report on the poll, 'Young U.S. Muslims back suicide attacks.'

The only quibble I would have with this paragraph that so perfectly encapsulates how fucked we are in America right now is that it makes it seem like the Washington Times is bizarrely out of step. Oh, no. Even Anderson Cooper was "horrified -- just horrified -- that 'so many' American Muslims would support such violence."

The prejudices of conventional wisdom are myriad. One that is held by many, many Americans at our particular moment in history is the essentially ignorant and particularly dangerous idea that Muslims are predisposed to violence.

No one is better than Glenn Greenwald at finding the key weakness in such instances of complete bullshit in the mainstream media consensus. The datum from the Pew Poll that aroused such racist idiots as Mark Steyn and Michelle Malkin was this: "while 80% of American Muslims oppose attacks on civilians in all cases, 13% said they could be justified in some circumstances."

Horrifying, just horrifying.

But wait, what about context? Oh, that..... Here's Greenwald:

The reality, though, is that it is almost impossible to conduct a poll and not have a sizable portion of the respondents agree to almost everything. And in particular, with regard to the specific question of whether it is justifiable to launch violent attacks aimed deliberately at civilians, the percentage of American Muslims who believe in such attacks pales in comparison to the percentage of Americans generally who believe that such attacks are justifiable.
The University of Maryland's highly respected Program on International Public Attitudes, in December 2006, conducted a concurrent public opinion poll of the United States and Iran to determine the comparative views of each country's citizens on a variety of questions. The full findings are published here (.pdf).
One of the questions they asked was whether "bombings and other types of attacks intentionally aimed at civilians are sometimes justified"? Americans approved of such attacks by a much larger margin than Iranians -- 51-16% (and a much, much larger margin than American Muslims -- 51-13%).

In an earlier post Greenwald finds another religion whose adherents hold some pretty ugly opinions. Can you imagine the day when a headline reads "White Christians support torture"?

And majorities of white Christians -- Catholics, evangelicals and protestants -- believe in torture not merely in the improbable-in-the-extreme "ticking time bomb" scenario; rather, they believe in torture as a matter of course [emphasis in orginal] (i.e., more than "rarely" -- either "often or "sometimes"). (By stark and revealing contrast, "secularists" oppose torture in far greater numbers). [emphasis mine]. Think about how depraved that is: what kind of religious individual affirmatively believes that people should be routinely tortured, including people who have never been proven to have done anything wrong?

Don't cross him, don't boss him

2007-05-21T20:41:00.001-07:00

Leave it to all-around great American Willie Nelson to offer up a nice, concise statement of why we all should care about farm policy and the upcoming Farm Bill.

I will quote his entire piece in toto. Can't see how that would upset anyone, but if it does, I'll be happy to trim it down:

Take Action: Support a Better Farm Bill

by Willie Nelson

I believe nothing is as central to our well-being as food — who grows it and how. When produced with the interests of the eater in mind, food makes our bodies strong. When produced with the dream of passing the land on to the next generation, food strengthens local communities. And when produced with a long view of the planet’s health, food keeps our environment intact, even thriving.

Family farmers have always understood the direct connection between healthy soil, healthy food and healthy people — that’s why they take great measures to improve and protect their soil. The key to strengthening this fabric that holds our country together is to keep family farmers on this land, from coast to coast. It’s a solution to many of today’s most important concerns — climate change, fossil fuel dependence, childhood obesity and dwindling biodiversity.

In the coming months, Congress will seal the next farm bill, legislation so broad in scope that it touches each of us in many ways. When you hear “farm bill,” think beyond the farm. Think food bill, renewable energy bill, nutrition bill, environmental stewardship bill, anti-hunger bill.

Over the past several decades, the farm bill has served the interests of large-scale industrial agriculture with policies designed to produce cheap food and lots of it. This cheap food policy, however, comes with incredibly high external costs: a depleted countryside with fewer farmers, degraded soils and waterways, and public health disasters. A new farm bill — one that serves the interests of all Americans — with a vision toward sustainability, can help reverse these trends.

Instead of countless dying small towns across rural America, imagine the countryside dotted with thriving communities, all of them contributing to strong local economies. Imagine clean waterways, protected for generations to come. Imagine farmers markets in every community with fresh, locally grown food, free of chemicals and additives. Imagine powering your home and automobile with energy from renewable sources produced close to your home. Imagine your child’s school serving fresh, wholesome food from your neighbors’ farms. Imagine young people returning to the land to carry on the great tradition of farming. These dreams aren’t futile. They are possible with a farm bill that serves your interests over those of giant corporations.

If you want your grandchildren to inherit a nation with healthy soil, clean water and nutritious food, pick up the phone today and call your representatives in Congress. Tell them you want a farm bill that assists young people who want to start farming; one that restores fairness in the marketplace so family farmers can compete with giant food companies and factory farms; one that puts better food in our schools and rewards farmers who transition to sustainable methods. Let them know you want a farm bill for all, because the farm bill belongs to all of us.

For Congressional contact information, visit www.congress.org. You’ll find helpful tips and talking points at www.capwiz.com/bread/home and www.ucsaction.org/campaign/2007_farm_bill. To keep up with farm policy news, visit www.farmpolicy.com. You can sign up for e-mail updates from Farm Aid at www.farmaid.org.

© 2007 Mother Earth News

A video I can't stop watching

2007-05-16T08:54:00.000-07:00

Cat Power, "Lived in bars." I love her singing, I love the spirit of this video, and I want that "The Greatest" jacket:

He only thinks it's Giuliani time

2007-05-16T07:02:00.000-07:00

I didn't watch the Republican debate, and I didn't watch the Democrats' debate, but I have been keeping track if only to see how "my boys"--Paul and Gravel--have been doing. As usual, the outsider antiwar candidate walked away with the most memorable performance.

And the former NYC mayor walked away with the creepiest.

Responding to Ron Paul's quite proper old-school liberatarian Republican take on U.S. foreign policy, in which he cited Ronald Reagan's wisdom in a way the others in that mob would never think of doing, Giuliani asked the Texas congressman to take back what he said (what is this? high school?). Here's the Nation's John Nichols:

The most heated moment in the debate, which aired live on the conservative Fox News network, came when the former New York mayor and current GOP front-runner angrily refused to entertain a serious discussion about the role that actions taken by the United States prior to the September 11, 2OO1, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon may have played in inspiring or encouraging those attacks.

Giuliani led the crowd of contenders on attacking Texas Congressman Ron Paul after the anti-war Republican restated facts that are outlined in the report of the The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.

Asked about his opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Paul repeated his oft-expressed concern that instead of making the U.S. safer, U.S. interventions in the Middle East over the years have stirred up anti-American sentiment. As he did in the previous Republican debate, the Texan suggested that former President
Ronald Reagan's decisions to withdraw U.S. troops from the region in the 198Os were wiser than the moves by successive Republican and Democratic presidents to increase U.S. military involvement there.

Speaking of extremists who target the U.S, Paul said, "They attack us because we've been over there. We've been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We've been in the Middle East [for years]. I think (Ronald) Reagan was right. We don't understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. Right now, we're building an embassy in Iraq that is bigger than the Vatican. We're building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting."

Paul argued that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda are "delighted that we're over there" in Iraq, pointing out that, "They have already... killed 3,400 of our men and I don't think it was necessary."

Giuliani, going for an applause line with a conservative South Carolina audience that was not exactly sympathetic with his support for abortion rights and other socially liberal positions, leapt on Paul's remarks. Interrupting the flow of the debate, Giuliani declared, "That's really an extraordinary statement. That's really an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of Sept. 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don't think I have ever heard that before and I have heard some pretty absurd explanations for Sept. 11. I would ask the congressman withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that."

The mayor, who is making his response to the 9-11 attacks on New York a central feature of his presidential campaign, was joined in the assault on Paul by many of the other candidates.

But congressman did not back down, and for good reason. Unlike Giuliani, the Texan has actually read the record.

The 9-11 Commission report detailed how bin Laden had, in 1996, issued "his self-styled fatwa calling on Muslims to drive American soldiers out of Saudi Arabia" and identified that declaration and another in 1998 as part of "a long series" of statements objecting to U.S. military interventions in his native Saudi Arabia in particular and the Middle East in general. Statements from bin Laden and those associated with him prior to 9-11 consistently expressed anger with the U.S. military presence on the Arabian Peninsula, U.S. aggression against the Iraqi people and U.S. support of
Israel.

The 9-11 Commission based its assessments on testimony from experts on terrorism and the Middle East. Asked about the motivations of the terrorists,
FBI Special Agent James Fitzgerald told the commission: "I believe they feel a sense of outrage against the United States. They identify with the Palestinian problem, they identify with people who oppose repressive regimes, and I believe they tend to focus their anger on the United States."

Fitzgerald's was not a lonely voice in the intelligence community.

Michael Scheuer, the former Central Intelligence Agency specialist on bin Laden and al-Qaeda, has objected to simplistic suggestions by President Bush and others that terrorists are motivated by an ill-defined irrational hatred of the United States. "The politicians really are at great fault for not squaring with the American people," Scheuer said in a CNN interview. "We're being attacked for what we do in the Islamic world, not for who we are or what we believe in or how we live. And there's a huge burden of guilt to be laid at Mr. Bush, Mr. Clinton, both parties for simply lying to the American people."

It is true that reasonable people might disagree about the legitimacy of Muslim and Arab objections to U.S. military policies. And, certainly, the vast majority of Americans would object to any attempt to justify the attacks on this country, its citizen and its soldiers.

But that was not what Paul was doing. He was trying to make a case, based on what we know from past experience, for bringing U.S. troops home from Iraq.

Giuliani's reaction to Paul's comments, especially the suggestion that they should be withdrawn, marked him as the candidate peddling "absurd explanations."

Viewers of the debate appear to have agreed. An unscientific survey by Fox News asked its viewers to send text messages identifying the winner. Tens of thousands were received and Paul ranked along with Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney as having made the best showing.

No wonder then that, when asked about his dust-up with Giuliani, Paul said he'd be "delighted" to debate the front-runner on foreign policy.

I'm probably not the first to make this suggestion, but a Ron Paul- Mike Gravel ticket would get my vote in 2008.

Update: A choice quote on Paul's performance, from my good buddy Dave:

They're gonna mind-controlled-robot-assassinate his ass. How much more of this blather will our military industrial complex take before whacking him?

Paul's 1/2 life is getting shorter and shorter. He should probably write a letter to the Corinthians or sumptin, before he stops breathing.

Faaarrrmmm livin' is the life for me...

2007-05-16T05:56:00.002-07:00

It's been over a month since I've blogged, but the truth is I don't have any energy left after a day spent watching my two-year-old twins and trying to get various farming projects off the ground.

My latest preoccupation has been with a box of baby chicks I bought last month, which has now grown into 26 rapidly fattening young chickens. The prior tenants of our coops, five old crabby hens and a neurotic rooster, haven't been particularly welcoming to the newcomers. I'd been bringing the chicks inside onto our porch evenings until last night, but they are unbelievably stinky creatures at this point. So I've rigged an elaborate but unsteady partition inside the coop.

When I first checked on the chicks, they had all crushed close to the door because they were so scared of the other chooks. But I made a point of putting about half of them onto the roosts and they made it through the night. Now it's pissing down rain on them and they're afraid to go back into the coop, so they're just getting drenched, and there's the added complication of my son's pet rabbit being very much in the mood for love-- he's mounting all the hens.

This week also marked my maiden foray into the world of beekeeping. The instructions for installing a queen into a package of bees couldn't be more simple--at least until you've opened the package and there are 8000 stinger-laden insects buzzing around you. You are supposed to remove a tiny cork, which allows the queen to chew her way out of about an inch of a candy-like substance. The time it takes her to emerge gives the workers a chance to get used to her scent, so they won't kill her when she shows up.

I managed to make a mess of both installations. With the first hive, I dropped the queen's cage into the box almost immediately, and had to reach into the wriggling swarm to fish her out. And I completely balled up the second installation, pushing the cork right into the queen's cage. I didn't crush her (I think), but now there's the risk that she emerged too early and has already been stung to death by her fickle workers. There seems to be a good deal of activity in the hive. Workers are coming and going and returning to the hive waddling under the weight of all the pollen on their legs, so I'm thinking things may be going just fine. But I'm going to consult with a fellow novice beekeeper by the weekend.

I know there's wars and scandals and all sorts of problems with the world, but for the moment I can only focus on children, bees, baking bread and chickens. It's kind of nice, really.

"Do you think this is the first six-year-old we've arrested?"

2007-04-09T20:34:00.000-07:00

Oh, it's bad. Bad. On the fourth anniversary of the "fall of Baghdad" (thinly noticed in U.S. corporate media, kind of a big deal in the Middle East), two news notices that make me wanna weep.

First, a respected professor emeritus, from Princeton no less, is refused a boarding pass on American Airlines for being on the "Terrorist Watch" list-- not for participating in a peace march (the airline clerk's first guess), but for lecturing on Dubya's many abuses of the Constitution.

One of the two people to whom I talked asked a question and offered a frightening comment: "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that." I explained that I had not so marched but had, in September, 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the Web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution. "That'll do it," the man said. "

And second, and just jaw-droppingly, gut-wrenchingly sad, courtesy of Bob Herbert, comes a report from "a small, backward city in central Florida" of the arrest, handcuffing, fingerprinting and booking of a six-year-old child!

"The student became violent," said Frank Mercurio, the no-nonsense chief of the Avon Park police. "She was yelling, screaming — just being uncontrollable. Defiant."

"But she was 6," I said.

The chief’s reply came faster than a speeding bullet: "Do you think this is the first 6-year-old we’ve arrested?"

Our future: mercenary olympics on ESPN, and no bees

2007-03-25T19:30:00.000-07:00

On a gorgeous spring day where I sweated and swore through the learning curve of installing a drip irrigation system in the garden, my evening Web browsing has been anything but the relaxing winding down I'd hoped it would be. In fact, it turned up a couple of pieces of truly scary glimpses of our future.

The first comes courtesy of a summary/review on Daily Kos on Jeremy Scahill's extremely alarming Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

Writes the reviewers, SusanG "... Blackwater would be a masterpiece of the genre of futuristic sci fi were it not so regrettably real. It’s got all the twists and turns and secret corners of a Hollywood thriller: records and contracts that can’t be traced, shady characters recruiting other shady characters in violent Third World nations, extremist religious figures lurking in the background of a mysterious unregulated company that uses PR tactics worthy of Orwell. Unfortunately for America, we’re living the plot in real time."

The review is excellent, as is this brief video excerpt:

And the second scary bit, a report from Der Spiegel on the decimation of bee populations both in Germany and in the United States.

Walter Haefeker is a man who is used to painting grim scenarios. He sits on the board of directors of the German Beekeepers Association (DBIB) and is vice president of the European Professional Beekeepers Association. And because griping is part of a lobbyist's trade, it is practically his professional duty to warn that "the very existence of beekeeping is at stake."
The problem, says Haefeker, has a number of causes, one being the varroa mite, introduced from Asia, and another is the widespread practice in agriculture of spraying wildflowers with herbicides and practicing monoculture. Another possible cause, according to Haefeker, is the controversial and growing use of genetic engineering in agriculture.
As far back as 2005, Haefeker ended an article he contributed to the journal Der Kritischer Agrarbericht (Critical Agricultural Report) with an Albert Einstein quote: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."

Mysterious events in recent months have suddenly made Einstein's apocalyptic vision seem all the more topical. For unknown reasons, bee populations throughout Germany are disappearing -- something that is so far only harming beekeepers. But the situation is different in the United States, where bees are dying in such dramatic numbers that the economic consequences could soon be dire. No one knows what is causing the bees to perish, but some experts believe that the large-scale use of genetically modified plants in the US could be a factor.

I am pretty virulently hostile to GMO crops, but from what the article reports, there doesn't seem to be conclusive proof that GMO crops are what's behind the disappearing bees--certainly nowhere near the proof that would be needed to spur any kind of action on the part of politicians or industry, anywhere, if the disinclination in Washington to take action on global warming is any indication....

But hey, it's only life itself that's at stake: bees, pollination, plants, animals ... man. No biggie....

Be ever vigilant

2007-03-20T06:34:00.000-07:00

From BoingBoing:

Bruce Schneier notes that the FBI has sent out an "informational bulletin" about the possibility that terrorists might try to become school bus drivers. The FBI notes that they have no reason to believe that this is actually happening, though -- it's just something someone there thought of.

On the subject of "scary-story-but-nothing-to-worry-about," here are a couple from[Cory Doctorow]:
* Osama bin Laden might recruit suicide bombers who fill their colons with Semtex and undetectable shards of broken glass. These anus-bombers might blow up airplanes with their explosive assholes, killing everyone on board. We should all get a thorough, deep rectal exam prior to boarding, starting right now.

* Terrorists might use rigged laptop batteries to trigger massive inflight lithium explosions. All laptops should henceforth travel in unpadded, unlocked bags. No battery-powered devices of any kind (digital watches, hearing aids, iPods, phones) should ever be allowed on airplanes. People with pacemakers should walk. Or stay put.
* Terrorists might start animal shelters and use them to recruit stray animals that can be trained to serve as superbug vectors, tearing through our cities, spreading weaponized Ebola. No living creatures -- other than (some) humans should be allowed within the city limits of any settlement bigger than 400 people.
* Terrorists could infiltrate the world's car companies and manufacture large, fuel-inefficient vehicles like Hummers. Once America has gone all SUV, the resulting carbon emissions would contribute to polar melting and global warming, causing devastating hurricanes through the southwest, killing and displacing millions of Americans. Ban car companies now, or the terrorists have won.

Wait! Were we even in the Vietnam War?

2007-03-16T18:39:00.000-07:00

Sad. Funny. Sad. Funny.

Country Life

2007-03-15T06:13:00.001-07:00

Today I bought a chainsaw. For price, power and ease of use, it seemed like a good deal. But I got home and kept staring at the box and thinking, "Wild Thing--who the fuck would buy a Wild Thing chainsaw? And what kind of marketing department comes up with shit like that??"

Like most entry level users, the first thing I'm looking for in a product like this is some kind of assurance that it won't dismember me or anyone in my immediate family. "Wild Thing" is not the most reassuring concept.

Anyway, I bought it. Do the marketeers know me better than I know myself? Were they speaking to the Leatherface deep inside?

We drove home tonight after sundown, our family of five, in two separate cars, from dinner at a friend's house. It's Wednesday evening, so the local Baptist congregation was just letting out, but in spite of the crowd, I noticed a shirtless man walking down the road, and my wife noticed him too. I guess he would be a drifter, by the look of things, and to use the police blotter vernacular. I slowed down for a look, half thinking at first I'd ask if everything was OK. But he glowered. My wife, following five minutes behind, had seen him too, and had the same experience.

But while I had noticed the creep on the road perpendicular to ours, my wife had seen him on our road, so that was a little disconcerting. He would have walked past our gate an hour ago, or else he's come up the gravel road to our unprotected nest.

Weird. I now take solace in the thought that even a psychotic drifter would assume that all the farmhouses in our neck of the woods are inhabited by folks who are packin'. We're not, but he can't know that--can he?

UNLESS HE'S READING MY BLOG!!!!!!

I rather enjoyed that

2007-03-14T21:20:00.000-07:00

Most NBA games are flat-out tedious affairs. But tonight's Dallas-Phoenix confrontation was the rare game that lives up to the league's ridiculous hype.

I was watching the fourth quarter intently, but in the last minute it looked to be pretty much wrapped up for Dallas, and that the great Steve Nash was not being his dominating small Canadian self. So I blinked for a minute, and pretty much missed Nash's 10 points in the last 58 seconds.

He then made a ridiculous number of amazing plays in both overtimes, both offensive and defensive. The one that for some reason didn't make the highlight reel: Nash uncharacteristically loses the inbounds pass under his own basket, and falls down in the process; the ball bounces around a bit, and comes to a Dallas player, who drives hard to the basket; but Nash has already gotten up and with the fastest feet in the league manages to draw a no-contest charge.

I'll always tune in when little Stevie is on the court.

Rite of passage

2007-03-14T19:13:00.000-07:00

Another great post from Tony Karon, who has recently returned from a vacation that was only a month in duration, but to me it seemed like years.

His first two posts back (here and here), on the prospects of the United States attacking Iran, are typically thoughtful and insightful looks at a subject that is full of posturing, misdirection and outright disinformation. Today, he allows a slightly atypical bit of disgust to surface, in this case with regard to presidential hopeful Barrack Obama and the eternally contemptible AIPAC. I saw recently that there's a billboard somewhere in New Zealand with Cheney's likeness and the phrase "Hell is too good for some people." That pretty much describes my attitude to AIPAC (and to Dick Cheney).

Here's Tony on Obama, the Democrats, and the whacked out lobby:

I have long been appalled by the craven genuflecting before the altar of vicious nationalism that appears to have become a required ritual for would-be Democratic Party presidential candidates courting what they see as the “Jewish vote.” Not only are they required to outdo one another in the extent of support they pledge for Israel; given that the element they’re addressing (right-wing Zionists who don’t reflect even the Jewish-American mainstream) is steeped in the toxic racism common to ultra-nationalism of all stripes, what they’re really required to do is outdo one another’s pledges of hostility towards the Palestinians. Kind of like that scene in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” where the basis for joining the People’s Front for the Liberation of Judea is your answer to the question “How much do you hate the Romans?”

....
Here’s my advice to Obama: AIPAC is a right-wing body, even on the Jewish-American political spectrum — in Israeli terms, its orientation is strongly Likudnik, aligning it with the right-wing fringe in Israel, too. Close to 80% of American Jews, according to surveys see the Iraq war as a mistake. (As opposed to the AIPAC crowd and Israeli government, which continues to support it.)

So, when you pander to the AIPAC crowd, you are not reaching the Jewish-American mainstream (even though most of the Jewish-American mainstream is loathe to directly challenge the AIPAC crowd, for fear of being labeled traitors are worse by rabid right-wingers like Alvin Rosenfeld). Nor are you really helping Israel, because its only chance of surviving rests in its ability to make peace with its neighbors, and Israeli peaceniks will tell you that the support of the U.S. (egged on by the AIPAC crowd) for the most belligerent and hawkish positions on the Israeli spectrum is actually working against Israel’s ability to make the compromises it will have to make in order to achieve peace.

And nobody will think any less of you, Barack, if you choose to speak the truth, and what you know to be the truth, rather than half-heartedly embrace falsehoods that aren’t doing anybody any good. The right-wing Zionists aren’t going to support you no matter how hard you pander, and the liberal mainstream will respect honesty and consistency. Israel needs American leaders that can march it back from its own self-destructive impulses, rather than cheerleaders of its march of folly.
Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m wasting my breath…
Read the whole piece...

Holy shit! Congressman a nonbeliever

2007-03-13T09:35:00.000-07:00

From the L.A. Times:

Secular groups Monday applauded a public acknowledgment by Rep. Pete Stark that he does not believe in a supreme being, making the Fremont Democrat the first member of Congress — and the highest-ranking elected official in the U.S. — to publicly acknowledge not believing in God.

OK. I didn't know that about Pete Stark, but good for him.

But the part that kills me is the "highest-ranking elected official in the U.S." part. You've gotta be kidding me! They couldn't find ONE other elected official to say that he or she doesn't believe in "the invisible man -- living in the sky -- who watches everything you do, every minute of every day."

Those are the, er, immortal words of George Carlin, and reading this crazy story moves me to repost an earlier appreciation of Mr. Carlin's take on "the greatest bullshit story ever told."

Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man -- living in the sky -- who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!

But He loves you.

He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, you talk about a good bullshit story. Holy Shit!

And only one elected U.S. rep has admitted to not believing that. Double holy shit!

Dems to Dubya: Bombs away!

2007-03-12T19:21:00.000-07:00

Most Americans would not trust George W. Bush to deliver their pizzas, but yesterday the Democrats decided to trust him with the (highly unconstitutional) authority to attack yet another country.

Juan Cole is good on this latest piece of appalling news about the state of the Republic.....

The Democrats are blinking and taking out of proposed legislation a provision that would have forbidden Bush to take military action against Iran without coming to the Congress first (i.e. without acting in accordance with the Constitution). I'm not sure why you need a statute, anyway, to ensure that the Constitution is followed . . . Except that it has been so long since presidents have paid much attention to the Constitution. The Imperial Presidency has overshadowed it, just as Emperor Augustus overshadowed the Roman Republic.

Those who said that such a provision would take the military option off the table with regard to Iran are simply wrong. It just required that the president make the case for a war to the legislature, which declares war. The option was still there if the legislature wanted it to be.

