King of Zembla

To Quote Our Good Friend Rev. Joe . . .

2008-11-05T13:17:00.000-08:00

"God DAMN, America!"

Some People Call You Batshit Crazy. John McCain Calls You His Base

2008-10-21T23:09:00.001-07:00

Via Zemblan patriot J.D.: A Mr. Jim Bramlett of the online community site InJesus.com has been calling for all-out "spiritual warfare" since he received the extremely disturbing missive excerpted below. He describes the author, Flo Ellers, as a credentialed member of "the International Fellowship of Ministries which is based in Washington State. She is also a member of EndTime Handmaidens and Servants of Jasper, Arkansas" -- so we think it is safe to conclude that Ms. Ellers knows a thing or two about chicken sacrifice:

Two days ago, I listened to a 9-6-08 message by Bree Keyton, a young woman evangelist who had just traveled to Kenya and visited Obama's home village and what she found out about his relations with his tribal people was chilling. And his "cousin" Odinga was dreadful. She said the witches, warlocks and those involved in satanism and the occult get up daily at 3 a.m. to release curses against McCain and Palin so B. Hussein Obama is elected.

Bree Keyton told the tribal "Christians" you are NOT Christian if you practice "tribalism" where they do voodoo to conjure up a goddess spirit or a "genie" and then come to church on Sunday to worship Jesus! What she discovered there is apparent in most churches around the world; namely, mixture in the church. Some renounced their devilish practices of blood covenant by killing sheep, goats, humans to be inducted into the tribe or to get a wife or to get revenge.

She said the current president of Kenya is a Christian. However, Obama's cousin Odinga ran aganist him and said he rigged the election and stirred up the masses to rape woman and boys, kill and burn and torture Christians, etc. until Obama contacted Condeleeza Rice and she granted Obama the right to contact Odinga and other ruling elders and he "convinced" them to stop terrorizing the Christians. Bree Keyton said the current Christian President was forced by our government (!) to "create" an office for Odinga (to make "peace") so he was made the Prime Minister (!) to make peace between the Christians and Odinga's Muslim religion!

Bree Keyton went and visited Obama's tribal people and she found out Obama is 75% Arab and his family are Muslims. Odinga is strill trying to become the President of Kenya. If he does, he will make a law forbidding all public preaching and institute Sharia Law. Bree K. said Odinga has made a pact with satan.

Bree K. also said when Obama visited his tribe in '06 and as late as Jan. '08 he went to every elder's home which has a "shrine" inside to worship the genie and asked for their blessing. She was told Obama and Odinga were both "destined" before they were born to be president/leader of their nation. They say "he is the chosen one". She said Obama's grandmother sacrificed a black and a white chicken to the "goddess of the river" so both whites and blacks will vote for Obama. All Islam loves and worships Obama. The world is mesmerized by him. Oprah's 200 million followers are out to elect Obama. Also, Dick Morris of Fox News was sent to Kenya to help Odinga run his campaign! I find that unbelievable.

The occultists are "weaving lazy 8's around McCain's mind to make him look confused and like an idiot". Bree K. said we need to break these curses off of him that are being sent from Kenya.

I read a portion of "Obama Nation" book and looked at several websites and found most of this information to be true, all except the curses part, of course....

First off, we'd like to apologize for our earlier, constant, and may we say, in retrospect, tasteless, mockery of candidate McCain's consistenly vapid, disjointed ramblings (you will find a typical example here). There is of course a world of difference between an idiot and a man who is compelled by warlocks (or genies) to act like an idiot, and believe us, we would never knowingly make fun of the latter. As far as we're concerned, voodoo-induced inanity is a type of, well . . . disease, we guess, or handicap . . . you know, like being a cripple. Disability, that's the word! Call it what you will, but the victims of this Satanic scourge deserve our respect, our sympathy, and -- for having the remarkable courage to appear before large crowds of people in a state of utter, stupefied bewilderment -- our admiration.

And secondly, we don't know how much Gov. Sarah Palin paid this wanker to rebuke every form of witchcraft against her, but we surely do hope she had a money-back guarantee:

Give Us $700 Billion in Small Bills or We Turn the Whole Country Over to Ollie North

2008-10-06T23:47:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you think we're joking:

See also this (courtesy of our funkalicious colleague Avedon Carol).

Ripe Pimple

2008-10-01T23:05:00.000-07:00

(Thanks to Zemblan patriot B.K. for the unpalatable metaphor.)

In a Week of Profoundly Scary Items . . .

2008-09-18T23:17:00.001-07:00

. . . we initially thought this one, by Mark Crispin Miller, the most profoundly scary:

To understand how Team McCain intends to get away with stealing this election, we must recall how Team Bush got away with it four years ago. (Those aren't two different teams.)

The plan for stealing this contest has everything to do with the ostensibly surprising choice of Sarah Palin as McCain's VP.

Here's why:

1. Election Day, 2004: The Myth of Bush's Christian "Surge"

First, let's recall that, after the 2004 election, everybody said that Bush had won because the true believers of the Christian right had come out--or, rather, poured forth--in unprecedented numbers, often at the last minute, to support him. Of course, by "everybody," I'm referring to the entire commentariate, both mainstream and left/liberal. On TV and in print, in news analyses and op-ed articles, they all said that Bush/Cheney had been re-elected by America's "values voters."

And they said it with a certain awe--as well they should, since Bush's victory was a sort of miracle. He had disapproval ratings in the upper 40's: higher than LBJ's in 1968, higher than Jimmy Carter's in 1980. Nor was he very popular in his own party, as many top Republicans came out against him--including moderates like John Eisenhower, rightists like Bob Barr, and many others such as William Crowe (chair of the Joint Chiefs under Ronald Reagan), General Tony McPeak (former Air Force chief of staff and erstwhile Veteran for Bush), libertarian Doug Bandow, neocon Francis Fukuyama, Lee Iacocca and Jack Matlock, Jr. (Reagan's ambassador to the USSR); and many other, lesser figures in his party also publicly rejected him.

And so did sixty (60) newspapers--all in "red" states--that had endorsed Bush four years earlier: two thirds of them now going for Kerry, the others none of the above. American Conservative, Pat Buchanan's own magazine, ran endorsements of five different candidates, only one of them for Bush. And 169 tenured and emeritus professors from the world's top business schools all signed a full-page ad decrying his economic policies, adducing them as reasons not to vote for him. (The ad was written by top faculty at his own alma mater, Harvard Business School.) The ad ran in the Financial Times, which, like The Economist, endorsed John Kerry.

And still Bush won, despite such big defections, thanks to that enormous turnout by the Christian right, as everybody kept on saying--even though there were good reasons to be very skeptical about that notion.

2. Election Day, 2004: There Was No Christian "Surge"

First of all, that talking point came from the Christian right itself, whose members certainly had every reason to exaggerate their clout. That they thus credited themselves, and that the claim was duly amplified by their own party and its propaganda organs (Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, et al.), should have been enough to make all non-believers doubtful.

And non-believers should have been especially suspicious of that claim because there's not a shred of evidence to back it up. On the other hand, there's solid evidence that that immense, last-minute vote for Bush was nothing but a propaganda fiction, cooked up by Karl Rove to mask his party's theft of that election.

To begin with, that fiction is preposterous on its face, since there were nowhere near enough of such right-wing believers to account for the incumbent's staggering advance, as Bush reportedly received 11.5 million more votes than he had won four years before. And how many evangelicals did that surge include? According to Karl Rove himself (among others), there were 4 million evangelicals who had not voted for Bush/Cheney in 2000. So, even if Rove managed to get every single one of them to vote for Bush this time around (and it's unlikely that he did), they could not possibly have made so big a difference--unless, of course, their numbers somehow
magically increased inside the polls, like Jesus's loaves and fishes.

In any case, Bush seems to have done worse with evangelicals than he had four years before. Consider how his "base" performed, in fact, on that Election Day, as measured by the National Exit Poll (and scrupulously analyzed by Michael Collins, whose essay, "The Urban Legend," is included in Loser Take All). Close study of the numbers in 2004 reveals that there was no big national surge of "values voters": on the contrary.

First of all, the nation's rural vote declined, dropping from 23% to just 16% of the overall national vote; and Bush's total rural vote went down from 14 million to just under 12 million. And while the nation's small town vote increased substantially--by 88%--those voters did not favor Bush as they had done four years before, but opted in near equal numbers for John Kerry. Of those 9.5 million votes, Bush got 4.9 million, while Kerry got 4.7 million. (In 2000, Bush had won 3.1 million small town votes, to Gore's 2 million.) And then there were the voters in the suburbs, who did come out for Bush in greater numbers than four years before--but hardly by enough to make for a decisive jump of any kind, as Bush won 28.3 million of those votes, to Kerry's 25.6 million.

Thus was there no elevated turnout in those regions where most "values voters" live--nor did the post-election polls suggest that "moral values" drove Bush/Cheney's startling re-election. On Nov. 11, Pew published the results of their most precise survey of the electorate. Having asked Americans to name the issue that most concerned them as they cast their ballots, Pew found that Iraq was Number One, noted by 25 percent, followed by "jobs and the economy," noted by 12 percent, with 9 percent invoking "terrorism." Only 9 percent named "moral values" as their main concern--with only 3 percent of them referring specifically to "gay marriage" (and another 2 percent referring to the candidates' own private lives).

Those numbers tell a very different story from the one hyped proudly by the men atop the Christianist machine. In particular, they said that they helped Bush prevail through their well-managed opposition to gay marriage--which Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, called "the hood ornament on the family values wagon that carried the president to a second term." That there was evidently no such wagon did not blunt the impact of such theocratic propaganda, which quickly resonated all throughout "the liberal media," so that it now stands as the truth.

Indeed, it was accepted as the truth so quickly that it went unquestioned even after the dramatic mass reaction to the Terri Schiavo case a few months later, when Bush and the Republicans in Congress intervened in that domestic tragedy, trying to force the very outcome that the Christianists were calling for: "Americans broadly and strongly disapprove of federal intervention in the Terri Schiavo case," ABC News reported. The public supportedthe removal of Schiavo's feeding tube by 63% to 28%, according to the network's polls.

And so it was throughout the media. According to USA Today, 76% disapproved of Congress's handling of the case, while only 20% approved. CBS News found that 82% believed that Bush and Congress should have stayed out of it. And so it went, with poll after poll confirming that the Bush Republicans' attempt to force their "moral values" on the situation was appealing only to a small minority, a/k/a the fringe. "When nearly 70 percent of the American public disagrees with you," wrote Eric Boehlert at the time, "you're out of step with the mainstream."

That strong reaction by (at least) two-thirds of us was far more telling than the press, and most top Democrats, were willing to perceive, and so they couldn't, wouldn't see the awful truth: Either We the People had abruptly given up our "moral values" since Election Day, or our apparent vote for Bush was a deception, based on vote suppression and election fraud committed in Ohio and elsewhere throughout the nation.

Thus the myth of that immense, last-minute Christian turn-out was a rationale concocted to "explain" Bush/Cheney's re-election--and the US press immediately bought it, out of a clear eagerness to close the book on that election right away, and thereby black out all the glaring signs of fraud throughout Ohio (and Florida, and elsewhere). Indeed, the press at once laughed off the "theory" of widespread election fraud, dismissing all the facts as fantasy; and in their place it offered fantasy as fact (as they had done before, and have done since).

Last night we felt reasonably certain that we would be able to count Mr. Miller's piece the most disturbing of the fortnight. Then, earlier today, right on cue, along came Scott Horton.

Meanwhile, in a Kingdom Far, Far Away . . .

2008-09-18T23:17:00.000-07:00

. . . just across the border from Zembla:

It was brief, two minutes. His brow was furrowed, and his words were careful: “The American people can be sure we will continue to act to strengthen and stabilize our financial markets and improve investor confidence.” Then, having imparted no specifics, he once again slipped out of sight.

In the increasingly surreal world of the White House, the appearance was a sign that all pretense of normalcy is gone. All week long, with Wall Street engulfed by what analysts are calling the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, President Bush had mostly stayed out of sight, except when trying to maintain the façade of business as usual . . . .

On Monday, as Americans absorbed the news that the venerable investment bank Lehman Brothers had been forced into bankruptcy, Mr. Bush received John Kufuor, the president of Ghana, at the White House. The sun-dappled South Lawn was awash in color that morning, as a full military honor guard and a fife and drum band marched across the grass, entertaining the leaders before they exchanged the customary pleasantries.

“Your tenure has been full of events and challenges, some very mind-boggling and hair-raising,” Mr. Kufuor told Mr. Bush, raising more than a few eyebrows. “You are a survivor,” the Ghanaian leader told the American president. “And my hope is that history would prove kinder to you.”

That evening, after the stock market had nose-dived, with the Dow Jones industrial average falling more than 500 points, Mr. Bush, his wife Laura and more than 100 of their guests dined on Maine lobster and ginger-scented lamb during a state dinner in the African leader’s honor. Then, in their tuxedoes and ball gowns they repaired to the Rose Garden to watch actors from Disney’s musical “The Lion King” perform a medley of songs under the cool, dark Washington sky.

(Photo links courtesy of Zemblan patriot J.M.)

Remedial English: the Metaphor

2008-09-12T12:33:00.000-07:00

She's the lipstick. He's the pig.

However, if Felony Convictions Are Going to Be the Topic of Discussion . . . .

2008-08-26T18:49:00.000-07:00

Mitt Romney, would-be second banana to presumptive GOP nominee John McCain, discussing the elderly former P.O.W.'s bewildering array of primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary, quinary, senary, septenary, and octonary residences:

Speaking to reporters at a lunch sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, Romney said that while McCain deserved his houses because of the "hard work" of himself and his family, "Barack Obama got a special deal from a convicted felon."

"I think it was a strange thing for Barack Obama to seize upon," Romney said. "If homes is going to be the topic of discussion that Barack Obama is going to end up on the short end of that one."

But Romney's attack stretches the truth. He was referring to Tony Rezko, a political fixer in Chicago and former Obama fund-raiser who was convicted by a federal jury earlier this year on corruption charges. It's true that Obama bought a piece of land from Rezko's wife to expand the yard of his $1.65 million Chicago home while Rezko was under federal investigation; Obama has since said the deal was a "bone-headed move," given the cloud that was already surrounding his former patron.

There is no evidence, however, that the Obamas got any "special deal" engineered by Rezko. Obama was able to buy the place thanks to two best-selling books and the six-figure salaries he and his wife were both earning.

Writing a best-seller can't be all that hard; in fact, we are at a loss to understand why more people don't do it more often. But what of the genuine "hard work" Mr. Romney mentions, by McCain "and his family"? McCain's own work consisted of dropkicking his first, poorer, crippled wife in favor of a good-looking beer heiress, which sounds on any number of counts like an easy call to us. The beer heiress's work consisted of being born into a rich family, which we are here to tell you can be quite trying, especially if there are hereditary obligations involved -- but we cannot in good conscience call it labor-intensive.

That leaves the beer heiress's father:

From Day 1, Hensley money has enabled McCain to be a full-time politician, free from financial concerns.

This story examines the roots of the Hensley fortune and John McCain's implacable bond to the liquor industry -- how it has enriched him personally and as a politician, and how those ties have dictated his actions on questions of public policy.

John McCain's political allegiances to liquor purveyors and his father-in-law's interests are subtle. That narrative is marked by a pattern of patronage.

The Hensley saga, meanwhile, swirls with bygone accounts of illicit booze, gambling, horse racing, deceit and crime. James Hensley embarked on his road to riches as a bootlegger . . . .

What is certain is that what occurred that December day was standard operating procedure for the Hensley brothers between April 1945 and January 1947. During this period, a 1948 federal criminal indictment charged, the Hensleys made approximately 1,284 false entries related to the sale of thousands of cases of liquor by their two companies -- United Sales Company in Phoenix and United Distributors in Tucson.

Ratliff's testimony eventually led to James and Eugene Hensley's conviction on federal conspiracy charges "with the intent and design to hide and conceal from the United States of America, the names and addresses of the person or persons to whom the said distilled spirits were sent, and the prices obtained from the sale thereof."

A federal jury in U.S. District Court of Arizona in March 1948 convicted James Hensley on seven counts of filing false liquor records in addition to the conspiracy charge. Eugene was convicted on 23 counts of filing false statements and the conspiracy count. Eugene was sentenced to one year in prison, and James to six months. Neither brother testified during the trial, relying instead on their lawyers, who included Louis B. Whitney, a prominent attorney who served as mayor of Phoenix from 1923 through 1925.

After a two-week stint in the Maricopa County jail, the men were released on bond on May 17, 1948, pending an appeal to the U.S. 9th Circuit. The appeals court affirmed the conviction on February 8, 1949.

Two weeks later, a judge sentenced Eugene to one year in a federal prison camp near Tucson, but suspended James' sentence, placing him on probation instead. Both men were fined $2,000. United Sales and United Distributors were also convicted and fined $2,000.

The criminal convictions had little immediate impact on the brothers' fortunes . . . .

Although Hensley wealth has helped propel McCain's political career, the senator will never get his hands directly on the Hensley fortune because of an antenuptial agreement he signed before his 1980 marriage.

A centerpiece in McCain's remarkable and sudden rise to national prominence is his promise of campaign-finance reform.

Yet McCain has relied heavily on the financial contributions from big corporate donors -- with the liquor and beer industry near the top of the list. McCain won -- one could say bought -- his first election to the House of Representatives in 1982 with lavish sums of Hensley beer money.

Far be it from us to suggest that felons are not hard workers. After his initial conviction, Mr. Hensley continued to show great entrepreneurial zeal:

[O]ld newspaper clips . . . showed Jim Hensley had been an underling to well-known power broker Kemper Marley Sr., a rich rancher and wholesale liquor baron with suspected links to the 1976 car-bomb murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles . . . .

In 1953, Jim Hensley was again charged with falsifying records at Marley's liquor firms. The companies were defended by William Rehnquist, who would go on to become chief justice of the Supreme Court. Hensley was found not guilty.

The Hensley Bros. subsequently invested some of their profits in the Ruidoso Downs racetrack. Yet, in a hearing before the New Mexico Racing Commission, they mysteriously omitted to mention a third, silent partner, bookmaker Clarence Baldwin:

At a May 1953 commission hearing in Albuquerque records show the Hensley brothers readily told of their connections with the Arizona wholesale liquor business and Marley in the 1930s and 1940s and the federal convictions in 1948 for making false entires on government records regarding ???? liquor sales.

However, the Henleys denied at the same hearing that Baldwin their old croney in Phoenix, had any stock interest in Ruidoso Downs.

But two years later, at another hearing records reflect Baldwin did have stock interest in the track.

We do hope that Mr. Romney secures his party's vice-presidential nomination, because we are always eager to learn more about the value of hard, extralegal work, and the difficulty of inheriting its fruits.

(Thanks to our eminent colleagues Josh Marshall and Jon Schwarz for the links.)

Headlines That Do Not Inspire Us to Continue Reading, Pt. XXVII

2008-08-26T18:39:00.000-07:00

From the AP feature "Entertainment Report," as seen in this morning's S.F. Chronicle:

Dick Partially Cleared

The Seven-Year Itch

2008-06-17T16:42:00.000-07:00

George Bush has it.

(Thanks to our venerated colleague Avedon Carol for the link.)

It's the Thought That Counts

2008-06-10T22:28:00.000-07:00

Via Zemblan patriot J.D.: We are taking this opportunity to remind the female denizens of Zembla that the anniversary of Yr. Mst. Bnvlnt. Dspt.'s nativity is less than six months away:

Playboy tycoon Hugh Hefner had a series of naughty sweet treats for his recent 82nd birthday, including chocolate body parts and a cake presented to him by a nude Pamela Anderson . . . .

Kendra Wilkinson, one of Hef's three girlfriends, says, "I think it was the perfect surprise for him - Pam Anderson, walking out with a cake naked . . . . what can get better than that?"

Wilkinson tells Us Weekly magazine she gave her man a white chocolate replica of her naked butt.

She adds, "I molded my ass, so I could call it 'chocolate starfish'. It was white chocolate, and I put a dark chocolate little thing right in the middle."

O Anus Mirabilis! -- or has Nathanael West already worn that gag out? At any rate, kudos to the free-thinking Ms. Wilkinson for resisting the societal pressure to bleach.

UPDATE: And kudos to us, for resisting our initial impulse to recast this item with John and Cindy McCain.

Perpetual Bush

2008-06-10T22:07:00.000-07:00

We commend to your attention an excellent five-part series by WaPo columnist Dan Froomkin, writing at his downtown crib, the Nieman Watchdog. The subject? What Mr. Bush will likely do to ensure that his pernicious influence lingers on well past the end of his benighted term as President. From installment #1, "Do We Really Expect the Bushies to Go Quietly?":

In any number of ways -- some overt, some covert – Bush, Vice President Cheney and their loyalists are assuredly taking steps to assure that their successors will find themselves hemmed in by limited options, balky subordinates, and inescapable obligations. Journalists should be looking for them and exposing them for what they are.

PART I: Iraq, Iran, and the Military

Iraq: The Petraeus Factor

The Bush legacy that has the most inertia, of course, is Iraq. The next American president will take office with as many as 140,000 troops still in harm’s way in Iraq, inheriting a war that will be hard to end even in the best-case scenarios. And while Obama is committed to a rapid pullout, there are ways the Bush administration can make it even more difficult than it has to be to change course. Among them: Putting stubborn loyalists in key military positions; continuing to build near-permanent bases until the last minute; letting out multi-year contracts; and committing to long-term agreements with the Iraqi government. In fact, the Bushies are doing all those and more . . . .
There are lots of other ways Bush can try to make it easier to stay in Iraq than to go. One particularly effective way is to make long-term commitments before he leaves office. To that end, two accords are currently being negotiated between the White House and the Iraqi government: a status of forces agreement and a separate "strategic framework."

Administration officials insist that the new agreements will not specify troop levels or otherwise tie the hands of the next president – but a “Declaration of Principles” signed by President Bush and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in November describes “a long-term relationship of cooperation and friendship” and calls for the U.S. to help Iraq defend itself “against internal and external threats.”

Negotiations on both accords are being held in secret, and the White House has said it does not intend bring the agreement before the U.S. Congress.

Some elements of the American negotiating position were recently leaked to Patrick Cockburn of the Independent, who wrote that Bush wants to retain the use of more than 50 military bases in Iraq and is insisting on immunity from Iraqi law for U.S. troops and contractors, as well as a free hand to carry out military activities without consulting the Baghdad government. At the same time, Iraqi resistance to such an accord is apparently on the rise, with many Iraqi lawmakers saying Bush's terms would infringe on Iraqi sovereignty and perpetuate the violence there. For more, see my June 5 column for washingtonpost.com, Bush’s Secret Iraq Deal.

And here’s one possibility Bush is likely to fight tooth and nail: Karen DeYoung wrote in the Washington Post on Friday that the Iraqi government may request an extension of the United Nations security mandate authorizing a U.S. military presence, due to expire in December, which would leave the negotiations over a future U.S.-Iraqi relationship and the role of U.S. forces in the country to the next American president.

Q. What are the White House’s goals in negotiating these two agreements? How are the negotiations proceeding? Why isn’t there greater transparency? Will Congress at least exercise its oversight power to find out what’s going on?

One particularly contentious issue is that of “permanent military bases.” It should be clear to everyone by now that when Bush administration officials deny that they are building permanent military bases, that doesn't mean a thing. See, for instance, this exchange last month between Sen. James Webb (D-Va.) and Assistant Defense Secretary Mary Beth Long. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a permanent military base. So even as Bush officials insist they have no intention of establishing permanent bases in Iraq, they have spent the last five years doing just that.

From installment #2, "Midnight Rulemaking, Last-Minute Hires and Executive Fiats":

Q. Are political appointees continuing or even accelerating their attempts to drive key civil servants out of their jobs?

A recent example of such behavior comes from Michael Hawthorne of the Chicago Tribune, who reported in early May that Mary Gade, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Midwest office, was forced out of her job after turning up the pressure on Dow Chemical to clean up dioxin contamination in Michigan.

A particularly unique facet of Bush’s approach to the executive branch has been a pattern of driving out competent, senior-level civil servants – often by removing their decision-making power – and replacing them with unqualified Republican loyalists. As Princeton University Professor David E. Lewis wrote on NiemanWatchdog.org, the effect of that can be profound:

Driving out career employees can result in a loss of expertise, institutional knowledge, long term perspective, and break up networks of relationships that facilitate governance across agencies. Career employees at the management level have worked their way up through the agency and know how it works, its routines, its culture, where the power is, and the ins and outs of policy. They often know and have ongoing relationships with key stakeholders. These stakeholders are key for implementing any agency policy. When careerists leave or get forced out it becomes harder to manage the agency.

FEMA’s incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina will of course be one of the lasting legacies of the Bush term. The White House’s disregard for scientific findings that don’t support their political beliefs is another hallmark. But there is also reason to believe that by removing people who know how to make government work, Bush political appointees have presided over a stealthy but steady erosion of government competence across the board. The question now is how bad have things gotten, and will they keep pushing good people out until the last minute . . . .
Q. Are appointees in federal agencies trying to cover their tracks? Are documents being properly retained?

As Steven Aftergood recently wrote on NiemanWatchdog.org:

The next President will have the authority to declassify and disclose any and all records that reflect the activities of executive branch agencies. Although internal White House records that document the activities of the outgoing President and his personal advisers will be exempt from disclosure for a dozen years or so, every Bush Administration decision that was actually translated into policy will have left a documentary trail in one or more of the agencies, and all such records could be disclosed at the discretion of the next President.

But that, of course, depends on appointees not destroying key documents.

Coming later this week: "Pardons and the Courts" (Wednesday); "Vice President Cheney" (Thursday); "Trying to Keep the GOP in Control" (Friday).