But after the Iraq fiasco it is amazing to me that Washington is still talking about going to war against Middle Eastern countries that pose no threat to the US mainland. The US got where it is after World War II by mostly avoiding direct military campaigns and occupations. The US does not have the resources to occupy two Middle Eastern oil states, and trying to do so will break it as surely as imperial overstretch broke its predecessors among the great powers. Those who think all this is good for Israel are being short-sighted. If the US spirals down into a non-entity over the next 30 years as a result of over-stretch, Israel will be left without a great power patron and might well not survive. The Europeans are fed up with its militarism and itchy trigger finger, and it hasn't made any friends in its own region.

Happy anniversary, "paranoid style"

2007-03-12T18:46:00.000-07:00

James Carroll, author of House of War, the sweeping, passionate and ultimately unsettling "biography" of the Pentagon, writes in today's Boston Globe of the need for American foreign policy to go back not just to the days before the current criminal mob took office, but to the very beginnings of America's postwar global dominance.

Carroll writes that the United States must look back a full six decades to reverse the faulty logic of the Truman Doctrine, instituted on this day in 1947, when Harry insisted that "nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life"--a slightly more sophisticated way of saying "you're either with us or against us."

Writes Carroll:

The occasion of Truman's pronouncement was his decision to militarily support one side in the civil war in Greece, and with that, the deadly precedent of American intervention in foreign civil wars was set. Fear of communism became a driving force of politics and a justification for vast military expenditures.
Nine days after announcing the Truman Doctrine, the president issued an executive order mandating loyalty oaths and security checks for federal employees, the start of the domestic red scare. The "paranoid style" of American life, in Richard Hofstadter's phrase, was set.

And so with the Truman Doctrine came war after war, some out in the open, some clandestine but every bit as bloody. Today, in the midst of what surely will rank as one of the most disastrous wars in American history, Carroll finds important questions still going unasked:

More than adjustments in tactics and strategy are needed. What must be criticized, and even dismantled, is nothing less than the national security state that Truman inaugurated on this date in 1947. The habits of mind that defined American attitudes during the Cold War still provide consoling and profitable structures of meaning, even as dread of communism has been replaced by fear of terrorism. Thus, Truman's "every nation must choose " became Bush's "You are with us or against us." America's political paranoia still projects its worst fears onto the enemy, paradoxically strengthening its most paranoid elements. The monstrous dynamic feeds itself.

The United States has obviously, and accidentally, been reinforcing the most belligerent elements in Iran and North Korea, but it is also doing so in Russia and China. Last week, for example, alarms went off in Washington with the news that China is increasing its military spending by nearly 18 percent this year, bringing its officially acknowledged military budget to $45 billion. Yet who was raising questions about massive American military sales (including missiles) to Taiwan, whose defense build up stimulates Beijing's? Speaking of budgets, who questions the recently unveiled Pentagon total for 2008 of more than $620 billion? (Under Bill Clinton, the defense budget went from $260 billion to about $300 billion.) Even allowing for Iraq and Afghanistan, how can such an astronomical figure be justified?

When the United States announces plans to station elements of its missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, why are Russian complaints dismissed as evidence of Vladimir Putin's megalomania? On this date in 1999, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic were admitted to NATO, in violation of American assurances to Moscow that NATO would not move east from the unified Germany. Now NATO looks further east still, toward Georgia and Ukraine. And Putin is the paranoid?

Last week, the Bush administration announced plans for the first new nuclear weapon in more than 20 years, a program of ultimately replacing all American warheads. So much for the nuclear elimination toward which the United States is legally bound to work by the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. Washington simultaneously assured Russia and China that this renewal of the nuclear arsenal was no cause for them to feel threatened. Hello? Russia and China have no choice but to follow the US lead, inevitably gearing up another arms race. It is 1947 all over again. A precious opportunity to turn the world away from nuclear weapons, and away from war, is once more being squandered -- by America. And what candidate running for president makes anything of this?

Know your chicken: A song for a sunny spring day

2007-03-09T09:31:00.000-08:00

Gorgeous day here in central Kentucky, the air ripe with the smell of a truckload of compost we just tilled into the garden.

I've got poultry on my mind, with the McMurray Hatchery catalog open on the table in front of me. Made me feel like sharing this classic from the East Village Scene BITD BMFEU (back in the day, before money fucked everything up).

My kids love to dance to it, and it just makes me smile. God bless Cibo Matto.

The stab in the back

2007-03-08T16:52:00.000-08:00

The phrase usually refers to the Jack Rippers of the world objecting to having their aggression thwarted by weak-willed civilians and media types. As this fascinating history in Harper's demonstrates, it is pure mythical, right-wing bull caca.

But stab in the back is such a vivid phrase. I would like to reclaim it for a current betrayal--of the war-weary American public by the Democratic Party.

"You're not weary of war," the newly elected leadership tells Joe Voter. "You're just weary of the IRAQ war. You'll LOVE what we have in store for Iran. Sanctions. Saber rattling. ALL OPTIONS ON THE TABLE. We can waste lives and treasure with the best of 'em.

"And are Democrats willing to bring the world a few more steps closer to Armageddon for short-term domestic political gain? Just watch us!"

Wait, but surely there was intelligent discussion on the topic of "containing" Iran. Someone stepped up and told Lantos, "Look, Tom, this is a little over the top, no?"

Er. Nope.

David Swanson writes this chilling summary of the extent of Congressional lock-step.

The absurd notion that Iran constitutes a threat to the United States was asserted in the opening breath out of Chairman Tom Lantos's mouth and never questioned by a single speaker through the hearing. Not a single speaker questioned the need to get tough on Iran in one way or another. Not a single speaker questioned the idea that a nation years away from possessing nuclear weapons and open to negotiating about them is a threat to the world's hugest nuclear power. Not a single speaker questioned assertions made during the hearing to the effect that Iran is supplying Iraqis with explosives. Not a single speaker questioned US preparations for war on Iran. And not one voice raised any concern over what sanctions would do to the Iranian people.

And from here, Chris Floyd brings the appropriate sense of despair.

... the national Democrats -- who were returned to power on a wave of public revulsion against the radical militarism of the Bush Regime -- are now trying to raise the war fever against Iran to the boiling point, in a bellicose bid to "outflank both the Bush administration and the United Nations with the toughest set of sanctions against Iran that have ever been proposed," as that right-wing calliope, the New York Sun, approvingly notes.

... The Lantos version of the latest Iran Provocation Act is being pitched as a partisan swipe at George W. Bush. (In their PR packaging, at least, the Democrats are being responsive to overwhelming public sentiment.) Lantos emphasizes that the bill would prohibit the president from granting waivers to any oil companies or countries that sign new energy deals with Iran. "If Dutch Shell moves forward with its proposed $10 billion deal with Iran, it will be sanctioned. If Malaysia moves forward with a similar deal, it too will be sanctioned. The same treatment will be accorded to China and India should they finalize deals with Iran," said Lantos. [And isn't it wonderfully democratic of this Democratic leader, telling other countries who they can and cannot trade with, and how? Oh well; if these rag-tag nations want to be part of our Greater Co-Propserity Sphere, they have to toe the line, right?]

Of course, all these draconian efforts to cripple the development of Iran's oil and gas industries will only make it more imperative for Tehran to develop its nuclear power program -- and therefore increase the likelihood that this program could one day be turned to the production of nuclear weapons. In other words, the bill is designed to exacerbate and accelerate the very danger -- nuclear proliferation -- that is the ostensible reason for keeping "all options on the table" against Iran.

But that's OK. We want them to keep building their nuclear program, so we can use it as an excuse to strike Iran. We want the people of Iran to suffer from crippling sanctions, as did the people of Iraq (while, as in Iraq, the leaders continue to live in luxury), because we want Iraqi society to deteroriate to the point that its leaders feel compelled to take some action that we can seize upon as a casus belli and launch a "retaliatory" attack whose real aim is "regime change." Both the Democrats and Republicans have very publicly committed the United States to this course.

So the Lantos law has nothing to do with bashing George W. Bush for giving his oil buddies waivers to work in Iran. That's just cornball for the rubes back home. It has everything to do with the pursuit of "regime change" in Tehran and the implanation of a friendly client regime that won't stand in the way of the long-held, bipartisan Establishment dream of unchallenged American dominance over world affairs.

And it It has nothing to do with punishing Iran for allegedly helping kill American soldiers in Iraq. Neither the Democrats or the Republicans, with a few honorable exceptions, give a damn about the American soldiers in Iraq. If they did, the soldiers would already be coming home -- or never sent there in first place. If they did, they would also be passing sanctions against Saudi Arabia, from whence gushers of money, weapons and recruits are flowing into Iraq to support the Sunni insurgency that is actually killing most of the Americans in Iraq.

No, they don't care about the soldiers. They care about "regime change" and advancing the frontiers of dominance. In this, the American Dominationists have found common cause with the government of Israel, which also desperately wants regime change in Tehran. And here the other raison d'etre of the Lantos bill comes into play: kowtowing to the interests of the Israeli militarists, and thus securing the domestic support of the Israel Lobby in America. And the Democrats are not even trying to hide the influence of the Lobby on the bill. As the Sun notes: "The introduction of the new legislation comes as more than 5,500 members of America's largest pro-Israel lobby [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] are set to arrive in Washington for their annual policy conference." Making their haj to this Mecca..House speaker Nancy Pelosi is scheduled to give her first major speech on Middle East policy as the House leader. Both the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate will make speeches at the event, which is also expected to draw presidential candidates such as Senators Clinton, Obama, Biden, and Brownback. Senator McCain is said to be likely to attend as well." Every one of these speakers will throw red meat to the crowd. Every single one of them will declare that "all options are on the table" against Iran. Every single one of them will wave the black flag of war.

Of course, most American Jews oppose the war in Iraq; So do most American WASPs -- although not in as great a number as American Jews, as several recent Gallup polls show. (The American religious group most opposed to the Iraq war is Black Protestants, the surveys found.) Most Americans oppose launching a war on Iran. But neither the WASP Dominationists who control American policy nor the Jewish leaders of the Israeli Lobby give a damn about what Americans -- of all faiths and none -- want. These honchos serve only the interests of power. They may tell us -- they may even tell themselves -- that they are only pursuing, with unfortunate but unavoidable ruthlessness, the security of the American and Israeli people. But the record of the past decades gives overwhelming proof that these policies do not bring security; they bring only more death, more suffering, more fear -- and more money for war profiteers, and more authoritarian power for government officials to wield with increasingly weak or non-existent restraints.

Three hands clapping

2007-03-07T19:25:00.000-08:00

Matt Taibbi's ongoing single-minded, ad hominim hatchet job on the writing of Thomas Friedman is unfair and vindictive--or it would be so, if it were someone other than Friedman he was talking about.

Friedman is the most prominent talking head featured in Radar's The Iraq Gamble, a look at how the careers of pundits like Friedman, David Brooks, Jeffrey Goldberg and Fareed Zakaria actually took off after they bet the farm on the Iraq invasion and occupation--and lost. But Friedman is far and away the most conspicuous and shameless of the bunch.

Here, Taibbi writes that Friedman is not content with being allowed to show his face in public after being perhaps the most influential--and certainly the most strident (Mr. "Give War A Chance") "liberal" to promote invading Iraq. Friedman, says Taibbi, is already preparing to blame the debacle of the Iraq invasion and occupation on a patsy-- the American people. His piece should be read from beginning to end, but is worth quoting at some length. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll agree: "Friedman should be hung upside down and have holes drilled in his skull."

Friedman's latest column, "Don't Ask, Don't Know, Don't Help," is yet another "the war should have worked" piece, and it's of a sort we're likely to see quite often in upcoming years.

What we have to remember about America's half-baked propaganda machine is that, dumb as it is, it always keeps its eye on the ball. The war in Iraq is lost, everyone knows that, but there are future wars to think about. When a war goes wrong, the reason can never that the invasion was simply a bad, immoral decision, a hopelessly fucked-up idea that even a child could have seen through. No, we always have to make sure that the excuse for the next war is woven into the autopsy of the current military failure. That's why to this day we're still hearing about how Vietnam was lost because a) the media abandoned the war effort b) the peace movement undermined the national will and c) the public, and the Pentagon, misread the results of the Tet offensive, seeing defeat where there actually was a victory.
After a few decades of that, we were ready to go to war again -- all we had to do, we figured, was keep the cameras away from the bloody bits, ignore the peace movement, and blow off any and all bad news from the battlefield. And we did all of these things for quite a long time in Iraq, but, maddeningly, Iraq still turned out to be a failure.
That left the war apologists in a bind. If after fixing all of the long-held Vietnam excuses Iraq could still blow up in our faces, that must mean that we not only misjudged Iraq, but we were wrong about why Vietnam failed, too. Now, if we're ever going to pull one of these stunts again, we're going to need to come up with a grander, even more outlandish excuse for why both wars were horrible, bloody failures. Who could come up with such an excuse? Well, a man who counts on three hands sure can. Here's Friedman quoting author Robert Hormats:
"In every major war that we have fought, with the exception of Vietnam, there was an effort prior to the war or just after the inception to re-evaluate tax and spending policies and to shift resources from less vital national pursuits to the strategic objective of fighting and winning the war," said Mr. Hormats, a vice chairman of Goldman Sachs (International). He quotes Roosevelt's 1942 State of the Union address, when F.D.R. looked Americans in the eye and said: "War costs money. ... That means taxes and bonds and bonds and taxes. It means cutting luxuries and other nonessentials. In a word, it means an Œall-out‚ war by individual effort and family effort in a united country."
Ever heard Mr. Bush talk that way? After Pearl Harbor, Mr. Hormats noted, Roosevelt vowed to mobilize U.S. industry to produce enough weapons so we would have a "crushing superiority" in arms over our enemies. Four years after the start of the Iraq war, this administration has still not equipped all our soldiers with the armor they need.
In other words, both Vietnam and Iraq failed not because they were stupid, vicious occupations of culturally alien populations that despised our very presence and were willing to sacrifice scads of their own lives to send us home. No, the problem was that we didn't make an effort to "re-evaluate tax and spending policies" and "shift resources" into an "all-out" war effort.
The notion that our problem in Iraq is a resource deficit is pure, unadulterated madness. Our enemies don't have airplanes or armor. They are fighting us with garage-door openers and fifty year-old artillery shells, sneaking around barefoot in the middle of the night ... to plant roadside bombs. Anytime anyone dares oppose us in the daylight, we vaporize them practically from space using weapons that cost more than the annual budgets of most Arab countries to design. We outnumber the active combatants on the other side by at least five to one. This year, we will spend more on the military than the rest of the world combined -- more than six hundred billion dollars. And yet Tom Friedman thinks the problem in Iraq is that we ordinary Americans didn't tighten our belts enough to support the war effort.
Friedman should be hung upside down and have holes drilled in his skull for even suggesting this, of course. We're talking about one of the richest men in media, a guy who in recent years got still richer beating the drum for this war from his $9.3 million, 11,400 square-foot mansion in suburban Maryland. He is married to a shopping mall heiress worth nearly $3 billion; the Washingtonian says he is part of one of the 100 richest families in America. And yet he has the balls to turn around and tell us that the pointless, asinine war he cheerleaded for failed because we didn't sacrifice enough for it. Are you reaching for the railroad spike yet?
This being tax season, I want you all to think about this Friedman column as you prepare your returns, because I'll bet anything he's surfing ahead of a trend here. If the next president is John McCain, or even if it isn't, you can be damn sure that we're going to hear a lot about how we blew Iraq because there weren't enough troops or resources shifted into Iraq.
You're going to hear that we didn't have money to pay for body armor, when the reality is that the reason troops didn't have body armor in recent years is that congressmen robbed the operations and maintenance accounts of the defense budget to pay for earmarks/pork projects (they took $9 billion in pork and earmarks out of the O&M allotment in 2005, for instance). They robbed the part of the budget that paid for ordinary soldiers‚ gear so they wouldn't have to touch the F-22 Raptor, the CVN(X) aircraft carrier, or any of the other mega-expensive and mostly useless weapons programs. I mean, think about it -- how else can you spend $600 billion dollars on the military every year and not have body armor for the soldiers deployed at war? Somewhere, someone who doesn't need it has to be sucking up that money.
But trust me, the myth is going to be that you didn't cough up enough for the war. It's your fault we failed, not Tom Friedman's. So put all three of your hands in your pockets and dig out that change you're holding back. We'll need it for his next great idea.

Read the whole piece....

A modest proposal

2007-03-06T19:00:00.000-08:00

Andrew Bacevich, career military man and self-avowed conservative, always seems to be on the money when he talks about foreign policy--and I'm speaking as a hard-core pinko pacifist.

Today, in the Boston Globe, Bacevich, who currently teaches at Boston University, makes some recommendations for a series of concrete proposals the Democrats can make to reverse the creepy, poorly thought-out, and murderous Bush Doctrine.

First, Bachevich brings us up to speed on just how big a grab Bush made when he declared a Doctrine in his own name:

Long viewed as immoral, illicit, and imprudent, preventive war -- attacking to keep an adversary from someday posing a danger -- became the centerpiece of US national security strategy in the aftermath of 9/11. President Bush unveiled this new strategy in a speech at West Point in June 2002. "If we wait for threats to fully materialize," he said, "we will have waited too long." The new imperative was to strike before threats could form. Bush declared it the policy of the United States to "impose preemptive, unilateral military force when and where it chooses."

Although the Constitution endows the legislative branch with the sole authority to declare war, the president did not consult Congress before announcing his new policy. He promulgated the Bush Doctrine by fiat. Then he acted on it.

Bacevich then proceeds to offer up some baby steps the Democratic-controlled Congress can take to at least begin to restore a semblance of sanity to U.S. foreign policy:

The fifth anniversary of President Bush's West Point speech approaches. Prior to that date, Democratic leaders should offer a binding resolution that makes the following three points: First, the United States categorically renounces preventive war. Second, the United States will henceforth consider armed force to be an instrument of last resort. Third, except in response to a direct attack on the United States, any future use of force will require prior Congressional authorization, as required by the Constitution.
The legislation should state plainly our determination to defend ourselves and our allies. But it should indicate no less plainly that the United States no longer claims the prerogative of using "preemptive, unilateral military force when and where it chooses."

Declaring the Bush Doctrine defunct will not solve the problems posed by Iraq, but it will reduce the likelihood that we will see more Iraqs in our future. By taking such action, Congress will restore its relevance, its badly tarnished honor, and its standing in the eyes of the American people.

I'm not thrilled with the bit about "stat[ing] plainly our determination to defend ourselves and our allies." Talk about a loophole you can drive an Abrams tank through.

But all the same I have to say I'm all for this sort of thing, and, given the unfortunate realities of mainstream U.S. politics, really think Bacevich would be a presidential candidate I could live with. Do I think his modest proposal has a ghost of a chance with the current Democratic Congress? Naaaaaaaahhhhh.

What's so funny' bout peace, love and ...?

2007-03-04T05:37:00.000-08:00

From the Times:

WASHINGTON, March 2 — About a dozen members of the Out of Iraq Congressional Caucus gathered on a sunny day last summer on the terrace outside the Capitol for a news conference. The only problem: no reporters showed up.

Ha ha. How funny. Of course, the Out of Iraq Caucus actually represents the opinion of a strong majority of Americans (who thought they were voting to bring the troops home last November). Why would anyone want to pay attention?

And why has talk of peace become such a taboo? Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi tries to grapple with the latter question. He begins a recent piece by quoting an ugly note from a Marine fighter pilot in Iraq, who laments that his tour of duty is almost up, because "the opportunities to kill these fuckers is rapidly coming to an end."

Taibbi takes this as an opportunity to actually ponder just how far America has gone down the road to complete militarization, which is pretty rare for a columnist for a mainstream publication:

I'm always wary of these stories about American soldiers acting like hateful, mindlessly violent psychopaths in Iraq, though they're not exactly rare -- from Abu Ghraib of course, to a chilling video of a pilot pointlessly wasting a huge crowd of what appear to be civilians in Fallujah ("Oh, dude!" the pilot chuckles, after the explosion appears to kill dozens), to a gang of squids in the Gulf who lined up on an aircraft carrier deck in a formation that cleverly read "Fuck Iraq," to soldiers running over a cab driver's car with a tank because he was suspected of looting a few pieces of wood to stories about the use of napalm in Tallulah and so on.

It's not that I don't believe these stories, and not that I don't want to hear them. I'm just wary of sullying the debate over this war with a referendum on the behavior of young soldiers who have been placed in an impossible position, sent to fight in a strange and hostile place with no clear mission and no detectable strategy for securing peace or victory. In my mind, all the people in the Bush administration and in Congress and in the media who got these kids sent there in the first place have to be the first ones held responsible for whatever those kids do after being thrown into the fire. I just don't yet have the stomach to start pointing the finger at a bunch of teenagers and twentysomethings who never should have been sent there in the first place.

But the letter from this Marine pilot is something different. What worries me about it is this unabashed glee in killing people from high altitudes might not be a psychiatric aberration, but an inevitable consequence of the entire structure of our economy, which is based heavily on government spending in the area of high-technology defense manufacturing. When [former Pentagon analyst Franklin "Chuck"] Spinney [who forwarded the Marine's note to Taibbi] focuses on this gruesome and bloody letter from a single Marine pilot, he's not ripping an individual soldier but showing graphically how the tail has, by now, wagged the whole dog -- how a society whose economy is based on high-tech defense spending will first tend to gravitate inexorably toward high-tech defense solutions to policy problems, and then over time will raise whole generations instilled with an implicit belief in and enthusiasm for such lunacies as the "surgical strike." Here's how Spinney put it:

We all know that the American Way of War is to use our technology to pour firepower on the enemy from a safe distance. Implicit in this is the central myth of precision bombardment that dates back at least to the Norden Bombsight in World War II...Of course this is all hogwash, as the conduct of the Iraq War has proven once again. Real war is always uncertain and messy and bloody and wasteful and accompanied by profound psychological and moral effects. But these preposterous theories are central to the American Way of War, because they justify the maintenance of a high cost high-tech military which is so essential to the welfare of the parasitic political economy of the military-industrial-congressional complex that is now seamlessly embedded in our political culture.

The reason I'm even writing about Spinney's letter this week is that we're now just seeing come into focus the first outlines of the rhetorical parameters for the 2008 presidential campaign. Among other things, I'm seeing a lot of TV commentators pound home the theme that the Democratic party needs to shed its reputation for "pacifism." An article I saw about Rudy Giuliani last week saluted the former mayor for being sensible on Iraq without being a "peacenik." After four years of Iraq, we still can't talk about peace in public! This evil bullshit has been buried in the commercial media's descriptive campaign language seemingly forever by now, but it may be time -- in the wake of this Iraq disaster -- to start thinking about where it comes from and what effect it may have on the national psyche.

I believe that Marine pilot is driven by the same forces that render the presidential candidacy of someone like Dennis Kucinich impossible in America. A country that feeds itself through the manufacture of war technology is bound to view peace, nonviolence and mercy as seditious concepts. It will create policies first and then people to fit its machines, finding wars to fight and creating killers to fight them. If that's true of us, and I think it is, our troubles won't be over even if someone brings the Iraq war to an end. We'll be treating the symptom and not the disease. And the reason our elections are a sham is that the disease is never on the table. Excepting the occasional Kucinich, no one in either party is interested in trying to change who we are, no matter how sick we become.

Read the whole piece....

Update: And today David Sirota takes the Times to task for its condescending coverage of the Out of Iraq Caucus, which it saddled with a "fringe" image, even with a majority of Americans opposing the war."

Says Sirota:

... Democrats who want to bring the troops home from Iraq do not have a "fringe image" among the public, which also -- according to polls -- strongly wants the same thing. Then again, maybe I'm wrong: Maybe this statement is just a very public admission that editors and reporters at newspapers like The New York Times really believe they get to unilaterally decide "images," not the public; and from their Beltway vantage point where the only Serious People are those neoconservatives who pushed the war in the first place, anyone who wants to end the war is a Dirty Hippie on the "fringe." Either way, this line is stunning (though sadly not shocking) for its sheer idiocy, its Beltway-typical disconnection from public opinion, its deliberate contempt for the majority of the country -- or whatever combination of all three led to its publication.

Underground Hero

2007-03-03T11:15:00.000-08:00

Tom Philpott, writing in Grist, calls Sir Albert Howard an underground hero because he presciently "concerned himself with the ground beneath our feet" (in a time when dirt was thought to be no more than the medium that held N, K and P) and also because his writing has for some time been hard to access. His important texts have been out of print since original publication.