Bomb Iran, and We'll Make It an Even Three Dozen

2008-06-10T21:38:00.000-07:00

To the list of great listmakers (Joyce, Berrigan, Sorrentino, Barth) please add the name of Dennis Kucinich, author of "Articles of Impeachment for President George W. Bush," immediately below:

Article I: Creating a Secret Propaganda Campaign to Manufacture a False Case for War Against Iraq.

Article II: Falsely, Systematically, and with Criminal Intent Conflating the Attacks of September 11, 2001, With Misrepresentation of Iraq as a Security Threat as Part of Fraudulent Justification for a War of Aggression.

Article III: Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction, to Manufacture a False Case for War.

Article IV: Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Posed an Imminent Threat to the United States.

Article V: Illegally Misspending Funds to Secretly Begin a War of Aggression.

Article VI: Invading Iraq in Violation of the Requirements of HJRes114.

Article VII: Invading Iraq Absent a Declaration of War.

Article VIII: Invading Iraq, A Sovereign Nation, in Violation of the UN Charter.

Article IX: Failing to Provide Troops With Body Armor and Vehicle Armor

Article X: Falsifying Accounts of US Troop Deaths and Injuries for Political Purposes

Article XI: Establishment of Permanent U.S. Military Bases in Iraq

Article XII: Initiating a War Against Iraq for Control of That Nation's Natural Resources

Article XIIII: Creating a Secret Task Force to Develop Energy and Military Policies With Respect to Iraq and Other Countries

Article XIV: Misprision of a Felony, Misuse and Exposure of Classified Information And Obstruction of Justice in the Matter of Valerie Plame Wilson, Clandestine Agent of the Central Intelligence Agency

Article XV: Providing Immunity from Prosecution for Criminal Contractors in Iraq

Article XVI: Reckless Misspending and Waste of U.S. Tax Dollars in Connection With Iraq and US Contractors

Article XVII: Illegal Detention: Detaining Indefinitely And Without Charge Persons Both U.S. Citizens and Foreign Captives

Article XVIII: Torture: Secretly Authorizing, and Encouraging the Use of Torture Against Captives in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Other Places, as a Matter of Official Policy

Article XIX: Rendition: Kidnapping People and Taking Them Against Their Will to "Black Sites" Located in Other Nations, Including Nations Known to Practice Torture

Article XX: Imprisoning Children

Article XXI: Misleading Congress and the American People About Threats from Iran, and Supporting Terrorist Organizations Within Iran, With the Goal of Overthrowing the Iranian Government

Article XXII: Creating Secret Laws

Article XXIII: Violation of the Posse Comitatus Act

Article XXIV: Spying on American Citizens, Without a Court-Ordered Warrant, in Violation of the Law and the Fourth Amendment

Article XXV: Directing Telecommunications Companies to Create an Illegal and Unconstitutional Database of the Private Telephone Numbers and Emails of American Citizens

Article XXVI: Announcing the Intent to Violate Laws with Signing Statements

Article XXVII: Failing to Comply with Congressional Subpoenas and Instructing Former Employees Not to Comply

Article XXVIII: Tampering with Free and Fair Elections, Corruption of the Administration of Justice

Article XXIX: Conspiracy to Violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965

Article XXX: Misleading Congress and the American People in an Attempt to Destroy Medicare

Article XXXI: Katrina: Failure to Plan for the Predicted Disaster of Hurricane Katrina, Failure to Respond to a Civil Emergency

Article XXXII: Misleading Congress and the American People, Systematically Undermining Efforts to Address Global Climate Change

Article XXXIII: Repeatedly Ignored and Failed to Respond to High Level Intelligence Warnings of Planned Terrorist Attacks in the US, Prior to 911.

Article XXXIV: Obstruction of the Investigation into the Attacks of September 11, 2001

Article XXXV: Endangering the Health of 911 First Responders

Is there anything else you'd like to know?

(Thanks to Zemblan patriot B.K. for the link.)

UPDATE (via Zemblan patriot J.D.): An MSNBC poll asks, "Do You Think President Bush's Actions Justify Impeachment?" Well . . . do ya, punk??

And If We Attack Iran, He May Give Up Sticking Lit Firecrackers in the Asses of Frogs

2008-05-13T21:41:00.000-07:00

Play on through!

(Courtesy of every Zemblan patriot we know.)

UPDATE: Despite the President's bold example, Iraq vet Dan Nevins plans to keep on playing golf. (Courtesy of the Wounded Warrior Project. Read more, or make a donation, here.)

A Line in the Sand

2008-05-08T16:14:00.000-07:00

We are great admirers of Sen. Russ Feingold, and although we found his L.A. Times op-ed on the subject of Mr. Bush's secret laws mostly admirable, we must take issue with one term he uses in the excerpt directly below. When the executive branch can ignore or emend the law of the land at whim, behind the backs of the electorate, the nation we inhabit cannot reasonably be called a "democracy":

It's a given in our democracy that laws should be a matter of public record. But the law in this country includes not just statutes and regulations, which the public can readily access. It also includes binding legal interpretations made by courts and the executive branch. These interpretations are increasingly being withheld from the public and Congress.

Perhaps the most notorious example is the recently released 2003 Justice Department memorandum on torture written by John Yoo. The memorandum was, for a nine-month period in 2003, the law that the administration followed when it came to matters of torture. And that law was essentially a declaration that the administration could ignore the laws passed by Congress . . . .

Another body of secret law involves the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). In 1978, Congress created the special FISA court to review the government's requests for wiretaps in intelligence investigations, which is -- and should be -- done behind closed doors. But with changes in technology and with this administration's efforts to expand its surveillance powers, the court today is doing more than just reviewing warrant applications. It is issuing important interpretations of FISA that have effectively made new law.

These interpretations deeply affect Americans' privacy rights, and yet Americans don't know about them because they are not allowed to see them. Very few members of Congress have been allowed to see them either. When the Senate recently approved some broad and controversial changes to FISA, almost none of the senators voting on the bill could know what the law currently is . . . .

No one questions the need for the government to protect information about intelligence sources and methods, troop movements or weapons systems. But there's a big difference between withholding information about military or intelligence operations from the public and withholding the law that governs the executive branch. Keeping the law secret doesn't enhance national security, but it does give the government free rein to operate without oversight or accountability . . . . Congress and the public shouldn't have to wonder whether the executive branch is following the laws that are on the books or some other, secret law.

The descent into tyranny is always a shorter one than we would like to imagine, shorter yet when ordinary citizens, through indifference, intimidation, or simple ignorance, acquiesce in the abrogation of their rights. That is why we must doff the imperial diadem to Zemblan patriot Brewster Kahle, inventor of WAIS, founder of Alexa Internet, and current director of the Internet Archive (which maintains and operates, among other worthy online projects, the Wayback Machine). We were shocked to learn, upon opening this morning's S.F. Chronicle, that Mr. Kahle has been embroiled in an ongoing contretemps with the FBI, and although he has never, in our presence, said a word about it, we are delighted to forgive him the oversight. He stood up, invoked the rule of law, and made the government blink:

Brewster Kahle, who runs an online library in San Francisco, was appalled when his volunteer lawyers told him in November that the FBI was demanding records of all communications with one of his patrons as part of an investigation of "international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities."

The FBI document, called a national security letter, told Kahle he could be prosecuted if he discussed the subject with anyone but his lawyers, and allowed him to speak with his attorneys only in person. Kahle said his Internet Archive, which has 500,000 card-holders, doesn't even keep the records the FBI was seeking.

He was allowed to speak publicly Wednesday under a rare settlement in which the FBI agreed to withdraw its letter and lift the gag order. That should show other librarians, and members of the public who receive any of the nearly 50,000 national security letters the government issues each year, that "you can push back on these," Kahle said.

National security letters are subpoenas issued by federal agencies to require businesses and other institutions to produce records of their customers. The agencies do not need court approval for the letters.

A 1986 law initially authorized their use against suspected spies, but the USA Patriot Act, passed after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, allowed agents to seek records of anyone connected to a foreign terrorism or espionage investigation, even if the target is not a suspect.

The Bush administration has increasingly used the letters to sidestep a 1978 law requiring federal agents to get a warrant from a special court, in a secret session, to obtain similar records. A law passed in 2006 bars agents from issuing national security letters to libraries, with some exceptions, and requires regular audits by the Justice Department's inspector general, who has found thousands of cases of misuse of the letters.

A federal judge in New York ruled national security letters unconstitutional in September, saying the gag order violated free speech and interfered with judicial authority. The government has appealed.

The bad news: according to Mr. Kahle's lawyers, there are only two other cases in which a national security letter has been challenged in court. As EFF attorney Marcia Hoffman put it, "The big question is, How many other improper (letters) have been issued by the FBI and never challenged?"

(Feingold link courtesy of our goldarndest colleague Avedon Carol.)

UPDATE: From Wired.com we learn that, of the three known court challenges to an NSL, "all of [them] ended with the FBI rescinding the NSL . . . . The ACLU has successfully quashed two other NSLs, including one request to a library system asking for web surfing histories of patrons and another to a small New York hosting provider asking for data about a website it hosted. The Internet Archive case is only the second time the courts allowed the recipient of a Patriot Act National Security Letter to reveal his or her identity."

Unelectable

2008-05-07T00:02:00.000-07:00

There's good news and better news. The good news: after a huge win in North Carolina and a hairsbreadth loss in Indiana, Barack Obama is the presumptive Democratic nominee, and can finally turn his attention to November's general election. The better news: John McCain, who has had the Republican nomination sewn up for weeks now, failed to manage 80% support in either state primary, which means that almost two hundred thousand Republicans went to the polls simply to cast a protest vote against him:

In Indiana, McCain earned the backing of 78 percent of Republican primary voters, with exited candidates Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney gaining 10 percent and five percent respectively. Congressman Ron Paul, who is still in the race, has received seven percent of the vote.

The numbers were even worse in North Carolina, where McCain won 74 percent of the vote, with Huckabee earning 12 percent, Paul earning seven percent, and four percent of Republican primary goers simply voting "no preference."

None of these totals, to be sure, will affect the Arizona Republican's almost certain path to the nomination. But it has been more than two months now since McCain became the presumptive GOP candidate, and in each state election since he achieved that measure he has continued to lose a relatively substantial chunk of Republican support. In Pennsylvania, for example, McCain won 73 percent of the vote, with Paul pulling in 16 and Huckabee 11.

The troubling figures, however, may be the popular vote totals - individuals who McCain will theoretically have to woo back into his good graces. In North Carolina more than 105,000 Republicans did not vote for McCain. And in Indiana, 85,000 voters - whether they were Republican, Democrat or Independent - cast their ballots for someone other than the Arizona Republican.

UPDATE: Zemblans of a certain age may recall the 1976 presidential debate in which Gerald Ford made a complete fool of himself by asserting that Poland was "independent and autonomous" from the USSR. When pressed on the point, instead of relenting, he insisted that there was "no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe" -- an astonishing brainfart from which his campaign never recovered.

And McCain? Well, let's put it this way: he ain't gonna get any less senile.

Bend That Twig!

2008-05-05T22:57:00.000-07:00

Via Zemblan patriot B.K.: From Dark Roasted Blend, an assortment of hideous playground sculptures, mostly from Russia and the Ukraine:

The Old Bait 'n' Switch

2008-05-05T00:46:00.000-07:00

Government programs that work must be watered down, undermined, or dismantled altogether, lest citizens draw the naive and dangerous conclusion that government programs can work. The personal account of veteran Patrick Campbell:

When I was sitting in a humvee in Baghdad two years ago, we had plenty of time to talk. While the conversations varied between musing about the morning's chow, the stifling heat or what type of truck we were going to buy when we got home, one theme remained constant. Everyone said they were going home to get that college degree that Uncle Sam promised us when we enlisted.

Last December, a year and a half late, I finally graduated. I still laugh when people ask me whether the military paid for my education. When I tell them how meager the actual education benefits are, their shock always make me feel like I just told a child that there is no such thing as the tooth fairy. Unfortunately, many of my battle buddies realized the hard way that the GI Bill isn't what it used to be. The education benefits for troops are so low that they either never enrolled, or dropped out of school because they couldn't handle working two part-time jobs or living back home on Mama's couch to afford to attend school.

My fellow veterans are struggling because the current GI Bill is woefully inadequate. Service members are forced to take out loans just to start classes, and then wait months to get any reimbursement. Even then, the benefit only covers 60 to 70 percent of the cost of a four-year public university. For expensive private schools, the GI Bill is barely a drop in the bucket. And every year, the GI Bill is losing value because education benefits have failed to keep up with the skyrocketing cost of education . . . .

Today, we are still reaping the benefits of one of the greatest social investment programs ever implemented. A 1988 congressional study proved that every dollar spent on educational benefits under the original GI Bill added $7 to the national economy in terms of productivity, consumer spending and tax revenue. Many of our leaders and luminaries took advantage of the GI Bill, including former Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, former Sen. Bob Dole, and authors Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer and Frank McCourt . . . .

For the hundreds of thousands of veterans returning with a mental health injury, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, earning a college degree will also create a safe space to readjust to civilian life. Since I have been back, there have been at least a few days when I was unable to attend class because something I saw in the news caused my mind to shoot right back into that cramped humvee. Thankfully, as a student, I had the luxury to take those days off and get the notes from a friend. Unfortunately, I know many veterans working full-time jobs who have had their jobs threatened because their bosses couldn't understand why that veteran needed a personal day.

A World War II-style GI Bill is more than just a social investment or an ethical obligation to our veterans; it's an important readiness tool. The GI Bill is the military's single most effective recruitment incentive; the No. 1 reason civilians join the military is to get money for college.

We have already seen the military double the number of GED waivers and increase the number of felonies allowable by a recruit. Enlistment bonuses have already climbed to $40,000 and could grow even higher. Instead of lowering standards and handing out big cash bonuses, why not keep the promise we made to our veterans, and help them get the education they have earned?

From the House of Ideas

2008-05-04T19:27:00.000-07:00

Via Zemblan patriot J.D.: We'll bet you a pristine copy of Tales to Astonish #35 that the U.S. government has poured many billions of dollars into the creation of robotic spy bugs designed to perform the exact same tasks that ordinary insects used to do for free, as a personal favor to Dr. Henry Pym:

A swarm of robotic insects is being developed for the military to hunt down enemy fighters in buildings and caves, carry mini bombs and identify chemical, nuclear or biological weapons . . . .

They are to be fitted with cameras, as well as sensors to identify different types of weapons, and can be kitted out with a small payload of explosives . . . .
A particular sound may be the courting equivalent of, "Come over here, you sexy beast." But a tiny change can alter the message entirely, making it something akin to, "You're about to be torn to shreds if you don't get out of my territory."

So remember: if you should happen to find yourself, of a langourous summer's evening, stretched out on the back-porch glider with a bag of pork rinds and a Mickey's Wide Mouth discussing the virtues of socialism with Uncle Clem, think twice before you swat that pesky mosquito. You may be costing the American taxpayer millions -- and hindering our national security efforts in the process!

But it isn't just the bugs. From that now-remote morning when we first saw the men in dark suits at curbside, rummaging through our garbage, raccoon-like, in the first harsh light of dawn, we have always harbored a powerful suspicion that our beloved collection of Marvel Comics (consigned to the trashbin by our Sainted, if Short-Sighted, Maw) wound up not at the dump but at DARPA. That longstanding conviction was only reinforced by the article excerpted below, from the website of the Brookings Institute; it is entitled "How to Be All That You Can Be: A Look at the Pentagon’s Five Step Plan For Making Iron Man Real," and it comes to us through the kind agency of our BARBARian colleague Swopa, at Needlenose:

The home for much of the work on the new technologies of the Future Force Warrior system is the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies at MIT. The program was started in 2002, with a $50 million grant from the Army, the largest ever grant in MIT’s history. Among the consortium working with MIT on the soldier systems are traditional defense firms like Raytheon to unexpected players like DuPont, the plastics company, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a leading research hospital of cancer and women’s health issues.

Without any sense of irony, the designers of this system say the ultimate plan of Future Force is to give soldiers near “super-powers.”[4] The system will come with many of the same components as the Land Warrior, just updated and sexed up. For example, while the gun in the old system was planned to be the venerable old M-16, the Future Force Warrior will carry a new “Weapon Subsystem,” that crosses a machine gun with a missile launcher. Most likely using the Metal Storm electrical system, it will shoot either bullets or tiny 15 mm explosive rockets. The advantage of the rockets is that they not only will be able to blow things up, but also are planned to have sensors that guide themselves at any designated target, raising every soldier to the level of an expert marksman. The weapon will also shoot an “electro-dart” that instead of exploding, stuns an enemy with an electrical shock . . . .

The sensors will also be a vast improvement. For example, instead of just regular night vision goggles and a video camera mounted on the rifle, the soldiers will be able have the enhanced MANTIS (Multi-spectral Adaptive Networked Tactical Imaging System) sight. Inspired by research into how insects “see” the world, MANTIS is a system which fuses together all the various images that different sensors (such as infrared light, thermal, etc.) detect into one single image. Individually, each of the sensors work well in some environment and poorly in others (infrared, for example, works great in low light, but terribly when there is smoke or dust; the reverse for thermal), but the combination into one gives the soldier the ability to see the world in multiple spectrums, much like the alien super-warrior in the movie Predator. MANTIS comes with a further twist. Each soldier’s helmet in the system is wirelessly linked to those of everyone else in their squad, "so that each person sees what every other person sees." The system also has “a TiVo-like record and playback capability” that allows the soldiers to rewind what they just saw and give anything that struck them as important an extra look . . . .

Much like Iron Man’s powered armor, future soldiers’ protections will also be computerized. The plan is for new body armor that, instead of Kevlar, is filled with nano-materials that are connected to a computer. It would normally be as flexible as regular uniform made of fabric. But, like how a crash-bag works inside a car, it would activate whenever the system detects a bullet strike and turn as hard as steel in an instant. Bullets would then bounce off the Future Force Warrior like those off of Superman’s chest.

This flexibility creates all sorts of other advantages. While traditional body armor can only take a limited number of strikes from a machine gun before the plate cracks, "When you have a uniform with this new nanotechnology, it can absorb unlimited numbers of machine-gun rounds," tells the Army’s soldier systems representative “Dutch” DeGay. The pliability could even be controlled. Gloves could turn into real-life brass knuckles, to give them a punch like Mike Tyson. Or, if the soldier gets hurt (such as from tripping on a rock while reading an email with their eyepiece), the uniform could go rigid to create a tourniquet or cast. The fabric could even be woven in with "nanomuscle fibers" that simulate real muscles, giving soldiers more an estimated “25 to 35 percent better lifting capability."[10]

The incorporation of electronics into the fabric also means that the armored uniform would not just be able to change shapes, but also may even change colors. Already, Fujitsu has made a computer screen that is made of fabric, while the E-Ink company has created ink that actually changes colors depending on its electronic charge. Incorporated into a uniform, such technology could create “chameleon” camouflage. The soldier’s uniform would be able to take the color of whatever is behind them or even form a rough holographic image like that in the movie Predator . . . .

But when it comes to actual development of real exoskeletons, the most influential of the science fiction visions comes from Robert Heinlein and his 1959 novel Starship Troopers.[13] Heinlein envisioned the infantry of the future as wearing technologic suits that make “You look like a big steel gorilla, armed with gorilla-sized weapons.” As the main character describes, “Our suits give us better eyes, better ears, stronger backs (to carry heavier weapons and more ammo), better legs, more intelligence (in the military meaning...), more firepower, greater endurance, less vulnerability… A suit isn't a space suit - although it can serve as one. It is not primarily armor - although the Knights of the Round Table were not armored as well as we are. It isn't a tank - but a single M.I. [Mobile Infantry] private could take on a squadron of those things and knock them off unassisted.” The book is so popular among military readers, that it is on almost all the various military professional reading lists and DARPA even footnoted it in a research proposal on turning Heinlein’s vision into reality.

We would not be a bit surprised if the men from DARPA also found Starship Troopers in our garbage, although this time around Maw is not to blame: we tossed it there ourselves, scarcely imagining the influence it would later have on future generations of lavishly-funded Imagineers. Nor did we foresee that our discarded paperback edition of Farnham's Freehold would provide the model for decades of Republican social policy.

We can, however, state with authority that we did not, inadvertently or otherwise, expose any impressionable minds to the outlandish sci-fi visions of Miss Ayn Rand. Our copy of Atlas Shrugged went straight to the imperial outhouse, where it grew shorter by a chapter or so each day until only the dust jacket remained.

SIDEBAR: Reading the Brookings article leads us to wonder whether certain Republican candidates might have been exposed to unhealthy levels of gamma radiation:

Is he man, or monster? Or . . . is he both? All we can say for sure is that we wouldn't like him when he's angry. And he's always angry.

UPDATE (courtesy of Zemblan patriot T.H.): Engadget has posted BAE's in-house animation of robo-bugs in action. Rock out, li'l robo-bugs!

UPDATE II: Is no one safe? Now we learn that even tiny woodland creatures are being spied upon by robotic simulacra of squirrels, lizards, even -- say it ain't so! -- cock-a-roaches:

Named Rocky after the cartoon character, the robo-squirrel is working its way into Hampshire's live-squirrel clique, controlled by researchers several yards away with a laptop computer and binoculars.

Sarah Partan, an assistant professor in animal behavior at Hampshire, hopes that by capturing a close-up view of squirrels in nature, Rocky will help her team decode squirrels' communication techniques, social cues and survival instincts.

Rocky is among many robotic critters worldwide helping researchers observe animals in their natural environments rather than in labs. The research could let scientists better understand how animals work in groups, court, intimidate rivals and warn allies of danger.

In Indiana, for instance, a fake lizard shows off its machismo as researchers assess which actions intimidate and which attract real lizards. Pheromone-soaked cockroach counterfeits in Brussels, meanwhile, exert peer pressure on real roaches to move out of protective darkness. In California, a tiny video camera inside a fake female sage grouse records close-up details as it's wooed - and more - by the breed's unusually promiscuous males . . . .

A particular sound may be the courting equivalent of, "Come over here, you sexy beast." But a tiny change can alter the message entirely, making it something akin to, "You're about to be torn to shreds if you don't get out of my territory."

"There's been the old, classic trade-off for years between the ecological relevance you get (researching) in the field, versus those studies in the lab where you can control the environment while knowing they're not going to react as much," [IU researcher Greg] Demas said. "Having these models out in the field is taking us to the next steps of the research."

The Horse Is Epitaph

2008-05-03T16:38:00.000-07:00

It's from a handicapper that's real sincere (namely Zemblan patriot J.M.):

The filly Eight Belles finished second behind favourite Big Brown in the Kentucky Derby on Saturday, then collapsed with two broken front ankles and was euthanized after crossing the wire.

The field of 20 horses was galloping out around the first turn at Churchill Downs when Eight Belles suddenly went down on both front legs and jockey Gabriel Saez slid off.

"When we passed the wire I stood up," said Saez, a first-time Derby rider. "She started galloping funny. I tried to pull her up. That's when she went down."

An equine ambulance reached her on the track and put down the filly.

"There was no possible way to save her," on-call veterinarian Dr. Larry Bramlage said. "She broke both front ankles. That's a bad injury."

Trainer Larry Jones and owner Rick Porter decided to run Eight Belles against the boys in America's greatest race despite her never having done so before.

Omen?

We are insuffiently skilled in the dark art of augury to offer a definitive explication of today's events, but we do hope the Democratic leadership had a qualified haruspex on hand to read the late filly's entrails:

Democrat Hillary Clinton has revealed her favorite for the 134th running of the Kentucky Derby on Saturday, May 3rd.

The presidential hopeful urged a group of her supporters in Louisville Thursday to put their money on the filly, Eight Belles.

And This Unwieldy Sceptre from Our Hand

2008-04-24T19:40:00.000-07:00

We thought we had stopped these devils at the Zemblan border, but despite our best efforts it seems a few of them managed to slip through:

Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.

Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo's sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure . . . .

"I'm tempted to say it's one huge joke," [police chief Jean-Dieudonne] Oleko said.

"But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it'," he said.

Oh, they know, m'sieu. Believe us. They know.

(Link via our occasionally indecorous colleague Susie Madrak of Suburban Raunch Queen, whose site we usually visit for the political commentary. No, really.)

SIDEBAR (courtesy of our equally indecorous colleague Badtux the Snarky Penguin): Even if they did steal your penis, socks-in-the-basket is not the answer:

A Hamilton man Tasered by police is in hospital after the stun gun ignited a "flammable object" in his pants, burning him . . . .

"Three officers went there in response to a disturbance call," said SIU spokesman Frank Phillips yesterday. "During the interaction, an officer discharged his Taser. A flammable object the man had in the waistband of his pants ignited."

The man, 31, was burned on his hand and thigh. He was taken to Hamilton General Hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

Double the Death Toll

2008-04-24T13:26:00.000-07:00

In heartening news, two senators have called for the resignation of Dr. Ira Katz, the VA official who conspired to suppress information about the epidemic of suicide among veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. That information emerged in a pro bono lawsuit brought by attorney Gordon Erspamer, the subject this morning of an S.F. Chronicle profile that includes the following jawdropper of a quote:

"If you add up the veterans' suicides among those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and compare it to the total combat deaths, the veteran suicides are higher," says Erspamer, who introduced a VA e-mail at the trial that showed an average of 18 vets a day are committing suicide. "The VA doesn't want that out" . . . .

His father, Ernest, was one of the "atomic veterans" exposed to large doses of radiation during bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946. When his father developed incurable leukemia 33 years later, Erspamer, a year out of the University of Michigan law school, was frustrated at the lack of governmental support for veterans.

"My dad said, 'I don't want to spend the last year of my life fighting the VA,' " Erspamer says. "So I carried it on for him."

His father died in 1980, but it took 10 years for Erspamer to manage to get disability and death benefits from the VA.

"We won $90,000," he says. "And to tell you the truth, I probably spent $200,000 of time working on the case" . . . .

Erspamer has high hopes for this case, although he expects that it may take five or six years to work its way through the courts. A win would mean, at least in theory, a quicker response to claims and more rights to appeal for veterans, although Erspamer puts it more succinctly.

"It would mean that you can't treat them like crap, to be blunt," he says.

SIDEBAR: The MIT Technology Review has now posted Part II of Emily Singer's article "Brain Trauma in Iraq":

Scientists have preliminary evidence that forces unique to blasts can damage the brain directly, independent of any blunt injuries that the blast might also cause. The key questions, however, remain unanswered. Which aspects of the blast do the most damage? How can the military better protect its personnel? And perhaps most important for legions of soldiers on patrol, can repeated exposure to weak blasts lead to long-lasting brain damage?

The prognosis for soldiers returning home with symptoms of brain damage is not encouraging. Decades of research into civilian head trauma have come to very little; treatments that seemed promising in animal models have turned out to be ineffective in human tests. "It's a completely untapped area of medical development," says trauma surgeon Jon Bowersox. While the military is testing a handful of existing drugs, there's a "time mismatch" when it comes to developing new treatments specifically for traumatic brain injury, Bowersox observes. "The military is interested in developing products they can have out during the current war," he says. "They are not used to the fact that medical development has a longer time line."

If you missed it earlier this week, part I is here.

UPDATE (via our stalwart colleague the Fixer at Alternate Brain): Just so's you'll know: while Iraq vets are begging for scraps, the Navy pays John McCain -- whose wife is reportedly worth something in excess of $100 million -- an annual "disability pension" of $58,358 that is 100% tax-exempt. Asks commenter Pansypoo: "Do I see a WELFARE QUEEN?"

A Conspiracy Theory We Can Root For

2008-04-24T00:48:00.000-07:00

The resignation of Adm. William Fallon as commander of CentCom and his imminent replacement by surgemeister David Petraeus have removed one large impediment to Dick Cheney's sinister designs on Iran -- but don't pop the champagne, or the bomb-bay doors, just yet. Our indefatigable colleague Scott Horton has caught wind of a rumor so wacky it might be true:

Over at the American Conservative magazine’s blog, Antiwar.com columnist and former CIA officer Philip Giraldi reports that Israeli sources have indicated to him that the recent leak to the FBI about the new-old Israeli spy case came from inside the Israeli government toward the end of thwarting Ehud Olmert, Dick Cheney and the War Party’s plans to expand the Middle Eastern slaughter to Iran – and that there are more spies to be revealed.

Apples and Oranges and Monsters

2008-04-23T23:32:00.000-07:00

From the Independent (UK), courtesy of Zemblan patriot K.Z.:

An American expert in torture techniques has denounced his government for allowing "waterboarding" to be practised against terror suspects, just as a graphic advertisement showing the brutal reality of the technique is unveiled to British cinema-goers.

Malcolm Nance, who trained hundreds of US servicemen and women to resist interrogation by putting them through "waterboarding" exercises, demanded an immediate end to the practice by all US personnel.

He said: "They seem to think it is worth throwing the honour of 220 years of American decency in war out of the window. Waterboarding is out-and-out torture, and I'm deeply ashamed President Bush has authorised its use and dragged the US's reputation into the mud."

Mr Bush faced criticism recently when he vetoed a Bill that would have outlawed such methods of "enhanced interrogation" – the White House refuses to describe it as torture.

Mr Nance said: "You have a purpose-built table with straps in a pattern so that people can be strapped and unstrapped quickly. The head is strapped down in such a way so they cannot resist the water. The head is elevated so the water goes down the oesophagus.

"The water is poured very carefully over the nose – you keep a constant pour. You are drowning in water but you don't have the ability to hold your breath. You feel the water going in, you understand that water is filling your lungs."

Mr Nance, who is now an independent consultant, said the technique was also futile, as well as barbaric, as the prisoner would say anything to survive – regardless of its truth.

Amnesty International has produced a brief advertisement depicting the procedure Mr. Nance describes above. We invite you to watch it, and then, if you have not already done so, to visit Daily Kos, where diarist Elsinora has provided a transcript of last night's Q&A session between former Attorney General John Ashcroft and the students of Knox College. (You will find useful analysis by our eminent colleague dday, writing at Digby's crib, here.)

UPDATE: Enough already with the bureaucratic squabbling! Can't you see agent Bauer has a city to save?

FBI Director Robert Mueller on Wednesday recalled warning the Justice Department and the Pentagon that some U.S. interrogation methods used against terrorists might be inappropriate, if not illegal . . . .

Mueller said the FBI does not use coercive techniques when questioning suspects or witnesses, and he reportedly pulled his agents out of CIA or military interrogations several years ago to protect them from legal consequences.

FBI protocol "wouldn't engage in torture," said Rep. Stephen Cohen, D-Tenn. "But if you find out that other agencies may engage in torture, that you believe is illegal — does your protocol include informing those agencies that you believe their actions are illegal?"

"Yes," Mueller answered.

"Who did you inform?" Cohen asked.

"At points in time, we have reached out to DoD, DoJ, in terms of activity that we were concerned might not be appropriate, let me put it that way," Mueller said. DoD refers to the Department of Defense and DoJ to the Department of Justice.

Mueller said some of the FBI's concerns dated back to 2002, when top al-Qaida detainees were waterboarded by CIA interrogators. Waterboarding involves strapping a person down and pouring water over his or her cloth-covered face to create the sensation of drowning. Critics call it a form of torture.

Asked how the Justice Department and Pentagon responded to the FBI's advice, Mueller declined to discuss it publicly, citing concerns about releasing classified information. He also referred to the Justice Department's legal guidance at the time that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods were legal as long as they did not result in organ failure or death.

That guidance, contained in a series of memos by the department's Office of legal Counsel, since has been rescinded.

UPDATE II: We must apologize for the update directly above. We made the Jack Bauer joke in the innocent belief that it was, in fact, only a joke. Then we read Scott Horton's interview with Philippe Sands, author of the soon-to-be-published Torture Team:

HORTON: The administration's narrative has been that a harsh set of interrogation techniques, including waterboarding and stress positions, was introduced in response to demands from interrogators in the field who concluded that what they had didn't work. How did you reach the conclusion that, in fact, the pressure for the new techniques came from high up in the administration and worked its way down?

SANDS: I have no doubt about the early, close, and active involvement of the upper echelons of the administration in the decision to request, approve and then use harsh techniques of interrogation on "Detainee 063," Mohammed Al Qahtani. The story that emerged from the interviews was clear and it was consistent (plus, I had the opportunity to put my findings to Jim Haynes, who was the final piece of the jigsaw). The administration's 'bottom-up' narrative--as spun by Mr. Haynes and others--is false, inaccurate, and misleading, and I believe it was knowingly intended to be so. The administration has scapegoated individuals who were on the ground at Guantánamo in order to protect itself. Names that could have been blacked out were not. That is deplorable, and the cover-up of what really happened will likely expose those who engaged in it to even greater difficulty.

HORTON: The lawyer whose legal analysis underpins the Rumsfeld memo is Diane Beaver, whom you describe as completely out of her depth dealing with a complex set of international law questions. But you also note, rather amazingly, how Beaver's description of plot points from the TV show "24" directly influenced the introduction of new techniques at Guantánamo, techniques that later were replicated by American interrogators around the world. How could that happen?

SANDS: The administration told a story which claimed that Diane Beaver's legal advice was the basis for the Haynes recommendation and the Rumsfeld approval of the new techniques. That is false. When Jim Haynes wrote his memo of November 27, 2002, recommending blanket approval for 15 new techniques of interrogation, and leaving three others open for future use (including waterboarding), he had knowledge of the contents of the Department of Justice legal memo from August 1, 2002, signed by Jay Bybee and written with the assistance of John Yoo. That document provided Jim Haynes with the cover he sought, not Diane Beaver's legal advice. She was hung out to dry by Jim Haynes, in a manner that was unbecoming of his office, deeply unfair to her and reflected what will look to many like a deliberate effort to cover up what actually happened.

UPDATE III: From Nat Hentoff, the story of an "enemy combatant" who, for some reason, has not yet received an invitation to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

A Walking Contradiction, Partly Truth and Partly Fiction

2008-04-23T21:21:00.000-07:00

-- but mostly the latter. It transpired this morning that:

In a bombshell disclosure before testimony began Wednesday morning in the Antoin "Tony" Rezko trial, a federal prosecutor said a former Rezko confidant was prepared to say that another friend of Rezko was trying to pull strings with White House political director Karl Rove to fire U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald and kill his investigation into Rezko.

Mr. Fitzgerald, as you no doubt recall, was at the same time pursuing a grand jury investigation into Mr. Rove's role in the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. The story continues:

Rove, a former deputy chief of staff to President Bush who is now a private consultant in Washington, said through his attorney that he didn't recall any such conversations and denied he ever sought Fitzgerald's firing.

"Karl has known Kjellander for many years but does not recall him or anyone else arguing for Fitzgerald's removal," Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, said Wednesday.

"And [Rove] is very certain that he didn't take any steps to do that, or have any conversations with anyone in the White House—or in the Justice Department—about doing anything like that." Kjellander issued a statement, saying, "I never have discussed with Karl Rove or any other person on the White House staff the proposition that U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald should or could be removed from his office."

We are pleased to inform you that Mr. Rove's memory, or that of his mouthpiece, has since received a salubrious jog. As of 3:44 EDT, TPM correspondent Paul Kiel was reporting that:

I spoke to Luskin just now, and he said that his statement ought to be qualified a bit: his statement on Kgellander stands as is, he said, but during the independent counsel investigation, he said, Rove was "frequently" approached about canning Fitzgerald: "a number of people approached Karl and suggested that Fitzgerald be removed because of the alleged politicization of the investigation, but he never took any follow-up steps except to say that I can't talk about that. He didn't want to do anything seen as compromising Fitzgerald's independence." Those approaches, Luskin said, came during fundraisers or other political events "in an unsolicited way.... Karl simply never responded and did not take any action."

The selfless paragon Mr. Rove, as you know, was called before the grand jury on five separate occasions to revise and clarify his testimony in the Plame case. We will keep you posted on further "qualifications" as they occur.

Previews of Coming Attractions

2008-04-23T14:02:00.000-07:00

From the remote, poverty-wracked isle of Haiti . . .

Riots in Haiti over explosive rises in food costs have claimed the lives of six people . . . .

Hermite Joseph, a mother working in the markets of Port au Prince, told journalist Nick Whalen that her two kids are “like toothpicks” they’ re not getting enough nourishment. Before, if you had a dollar twenty-five cents, you could buy vegetables, some rice, 10 cents of charcoal and a little cooking oil. Right now, a little can of rice alone costs 65 cents, and is not good rice at all. Oil is 25 cents. Charcoal is 25 cents. With a dollar twenty-five, you can’t even make a plate of rice for one child.”

The St. Claire’s Church Food program, in the Tiplas Kazo neighborhood of Port au Prince, serves 1000 free meals a day, almost all to hungry children -- five times a week in partnership with the What If Foundation. Children from Cite Soleil have been known to walk the five miles to the church for a meal. The cost of rice, beans, vegetables, a little meat, spices, cooking oil, propane for the stoves, have gone up dramatically. Because of the rise in the cost of food, the portions are now smaller. But hunger is on the rise and more and more children come for the free meal. Hungry adults used to be allowed to eat the leftovers once all the children were fed, but now there are few leftovers . . . .

The Cato Institute recently reported that rice is one of the most heavily supported commodities in the U.S. -- with three different subsidies together averaging over $1 billion a year since 1998 and projected to average over $700 million a year through 2015. The result? “Tens of millions of rice farmers in poor countries find it hard to lift their families out of poverty because of the lower, more volatile prices caused by the interventionist policies of other countries.”

In addition to three different subsidies for rice farmers in the U.S., there are also direct tariff barriers of 3 to 24 percent, reports Daniel Griswold of the Cato Institute -- the exact same type of protections, though much higher, that the U.S. and the IMF required Haiti to eliminate in the 1980s and 1990s.

. . . to the dark, distant corners of the strife-torn third world . . .

Samake Bakary sells rice from wooden basins at Abobote market in the northern suburbs of Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire. He points to a bowl of broken Thai rice which, at 400 CFA francs (roughly $1) per kilogram, is the most popular variety. On a good day he used to sell 150 kilos. Now he is lucky to sell half that. “People ask the price and go away without buying anything,” he complains. In early April they went away and rioted: two days of violence persuaded the government to postpone planned elections . . . .

[F]ood riots have erupted in countries all along the equator. In Haiti, protesters chanting “We’re hungry” forced the prime minister to resign; 24 people were killed in riots in Cameroon; Egypt’s president ordered the army to start baking bread; the Philippines made hoarding rice punishable by life imprisonment . . . .

Last year wheat prices rose 77% and rice 16% (see chart 1). These were some of the sharpest rises in food prices ever. But this year the speed of change has accelerated. Since January, rice prices have soared 141%; the price of one variety of wheat shot up 25% in a day.
In Cameroon, 24 people have been killed in food riots since February, while in Haiti, protesters chanting, "We're hungry" forced the prime minister to resign this month.

In the past month, there have been food riots in Egypt, Cote d'Ivoire, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Madagascar.

The World Bank now believes that some 33 countries are in danger of being destabilised by food price inflation, while Ban Ki-Moon, the UN secretary-general, said that higher food prices risked wiping out progress towards reducing poverty and could harm global growth and security.

. . . to the fabled realm of exotic Japan . . .

MARIKO Watanabe admits she could have chosen a better time to take up baking. This week, when the Tokyo housewife visited her local Ito-Yokado supermarket to buy butter to make a cake, she found the shelves bare . . . .

While soaring food prices have triggered rioting among the starving millions of the third world, in wealthy Japan they have forced a pampered population to contemplate the shocking possibility of a long-term — perhaps permanent — reduction in the quality and quantity of its food.

A 130% rise in the global cost of wheat in the past year, caused partly by surging demand from China and India and a huge injection of speculative funds into wheat futures, has forced the Government to hit flour millers with three rounds of stiff mark-ups. The latest — a 30% increase this month — has given rise to speculation that Japan, which relies on imports for 90% of its annual wheat consumption, is no longer on the brink of a food crisis, but has fallen off the cliff.

According to one government poll, 80% of Japanese are frightened about what the future holds for their food supply.

Last week, as the prices of wheat and barley continued their relentless climb, the Japanese Government discovered it had exhausted its ¥230 billion ($A2.37 billion) budget for the grains with two months remaining. It was forced to call on an emergency ¥55 billion reserve to ensure it could continue feeding the nation.

. . . to the outermost reaches of faraway . . . Silicon Valley?

At a Costco Warehouse in Mountain View, Calif., yesterday, shoppers grew frustrated and occasionally uttered expletives as they searched in vain for the large sacks of rice they usually buy.

"Where's the rice?" an engineer from Palo Alto, Calif., Yajun Liu, said. "You should be able to buy something like rice. This is ridiculous."

The bustling store in the heart of Silicon Valley usually sells four or five varieties of rice to a clientele largely of Asian immigrants, but only about half a pallet of Indian-grown Basmati rice was left in stock. A 20-pound bag was selling for $15.99.

"You can't eat this every day. It's too heavy," a health care executive from Palo Alto, Sharad Patel, grumbled as his son loaded two sacks of the Basmati into a shopping cart. "We only need one bag but I'm getting two in case a neighbor or a friend needs it," the elder man said.

The Patels seemed headed for disappointment, as most Costco members were being allowed to buy only one bag. Moments earlier, a clerk dropped two sacks back on the stack after taking them from another customer who tried to exceed the one-bag cap.

"Due to the limited availability of rice, we are limiting rice purchases based on your prior purchasing history," a sign above the dwindling supply said.

. . . to Fresno, Fullerton, and Yuba City??

Sam's Club, the No. 2 U.S. warehouse club operator, is limiting sales of the 20-pound (9 kg), bulk bags of rice to four bags per customer per visit, and is working with suppliers to ensure the products remain in stock . . . .

With prices for basic food items surging, customers have been going to the clubs to try to save money on bulk sizes of everything from pasta to cooking oil and rice.

Sam's Club said it is not limiting sales of flour or cooking oil at this time.

. . . to San Fran-Frickin'-Cisco???

Around the region, grocery stores reported having completely run out of their supplies of [matzo] for Passover, the weeklong observance that began Saturday evening.

Safeway, Whole Foods, Lunardi's, Lucky and Mollie Stone stores were among those that reported selling out of their supply of the unleavened bread. A reporter's calls found matzo-less stores in San Francisco, San Rafael, Oakland, Lafayette, Walnut Creek, Berkeley and Palo Alto. Even stores that specialize in Jewish products, such as Afikomen Judaica in Berkeley, said they'd run dry. Most grocers said the shelves emptied Friday or Saturday.

Our main feature, James Howard Kunstler's World Made by Hand, will begin presently, but there is still time to purchase a snack at our concession stand. Do not attempt to cut in line. Take a number, join the queue, comport yourself in an orderly fashion, and have your cash or barter goods ready when you reach the counter. We assure you, there will be plenty of popcornette to go around as long as no one exceeds his quota.

Remember, the ushers are armed.

(We are indebted to Zemblan patriots K.Z., J.D., and B.K. for the links.)

Somos Todos Los Mexicanos

2008-04-22T00:27:00.000-07:00

We had not read that the President would be visiting New Orleans this week for a summit meeting with heads of state from our NAFTA partners Canada and Mexico, but that, of course, is just as he planned it. The news media are naturally preoccupied by the imminent Obama-Clinton slugfest (as Muhammad Ali would have it, the Mania in Pennsylvania), and no one is paying any attention whatsoever to Mr. Bush's itinerary -- no one, that is, except Greg Palast:

[T]he summit planned for the N.O. two years back was meant to showcase the rebuilt Big Easy, a monument to can-do Bush-o-nomics. Well, it is a monument to Bush’s leadership: The city still looks like Dresden 1946, with over half the original residents living in toxic trailers or wandering lost and broke in America.

The second reason Bush has kept this major summit a virtual secret is its real agenda. More important, the agenda-makers, the guys who called the meeting, must remain as far out of camera range as possible: The North American Competitiveness Council.

Never heard of The Council? Well, maybe you’ve heard of the counselors: the chief executives of Wal-Mart, Chevron Oil, Lockheed-Martin and 27 other multinational masters of the corporate universe. And why did the landlords of our continent order our presidents to a three-nation pajama party? Their term is “harmonization.”

Harmonization has nothing to do with singing in fifths like Simon and Garfunkel. Harmonization means making rules and regulations the same in all three countries. Or, more specifically, watering down rules – on health, safety, labor rights, oil drilling, polluting and so on - in other words, any regulations that get between The Council members and their profits.

Take for example, pesticides. Wal-Mart and agri-business don’t want to reduce the legal amount of poison allowed in what you eat. Solution: “harmonize” US and Canadian pesticide standards to Mexico’s . . . .

The three chiefs of state will meet privately with the thirty corporate chiefs where they are also expected to legally erase more of our borders, to expand the “NAFTA highway.” Technically, the NAFTA highway is a set of legal rules governing transcontinental shipment. Some fear NAFTA highway expansion will allow a new flood of cheap Mexican products into the US and Canada. Not so. Their hunger to expand the NAFTA highway is to bring in even cheaper Chinese goods.
As trade expert Maud Barlow explained to me, the new “NAFTA highway” will allow Chinese stuff dumped into Mexico to be hauled northward as duty-free “Mexican” products . . . .

Barlow said that the US Ambassador to Canada told her the legal changes wrought in New Orleans will not be put before the three national Congresses for a vote. “We don’t want to open up another NAFTA.” So, they’ll skip the voting stuff.

Yoodunit

2008-04-22T00:11:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of our one-and-onliest colleague Avedon Carol: The National Lawyers' Guild wants Peter Arnett's son-in-law John Yoo, the man who concocted a legal justification for the Bush administration's policy of torture, to lose his job. His bosses at UC Berkeley law school, citing academic freeedom, claim they have no grounds on which to sack him unless he's committed a "criminal act which has led to a conviction in a court of law." We would not care to place a wager on the prospect of a conviction, but there's a pretty fair chance that Yoo has in fact committed a crime; as Scott Horton argues below, it may come down to a matter of timing:

It's not Yoo's ideas in an academic setting that give rise to his current problems but his conduct as a government lawyer. Yoo says that he was asked his opinion about technical legal issues related to interrogation and detainee treatment during wartime, and he gave it his best shot. He also argues that he strained to give policymakers and actors the greatest possible latitude in which to manage a difficult conflict. But he only advised and theorized; others took the decision to implement the program.

But Yoo's account of how and why the torture memos were crafted may not hold up. Congress is preparing hearings into the subject, and they have invited Yoo to testify. International law scholar Philippe Sands and other writers have punched holes in Yoo's claims about the facts. It increasingly appears that the Bush interrogation program was already being used before Yoo was asked to write an opinion. He may therefore have provided after-the-fact legal cover. That would help explain why Yoo strained to take so many implausible positions in the memos.

It also appears that government lawyers had told Bush administration officials that some of the techniques already in use were illegal, even criminal. In fact, a senior Pentagon lawyer described to me exchanges he had with Yoo in which he stressed that those using the techniques could face prosecution. Yoo notes in his Pentagon memo that he communicated with the Criminal Division of the Justice Department and got assurances that prosecutions would not be brought. The question becomes, was Yoo giving his best effort at legal analysis, or was he attempting to protect the authors of the program from criminal investigation and prosecution? . . . .

According to Human Rights First, more than 100 people have died in U.S. detention in the war on terrorism. It documented 11 cases where the deaths resulted from coercive interrogation techniques, and others where there was at least some connection. Yoo insists that there is no relationship between the deaths and his advice, because he didn't set policy or carry it out, he merely offered a legal opinion. But had he refused to give the opinion that was sought, the program might have been suspended and some of those detainees might be alive . . . .

Is it right to say that lawyers dispensing bad advice in memos face no liability for what happens when people act in reliance on them? At the end of World War II, the U.S. took a different view in one narrow area. When the legal advice had to do with the treatment of detainees in wartime, the U.S. argued, lawyers had to adhere closely to the law or face prosecution. In one case, two German Justice Ministry lawyers were charged and sentenced to 10 years in prison for giving advice that allowed the creation of a special internment system for suspected insurgents. Their advice was close to that dispensed by Yoo.

The Bush administration came to Washington promising a culture of accountability. In this area, as in so many others, it has delivered just the opposite.

UPDATE: See also this (via Susie, Queen of Philly).

Next Thing You Know They'll Be Taking Queers

2008-04-21T23:28:00.000-07:00

Via Zemblan patriot K.Z.: According to the item below, 18 percent of Army recruits in the last fiscal year required conduct waivers to enlist. Which raises the question: why are so many thieves, rapists and killers volunteering for the armed forces when they could earn four times the money working for Blackwater?

Under pressure to meet combat needs, the Army and Marine Corps brought in significantly more recruits with felony convictions last year than in 2006, including some with manslaughter and sex crime convictions.

Data released by a congressional committee shows the number of soldiers admitted to the Army with felony records jumped from 249 in 2006 to 511 in 2007. And the number of Marines with felonies rose from 208 to 350 . . . .

The bulk of the crimes involved were burglaries, other thefts, and drug offenses, but nine involved sex crimes and six involved manslaughter or vehicular homicide convictions. Several dozen Army and Marine recruits had aggravated assault or robbery convictions, including incidents involving weapons.

Both the Army and Marine Corps have been struggling to increase their numbers as part of a broader effort to meet the combat needs of a military fighting wars on two fronts. As a result, the number of recruits needing waivers for crimes or other bad conduct has grown in recent years, as well as those needing medical or aptitude waivers . . . .

[Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Jonathan Withington] added that "low unemployment, a protracted war on terror, a decline in propensity to serve," and the growing reluctance of parents, teachers and other adults to recommend young people go into the military, has made recruiting a challenge.

There are, of course, quite a few reasons why parents, teachers and other (sane) adults are "growingly reluctant" to send young Americans into Mr. Bush's meat grinder, and you may read about one of them in the May/June issue of the MIT Technology Review:

Traumatic brain injury has been called the signature injury of the Iraq War, in which increasingly powerful IEDs and rocket-propelled grenades are the insurgents' weapons of choice. Because they produce such powerful blasts, these weapons often cause brain injuries. Meanwhile, thanks to better body armor and rapid access to medical care, many soldiers whose injuries would have been fatal in previous wars are returning alive--but with head trauma. "With IEDs, the insurgents have by dumb luck developed a weapon system that targets our medical weakness: treating brain injury," says Kevin "Kit" Parker, a U.S. Army Reserve captain and assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Harvard University who served in southern Afghanistan in 2002. Doctors do not yet fully understand brain injuries, particularly those caused by blasts, and no effective drug treatments exist. Early evidence suggests that explosions, which account for nearly 80 percent of the brain injuries identified at Walter Reed, cause unique and potentially long-lasting damage.

The extent and impact of the brain-injury epidemic are not yet clear, though the U.S. Congress appropriated $300 million last year for research into traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. The U.S. Department of Defense reports that approximately 30 percent of those evacuated from the battlefield to Walter Reed Army Medical Center have traumatic brain injury (TBI). The problem is probably worse than that: the DOD figure does not include brain injuries in soldiers whose wounds were not severe enough to require evacuation or whose injuries were not identified until after they completed their tours. Post-deployment surveys suggest that 10 to 20 percent of all deployed troops have experienced concussions. At worst, thousands of service members could return home with long-lasting problems, ranging from debilitating cognitive deficits to severe headaches and depression to subtler personality changes and memory deficits . . . .