The good news is that the University of Kentucky Press has recently reissued The Soil and Health in a paperback edition.

Well, you may ask, so what? Who was Sir Albert? Philpott provides a concise history of the man and his importance as at the very least the inspiration for the first wave of the organic movement.

A few excerpts:

Around 1900, a 27-year-old British scientist named Albert Howard, a specialist in plant diseases, arrived in Barbados, then a province of the British Empire. His charge was to find cutting-edge cures for diseases that attacked tropical crops like sugar cane, cocoa, bananas, and limes.

To use the terms of the day, his task was to teach natives of the tropics how to grow cash crops for the Mother Country. The method was to be rigorously scientific. He was a "laboratory hermit," he would later write, "intent on learning more and more about less and less."

But the "natives," in turn, had something to teach him. On tours through Barbados and neighboring islands, through "contact with the land itself and the practical men working on it," a new idea dawned on Howard: that "the most promising method for dealing with plant diseases lay in prevention," not in after-the-fact treatments.

The insight was radical. Then, as now, conventional science tended to view plant diseases as isolated phenomena in need of a cure. But Howard began to see diseases as part of a broader whole. As quickly as he could, he fled the controlled environment of the lab and concerned himself with how plants thrive or wither in their own context -- outside in the dirt, tended by farmers.

....Howard began his career not long after the triumph of the Industrial Revolution. The rise of mass production had prompted a mass migration from farms to cities, leaving a dearth of rural labor and a surplus of urban mouths to feed. Tasked with the problem of growing more food with less land and labor, scientists in Howard's time worked to apply industrial techniques to agriculture.

By then, science itself had succumbed to industrialism's division-of-labor logic. The study of plant disease had become a specialized branch of plant science, itself a subset of biology. The task of growing food could only be studied as a set of separate processes, each with its own subset of problems and solutions.

Soil specialists working at that time had isolated the key elements in soil that nurture plants: nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus. Known as N, K, and P, respectively, these three elements still dominate modern fertilizer production. By learning to synthesize them, soil specialists had "solved" the "problem" of soil fertility.

The process for synthesizing nitrogen, it turned out, also made effective explosives. The same specialists who had industrialized agriculture also, as tensions among European powers mounted in the early 20th century, began to think about industrializing war. During World War I, munitions factories sprouted throughout England, using those fertilizer-making techniques to mass-produce explosives.

Soon thereafter, weapons technology repaid its debt to agriculture. As Howard puts it, "When peace came, some use had to be found for the huge factories [that had been] set up and it was obvious to turn them over to the manufacture of [fertilizer] for the land. This fertilizer began to flood the market." These technologies made their way over the Atlantic to the United States.

Thus began modern agriculture. No longer dependent on animal manure to replenish soil, farmers could buy ready-made fertilizer from a fledgling chemical industry. For the first time in history, animal husbandry could be separated from the growing of crops -- and meat, dairy, egg, and crop production could all be intensified. As production boomed, prices for farm goods dropped, forcing many farmers out of business. Technology had triumphed: fewer and fewer people had to concern themselves with growing food.

But Howard prophesied that the victories of industrial agriculture, whose beginnings he lived to see, would prove short-lived. In its obsession with compartmentalization, modern science had failed to see that the health of each of the earth's organisms was deeply interconnected. Against the specialists who thought they had "solved" the fertility problem by isolating a few elements, Howard viewed the "whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal, and man as one great subject."

.... Was Howard right? Despite his gloomy pronouncements, industrial agriculture has so far kept many of its promises. Food production has undeniably boomed over the past century.

And yet, the Green Revolution -- the concerted effort, begun at about the time of The Soil and Health's publication, to spread the benefits of industrial agriculture to the global south -- has failed to eradicate world hunger. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, more than 800 million people live in a state of undernourishment. And in the United States, where industrial agriculture arguably won its most complete victory, diet-related maladies are reaching epidemic proportions. Howard's contention that chemical-dependent soil can't produce healthy food may yet be borne out.

And, of course, industrial agriculture's environmental liabilities are piling up, and could still prove its undoing.

I think the crazy ironic link between the creation of industrial agriculture and the industrialization of armaments can't be stressed enough--and all too few are aware of it. The insights of Howard and Rodale and Wendell Berry and Michael Pollan about the tragic error of the Green Revolution are indisputable. Whether they will have an impact on how most of the industrialized world eats is a huge looming question, right up there with "Will we ever be done with war?" I'm skeptical, but hopeful. I'm off to add The Soil and Health to my bookshelf.

Read the whole essay in Grist....
An appreciation of Sir Albert Howard, with plenty of links for further reading.

Black Snake ha ha

2007-03-02T06:26:00.000-08:00

A rare display of wit in the Arts pages of the Times from A.O. Scott:

Really, though, the character, played with his usual fearsome wit by Samuel L. Jackson, is a tried-and-true Hollywood stock figure: the selfless, spiritually minded African-American who seems to have been put on the earth to help white people work out their self-esteem issues. No doubt “Black Snake Moan” is a provocative title, but a more accurate one might be “Chaining Miss Daisy to the Radiator in Her Underwear.”

Haven't seen the movie, but I'm planning to. So I don't know if I agree with Scott's assessment. But ya gotta give a good line its due....

Shut up and suffer

2007-02-28T18:16:00.001-08:00

... and just in case the wounded vets in Walter Reed's Medical Hold Unit don't feel like suffering in silence, they're being moved to an area that's inaccessible to journalists.

Just when I thought the outrage meter couldn't possibly tick any higher, this hideous story shows that the White House and Pentagon are still capable of shocking the world with their indifference and contempt for the very troops they so loudly proclaim they represent.

From the Army Times story titled "Troops told to keep quiet":

Soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s Medical Hold Unit say they have been told they will wake up at 6 a.m. every morning and have their rooms ready for inspection at 7 a.m., and that they must not speak to the media.
“Some soldiers believe this is a form of punishment for the trouble soldiers caused by talking to the media,” one Medical Hold Unit soldier said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
It is unusual for soldiers to have daily inspections after Basic Training.
Soldiers say their sergeant major gathered troops at 6 p.m. Monday to tell them they must follow their chain of command when asking for help with their medical evaluation paperwork, or when they spot mold, mice or other problems in their quarters.
They were also told they would be moving out of Building 18 to Building 14 within the next couple of weeks. Building 14 is a barracks that houses the administrative offices for the Medical Hold Unit and was renovated in 2006. It’s also located on the Walter Reed Campus, where reporters must be escorted by public affairs personnel. Building 18 is located just off campus and is easy to access.

"The hippies" finally get through

2007-01-14T06:31:00.000-08:00

Dallas Morning News columnist (and National Review Online contributor) Rod Dreher had an epiphany this week, as he recounted in an NPR interview:

As I sat in my office last night watching President Bush deliver his big speech, I seethed over the waste, the folly, the stupidity of this war.

I had a heretical thought for a conservative -- that I have got to teach my kids that they must never, ever take Presidents and Generals at their word -- that their government will send them to kill and die for noble-sounding rot -- that they have to question authority.

On the walk to the parking garage, it hit me. Hadn't the hippies tried to tell my generation that? Why had we scorned them so blithely?

The "heretical thought" is kind of confusing to me. Distrust of presidents and generals would seem to go hand in hand with any true conservative, libertarian thought. But for some reason the American brand of conservatism has always exempted the military from their comprehension of "Big Gubmint" instead of its most wasteful, destructive manifestation.

But no matter. Rod has come around, and good for him.

Dreher is an interesting conservative, it must be said. He is the author of a recently published book with the ungainly title Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican party).

In which he explores a potential common ground, based in healthy local food consumption between conservatives and left-leaning granola types, a nexus I see every time I pick up a copy of one of my favorite magazines, the Stockman Grass Farmer.

It's a bloody fortune for some people

2007-01-12T06:47:00.000-08:00

Harry would be so proud....

“Mr. Reed, what do you think this war is about?”
“PROFITS.” -- Reds

Writing in Counterpunch, Ismael Hossein-zadeh, the author of The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism, takes a look at something that's lost in all the false discourse about why we're in Iraq. It's not about security, or democracy, or too few troops. It's about the bottom line....

I like the distinction he brings up between vulgar colonialism (which at least had the benefit of seeing some of the booty trickle down to the masses at home) and the parasitic colonialism practiced today, which sucks the home country's coffers dry....

No business model or entrepreneurial paradigm can adequately capture the nature of this kind of scheming and profiteering. Not even illicit businesses based on rent-seeking, corruption or theft can sufficiently describe the kind of nefarious business interests that lurk behind the Bush administration's preemptive wars. Only a calculated imperial or colonial kind of exploitation, albeit a new form of colonialism or imperialism, can capture the essence of the war profiteering associated with the recent US wars of aggression. As Shalmali Guttal, a Bangalore-based researcher put it, "We used to have vulgar colonialism. Now we have sophisticated colonialism, and they call it 'reconstruction.'"

Classical colonial or imperial powers roamed on the periphery of the capitalist center, "discovered" new territories, and drained them off of their riches and resources. Today there are no new places in our planet to be "discovered." But there are many vulnerable sovereign countries whose governments can be overthrown, their infrastructures smashed to the ground, and fortunes made as a result (of both destruction and "reconstruction). And herein lies the genius of a parasitically efficient market mechanism, as well as a major driving force behind the Bush administration's unprovoked unilateral wars of choice.

Not only does the new form of imperial or colonial aggression, driven largely by the powerful interests that are vested in the armaments industries and other war-based businesses, bring calamity to the vanquished, but it is also detrimental and burdensome to the victor, namely, the imperium and its citizens. Contrary to the external military operations of past empires, which usually brought benefits not only to the imperial ruling classes but also (through "trickle-down" effects) to their citizens, U.S. military expeditions and operations of late are not justifiable even on the grounds of national economic gains.

Indeed, escalating US military expansions and aggressions have become ever more wasteful and cost-inefficient as they are hollowing out the public treasury, undermining social spending, and accumulating national debt. Viewed in this light, the new form of imperialism can perhaps be called "parasitic" imperialism.

War profiteering is, of course, not new; it has always existed in the course of the history of warfare. What makes war profiteering in the context of the recent US wars of choice unique and extremely dangerous to world peace and stability, however, is the fact that it has become a major driving force behind war and militarism.
This is key to an understanding of why the US ruling elite is reluctant to pull US troops out of Iraq. The reluctance or "difficulty" of leaving Iraq stems not so much from pulling 140,000 troops out of that country as it is from pulling out more than 100,000 contractors. As Josh Mitteldorf of the University of Arizona recently put it, "There are a lot of contractors making a fortune and we don't want that money tap turned off, even though it is borrowed money, which our children and grandchildren will have to repay."
It follows that US troops will not be withdrawn from Iraq as long as antiwar voices are not raised beyond the premises and parameters of the official narrative or justification of the war: terrorism, democracy, civil war, stability, human rights, and the like. Antiwar forces need to extricate themselves from the largely diversionary and constraining debate over these secondary issues, and raise public consciousness of the scandalous economic interests that drive the war.

It is crucially important that public attention is shifted away from the confining official narrative of the war, parroted by the corporate media and political pundits, to the economic crimes that have been committed because of this war, both in Iraq and here in the United States. It is time to make a moral case for restoring Iraqi oil and other assets to the Iraqis. It is also time to make a moral case against the war profiteers' plundering of our treasury, or tax dollars. To paraphrase the late General Smedley D. Butler, most wars could easily be ended-they might not even be started-if profits are taken out of them.
Read the whole article....

Well, there's a thought. What about introducing legislation to forbid profiting from war? Think that one will fly?

While the democrats congratulate themselves ...

2007-01-11T10:41:00.001-08:00

... on their symbolic protests, the Bush administration has basically opened war fronts in two new countries. There was that appallingly transparent massacre of civilians by helicopter gunships earlier in the week in Somalia, (a grotesque show of force on defenseless targets, timed to coincide with Bush's speech, with the inevitable deaths of innocents and just as inevitable belated admission that the "mission" failed), and now today U.S. troops stormed an Iranian consulate in Irbil, northern Iraq, this morning and basically kidnapped six employees. The Times reports that "Fuad Hussein, the spokesman for the president of the [Kurdish, pro-American] semiautonomous territory, Massoud Barzani. Mr. Hussein called the raid an 'abduction.'"

All the headlines are consumed with meta-commentary on how Bush's speech played in Peoria. Meanwhile, Bush continues to do whatever the hell he feels like. Should we be surprised? His press secretary Tony Snow, who at least wins points for candor, comes right out and says it, "the President will not shape policy according to public opinion."

On what Bush has in store for Iran, there have been two great analyses posted today: Tony Karon, Bush’s New Iraq Plan: Bomb Tehran, and Glenn Greenwald, President's intentions towards Iran need much more attention.

Here's Greenwald:

I think there is a tendency to dismiss the possibility of some type of war with Iran because it is so transparently destructive and detached from reality that it seems unfathomable. But if there is one lesson that everyone should have learned over the last six years, it is that there is no action too extreme or detached from reality to be placed off limits to this administration. The President is a True Believer and the moral imperative of his crusade trumps the constraints of reality.

The AEI/Weekly Standard/National Review/Fox News neonconservative warmongers are mocked because of how extremist and deranged their endless war desires are, but the President is, more or less, one of them. He thinks the way they think. The war in Iraq has collapsed and the last election made unmistakably clear that Americans have turned against the war, and the President's response, like their response, was to escalate. How much more proof do we need of how extremist and unconstrained by public opinion and basic reality he is?

And Karon:

But it was the characterization of Iran’s role that was most disturbing [about Bush's speech]. Bush suggested that the Iraqi people had voted for united country at the polls, and seen their dreams dashed by the maneuvering of Iran and Syria and others. That’s a crock. Iran enthusiastically supported those elections, and why wouldn’t they? The Shiite majority voted overwhelmingly in favor of parties far closer to Tehran than they are to Washington. Moreover, while Bush implies that sectarianism was somehow a deviation from what the electorate had chosen, in fact the electorate had voted almost entirely on sectarian and ethnic lines. The sectarian principle is at the heart of the democratically elected government; it’s not some imposition by al-Qaeda or Iran.

Iran and Syria must be addressed, Bush said, but only as a threat — he accused them of offering support to insurgent forces attacking U.S. troops, and vowed to stop them. Almost in the same breath, he added: “We are also taking other steps to bolster the security of Iraq and protect American interests in the Middle East. I recently ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region. We will expand intelligence sharing and deploy Patriot air defense systems to reassure our friends and allies. We will work with the governments of Turkey and Iraq to help them resolve problems along their border. And we will work with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating the region.”

Carrier strike groups and Patriot missile defenses are of no use in the counterinsurgency war in Iraq: They are an attempt to turn up the heat on Iran by preparing for an air strike, and putting in place the means to contain Iran’s response via its missile capability. Bush called for regional support, but only on the basis of his anti-Iran alliance — for the Sunni regimes, support for the U.S. in Iraq was cited as a duty in light of their common purpose in containing Iran.

So, essentially we’re now being asked to believe that the Iraqi government, dominated by Iran-friendly Shiite religious parties, is going to act in concert with Bush’s plan — and even Bush admitted that their support is the critical factor — giving U.S. forces the green light to take control of Sadr City from the Sadrists and so on, even as Washington moves its assets into position for a military strike on Iran. It may be, of course, that Washington is posturing in order to sweat Tehran into believing that a military strike is coming in order to intimidate the Islamic Republic into backing down, but frankly I wouldn’t bet on the collective strategic wisdom of Cheney-Rice and Khamenei-Larijani-Ahmedinajad combining to avoid a confrontation. And if the U.S. is raising the stakes, you can reliably expect Iran to do the same, probably starting in Iraq.

Oh, yeah, and on the other front, that Somalia massacre didn't get the al qaeda baddies after all. Quelle surprise!

And the number of shepherds, children and newlywed couples whose flesh was shredded by helicopter gunship fire continue to climb....

"We are really scared," said [Dirir Moalim Hussein, a herder]. "We heard bombing and heavy explosions over our village, it was dark and no one could see well. I ran with two children, I don't know in what direction, but three of my family were killed, including my wife."

"I have nothing right now," Hussein said. "I have lost everything, they have bombed my cows and goats, we don’t know what crime we committed and we have been punished for no reason.”

Justin Raimondo sums it up with his characteristic biting sarcasm:

The series of blunders and willful miscalculations that led to our present predicament in Iraq are now being replicated in Somalia, where a rather large U.S. footprint is being stamped into the hard Somali soil. Well, it isn't a footprint, quite yet, but rather a series of bomb craters, where the lives of "many" civilians, according to news reports, have been summarily ended. U.S. bombing raids, ostensibly aimed at al-Qaeda fighters supposedly hidden among native Islamic militias, have succeeded in killing scores, albeit none of the three dudes we are allegedly after. That's right: we're bombing a country because we're after a terrorist trio....

The tormented fat kid with the wedgie

2007-01-08T12:05:00.000-08:00

If we have to live in a world where Thomas Friedman is considered a wise man, we at least have the consolation of a Matt Taibbi, who has proven to be so sharp on the utter fatuousness of the Cult of the man with the "Seventies porn-star mustache." (David Rees is pretty good too. See above....)

Taibbi will always have a hard time surpassing his "Flathead" column, back before he was Rolling Stone's politics guy, but today he makes a mighty brave effort with this rant about the Saddam Hussein hanging debacle, one where he describes who, exactly, got us into Iraq.

Remember that this war was cooked up by American bureaucrats, people who know an awful lot more about bowling than they do about Islam. True, there were a few genuine lunatics involved in dreaming up the invasion -- that crazy fraternity of neocon academics, wanna-be revolutionaries who spent the whole 1990s bitter about Clinton and wired on coffee and Goldwater biographies, waiting for their Big Chance. Those people came up with the specific details of the Iraq plan (when, where, ostensibly why) and it's doubtful that anyone else but a lunatic could have dreamed up those particulars, since their logic generally eludes the sane and the normal.

But the engine behind this entire escapade was really the great mass of ordinary Beltway apparatchiks and media creatures who cheerfully assented once the idea squirted out of Bush's mouth. You're talking about a bunch of half-bright golfers from the Virginian suburbs, people raised on Archie comics and fuzzy patriotic platitudes and old saws gleaned from William Holden war movies and their postwar corporate-executive dads. They went for the war because people they trusted told them it was a good idea, and some of them even ended up running parts of the operation, either in Iraq or in positions of responsibility here at home.

Tom Friedman is the oracle of this crowd, the tormented fat kid with a wedgie who got smart in his high school years and figured out that all he had to do to be successful was shamelessly and relentlessly flatter his Greatest-Generation parents, stroke their outdated prejudices, sell them on the idea that the entire aim of the modernization process is the spreading of their amazing legacy through the use of space-age technology.
So he goes into America's sleepy suburbs with his Seventies porn-star mustache and he titillates the book clubs full of bored fifty- and sixtysomething housewives with tales of how the Internet is going to turn Afghanistan into Iowa. The suburban guys he ropes in with a half-baked international policy analysis -- what's "going on" on "the Street," as Friedman usually puts it -- that he cleverly makes sound like the world's sexiest collection of stock tips: "So I was playing golf with the Saudi energy minister last week, and he told me..."
This is just a modern take on the same old bullshit rap that traveling salesmen all over America have been laying on wide-eyed yokels at 99 Steak Houses and Howard Johnsons hotel bars for decades: So I was having lunch with Jack Welch at the Four Seasons last week when I heard about this amazing opportunity.... And these middle-manager types who live in Midwestern cubicles or in the bowels of some federal bureaucracy in Maryland eat it up: They buy every one of Friedman's books, treat his every word like gospel and before you know it they're all talking about Israeli politics and "the situation" in Yemen or Turkey or wherever like they're experts.

And so this is how we got where we are. You get a whole nation full of people who spend 99 percent of their free time worrying about their lawns or their short iron game, you convince them that they know something about something they actually know nothing about, and next thing you know, they're blundering into a 1,000-year blood feud between rival Islamic groups, shooting things left and right in a panic, and thinking that they can make it all right and correct each successive fuckup by "keeping our noses to the grindstone" and "making lemons out of lemonade."

Read the whole piece...

The Pentagon's fantasies of containing "failed, feral cities"

2007-01-08T07:38:00.000-08:00

Paul Verhoeven's Robocop seems more and more to be the inspiration for the Pentagon's wet dreams of world domination. The United States military has deduced, after getting its ass kicked time and time again by brown people armed only with seat-of-the-pants technology and local knowledge, that it needs more, smarter firepower, if it hopes to control the planets favelas -- from Baghdad to Bogota -- where resistance to American domination is sure to be based. If there's a very nice payday in these schemes for military contractors at the public's expense, well, so much the better....

Nick Turse points out rather well in his Pentagon to Global Cities -- Drop Dead, that ever since the Pentagon became, well, the Pentagon, the American record in war fighting has really pretty much been for shit. Lots of death and destruction, to be sure, but not many W's:

[E]ven with high-tech exploding frisbees, spider-man suits, terminator-like robots, and urban training facilities galore coming on line. In the wars begun since the U.S. high command moved into its own self-described virtual "city" -- the Pentagon -- a distinct inability to decisively defeat any but its weakest foes has been in evidence.

Well, the planners and dreamers reason, we just haven't been throwing enough tax dollars at the problem, so they have redoubled their efforts to create an array of lethal, high-tech gadgets that would make Q of James Bond fame salivate.

But my thinking is that, after the contractors who develop the HURTS (Heterogeneous Urban RSTA Teams) and Nano air vehicles (mechanized gnats, I kid you not) receive their handsome slice of our hard-earned bucks, the Imperial Dreamers will still be at Square One. I'm thinking that their best efforts will result in something that more resembles the ED-209 -- the extremly lethal machine that couldn't handle going down stairs -- than Robocop himself.

At least I hope that to be the case, because by the time all these systems are in place, I fear that there won't be a very distinct line in the Pentagon's thinking to distinguish between domestic and foreign-born troublemakers. Is it too paranoid to think that these tools of destruction will surely work as well in neutralizing "terrorists" and "drug dealers" ... in Detroit as in Dhakka....

As Tom Englehardt writes in his introduction to Turse's piece:

The future -- whether imagined as utopian or dystopian -- was, not so long ago, the province of dreamers, or actual writers of fiction, or madmen and cranks, or reformers and journalists, or even wanna-be war-fighters, but not so regularly of actual war-fighters, or secretaries of defense, or presidents. In our time, the Pentagon and the IC have quite literally become the fantasy-based community. And yet, strangely enough, the urge of our top policy-makers (and allied academics and scientists) to spend their time in relatively distant futures has been little explored or considered by others.

A couple of things can be said about this near compulsion. First, it's largely confined to the arts of war. There is no equivalent in our government when it comes to health care or education, retirement or housing. No well-funded government think-tanks and lousy-with-loot research organizations are ready to let anyone loose dreaming about our planet's endangered environment, for instance. The future -- the only one our government seems truly to care about -- is most distinctly not good for you. It's a totally weaponized, grimly dystopian health hazard for the planet.

Of course, future fictions are notorious for their wrong-headedness. All you have to do is check out old utopian or dystopian fiction, if you don't believe me. The scandal here is not that, like most human beings, our soldiers and spies are sure to be desperately wrong on most aspects of their future fictions. The scandal is that we're mortgaging our wealth and our futures, whatever they may be, to their bloodcurdling, self-interested, and often absurd fantasies.
After all, they're running a giant, massively profitable business operation off fictional futures, while creating their own armed reality at our expense.

Later this week on Tomdispatch, writes Englehardt, Frida Berrigan will explore another aspect of "the future the Pentagon has planned for us," an overview of the major American weapons systems "being prepared for a planet that will never exist."

Snark attack

2007-01-07T07:57:00.000-08:00

Deborah Solomon's interviews in the Times' magazine are typically lively and entertaining, often for the way she can manage to slip in tricky, difficult questions. It's fun to see coddled celebrities squirm.

But at the tail end of today's interview with Yusuf Islam, the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens, Solomon wields a very clumsy ideological axe and insists that for Mr. Islam to be considered a "moderate" Muslim, he "denounce" "the extremist fringe" of the Muslims religion. Islam handles the ham-handed--and frankly racist--questioning with exemplary grace, but that doesn't excuse it.

How do you support yourself these days — off your old hits?
I think we sell about 1.5 million albums a year.
Which is how much in royalties? About a dollar an album?
Probably more.
For all your devotion to education and good deeds, government officials in various countries have tried to link you to extremist groups, including Hamas. What do you think of Hamas?
That’s an extremely loaded question.
Can you try to answer it?
I have never supported a terrorist group or any group that did other than charity and good to humankind.
O.K., but many of us here in the States would like to see moderate Muslims make more of an effort to denounce the extremist fringe of the faith. Very few mainstream Muslims have publicly criticized their radical brethren.
If I am not an example of that, then tell me, Who is?
So would you say you have contempt for a terrorist group like Hamas?
I wouldn’t put those words in my mouth. I wouldn’t say anything on that issue. I’m here to talk about peace. I’m a man who does want peace for this world, and I don’t think you will achieve that by putting people into corners and asking them very, very difficult questions about very contentious issues.

"Many of us here in the states would like to see moderate Muslims make more of an effort to denounce the extremist fringe of the faith." Anyone with any sophistication could see that that sentence contains the assumption that Muslims are uniquely violent. And Solomon further compounds her ignorance by stating that Americans as a group --"many of us here in the States"--share this prejudice. It just ain't so.

Which brings to mind Jennifer L. Pozner's article that ran in the aftermath of the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Our media preserves the "terrorist" word for a small subset of terrorists, the foreign born ones. Historically, in terms of frequency and distribution of murderous attacks, domestic terrorists, (most of them intensely Christian-identified), have been a much greater danger to Americans, especially those who ever find themselves in the vicinity of an abortion clinic. But you'd never know that by reading most newspapers.

On Sept. 11, 2006, the fifth anniversary of the terror attacks that devastated our nation, a man crashed his car into a building in Davenport, Iowa, hoping to blow it up and kill himself in the fire.
No national newspaper, magazine or network newscast reported this attempted suicide bombing, though an AP wire story was available. Cable news (save for MSNBC's Keith Olbermann) was silent about this latest act of terrorism in America.
Had the criminal, David McMenemy, been Arab or Muslim, this would have been headline news for weeks. But since his target was the Edgerton Women's Health Center, rather than, say, a bank or a police station, media have not called this terrorism -- even after three decades of extreme violence by anti-abortion fanatics, mostly fundamentalist Christians who believe they're fighting a holy war.
Since 1977, casualties from this war include seven murders, 17 attempted murders, three kidnappings, 152 assaults, 305 completed or attempted bombings and arsons, 375 invasions, 482 stalking incidents, 380 death threats, 618 bomb threats, 100 acid attacks, and 1,254 acts of vandalism, according to the National Abortion Federation.

By Solomon's line of thinking, all Christians --or Jews, or Hindus--should be called upon to denounce the actions of their more radical brethren. Somehow, I don't see that happening.

Look, I understand Solomon's basically paid to be a bit of a bitch, but here her stereotyping in dangerous and inflammatory. A quick look at the right-wing blog response confirms that Yusuf Islam has failed the reactionary's favorite litmus test: "Cat Stevens REFUSES to denounce Hamas." [Name's not Cat Stevens, dude. Shades of the late sixties: it's a lot like the sportswriters who persisted in calling Muhammad Ali Cassius Clay].

Callling Hamas a terrorist organization, and leaving it at that, is typical of the oversimplifications that permeate the pages of the Times. I hadn't realized that this dumbed-down conventional wisdom had penetrated to what's supposed to be one of the most lighthearted features in that that publication. For a much more sophisticated view of what Hamas actually is, I'd suggest starting with this post from Tony Karon's Rootless Cosmopolitan.

Pure (low-budget) Hollywood

2006-12-31T08:27:00.000-08:00

As the Angry Arab points out, the New York Times' "Defiant Despot" retrospective on Saddam's reign avoids making any reference "to the support that Saddam was getting from Gulf governments and from Western governments for much of the 1970s and 1980s. "

Chris Floyd gets more specific:

[W]hat you will not find is any detail or examination whatsoever of the prominent, direct and continuing role the United States government played in bringing Saddam to power, maintaining him in office, underwriting his tyranny, and rewarding his aggression. This decades-long history -- beginning with the CIA's assistance in not one but two coups that first brought the Baath Party to power then cemented the hold of Saddam's internal faction on the country through the journey to Baghdad by the obsequious Donald Rumsfeld who came bearing words of support, bags of cash and military high-tech for Saddam's chemical weapons attacks on Iran down to the delivery of money, WMD technology and other goods of war by George Herbert Walker Bush up to the very day before Saddam's long-threatened invasion of Kuwait, which Bush's personal representative had told the dictator was of no concern to the United States -- does not appear in McFarquhar's mountain of prose.

You'll find damning reference to Saddam's gas attack on Iraqi Kurds during the Reagan-Bush-supported war with Iran; but you will find not a single word of how the Bush I administration, which included Powell and Cheney, fought hard to kill off Congressional condemnation of the gassing. Nor does McFarquhar see fit to inform the public how Bush I signed a presidential directive mandating that U.S. government agencies forge ever-stronger ties with Iraq, despite the caveats of his own intelligence apparatus. And although McFarquhar finds space to quote from Saddam's ludicrous novels, he cannot quite squeeze in any reference to the Congressional investigations and other probes that revealed how Bush I secretly financed Saddam and, with British help, secretly supplied him with advanced weaponry through a series of corporate cut-outs and funneling cash through the bowels of what the U.S. Senate described as "one of the largest criminal enterprises in history" (until Junior Bush's gang came along), the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

Nope, the Paper of Record's paints a portrait of the dead tyrant (or his double) as the opposite of a deus ex machina--an "evil" man who came out of nowhere to oppress his own people. Whatever that is in Latin...

Robert Fisk points out there are others who might be held responsible for today's Iraq:

In the aftermath of the international crimes against humanity of 2001 we have tortured, we have murdered, we have brutalised and killed the innocent - we have even added our shame at Abu Ghraib to Saddam's shame at Abu Ghraib - and yet we are supposed to forget these terrible crimes as we applaud the swinging corpse of the dictator we created.
Who encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, which was the greatest war crime he has committed for it led to the deaths of a million and a half souls? And who sold him the components for the chemical weapons with which he drenched Iran and the Kurds? We did. No wonder the Americans, who controlled Saddam's weird trial, forbad any mention of this, his most obscene atrocity, in the charges against him. Could he not have been handed over to the Iranians for sentencing for this massive war crime? Of course not. Because that would also expose our culpability.
And the mass killings we perpetrated in 2003 with our depleted uranium shells and our "bunker buster" bombs and our phosphorous, the murderous post-invasion sieges of Fallujah and Najaf, the hell-disaster of anarchy we unleashed on the Iraqi population in the aftermath of our "victory" - our "mission accomplished" - who will be found guilty of this?

And what do the Iraqis think of this "closure"? Is everything better now? Riverbend, God bless her, has, as usual, a few choice words:

A day in the life of the average Iraqi has been reduced to identifying corpses, avoiding car bombs and attempting to keep track of which family members have been detained, which ones have been exiled and which ones have been abducted.

2006 has been, decidedly, the worst year yet. No- really. The magnitude of this war and occupation is only now hitting the country full force. It's like having a big piece of hard, dry earth you are determined to break apart. You drive in the first stake in the form of an infrastructure damaged with missiles and the newest in arms technology, the first cracks begin to form. Several smaller stakes come in the form of politicians like Chalabi, Al Hakim, Talbani, Pachachi, Allawi and Maliki. The cracks slowly begin to multiply and stretch across the once solid piece of earth, reaching out towards its edges like so many skeletal hands. And you apply pressure. You surround it from all sides and push and pull. Slowly, but surely, it begins coming apart- a chip here, a chunk there.

That is Iraq right now. The Americans have done a fine job of working to break it apart. This last year has nearly everyone convinced that that was the plan right from the start. There were too many blunders for them to actually have been, simply, blunders. The 'mistakes' were too catastrophic. The people the Bush administration chose to support and promote were openly and publicly terrible- from the conman and embezzler Chalabi, to the terrorist Jaffari, to the militia man Maliki. The decisions, like disbanding the Iraqi army, abolishing the original constitution, and allowing militias to take over Iraqi security were too damaging to be anything but intentional.

The question now is, but why? I really have been asking myself that these last few days. What does America possibly gain by damaging Iraq to this extent? I'm certain only raving idiots still believe this war and occupation were about WMD or an actual fear of Saddam.

Al Qaeda? That's laughable. Bush has effectively created more terrorists in Iraq these last 4 years than Osama could have created in 10 different terrorist camps in the distant hills of Afghanistan. Our children now play games of 'sniper' and 'jihadi', pretending that one hit an American soldier between the eyes and this one overturned a Humvee.

This last year especially has been a turning point. Nearly every Iraqi has lost so much. So much. There's no way to describe the loss we've experienced with this war and occupation. There are no words to relay the feelings that come with the knowledge that daily almost 40 corpses are found in different states of decay and mutilation. There is no compensation for the dense, black cloud of fear that hangs over the head of every Iraqi. Fear of things so out of ones hands, it borders on the ridiculous- like whether your name is 'too Sunni' or 'too Shia'. Fear of the larger things- like the Americans in the tank, the police patrolling your area in black bandanas and green banners, and the Iraqi soldiers wearing black masks at the checkpoint.

Again, I can't help but ask myself why this was all done? What was the point of breaking Iraq so that it was beyond repair? Iran seems to be the only gainer. Their presence in Iraq is so well-established, publicly criticizing a cleric or ayatollah verges on suicide. Has the situation gone so beyond America that it is now irretrievable? Or was this a part of the plan all along? My head aches just posing the questions.

What has me most puzzled right now is: why add fuel to the fire? Sunnis and moderate Shia are being chased out of the larger cities in the south and the capital. Baghdad is being torn apart with Shia leaving Sunni areas and Sunnis leaving Shia areas- some under threat and some in fear of attacks. People are being openly shot at check points or in drive by killings… Many colleges have stopped classes. Thousands of Iraqis no longer send their children to school- it's just not safe.

Why make things worse by insisting on Saddam's execution now? Who gains if they hang Saddam? Iran, naturally, but who else? There is a real fear that this execution will be the final blow that will shatter Iraq. Some Sunni and Shia tribes have threatened to arm their members against the Americans if Saddam is executed. Iraqis in general are watching closely to see what happens next, and quietly preparing for the worst.

This is because now, Saddam no longer represents himself or his regime. Through the constant insistence of American war propaganda, Saddam is now representative of all Sunni Arabs (never mind most of his government were Shia). The Americans, through their speeches and news articles and Iraqi Puppets, have made it very clear that they consider him to personify Sunni Arab resistance to the occupation. Basically, with this execution, what the Americans are saying is "Look- Sunni Arabs- this is your man, we all know this. We're hanging him- he symbolizes you." And make no mistake about it, this trial and verdict and execution are 100% American. Some of the actors were Iraqi enough, but the production, direction and montage was pure Hollywood (though low-budget, if you ask me).

The end of a beautiful friendship

2006-12-29T16:59:00.000-08:00

Chris Floyd on the (probably) soon-to-be-deceased Iraqi leader (or, possibly, his Body Double #7):

The decades-long record of American collusion in the crimes of Saddam Hussein is clear and overwhelming -- and has been documented not only by news organizations like the Los Angeles Times but also by investigations of the United States Congress. Yet not a word of this is breathed in the media or Congress today; it is as if it never existed. And now the American-formed, American-backed government is about to take Saddam from American custody and hang him on an American-built gallows. It's like Al Capone throwing the switch with Frank Nitti in the chair.

Few will mourn Saddam -- a thug enthroned with the help of the CIA and sustained in power for years by the Bush Faction which is now about to kill him. The falling out of thieves ends ever thus. But far more disturbing is the way that the memory of even very recent, very public events can be manipulated and erased for sinister ends: in this case, to justify the mass murder of more than 600,000 innocent people. In the fever dreams of dominance and divine favor that pollute the minds of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, the idea has taken hold that the blood of Saddam Hussein will somehow wash the clotted viscera of dead children from their hands.

It will not. It will lead only to more blood. But this is nothing now to such men. They are each, like Saddam, like Macbeth, "in blood stepp'd so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er. Strange things I have in head, that will to hand."

Strange things indeed are in their heads, and we have yet to sup full of the horrors they are willing into being.

FDA: Cloned animals safe to eat ... and WON'T have to be labelled!

2006-12-28T17:58:00.000-08:00

It only makes sense.

In a nation where 89 percent oppose escalation of the Iraq catastrophe, and yet the government bullies its way forward with nary a whimper of dissent from the media or opposition party, there's a perversely symmetrical logic to the FDA's declaration, in the face of overwhelming public wariness, that cloned meat and dairy products are safe.

So safe that there's no need to identify cloned products as such. And here's betting that alternative producers will be forbidden from advertising their products as NOT cloned.

OK. It's almost too obvious to say. Cloned food is "safe" not because all possible ramifications and side effects have been looked into (they have not), but because big money corporate interests stand to make megabucks off the technology.

The best comment to date I've seen was on a grist message board from one SM Lowry (in fact, it was the ONLY message on the message board. Kinda scary that this announcement didn't have a broad ohmyfuckingod impact) :

This is really no surprise, and activists who oppose cloning have no definitive proof that eating cloned meat poses a problem. On the other hand, those who support it have no definitive proof that it doesn't. No one has eaten cloned meat or slurped milk from cloned cows long enough for there to be statistics one way or another. But, in when the agenda is controlled by those who benefit one way or another, precaution is ignored in favor of profit. Ten years down the road we may discover many problems we didn't know existed today. At least cloned animals aren't going to be spreading their genetically engineered sperm all over the place like the GE pollen from plants.

The thing that gets me with all of this (and with GE foods, too) is no labeling will be required. So once this stuff comes on the market the only thing those opposed to it can do is not buy meat or milk except from small-scale, local farmers who promise not to use cloned animals. (Which isn't such a terrible thing, really). Also the industry will probably try to use legal force to forbid farms and markets from labeling as they did with dairy producers that labeled their products BGH free.

Here's the comment from the Consumer Federation of America:

The Food and Drug Administration today announced it intends to allow cloned
milk and meat in the food supply, imposing these products on a public that
opposes cloning technology and does not want to consume cloned foods.

The Gallup Research Organization reports that over 60 percent of Americans
think animal cloning is immoral. Other respected independent polls report
consumers declare they will not knowingly eat the products even after FDA
approves them. Both FDA and the cloning industry are aware that consumers
won’t knowingly buy cloned foods. The FDA therefore has okayed selling the
products without identifying labels, preventing consumers from choosing not to
purchase and use cloned foods.

CFA urges consumers who oppose production and sale of milk and meat from
cloned animals to make their views known. Write to the FDA and tell them to
reverse this anti-consumer action. Write to your members of Congress urging
them to put a stop to FDA’s efforts to sell cloned animals. Tell your supermarket
manager that you don’t want to eat cloned milk and meat and ask them not to sell
these.

And a not insignificant sidebar: Maryland farmer Greg Wiles, the first to have a commercial clone on his dairy farm, is in dire financial straits (because of his clones) and may be forced to sell them for slaughter, from whence they will enter the food supply. Wiles does not want it to come to that. Interestingly, his reservations about his own cows have met with a hands over the ears response on the part of federal officials:

Mr. Wiles, who has experienced a number of health problems with his cloned animals, believes that the animals should not be put into the food supply and instead be evaluated as part of the risk assessment process used to determine whether or not milk and meat from cloned animals is safe. Over the last several years, Mr. Wiles has brought this matter to the attention of the government meeting with FDA and USDA officials but has been rebuffed in his attempts to have his cloned animals fully evaluated and used in research.

"Poquito"

2006-12-12T18:39:00.000-08:00

An interview with Silvestre Reyes, Texas Democrat and the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, by Jeff Stein of CQ.com, shows Reyes is a little ... um ... lacking when it comes to the facts about the Middle East. Reyes, who has been on the House Intelligence Committee for the past six years, did not know that al qaeda is a Sunni organization and seems never to have heard of Hezbollah.

And Hezbollah? I asked him. What are they?

“Hezbollah. Uh, Hezbollah...”

Al Qaeda is what, I asked, Sunni or Shia?

“Al Qaeda, they have both,” Reyes said. “You’re talking about predominately?”

“Sure,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“Predominantly — probably Shiite,” he ventured....
He laughed again, shifting in his seat.

“Why do you ask me these questions at five o’clock? Can I answer in Spanish? Do you speak Spanish?”

“Poquito,” I said—a little.

“Poquito?! “ He laughed again.

“Go ahead,” I said, talk to me about Sunnis and Shia in Spanish.

Reyes: “Well, I, uh....”

In the interest of bipartisanship, Stein does share the following anecdote illustrative of extreme ignorance on the other side of the aisle...

Trent Lott, the veteran Republican senator from Mississippi, said only last September that “It’s hard for Americans, all of us, including me, to understand what’s wrong with these people.”
“Why do they kill people of other religions because of religion?” wondered Lott, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, after a meeting with Bush.

“Why do they hate the Israelis and despise their right to exist? Why do they hate each other? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference?

“They all look the same to me,” Lott said.

There were some weirdnesses in the interview on the part of Mr. Stein, to be sure, in particular certain pedantic ejaculations like the following:

I apologized for putting him “on the spot a little.” But I reminded him that the people who have killed thousands of Americans on U.S. soil and in the Middle East have been front page news for a long time now.

It’s been 23 years since a Hezbollah suicide bomber killed over 200 U.S. military personnel in Beirut, mostly Marines.

Hezbollah, a creature of Iran, is close to taking over in Lebanon. Reports say they are helping train Iraqi Shiites to kill Sunnis in the spiralling civil war.

Calling Hezbollah "a creature of Iran" is in itself either ignorant or at the least disingenuous (Tony Karon is excellent on the secular nationalism at the root of Hizballah.) ... and yes I know that I'm spelling Hezbollah/Hizballah two different ways here.

But hey, Stein writes for a mainstream Washington audience. Talking about the Middle East in terms of "the people who have killed thousands of Americans on U.S. soil and in the Middle East" (without mentioning the hundreds of thousands--or more--killed by Americans on "Middle Eastern soil"--what is it with the soil with these people?) is pretty much just the way people talk in Washington.

But of course Stein's main point, that the incoming head of the Intel Committee should know a few basic facts about a focal region (for better or worse) of U.S. foreign policy, is of course correct and more than a little disturbing.

RIAA, the artist's best pal

2006-12-12T15:41:00.000-08:00

Barry Ritholtz, who writes the excellent economics blog the Big Picture, pointed out this latest instance of out and out scumminess from the appalling RIAA, an industry group that purports to support musicians, songwriters and composers.

"Anyone who thought the RIAA was anything less than a group of shameless hucksters shilling on behalf of their corporate masters should by now be thoroughly disabused of that notion," writes Ritholtz.

Read this story from Good Morning Silicon Valley and I think you'll agree with Barry:

Throughout its campaign against peer-to-peer services, The Recording Industry Association of America has insisted, unequivocally, that file-sharing hurt musicians. There is a clear correlation between file-sharing and loss of revenue for the music industry, the RIAA argues, one that undermines the livlihoods of the recording artists whose work it peddles. It's a sympathetic argument and one that the group has trotted out time and time again as it fired off lawsuits at college students, grade schoolers and deceased grandmothers (see " Can I charge this copyright infringment settlement to my student bursar account?" and "Music industry to recoup alleged file-sharing losses one 12-year-old at a time"). But it's a disingenous one as well. Because much as the RIAA would like us to see it as a champion of creative artists, it's an industry group concerned with industry profits. And the best interests of artists matter little when it comes to exploiting the revenue streams they create. So, while it's sad to hear that the RIAA is lobbying to reduce rates on royalties paid to songwriters, it's not unexpected. Earlier this month, the group began petitioning government Copyright Royalty Judges to lower the rates paid to publishers and songwriters for use of lyrics and melodies in applications like cell phone ring tones. Citing general music industry change, RIAA Executive Vice President and General Council Steven Marks told The Hollywood Reporter that so-called "Mechanical Royalties" have become badly outdated. That may be true, but is reducing them really the answer? If anything they should be increased, shouldn't they? Particularly if ringtone services generated additional revenues at a time when piracy was "devastating" the record industry. My God, don't these people ever stop?

Cheap grain and pig manure

2006-12-12T10:14:00.000-08:00

Mmmm. Ponds o' pig shite as far as the eye can see...

George Pyle, an editorial writer for the Salt Lake Tribune, posted this piece in Counterpunch today. It sums up the disaster that is 21st Century farming in America awfully well:

In farm country, Christmas comes about every five years.

The next visit of Santa Claus -- or in this case, Uncle Sam -- is due in 2007. The wish list of American agribusiness giants and their vassals at the U.S. Department of Agriculture is the same as always: many billions of federal dollars propping up an unnatural, anti-competitive, security-undermining, environment-destroying system that gluts the world with cheap grain and pig manure.

And any warm feeling taxpayers might get for thinking their money goes to support the traditional family farm springs from about as much reality as flying reindeer.

After 52 public forums from Florida to Alaska, many presided over personally by Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns, and more than 4,000 public comments, the USDA clings to its willful misreading of the situation, promoting policies that endanger the planet and destroy farmsteads from Nebraska to Niger.

Some hold out hope that Congress, after decades of agreeing that the solution to every farm problem is larger production subsidies, might take another course. The ascension of the Democrats, specifically the fact that conservation-friendly Tom Harkin of Iowa will be chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, provides some encouragement.

But the USDA's own summary of the issues facing American agriculture -- "Strengthening the Foundation for Future Growth in U.S. Agriculture" -- still views farming as an industrial process needing to ramp up production and increase exports.

It's a sad missive that refers to the dependency of livestock and vegetable producers on straightjacketing production contracts with giant processors as "opportunities," and calls the need for farm families to balance their budgets with off-farm jobs a "choice."

It's a business plan that assumes poor nations whose agricultural base is destroyed by America's market-glutting production will magically start having the kind of disposable income necessary to buy our grain and meat. Our government's refusal to deviate from this view was the key reason why the last round of World Trade Organization talks, once seen as a chance to bring poor nations into the fold, collapsed in July.

It's a blueprint for yet another round of taxpayer subsidies for the so-called "program crops" -- generally wheat, corn, rice, soybeans and cotton -- that push farmers to max out their production using all the fertilizer and pesticides they can afford.

The government dropped nearly $144 billion on farm subsidies between 1995 and 2004, according to calculations by the Environmental Working Group. The bulk of that money went to an ever-shrinking number of giant companies and cooperatives that continue to soak up both the taxpayers' money and their neighbors' land.

The resulting cut-rate price of corn further encourages feedlot fattening of cattle, hogs and poultry rather than the more natural grazing. The nitrogen-heavy runoff from those massive feeding operations, combined with all the fertilizer that flows from wheat and corn fields in the Plains and upper Midwest, endangers municipal water supplies and once-teeming sealife downstream in the Gulf of Mexico.

Soil conservation is always a part of farm legislation, but a small part. In Kansas, for example, federal farm payments over the decade ending in 2004 totaled $6.2 billion for production subsidies and $1 billion for conservation. When budget hawks start looking for savings, it is the conservation plans, not the subsidies, that are on the chopping block.

True conservation farming, where land is lovingly husbanded everywhere, not hyper-farmed here and left fallow there, is the key to sustainable, affordable food production. And we can have it for a fraction of what we now spend on production subsidies.

If we tell Congress that is what we want.

Ah, the holidays

2006-12-07T15:37:00.000-08:00

As a preemptive blow against all the Yuletide schlock that is coming our way, I have to share the greatest Christmas carol of all time, the Pogues' "Fairytale of New York" featuring Kirsty MacColl.

It was brought to mind by this post from Jeff Wells, which delves into the tragic and very likely criminal circumstances surrounding MacColl's death, while scuba diving with her family in Cozumel. As with any post on Wells' Rigorous Intuition site, it's well worth a read.

The rest is just bullshit and murder

2006-12-07T06:19:00.000-08:00

As Glenn Greenwald points out, the only voices disqualified from the Baker group were those who were right in the first place, those who opposed the war from the beginning.

Now, as Tom Engelhardt and Michael Schwartz report, comes new polling data indicating that the voices of both the Iraqi and American public are united in wanting an end to the occupation, as well as being opposed to that elephant in the corner of the room, the permanent bases.