[E]ven a single concussion can produce serious symptoms, including severe headaches, difficulty sleeping, problems with memory and concentration, and even changes in personality. "The spouses say, 'He is totally different--he used to be a quiet guy and now he's agitated,' or 'He used to be energetic and now has no motivation,'" says Jeffrey Barth, a neuropsychologist at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville who has done pioneering work in the study of concussion. "They can also lose the ability to put everything together and to make good judgments." About half of people who suffer concussions quickly recover. But in the rest, symptoms can linger indefinitely. About 10 percent of concussion victims have problems severe enough to interfere with daily life and work. "No one knows how to treat it, how long it lasts, and whether it's safe to leave someone deployed," says Jon Bowersox, chief of surgery at the Cincinnati VA Medical Center and a colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve.

Especially worrying is the prospect that troops in Iraq will suffer repeated concussions, reinjuring their brains while they're still in a vulnerable state. For soldiers patrolling highways and guiding convoys, exposure to multiple blasts is a given; some have reported encountering tens of blasts in a day. In rare cases, multiple concussions in quick succession can lead to serious injury. But subtler damage may also accumulate, leading to depression and cognitive decline. "It's still an open question," says Barth. "How many concussions can you have without having a really bad outcome down the road?" . . . .

Ling's team will soon begin studying other potential causes of injury, such as electromagnetic pulses (EMPs). If the EMP from a blast is powerful enough, it can interfere with nearby electronic devices. "The brain is an electrical organ," says Ling. "If an EMP pulse can take out a radio, why not short-circuit the brain?"

Meanwhile, the pig studies have shed some light on the biology of blast-related brain injury. Animals subjected to explosions show signs of neurodegeneration: according to Ling, preliminary results suggest that some of the pigs' neural fibers start to break down, triggering cell death primarily in the cerebellum (a brain structure involved in balance and coördination) and the frontal lobes (which play a role in impulse control, judgment, problem solving, complex planning, and motivation). As with the injured soldiers, however, it is not yet clear how the test pigs will fare in the long run--whether they will heal, whether their walking deficits will continue, or whether their initial injuries will set off a spiral of neural degeneration. And perhaps most important, it remains uncertain whether pigs exposed to repeated explosions will suffer exponentially more harm than those whose exposure is more limited.

Shocking the Brain: Computer simulations are helping scientists identify the parts of the brain most vulnerable to blast injury. This series of images shows a simulated pressure wave (originating in the right side of the first image) hitting the front of the virtual head (center, shown here cut in half), with the highest pressure levels shown in red. The pressure wave ricochets around the tissue as it’s deflected by different brain structures and continues to propagate inside the brain even after the pressure wave in the air has passed (last two frames).
Credit: Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center

In possibly related news, a CBS News report has estimated an average of 1,000 suicide attempts per month by veterans at U.S. medical facilities. "[A]ttorneys for veterans rights groups accused the VA of nothing less than a cover-up, deliberately concealing the real risk of suicide among veterans,” the report states.

UPDATE (4/22): Of the estimated one thousand vets who attempt suicide each month, roughly half succeed. From this morning's S.F. Chronicle:

More than 120 veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq commit suicide every week while the government stalls in granting returning troops the mental health treatment and benefits to which they are entitled, veterans advocates told a federal judge Monday in San Francisco.

The rights of hundreds of thousands of veterans are being violated by the Department of Veterans Affairs, "an agency that is in denial," and by a government health care system and appeals process for patients that is "broken down," Gordon Erspamer, lawyer for two advocacy groups, said in an opening statement at the trial of a nationwide lawsuit.

He said veterans are committing suicide at the rate of 18 a day - a number acknowledged by a VA official in a Dec. 15 e-mail - and the agency's backlog of disability claims now exceeds 650,000, an increase of 200,000 since the Iraq war started in 2003 . . . .

"The time delays are staggering," Erspamer, the plaintiffs' lawyer, told [U.S. District Judge Samuel] Conti on Monday. Although the VA says it decides the typical claim for benefits in six months, he said, the agency takes far longer to review post-traumatic stress claims, and four years or more for the government to hear veterans' appeals of denied treatment.

Veterans who seek benefits within the VA's grievance system have no right to a lawyer and no right to demand records or question opposing witnesses, Erspamer said. The plaintiffs want Conti to grant those rights and to require the agency to set a timetable for deciding claims.

In other words, returning soldiers who take on the VA bureaucracy get roughly the same deal as detainees at Gitmo. Now that's harmonization.

Plutonian Plutocracy

2008-04-21T18:59:00.000-07:00

Through that Orwellian semantic alchemy in which the modern GOP seems to specialize, the term "class war," which until recently referred to the routine screwing of the poor by the rich, has evolved. It now refers to the act of pointing out that the poor are routinely screwed by the rich, a rhetorical strategem that is widely considered déclassé at best and terroristic at worst, and one that our wiser statesmen are understandably loath to deploy. Why rouse the beleaguered, the benighted, the (dare we say) embittered masses to challenge a perfectly functional social order, or worse yet, to question the altruism of their socioeconomic betters? Why mess with a good thing? As the noted sage W. Claude Dukenfield famously advised, never give a sucker an even break, or smarten up a chump -- especially when the chump can be taught, through that Orwellian cognitive alchemy in which the modern GOP seems to specialize, to reject his own interests and embrace those of the carny who is picking his pocket on the midway in broad daylight.

Our distinguished homie Thos. Frank has written at length on this phenomenon in his popular book What's the Matter with Kansas? You have certainly read his essays in The Baffler, and although we have not seen a new issue of that fine periodical in some time, we are pleased to learn from Zemblan patriot M.F. that Mr. Frank is now writing a weekly column for an obscure investors' tip sheet based in lower Manhattan, the Wall St. Journal, from which the following meditation on elitism is taken:

"Elitism" is thus a crime not of society's actual elite, but of its intellectuals. Mr. Obama has "a dash of Harvard disease," proclaims the Weekly Standard. Mr. Obama reminds columnist George Will of Adlai Stevenson, rolled together with the sinister historian Richard Hofstadter and the diabolical economist J.K. Galbraith, contemptuous eggheads all. Mr. Obama strikes Bill Kristol as some kind of "supercilious" Marxist. Mr. Obama reminds Maureen Dowd of an . . . anthropologist.

Ah, but Hillary Clinton: Here's a woman who drinks shots of Crown Royal, a luxury brand that at least one confused pundit believes to be another name for Old Prole Rotgut Rye. And when the former first lady talks about her marksmanship as a youth, who cares about the cool hundred million she and her husband have mysteriously piled up since he left office? Or her years of loyal service to Sam Walton, that crusher of small towns and enemy of workers' organizations? And who really cares about Sam Walton's own sins, when these are our standards? Didn't he have a funky Southern accent of some kind? Surely such a mellifluous drawl cancels any possibility of elitism.

It is by this familiar maneuver that the people who have designed and supported the policies that have brought the class divide back to America – the people who have actually, really transformed our society from an egalitarian into an elitist one – perfume themselves with the essence of honest toil, like a cologne distilled from the sweat of laid-off workers. Likewise do their retainers in the wider world – the conservative politicians and the pundits who lovingly curate all this phony authenticity – become jes' folks, the most populist fellows of them all.

But suppose we read on, and we find the news item about the hedge fund managers who made $2 billion and $3 billion last year, or the story about the vaporizing of our home equity. Suppose we become a little . . . bitter about this. What do our pundits and politicians tell us then?

That there is no place for such sentiment in the Party of the People. That "bitterness" is an ugly and inadmissible emotion. That "divisiveness" is a thing to be shunned at all costs.

Conservatism, on the other hand, has no problem with bitterness; as the champion strategist Howard Phillips said almost three decades ago, the movement's job is to "organize discontent." And organize they have. They have welcomed it, they have flattered it, they have invited it in with millions of treason-screaming direct-mail letters, they have given it a nice warm home on angry radio shows situated up and down the AM dial. There is not only bitterness out there; there is a bitterness industry . . . .

If Barack Obama or anyone else really cares to know what I think, I will simplify it all down to this. The landmark political fact of our time is the replacement of our middle-class republic by a plutocracy. If some candidate has a scheme to reverse this trend, they've got my vote, whether they prefer Courvoisier or beer bongs spiked with cough syrup. I don't care whether they enjoy my books, or would rather have every scrap of paper bearing my writing loaded into a C-47 and dumped into Lake Michigan. If it will help restore the land of relative equality I was born in, I'll fly the plane myself.

The Oldest, Cheapest Jokes Are the Best

2008-04-16T22:21:00.000-07:00

All right, then: they could talk. But did they have anything to say?

Neanderthals have spoken out for the first time in 30,000 years, with the help of scientists who have simulated their voices using fossil evidence and a computer synthesizer.

Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, used new reconstructions of Neanderthal vocal tracts to work out how they would have sounded, NewScientist.com reported on Wednesday . . . .

McCarthy, who based his reconstructions on 50,000-year-old fossils from France, aims eventually to simulate an entire Neanderthal sentence.

Neanderthals were a dead-end offshoot of the human line who inhabited Europe and parts of west and central Asia. Researchers believe they survived in Europe until the arrival of modern humans about 30,000 years ago.

We were shocked to read the above, because we have always assumed that Neanderthals were among us still; it seems, in fact, that for the past few years we have been bombarded with Neanderthal conversation seven nights a week. Is it possible that we have been listening, all along, to an incredibly lifelike simulation?

Dear David

2008-04-11T00:26:00.000-07:00

We had not forgotten the case of Col. Ted Westhusing, who volunteered to serve in what he believed to be a just war, and who died, a few months later, of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, leaving a four-page suicide note:

Thanks for telling me it was a good day until I briefed you. [Redacted name]—You are only interested in your career and provide no support to your staff—no msn [mission] support and you don’t care. I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human right abuses and liars. I am sullied—no more. I didn’t volunteer to support corrupt, money grubbing contractors, nor work for commanders only interested in themselves. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored. I trust no Iraqi. I cannot live this way. All my love to my family, my wife and my precious children. I love you and trust you only. Death before being dishonored any more. Trust is essential—I don’t know who trust anymore. [sic] Why serve when you cannot accomplish the mission, when you no longer believe in the cause, when your every effort and breath to succeed meets with lies, lack of support, and selfishness? No more. Reevaluate yourselves, cdrs [commanders]. You are not what you think you are and I know it.

COL Ted Westhusing

Life needs trust. Trust is no more for me here in Iraq.

We had, however, forgotten -- until we saw a post by our distinguished colleague Melina Coco, of Brilliant at Breakfast -- the names of the officers to whom Col. Westhusing's note was addressed.

So Many Asses, So Little Cover

2008-04-10T23:54:00.000-07:00

Via our stalwart colleagues at Cursor: No Zemblan patriot will be shocked to learn that the Bush administration is, according to ABC News, chock full o'war criminals , or to realize that the Military Commissions Act was indeed vital to our national security, if national security is defined as exempting the President and his cronies from prosecution under the plethora of existing statutes they knowingly violated. Alas, we do not think it likely that the team of miscreants who contrived to make "America" synonymous with "torture" will ever swing from a yardarm, or even, for that matter, do hard time; still, readers may take some comfort in the knowledge that, when it comes to travel abroad, Mr. Bush's post-presidential itineraries will probably, of necessity, be as mingy and restricted as his pre-presidential itineraries. Not that he will consider his enforced provincialism much of a burden; we expect to see him happily ensconced at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, where he will have ample opportunity to build upon the one positive achievement of his two terms in office: the clearing of brush.

For informed speculation as to which administration insider spilled his guts to ABC, see our learned colleague Marcy Wheeler of Emptywheel. For informed speculation as to the disposition of the mysteriously-destroyed CIA torture tapes, see our learned colleague Marcy Wheeler of Emptywheel. For informed speculation as to the roles of the FBI and the DOD in the implementation of torture, see . . . oh, hell, you know the drill.

"The End Result of This Whole Fucking Debacle"

2008-04-10T23:40:00.000-07:00

Via Zemblan patriot J.D.: Our esteemed colleague Jeffrey Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere has posted a brief audio clip from the upcoming Errol Morris documentary Standard Operating Procedure in which "a middle-aged, non-military investigator who looked into the matter [of Abu Ghraib] while stationed in Iraq" offers his considered opinion on Mr. Bush's excellent adventure.

Standard Operating Procedure opens April 25 in New York City, and May 2 in Los Angeles.

The Hazards of Passing Laws That Eliminate the Rule of Law

2008-04-09T00:19:00.000-07:00

Offered without comment, from the Center for American Progress:

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced it would use its authority to bypass several laws and regulations that could impede its progress to build a fence on the southern border between the United States and Mexico. The authority comes from a 2005 law, which also stripped courts of the right to review more of the sort of unilateral power the Bush administration has so often claimed for itself." The Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club sued Chertoff last year over his decision to suspend 19 environmental laws to build the fence through a national conservation area in Arizona. "Fourteen House Democrats, including eight committee chairman, said yesterday that they will file a brief supporting" the legal challenge to Bush's fence plans. Ironically, even as Chertoff announced he would ignore numerous laws to proceed with the fence, he declared last week, speaking of illegal immigration, "there's no excuse for not complying with the law as it's been set forth."

Strap Her to the Rack That She May Realize Her Heresy

2008-04-09T00:09:00.000-07:00

Democratic legislator: You are allowed to express your opinion on the separation of church and state if, and only if, you happen to belong to my church.

(Link courtesy of our ripsnortin' colleague Avedon Carol.)

The Single Most Important Blog Post of the Fortnight . . .

2008-04-08T22:46:00.000-07:00

. . . comes, not surprisingly, from our stalwart colleague J. Schwarz of A Tiny Revolution, who explains America's obligation to the people of Iraq in terms even the dimmest of moral simpletons should be able to understand:

What's almost unknown in America is that al-Sadr isn't just demanding US withdrawal at the point of a gun. The Iraqis who want us to leave—ie, the great majority—have been trying to make it happen with words and the law for some time. They've followed all the rules of democracy and "won," but...we're still there.
The legal authority for the US presence is the UN mandate. The Iraqi parliament passed a law last summer requiring that they got to approve and set conditions for any extension of the mandate when it expired at the end of 2007 . . . .

But in December, 2007 when the mandate was about to expire, Maliki (in his role as Bush's mini-me) told the Iraqi parliament "Suck. On. This." and got it extended to the end of 2008 without any vote. Now, despite the fact that the Iraqi constitution gives the parliament authority to approve all treaties (and the US constitution gives the congress authority to approve all treaties) Bush and Maliki are planning to sign an "agreement" approving a permanent US occupation...without the involvement of either country's legislative branch. Moreover, since Maliki is our puppet, this essentially is the administration agreeing with itself . . . .

The Iraqis who want us to leave, but are willing to work for it non-violently, can honestly ask: what else are we supposed to do? There unfortunately doesn't seem to be an answer.

Why aren't the Democratic candidates discussing these issues with Gen. Petraeus? -- or, for that matter, Sen. John McCain? (No, thank you for the offer, but we don't actually need you to tell us the answers.)

The Triumph of Western Civilization, or: the Failure of Western Civilization

2008-04-08T21:58:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Zemblan patriot F.D.: When last we checked, Russian cinema was dominated by the likes of Tarkovsky, Klimov, Chukrai, et al (and if you are tempted to surmise that we have not checked all that recently, we reluctantly concede the point). We are pleased to discover that, despite the national trauma of WWII, Russian auteurs have finally learned how to lighten up, Francis, as evidenced by the Britney Spears gags in the trailer for Hitler Kaput (immediately below):

We cannot say with any certainty what Mel Brooks might be feeling at this moment, but we're willing to bet that his emotions are even more . . . complex than our own.

As in a Dream

2008-04-04T22:32:00.000-07:00

An assortment of links in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., murdered forty years ago today:

The Letter from Birmingham Jail, with annotations by Zemblan patriot Alex Irvine.
Cornel West talks with Tavis Smiley about the Santa Clausification of MLK:

[Y]ou see a lot of chit-chat about Martin every year and Martin has been so domesticated and tamed and defamed, you know, what we call the Santa Clausification of the brother . . . .

He just becomes a nice little old man with a smile with toys in his bag, not a threat to anybody, as if his fundamental commitment to unconditional love and unarmed truth does not bring to bear certain kinds of pressure to a status quo. So the status quo feels so comfortable as though it's a convenient thing to do rather than acknowledge him as to what he was, what the FBI said, "The most dangerous man in America." Why? Because of his fundamental commitment to love and to justice and trying to keep track of the humanity of each and every one of us . . . .

We have to be clear that, when we're talking about towering freedom fighters like a Nelson Mandela or a James Brown, I'll say the same thing about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and others, these folk are such powerful forces that [they] are threats to powers that be. Of course, Jesus is a grand example; I'll speak as a Christian. And, of course, we've seen Jesus being Santa Clausified the last two thousand years.

Our learned colleague Rick Perlstein, to whom we are indebted for the above link, supplies the historical context for the events of April 1968 in an excerpt from his upcoming book Nixonland:

King had been reluctant to involve himself in the sanitation workers' labor grievances in Memphis. He was planning the campaign of his life and was frazzled beyond recognition. He'd first thought of the idea in the autumn after the agonizing 1966 Chicago campaign: a general strike of the poor in the nation's capital. "We ought to come in mule carts, in old trucks, any kind of transportation people can get their hands on. People ought to come to Washington, sit down if necessary in the middle of the street and say, 'We are here; we are poor; we don't have any money; you have made us this way; you keep us down this way; and we've come to stay until you do something about it." What his exertions had already won--the right to vote; the right to a lunch counter hamburger--had long ago begun to feel to him a mockery. Americans still remained indifferent, perhaps even more than before, to the abject racialized privation in their midst. He said the Kerner Report showed how "the lives, the incomes, the well-being of poor people everywhere in America are plundered by our economic system." He now frankly called himself a socialist.

The plan, as it shaped up through early '68, was for the initial assault on D.C. to come on Eastertide: one hundred leaders lobbying for a government jobs or guaranteed income program. That failing, 3,000 destitute Americans would "tent in" on the Mall. If that didn't get results King imagined a "massive outpouring of hundreds of thousands of persons" the weekend of June 15. Civil disobedience had never been attempted on such a scale. To transform what he now called "a sick, neurotic nation" would require disruption "as dramatic, as dislocative, as attention-getting as the riots without destroying life or property." "The city will not function," he'd told reporters after his testimony to the Kerner Commission. He spoke of similar demonstrations nationwide: "We got to go for broke this time" . . . .

What happened next was the lead story in the next day's New York Times. "Dr. King was whisked away from the march.... He was reportedly taken to a motel and could not be reached immediately. His office in Atlanta also declined to comment.... The destruction that broke out at various points along the march is expected to raise more questions about Dr. King's projected crusade in Washington next week." This was all the proof some needed: the appearance of Dr. Martin Luther King brought forth riots. Or, at least, couldn't stop them.

He led another procession the next day. It was ringed this time by 4,000 National Guardsmen. The garbagemen known locally on their rounds as "walking buzzards" marched wearing placards reading "I Am A Man." For each one, a helmeted guardmsan stood planted a yard or so away, rifle pointed at the ready at their heads.

King insisted, "We are fully determined to go to Washington. We feel it is an absolute necessity.... Riots are here. Riots are part of the ugly atmosphere. I cannot guarantee that riots will not take place this summer. I can only guarantee that our demonstration will not be violent." Senator Byrd, chair of the D.C. subcommittee, called for a court order to stop him: "If this self-seeking rabble-rouser is allowed to go through with his plans here, Washington may well be treated to the same kind of violence, destruction, looting, and bloodshed." Edward Brooke, the Negro Senator, agreed. "How do you avoid assembling that many people under the inflammable conditions that exist today where one little spark--some irresponsible kid--could set it off?" . . . .

Sunday morning Dr. King preached at National Cathedral: "I don't like to predict violence, but if nothing is done between now and June to raise ghetto hope I feel that this summer will not only be as bad but worse than last year." Then he gave a press conference to send a chill down the President's spine: if he got no results in his Poor People's Campaign by August, he said, Democrats "will have a real awakening in Chicago"--where they would be holding their national convention to renominate Lyndon Baines Johnson. The Chicago Tribune editorialized that King claimed to be for nonviolence "while clandestinely conspiring with the most violent revolutionaries in the country." They quoted J. Edgar Hoover: King was "the most notorious liar in the country."

Courtesy of our revered colleague Avedon Carol, the details of a civil trial that you might have missed, because it did not receive much publicity at the time:

According to a Memphis jury's verdict on December 8, 1999, in the wrongful death lawsuit of the King family versus Loyd Jowers "and other unknown co-conspirators," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of his own government. Almost 32 years after King's murder at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968, a court extended the circle of responsibility for the assassination beyond the late scapegoat James Earl Ray to the United States government.

And, for dessert, via Zemblan patriot J.D.: Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) on straight-talkin' John McCain's decision to apologize for opposing the MLK Holiday Act, a mere twenty-five years after the fact.

Sick-Fuck Nation

2008-04-04T00:23:00.000-07:00

Our distinguished colleague Scott Horton on Berkeley professor John Yoo's 81-page torture memorandum of March 14, 2003:

According to the official narrative, the Bush Administration turned to the Justice Department for legal guidance on what could be done to give interrogators the latitude they were demanding in dealing with prisoners taken in the war on terror. However, not a single element of the official narrative is entirely true. The interrogators were not “pushing for broader authority.” Indeed, the pushing was all coming out of the White House (from Vice President Cheney, to be specific), and the intelligence professionals were actually pushing back. Moreover, torture was being used almost from the start of the “war on terror.” Special operations units operating under the authority of Dr. Stephen Cambone, the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, had been authorized to use torture techniques from the opening of the war, and they used them with gusto. At Guantánamo and at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, numerous instances of “highly coercive techniques” had been documented; indeed, the stories out of Bagram are among the most gruesome to be documented. In the documentary “Taxi to the Dark Side,” for instance (for which I consulted and in which I appear), we find footage of a senior U.S. officer in Afghanistan talking about the authority for torture, which was issued, and which military personnel were instructed to lie about or deny to keep covered up.
So why the need for Yoo Two? Jane Mayer pieced that together for us in “The Memo.” Navy officers had gotten a gander at what was up at Gitmo, and it had gotten back to Alberto Mora, the Navy general counsel in the Pentagon. He had also learned about a Rumsfeld order issued on December 2, 2002, authorizing a series of brutal techniques, including waterboarding. Other senior military lawyers quickly also learned about this. An uproar followed in the Pentagon and Haynes found himself isolated and under pressure from all sides. He folded and asked Rumsfeld to rescind the order.

The traditional military forces in the Pentagon felt they had scored a victory, but of course Haynes was determined to proceed with all the torture practices he had advised Rumsfeld to approve. He was intent on outmaneuvering the generals, admirals and figures like Mora. And while he lacked many allies in the Pentagon—other than the Neocon dead-enders like Doug Feith and Stephen Cambone—he knew he could count on the OLC to come through for him.

So the OLC memo was solicited as a trump card to override objections within the military, and to silence objections based on law. Indeed, the memo was subsequently used in the aborted Pentagon Working Group Report, whose members were told they were bound to accept the reasoning and opinions expressed in it. In fact, most of the Working Group found the memo so facially implausible and foolish in its reasoning that they refused . . . .
When Yoo Two was declassified and released, we see that not a single word of the document was blacked out or excised. And indeed, there was no basis whatsoever for the classification to start with, not even a figleaf.

So why has a legal policy statement been classified and withheld for five years? The answer to that question is now clear. The memorandum would have produced reactions of ridicule and outrage from throughout the professional community—as indeed it has. The author and the classifier knew that. They used classification as a political tool to keep something which is a quintessentially public document out of the reach of the public. Moreover, this classification reflects a regular pattern of abuse by the Bush Administration, a fact to be kept in mind when considering Attorney General Mukasey’s harsh and factually unfounded criticisms of pending legislation designed to reign in the use of state secrecy claims to cloak corruption and criminal conduct by state actors . . . .
Congress should act immediately to require the full disclosure of all remaining torture memoranda. Yoo Two reveals a number of other documents upon which many of its conclusions rest. Of particular importance, it notes that Yoo conferred with the Criminal Division (then headed by Michael Chertoff, assisted by the current head, Alice Fisher), with respect to the application of statutes prohibiting torture against military actors. In testimony before Congress, Chertoff repeatedly denied involvement in the preparation of the torture memoranda, notwithstanding mounting evidence to the contrary. The candor of his testimony, and that of his successor Alice Fisher, has repeatedly been challenged by others who were involved at the time. Yoo Two puts Chertoff and Fisher right in the middle of the process of formulating torture policy, and more particularly, of giving non-prosecution assurances for purposes of inducing the application of torture practices.
Congress should insist that Steven Bradbury vacate OLC.

Until the torture documents have been publicly produced, Congress should refrain on action on all Justice Department nominees.

Congress should call Jim Haynes, under subpoena if necessary, to testify about his involvement in this matter from the outset, as well as the evidence provided by JAG officers that he orchestrated the plea bargain for David Hicks and the currently pending Guantánamo proceedings as political show trials.

Congress should recall Major General Geoffrey Miller and review in detail his conduct in connection with the introduction of torture in Iraq and his supervision of the torture regime at Guantánamo, particularly to ascertain his communications and dealings with Donald Rumsfeld, Stephen Cambone and William Boykin and their role in the introduction of the torture system . . . .
Silence will buy us a continuation of this corruption of our nation. But isn’t it worth raising your voice and articulating your anger to get our country back? It should start with insisting that Congress use the tools it has–oversight and the budget–to force changes. Say “no” to torture; it’s an easy first step on the road back to decency.

Iraq, We Drink Your Milkshake!