And in "Meese of Arabia," Chris Floyd has, as he so often does, the most best visceral take:

The Iraq Study Group's report simply confirms, yet again, the bedrock truth of the war: the American Establishment has no intention of leaving Iraq, ever, and no intention of having anything but a pliant, cowed, bullied puppet government in Baghdad to carry out whatever the Establishment decides is in its best interests on any given day. Iraq was invaded because large swathes of the American elite thought they could make hay of it one way or another (financially, politically, ideologically or even psychologically, for those pathetic souls who get their sense of manhood or personal validation from their identification with a big, swaggering, domineering empire). And U.S. troops will remain in Iraq, indefinitely, at some level, because the American elite think they can make hay of the situation one way or another. The war is all about -- is only about -- what the American elite feel is in their own best interest, how it aggrandizes their fortunes, flatters their prejudices, serves their needs. That's it. The rest is just bullshit and murder.

Here is a more substantial excerpt from the Englehardt/Schwartz piece:

As of this morning, new polling data about American public opinion on Iraq is on the table. The Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), through its WorldPublicOpinion.org, has just released its post-election poll. On crucial issues, especially the matter of setting a timetable for withdrawal and the Bush administration's (in all but name) permanent bases in Iraq, American and Iraqi public opinion are in remarkably similar places; that the Bush administration, as the election results indicated, is now distinctly a minority regime; and that the Democrats are still largely lagging behind public opinion on Iraq, as is the media, as is James Baker's Iraq Study Group (ISG), which today releases its "consensus report" to the president.

The PIPA numbers indicate that, even if George W. Bush remains adamantly in his no-longer-mission-accomplished, but stay-until-the-mission-is-accomplished dream state, Americans have largely awoken. Yes, they do agree with the ISG recommendations by whopping proportions. Three out of four Americans (including 72 percent of Republicans), according to PIPA, believe that the U.S. should be engaged in conversation and negotiation with Iran and Syria; and they even more massively favor a major international conference on the Iraqi catastrophe. However, those aren't actually the most interesting figures. Here are some of those:

In the poll, 54 percent of Americans believe that attacks on U.S. forces are approved by half or more of all Iraqis; 66 percent (including a near majority of Republicans) believe that a majority of Iraqis oppose the establishment of permanent U.S. bases in their country (only 28 percent disagree); and 68 percent (including a majority of Republicans) believe that, in any case, we should not have such bases. This is an especially remarkable set of figures, given that permanent bases have received next to no attention in the American mainstream media.

Most important of all, given the arrival of the Iraq Study Group's "consensus" proposal for a "phased withdrawal" that is to begin without a timetable in sight, 58 percent of Americans, according to PIPA, want a withdrawal of all U.S. troops on a timeline – 18 percent within six months, 25 percent within a year, 15 percent within two years. Moreover, if the Iraqi government were to request such a withdrawal on a year's deadline, 77 percent of respondents (including 73 percent of Republicans) think we should take them up on it. In this they agree with the Iraqi public. As Middle Eastern expert Robert Dreyfuss wrote recently, "Polls have shown that up to 80 percent of Sunni Arabs and 60 percent of Shi'ite Arabs want an immediate end to the occupation."

These new numbers should act as a wake-up call. Without much help from anyone, politicians or the media, the American people, it seems, have formed their own Iraq Study Group and arrived at sanity well ahead of the elite and all the "wise men" in Washington.
Read the whole article...

Only because they deserve it

2006-12-06T12:04:00.000-08:00

From the BBC:

The richest 2% of adults in the world own more than half of all household wealth, according to a new study by a United Nations research institute.

The report, from the World Institute for Development Economics Research at the UN University, says that the poorer half of the world's population own barely 1% of global wealth.

Our Daily Bread

2006-12-05T19:32:00.000-08:00

The image above is one of a number of disturbing and oddly aesthetic stills from Our Daily Bread, a new documentary from Austrian director Nikolaus Geyrhalter. Check here for scheduled U.S. showings.

The promo materials describe the film this way:

Welcome to the world of industrial food production and high-tech farming! To the rhythm of conveyor belts and immense machines, the film looks without commenting into the places where food is produced in Europe: monumental spaces, surreal landscapes and bizarre sounds - a cool, industrial environment which leaves little space for individualism. People, animals, crops and machines play a supporting role in the logistics of this system which provides our society’s standard of living.

OUR DAILY BREAD is a wide-screen tableau of a feast which isn’t always easy to digest - and in which we all take part. A pure, meticulous and high-end film experience that enables the audience to form their own ideas.

I can't say for sure, but I sort of doubt documentary makers would have even been allowed access to a factory hog farm in the U.S.

In contrast to the creepy vibe these images convey, I want to mention "Mystery Meat," Heidi Julavits' account of the borderline obsessive lengths to which she went to cook every last bit of a split quarter of Belted Galloway beef she and her husband purchased last summer. I hope the article hasn't vanished behind the firewall. It was terrific. Here's a brief excerpt:

Before tackling the weird cuts, we do a bit of research. What is the difference between top round, bottom round, eye-of-round, rump, chuck, London broil? These answers are strangely hard to come by, given that the terms have changed, as small-town butchers have been replaced by packing plants and as consumers like me have become increasingly parts-ignorant. Sorting through the contradictory advice of beef authorities is a head-twisting experience much akin to reading books on infant sleep theory. Julia Child and Simone Beck provide an interesting entry point in “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” though they spend most of their time translating French cuts like entrecôte into America-speak, or former America-speak. (An entrecôte is like a Delmonico or a club steak, they tell us. Huh? Give or take, they’re both a rib-eye.)

I was happy to read a piece like this in the New York Times Style section, from a highly regard novelist and literary celeb (and talented and funny writer). To me, this article dovetails nicely with a recent oral history I'm feeling a little guilty about keeping off the shelves of the Lexington public library, Food and Everyday Life on Kentucky Family Farms, 1920-1950 by John and Anne Van Willigen.

I guess the techniques discussed therein on making beaten biscuits don't seem on first glance to have much to do with the Julavits' series of efforts at preparing their bottom round (on three successive nights they went three different international marinades--first adobo, then a Vietnamese effort featuring fish sauce, and lemongrass, and finally a Korean bulgogi preparation), but in my mind they have everything to do with one another.

I will try to articulate just how that works at some later date, but for now I'm tired and want to recommend both the Julavits story and Food and Everyday Life on Kentucky Family Farms....

So very hard to go ...

2006-12-04T18:16:00.000-08:00

Victims of 2005 airstrikes at Ramadi (AP photo)

... especially when you never intended to leave...

Tom Englehardt has an excellent, if discouraging, take on what results--if any--we should expect from Baker's Iraq Study Group, which I am taking the liberty of reproducing here at length.

Put in a nutshell, the Iraq Study Group plan -- should it ever be put into effect -- might accomplish the following: As a start, it would in no way affect our essential network of monumental permanent bases in Iraq (where, many billions of dollars later, concrete is still being poured); it would leave many less "combat" troops but many more "advisors" in-country to "stand up" the Iraqi Army (tactics already tried, at the cost of many billions of dollars, and just about sure to fail); many more American troops will find themselves either imprisoned on those vast bases of ours in Iraq or on similar installations in the "neighborhood" where they are likely to bring so many of our problems with them. And those aggressive chats with the neighbors, whose influence in Iraq is overestimated in any case, are unlikely to proceed terribly well because the Bush administration will arrive at the bargaining table, if at all, with so little to offer (except lectures).

All of this should ensure that, well into 2008, at least 70,000 American military personnel will still be in Iraq, after which, in the midst of a presidential election season, will actual withdrawal finally appear on some horizon? In other words, the Baker Commission plan guarantees us at least another 3-5 years in Iraq.

And, oh yes, here's something else no one is likely mention. Those Americans left behind after the phased withdrawers head for the horizon will surely be more vulnerable, which means, as in Vietnam during the Vietnamization years, the ratcheting up of American air power and far more sentences in news reports that read like this: "Two Apache helicopters firing anti-missile flares swooped over Fadhil neighborhood, a Sunni insurgent stronghold in one of the oldest parts of the capital, amid the slow thump of heavy machinegun fire, witnesses said."

And, oh yes, during this "short" period of perhaps 12-14 months when we are supposed to be phasing away, based on present casualty rates, perhaps another 40,000 to 60,000 Iraqi civilians will die horrific deaths as will at least modest numbers of young Americans, reminding us that the definitions of "short," "remarkable consensus," and "horizon" -- after all, your horizon may be someone else's home -- are in the eye of the beholder. And just one more thing: all this will be directed out of the largest embassy in the world, a vast, nearly complete, nearly billion dollar complex set in the heart of Baghdad's Green Zone and armed with its own anti-missile system, which no "exit" strategy on any table in any foreseeable future is likely to mention.

... While the Iraqis were experiencing an actual civil war, combined with an actual insurgency, combined with actual American attacks from the air and the ground on actual city neighborhoods, combined with actual terrorist attacks, combined with actual widespread criminal activity, combined with the actual collapse of their economy, combined with the actual non-delivery of essential social services, combined with the actual flight of whole populations from ethnically cleansed or simply half-destroyed neighborhoods, combined with actual staggering death tolls, the American media and White House officialdom have passed through their own maelstrom over whether or not to apply the term "civil war" to the Iraqi situation. NBC and the Los Angeles Times have finally voted "yes"; others are waffling; the administration continues to deny that the "sectarian violence" in Iraq could possibly be a "civil war," which is evidently imagined inside the Oval Office as nothing short of Armageddon itself.

While the media, politicians, and administration spokesmen fight over how exactly to characterize the mountains of dead Iraqis, the urban killing fields where militias now deposit tortured and murdered former human beings, and the stuffed morgues of Iraq's cities, there are perhaps a few other words and phrases passing around Washington that might be reconsidered.

Let's start with "phased withdrawal." Withdrawal ("the act or process of withdrawing, a retreat or retirement") usually means sayonara, arrivederci, so long. And a "phase," of course, is a "stage." But put them together and, at least in the present collective Washingtonian imagination, we're still somehow embedded in Iraq the year after next with no actual plan for leaving in sight and none of our basic structures -- 5 or 6 bases the size of American towns and a goliath of an embassy -- in that country touched. Perhaps it's time to relabel this "option," something like "phased staying" or "phased permanency."

In turn, the Iraq Study Group's findings, which, as James Fallows recently noted, have been layered into our world these last weeks via "obviously authoritative leaks," might be relabeled "phased recommendations." They may not, however, faze George W. Bush, who has already responded (or perhaps presponded) by ordering two other sets of reviews to be conducted, ensuring that Washington will be flooded with recommendations. We face a veritable war of the recommendations. All of this is a classic case of Washington fiddling while Baghdad burns.

"Redeploy," according to my dictionary means to "move (military forces) from one combat zone to another." That may turn out to be all too correct, if redeployment, or "a responsible redeployment outside of Iraq," or even (gulp) "phased redeployment" turns out to be the order of the day. Redeploying to, say, various Gulf statelets and Kuwait, we may indeed take our combat zones with us, as we did in the early 1990s when, in the wake of Gulf War I, American troops were plunked down in sizeable numbers in Saudi Arabia. (Does the missing-in-action name Osama bin Laden come to anyone's mind?)

Don't confuse any of this, as often happens in the press, with an "exit strategy." An exit, my dictionary tells me, is "the act of going away or out; a passage or way out." Classically, critics have wondered whatever happened to Colin Powell's famed post-Vietnam dictum that no American war should be launched without its exit strategy in place. The answer was always that the Bush administration simply never imagined leaving Iraq. To a large extent, despite all the ado, this remains true even in Donald Rumsfeld's final, secret memo of options to the President.

So here's a small hint. You'll know something's in the air when some serious panel gets together to sort out our future strategy in Iraq, and you start regularly seeing "withdrawal" surface in the media without an adjective attached, or when you see any sober discussion of permanent bases, American air power, or oil.
Read the whole post....

The kind of guy you have working for you

2006-11-30T19:17:00.000-08:00

I never thought I'd be posting a link to anything written in my local paper, but this column, by the editor of another small town Kentucky paper, offered a jaw-droppingly creepy anecdote about Mr. "Money Is Speech," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell:

In the fall of 2002, the county weekly where I was editor was paid a visit by one of the most important politicians in the country.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was in an easy re-election race against a little-known, inexperienced opponent. But he was taking nothing for granted, so he had come to Nicholasville to seek the endorsement of The Jessamine Journal.

He had scheduled an interview with our publisher, Dave Eldridge, but Dave thought that, as editor, I too should be involved in the conversation.

When McConnell and his entourage arrived, we greeted them warmly.

We weren't prepared for what happened next. An aide produced a manila folder, opened it and showed Dave a photo taken of the rear of my car 10 years before showing bumper stickers opposing the United States' illegal proxy war in Nicaragua.

"This is the kind of guy you have working for you," McConnell said.

Dave laughed and brushed it off. There were no secrets between us where our politics were concerned. We argued politics for fun.

But I couldn't believe a United States senator had a 10-year-old dossier on me! I was flattered. The intent, I'm sure, was to embarrass. And I was embarrassed, but for him, not myself. How petty for someone of his stature to engage in gutter fighting.

But that's the kind of guy you have working for you.

Questions abound.

Who provided McConnell with the photos?
Was it a volunteer, or was this an assignment?
Was someone taking pictures of the bumpers of every small town newsman in the Commonwealth?
Was this done with public funds?

And most important,

What could possibly be the cause for his facial expression in the picture above?

Friedman: "Harder, harder!"

2006-11-29T18:18:00.000-08:00

You call this war!? The man with the mustache wants more!
Photo: Dahr Jamail

I was naive enough to hope for the day when Thomas Friedman owned up, but no.

The columnist whose dimwitted mantra--in not one, but three unprovoked American aggressions against defenseless countries--was "Give war a chance" (get it?) has doubled down, and says that the problem with Iraq can only be solved with more American mayhem.

He even uses the phrase "iron fist" with no apparent trace of irony.

What a fucking asshole.

Chris Floyd has an appropriately enraged response:

You would think that by now we would have "supp'd full with horrors" on the New York Times op-ed pages. What could be worse than the atrocities that have filled those gray columns in the past few years, the loud brays for war, the convoluted excuses for presidential tyranny, the steady murmur of chin-stroking bullshit meant to comfort the comfortable elite and confirm them -- at all times, at any cost -- in their well-wadded self-righteousness? Surely, you would think, we have seen the worst.

If this was your thought, then alas, alas, alack the day, you were bitterly mistaken, my friend. Comes now before us the portly, fur-lipped figure of Thomas Friedman, Esq., who today has penned what must be the most morally hideous and deeply racist column ever to appear in those rarefied journalistic precincts: "Ten Months or Ten Years."

It seems that this very enthusiastic promoter of the unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq - which he proudly called "a war of choice," apparently not realizing that he was parroting the propagandists of the Nazi regime that killed millions of his ethnic kindred -- has now discovered that Iraqi Arabs are hopeless, worthless barbarians, broken by "1,000 years of Arab-Muslim authoritarianism" and can only be held together by an "iron fist."

Read the whole Floyd piece (the Friedman drivel is reproduced therein)....

And while we're on the subject of the pundit of our age, Matt Taibbi's "Flathead" is priceless....

An old friend and the greatest story ever sold

2006-11-27T08:49:00.000-08:00

Clearing the cobwebs from a week of travel and Thanksgiving festivities.

While scanning the channels chez the in-laws on Thanksgiving night, came upon an HBO George Carlin performance from 1999, "You Are All Diseased." For years I had mistakenly filed Mr. Carlin away under "1960s counterculture comics," but that was my loss.

I was amazed at how biting and funny he was (and this was at the tail end of the Clinton years, with nary a Dubya nor a neocon nor a Patriot Act in sight).

I couldn't find a transcript of that performance, but did find some of the material from other sources he used in the show, including this one, dated 1997 but more relevant than ever today:

In the Bullshit Department, a businessman can't hold a candle to a clergyman. 'Cause I gotta tell you the truth, folks. When it comes to bullshit, big-time, major league bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims: religion. No contest. No contest. Religion. Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told.

Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man -- living in the sky -- who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!

But He loves you.

He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, you talk about a good bullshit story. Holy Shit!

And check out this homemade video clip featuring Carlin on bombing, religion, the media, and God... Courtesy of TAMMRON....

The new Congress and your food: If ADM is smilin', you shouldn't be

2006-11-15T16:15:00.000-08:00

First the good news....

Richard Pombo is gone!

And so are such other "unlamented industrial-agriculture enthusiasts [as] Sens. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), George Allen (R-Va.), Conrad Burns (R-Mont.), Mark Kennedy (R-Minn.), and James Talent (R-Mo.)."

But as Tom Philpott, that sensible and articulate voice of sustainable agriculture, points out in Grist, "for every bought-and-paid-for Republican that the public sent packing, the agribusiness lobby has a reliable Democrat waiting at the gate. "

And this Congress will be entrusted with writing a Farm Bill.

Says Philpott, "Since the Nixon era, Farm Bills have essentially become five- or six-year plans for using government power to extract wealth from farmers and deposit it on the bottom lines of the agribusiness giants -- sustainability and environmental concerns be damned. Unhappily, prospects for reforming the 2007 version look bleak."

First at the trough will be "the Exxon of corn," Archer Daniels Midland, the world's biggest corn buyer and the No. 1 U.S. ethanol producer. "ADM has managed over the last 25 years to rig up lucrative markets for two related products that would never have gained traction in a free market: corn-based ethanol and high-fructose corn syrup. Both thrive by grace of a baroque and related set of government subsidies and quotas. "

Nancy Pelosi has already stumped through Minnesota pledging allegiance to ethanol subsidies--er, I mean, the limitless potential of the fuel of the future. And in the Senate Tom Harkin looks to take over the ag committee. "This is the man who, facing down critics who dared question ethanol's environmental value, once took a swig of the corn-based fuel on the Senate floor, evidently to demonstrate its salubrious qualities."

And in the White House, well, let's not go there....

All of this is tremendously disheartening, yet it must not be allowed to forestall political action. Indeed, on several fronts, pro-sustainable agriculture forces are rolling out Farm Bill agendas that challenge the agribusiness chokehold on farm policy. These efforts reassert farming not as an industrial process geared to the needs of conglomerates, but rather as a way to build community, feed people, and regenerate soil.

From the heartland, the Iowa-based National Family Farm Coalition has come out with a farmer-oriented agenda [PDF] that demands the end of the direct-payment subsidies so beloved by ADM and other large corn buyers. In Washington, D.C., American Farmland Trust has released a comprehensive Farm Bill plan that makes a powerful case for replacing commodity subsidies with "green payments" that would reward farmers for environmental stewardship.

Meanwhile, the Farm and Food Policy Project, a broad coalition of environmental, sustainable-agriculture, and anti-hunger groups, plans to release its Farm Bill proposal sometime this month.

These efforts are critically important. Any citizen interested in creating a sane food system should study them and pressure their representatives to vote accordingly during the Farm Bill debates.

Read the whole piece...

"Springtime for Hitler"

2006-11-13T18:24:00.000-08:00

Will Bunch wonders if Bush and Rove were "the Producers" of an intentional flop last week.

As evidence, he presents a series of final week Republican fuckups that look more than a little fishy, given the fact that the Red Team had been, until Tuesday, a paradigm of ruthless efficiency in every election this millennium.

1. [I]n Pennsylvania, why did the Bush-led Justice Department step up its investigation of vulnerable U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon just weeks before Election Day....
2. How did it come to pass that the predatory sexual habits of Rep. Mark Foley -- which we now know was a closely held secret among GOP insiders for years -- suddenly leaked out to ABC's Brian Ross a month before the election. There is one political operative in this country who is notorious for using rumors or allegations of homosexuality or pedophilia to destroy his election rivals -- and that operative is Karl Rove. According to accounts of how the story broke, it was Republican staffers who leaked the emails to Ross and to other D.C. insiders on the summer of 2006.

3. Given that Bush's approval rating hovered in the 35 to 40 percent range thoughout the election season, why did the White House suddenly make the president more visible by having more press conferences -- and thus taking more hostile questions on Iraq and other unpleasant subjects -- than at any other time in his six-year presidency, including two in roughly one week during the October home stretch?

4. Despite voters' increasingly strong dislike of Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary was deliberately put in front of the cameras at a key time in the race, on Oct. 26, just 12 days before the election....

5. Likewise, given Bush's low popularity and approval ratings, why was he dispatched at the last minute to the closest races, when other Republicans thought that his presence did more harm than good? Bush appeared with Sen. Conrad Burns in Montana just five days before the election, and for Missouri Sen. Jim Talent the day after that; and made frequent visits on behalf of Virginia Sen. George Allen. All three lost by narrow margins. Tennesee's GOP candidate Bob Corker got the more popular Laura Bush instead...and won.

6. Just four days before the election, and with polls showing the Iraq war highly unpopular, you had these comments from Vice President Cheney: The Bush administration is determined to continue "full speed ahead" with its policy in Iraq, regardless of Tuesday's midterm elections, Vice President Cheney said Friday. Cheney said in an interview with ABC News that the administration is convinced that it is pursuing the right path in Iraq. "It may not be popular with the public. It doesn't matter, in the sense that we have to continue what we think is right," Cheney said. "That's exactly what we're doing. We're not running for office. We're doing what we think is right."

7. Then you had the whole Cheney-Rumsfeld fiasco. Bush went out of his way to praise the two men just five days prior to the election, knowing full well how unpopular they were....

8. And of course Rove made a number of confoundingly bad decisions, dumping millions of dollars into Senate races that seemed hopeless for the Republicans -- and ultimately were -- in the solidly "blue" states of New Jersey and Maryland, where in hindsight a few dollars spent in the right ways might have salvaged the once-"red" Montana and Virginia.

And why, Bunch asks, would the Republicans want to do such a thing?

Everything we watched Bush do since Wednesday morning seems to be geared in one direction: Bringing Democrats to the table on Iraq. The problem for the Democrats is this: They came to office without a plan for Iraq. Bush doesn't seem to have one either. Nobody does, although James Baker and his friends are said to be working on one. But now whatever emerges from the coming discussions will not longer be the GOP plan. It will be the Bush/Democrats' plan.

And we're afraid that the war planners are expecting things to get worse over there in 2007. Good politicians are able to ensure that when bad fallout is inevitable, that the blame can be shared. A GOP majority in Capitol Hill would have guaranteed that "the Republican war in Iraq" would dominate the 2008 presidential race, and that equation would hand the keys to the White House to the Democrats for sure. And Bush's patrons -- oilmen and the defense contractors -- need the White House a lot more than Congress, especially after the recent expansion of presidential powers. And now both parties will have a stake in Iraq, and the ... coming fiasco there.

I can't tell for sure if Bunch is completely serious here, but he speaks for a lot of folks who wonder why the Republicans really went down without a fight. As regards the Iraq mess, the Democrats won't be able to skate away from responsibility. Nor should they be allowed to.

Read the whole piece...

"You gotta go, you gotta go"

2006-11-10T18:59:00.000-08:00

... or "Don't let the door hit your fat ass on the way out, you son-of-a-bitch."

From Glenn Greenwald:

It doesn't look like there there is excessive meekness or conciliation coming from the soon-to-be Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Charlie Rangel, who "revealed yesterday that he's got his eye on Capitol Hill office space now held by . . . Vice President Dick Cheney":
"Mr. Cheney enjoys an office on the second floor of the House of Representatives that historically has been designated for the Ways and Means Committee chairman," explained Rangel . . . "I talked to [future House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi about it this morning," a giddy Rangel crowed during a news conference at his Harlem office. "I'm trying to find some way to be gentle as I restore the dignity of that office," chuckled Rangel. "You gotta go, you gotta go."

Rummy, you're scummy, but it wasn't ALL your fault

2006-11-10T08:14:00.000-08:00

One down, one to go...

I can think of no public figure, OK, there's one, whose comeuppance would be met with greater glee. And yet, as Tony Karon points out, the idea that we got rid of the one problem child is self-serving and just plain wrong.

The news that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is to be the Bush Administration’s ritual sacrifice on the altar of its electoral rebuke comes as no surprise: It had been obvious for months now the call for Rumsfeld’s head is a kind of consensual fetish among those who supported the Iraq war for not having to deal with their own culpability in the catastrophe it inevitably became. I say “inevitably” because you don’t have to have a working knowledge of Iraqi history to have anticipated how Iraqis would respond to their country being occupied by a foreign army — you simply needed to have watched “Red Dawn” back in the 80s. (A working knowledge of Iraqi history, as many U.S. military types who quietly but firmly opposed the war had, would certainly have helped anticipate some of the specific sectarian and regional consequences, but that’s another matter.)

But instead of admitting and reckoning with the fact that the war they advocated was a catastrophically bad idea, everyone from neocon hacks to flip-flopping Democrats, Bob Woodward (arch channeler of White House sources) and the self-styled “liberal hawks” of the chattering classes, like Peter Beinart and George Packer, have signed on to the notion that it was a good war, the right war, executed badly, because Rumsfeld adhered to some bizarre capital-intensive theory of warfare. In other words, if Rumsfeld had simply sent more troops, the outcome would have been different.

And that narrative, which the White House itself appears to have adopted in the wake of its midterm electoral drubbing, is a self-serving evasion. Indeed, the “blame Rumsfeld for Iraq” chorus reminds me of nothing as much as listening to Trotskyists trying to rescue Bolshevism by blaming its grotesque consequences on Stalin’s “implementation” rather than on its inner logic.
Having more troops in Iraq would have made a tactical differences, and might have altered the story arc and timeline, but I can’t see how it would have produced a fundamentally different outcome. And the idea evades the reality that the troop levels in Iraq were a function of the politics of the war rather than of some whacky CEO cost-cutting obsession. In fact, the chiefs of staff (and Powell, too, initially) were trying to stop the war, or at least slow the train by making the project look prohibitive because of the troop levels required. They believed it needed up to a half million troops, and they probably also knew that presented with a realistic picture of the cost and commitment, that Congress would balk. That was the reason why, for example, Paul Wolfowitz jumped so aggressively down General Shinseki’s throat when he suggested before Congress that the U.S. would need a “few hundred thousand” troops to secure the peace. It wasn’t that Wolfowitz was seized by some Rumsfeldian “New Generation Warfare” theory; it’s that he was on board with a political strategy to make the invasion happen and destroy any obstacle that would prevent it.

Karon should be an everyday read. He's is a great blogger, a humane sophisticated voice. We should be happy that he has a forum at Time. com (God knows there are few mainstream columnists of his caliber).

Other recent Karon posts absolutely slaughter the conventional wisdom on such sacred mainstream sacred cows as the impossibility of compromise with Hamas and the existence of an Iran "crisis." His piece on Beijing's geopolitics is a marvel of reason and concision. And I resisted at first, but came around to his finding Borat more than a little troubling:

So, you wonder what the Kazakh’s must make of being tarred with the brush of anti-Semitism when the reality couldn’t be further from the truth? I’d say that Sascha Baron Cohen is a prat, and a racist prat at that: Essentially, he’s operating his own stereotype, i.e. that Muslims are inherently anti-Semitic....

Let’s just say Baron needs to go back to Oxford and learn a little history — he might learn that over the long haul of Jewish history, we’ve done a lot better under Islamic rule than we’ve fared in the Christian West. Then again, if Sascha Baron Cohen did a skit of some provincial Catholic bishop singing “throw the Jew down the well”, he wouldn’t be opening his movie all over America right now.

Morning in America

2006-11-09T18:59:00.000-08:00

Been away from blogging for a couple of days, reorganizing the home office and configuring my new computer. I didn't miss anything, did I?

I see Britney gave whatshisname his walking papers, and is sporting a new "svelte and single" look....

Oh yeah. Ah, the midterm elections. The results are better than a sharp stick in the eye, but I'm resisting actually being happy about all this.

Perhaps my naivete is showing but for the entire week I've been digesting, in slackjawed amazement, Matt Taibbi's recent "The Worst Congress Ever" cover story in Rolling Stone. Nothing he wrote was a state secret, yet it's not something we see every day in the respectable press. I read the Times and the Post a decent amount, and I have never seen an article in either of those august papers of record that spells out the Bush League (oh! didn't mean it, but it fits) bullshit that has gone on in Washington over the past six years.

To choose one of many vivid, funny/sad anecdotes, here's Taibbi on how the conference hearings have been run in the Bush era (they're the hearings needed to iron out the differences between House and Senate versions of a bill):

According to the rules, conferences have to include at least one public, open meeting. But in the Bush years, Republicans have managed the conference issue with some of the most mind-blowingly juvenile behavior seen in any parliament west of the Russian Duma after happy hour. GOP chairmen routinely call a meeting, bring the press in for a photo op and then promptly shut the proceedings down. "Take a picture, wait five minutes, gavel it out -- all for show" is how one Democratic staffer described the process. Then, amazingly, the Republicans sneak off to hold the real conference, forcing the Democrats to turn amateur detective and go searching the Capitol grounds for the meeting. "More often than not, we're trying to figure out where the conference is," says one House aide.
In one legendary incident, Rep. Charles Rangel went searching for a secret conference being held by Thomas. When he found the room where Republicans closeted themselves, he knocked and knocked on the door, but no one answered. A House aide compares the scene to the famous "Land Shark" skit from Saturday Night Live, with everyone hiding behind the door afraid to make a sound. "Rangel was the land shark, I guess," the aide jokes. But the real punch line came when Thomas finally opened the door. "This meeting," he informed Rangel, "is only open to the coalition of the willing."

They've set the bar pretty damn low for the Dems.

Of course. OF COURSE. the Republicans that have been running the show for the past six years are unspeakably evil, and I can't say I'm unhappy that they have been smoked. But. But.

Sharper minds than mine have been all over the fact that the Democrat establishment has been fighting hard to tamp down the antiwar ardor. In Counterpunch, Cockburn and St. Clair write:

Wherever they were given the opportunity, voters across the country went strongly for antiwar candidates. True, the national Democrats, led by Rahm Emanuel of the Democratic Congressional Campaign, had tried pretty successfully to keep such peaceniks off the ballot, but in a few key races the antiwar progressives romped home. The Democrats won, despite Emanuel. If the Clintonites weren't still controlling most of the campaign money, and more openly antiwar populi sts had been running, the Democrats today would probably be looking at a wider majority in the House and one committed solidly to getting out of Iraq.

And I have to love being able to rely on Billmon for a serious dose of well-reasoned pessimism. Commenting on the fickleness of last-minute deciders, he writes:

[I]t seems worth remembering that the size of the Democratic wave was hugely influenced at the margin (which is where it counts) by that tenth of the electorate who couldn't make up their minds until literally the last minute -- despite everything that's been done, said, reported and revealed over the two years since they were last asked to take the fate of the world's only superpower into their hands.

Next time, they could easily break the other way, for reasons just as ephemeral.

And an even bigger spoilsport is Jeff Wells of Rigorous Intuition who, in an unusually flat piece, does manage to open with a damn good question:

What kind of world would greet Robert Gates' appointment as Secretary of Defense as a happy news item? Regrettably, this one. That's the true Bush legacy: diminished expectation, and delight and surprise at achieving debased, small victories that have to be handed to us.

I could even top them. Well, OK, so I will. Here ya go, your tax dollars still hard at work:

Oops. We did it again.

Well, that was a shocker!

2006-11-06T11:50:00.000-08:00

New, improved Iraq:
"Two channels, Salahiddin and Zawra, shut down.
Security forces raid the offices of the channels."
(from riverbend).

Stunning verdict rendered in Baghdad, no?

A couple of comments. First, let's remember that, as Juan Cole points out,"The Dujail charges have the advantage for Washington of stemming from an incident that occurred a year before the U.S. rapprochement with the Iraqi Baath Party in 1983."

All the other graver charges that could be brought against Saddam Hussein, could be brought against his American enablers as well.

Writes Cole:

The only conclusion one can draw from available evidence is that Rumsfeld was more or less dispatched [to Baghdad, for a second time, in 1985, when he was a "private citizen," by the Reagan Administration] to mollify Hussein and assure him that his use of chemical weapons was no bar to developing the relationship with the U.S., whatever the State Department spokesman was sent out to say. As former National Security Council staffer Howard Teicher affirmed, “Pursuant to the secret NSDD [National Security Directive], the United States actively supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing US military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure that Iraq had the military weaponry required.” The requisite weaponry included cluster bombs. Whether it also included, from Washington’s point of view, chemical weapons and biological precursors for anthrax, Teicher does not say.

... When the Dujail case is resolved and the tribunal trying Hussein goes on to other crimes, sooner or later the issue of chemical weapons use must arise. Iran is already furious that the tribunal seems unlikely to charge Hussein for his battlefield deployment of this weapon. When the issue arises, it will be difficult for Donald Rumsfeld to avoid sharing the docket, at least symbolically, with his old friend, Hussein. Rumsfeld helped to forge the U.S. alliance with Iraq that lasted from 1984 until Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August of 1991. He did so in full knowledge that the Baath regime was using mustard gas--which severely burns the lungs--against the Iranian children sent by Khomeini to launch “human wave” attacks. One Iranian survivor commented that with each flaming breath he takes, he wishes the gas had killed him. The pogrom against the Shiites of Dujail was a horrible crime. Far more horrible ones, in which the U.S. government was intimately complicit, were to follow.

Read the whole piece...

Note: Cole's piece is from 2005. For a more contemporaneous take, please read Riverbend's reaction:

I’m more than a little worried. This is Bush’s final card. The elections came and went and a group of extremists and thieves were put into power (no, no- I meant in Baghdad, not Washington). The constitution which seems to have drowned in the river of Iraqi blood since its elections has been forgotten. It is only dug up when one of the Puppets wants to break apart the country. Reconstruction is an aspiration from another lifetime: I swear we no longer want buildings and bridges, security and an undivided Iraq are more than enough. Things must be deteriorating beyond imagination if Bush needs to use the ‘Execute the Dictator’ card.

Iraq has not been this bad in decades. The occupation is a failure. The various pro-American, pro-Iranian Iraqi governments are failures. The new Iraqi army is a deadly joke. Is it really time to turn Saddam into a martyr?

... It’s not about the man- presidents come and go, governments come and go. It’s the frustration of feeling like the whole country and every single Iraqi inside and outside of Iraq is at the mercy of American politics. It is the rage of feeling like a mere chess piece to be moved back and forth at will. It is the aggravation of having a government so blind and uncaring about their peoples needs that they don’t even feel like it’s necessary to go through the motions or put up an act. And it's the deaths. The thousands of dead and dying, with Bush sitting there smirking and lying about progress and winning in a country where every single Iraqi outside of the Green Zone is losing.

Read the whole piece...

Number two ... but closing fast

2006-11-03T09:29:00.000-08:00

Hey, here's betting after 808 more days (countdown is here), Dubya'll be number one on everyone's list.

From the Guardian:

America is now seen as a threat to world peace by its closest neighbours and allies, according to an international survey of public opinion published today that reveals just how far the country's reputation has fallen among former supporters since the invasion of Iraq.
Carried out as US voters prepare to go to the polls next week in an election dominated by the war, the research also shows that British voters see George Bush as a greater danger to world peace than either the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, or the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Both countries were once cited by the US president as part of an "axis of evil", but it is Mr Bush who now alarms voters in countries with traditionally strong links to the US.

Read the whole article....

And Billmon is quite good here on the dangers Dubya will continue to present as a lame duck, no matter who wins control of Congress:

But even if a November or December surprise isn't on the drawing boards, the historical pattern suggests a period of danger may lie ahead. The last two lame duck years of any president's second term are traditionally devoted to foreign policy, as the White House's domestic clout fades and the political focus shifts to the succession question. For most presidents, this usually means launching or intensifying ambitious diplomatic or peacemaking efforts, such as Clinton's bid to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in one swift go at Camp David.

But Bush (or Cheney, take your pick) isn't like "most presidents." His diplomatic efforts, with few exceptions, have all reached what appear to be dead ends -- with the Israelis and the Palestinians, with the Iranians and probably with the North Koreans, although with Kim Jong-il who the hell knows?

If Shrub wants to spend his last two years rolling those stones up the hill only to watch them roll back again, more power to him. But at this point, unless he wants the words "Led America Into Its Worst Strategic Defeat Since Vietnam" chiseled on his historical tombstone, he's going to need a bigger flight forward to fly forward to.

What's more, compared to other recent administrations, Bush and/or Cheney will have maximum freedom of action to be as reckless as they want to be.

George Will has noted that the 2008 election will be the first election since 1952 in which neither a sitting president nor a sitting vice president are running for the top slot. Neocon Robert Kagan notes that this situation will free Bush from any need to worry about the consequences of his actions over the next two years -- in the way that Ronald Reagan had to keep George Bush's political interests in mind in 1988 and Bill Clinton tried to protect Al Gore's chances in 2000. That is, unless Shrub also cares about improving John McCain or Rudy Guilani or Mitt Romney's electoral chances. But when did a Bush ever give a shit about anyone not named Bush?

Read the whole Billmon piece...

Very sad news

2006-11-01T20:32:00.000-08:00

The Times has a story on O'Connor's Bar and the legacy of owner Patrick O'Connor, who died October 8.

I lived a dozen long strides from O'Connor's from 1987 to 1992, and as I moved around Brooklyn was never more than a mile away, until packing up for Kentucky three years ago. O'Connor's was a home away from home.

I always hate to hear the old-timers saying "It's not like the old days," but of course with O'Connor's you have to say that. In the years prior to the hipster infusion, I spent many afternoons and evenings with half a dozen others at the bar, sometimes fewer. A Times report from early 2005 captions an interior shot of O'Connor's with the words: "Park Slope, Brooklyn, a neighborhood that a report says has more residents who drink to excess than average." The old-timer in me says, "That's nothin'. You shoulda seen it ..."

The prices were nice of course, the ambiance cozy, the old 45s jukebox an eccentric treasure trove--when Macnamara's Band (Bing Crosby) and Gloria (Laura Branigan) were two of the more popular selections-- but Mr. O'Connor himself was the main attraction. I sensed he disagreed strongly with me on all the hot-button issues, but he was always polite and always keen to keep the conversation going.

He was notorious for buying rounds, sometimes two or three in succession, just as you were getting ready to hit the road, and there were a good few subway rides to work where I cursed his geniality. We called that last-minute round-buying "Getting Pat-ed."

Pat moved to the day shift in later years and I regret not having stopped in more often. He was a wonderful, wonderful man.

And about that moose over the bar. O'Connor's was a dark, hazy place. Didn't matter if it was day or night. I remember once mentioning the moose in passing while chatting with a old guy who'd been coming in there for years. The conversation went on and on and I noticed the guy seemed a little distracted by something. Finally, twenty minutes after I mentioned it, he broke down and asked, "What moose?"

Earl Butz's dream

2006-11-01T19:01:00.000-08:00

At Grist, Tom Philpott evokes the Ancient Mariner--"Water, water, every where,/Nor any drop to drink"--while looking at the absurdities of industrial agriculture in the midwest, where corn fields stretch to the horizon but the locals only eat what's grown in their region when it returns "in the form of corn-syrup-sweetened Coca-Cola and corn-fed McDonald's burgers."

"Currently, a typical farm in the Midwest produces inputs for industrial production. What if, instead," Philpott wonders, "farms focused on growing fresh food for their neighbors?"

He points to the work of independent Minnesota farm researcher Ken Meter who in a 2001 paper "Finding Food in Farm Country" [co-authored with John Rosales], " argues persuasively that the dismal economics of farm-state agriculture could be improved by developing local markets."

Meter's work shows that commodity farming, rather than building wealth, extracts money from rural communities. In a seven-county region of southeastern Minnesota in 1997, farmers brought in an impressive $866 million selling their wares. However, amazingly, they incurred $947 million in costs to do so -- a loss of a cool $80 million. Federal subsidies covered just half of that loss; the rest had to be made up by non-farming activities.

Moreover, nearly half of the $947 million in incurred expenses left the area, as payments to distant suppliers of seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides, or to banks in the form of interest.

Meanwhile, though, the seven-county region's 120,000 households were busily buying food and eating it. Meter reckons that southeastern Minnesotans were spending $500 million on food annually -- and only $2 million of it on fare grown within the region. Yet if they could manage to buy just 20 percent of their food from nearby growers, that would amount to $100 million in additional sales for the region's farms, more than wiping out their $80 million loss in 1997.

In spite of big ag having done all that it can to ensure that all energies of Midwestern farmers are directed toward "the mass production of a few inedible commodities," Philpott writes that Meter proves "in case study after case study" that "Farming for distant commodity markets sucks resources out of communities, and residents of those communities spend heavily on food from outside." A little effort at redeveloping atrophied local food markets might make the bread basket of America worthy of the name again.

Read the whole article...

And a little background as to how Iowa got this way, courtesy of Michael Pollan's NY Times article, The (Agri)Cultural Contradictions Of Obesity:

So why did we ever abandon [New Deal farm policy that featured price supports and grain reserves, with minimal costs, if any, to taxpayers]? Politics, in a word. The shift from an agricultural-support system designed to discourage overproduction to one that encourages it dates to the early 1970's -- to the last time food prices in America climbed high enough to generate significant political heat. That happened after news of Nixon's 1972 grain deal with the Soviet Union broke, a disclosure that coincided with a spell of bad weather in the farm belt. Commodity prices soared, and before long so did supermarket prices for meat, milk, bread and other staple foods tied to the cost of grain. Angry consumers took to the streets to protest food prices and staged a nationwide meat boycott to protest the high cost of hamburger, that American birthright. Recognizing the political peril, Nixon ordered his secretary of agriculture, Earl (Rusty) Butz, to do whatever was necessary to drive down the price of food.

Butz implored America's farmers to plant their fields ''fence row to fence row'' and set about dismantling 40 years of farm policy designed to prevent overproduction. He shuttered the ever-normal granary, dropped the target price for grain and inaugurated a new subsidy system, which eventually replaced nonrecourse loans with direct payments to farmers. The distinction may sound technical, but in effect it was revolutionary. For instead of lending farmers money so they could keep their grain off the market, the government offered to simply cut them a check, freeing them to dump their harvests on the market no matter what the price.

The new system achieved exactly what it was intended to: the price of food hasn't been a political problem for the government since the Nixon era. Commodity prices have steadily declined, and in the perverse logic of agricultural economics, production has increased, as farmers struggle to stay solvent. As you can imagine, the shift from supporting agricultural prices to subsidizing much lower prices has been a boon to agribusiness companies because it slashes the cost of their raw materials. That's why Big Food, working with the farm-state Congressional delegations it lavishly supports, consistently lobbies to maintain a farm policy geared to high production and cheap grain.

"A good place to toss trash"

2006-10-29T18:03:00.000-08:00

Bobbie Ann Mason has an angry, heartbreaking piece in the New York Times today on how her home state of Kentucky fits into the global economy.

Mason's op-ed brought to mind a comment by Wendell Berry earlier this year, as he responded to the proclamation that the University of Kentucky was determined to become a Top 20 national research institution by the year 2020.

I'm paraphrasing now, because I can't find the op-ed online, but Berry was, to say the least, skeptical of the idea that "Top 20" status was desirable or obtainable for UK, given that it is a land-grant institution situated smack dab in the middle of a state that is, in effect, a natural resources colony for the larger economies beyond its borders.

Today, Mason picks up Berry's thought...

In Kentucky we’re used to remote control. Historically, outsiders have dominated the place like a kudzu invasion. Many of the coal mines are owned by huge out-of-state companies. The coal and the profits depart, leaving behind ravaged land and poisoned streams, soil and air. In 2000, 300 million gallons of sludge spilled from a coal slurry pond in Martin County, a greater toxic accident than the Exxon Valdez oil disaster. You might not remember that, because Kentucky seems out of sight, out of mind — a good place to toss trash.

Actually, Mason soft-pedals the extent of the catastrophe, at least in comparison to the Exxon-Valdez disaster. At 300 million gallons, we're talking 30 times the extent of that notorious spill.

And just so you know, that Martin County spill happened in October 2000. In January 2001, as Dubya took office, investigators into the spill were told to "wrap things up"--just as they were getting started.

But of course Massey Energy, the parent company of the negligent mining outfit, had to pay massive fees to clean up the largest ecological disaster east of the Mississippi River. Well, yea, or so you'd think. But, no. An April 2002 fine 0f $110, 000 was later reduced to $5,600.

But wait, there's more to Kentucky than just coal catastrophes!

For example, consider our weapons-of-mass-destruction site, the Blue Grass Army Depot in Richmond, where a stockpile of chemical weapons has been languishing since World War II. At least 55,000 rockets, with 523 tons of chemical weapons, are stored in shabby igloos. How to dispose of toxins like mustard gas and sarin has been a debate for decades. And the stuff is prone to pesky leaks. But at last Kentucky is getting a $2 billion federal plant that will neutralize the weapons by separating the chemicals and washing them in water. It’s a pilot plant, to find out if this process will really work.

Local leaders insist on local hiring so the community can benefit economically. So the government contractor plans to recruit teenagers at high schools, vo-tech schools, even church groups, to train them for careers in working safely with weapons of mass destruction. One procedure will involve cutting the heads off chemical-filled rockets with something like a pipe cutter.
Then there are the leftover contaminants from the cold war. The Paducah uranium-enrichment plant has been cleaning up its old piles of radioactive uranium, tritium, plutonium and what-have-you, and now it has a chance of opening a major recycling plant for nuclear waste from all over the globe. It would treat spent fuel rods from nuclear reactors in order to salvage the residue of radioactive uranium and plutonium for use in power plants.

As part of the Bush initiative to recycle nuclear waste, the contaminated byproducts would come (by flatcar? 18-wheeler? FedEx?) into our state. Importing deadly radioactive stuff would be a boon for the community, creating up to 6,000 jobs, so you can’t argue. Or can you?

That’s not all. Kentucky’s politicians have also proposed building a $451 million lab for the study of pathogens that might be unleashed in a bioterrorism attack (ebola, anthrax). Before the boom in weapons of mass destruction, Kentucky’s economy depended on its land. But with farms disappearing, country life is becoming a memory.

To preserve the idea of Kentucky as a state of farms with a farm state of mind, we’re getting a $24 million agriculture museum. I imagine a pretend working farm with Civil War re-enactors playing old-timey farmers.

In rural Kentucky, where the health of the land once meant plowing manure under the soil each spring, the future is not in cows and corn. We’re now poised to take on the burden of the world’s poisons. Y’all come!

Read the whole op-ed...

Turning one solution into two problems

2006-10-17T07:30:00.000-07:00

Michael Pollan, in his discussion of the latest food scare, invokes Wendell Berry's observation that "when we took animals off farms and put them onto feedlots, we had, in effect, taken an old solution — the one where crops feed animals and animals’ waste feeds crops — and neatly divided it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution problem on the feedlot."

Our industrial agriculture system is making people sick at an alarming rate. "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that our food supply now sickens 76 million Americans every year, putting more than 300,000 of them in the hospital, and killing 5,000."

The solution, to Pollan, to me, to any lucid human being, is simple: decentralize the food system. But it gets complicated because of government bureaucracies and industrial producers protecting their massive investments:

These days, when people make the case for buying local food, they often talk about things like keeping farmers in our communities and eating fresh food in season, at the peak of its flavor. We like what’s going on at the farmers’ market — how country meets city, how children learn that a carrot is not a glossy orange bullet that comes in a bag but is actually a root; how we get to taste unfamiliar flavors and even, in some sense, reconnect through these foods and their growers to the natural world. Stack all this up against the convenience and price of supermarket food, though, and it can sound a little. . .sentimental.

But there’s nothing sentimental about local food — indeed, the reasons to support local food economies could not be any more hardheaded or pragmatic. Our highly centralized food economy is a dangerously precarious system, vulnerable to accidental — and deliberate — contamination. This is something the government understands better than most of us eaters. When Tommy Thompson retired from the Department of Health and Human Services in 2004, he said something chilling at his farewell news conference: “For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do.” The reason it is so easy to do was laid out in a 2003 G.A.O. report to Congress on bioterrorism. “The high concentration of our livestock industry and the centralized nature of our food-processing industry” make them “vulnerable to terrorist attack.” Today 80 percent of America’s beef is slaughtered by four companies, 75 percent of the precut salads are processed by two and 30 percent of the milk by just one company. Keeping local food economies healthy — and at the moment they are thriving — is a matter not of sentiment but of critical importance to the national security and the public health, as well as to reducing our dependence on foreign sources of energy.

Yet perhaps the gravest threat now to local food economies — to the farmer selling me my spinach, to the rancher who sells me my grass-fed beef — is, of all things, the government’s own well-intentioned efforts to clean up the industrial food supply. Already, hundreds of regional meat-processing plants — the ones that local meat producers depend on — are closing because they can’t afford to comply with the regulatory requirements the U.S.D.A. rightly imposes on giant slaughterhouses that process 400 head of cattle an hour. The industry insists that all regulations be “scale neutral,” so if the U.S.D.A. demands that huge plants have, say, a bathroom, a shower and an office for the exclusive use of its inspectors, then a small processing plant that slaughters local farmers’ livestock will have to install these facilities, too. This is one of the principal reasons that meat at the farmers’ market is more expensive than meat at the supermarket: farmers are seldom allowed to process their own meat, and small processing plants have become very expensive to operate, when the U.S.D.A. is willing to let them operate at all. From the U.S.D.A.’s perspective, it is much more efficient to put their inspectors in a plant where they can inspect 400 cows an hour rather than in a local plant where they can inspect maybe one.