2008-04-03T23:20:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of our steadfast colleagues at Cursor: We have long maintained that the decision to invade Iraq arose in large part from the desire of Messrs. Cheney and Bush, and (at the risk of being redundant) their patrons at the major oil companies, to have their hands on the spigots a few decades hence when demand is at its peak, and productivity well past it. Katherine Bagley of the Columbia Journalism Review here laments the failure of the 'Murrican press to consider the issue of "peak oil," a failure which stems, we believe, from a simple reluctance to belabor the obvious:

“Peak oil” is shorthand for the understanding that there is a finite amount of oil in the world and at some point we will hit a production peak, after which oil production will steadily decline until supplies are effectively exhausted. Present oil reserves took nearly 550 millions years to form and with current consumption rates, there is no possible way to replenish the resources before they are used up. However, the concept of peak oil is not only about the decrease of production, but also the end of cheap oil. As oil fields are depleted and the discovery of new fields decreases, oil becomes harder and thus more expensive to produce . . . .

[J]ournalists have been slow to explore its connection to current oil issues. Are rising prices at the pumps a result of the weakening U.S. dollar, low petroleum supply, or both? Could OPEC’s decision to not increase production rates be an acknowledgment of limited field capacities and diminishing reserves? While we won’t know that we have reached the world’s oil production peak until years after it happens, these questions are worth asking and the concept worth exploring.

The falling dollar has been made the culprit in many stories around the globe about rising petroleum prices. A March 4 article in the Los Angeles Times claimed market trading and the Federal Reserves’ interest-rate cut, which affected the value of the dollar, were to blame for $100-plus barrel prices. Peak oil was not mentioned once in the entire article. Articles the same day in USA Today and The Washington Post

A flood of articles about OPEC rebuffing President Bush’s plea for higher production also failed to mention peak oil. A March 6 New York Times article goes so far as to say: “Most energy analysts agree there is no shortage of oil.” Maybe, but to what degree does -- or should -- an undetermined, but almost certain, future shortage weigh on decision makers in the present also concentrated purely on the stumbling dollar as the cause of rising prices?

Elsewhere, our esteemed colleague Joseph Romm explains why it was perhaps not the best idea to put a brace of corrupt oilmen in charge of America's energy policy:

Many of us have predicted for a very long time that a quarter century of ignoring or underfunding the key solutions to our addiction to oil would have consequences. For instance, an April 1996 article I coauthored warned about what the Gingrich Congress was trying to do:

Congressional budget-cutters threaten to end America's leadership in new energy technologies that could generate hundreds of thousands of high-wage jobs, reduce damage to the environment, and limit our costly, dangerous dependency on oil from the unstable Persian Gulf region.

Now, absent an aggressive set of government-led policies, the oil situation will only get worse, with oil and gasoline prices doubling (or worse) in the next quarter century. Crucially, we must solve our oil addiction and carbon addiction together, and soon. Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency, said in November:

These two things put together, the short term security, medium term security of our oil markets, plus the climate change, consequences of this energy use, my message is that, if we don't do anything very quickly and in a bold manner, the wheels may fall off. Our energy system's wheels may fall off. This is the message that we want to give.

The problem is urgent. And the solutions are known.

Clearly we now have only two realistic strategies -- indeed, we have had only two realistic strategies for decades. We must greatly increase the fuel economy of our vehicles, and we must find one or more alternative fuel sources that are abundant, low-carbon, and affordable. Both of these are strategies that conservatives have strongly fought for a long time.

Just to be clear, let's just say we adopted the favorite strategy of conservatives (more supply) and we opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, and we found enough to provide one million barrels a day for 30 years. That would delay the peak in oil one whole year! Catastrophe not averted. And, of course, it would only make global warming harder to fight. More domestic supply is not the solution.

Significantly, both Senators Clinton and Obama have announced plans to sharply increase fuel economy standards. As for McCain, one of his top economic advisors recently said that if his cap and trade system worked well enough, he might take the new standards off the books. That shows the McCain campaign does not understand what it will take to solve either the global warming or the peak oil problem.

Why William S. Burroughs Did Not Wish to Be Elected President

2008-04-03T22:54:00.000-07:00

If the author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, The Wild Boys, and Thuvia, Maid of Mars (whoops! Wrong Burroughs. Our deepest apologies) is to be believed, the decision not to run had nothing to do with electability, and everything to do with sanity. From Harper's, March 1975:

Both in this life or any previous incarnations I have been able to check out, I never wanted to be President. This innate decision was confirmed when I became literate and saw the President pawing babies and spouting bullshit. I attended Los Alamos Ranch School, where they later made the atom bomb, and bombs bursting in air over Hiroshima gave proof through the night that our flag was already there. Then came the Teapot Dome scandal under President Harding, and I remember the unspeakable Gaston Means, infamous private eye and go-between in that miasma of graft, walking into a hotel room full of bourbon-drinking, cigar-smoking lobbyists and fixers, with a laundry hamper.

“Fill it up boys, and we talk business.”

I do not mean to imply that my youthful. Idealism was repelled by this spectacle. I had by then learned to take a broad general view of things. My political ambitions were simply of a humbler and less conspicuous caliber. I hoped at one time to become commissioner of sewers for St. Louis County–$300 a month, with the possibility of getting one’s shitty paws deep into a slush fund–and to this end I attended a softball game where such sinecures were assigned to the deserving and the fortunate. Everybody I met said, “Now I’m old So-and-so, running for such and such, and anything you do for me I’ll appreciate.” My boyish dreams fanned by this heady atmosphere and three mint juleps, I saw myself already in possession of the coveted post, which called for a token appearance twice a week to sign a few letters at the Old Court House; while I’m there might as well put it on the sheriff for some marijuana he has confiscated, and he’d better play ball or I will route a sewer through his front yard. And then across the street to the Court House Café for a coffee with some other lazy bastards in the same line of business, and we wallow in corruption like contented alligators.

I never wanted to be a front man like Harding or Nixon–taking the rap, shaking hands, and making speeches all day, family reunions once a year. Who in his right mind would want a job like that? As commissioner of sewers I would not be called upon to pet babies, make speeches, shake hands, have lunch with the queen; in fact, the fewer voters who knew of my existence, the better. Let kings and Presidents keep the limelight. I prefer a whiff of coal gas as the sewers rupture for miles around–I have made a deal on the piping which has bought me a $30,000 home, and there is talk in the press of sex cults and orgies carried out in the stink of what made them possible. Fluttering from the roof of my ranch-style house, over my mint and marijuana, Old Glory floats lazily in the tainted breeze.

But there were sullen mutters of revolt from the peasantry: “Is this the American way of life?” I thought so, and I didn’t want it changed, sitting there in my garden, smoking the sheriff’s reefers, coal gas on the wind sweet in my nostrils as the smell of oil to an oil man or the smell of bullshit to a cattle baron. I sure did a sweet thing with those pipes, and I’m covered, too. What I got on the Governor wouldn’t look good on the front page, would it, now? And I have my special police to deal with vandalism and sabotage, all of them handsome youths, languid and vicious as reptiles, described in the press as no more than minions, lackeys, and bodyguards to His Majesty the Sultan of Sewers.

The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts. Then I met the gubernatorial candidate, and he looked at me as if trying to focus my image through a telescope and said, “Anything I do for you I’ll depreciate.” And I felt the dream slipping away from me, receding into the past, dim, jerky, far away–the discrete gold letters on a glass door: William S. Burroughs, Commissioner of Sanitation. Somehow I had not intersected. I was not one of them. Perhaps I was simply the wrong shape. Some of my classmates, plump, cynical, unathletic boys with narrow shoulders and broad hips, made the grade and went on to banner headlines concerning $200,000 of the taxpayers’ money and a nonexistent bridge or highway, I forget which. It was a long time ago. I have never aspired to political office since. The Sultan of Sewers lies buried in a distant 1930s softball game.

What would you do if you were in the President’s place? You would be inexorably pressured by the forces and the individuals that made you President, and by your own desire to be President in the first place; so you would wind up doing just what they all have done. It’s enough to stop any sane man from wanting to be President.

We cannot help but note that Mr. Burroughs omits any mention of his pastor's anti-American statements, which is probably for the best, since in all likelihood the closest thing he had to a pastor was Aleister Crowley.

N.B.: In the same article, several other worthies, including Eugene McCarthy, George Romney, Kevin Phillips, Ted Sorensen, and Ronald Reagan, join Mr. Burroughs in explaining why they stopped wishing to be President. One of them, we must confess, did not stop wishing quite as decisively as we would have liked.

The System of Dr. Addington and Professor Yoo

2008-04-03T12:29:00.000-07:00

During the spring of 20--, while on a tour through the extreme northern provinces of Virginia, our route led us within a few miles of a certain Maison Blanche or private mad-house, about which we had heard much in Washington from our medical friends. As we had never visited a place of the kind, we thought the opportunity too good to be lost.

We had heard, at Washington, that the institution of Monsieur Maillard was managed upon what is vulgarly termed the "system of soothing" -- that all punishments were avoided -- that even confinement was seldom resorted to -- that the patients, while secretly watched, were left much apparent liberty, and that most of them were permitted to roam about the house and grounds in the ordinary apparel of persons in right mind.

Monsieur Maillard was a portly, fine-looking gentleman of the old school, with a polished manner, and a certain air of gravity, dignity, and authority which was very impressive. He ushered us into a small and exceedingly neat parlor, containing, among other indications of refined taste, many books, drawings, pots of flowers, and musical instruments. A cheerful fire blazed upon the hearth as he poured us a glass of Clos de Vougeot. "I may state the system, then, in general terms, as one in which the patients were menages -- humored. We contradicted no fancies which entered the brains of the mad. On the contrary, we not only indulged but encouraged them; and many of our most permanent cures have been thus effected. There is no argument which so touches the feeble reason of the madman as the argumentum ad absurdum. We have had men, for example, who fancied themselves chickens. The cure was, to insist upon the thing as a fact -- to accuse the patient of stupidity in not sufficiently perceiving it to be a fact -- and thus to refuse him any other diet for a week than that which properly appertains to a chicken. In this manner a little corn and gravel were made to perform wonders."

"But was this species of acquiescence all?"

"By no means. We put much faith in amusements of a simple kind, such as music, dancing, gymnastic exercises generally, cards, certain classes of books, and so forth. We affected to treat each individual as if for some ordinary physical disorder, and the word 'lunacy' was never employed. A great point was to set each lunatic to guard the actions of all the others. To repose confidence in the understanding or discretion of a madman, is to gain him body and soul. In this way we were enabled to dispense with an expensive body of keepers."

"And you had no punishments of any kind?"

"None."

"How, then, were your patients dissuaded from breaking the rules of the Maison?"

"No institution can exist without a rigidly codified set of rules, and ours is no exception. But as I told you, the administration of the rules devolved upon the lunatics themselves. When one patient, in the grip of delirium, was driven to violate the edicts of the Maison -- to indulge, let us say, in an act of wanton violence against one of his fellows, by whom he had been wronged, or snubbed -- it was incumbent upon him to present his case to a third, impartial lunatic. If even one such person could be induced, upon hearing the particulars of the case, to give his consent, then the standing proscriptions against violence would be summarily waived, or adjudged inapplicable, so that our would-be assailant might undertake his barbarous rampage with full impunity."

"But one lunatic can always find another to ratify his manias. Are you not saying that, in essence, there were no constraints upon the conduct of your inmates?"

"That is the system we devised. Our patients found it a capital one of its kind."

"One in which an entire body of established law might be annulled, upon the fugitive whim of a single lunatic?"

"The laws of the Maison, the laws of man, the laws of God -- all subject to nullification, for what law can bind a lunatic?"

"But surely such a system must lead to anarchy, or worse. In your own experience -- during your control of this house -- have you had no practical reason to think such liberty hazardous in the case of a lunatic?"

"Here? -- in my own experience? -- why, I may say, yes. For example: -- no very long while ago, a singular circumstance occurred in this very house. The 'soothing system,' you know, was then in operation, and the patients were at large. They behaved remarkably well -- especially so, any one of sense might have known that some devilish scheme was brewing from that particular fact, that the fellows behaved so remarkably well. And, sure enough, one fine morning the keepers found themselves pinioned hand and foot, and thrown into the cells, where they were attended, as if they were the lunatics, by the lunatics themselves, who had usurped the offices of the keepers."

"You don't tell us so! We never heard of any thing so absurd in our life!"

"Fact -- it all came to pass by means of a stupid fellow -- a lunatic -- who, by some means, had taken it into his head that he had invented a better system of government than any ever heard of before -- of lunatic government, I mean. He wished to give his invention a trial, I suppose, and so he persuaded the rest of the patients to join him in a conspiracy for the overthrow of the reigning powers."

"But we presume a counter-revolution was soon effected. This condition of things could not have long existed. The country people in the neighborhood -- visitors coming to see the establishment -- would have given the alarm."

"There you are out. The head rebel was too cunning for that. He admitted no visitors at all -- with the exception, one day, of a very stupid-looking young gentleman of whom he had no reason to be afraid. He let him in to see the place -- just by way of variety, -- to have a little fun with him. As soon as he had gammoned him sufficiently, he let him out, and sent him about his business."

"And how long, then, did the madmen reign?"

"Oh, a very long time, indeed -- a month certainly -- how much longer I can't precisely say. In the meantime, the lunatics had a jolly season of it -- that you may swear. They doffed their own shabby clothes, and made free with the family wardrobe and jewels. The cellars of the chateau were well stocked with wine; and these madmen are just the devils that know how to drink it. They lived well, I can tell you."

Here our host's observations were cut short by a series of loud screams, or yells, from some portion of the main body of the chateau. They seemed to proceed from persons rapidly approaching.

"Gracious heavens!" we ejaculated -- "the lunatics have most undoubtedly broken loose."

"I very much fear it is so," replied Monsieur Maillard, now becoming excessively pale. He had scarcely finished the sentence, before loud shouts and imprecations were heard beneath the windows; and, immediately afterward, it became evident that some persons outside were endeavoring to gain entrance into the room.

TO BE CONTINUED

Be sure to visit this space next week, when the astonishing secret of Monsieur Maillard will be revealed in the thrill-packed conclusion of "The System of Dr. Addington and Professor Yoo"!!

Pray for Barbara's Baby

2008-03-27T00:37:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Zemblan patriot B.K.: We were hoping that John Cassavetes and Mia Farrow would get the chance to reprise their earlier roles, but we are reliably told that Mr. Cassavetes, alas, is unavailable:

Director Oliver Stone has set James Cromwell to play George Herbert Walker Bush and Ellen Burstyn to play former first lady Barbara Bush in "W," a drama about the formative years of their son, President George W. Bush.

Josh Brolin is playing the title character, and Elizabeth Banks will play first lady Laura Bush . . . .

Stone was calling the project "Bush" when he began showing it to buyers (Daily Variety, Jan. 21), but the filmmakers are now calling it "W." The film is expected to be ready for distribution possibly by the November presidential elections and certainly before Bush leaves the White House in January.

If all goes according to plan, beloved comedians Robin Williams and Billy Crystal will supply voices for the pivotal characters of "Frog I" and "Frog II," into whose asses the young, sociopathic W. inserts lit firecrackers before chucking the two of them skyward. Ron Silver is reportedly being sought for the part of W.'s benefactor and business partner, the late Salem bin Laden.

Sammy Sosa will play himself.

PHOTO: Barbara Bush (Ellen Burstyn) lures Magog to her bed on the night of the future president's conception, in the Oliver Stone production of W., formerly titled Bush.

UPDATE: And by the way, Mr. Stone, we're still waiting to see Ronnie & Maggie, with Meryl Streep.

Skip McCoy, R.I.P.

2008-03-26T18:46:00.000-07:00

No offense to fans of Tommy Udo, Harry Fabian, Dan Madigan, et al, but he'll always be Skip McCoy to us.

SKIP'S BEST LINE:

1.) "Are you wavin' the flag at me?

1. [tie]) CANDY: "I like you, Skip. I really like you." SKIP: "Everybody likes everybody when they're kissing."

TWO OR THREE THINGS WE DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT RICHARD WIDMARK:

1.) Mr. Widmark's daughter was at one time married to Sandy Koufax.

2.) He tried to enlist in the army three times during World War II, but was rejected each time owing to a perforated eardrum.

3.) He had no middle name.

HOW RICHARD WIDMARK BECAME AN ACTOR (courtesy of Zemblan patriot J.M.):

As a young man he went on a bicycle tour of Nazi Germany. He was barred from visiting Dachau, then a camp for political prisoners, but still managed to infiltrate a youth camp where he watched some “ferocious old boy yelling Nazi doctrines at these little kids”. He shot some film, returned to America and began giving illustrated lectures on the topic.

He was shy but he found that he was good at public speaking. That gave him the confidence to turn to acting at Lake Forest College, Illinois, where he had won a scholarship to read law in the early 1930s. Widmark stayed on at the college during the latter 1930s, teaching in the drama department and, though he weighed less than ten stone, playing American football.

PHOTOS: Skip's magic fingers go to work on the clasp of Candy's purse (upper left); Skip decks a lousy commie in a subway men's room (lower right).

The One Egg We Did Not Wish to Find

2008-03-24T00:23:00.000-07:00

We sat on this item because we knew many of you would be enjoying the Easter holiday with your families, and we did not want to spoil it for you. But our stalwart colleague Chris Floyd of Empire Burlesque says that we should all be preparing ourselves for the imminent possibility of an American nuclear strike on Iran:

Last Friday, Dick Cheney was in Saudi Arabia for high-level meetings with the Saudi king and his ministers. On Saturday, it was revealed that the Saudi Shura Council -- the elite group that implements the decisions of the autocratic inner circle -- is preparing "national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive hazards that may affect the kingdom following experts' warnings of possible attacks on Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactors," one of the kingdom's leading newspapers, Okaz, reports.

John McCain, Idiot Magnet

2008-03-23T23:43:00.000-07:00

It pains us to follow the minutiae of the Democratic primary campaigns: we don't care about one candidate's crazy preacher (political analysis, pretty solid; God talk, wack) or another's membership in a secretive cult, and we personally feel that any spokesperson for any candidate who says anything about any subject whatsoever should be renounced, repudiated, and forced to retire from public service on the spot. We are eager and willing to support whichever pitiful, compromised hack the party gives us, but for the love of God kindly pick one and let us get on with it.

And those are the Democrats; our interest in the mechanics of the GOP campaign team comes perilously close to nonexistence, a great emptiness, a void, the sort of absolute interstellar vacuum in which eyeballs bulge and pop as one's blood approaches the boiling point. We must nonetheless don our pressure suits and pay closer attention, for even at this early stage of the contest there is no dearth of grotesque astonishments to be had; to cite but one, we did not know, until we read tomorrow's Krugman column (on the current financial meltdown), that John McCain has enlisted, as his chief economic adviser, former senator Phil Gramm.

God's baby momma! Phil Gramm? Did we just type the name "Phil Gramm"? The chief economic adviser to Mr. National Security is . . . Phil Gramm?

From the Sept. 20, 2001 edition of the NYT (as cited a couple of years back by our distant lookalike cousin Sammy Sassendyll:

A six-year struggle to uncover Osama bin Laden's financial network failed because American officials did not skillfully use the legal tools they had, did not realize they needed stronger weapons, and faced resistance at home and abroad, officials involved in the effort say.

Federal officials say they have not persuaded foreign banks to open their books to investigators and that in this country, a law that would have allowed the United States to penalize foreign banks that did not cooperate was blocked last year by a single United States senator . . . .

But present and former government officials say that since the mid- 1990's, they did not fully use the legal tools they had to wage this difficult fight. "We could have starved the organization if we put our minds to it," said Richard Palmer, who gained experience in money laundering as the Central Intelligence Agency's station chief in Moscow during the 1990's. "The government has had the ability to track these accounts for some time."

Congress is now reviving a proposal killed last year by Senator Phil Gramm, the Texas Republican who was then chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. The bill, introduced by the Clinton administration, would give the Treasury secretary broad power to bar foreign countries and banks from access to the American financial market unless they cooperated with money-laundering investigations. It was strongly opposed by the banking industry and Mr. Gramm.

"I was right then and I am right now" in opposing the bill, Mr. Gramm said yesterday. He called the bill "totalitarian" and added, "The way to deal with terrorists is to hunt them down and kill them" . . . .

The effort to track the bin Laden group's money began in earnest when President Bill Clinton signed a classified presidential order on Oct. 21, 1995. The secret order, Presidential Decision Directive 42, ordered the Departments of Justice, State and Treasury, the National Security Council, the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies to increase and integrate their efforts against international money laundering by terrorists and criminals.

The government agencies joined together to try to penetrate the bin Laden network of businesses, charities, banks and front companies. They failed . . . .

The lack of great success was "mostly due to the limited assistance we received from key countries abroad," Mr. Wechsler said. He blamed "their lack of political will or weaknesses in their laws which fail to effectively regulate their financial institutions and charities."

Until last week's attacks, the Bush administration was not much more enthusiastic about new money laundering laws than Mr. Gramm. Led by its chief economic adviser, Lawrence B. Lindsey, the administration did not want to pressure international banks in the United States and elsewhere to open their books.

The chief economic adviser to Mr. Straight Talk is . . . Phil Gramm? This Phil Gramm?

The one person in the Enron scandal whom congress is not likely to subpoena is its own revered Phil Gramm, the retiring Republican Senator from Texas. Gramm and his wife, Wendy, have tight links to Enron, Wendy being a director and Gramm the pusher of legislation that assisted the company during its troubles last year . . . .

In an apparent response to a 1992 plea from Enron, Dr. Wendy Gramm, then chair of the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission, moved to exempt the company's energy-swap operation from government oversight. By then, the Houston-based Enron was a major contributor to Senator Gramm's campaign.

A few days after she got the ball rolling on the exemption, Wendy Gramm resigned from the commission. Enron soon appointed her to its board of directors, where she served on the audit committee, which oversees the inner financial workings of the corporation. For this, the company paid her between $915,000 and $1.85 million in stocks and dividends, as much as $50,000 in annual salary, and $176,000 in attendance fees, according to a report by Public Citizen, a group that has relentlessly tracked Enron, which in turn has called the report unfair.

Meanwhile Enron had become Phil Gramm's largest corporate contributor—and according to Public Citizen, the largest across-the board donor in its industry. Between 1989 and 2001, the company tossed Gramm just under $100,000 . . . .

n June 2000, Senator Gramm co-sponsored the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, a measure aimed at deregulating certain kinds of futures trading, but not energy futures. That bill never made it to the floor, and thus quietly died. Six months later, on December 15, Gramm curiously turned up as co-sponsor of a bill with the same name, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which did deregulate energy futures and which, without undergoing the usual committee hearings and preliminary votes, was immediately attached as a rider to an 11,000-page appropriations bill. It passed and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton six days later . . . .

All during this period there was a series of remarkable coincidences. Between June and December 2000, the California energy situation was worsening but still not in crisis. After the Gramm bill went through, all hell broke loose, with one emergency rolling blackout after another. There were charges that out-of-state suppliers were withholding gas and running up the price. Finally, in June 2001, public pressure forced the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, to reassert price controls.

The chief economic adviser to Mr. Campaign Finance Reform is . . . Phil Gramm? Mister . . . Wendy . . . Gramm???

You'd expect Wendy Gramm, now head of the Regulatory Studies Program at George Mason University's Mercatus Center, to recognize that the Enron board's extraordinary failure indicated a dire need for reform. You'd be dead wrong.

Gramm thinks the system works just fine. After all, she pocketed an estimated $2 million as an Enron director.

Gramm joined Enron's board after chairing the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission, where she issued regulations that legalized the type of electricity trading that helped Enron make millions in illegal profits (on Gramm's watch as a director). As a member of Enron's audit committee, Gramm found nothing wrong with accounting tricks that inflated earnings and siphoned money to selected executives in violation of company rules, if not federal laws. Coincidentally, Enron also delivered campaign cash to Gramm's husband, former U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, and now provides that arch opponent of big government with his first private-sector job in decades at the Swiss bank UBS, which owns the rump of Enron's energy trading operations.

And just a few minutes before we had been laughing uproariously at Mr. Krugman's mention, earlier in the same article, that John McCain was also consulting with Kevin Hassett, co-author of Dow 36,000. Why, we chortled, he might as well be getting his economic advice from the Imperial Beagle! -- but then we saw the name Phil Gramm, and realized that we would all be far better off if Mr. McCain were getting his economic advice from the Imperial Beagle, and instead of laughing we wept. It was, after all, Easter, and like Jesus, we wept.

For we knew that, however unlikely it may seem, things can always get worse.

The Library of Zembla

2008-03-20T23:56:00.000-07:00

We had the great pleasure this past weekend of hearing Zemblan patriot Jeffrey Ford read from his latest novel, The Shadow Year (Wm. Morrow), at Borderland Books in San Francisco. The Girl in the Glass is one of our recent favorites, and Mr. Ford's new book is the real stuff as well, but then we knew it would be when we read the following excerpt in a review by the admirable Liz Hand:

On the TV, Hercules was lifting a giant boulder. Pop was awake now, reading a magazine. He saw I was also awake and said, "You shouldn't watch this junk," nodding toward the television. "You should read a magazine. It's educational. See?" he said, and turned the magazine in his hands so I could see the page he was on. There was no writing, just a picture of a naked woman sitting on the lap of a guy in a gorilla suit. I could feel my face flush. Nan looked over and laughed. "Put that away," she said.

How Mr. Ford, a native of New Jersey, acquired such an intimate knowledge of the customs and mores of Zembla we cannot say, but we nonetheless recommend that you order The Shadow Year by clicking on the image at right.

SIDEBAR: Our distinguished colleague James Howard Kunstler of Clusterfuck Nation has published his first novel, World Made by Hand. Readers of Mr. Kunstler's nonfiction (such as The Long Emergency) will not be surprised to learn that his novel depicts a whimsical near-future in which there is no oil to fuel the trucks that once brought groceries to our Safeways and cheap manufactured goods to our Wal-Marts. The summers are very, very hot.