The future looks fairly scary to me, as someone who believes in the idea of local food economies. Every scare drives consumers deeper into the very system that is making them less safe. (That paradoxical scenario has a familiar ring to it....)

It’s easy to imagine the F.D.A. announcing a new rule banning animals from farms that produce plant crops. In light of the threat from E. coli, such a rule would make a certain kind of sense. But it is an industrial, not an ecological, sense. For the practice of keeping animals on farms used to be, as Wendell Berry pointed out, a solution; only when cows moved onto feedlots did it become a problem. Local farmers and local food economies represent much the same sort of pre-problem solution — elegant, low-tech and redundant. But the logic of industry, apparently ineluctable, has other ideas, ideas that not only leave our centralized food system undisturbed but also imperil its most promising, and safer, alternatives.

Read the whole article...
Here's a group review of books on the food system by Tom Philpott at Grist...

South turns against the war

2006-10-16T12:05:00.000-07:00

A new poll from the Institute for Southern Studies indicates a major swing in attitudes towards the Iraq invasion among residents of the South, a bastion of pro-war sentiment for the first three years of Bush's war.

(For reasons why the South became so pro-war, the very same Institute offers Missiles and Magnolias.)

Some excerpts from the current poll:

The results signal a shift in Southern attitudes towards Iraq. As recently as July 2005, a Pew Center poll found 53% of Southerners believed using military force against Iraq was "the right decision," the highest level of support in the country. Most polls since 2002 have shown support for the Iraq war in Southern states rating higher than, or even with, national attitudes.

"The depth and strength of anti-war sentiment in the South is eye-opening, given the region’s high level of military pride and early embrace of U.S. policy in Iraq," says Chris Kromm, director of the non-partisan Institute based in Durham, NC. "The current Washington leadership has counted on Southern states as a bastion of support on Iraq, but clearly that support is deteriorating."

The poll also looked at the public’s willingness to accept the future human and material costs of the ongoing counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq. When asked to provide "an acceptable number of U.S. military deaths" in Iraq, 63% of respondents in Southern states and 68% in other regions said "zero."

When asked later in the survey how much more money the US should "spend in order to complete the mission in Iraq," 50% of Southerners and 47% of respondents elsewhere said no additional dollars should be spent.

"The evidence suggests a public consensus is developing, in the South and beyond: 'no more money and no more lives for Iraq,'" said Elena Everett, a Program Associate at the Institute. "With the mid-term elections approaching, the question is, how will Washington respond?"

Read the whole press release...

Paraguay, why?

2006-10-16T10:53:00.000-07:00

A recent story in Prensa Latina states that a certain George Bush has purchased a 100,000-acre ranch in Paraguay.

An Argentine official regarded the intention of the George W. Bush family to settle on the Acuifero Guarani (Paraguay) as surprising, besides being a bad signal for the governments of the region.

Luis D Elia, undersecretary for the Social Habitat in the Argentine Federal Planning Ministry, issued a memo partially reproduced by digital INFOBAE.com, in which he spoke of the purchase by Bush of a 98,842-acre farm in northern Paraguay, between Brazil and Bolivia.

The news circulated Thursday in non-official sources in Asuncion, Paraguay.

D Elia considered this Bush step counterproductive for the regional power expressed by Presidents Nestor Kirchner, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro.

He said that "it is a bad signal that the Bush family is doing business with natural resources linked to the future of MERCOSUR."

The official pointed out that this situation could cause a hypothetical conflict of all the armies in the region, and called attention to the Bush family habit of associating business and politics.

Paraguay, WTF? I've seen some half-serious speculation that perhaps Dubya intends to flee in the case of a Democrat sweep in November. I prefer to go with the intrepid and always fascinating Jeff Wells of Rigorous Intuition, who thinks Prensa is mistaken, and that George H.W. Bush is the purchaser, not his son.

With that, I will just send you, dear reader, off to the Rigorous Intuition site. Tie a rope around your waist and follow the links to the other postings by Wells (this one and this one) on the subject of Paraguayan land purchases, drug trafficking, the Rev. Moon, and the world's largest resource of potable water.

"Thuggish"

2006-10-15T18:56:00.000-07:00

My hometown paper made me proud today when it published the first installment of John Cheves' four-part profile of Mitch McConnell, the man whose motto is "money is speech," and whose Ahab-esque opposition to campaign finance reform has been his signature issue (if you can call that an issue...) As "Price tag politics" demostrates at length, McConnell's pet issue is simply "money and the power it buys."

The ever-so-creepy McConnell stands to become the Senate Majority Leader (if the Republicans hold the majority) come November.

Even before the initial installment was published today, the senior senator from Kentucky was going apeshit about the profile because the Herald-Leader accepted funding for the piece from the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Deer Creek Foundation, an organization dedicated to such outrageous concepts as "the preservation and advancement of majority rule in our society, including the protection of basic rights as provided by the Constitution and Bill of Rights and education that relates to this concept." The new owner of the Herald-Leader is returning the funding but is standing firmly by the story. (Check the very thorough "complete coverage" section.)

Cheves' characterization of McConnell as a shakedown artist extraordinaire is based not on any partisan sniping, but on the grumblings of corporate donors on whom Mitch leaned too heavily.

Not every donor wants to pay forever. In 1999, a group of prominent corporate leaders -- including some of McConnell's donors -- led a rebellion against his fund-raising style. To his great anger, they endorsed reform.

One of them was Edward Kangas, who was worldwide chairman and chief executive of accounting giant Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu from 1989 to 2000.

Kangas was no purist. In 1995, he and other Deloitte executives put together about $20,000 for McConnell. Kangas said Deloitte wanted "visibility" as it lobbied for the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, making it harder for investors to recover fraud losses. The GOP Congress passed the act over President Clinton's veto.

Consumer advocates howled, but McConnell backed the act. Arthur Anderson & Co. -- the accounting firm later disgraced by its role in the Enron Corp. fraud -- encased a copy of the bill in plastic to keep as a trophy. It also gave McConnell $3,000 about the time of the Senate vote.

Sending money to politicians on occasion is standard business, Kangas said. But it began to feel as if whenever Congress met, lawmakers called to mention upcoming votes that could help or harm Deloitte, he said. And a donation request would follow.

"It was a shakedown," Kangas recalled, declining to say whether he specifically referred to McConnell.

"It's often a regulated industry, like the banks, the financial services companies, the pharmaceuticals," he said. "An executive gets a call from a politician -- or someone close to the politician, who everyone knows speaks for him -- who says, 'Hey, it would be really appreciated if you could show us some support right now.'"

So Kangas joined other corporate leaders at the Committee for Economic Development -- a Washington-based business group -- in endorsing the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill.

McConnell was outraged. He mailed angry protest letters to CED members and their companies to warn that their reform advocacy would crimp the income of the Republican Party.

"I would think that public withdrawal from this organization would be a reasonable response," he wrote. At the bottom, he scrawled personal messages naming individuals and concluding: "I hope (name) will resign from CED. Mitch."

"Mitch was not completely happy," Kangas said, chuckling.

"It was thuggish," said Charles E.M. Kolb, the CED's president.

Kolb, a White House adviser to the first President Bush and an appointee under President Reagan, previously had donated to McConnell, but he resented McConnell's tone. His group stood firm.

"His letters sounded like a heavy-handed threat -- 'Continue to do business with these guys, and you won't do business with us' -- but it backfired," Kolb said. "It became a strong piece of evidence as to what's wrong with the system. It was Exhibit A."

Read the whole article....

McConnell by the numbers.

And don't miss this article from American Scientist, "The Dirt on Coal." McConnell is a big recipient of donations from the mining industry... and the head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration reports to McConnell's wife, anti-labor Labor Secretary Elaine Chao. Not that that's any big deal....

Look at the bright side

2006-10-11T07:37:00.000-07:00

As Keith Olberman explains in "Why does habeas corpus hate America," people are exagerrating about the systematic removal of their Constitutional rights. Come on, a mere 90 percent of the Bill of Rights has been gutted by the Bush Administration, at least so far....

Countdown has learned that habeas corpus actually predates the "Constitution," meaning it's not just pre-September 11th thinking, it's also pre-July 4th thinking.

In those days, no one imagined that enemy combatants might one day attack Americans on native soil.

In fact, Countdown has obtained a partially redacted copy of a colonial "declaration" indicating that back then, "depriving us of Trial by Jury" was actually considered sufficient cause to start a War of Independence, based on the then-fashionable idea that "liberty" was an unalienable right.

Today, thanks to modern, post-9/11 thinking, those rights are now fully alienable.

The reality is, without habeas corpus, a lot of other rights lose their meaning.

But if you look at the actual Bill of Rights — the first ten amendments to that pesky Constitution — you'll see just how many remain.

Well, ok, Number One's gone.

If you're detained without trial, you lose your freedom of religion, speech, the press and assembly. And you can't petition the government for anything.

Number Two? While you're in prison, your right to keep and bear arms just may be infringed upon.

Even if you're in the NRA.

Three?

No forced sleepovers by soldiers at your house. OK. Three is unchanged.

Four?

You're definitely not secure against searches and seizures, with or without probable cause - and this isn't even limited to the guards.

Five… Grand juries and due process are obviously out.

Six. So are trials, let alone the right to counsel. Speedy trials? You want it when?

Seven. Hmmmm. I thought we covered "trials" and "juries" earlier.

Eight — So bail's kind of a moot point…

Nine: "Other" rights retained by the people. Well, if you can name them during your water-boarding, we'll consider them.

And Ten — powers not delegated to the United States federal government seem to have ended up there, anyway.

So as you can see, even without habeas corpus, at least one tenth of the Bill of Rights, I guess that's the Bill of "Right" now… remains virtually intact.

And we can rest easy knowing we will never, ever have to quarter soldiers in our homes… as long as the Third Amendment still stands strong.

The President can take care of that with a Signing Statement.

Watch the video.

Read it and weep

2006-10-10T14:46:00.000-07:00

The details of Jose Padilla's incarceration have come out. His lawyers have filed a Motion to Dismiss the Indictment against him on the grounds that the Government has engaged in outrageous conduct. Read about what was done to Padilla for 3 1/2 years, via Glenn Greenwald's blog, and realize that the disgusting behavior (on the part of the authorities) detailed therein is now perfectly legal.

Unless there's a significant challenge from the courts to the Military Commissions Act (the legislative branch has shown its colors already), anyone--citizen or not--can be swept up and shut away without charge--forever--and nobody can do anything about it.

Says Greenwald:

The case of Jose Padilla is one of the most despicable and outright un-American travesties the U.S. Government has perpetrated for a long time. It is impossible to defend that behavior, let alone engage in it, and claim with any legitimacy that one believes in the principles that have defined and guided this country since its founding. But there has been no retreat from this behavior. Quite the contrary. The atrocity known as the Military Commissions Act of 2006 is a huge leap forward to elevating the Padilla treatment from the lawless shadows into full-fledged, officially sanctioned and legally authorized policy of the U.S. Government. The case of Jose Padilla is no longer a sick aberration, but is instead a symbol of the kind of Government we have chosen to have.

Christians acting like ... Christians

2006-10-10T08:27:00.000-07:00

That ought not to be a "Man Bites Dog" headline, but it's rarer than it should be.

Forgiving enemies? Objecting to aggressive war? Protecting God's Creation? What a radical religion Christianity could be.

In the past I've written of Wendell Berry's typically withering take on Christianity's eager complicity in the world's greatest evils. "Because it has been so exclusively dedicated to incanting anemic souls into Heaven, [modern Christianity] has been made the tool of much earthly villainy." Berry argues that the religion is being misrepresented and misappropriated:

The religion of the Bible, on the contrary, is a religion of the state and the status quo only in brief moments. In practice, it is a religion for the correction equally of people and of kings. And Christ's life, from the manger to the cross, was an affront to the established powers of his time, just as it is to the established powers of our time. Much is made in churches of the "good news" of the Gospels. Less is said of the Gospels' bad news, which is that Jesus would have been horrified by just about every "Christian" government the world has ever seen. He would be horrified by our government and its works, and it would be horrified by him. Surely no sane and thoughtful person can imagine any government of our time sitting comfortably at the feet of Jesus while he is saying, "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you."

A couple of recent events might indicate that at least some Christians (Evangelicals, even) are fighting to reclaim their religion from the sex-obsessed, xenophobic, racist types who've given it such a bad name.

In February U.S. Members of the World Council of Churches issued a strong statement on the Iraq invasion, declaring it to have been "launched in deception and violating global norms of justice and human rights." According to the AP, the statement also "warned the United States was pushing the world toward environmental catastrophe with a 'culture of consumption' and its refusal to back international accords seeking to battle global warming."

Bill McKibben wonders if recent developments might indicate that Evangelicals might take the lead in a drive to save the planet, citing the February issuing of the Evangelical Climate Initiative, "a document that may turn out to be as important in the fight against global warming as any stack of studies and computer models." The Initiative, McKibben argues, "made clear, among other things, that even in the evangelical community, 'right wing' and 'Christian' are not synonyms, and in so doing it may have opened the door to a deeper and more interesting politics than we've experienced in the last decade of fierce ideological divide."

We can only hope.

And Sally Kohn, of California's Center for Community Change, wrote a wonderful piece titled "What the Amish Are Teaching America.", which I've quoted from below:

The evening of the shooting, Amish neighbors from the Nickel Mines community gathered to process their grief with each other and mental health counselors. As of that evening, three little girls were dead. Eight were hospitalized in critical condition. (One more girl has died since.) According to reports by counselors who attended the grief session, the Amish family members grappled with a number of questions: Do we send our kids to school tomorrow? What if they want to sleep in our beds tonight, is that okay? But one question they asked might surprise us outsiders. What, they wondered, can we do to help the family of the shooter? Plans were already underway for a horse-and-buggy caravan to visit Charles Carl Roberts’ family with offers of food and condolences. The Amish, it seems, don’t automatically translate their grieving into revenge. Rather, they believe in redemption.
Meanwhile, the United States culture from which the Amish are isolated is moving in the other direction — increasingly exacting revenge for crimes and punishing violence with more violence. In 26 states and at the federal level, there are “three strikes” laws in place. Conviction for three felonies in a row now warrants a life sentence, even for the most minor crimes. For instance, Leandro Andrade is serving a life sentence, his final crime involving the theft of nine children’s videos — including “Cinderella” and “Free Willy” — from a Kmart. Similarly, in many states and at the federal level, possession of even small amounts of drugs trigger mandatory minimum sentences of extreme duration. In New York, Elaine Bartlett was just released from prison, serving a 20-year sentence for possessing only four ounces of cocaine. This is in addition to the 60 people who were executed in the United States in 2005, among the more than a thousand killed since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976. And the President of the United States is still actively seeking authority to torture and abuse alleged terrorists, whom he consistently dehumanizes as rats to be “smoked from their holes”, even without evidence of their guilt.

Our patterns of punishment and revenge are fundamentally at odds with the deeper values of common humanity that the tragic experience of the Amish are helping to reveal. Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done in life. Someone who cheats is not only a cheater. Someone who steals something is not only a thief. And someone who commits a murder is not only a murderer. The same is true of Charles Carl Roberts. We don’t yet know the details of the episode in his past for which, in his suicide note, he said he was seeking revenge. It may be a sad and sympathetic tale. It may not. Either way, there’s no excusing his actions. Whatever happened to Roberts in the past, taking the lives of others is never justified. But nothing Roberts has done changes the fact that he was a human being, like all of us. We all make mistakes. Roberts’ were considerably and egregiously larger than most. But the Amish in Nickel Mines seem to have been able to see past Roberts’ actions and recognize his humanity, sympathize with his family for their loss, and move forward with compassion not vengeful hate.

Read Kohn's entire piece here....
Read McKibben's entire piece here...

Killer answer

2006-10-09T20:15:00.000-07:00

Flipping through Vanity Fair, which arrived today, dwelling on their big Awards Show tie-in Country & Western [!?] Music Portfolio, which offered many WTF moments.

I imagine these things are put together on a tight schedule and maybe some who should be included can't get it together for a photo shoot while travelling to 300-plus cities a year. But off the top of the head, no Alan Jackson, Brad Paisley, Big & Rich, George Strait or Toby Keith? No Dixie Chicks? In their place Bob Seger, Kid Rock, Sheryl Crow, Dan ZANES???!!!

Much strain noted in the editorial categories created to explain to city folk why they should care about this or that hillbilly (obscuring the fact that VF's readership is much more likely to be WalMart than Upper West Side). I can imagine interminable editorial meetings hammering out the many shades of nonconfomity conveyed by the Bohemians, the Rebels, the Outlaws, the Adventurers, the Renegades....

And a huge omission was partially rectified by running the Proust Questionnaire past Jerry Lee Lewis, whose many pedestrian answers were offset by some truly memorable ones, including perhaps the best Proust Questionnaire answer ever:

What is your most marked characteristic?
My left hand is dynamite!

The most important invention of the 20th century?

2006-10-09T19:18:00.000-07:00

Fritz und Albert

[Haber's] story has been all but written out of the 20th century. But it embodies the paradoxes of science, the double edge to our manipulations of nature, the good and evil that can flow not only from the same man but from the same knowledge.

Since the spring I have been continually re-reading parts of Michael Pollan's wonderful The Omnivore's Dilemma. I keep returning to one three-page section that makes some incredible connections about how we got to be where we are today. It also clarifies some fairly basic science for the likes of liberal arts majors such as I.

I was prepared to key in the entire section Pollan wrote on Fritz Haber, but an editor at Smithsonian excerpted it, with some small changes in an article titled "What's Eating America?"

Haber was a German Jew whose contributions to the German war efforts in WW I were not enough to save him from being hounded out of his country by the Nazis (who exterminated many members of his family in the camps using his invention, Zyklon B). His first wife was so sickened by his work with poison gases that she killed herself with his army pistol.

These anecdotes, as ugly and horrifyingly ironic as they are, are really just a sick, but not completely tangential, aside to Haber's story. I have never heard it claimed, but to my eyes it seems Haber's major scientific invention ranks right up there with splitting the atom. For it was he who figured out how to fix nitrogen synthetically.

One result of Haber's work was the existence today of billions of people. Were it not for his invention, two out of five of us would simply not exist!

And of course the synthetic fixing of nitrogen continues to have monstrously large (and overwhelmingly negative) consequences for agriculture and the planet itself, which Pollan explains below:

The great turning point in the modern history of corn, which in turn marks a key turning point in the industrialization of our food, can be dated with some precision to the day in 1947 when the huge munitions plant at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, switched over from making explosives to making chemical fertilizer. After World War II, the government had found itself with a tremendous surplus of ammonium nitrate, the principal ingredient in the making of explosives. Ammonium nitrate also happens to be an excellent source of nitrogen for plants. Serious thought was given to spraying America's forests with the surplus chemical, to help the timber industry. But agronomists in the Department of Agriculture had a better idea: spread the ammonium nitrate on farmland as fertilizer. The chemical fertilizer industry (along with that of pesticides, which are based on the poison gases developed for war) is the product of the government's effort to convert its war machine to peacetime purposes. As the Indian farmer activist Vandana Shiva says in her speeches, "We're still eating the leftovers of World War II."

F1 hybrid corn is the greediest of plants, consuming more fertilizer than any other crop. Though F1 hybrids were introduced in the 1930s, it wasn't until they made the acquaintance of chemical fertilizers in the 1950s that corn yields exploded. The discovery of synthetic nitrogen changed everything—not just for the corn plant and the farm, not just for the food system, but also for the way life on earth is conducted.

All life depends on nitrogen; it is the building block from which nature assembles amino acids, proteins and nucleic acid; the genetic information that orders and perpetuates life is written in nitrogen ink. But the supply of usable nitrogen on earth is limited. Although earth's atmosphere is about 80 percent nitrogen, all those atoms are tightly paired, nonreactive and therefore useless; the 19th-century chemist Justus von Liebig spoke of atmospheric nitrogen's "indifference to all other substances." To be of any value to plants and animals, these self-involved nitrogen atoms must be split and then joined to atoms of hydrogen.

Chemists call this process of taking atoms from the atmosphere and combining them into molecules useful to living things "fixing" that element. Until a German Jewish chemist named Fritz Haber figured out how to turn this trick in 1909, all the usable nitrogen on earth had at one time been fixed by soil bacteria living on the roots of leguminous plants (such as peas or alfalfa or locust trees) or, less commonly, by the shock of electrical lightning, which can break nitrogen bonds in the air, releasing a light rain of fertility.

In his book Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch and the Transformation of World Food Production, Vaclav Smil pointed out that "there is no way to grow crops and human bodies without nitrogen." Before Haber's invention, the sheer amount of life earth could support—the size of crops and therefore the number of human bodies—was limited by the amount of nitrogen that bacteria and lightning could fix. By 1900, European scientists had recognized that unless a way was found to augment this naturally occurring nitrogen, the growth of the human population would soon grind to a very painful halt. The same recognition by Chinese scientists a few decades later is probably what compelled China's opening to the West: after Nixon's 1972 trip, the first major order the Chinese government placed was for 13 massive fertilizer factories. Without them, China would have starved.

This is why it may not be hyperbole to claim, as Smil does, that the Haber-Bosch process for fixing nitrogen (Bosch gets the credit for commercializing Haber's idea) is the most important invention of the 20th century. He estimates that two of every five humans on earth today would not be alive if not for Fritz Haber's invention. We can easily imagine a world without computers or electricity, Smil points out, but without synthetic fertilizer billions of people would never have been born. Though, as these numbers suggest, humans may have struck a Faustian bargain with nature when Fritz Haber gave us the power to fix nitrogen.

Fritz Haber? No, I'd never heard of him either, even though he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1918 for "improving the standards of agriculture and the well-being of mankind." But the reason for his obscurity has less to do with the importance of his work than an ugly twist of his biography, which recalls the dubious links between modern warfare and industrial agriculture: during World War I, Haber threw himself into the German war effort, and his chemistry kept alive Germany's hopes for victory, by allowing it to make bombs from synthetic nitrate. Later, Haber put his genius for chemistry to work developing poison gases—ammonia, then chlorine. (He subsequently developed Zyklon B, the gas used in Hitler's concentration camps.) His wife, a chemist sickened by her husband's contribution to the war effort, used his army pistol to kill herself; Haber died, broken and in flight from Nazi Germany, in a Basel hotel room in 1934.

His story has been all but written out of the 20th century. But it embodies the paradoxes of science, the double edge to our manipulations of nature, the good and evil that can flow not only from the same man but from the same knowledge. Even Haber's agricultural benefaction has proved to be a decidedly mixed blessing.

When humankind acquired the power to fix nitrogen, the basis of soil fertility shifted from a total reliance on the energy of the sun to a new reliance on fossil fuel. That's because the Haber-Bosch process works by combining nitrogen and hydrogen gases under immense heat and pressure in the presence of a catalyst. The heat and pressure are supplied by prodigious amounts of electricity, and the hydrogen is supplied by oil, coal or, most commonly today, natural gas. True, these fossil fuels were created by the sun, billions of years ago, but they are not renewable in the same way that the fertility created by a legume nourished by sunlight is. (That nitrogen is fixed by a bacterium living on the roots of the legume, which trades a tiny drip of sugar for the nitrogen the plant needs.)

Liberated from the old biological constraints, the farm could now be managed on industrial principles, as a factory transforming inputs of raw material—chemical fertilizer—into outputs of corn. And corn adapted brilliantly to the new industrial regime, consuming prodigious quantities of fossil fuel energy and turning out ever more prodigious quantities of food energy. Growing corn, which from a biological perspective had always been a process of capturing sunlight to turn it into food, has in no small measure become a process of converting fossil fuels into food. More than half of all the synthetic nitrogen made today is applied to corn.

From the standpoint of industrial efficiency, it's too bad we can't simply drink petroleum directly, because there's a lot less energy in a bushel of corn (measured in calories) than there is in the half-gallon of oil required to produce it. Ecologically, this is a fabulously expensive way to produce food—but "ecologically" is no longer the operative standard. In the factory, time is money, and yield is everything.

One problem with factories, as opposed to biological systems, is that they tend to pollute. Hungry for fossil fuel as hybrid corn is, farmers still feed it far more than it can possibly eat, wasting most of the fertilizer they buy. And what happens to that synthetic nitrogen the plants don't take up? Some of it evaporates into the air, where it acidifies the rain and contributes to global warming. Some seeps down to the water table, whence it may come out of the tap. The nitrates in water bind to hemoglobin, compromising the blood's ability to carry oxygen to the brain. (I guess I was wrong to suggest we don't sip fossil fuels directly; sometimes we do.)

It has been less than a century since Fritz Haber's invention, yet already it has changed earth's ecology. More than half of the world's supply of usable nitrogen is now man-made. (Unless you grew up on organic food, most of the kilo or so of nitrogen in your body was fixed by the Haber-Bosch process.) "We have perturbed the global nitrogen cycle," Smil wrote, "more than any other, even carbon." The effects may be harder to predict than the effects of the global warming caused by our disturbance of the carbon cycle, but they are no less momentous.

The flood of synthetic nitrogen has fertilized not just the farm fields but the forests and oceans, too, to the benefit of some species (corn and algae being two of the biggest beneficiaries) and to the detriment of countless others. The ultimate fate of the nitrates spread in Iowa or Indiana is to flow down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, where their deadly fertility poisons the marine ecosystem. The nitrogen tide stimulates the wild growth of algae, and the algae smother the fish, creating a "hypoxic," or dead, zone as big as New Jersey—and still growing. By fertilizing the world, we alter the planet's composition of species and shrink its biodiversity.

And yet, as organic farmers (who don't use synthetic fertilizer) prove every day, the sun still shines, plants and their bacterial associates still fix nitrogen, and farm animals still produce vast quantities of nitrogen in their "waste," so-called. It may take more work, but it's entirely possible to nourish the soil, and ourselves, without dumping so much nitrogen into the environment. The key to reducing our dependence on synthetic nitrogen is to build a more diversified agriculture—rotating crops and using animals to recycle nutrients on farms—and give up our vast, nitrogen-guzzling monocultures of corn. Especially as the price of fossil fuels climbs, even the world's most industrialized farmers will need to take a second look at how nature, and those who imitate her, go about creating fertility without diminishing our world.

Another scandal, another coverup, another snarling attack on leakers

2006-10-02T07:11:00.000-07:00

Glenn Greenwald is masterful here on Hastert's disgraceful "investigation"--not into the Republican cover-up of its knowledge of Mark Foley's issues, but into who spilled the beans about the cover-up.

Which, as Greenwald points out, has been the M.O. from Day One of our One-Party-Rule Era.

Whenever someone exposes wrongdoing on the part of Beltway Republicans, their reaction has been to attack and threaten those who expose the wrongdoing. When Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill published a book with Ron Suskind which revealed that the administration was planning to attack Iraq long before 9/11, they began immediately threatening O'Neill with a criminal investigation over documents they claimed he improperly took. When The New York Times exposed the President's illegal eavesdropping, they threatened a criminal investigation of the reporters and editors who published the story. And now Hastert is attempting to depict as the real criminals those who exposed the conduct of the House GOP leaders in the Foley scandal.

.... It is critical to keep in mind what this scandal is about and what it is not about. It is true that there are legal and criminal aspect to this scandal, but legal issues here are secondary at most. This is not a case involving complex federal criminal statutes or debates over whether enough evidence can be compiled demonstrating that GOP House leaders broke the law. Instead, the issue is one of political corruption and lack of character -- the fact that the GOP House leadership is so devoted to preservation of its own power that they are willing to do anything, no matter how corrupt or repugnant, to cling to that power.

The behavior of the GOP House leadership here is reprehensible and intolerable even if they are able to avoid criminal prosecution for it. That point, after all, was supposedly the centerpiece of Republican rule in Washington, according to the President:

Let me say a few words about important values we must demonstrate while all of us serve in government. First, we must always maintain the highest ethical standards. We must always ask ourself (sic) not only what is legal, but what is right. There is no goal of government worth accomplishing if it cannot be accomplished with integrity.
Even worse than Hastert's deliberate exclusion of the real issue here from the scope of the investigation he requested is the real purpose of his letter -- which is to trigger a criminal investigation and prosecution by the Bush-controlled Justice Department of those in the media and elsewhere who revealed to the American public that the GOP House leadership was protecting a predator in their midst.

Read the whole article...

"A tortured debate"

2006-09-21T20:28:00.000-07:00

A tip o' the hat to Molly Ivins, whose column with the title above begins:

Some country is about to have a Senate debate on a bill to legalize torture. How weird is that?

Sadly, the debate is over, and the bad guys won. Surprise: there were no good guys!

This torture thing, like this war thing, is beyond my comprehension. Everyone goes about their business as if nothing's wrong, and Bush's ratings actually jump.

I'll be back on the war thing soon, of course. But Bush and "rebel" Republicans debating, and trying to reach a compromise on, the gutting of the Geneva Conventions, is pretty much beyond belief (in a world where every day's news keeps setting the disbelief bar higher). I like what Lindsay Beyerstein said about the absurdity of discussions on the issue of torture, which (if anti-torture) often focus on the practical drawbacks of torturing people. It's not that it's, like, categorically evil, it just might be, like, counterproductive:

It's sort of like writing rape-prevention posts about how you shouldn't rape people because it's not going to be as much fun as you think, or because you might drive your victim into the arms of radical feminists, etc. It seems either obscene or otiose to explain to would-be rapists why rape is a poor means to their ends. The moral argument against rape is so strong, and the consensus on the subject is so broad that it seems silly even to consider the instrumental arguments against it.

Chris Floyd can be counted on to cut to the emotional quick on many issues. On the subject of the disgusting torture "debate," he does not disappoint:

Let's be very clear.... What Bush has been talking about and protesting against were efforts to ensure that CIA interrogators could not torture suspects. Because of course they could continue to use ordinary methods of interrogation -- which experts uniformly agree produce better intelligence -- just as they have always been able to. When Bush and Tennessee cat-torturer [Bill Frist] talk about the "program of interrogation" continuing, they mean allowing the CIA to torture captives by various methods without being charged with war crimes and felony violations of American law. That is precisely what they are talking about, and nothing else. But you won't see it put that way on the pages of our most august journalist institutions nor on the broadcasts of our world-renowned network news shows.

And let us make one other point -- and in a most impolitic way, for the truth is often an impolitic commodity: John McCain is a goddamned liar. Yes, he himself suffered torture, yes he came through it, yes, we all admire his fortitude during that ordeal in his youth: but his record in later life, in politics, is that of a moral coward with good PR skills. (Not that it takes much skill to wow the poltroons who squat on the commanding heights of the corporate media world today.) And today, he has opened his mouth and emitted a damnable lie, to wit: "the integrity and letter and spirit of the Geneva Conventions have been preserved.”

This is an untrue statement, analogous to saying the moon is located in his rectum or that he can bite through pig iron with his bare teeth. Every step the Bush gang has taken in this pro-torture, don't-prosecute-us campaign is designed to weaken the integrity and letter and spirit of the Geneva Conventions. The Conventions, which have been adopted into American law by Congress -- in bills sponsored and championed by Republicans -- are crystal clear on torture. There is no need to "preserve" their integrity with new legislation; there is nothing wrong with the Conventions that need to be "fixed" -- unless, of course, you wish to use interrogation techniques that any sentient human being would recognize as torture. In that case, of course you have to "fix" the Conventions by gutting their integrity, letter and spirit.

John McCain might be a moral coward in his old age, but he's not stupid. He knows all this. He knows that the Bush Administration has been trying to wriggle out of the Conventions since the earliest days of the "War of Terror." He knows that gutting the Conventions is at the heart of Bush's "interrogation program" which McCain and his "rebels" have just saved with their grand "compromise."

Therefore, we will say it again clearly, so that even the nabobs on the Washington Post editorial page can hear it: John McCain is a goddamned liar, and his "agreement" today serves some of the most evil principles ever supported openly by the United States government since slavery.

I might quibble with Mr. Floyd that the practice of torture has some competition in the "most evil principles" contest with the general acceptance of dropping bombs on, and strafing with helicopter gunships, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Iraqis and Afghans and (through our Middle Eastern Mini Me) Lebanese women and children--but it's part of the same fabric of savagery that our nation continues to perpetuate on the world.

Tortured to death by the CIA (l.), children shot by U.S. forces (r.).

A state of unhealthy denial

2006-09-19T20:21:00.000-07:00

Karen Armstrong, as usual, a voice of reason, writes in the Guardian about Islamophobia:

Jesus had told his followers to love their enemies, not to exterminate them. It was when the Christians of Europe were fighting brutal holy wars against Muslims in the Middle East that Islam first became known in the west as the religion of the sword. At this time, when the popes were trying to impose celibacy on the reluctant clergy, Muhammad was portrayed by the scholar monks of Europe as a lecher, and Islam condemned - with ill-concealed envy - as a faith that encouraged Muslims to indulge their basest sexual instincts. At a time when European social order was deeply hierarchical, despite the egalitarian message of the gospel, Islam was condemned for giving too much respect to women and other menials.

In a state of unhealthy denial, Christians were projecting subterranean disquiet about their activities on to the victims of the Crusades, creating fantastic enemies in their own image and likeness. This habit has persisted. The Muslims who have objected so vociferously to the Pope's denigration of Islam have accused him of "hypocrisy", pointing out that the Catholic church is ill-placed to condemn violent jihad when it has itself been guilty of unholy violence in crusades, persecutions and inquisitions and, under Pope Pius XII, tacitly condoned the Nazi Holocaust.

Pope Benedict delivered his controversial speech in Germany the day after the fifth anniversary of September 11. It is difficult to believe that his reference to an inherently violent strain in Islam was entirely accidental. He has, most unfortunately, withdrawn from the interfaith initiatives inaugurated by his predecessor, John Paul II, at a time when they are more desperately needed than ever. Coming on the heels of the Danish cartoon crisis, his remarks were extremely dangerous. They will convince more Muslims that the west is incurably Islamophobic and engaged in a new crusade.

Anniversary

2006-09-11T18:15:00.000-07:00

It was a gorgeous day today, one spent largely outside in the garden with my kids.

Meanwhile, according to the Independent:

The "war on terror" - and by terrorists - has directly killed a minimum of 62,006 people, created 4.5 million refugees and cost the US more than the sum needed to pay off the debts of every poor nation on earth.

If estimates of other, unquantified, deaths - of insurgents, the Iraq military during the 2003 invasion, those not recorded individually by Western media, and those dying from wounds - are included, then the toll could reach as high as 180,000.

And Billmon has perhaps the most apt summing up of what today means:

If you had told me, five years ago, that on the fifth anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in history Ground Zero would still be nothing but an enormous hole in the ground, I wouldn't have believed you -- just as I wouldn't have believed that a major American city could be thoroughly trashed by a Category 4 hurricane and then left to moulder in the mud for a year while various federal, state and local bureaucrats and hack politicians tried to make up their minds what to do.

I would have said that while those kinds of things can and do happen in Third World kleptocracies or decaying Stalinist police states, they're simply not possible in the richest and most powerful nation in history. Even if the voters could somehow be bamboozled into accepting such incompetence, the wealthy elites and corporate technocrats who own and operate the world's only remaining superpower would never stand for it.

You can learn a lot about a country in five years.

What I've learned (from 9/11, the corporate scandals, the fiasco in Iraq, Katrina, the Cheney Administration's insane economic and environmental policies and the relentless dumbing down of the corporate media -- plus the repeated electoral triumphs of the Rovian brand of "reality management") is that the United States is moving down the curve of imperial decay at an amazingly rapid clip. If anything, the speed of our descent appears to be accelerating.

The physical symptoms -- a lost war, a derelict city, a Potemkin memorial hastily erected in a vacant lot -- aren't nearly as alarming as the moral and intellectual paralysis that seems to have taken hold of the system. The old feedback mechanisms are broken or in deep disrepair, leaving America with an opposition party that doesn't know how (or what) to oppose, a military run by uniformed yes men, intelligence czars who couldn't find their way through a garden gate with a GPS locator, TV networks that don't even pretend to cover the news unless there's a missing white woman or a suspected child rapist involved, and talk radio hosts who think nuking Mecca is the solution to all our problems in the Middle East. We've got think tanks that can't think, security agencies that can't secure and accounting firms that can't count (except when their clients ask them to make 2+2=5). Our churches are either annexes to shopping malls, halfway homes for pederasts, or GOP precinct headquarters in disguise. Our economy is based on asset bubbles, defense contracts and an open-ended line of credit from the People's Bank of China, and we still can't push the poverty rate down or the median wage up.

I could happily go on, but I imagine you get my point. It's hard to think of a major American institution, tradition or cultural value that has not, at some point over the past five years, been shown to be a.) totally out of touch, b.) criminally negligent, c.) hopelessly corrupt, d.) insanely hypocritical or e.) all of the above.

Dick's dollars

2006-08-28T11:24:00.000-07:00

I know this isn't exactly new news, but I've been thinking over the weekend about an old-ish story (May) from Kiplingers' that was mentioned on a blog or two last week.

The gist of the story is that the Cheney family's financial disclosure forms indicate that the co-president is betting rather heavily on "a rise in inflation and interest rates and on a decline in the value of the dollar against foreign currencies."

Which, for just about anyone else, would be fine. Nothing wrong with hedging against a decline in the dollar.

But Dick Cheney, perhaps the most powerful vice president in history, can do as much as anyone to influence the direction of the dollar (with, to take a CRAZY example that would never happen in the REAL world: overspending and overborrowing and engaging in endless, grotesquely expensive military adventures).

So a guy with that clout betting on the decline of the dollar: isn't that more than a little like insider trading?

Lucy and the football

2006-08-11T07:14:00.000-07:00

Anyone asking how exactly we know to trust the people who told us about this plot?

Just as a matter of procedure, y'know, Trust but verify.

So depressing to watch the cable news nets yesterday. These guys are PUMPED. This is what they do best--sow fear in business travelers.

On MSNBC they trotted out a couple of "terror analysts" whose comments struck me as bizarrely scripted.

Hey, all that they say about this plot may be true, or it may all be about domestic politics again, on both sides of the pond.

Given the limited info we have (and we'll be reliant on what other data UK and US intelligence deigns to release), here's a pretty good rumination from Rigorous Intuition:

The crawl on MSNBC Thursday night read Terror in the Sky: Mass Murder on an Unimaginable Scale! Well, no; and I mean no to everything.

There is no terror in the sky, unless you're Iraqi or Lebanese, or reside in northern Israel or any of the world's other free-fire zones and might expect to see death fall from it. Or unless we can include the sky itself, churning with strange weather and unwholesome artifacts, and a sun that now seems to burn an alien white. Because if we look up, we may just catch our breath.

The mass murder never was, and the unimaginable scale! was imagined more than ten years ago, and given the name Project Bojinka. Substitute the Pacific for the Atlantic, and toss in the assassination of the Pope and the crashing of a plane into CIA headquarters for good measure, and you have a thwarted operation that's earned its exclamation point. But 2006 isn't 1995, and today citizens of the great crusader nations must be reminded, repeatedly and at the pleasure of their minders, just how vulnerable they are, and therefore dependent upon the same dark mills of empire that intentionally exacerbate those vulnerabilities.

"Weeks before September 11th, this is going to play big," boasts a naturally unnamed White House official in the AFP story "Bush Seeks Political Gains from Foiled Plot." Bush and Blair conferred last weekend on the "imminent attack" (though neither man was sufficiently moved to break off their vacations), and the White House tooled its response to Joe Lieberman's defeat at the hands of a "far left" cut 'n runner accordingly. The thwarting of the plot (with a man inside, as is the custom in plots both thwarted and unthwarted) became itself a time bomb, rigged to detonate in the faces of populist leaders who even modestly reflect the now conventional wisdom that the war is an abject failure (at least according to how failure is conventionally understood). This would be a reminder and an example that the threat is real, though the threat was no less real - and possibly more real - when Bojinka was foiled in 1995.

Last night on the RI forum, "sunny" wondered "So, if the plot was foiled, why was the terror alert raised? That in itself tells me everything I need to know."

Let one happen, stop the rest. Should we to be grateful then that, for whatever reason, they stop some?

Grace

2006-08-05T12:48:00.000-07:00

Under pressure. Please, God, if I am ever in a city that is being terror-bombed, please let me have the sang-froid and wit of this sign-maker.

Pic from Beirut, from the AngryArab.

Paging a third-party candidate

2006-08-04T06:31:00.000-07:00

Somebody run for President!

Viable or not, I don't care. Ralph. Bill Moyers. Gus Hall, where are you now? (I know, I know).

There's overwhelming popular support among regular folks for an impartial approach vis a vis Israel's attack on Lebanon ("65 per cent of respondents think the U.S. should not take either side"), but that 65 percent equals zero in the House and Senate, where AIPAC is literally penning House resolutions.

The disconnect between the Democrat War Party and its constituency has never been more pronounced than it is on the question of the widening wars in the Middle East.

From here, it looks like voters are helpless to stop the runaway train that at the moment keeps the U.S. from pulling out of Iraq, supports the terror bombing of Lebanon, and will ultimately lead to military attacks on Syria and Iran.

Billmon's The War Party is an astute analysis first of the mighty hole the U.S. has dug itself with its recklessness in the Middle East to date, and then a (properly) despairing lament that antiwar Americans have absolutely no political representation in either of the major parties.

What's become clear to me is that the Democratic Party (even it's allegedly anti-war wing) will not try to stop this insanity, and in fact will probably be led as meekly to the slaughter as it was during the runup to the Iraq invasion. Watching the Dems line up to salute the Israeli war machine, hearing the uncomfortable and awkward silence descend on most of Left Blogistan once the bombs started falling in Lebanon, seeing how easily the same Orwellian propaganda tricks worked their magic on the pseudoliberals -- all this doesn't leave too much room for doubt. As long as World War III can be sold as protecting the security and survival of the Jewish state, I suspect the overwhelming majority of Democratics will support it.
.... I think the moment when I realized the Dems once again were going to be -- would always be -- dutiful spear carriers for the neocons was after Howard Dean and company treated the Iraqi prime minister's recent visit to Washington as an opportunity to do a little pro-Israel pandering of their own.
... The lesson learned from the Democratic reaction to the Israel's war of choice is that the Dems are only likely to oppose war as long as the war in question can be framed as a fight against Iraqi insurgents and/or Shi'a death squads, rather than a fight for Israel. But the Iraq occupation isn't going to fit neatly into that frame much longer. In fact it's already slipped out of it. The Dems -- always a little slow on the uptake -- just haven't realized it yet. But when the time comes to choose (for Israel, or against war with Iran) I fully expect to see Ned Lamont in the front ranks of the pro-war phalanx, right next to the last great white Democratic anti-war hope, Howard Dean.

People tell me I shouldn't get hung up on this because, you know, if the Dems get in they'll make sure the seniors get their Social Security checks a little faster -- or they'll keep the Supreme Court out of the hands of legal madmen or do something about global climate change or save the whales or whatever else it is that's supposed to make the Democratic Party infinitely preferable to the Republicans.

It's not that I discount these differences entirely -- although they're easily oversold. But compared to the fate that awaits the republic, and the world, if the United States deliberately starts a war with Iran, those other considerations start to look pretty insignificant. I mean, we're talking about World War III here, fought by people who want to use tactical nuclear weapons. I'm supposed to put that out of my mind because the Dems might be a little bit more generous about funding the VA budget??? I'm sorry, but that's fucking nuts.
Read the whole post...

It's all their fault

2006-08-01T06:49:00.000-07:00

When asked who was responsible for the civilian deaths in Qana, Peres -- a former Israeli prime minister -- said, "Totally, totally it's (Hizbollah's) fault."
—Reuters

Human Rights Watch thinks otherwise:

Israel/Lebanon: Israel Responsible for Qana Attack
Indiscriminate Bombing in Lebanon a War Crime

Robert Fisk was on Democracy Now last night and had this to say about the Qana bombings and the outrageous—and unchallenged—rationale offered by Israeli generals and politicians:

It’s quite clear from listening to the IDF statement today that they believe that family deserved to die, because 90 feet away, they claim, a missile was fired. So they sentenced all those people to death. Is that what we're supposed to believe? I mean, presumably it is. I can't think of any other reason why they should say, “Well, 30 meters away a missile was fired.” Well, thanks very much. So those little children’s corpses in their plastic packages, all stuck together like giant candies today, this is supposed to be quite normal, this is how war is to be waged by the IDF.
The fact that when they made these comments, they went unchallenged on television, was one of the most extraordinary scenes I’ve seen. I got back from Tyre on a very dangerous overland journey on an open road, which was under air attack, and I got back, and just before the electricity was cut, I saw the BBC reporting what the Israelis had said, but without questioning the morality that if someone fires a missile near your home, therefore it is perfectly okay for you to die.
Read the whole interview...

Who's Dr. Evil and who's Mini-Me in all this?

2006-07-31T12:01:00.000-07:00

Justin Raimondo makes a good case for Shrub being Mini, but Tony Karon has a persuasive argument that Israel is fighting a proxy war for Washington. They both might be right. The bottom line is that the "special relationship" encourages each partner to do crazy things it wouldn't do outside of the folie a deux. Here are excerpts from Karon's article:

Hizballah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said a curious thing Saturday: Israel has recognized reality and is ready for a cease-fire in Lebanon, Nasrallah claimed, but it is the U.S. that insists that it fight on.
... Listening the millenarian rubbish pouring out of the mouths of Bush and Blair last Friday about this being a fight led by the U.S. and its allies for a “new Middle East” of freedom from tyranny blah blah there was also a sense that this skirmish had been appropriated by the U.S. for its wider global war, and Iran, of course, is its prime target right now — with Hizballah being identified as an Iranian asset that could be destroyed....

I’ve always maintained that the “pro-Israel” position of the Bush administration, formulated and influenced by hardline American Likudniks (whom, it must be said, are hardly representative of mainstream Israeli thinking) is actually fundamentally bad for Israel. Its infantile, aggressive maximalism precludes Israel from doing what it will take to live at peace with its surroundings, instead demanding a confrontational approach in keeping with Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall” in which Israel’s survival depends on crush and humiliating the Arabs. Bush may talk the language of “Arab liberation,” but his contempt for Arab democracy is plain — just look at his response to the Hamas election victory. His administration appears to be dedicated to a remaking of the Middle East on America’s terms through violent social engineering. The depth of their failure in Iraq appears not to have deterred them from another adventure in Lebanon, this time using Israel as their agent of “change.” And if hundreds of Lebanese children are killed in Israeli air strikes, they’re just victims of the “birth pangs of a New Middle East.”
... So, not only is Hizballah going to emerge stronger, having survived the onslaught and therefore have a substantial hand in shaping the cease-fire that will follow — and politically, while the Administration may have been hoping the Israeli campaign would turn Lebanese against Hizballah, the opposite has occurred: A poll last week found that a solid 70 percent of Lebanese, across the board, supported Hizballah’s capture of the two Israeli soldiers that started the current confrontation...

Not surprising, also, 86 percent of Lebanese in the same survey don’t believe the U.S. is an honest broker. And frankly, the Lebanon debacle will have sealed America’s fate in Arab eyes for a generation: When the next al-Qaeda attacks come on U.S. soil, I don’t expect there’ll be much hand-wringing or denial in the Arab world, blaming the Mossad for something they didn’t want to believe Arabs were capable of and so forth. And media outlets wanting to run “Why do they Hate Us?” specials can probably start writing them already.
... But it also seems clear that Israel’s own position is weakened. It has once again aroused the hatred of the Arab world, and the disdain of much of the international community for its plainly excessive response, all in pursuit of reestablishing its “deterrent” capacity — but if Hizballah is left standing, and indications are that it will be, that deterrent capacity itself will have been undermined. And Israel will have to pay a diplomatic price too, being forced back into internationally supervised peace discussions with a view to settling the conflict on the basis of the 1967 borders, as Brent Scowcroft, of the grownup Bush administration so forcefully argues.

And War in Context, quoting the Washington Post, points out that Condi got the news about Qana in an odd way:

Rice did not learn of the attack until midmorning, during one-on-one talks with Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz in a meeting room on the 10th floor of Jerusalem's David Citadel Hotel. She was "reiterating our strong concern" about civilians killed during the hostilities, she said later. But Peretz did not mention the attack, nor had Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni over breakfast.

Rice found out via e-mail. It came from the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. Assistant Secretary of State C. David Welch got the message and interrupted the meeting to tell her, U.S. officials said.

Rice was "sickened" by the report, a close aide said. "What is this?" she asked Peretz.

Israel was looking into it, Peretz responded, according to U.S. officials. Peretz said he would get back to her. The meeting ended within 15 minutes.

Now that's a "special" relationship.