Action Alert: Demand That Your Candidate Repudiate the Declaration of Independence

2008-03-20T23:26:00.000-07:00

Over the course of a long and grueling presidential campaign we have found our sympathies shifting on an almost daily basis, from Hillary on Monday to Obama on Tuesday, and even, on every sixth Friday of the month, to the noted "maverick" (which is French, we are told, for "dithering fuckwit") John McCain, who was once a POW and who is on that basis at least as qualified for the presidency as any detainee at Gitmo. It is too soon for us to say how we will ultimately cast our ballot, but there is one thing we can tell you with absolute certainty: we love our adopted country of America, and we will never, ever, vote for a candidate who endorses the following load of hooey -- which you may recall from civics class, if you are old enough to have taken civics class and young enough to remember having done so:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness . . .

. . . and so on and so forth, blah, blah, blah. It all sounds quite reasonable, doesn't it? Uplifting, too, perhaps even noble! -- until you realize that the primary author of these hifalutin sentiments was a crazy asshole, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of his day, who also said:

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.

Say wha-a-a-a-at???

Do not imagine for a moment that you get to choose the baby OR the bathwater; it's both, or nothing. Call or write your candidate's campaign office and demand to know his (or her) position on Life, Liberty, and blah blah blah. Is he (or she) willing to renounce the Declaration of Independence in the strongest possible terms? -- and if not, then how can you or any true patriot so much as consider supporting a candidate who shares our third president's obvious death wish for America?

N.B.: If you need any further encouragement, there is also plenty of evidence to sugggest that Thos. Jefferson had carnal relations with a Negro woman. (We started to say "with a Negro woman not his wife," but then we thought: why belabor the obvious?)

The Best Part Is When All the Kids Get Together and TP the Wailing Wall

2008-03-20T17:30:00.000-07:00

The culturally sensitive John McCain is in Israel burnishing his foreign-policy credentials, and given his unfortunate tendency to open his mouth every now and then, he is very lucky indeed to have an actual Jew on 24-hour call:

When McCain made a foreign policy gaffe in Jordan on Tuesday, it was Sen. Joe Lieberman who quietly pointed out the mistake, giving McCain an opportunity to correct himself in front of the international press corps. In Israel yesterday, NBC’s Lauren Appelbaum reports, Lieberman once again intervened when McCain made an incorrect reference about the Jewish holiday Purim -- by calling the holiday "their version of Halloween here" . . . .

Purim is not the equivalent of an Israeli Halloween, Appelbaum notes. The holiday -- although a joyous one -- commemorates a time when the Jewish people living in Persia were saved from mass execution. When Sen. Lieberman had a chance to speak at the press conference, he placed the blame of the mistake on himself. "I had a brief exchange with one of the mothers whose children was in there in a costume for Purim," Lieberman, who is Jewish and celebrates the holiday, said. "And it's my fault that I said to Senator McCain that this is the Israeli version of Halloween. It is in the sense because the kids dress up and it's a very happy holiday and actually it is in the sense that the sweets are very important of both holidays."

"Could I just say that I understand this is the holiday of Hadassah, otherwise known as Esther," McCain later said. Those in attendance quickly made light of the mistake.

Forget it! Nothing a few extra billion in military aid can't patch up there, Slick!

Next on the itinerary: candidate McCain drops in on Gen. Pervez Musharraf and offers to help him trim the Ramadan tree.

UPDATE: Latest from McCain: "I MEANT to say that!"

DATELINE 2010: "I take full responsibility for the unfortunate nuclear exchange," said new President Joe Lieberman from an undisclosed location believed to be several miles underneath the Rockies. "I told the late President that if he wet the bed again, he should press the red button so the cute night nurse would come and sponge him off.

"I thought he knew I was kidding. I mean, I told him the same joke two weeks ago and it just cracked him up."

A Boy Loves His Dog

2008-03-19T22:09:00.000-07:00

We were actually quite satisfied with the Imperial Beagle, who has been receiving unprecedented respect from passersby since the extremely gratifying climax of the Westminster Dog Show --

-- until Zemblan patriot J.D. sent us the footage immediately below of "Big Dog," an artificial creature conceived and constructed by the engineers at Boston Dynamics with the benefit of a measly $10 million grant from DARPA:

In the Imperial Beagle's favor: 1) he is extremely affectionate and howls to greet us whenever we come home, and 2) has no lethal military applications, that we are aware of.

In Big Dog's favor: 1) he can carry a 340-lb. payload, and 2) does not eat his own shit.

Can anyone put us in touch with the breeder?

The Village People and the Osmonds Were Narrowly Aced Out by Wham!

2008-03-17T23:52:00.000-07:00

From the April issue of Harper's (not yet online), a want ad plucked from the Federal Business Opportunities website:

Professional Celebrity Rock Music Band, sought for tour of Forward Operating Bases in Kuwait and Afghanistan. Musical repertoire should consist of Southern rock, pop rock, post-grunge, and hard rock. At least one member should be recognized as a professional celebrity. The Government will conduct a performance risk assessment based on the quality, relevancy, and recency of the Offeror's past performances as they relate to the probability of successful accomplishment of the required effort. Performers shall be wholesome and adhere to the standards of good taste; profanity, vulgarity, or connotations of sexual depravity and perversion will not be used. Female entertainers shall be displayed in ways not offensive to the host nation. Protective military equipment, such as Kevlar, body armor, and eye and ear protection, will be provided when the group is traveling on rotary or fixed-wing military aircraft. Any criminal conduct, unexcused tardiness, indecency or obscenity, drunkenness, use of narcotics or hallucinatory drugs, or damage to Government property will be grounds for termination of the contract.

UNRELATED SIDEBAR: A couple of items from the April Harper's Index (not yet online either):

Amount that Rudy Giuliani's campaign spent to win a single Republican delegate: $48,000,000
Amount it would have cost him to win the nomination at this rate, expressed as a percentage of Bill Gates's net worth: 97

UNRELATED SIDEBAR II: Good Lord. If you're going to sit there pissing and moaning about the fact that the April Harper's is not yet online, visit the damned website and read our wily colleague Scott Horton on the mysterious disappearance from our national consciousness of "the largest corruption scandal in American history":

Might there be a reason why the [Jack] Abramoff investigation ran out of gas and plummeted into the ocean in some undisclosed location? Well, the connections to Rove and Bush are obvious. But even more troubling are the Abramoff ties to the Justice Department itself, particularly in the form of Attorney General John Ashcroft. Here are just some of the interesting intersections:

in 1997, John Mashburn left his position as Legislative Director for Senator John Ashcroft and signed on to lobby for Preston Gates, where Jack Abramoff was the Government Affairs Counselor. Mashburn very quickly became enmeshed in the dirtiest of the Abramoff dealings, including the Northern Marianas, Mississippi Choctaw and Future of Puerto Rico accounts.

In 1997, a group called Toward Tradition, whose chairman was Jack Abramoff, hired Ashcroft as a guest speaker.

In 1997, another Abramoff client paid for a trip to the Pacific by another of Ashcroft’s legislative assistants.

In 1999, Ashcroft participated in the famous Abramoff-organized junket to the Tartan Tournament at St. Andrew’s, Scotland.

Jack Abramoff was a major contributor to Ashcroft’s 2000 re-election effort, in which Ashcroft was defeated by a dead man.

Kevin Ring, another key Ashcroft insider, who advised Ashcroft on judicial nominations among other things, quickly emerged as a member of Jack Abramoff’s inner circle.

As questions were raised about Abramoff’s illicit dealings in the Northern Marianas, and the U.S. Attorney there began a probe, he was promptly removed from office–a step which only Ashcroft could have implemented.

So John Ashcroft had no shortage of burning reasons to suffocate the Abramoff investigation. All of these points were cited in the demand for a special prosecutor to handle the Abramoff matter. Ashcroft denied these requests, and insisted that the Abramoff questions be handled in the normal course by his Justice Department. Then Ashcroft was succeeded by Alberto Gonzales, whose prime function was to stand as a guard dog for the White House, insuring that the criminal conduct that occurred at 1600 Pennsyvlania Avenue stayed at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

So why did the Abramoff investigation run out of gas and disappear? Does anyone seriously question why? It’s another reason why the bread-and-circus tales of prostitutes in the Mayflower Hotel are so useful.

Does Bear Stearns Have Any Bling?

2008-03-17T16:38:00.000-07:00

From our distinguished colleague Athenae of First Draft comes the Righteous Rant of the Week (and yes, we know it's early in the week. We don't need to see the other entries. The contest is over. Sue us):

Does Bear Stearns have a big screen TV?

What about bling? Any bling they could sell?

Couldn't Bear Stearns just get a job, already? I mean, I know of six or seven places that are hiring. I don't know what they pay, but surely it would be enough to keep them in sneakers and Xbox games . . . .

Let me just ask. I'm sure somebody out there has the answer. After all, they had reasons why Katrina victims deserved to drown and die, be forced from their homes and screwed by their insurance companies and disregarded by their country. They had reasons why uninsured children didn't deserve health care, why those who died from a lack of medical attention only got what they had coming. They had reasons why the people who came to emergency rooms were just looking for drugs, they had reasons why thieves got rich and saints got shot, they had all kinds of explanations for everything that looked to everybody else like a fucking problem we needed somebody to solve. I'm sure the answers here are just as simple, just as easy.

But I do think we should ask. And you know, I think we should ask in the same condescending, fuck-all-you-peasants know-it-all bullshit fuck-ass tone that we use when requesting that the rest of the nation's needy prove their legitimacy to us. I think we should ask with the same nasty assumptions at the back of our throats, the same willingness to believe that somebody else is running a scam on us to get a fat government check, the same nasty, mean, small little pinchingness we use toward individual human beings. I think we should ask those questions.

Our first runner-up, which will be elevated to Righteous Rant of the Week should Athenae's rant be unable, for any reason, to fulfill its duties and obligations, comes from our occult colleague IOZ of Who Is IOZ?

Maybe you're thinking to yourself, "Why is this IOZ fellow, who says he's all for the free movement of labor and capital across borders and over oceans and to distant stars and foreward and backward in time, why is this guy so down and dismissive of capitalism?" Well, this is why: because capitalism is a scam, a condfidence game, fooling you easy marks into supposing that you live in something other than a confiscatory command economy. And as surely as the symbolic vestiges of the old, aristocratic republic have proven more effective means of popular control than any outright tyranny ever has--a gaudy quadrennial spectacle more effective at keeping the discontented off the streets than all the tanks in Tiananmen--so to does ritual genuflection at The Wisdom of Markets camouflage the plain fact that the invisible hand is not actually invisible if you just open your eyes . . . .

Well, what drove [the housing market] up was the easy-credit ponzi scheme, and with the phony, assetized debts of all those paper-and-pony mortgages, the same folks doing the dodgy lending reaped a second windfall in financing huge institutional sales of equally phony investments, and they all bought each other's crap and made a ton of money and now, taxpayers, you poor suckers, you're going to bail them out. But don't worry, because Barack Obama is going to fix Social Security.

(Links courtesy of -- ahhr, fuck it, we're tired of typing their damned names.)

In Which We See the Doughnut

2008-03-14T00:08:00.000-07:00

Given recent developments, we cannot deny that we are, at certain times, susceptible to overwhelming feelings of melancholy and dread: whenever our eyes are open, for example, or when the swift approach of the royal vacuum cleaner forces us to abandon our customary fetal position on the carpet. We will not, however, wear the brand of the pessimist! -- for, as we will be the first to tell you, there is always some occasion for joy in the land! -- and although the standard-bearers of the Democratic Party (artist's conception, right) have spared no effort in driving our already-low expectations to downright Chthonian levels, a number of canny, principled legislators have in recent days brought us great and unexpected pleasure simply by doing what we elected them to do: that is, defending the Constitution and the rule of law against the depredations of Mr. Bush and his wretched pack of power-hungry jackals. May the items immediately below gladden your withered, pruny hearts as they did ours:

1.) On Wednesday, John Conyers and 19 members of the House Judiciary Committee released the following statement:

As a result of our review of classified as well as unclassified materials concerning the Administration’s Terrorist Surveillance Program, we have concluded that blanket retroactive immunity for phone companies is not justified. However, we do recommend a course of action that would both permit the carriers the opportunity to defend themselves in court and also protect classified information – by eliminating current legal barriers and authorizing relevant carriers to present fully in court their claims that they are immune from civil liability under current law, with appropriate protections to carefully safeguard classified information. In addition, we recommend legislation to fill a current gap in liability protection for carriers, and to create a bipartisan commission to thoroughly investigate the legality of the warrantless surveillance program.

In other words, under Conyers's proposal, telecom companies would have the chance to defend themselves against potential lawsuits by revealing, in court, exactly how the Bush administration persuaded them to break the law. This ingenious wrinkle prompted the usual hissy fit from the President, who as usual accused Congress of endangering American lives by refusing to whitewash his own felonies.

Nancy Pelosi, to her enduring credit, patiently explained to the press that the President was full of shit, and earlier today the House passed the Democratic version of the FISA renewal bill, which contains no retroactive immunity for telecoms, by a vote of 213-197. Our learned colleague Glenn Greenwald reports that:

As impressive as the House vote itself was, more impressive still was the floor debate which preceded it. I can't recall ever watching a debate on the floor of either House of Congress that I found even remotely impressive -- until today. One Democrat after the next -- of all stripes -- delivered impassioned, defiant speeches in defense of the rule of law, oversight on presidential eavesdropping, and safeguards on government spying. They swatted away the GOP's fear-mongering claims with the dismissive contempt such tactics deserve, rejecting the principle that has predominated political debate in this country since 9/11: that the threat of the Terrorists means we must live under the rule of an omnipotent President and a dismantled constitutional framework . . . .

It is, of course, true that this bill will have a hard time passing the Senate (though if even most House Blue Dogs were persuaded to support this bill, why can't most Democratic Senators who previously voted for the Rockefeller bill be persuaded?). It's also true that even if it did pass the Senate, the President will veto it, and there won't be enough votes to override the veto. So this bill won't become law, but that doesn't matter.

The reality is that the best possible outcome here is nothing -- we lived quite well for 30 years under FISA and if no new bill is passed, we will continue to live under FISA. FISA grants extremely broad eavesdropping powers to the President and the FISA court virtually never interferes with any eavesdropping activities. And the only "fix" to FISA that is even arguably necessary -- allowing eavesdropping on foreign-to-foreign calls without warrants -- has the support of virtually everyone in Congress and could be easily passed as a stand-alone measure.

What matters is not that this bill becomes law, but that the Rockefeller/Cheney bill does not.

(Thanks as always to our venerated colleague Avedon Carol for the links.)

2.) And, courtesy of our rumbustious colleague Jonathan Schwarz, an item which we take the liberty of pinching more or less intact:

Gen. William Fallon was, until Tuesday, the commander of U.S. Central Command. Last week, an article in Esquire called him the Bush administration's primary obstacle to an attack on Iran and advocate of serious diplomacy. Now, this military voice of reason on Iran has resigned, under pressure from the White House.

There is new momentum behind legislation introduced by Senator James Webb and Rep. Mark Udall that would prevent the President from attacking Iran without Congressional authorization. Senator Hillary Clinton, in a press release following Gen. Fallon's resignation, urged support for the bill. Just Foreign Policy met personally with Senator John Kerry during the Folly of Attacking Iran Tour, and he reaffirmed his active support.

You may urge your Congresspeople to support Webb/Udall by filling out a brief form here.

We hope to bring you more peppy, invigorating news in the coming weeks! -- but we do ask you not to hold your breath.

UPDATE (courtesy of our esteemed colleague Mark Adams of Dispassionate Liberal): More evidence that Some Democrats Can Learn! Inside Baseball aficionados will certainly enjoy this detailed analysis, by Daily Kos diarist Kagro X, of the Byzantine procedural rules that allowed your Democratic House leadership to neutralize the GOP's usual obstructionist tactics on the FISA bill:

You can't move to recommit an amendment to an amendment.

So the House gets to strip immunity (and the other junk) back out of H.R. 3773, and the Republicans can't just undo that work with a motion designed to peel off Blue Dogs. If the amendment to the Senate amendment passes, it pops right back out of the House and goes back to the Senate on the express bus, no stops.

And there's more. It arrives back in the Senate in privileged form, as a message from the House (the message being: we amended your crap) the consideration of which is not subject to filibuster. To be sure, the Republicans (or anyone willing to stand in their shoes) can filibuster the actual debate on the House amendment to Senate amendment, but they can't filibuster the question of whether or not to even have that debate, as they can with most other legislation.

If the above seems a tad confusing, well, let's just say there's plenty more where that came from!

Someone Get This Thing into Orbit Before the Republicans Win Another Term

2008-03-13T22:58:00.000-07:00

If we wait much longer, there won't be anything worth saving:

If civilisation is wiped out on Earth, salvation may come from space. Plans are being drawn up for a “Doomsday ark” on the moon containing the essentials of life and civilisation, to be activated in the event of earth being devastated by a giant asteroid or nuclear war.

Construction of a lunar information bank, discussed at a conference in Strasbourg last month, would provide survivors on Earth with a remote-access toolkit to rebuild the human race.

A basic version of the ark would contain hard discs holding information such as DNA sequences and instructions for metal smelting or planting crops. It would be buried in a vault just under the lunar surface and transmitters would send the data to heavily protected receivers on earth. If no receivers survived, the ark would continue transmitting the information until new ones could be built.

The vault could later be extended to include natural material including microbes, animal embryos and plant seeds and even cultural relics such as surplus items from museum stores.

The good news: you can carry quite a few microbes and animal embryos in a MOMA tote bag. The bad news: President Bush has threatened to block funding for the project unless the ark contains a hood, a waterboard, a car battery, a lightstick, and the carpet beater used on James Bond's nuts in Casino Royale.

It's a legacy thing.

It's Categorized as "Humor." Which We Find Infuriating!

2008-03-13T18:35:00.000-07:00

Amateur dudgeonologists! How much do you really know about Sen. Buster Bloodvessel (right), the GOP presidential nominee and national poster boy for inchoate rage? If you're seeking a higher education in ire and vexation, take Paul Slansky's McCain quiz from the current issue of The New Yorker. You too can be a scholar of choler!

1. What did Richard Kimball, John McCain’s opponent in his 1986 Senate race, do during a debate that got McCain so upset that, according to his aide Jay Smith, he "wanted to kill" Kimball?

(a) He pointed out that McCain had referred to the retirement community Leisure World as "Seizure World."

(b) He revealed that McCain was standing on a riser behind his podium.

(c) He said, "I’m not the one who left his disabled first wife so he could marry a rich young beer heiress."

We don't mean to sound, well, ageist, but we are not altogether convinced that the strains of the Presidency would be beneficial to Mr. McCain's well-being. In January of 2009 he will be 72, or two years and five months older than our most geriatric president, Ronald Reagan, at the time of his first inauguration. He is, in addition, a survivor of stage IIa melanoma. And just look at the man (left)! He's plainly ready to pop. If he does make it to the Oval Office, we give him exactly the same chances as a pimple on Prom Night.

Keep an eye on the Republican veep nominee, who, if elected, is likely to inherit an even worse mess than the one McCain inherits from Bush. Mitt Romney, anyone? Mike Huckabee? . . . Condi Rice???

N.B.: We always thought Richard Kimball was the doctor who escaped police custody in a train wreck and set out to find the one-armed man who had murdered his wife, but that chap, we are reliably told by the imperial reseacher, was in fact Richard Kimble. Of course, it would not surprise us a bit to learn that McCain wanted to kill Kimble as well. Just look at the man!

Then She Danced the Hoochie-Coochie for the Pleasure of the Sheikh

2008-03-11T23:41:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of our distinguished colleague Prometheus 6: Renowned exporter of American values Condi Rice sends a strong message, to wit: Do as we say, not as we do. Or . . . okay, then, do as we do, but at least try to make it look like . . . oh, fuck it, just take the goddam money:

EGYPTIAN FOREIGN Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit couldn't conceal his smug satisfaction as he stood next to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at a news conference in Cairo last week. In the past, Mr. Aboul Gheit fumed in such situations as Ms. Rice spoke out about the need for Egypt to move toward democracy or criticized the unjust imprisonment of liberal reformers such as Ayman Nour. Now he watched as, at the prompting of an Egyptian state television reporter, Ms. Rice acknowledged that the Bush administration had quietly waived a congressional hold on $100 million in military aid to Egypt.

The government of Hosni Mubarak hasn't come close to meeting the conditions Congress attached to the money, which are that it protect the independence of the judiciary, stop police abuses and curtail arms smuggling from Egypt to Gaza. In testimony to Congress last month, Margaret Scobey, the nominee to be ambassador to Egypt, said "the government's respect for human rights remains poor, and serious abuses continue." That was an understatement: In fact, the Mubarak government has sought to crush all proponents of democratic liberalization, from a movement of judges to crusaders such as Mr. Nour and Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who has been exiled from Egypt since he shook President Bush's hand at a conference of democratic dissidents last year . . . .

Yet three years after Mr. Bush promised the world's democratic reformers that the United States would stand with them, the administration has so reversed itself that it joins Mr. Mubarak in rejecting restrictions attached by Congress to aid money. Ms. Rice said the administration used a waiver built into the legislation so the Egyptian military will get the full $1.3 billion allocated by the administration this year . . . . Lamely, she said she had talked about the need for reform with the foreign minister during their private meeting.

Plainly America's stature in the world has dwindled. Why, we remember a time when foreign leaders would not have dared to humiliate our emissaries in public until they were absolutely certain that the check had cleared.

UPDATE: But that was back in the day, when foreign leaders looked forward to receiving checks payable in dollars.

Fifth Column

2008-03-10T16:52:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Zemblan patriot B.K.: If you occasionally find yourself in one of those tedious but unavoidable debates about which Democratic candidate the Republicans would rather face in November, we have some new evidence you may wish to adduce next time the subject arises. It comes from Ohio, the same state that brought you four more years of George Bush in 2004::

A staggering 16,000-plus Republicans in Cuyahoga County switched parties when they voted in last week's primary.

That includes 931 in Rocky River, 1,027 in Westlake and 1,142 in Strongsville. More than a third of the Republicans in Solon and Bay Village switched. Pepper Pike had the most dramatic change: just under half its Republicans became Democrats. And some of those who changed - it's difficult to say how many - could be in trouble with the law.

At least one member of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections wants to investigate some Republicans who may have crossed party lines only to influence which Democrat would face presumed Republican nominee John McCain in November . . . .

In a nutshell, here's how it's supposed to work: Ohio voters are allowed to switch party affiliations on the day of a primary election but only if they sign a pledge vowing to support their new party - and mean it.

In the days following the election, The Plain Dealer interviewed more than two dozen voters - most of them Republicans who crossed over to Democrats last week.

None - including five who acknowledged lying about supporting the Democrats - were challenged. And several said poll workers never asked them to sign a pledge but gave them a Democratic ticket . . . .

It started a few weeks ago when conservative radio powerhouse Rush Limbaugh suggested that his Republican following cross over during the primary to vote for Clinton. Clinton, Limbaugh argued, would be easier for McCain to beat in November than Obama.

Soon, local morning radio show host Bob Frantz echoed Limbaugh on WTAM AM/1100, and the buzz began to grow . . . .

[Republican voter Hazel] Sferry said she thought it was a great idea to mess with the other party if it helped McCain win. "I don't mind being deceptive to politicians," she said. "They are deceptive to us."

Ode on a $5,500 Blow Job

2008-03-10T15:37:00.000-07:00

The fellatrix was quite unprepared, she admits,
For the grilling she got from Blitzer.
Most gentlemen ask if she swallows or spits;
He asked if she swallows Spitzer.

UPDATE: Who was the original target of the investigation -- the hookers, or the Gov?

SMART SHOPPERS' ALERT: Our contact at the Emperor's Club, "Thorstein B. Veblen" (not his real name), tells us that there is very little difference between the $5,500 "Icon" blow job and the $3,000 "Seven-Diamond" blow job. "The Icon's for out-of-towners," he says, "guys on expense accounts who want to brag to the boys back home. Regulars know better." There is, however, a noticeable dropoff in quality between the Seven-Diamond and the Three-Diamond. "For a grand? Truthfully, you could slip that money to your wife, and ten minutes later you'd both be just as happy."

With a rating of 8.5 pearls out of ten, the $3,000 "Seven-Diamond" blow job wins our King of Zembla Best Value Award.

UPDATE II: Our BARBARian colleague Scaramouche informs us that radio personality Dr. Laura Schlessinger has argued, in a novel inversion of conventional wisdom, that blame for the scandal properly lies with Mrs. Eliot Spitzer and her One-Diamond conjugal skills. We are not altogether sold on Dr. Schlessinger's interpretation of events, but we salute her ongoing efforts to encourage greater openness between the sexes.

UPDATE III: Our deepest apologies to Zemblan patriots who clicked on the second hyperlink in Update II above and were shocked by what they found there. The offending link, which apparently originated in a comment thread at the Scaramouche blog, found its way onto our site through a faulty cut-and-paste operation by the Webmaster of Zembla, who is being soundly flogged as we write this. Again, as a matter of policy, we do not link to material that might be considered "seamy" or "gamy," and we deeply regret the error. The correct link is here.

UPDATE IV: Blogging may be slow today, because the Assistant Webmaster is now being soundly flogged as well, which means we have to do every. God. Damned. Thing. Ourselves.

Private Functions

2008-03-08T17:14:00.000-08:00

If you have been following the FISA negotiations, you have probably already seen the tidbit below, from Monday's WaPo:

But in response to a question at the meeting by David Kris, a former federal prosecutor and a FISA expert, [Assistant AG for National Security Kenneth] Wainstein said FISA’s current strictures did not cover strictly foreign wire and radio communications, even if acquired in the United States. The real concern, he said, is primarily e-mail, because “essentially you don’t know where the recipient is going to be” and so you would not know in advance whether the communication is entirely outside the United States.

As you know, the White House has not had much luck keeping track of its own emails. A number of high-ranking officials appear to have used RNC accounts, in violation of government rules, to conduct their official business, and because the RNC servers were routinely purged, none of that official business will ever come to light. As for the administration emails that were properly routed through White House servers, several million have inexplicably vanished. On the other hand, your online correspondence is supremely important, and based on Mr. Wainstein's admirably candid remarks above we can only conclude that the Bush administration has been sifting through it quite assiduously, on the off chance that some stray remark in your latest email or IM might give us the very edge we need in our war on terror.

The process is called data mining, and our distinguished colleague Lambert, of Corrente, explains it here:

10-to-1, 100-to-1, these fascist weasels decided to suck up all email, just to get some of it right away. And the odds are that they archived it all, on the chance that some of it would be useful later (especially if privatized).

After all, Bush’s illegal and unconstitutional program of warrantless surveillance of all email began before 9/11, so it has nothing to do with “terror” at all (except the terror of Our Betters that somewhere, somebody might not be subject to their control). And the program really does suck down all Internet data. That’s why AT&T built a secret room with a splitter in it that does just that.

Lambert also links to a mordant wisecrack by Ryan Singel of Wired:

DNI Michael McConnell, the serial exaggerator who claims to be a non-political straight shooter, himself kept saying the NSA lost 70 percent of its capabilities after the ruling. If that's the case, that means that 70 percent of what the NSA does is collect emails inside United States telecom infrastructure and service providers.

Why can't the administration be troubled to seek secret warrants for its domestic spy operations, as current FISA law prescribes? Because it's intercepting literally millions of communications each day. Ten thousand monkeys at ten thousand typewriters could never complete the legally-mandated paperwork.

We no doubt have a small handful of readers (and if we do not have them, we will have to invent them) who really do believe that the FISA controversy is all about fighting terror, and has nothing to do with the Bush administration's desire to spy upon innocent American citizens or, even worse, God forbid, political opponents. We can only refer those perhaps-imaginary readers to a now-forgotten scandal we covered in the first week of this blog's existence, which was, we are depressed to admit, exactly four years ago:

Two Republican Senate staffers accessed and leaked information from thousands of Democratic files over an 18-month period, an investigation by the U.S. Senate Sergeant at Arms has concluded.

The report, released Thursday, describes the forensics investigation in detail. It found that a Republican clerk for Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, accessed at least 4,670 files in the home directories of Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee. A senior Republican aide to the Judiciary Committee helped the clerk to target files that might help the Republicans win their judicial nominations, the report stated . . . .

Between November 2001 and April 2003, a Republican clerk for the Judicial Committee discovered how to access home directories that had their permissions incorrectly set, the report stated. Despite an initial reprimand from two senior staff members for the unauthorized access, the clerk continued to access the documents when he found that another senior aide was interested in the information, the report concluded. Investigators found more than 4,670 files from Democratic committee members and their staff in an encrypted file on the clerk's computer.

The report concluded that the case could be prosecuted as a crime under several laws, including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, and for false statements made to investigators.

The Democrats called for immediate actions on the findings.

Here's what they got. The Republican leadership, we need not tell you, skated; 'twas ever thus.

And, of course, there's this. from December of 2005:

A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn't know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.

A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period . . . .

[T]he DOD database includes at least 20 references to U.S. citizens or U.S. persons. Other documents obtained by NBC News show that the Defense Department is clearly increasing its domestic monitoring activities. One DOD briefing document stamped “secret” concludes: “[W]e have noted increased communication and encouragement between protest groups using the [I]nternet,” but no “significant connection” between incidents, such as “reoccurring instigators at protests” or “vehicle descriptions” . . . .

Some Pentagon observers worry that in the effort to thwart the next 9/11, the U.S. military is now collecting too much data, both undermining its own analysis efforts by forcing analysts to wade through a mountain of rubble in order to obtain potentially key nuggets of intelligence and entangling U.S. citizens in the U.S. military’s expanding and quiet collection of domestic threat data.

Two years ago, the Defense Department directed a little known agency, Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, to establish and “maintain a domestic law enforcement database that includes information related to potential terrorist threats directed against the Department of Defense.” Then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz also established a new reporting mechanism known as a TALON or Threat and Local Observation Notice report. TALONs now provide “non-validated domestic threat information” from military units throughout the United States that are collected and retained in a CIFA database. The reports include details on potential surveillance of military bases, stolen vehicles, bomb threats and planned anti-war protests. In the program’s first year, the agency received more than 5,000 TALON reports. The database obtained by NBC News is generated by Counterintelligence Field Activity.

CIFA is becoming the superpower of data mining within the U.S. national security community. Its “operational and analytical records” include “reports of investigation, collection reports, statements of individuals, affidavits, correspondence, and other documentation pertaining to investigative or analytical efforts” by the DOD and other U.S. government agencies to identify terrorist and other threats. Since March 2004, CIFA has awarded at least $33 million in contracts to corporate giants Lockheed Martin, Unisys Corporation, Computer Sciences Corporation and Northrop Grumman to develop databases that comb through classified and unclassified government data, commercial information and Internet chatter to help sniff out terrorists, saboteurs and spies.

We mention all this because we know you have nothing to hide. Which is, we guess, why we so often see you at the shopping mall buck naked.

UPDATE: But wait. There's more! From Kevin Poulsen, Mr. Singel's colleague at the Wired "Threat Level" blog:

A U.S. government office in Quantico, Virginia, has direct, high-speed access to a major wireless carrier's systems, exposing customers' voice calls, data packets and physical movements to uncontrolled surveillance, according to a computer security consultant who says he worked for the carrier in late 2003.

Niche Marketing

2008-03-07T00:11:00.000-08:00

If you're feeling blue . . .

More than a quarter of U.S. soldiers on their third or fourth tours in Iraq suffer mental health problems partly because troops are not getting enough time at home between deployments, the Army said Thursday.

Overall, about 17.9 percent of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan had mental health problems in 2007, according to an annual Army survey. That is slightly below the 2006 figure of 19.1 percent but relatively consistent with previous years . . . .

"Soldiers are not resetting entirely before they get back into theater," said Lt. Col. Paul Bliese, who led the Army's Mental Health Advisory Team survey for 2007.

By "resetting" Bliese meant soldiers are not getting enough time to recover from the trauma of duty in a war zone . . . .

Short dwell times helped the Pentagon execute President Bush's troop "surge" last year that boosted troop levels in Iraq to 160,000 and keep about 28,000 troops in Afghanistan.

If you're feeling really, really blue . . .

Last year, 121 soldiers in the Army and active-duty National Guard and Reserves committed suicide, the largest number since the military began keeping records in 1980.

That is more than double the 52 suicides reported in 2001, the year the war in Afghanistan began, according to a Pentagon report. The report also cited 2,100 attempted suicides or self-inflicted injuries last year -- six times the 350 reported in 2002, before the Iraq war . . . .

The current suicides, one-quarter of which occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan, are primarily the result of strained personal relationships exacerbated by repeated deployments that last up to 15 months, Ritchie said. That, coupled with the availability of firearms, can become a deadly combination.

. . . then why not take the President's advice? Do yourself -- AND your friendly neighborhood military contractor! -- a favor. Try a little retail therapy. Go shopping!

More REI than M.A.S.H., [Commando Military Supply] is regularly jam-packed with deploying grunts and sergeants, poking around for custom gear including $200 flashlights, $150 Oakley protective sunglasses, $180 Thinsulate boots, and $20 thermal socks . . . .

The traditional Army credo is that it's guts that win the glory – not fancy long-johns or Oakley sunglasses. But that old-school thinking is wicking away like perspiration through Gore-Tex as US soldiers today go beyond military-issue battle dress uniforms in favor of top-of-the-line gear to help them get home in one piece – and look sharp, too.

One reason, critics say, is that military procurement, especially of life-saving equipment, is still too slow. Quietly, however, the Pentagon – with the Army leading the charge – has begun bypassing rigid procurement rules, loosening uniformity requirements, and even spearheading technical innovations in gear, ranging from flame-retardant shirts to low-infrared signature zippers.

"The idea now is, 'If it helps Joe do the mission, let him have it – as long as it's not hot pink,' " says Army veteran Logan Coffey, founder of Tactical Tailor, a custom-maker of packs and pouches in Lakewood, Wash. "It's a giant change" in the military mind-set, he says in a phone interview.

Since 9/11, the market for tactical war gear has expanded from nearly nonexistent to nearly $150 million in sales each year, which includes sales directly to soldiers as well as to the Pentagon, according to industry sources . . . .

To some critics, the sight of soldiers buying their own battle gear symbolizes a divide between frontline grunts and rear echelon procurement officers who may never have seen battle. Rep. Gene Taylor (D) of Mississippi told the House Armed Services Committee last week that supplies such as body armor and uparmored Humvees "[have] taken entirely too long" to get to frontline troops . . . .

"The Army is planning a $20 billion future combat system, and they can't provide boots that don't wear out," says Roger Charles, editor of DefenseWatch, an investigative website that advocates on behalf of frontline soldiers. "There's no priority for taking care of relatively mundane items where most people would think, 'Gosh, that's so simple. Why don't they have the best boots, the best uniforms, the best helmets, and the best flak jackets?'"

. . . . Even in life and death situations, fashion means something on the battlefield, soldiers say. "The Army does issue everyone glasses, but the young soldier wants to look cool, fashionable. He wants to look sexy," says Mr. Coffey.

Remember: in today's army, you've got to spend to survive!

TANGENTIALLY RELATED SIDEBAR (via our one-and-onliest colleague A. Carol): And while we're on the subject of ill-gotten gains, you will no doubt be delighted to learn that America's #1 war profiteer, KBR, has figured out yet another way to suck a few dollars out of every taxpayer's pocket:

Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation's top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in this tropical tax haven.

More than 21,000 people working for KBR in Iraq - including about 10,500 Americans - are listed as employees of two companies that exist in a computer file on the fourth floor of a building on a palm-studded boulevard here in the Caribbean. Neither company has an office or phone number in the Cayman Islands.

The Defense Department has known since at least 2004 that KBR was avoiding taxes by declaring its American workers as employees of Cayman Islands shell companies, and officials said the move allowed KBR to perform the work more cheaply, saving Defense dollars.

But the use of the loophole results in a significantly greater loss of revenue to the government as a whole, particularly to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds . . . .

"Failing to contribute to Social Security and Medicare thousands of times over isn't shielding the taxpayers they claim to protect, it's costing our citizens in the name of short-term corporate greed," said Senator John F. Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee who has introduced legislation to close loopholes for companies registering overseas.

Ptui

2008-03-06T17:58:00.000-08:00

On the prospects of a Clinton-Obama "unity" ticket:

Hillary Rodham Clinton, fresh off a campaign saving comeback, hinted Wednesday at the possibility of sharing the Democratic presidential ticket with Barack Obama — with her at the top. Obama played down his losses, stressing that he still holds the lead in number of delegates, and referred to talk of a joint ticket as "premature."

"Premature" is not, we think, the term Mr. Obama was looking for. In light of today's pronouncements by Sen. Clinton, we would have gone with "clinically insane":

“I think that since we now know Sen. McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that. And I think it’s imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold,” the New York senator told reporters crowded into an infant’s bedroom-sized hotel conference room in Washington.

“I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Sen. McCain has done that and you’ll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his candidacy,” she said.

Calling McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee a good friend and a “distinguished man with a great history of service to our country,” Clinton said, “Both of us will be on that stage having crossed that threshold."

Question: why is Ms. Clinton bothering to offer Mr. Obama the #2 slot on the Democratic ticket when she herself is so plainly angling for the #2 slot on the GOP ticket? -- and probably breaking poor Joe Lieberman's heart in the process?

We have hitherto refrained from endorsing either candidate. As we are only too happy to confess, we harbor deep reservations about Ms. Clinton and about Barack Obama as well; until tonight we have been content to watch, from our neutral corner, as they slug it out between themselves, for we are Democrats of long standing, and therefore quite accustomed to holding our noses as we vote. We fear, however, that we cannot pinch our nostrils tightly enough to block out the stink of Ms. Clinton's latest perfidy. Let us put it as charitably as we can: we know that ambition drives people to do and say desperate, contemptible things, but if Ms. Clinton is willing to suggest, in her most frivolous moment, that she would prefer to see ANY Democrat lose the presidency to John McCain, then she does not have the best interests of her constituency or her country at heart, and she is manifestly unfit to be the Democratic nominee.

Let us be done with her.

Support Our Mercs

2008-03-04T23:19:00.000-08:00

We have a cynical friend who likes to say that the primary function of government is to keep the populace from finding out where the money actually goes. If William D. Hartung's arithmetic is correct, the Pentagon will spend a minimum of $57,870 on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the ten seconds it takes you to read this introduction.

You (and your children) are the ones writing the checks. But who cashes them?

[T]o hear the howling of the white-collar warriors in Washington every time anyone suggests knocking a nickel off administration war-spending requests, you would think that the weekly $3.5 billion outlay is all "for the troops." In fact, only 10% of it, or under $350 million per week, goes to pay and benefits for uniformed military personnel. That's less than a quarter of the weekly $1.4 billion that goes to war contractors to pay for everything from bullets to bombers. As a slogan, insisting that we need to keep the current flood of military outlays flowing "for Boeing and Lockheed Martin" just doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

You could argue, of course, that all these contracting dollars represent the most efficient way to get our troops the equipment they need to operate safely and effectively in a war zone -- but you would be wrong. Much of that money is being wasted every week on the wrong kinds of equipment at exorbitant prices. And even when it is the right kind of equipment, there are often startling delays in getting it to the battlefield, as was the case with advanced armored vehicles for the Marine Corps.

But before we get to equipment costs, let's take a look at a week's worth of another kind of support. The Pentagon and the State Department don't make a big point -- or really any kind of point -- out of telling us how much we're spending on gun-toting private-contract employees from companies like Blackwater and Triple Canopy, our "shadow army" in Iraq, but we can make an educated guess. For example, at the high end of the scale, individual employees of private military firms make up to 10 times what many U.S. enlisted personnel make, or as much as $7,500 per week. If even one-tenth of the 5,000 to 6,000 armed contract employees in Iraq make that much, we're talking about at least $40 million per week. If the rest make $1,000 a week -- an extremely conservative estimate -- then we have nearly $100 million per week going just to the armed cohort of private-contract employees operating there.

Now, let's add into that figure the whole private crew of non-government employees operating in Iraq, including all the cooks, weapons technicians, translators, interrogators, and other private-contract support personnel. That combined cost probably comes closer to $300 million per week, or almost as much as is spent on uniformed personnel by the Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marines . . . .

Given all of this, it may sound like we have a fair amount of detail about the costs of a week of war. No such luck. Until the "supplemental" costs of war are subjected to the same scrutiny as the regular Pentagon budget, there will continue to be hundreds of millions of dollars unaccounted for each and every week that the wars go on. And there will be all sorts of money for pet projects that have nothing to do with fighting current conflicts. So don't just think of that $3.5 billion per week figure as a given. Think of it as $3.5 billion . . . and counting.

The Power of Stoopid

2008-03-04T16:16:00.000-08:00

Three sages:

Take, say, sports -- that's another crucial example of the indoctrination system, in my view. For one thing because it -- you know, it offers people something to pay attention to that's of no importance. That keeps them from worrying about -- keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea of doing something about. And in fact it's striking to see the intelligence that's used by ordinary people in [discussions of] sports [as opposed to political and social issues]. I mean, you listen to radio stations where people call in -- they have the most exotic information and understanding about all kind of arcane issues.

-- Noam Chomsky, interviewed in Manufacturing Consent (1992)

Politics is about identity. The candidates and parties that win are not those aligning their positions most precisely with a majority of the electorate. The winners are those who form a positive image in the public mind of who they are (and a negative image of who their opponents are). Issues are a vehicle to create that identity . . . .

The Democrat comes before the public and says, "If you read my 10-point policy plan, I'm sure you'll vote for me. Let's go over it point by point." The Republican then comes before the public, points to the Democrat, and says, "That guy is a weak, elitist liberal who hates you and everything you stand for. I'm one of you and he's not." And guess who wins . . . .

[V]oters don't read policy papers, and they don't make decisions with a checklist of issues in their hands. That's why Republican campaigns operate on a different level: Whom do you identify with? Whom can you trust? Who is strong, and who is weak? These questions transcend issues, which is why Republicans -- who know they are at a disadvantage on the issues -- spend so much time talking about them.

-- Paul Waldman, the Boston Globe (9/6/06)

No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.

-- H. L. Mencken

From our close study of the above we have concluded that most Americans, though not necessarily stoopid, nevertheless tend, for a variety of reasons primarily systemic in nature, to vote stoopid. Our perspicacious colleague and fellow Warriors fan Swopa, to whom we are indebted for the Waldman quote above, has been tracking the efforts of Candidate Obama to appeal to a stoopid constituency (or, more precisely, to appeal to a broad constituency on a stoopid level), and he has not, so far, been displeased with the results.

We bow to no one in our respect for Mr. Swopa's political acumen, but he is, at the end of the day, a member of the pointy-headed liberal elite -- as, we hasten to confess, are we! -- and we could not help but wonder whether Obama's admittedly mad framing skillz would pay similar, measurable dividends among hoi polloi.

Well, to quote a famous marine, surprise, surprise, surprise! According to a new Rasmussen poll commissioned by Fox News and the Washington Times -- and do not neglect the potential for disinformation when Messrs. Murdoch and Moon are doing the commissioning -- Obama's stoopidity index is surging:

[T]he survey determined that a quarter of self-identified Republicans rated Mr. McCain most likable, but nearly as many — 23 percent — chose Mr. Obama as most likable. And among all adults surveyed, Mr. Obama was rated likable by more people than Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mr. McCain combined,

By contrast, likability has never been Mr. McCain's strong suit — even long-shot Republican candidate Mike Huckabee was rated more likable in the poll, both among all adults and Republicans specifically. Mr. McCain instead is betting on his national-security credentials, and there the survey shows him topping both Democrats combined.

Mr. McCain led with 39 percent to Mr. Obama's 17 percent and Mrs. Clinton's 19 percent when those surveyed were asked who "will be the toughest on matters of national security." Even among self-identified Democrats, Mr. McCain fared decently with one in five rating him toughest . . . .

Despite facing candidates with far more experience in government, [Obama] was rated smartest by 26 percent of those polled, more so than Mrs. Clinton, who won 22 percent, and Mr. McCain, who garnered 17 percent. Mr. Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, was fourth with 10 percent.

Even among Democrats, Mr. Obama was rated smartest by nearly half — a full 10 percentage points more than Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Obama also was wildly popular among independents and third-party members, 41 percent of whom rated him most likable.

All very encouraging. Remember, however, that while "likable" always wins votes from the stoopid bloc, "smart" is not necessarily a plus, and is inevitably trumped by "strong on defense." The last eight years clearly demonstrate that the average American voter is willing to overlook such putative defects as inexperience and pig-ignorance if he believes that a candidate A) would be fun to drink a beer with, and B) is likely to surround himself with the very best team of criminals, liars, would-be fascists, and paranoid-schizophrenic psycho freaks his handlers can assemble for him.

UPDATE: Uh oh. Hillary takes Ohio, Texas, and Rhode Island. Stoopid hates Hillary.

Law? Law No More

2008-03-04T13:36:00.000-08:00

Many of you, we know, are well and truly geeked by the ongoing cage matches in the Democratic Thunderdomes of Texas, Ohio, Vermont, and Rhode Island, but we ask you not to be distracted (in the manner of the zombies from Land of the Dead, who lapsed into an instant stupor at the sight of fireworks) from a concurrent, and considerably less rousing, spectacle: the shameful rush of the House of Representatives toward a "compromise with," which is to say a "capitulation to," the White House on the crucial issue of telecom immunity. If you are not familiar with the issue -- and if you're not, what are you doing here? -- please take a moment to read "Why We Sued the Phone Company," by Studs Terkel, Quentin Young, Barbara Flynn Currie and James Montgomery, from yesterday's Chicago Tribune:

The truth is that telecoms do not need a special deal. These companies have immunity from lawsuits for turning over customer records to the government if they do so in conformity with existing law. But, in this instance, the telephone companies knowingly violated that law. If we give them a free pass this time, won't the telephone companies feel free to violate the laws protecting our privacy in the future?

The Bush administration and its supporters in Congress complain that these lawsuits are simply about money and enriching trial lawyers -- suggesting that the litigation should be stopped because of the potential damages that might be awarded in such lawsuits. This criticism ignores the fact that, according to the rules in the federal court, the only way that we could ensure that a federal judge could continue to explore previous violations if the companies simply changed their participation or the government changed or ended the program was to ask for minimal damages. We are not interested in recovering money for ourselves, nor is our counsel, the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. We, however, are committed to assuring that these giant companies are punished for violating the law and thus dissuaded from violating the law in the future.

More important, amnesty not only lets the companies off the hook without answering any questions, it assures that the American people will never learn about the breadth and extent of the lawless program.

This last bit is of course the crux of the issue: it's the White House, not the telecom industry, that is clamoring for retroactive immunity. Why? Because retroactive immunity for the President's accomplices ensures that the scope of the President's warrantless wiretapping program, and the extent of his own crimes, will never come to light.

The (nominal) Democrats in the House are already passing the Astroglide in anticipation of Thursday's vote, so it is a near-certainty that Mr. Bush will get the free pass he desires. Still, even a doomed stand is sometimes worth taking. If, as a matter of routine, you expect your elected representatives to uphold the rule of law, please remind them of that fact by clicking here or here.

(Thanks to our ever-lovin'est colleague A. Carol for a plethora of links.)

UPDATE: We are pleased to discover, belatedly, that our learned colleague Glenn Greenwald has written the article we have been hoping to see for some months now, about the controversy that surrounded FISA at its inception in the late seventies:

[O]pposition to FISA -- in many civil libertarian and even conservative circles -- was fierce, not on the ground that it imposed too many restrictions on Government eavesdropping but on the opposite ground: that FISA gave legal sanction to sweeping, excessive, unchecked government power to spy on Americans . . . .

Back then, the premise that unchecked presidential spying would lead to massive abuses -- as it did for decades -- was just a given, something beyond the realm of what could be reasonably debated. Now, only far Left partisans worry about such silly things . . . .

Back then -- with a relentless, ideologically extreme Evil Empire threatening our very existence and our freedoms -- GOP fear-mongering was brushed aside. The political establishment overwhelmingly concluded that warrantless eavesdropping presented intolerable dangers, and many believed that FISA's "safeguards" were actually woefully inadequate. Telecoms lobbied on behalf of their customers' privacy rights and against being drawn into government surveillance. Editorial boards were almost unanimously on the side of greater oversight on presidential spying.

That all seems so quaint. The mindset which back then defined the radical, pro-surveillance right-wing fringe has now become the sweet spot of our political establishment. The GOP fear-mongering that back then was laughed away today dominates our discourse and shapes our laws. The secret FISA court which back then was viewed even by some conservatives as an extreme threat to civil liberties is now the outermost liberal viewpoint, one that is about to be ejected altogether by the Democratic Congress from the mainstream spectrum. The political establishment today knows only one viewpoint: literally no limits are tolerable on the power of the loving, protective Surveillance State.

Instead, He Lived to Sing "Satisfaction" at the Age of 45

2008-03-03T23:55:00.000-08:00

If the hitherto-untold tale of the attempted murder of Mick Jagger has a moral, it is this: Never Send a Biker to Do a Pirate's Job:

The attempt to kill Sir Mick was made by a group of Hells Angels after the infamous Altamont Speedway Free Concert in 1969, which the Rolling Stones had organised and for which the motorcycle gang reportedly provided security . . . .

According to Mark Young, a former special agent, interviewed in BBC radio series The FBI at 100, which begins tomorrow, a boat of Hells Angels set out to take revenge on the singer at his holiday home in the Hamptons, Long Island, New York.

"The Hells Angels were so angered by Jagger's treatment of them that they decided to kill him," said Tom Mangold, who presents the series. "A group of them took a boat and were all tooled up and planned to attack him from the sea.

"They planned the attack from the sea so they could enter his property from the garden and avoid security at the front. The boat was hit by a storm and all of the men were thrown overboard. All survived and there was not said to have been any further attempt on Jagger's life."

It is understood that Sir Mick was never informed of the alleged assassination attempt.

We Were in Our Perky Pat Layout Chewing Can-D When We Heard the News

2008-03-02T16:54:00.000-08:00

Philip K. Dick died twenty-six years ago today.

In honor of the occasion, we would like to repost an excerpt from Thomas M. Disch's introduction to the 1984 Bluejay edition of Mr. Dick's 1964 novel The Penultimate Truth:

In October of 1962, Kennedy had his moment of macho glory when he declared a quarantine around Cuba, where the Russians were building missile bases. For a few days everyone was waiting for the bombs to fall. The sensation of dread and helplessness was just the stuff nightmares were made of. for those who had read more than the government's bromidic brochures on the subject of nuclear destruction and who were living at that time in a major (i.e., targeted) city, there was little to be done but figure the odds for survival. The poet Robert Frost, legend has it, reckoned doomsday even likelier than that, and when he appeared at a symposium at Columbia University, he declared himself to be delighted that now he would not die alone (he was then eighty-eight) but would take all of humanity with him.

A year and a month later, in November of 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated, probably as a quid pro quo for his earlier efforts to play a similar dirty trick on Castro. However, at the time we were asked to believe that the deed was accomplished by a single bullet fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. Earl Warren, having been admonished by President Johnson that continued doubts of the scapegoat's sole guilt could lead to nuclear war, was directed to write a scenario to this effect. The Warren Commission issued its report in 1964, the same year in which The Penultimate Truth was published. Neither was nominated for a Hugo, for indeed both books were much too hastily written to deserve such an honor . . . .

[The Penultimate Truth] concerns the conspiracy of the yance-men of Callisto, a satellite of Jupiter, to brainwash the guileless Callistotes into a condition of abject conformity by means of the televised speeches of a (nonexistent) homespun philosopher [named Yancy] who is a cross between Arthur Godfrey and George Orwell's Big Brother. The problem is resolved not by revealing the deception to the gullible population, but by using the Yancy mannikin to inculcate a preference for Greek tragedy and Bach fugues among those who formerly were satisfied by Westerns and the songs of Stephe Collins Foster . . . .

What it meant for Dick -- as for his novel's protagonist, Joseph Adams -- to be a yance-man was that he knew, as most of his fellow citizens did not, that the real sociopolitical function of the cold war and the arms race was to guarantee comfortable "demesnes for corporate executives and other officials of the military-industrial establishments." Only as long as there was the menace of an external enemy would a majority of people agree to their own systematic impoverishment. But if one's "enemy" was in the same situation with respect to its captive populations, then a deal could be struck to keep their reciprocal menace ever-threatening -- not at all a difficult task with the unthinkable power of the nuclear arsenals both sides possessed . . . .

The great difference between Orwell's world-nightmare and Dick's is that the possibility of nuclear holocaust has not yet informed Orwell's vision, while it dominates Dick's. Never mind that the future Dick has imagined could not have come into being, that the radiation released by a nuclear war would have had far more awful and widespread consequences than the singeing represented in The Penultimate Truth . . . . It is a denial we all learned to make, having passed through the twin crises of 1962 and 1963: the Missile Crisis and the Assassination. Robert Frost died alone after all, and the rest of us, by and large, survived. If we'd never bothered listening to the news, there'd have been no reason to be fussed. Life went on. The Beach Boys produced new and better songs. Ditto Detroit and cars. That segment of the entertainment industry devoted to politics had an election, Johnson versus Goldwater, and the plot was that Goldwater would lead us into war. So we voted, by and large, for Johnson . . . .

Indeed, Eisenhower's nomination in 1952 [had been] denounced by Taft's supporters as a triumph of showbiz over politics, while, with the benefit of hindsight, Kennedy's entire career seems a pageant choreographed by the yance-men around him -- Schlesinger, Bradlee, even Mailer. Christopher Lasch writes, in the October 1983 issue of Harper's magazine: "Never was a political myth so consciously and deliberately created or so assiduously promoted, in this case by the very people who had deplored Madison Avenue's participation in President Eisenhower's campaigns." As Norman Mailer wrote in his account of the 1960 Democratic Convention, which helped to fix Kennedy's image as an "existential hero," the "life of politics and the life of myth had diverged too far" during the dull years of Eisenhower and Truman. It was Kennedy's destiny, Mailer thought (along with many others), to restore a heroic dimension to American politics, to speak and represent the "real subterranean life of America," to "engage" once again the "myth of the nation," and thus to bring a new "impetus . . . to the lives and imaginations of the American."

If this is how one of the man's vassals speaks of him, in public, in his lifetime, Lasch's cae -- and Dick's -- seems fairly unassailable. Of course, those intellectuals who promoted Kennedy for his mythic potential felt with a certain complacent knowingness that they were privileged to see the reality behind the myth (for that is a yance-man's greatest reward) . . . .

[T]hat element of the story that all readers remember, after the lapse of however many years, is the notion of the human race imprisoned in underground factories because they've been tricked into believing that a nuclear war has destroyed the world. It's an extraordinarily resonant idea. One thinks of the dwellers in Plato's cave who know nothing of reality but the shadows cast on the wall; of the similar destiny of Wells's Morlocks; of the prisoners in Beethoven's Fidelio; an dof ourselves, living in the shadow of a nuclear threat that is only bearable when we pretend that it does not exist. To have recognized that our situation is a kind of madness ("What, me worry?" sang the Titanic's passengers)has not helped us toward a solution, for our situation with respect to the bomb is not much different in 1983 than it was in 1964. And for that reason The Penultimate Truth, for all its flaws, remains a book that can speak to the terror that is the bedrock of our social order.

Prophets Without Honour in Their Own Land

2008-03-02T14:42:00.000-08:00

1.) One of our longtime favorite blogs, Mark Gisleson's Norwegianity, is about to go dark. We strongly recommend that you take a farewell stroll (a farewell scroll?) down the main page, where you will find any number of fascinating and informative links, including one to the video directly below, in which Dick Gregory offers his apology to the First Black President:

(Courtesy of our esteemed colleagues at The Unapologetic Mexican and Mercury Rising, where we also discovered links to Gregory's complete remarks from the 2008 State of the Black Union conference: Parts one, two, three, and four.)

2.) Another of our favorite bloggers, J. Schwarz of A Tiny Revolution, was threatening to take Sunday off because, as he put it, "the weather [was] so nice." Luckily, we were able to talk him back from the brink, and he is now hard at work churning out some sparkling new material which he has promised to post by nightfall at the latest. While we wait, we invite you to join us in watching a remarkable artifact unearthed by Mr. Schwarz's good friend Dennis Perrin, to wit, a video recording of Noam Chomsky's 1969 appearance on the late William F. Buckley's Firing Line:

Note the increasingly frantic arching of the eyebrows as it dawns on Mr. Buckley, perhaps for the first time, that he may not know as much as he thinks he does.

Part 2 of the same interview may be seen here.

THE BUCKLEY UPDATE: Our esteemed colleague (and future Nobel laureate) Josh Narins directs us, in comments, to an amusing anti-eulogy by Alexander Cockburn, who remembers to address the late Mr. Buckley's stylistic, as well as his political, deficiencies:

I found him mostly unwatchable and unreadable, being 97 per cent predictable and disgusting in all his views, with a style intolerably loaded with affectation -- fake English urbanity and pompous usage. He was the sort of writer who could never use the word "punishment" without sticking "condign" in front of it, the better to flaunt his stylistic credentials . . . .

Buckley wore urbanity like cheap make-up, badly applied. At the slightest challenge it disappeared and we were left with the hiss and venom of a true reptile.

There follows an extended passage from what is perhaps Mr. Buckley's most noisome eructation, a 1957 editorial from the National Review entitled "Why the South Must Win."

THE CHOMSKY UPDATE: From AlterNet, the transcipt of a (long) speech in which Noam Chomsky considers, among other matters, the marginalization of Iraq as an issue in Campaign 2008:

One of the most dedicated and informed journalists who has been immersed in the ongoing tragedy, Nir Rosen, has just written an epitaph entitled "The Death of Iraq" in the very mainstream and quite important journal Current History. He writes that "Iraq has been killed, never to rise again. The American occupation has been more disastrous than that of the Mongols, who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century," which has been the perception of many Iraqis, as well. "Only fools talk of 'solutions' now," he went on. "There is no solution. The only hope is that perhaps the damage can be contained."

But Iraq is, in fact, the marginal issue, and the reasons are the traditional ones, the traditional reasoning and attitudes of the liberal doves who all pray now, as they did forty years ago, that the hawks will be right and that the US will win a victory in this land of wreck and ruin. And they're either encouraged or silenced by the good news about Iraq.

And there is good news. The US occupying army in Iraq -- euphemistically it's called the Multi-National Force-Iraq, because they have, I think, three polls there somewhere -- that the occupying army carries out extensive studies of popular attitudes. It's an important part of counterinsurgency or any form of domination. You want to know what your subjects are thinking. And it released a report last December. It was a study of focus groups, and it was uncharacteristically upbeat. The report concluded -- I'll quote it -- that the survey of focus groups "provides very strong evidence" that national reconciliation is possible and anticipated, contrary to what's being claimed. The survey found that a sense of "optimistic possibility permeated all focus groups and far more commonalities than differences are found among these seemingly diverse groups of Iraqis" from all over the country and all walks of life. This discovery of "shared beliefs" among Iraqis throughout the country is "good news, according to a military analysis of the results," Karen de Young reported in the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago.

Well, the "shared beliefs" are identified in the report. I'll quote de Young: "Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the US military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of [what they call] 'occupying forces' as the key to national reconciliation." So those are the "shared beliefs." According to the Iraqis then, there's hope of national reconciliation if the invaders, who are responsible for the internal violence and the other atrocities, if they withdraw and leave Iraq to Iraqis . . . .

[A few days ago] George Bush issued another one of his signing statements declaring that he will reject crucial provisions of congressional legislation that he had just signed, including the provision that forbids spending taxpayer money -- I'm quoting -- "to establish any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of [United States} Armed Forces in Iraq" or "to exercise [United States] control of the oil resources of Iraq." OK? Shortly after, the New York Times reported that Washington "insists" -- if you own the world, you insist -- "insists that the Baghdad government give the United States broad authority to conduct combat operations," a demand that "faces a potential buzz saw of opposition from Iraq, with itsdeep sensitivities about being seen as a dependent state." It's supposed to be more third world irrationality.

So, in brief, the United States is now insisting that Iraq must agree to allow permanent US military installations, provide the United -- grant the United States the right to conduct combat operations freely, and to guarantee US control over the oil resources of Iraq. OK? It's all very explicit, on the table. It's kind of interesting that these reports do not elicit any reflection on the reasons why the United States invaded Iraq. You've heard those reasons offered, but they were dismissed with ridicule. Now they're openly conceded to be accurate, but not eliciting any retraction or even any reflection.

N.B.: Although it seems to have been lost in transcription, we believe Mr. Chomsky is undertaking a mild ethnic joke in the third paragraph above. If the bit about the Multi-National Force is to make any sense, "three polls" should obviously read "three Poles."

Our Object All Sublime

2008-03-01T23:54:00.000-08:00

We shall achieve in time / To let the punishment fit the crime / The punishment fit the crime:

Hagee isn't just McCain's problem--he's a problem for the GOP as a whole, embraced by all the leading Republicans (and faux Democrats). And the Hagee problem illustrates the much broader dilemma faced by the GOP: when you build a coalition from varieties of religious intolerance, you can't be surprised when the various intolerances are intolerant of each other.

And make each prisoner pent / Unwillingly represent / A source of innocent merriment / Of innocent merriment! (Link courtesy of our BARBARian colleague Paperwight, who has characteristically enlightening things to say about these and other strange bedfellows here.)

Different Career Paths

2008-02-29T00:40:00.000-08:00

While visiting our erudite colleague Susie Bright for the usual reasons-we-would-sooner-not-discuss, we were distressed to learn that the "process of spiritual restoration" undertaken by ex-Reverend Ted Haggard has come to an unhappy end. Pastor Ted, you may recall, was sacked by his Colorado mega-church in late 2006 over allegations that he A) bought amphetamines and B) paid a male prostitute for regular, hot, humpy sex. Subsequent reports that the Rev. Haggard had been restored to full heterosexuality by three weeks of intensive therapy with a quartet of ministers may have been premature:

New Life [Church] has been at odds with its former pastor since he left.

In its statement Tuesday night, church officials said, "New Life recognizes the process of restoring Ted Haggard is incomplete and maintains its original stance that he should not return to vocational ministry. However, we wish him and his family only success in the future" . . . .

Haggard also irritated New Life leaders by requesting donations to support him and his family while he got a degree in counseling at the University of Phoenix. The donations were to be collected by Families with a Mission, a Monument non-profit run by Paul Huberly, a twice-convicted registered sex offender.

Meanwhile, Haggard's accuser, male escort Mike Jones, is getting his act together and taking it on the road:

His one-man play “Naked Before God: Exposing the Hypocrisy of Ted Haggard,” will play the Bug Theatre March 13-22.

After the Denver run, Jones and his peeps hope to take the show on the road to such cities as San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, Portland, LA.

“It’s a monologue,” Jones says, “But there’s some acting involved as I recreate some of the situations I was going through. It’s funny and tearful. I think at the end people are going to feel exhausted. They’ll go ‘Wow, I can’t believe what he went through’” . . . .

He says the costume is what he always wore working, gym shorts and a T-shirt.

"It's Not Bad Apples, But Bad Barrel-Makers"

2008-02-29T00:17:00.000-08:00

As part of his presentation earlier today at TED 2008, Prof. Philip Zimbardo, creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment and author of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, showed a video including a number of previously-unreleased photographs from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. (Zimbardo gained access to the pictures while serving as an expert witness in the defense of Sgt. Chip Frederick, one of the "bad apples" court-martialled for his treatment of Iraqi detainees at that infamous facility.) The public appetite for photographic evidence of American atrocities has apparently diminished in the last couple of years, for, as we discovered when we ran a Google search on "new photos Abu Ghraib," most domestic news outlets have chosen to ignore the story altogether; the bulk of the coverage emanates from such far-flung locales as South Africa, Egypt, Iran, Canada, France, and Australia.

Wired, however, has posted both the photos and the video, as well as a fascinating interview with Zimbardo himself:

Wired: How did what happened at Abu Ghraib compare to your Stanford prison study?

Zimbardo: The military intelligence, the CIA and the civilian interrogator corporation, Titan, told the MPs [at Abu Ghraib], "It is your job to soften the prisoners up. We give you permission to do something you ordinarily are not allowed to do as a military policeman -- to break the prisoners, to soften them up, to prepare them for interrogation." That's permission to step across the line from what is typically restricted behavior to now unrestricted behavior.

In the same way in the Stanford prison study, I was saying [to the student guards], "You have to be powerful to prevent further rebellion." I tell them, "You're not allowed, however, to use physical force." By default, I allow them to use psychological force. In five days, five prisoners are having emotional breakdowns.

The situational forces that were going on in [Abu Ghraib] -- the dehumanization, the lack of personal accountability, the lack of surveillance, the permission to get away with anti-social actions -- it was like the Stanford prison study, but in spades.

Those sets of things are found any time you really see an evil situation occurring, whether it's Rwanda or Nazi Germany or the Khmer Rouge.

Wired: But not everyone at Abu Ghraib responded to the situation in the same way. So what makes one person in a situation commit evil acts while another in the same situation becomes a whistle-blower?

Zimbardo: There's no answer, based on what we know about a person, that we can predict whether they're going to be a hero whistle-blower or the brutal guard. We want to believe that if I was in some situation [like that], I would bring with it my usual compassion and empathy. But you know what? When I was the superintendent of the Stanford prison study, I was totally indifferent to the suffering of the prisoners, because my job as prison superintendent was to focus on the guards.

As principal [scientific] investigator [of the experiment], my job was to care about what happened to everybody because they were all under my experimental control. But once I switched to being the prison superintendent, I was a different person. It's hard to believe that, but I was transformed . . . .

Wired: You've said that the way to prevent evil actions is to teach the "banality of kindness" -- that is, to get society to exemplify ordinary people who engage in extraordinary moral actions. How do you do this?

Zimbardo: If you can agree on a certain number of things that are morally wrong, then one way to counteract them is by training kids. There are some programs, starting in the fifth grade, which get kids to think about the heroic mentality, the heroic imagination.

To be a hero you have to take action on behalf of someone else or some principle and you have to be deviant in your society, because the group is always saying don't do it; don't step out of line. If you're an accountant at Arthur Andersen, everyone who is doing the defrauding is telling you, "Hey, be one of the team."

Heroes have to always, at the heroic decisive moment, break from the crowd and do something different. But a heroic act involves a risk. If you're a whistle-blower you're going to get fired, you're not going to get promoted, you're going to get ostracized. And you have to say it doesn't matter.

Most heroes are more effective when they're social heroes rather than isolated heroes. A single person or even two can get dismissed by the system. But once you have three people, then it's the start of an opposition.

So what I'm trying to promote is not only the importance of each individual thinking "I'm a hero" and waiting for the right situation to come along in which I will act on behalf of some people or some principle, but also, "I'm going to learn the skills to influence other people to join me in that heroic action."

Better than the Alternative

2008-02-28T23:37:00.000-08:00

We did not know, until we saw this morning's item from our stalwart colleagues at Cursor, that "two years and 144 cases have passed" since Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas last asked a question from the bench:

[Q]uestions may be helpful to the others, Thomas said, but not to him.

"One thing I've demonstrated often in 16 years is you can do this job without asking a single question," he told an adoring crowd at the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group.

For audio commentary by the effervescent Dahlia Lithwick of Slate, click here.

Bush League

2008-02-28T21:39:00.000-08:00

We never had any use for the goddamned Celtics, but we warmed up a little to Larry Bird after he refused Ronald Reagan's invitation to visit the White House following Boston's NBA championship in 1984. (Although we must confess that our Birdmania did not reach its zenith until he traded Stephen Jackson and Al Harrington to Golden State in exchange for Mike Dunleavy and Troy Murphy.) Our rumbustious colleague Jurassicpork, at Welcome to Pottersville, informs us that Manny Ramirez of the World Series champion Red Sox recently followed Bird's example by passing up a chance to bask in the reflected glory of our current President, and was as a result favored, in his absence, with a characteristically droll jibe from the sad little fuck whose worst mistake in life, prior to 2001, had been the trading of Sammy Sosa. (Since then, of course, he has left that dubious achievement in the dust):

"I'm sorry [Papi's] running mate, Manny Ramirez, isn't here. I guess his grandmother died again," [President Bush] said to laughter. "Just kidding. Tell Manny I didn't mean it.

President. Of. These. United. States. One cannot help but wish he'd had a mother who might have helped him appreciate that certain jokes are best not made in public.

But then we cannot believe that Manny Ramirez is much offended by Mr. Bush's barbs, for the target of the President's wit undoubtedly enjoys a public approval rating considerably higher than the President's own 19%.

Why We Fight

2008-02-28T00:49:00.000-08:00

Our indefatigable colleague Chris Floyd quotes Stars & Stripes:

CAMP ARIFJAN, Kuwait — U.S. Army Central is establishing a permanent platform for “full spectrum operations” in 27 countries around southwest Asia and the Middle East, its commander says . . . .

“It’s the first Army command to do this,” said [Lt. Gen. James] Lovelace, who also heads the Coalition Forces Land Component. “Now, we’re not only operational but the Army has committed other assets . . . . They regionally focus on this area. That was not always the case,” said Lovelace, who took command in mid-December. “These commands now have a permanent responsibility to this theater. They’ll have a permanent presence here. The personnel will change; the commands will remain."

Our indefatigable colleague Chris Floyd quotes William Arkin of the WaPo's Early Warning blog:

The Air Force and Navy, meanwhile, have set up additional permanent bases in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Oman. By permanent I mean large and continuing American headquarters and presences, most of which are maintained through a combination of coalition activities, long-standing bilateral agreements and official secrecy. Tens of billions have been plowed into the American infrastructure . . . .

When a war with Iran loomed and World War III seemed to be gaining traction in the Bush administration, this entire base structure was seen as the "build-up" for the next war. The build-up of course began decades ago, but since 9/11, the focus has been almost exclusively "supporting" U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran is there, but to interpret the planting of the American flags and the moving of chess pieces as being focused on Tehran is to miss what is really going on . . . .

[A] permanent American military presence in the region brings with it its own dangers and provocations. But most important what it brings for the next president is a fait accompli: a pause that facilitates a drawdown that begins to look a lot like a continuation of the same military and strategic policy, even at a time when there is broad questioning as to whether this is the most effective way to fight "terrorism."

Our indefatigable colleague Chris Floyd even quotes Chris Floyd:

In a world of dwindling petroleum resources, those who control large reserves of cheaply-produced oil will reap unimaginable profits – and command the heights of the global economy. It's not just about profit, of course; control of such resources would offer tremendous strategic advantages to anyone who was interested in "full spectrum domination" of world affairs, which the Bush-Cheney faction and their outriders among the neocons and the "national greatness" fanatics have openly sought for years. With its twin engines of corporate greed and military empire, the war in Iraq is a marriage made in Valhalla.

And this unholy union is what Bush is really talking about when he talks about "victory." This is the reason for so much of the drift and dithering and chaos and incompetence of the occupation: Bush and his cohorts don't really care what happens on the ground in Iraq – they care about what comes out of the ground. The end – profit and dominion – justifies any means. What happens to the human beings caught up in the war is of no ultimate importance; the game is worth any number of broken candles.

And in plain point of fact, the Bush-Cheney faction – and the elite interests they represent – has already won the war in Iraq . . . . They've won even if Iraq collapses into perpetual anarchy, or becomes an extremist religious state; they've won even if the whole region goes up in flames, and terrorism flares to unprecedented heights – because this will just mean more war-profiteering, more fear-profiteering. And yes, they've won even if they lose their majority [in November 2006] or the presidency in 2008, because war and fear will still fill their coffers, buying them continuing influence and power as they bide their time through another interregnum of a Democratic "centrist" – who will, at best, only nibble at the edges of the militarist state – until they are back in the saddle again. The only way they can lose the Iraq War is if they are actually arrested and imprisoned for their war crimes. And you know and I know that's not going to happen.

So Bush's confident strut, his incessant upbeat pronouncements about the war, his complacent smirks, his callous indifference to the unspeakable horror he has unleashed in Iraq – these are not the hallmarks of self-delusion, or willful ignorance, or a disassociation from reality. He and his accomplices know full well what the reality is – and they like it.

If Breaking the Law Is Illegal, Won't Telecom Companies Be Scared to Break the Law?

2008-02-28T00:28:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of our captivating colleague Avedon Carol: Richard Clarke, Rand Beers and other prominent counterterrorism experts have just written a letter to Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, telling Mike McConnell what we would have told Mike McConnell if Mike McConnell had asked us:

The sunset of the Protect America Act (PAA) does not put America at greater risk. Despite claims that have been made, surveillance currently occurring under the PAA is authorized for up to a year. New surveillance requests can be filed through current FISA law. As you have stated, "Unlike last summer, there is no backlog of cases to slow down getting surveillance approvals from the FISA court. We're caught up to all of it now." As court orders are received, telecom companies are required to comply. Also, existing NSA authority allows surveillance to be conducted abroad on any known or suspected terrorist without a warrant. It is unclear to us that the immunity debate will affect our surveillance capabilities.

You stated on Fox News Sunday February 17 "the entire issue here is liability protection for the carriers" and that with the expiration of the Protect America Act, the telecom companies "are less inclined to help us." As mentioned above, the authorizations of surveillance under the sunset PAA still run for a year and they provide clear legal protection to any cooperating communications carrier. For new targets that are somehow not covered by the existing authorizations, the FISA court can issue an order, which the telecom companies are legally obliged to follow. Telecommunications companies will continue to cooperate with lawful government requests, particularly since FISA orders legally compel cooperation with the government. Again, it is unclear to us that the immunity debate will affect our surveillance capabilities.

The intelligence community currently has the tools it needs to acquire surveillance of new targets and methods of communication. As in the past, applications for new targets that are not already authorized by the broad orders already in place under the PAA can be filed through the FISA courts, including the ability to seek warrants up to 72 hours retroactively. Despite this fact, the President claimed on February 16 that as a result of PAA not being extended by Congress "the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence will be stripped of their power to authorize new surveillance against terrorist threats abroad." It remains unclear-in light of the law-how the President believes surveillance capabilities have changed.

Messrs. Clarke, Beers et al, influenced, perhaps, by the television quiz show Jeopardy!, seem to have phrased their complaint in the form of a question. We are less diplomatic, and would therefore have explained the problem to Mike McConnell simply and unambiguously, in the declarative, thus: the President does not for a moment believe that surveillance capabilities have changed. The President is demanding telecom immunity to prevent his own felonies from coming to light.

Clear enough for you?

Texas Tea

2008-02-27T22:43:00.000-08:00

Corporations, as you undoubtedly know, achieved the legal status of persons in 1886 when Supreme Court Justice Morrison Remick Waite, a damnable judicial activist if ever there was one, asserted in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company that:

The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.

Justice Zip-It's fiat, which finds no support anywhere in the actual text of the Constitution, has had quite a few (perhaps) unanticipated consequences. To cite but one, pointed out by our distinguished colleague Greg Palast: when a human being sues a large corporation, the defendant can often prevail by the simple tactic of outliving the plaintiff:

Next month marks 19 years since the Exxon Valdez dumped its load of crude oil across the Prince William Sound, Alaska. A big gooey load of this crude spilled over the lands of the Chenega Natives. Paul Kompkoff was a seal-hunter for the village. That is, until Exxon’s ship killed the seal and poisoned the rest of Chenega’s food supply.

While cameras rolled, Exxon executives promised they’d compensate everyone. Today, before the US Supreme Court, the big oil company’s lawyers argued that they shouldn’t have to pay Paul [Kompkoff] or other fishermen the damages ordered by the courts.

They can’t pay Paul anyway. He’s dead.

That was part of Exxon’s plan. They told me that. In 1990 and 1991, I worked for the Chenega and Chugach Natives of Alaska on trying to get Exxon to pay up to save the remote villages of the Sound. Exxon’s response was, “We can hold out in court until you’re all dead” . . . .

But Exxon didn’t do it alone. They had enablers. One was a failed oil driller named “Dubya.” Exxon was the largest contributor to George W. Bush’s political career after Enron. They were a team, Exxon and Enron. The Chairman of Enron, Ken Lay, prior to his felony convictions, funded a group called Texans for Law Suit Reform. The idea was to prevent Natives, consumers and defrauded stockholders from suing felonious corporations and their chiefs.

When George went to Washington, Enron and Exxon got their golden pass in the appointment of Chief Justice John Roberts. Today, as the court heard Exxon’s latest stall, Roberts said, in defense of Exxon’s behavior in Alaska, “What more can a corporation do?”

If you are old enough to remember 2004, you certainly recall the scorn and contumely heaped upon vice presidential candidate John Edwards, who, in his lawyerin' days, helped recover damages for families whose children had been maimed by corporate negligence. (One such lawsuit, brought on behalf of a five-year-old whose intestines had been ripped out by the suction of a defective pool drain, was memorably dismissed by CNN's resident anus Tucker Carlson as "the Jacuzzi case.") You may also remember the bizarre moment during the presidential debates when dithering fuckwit John Kerry, in response to a totally unrelated question, trotted out a half-assed Republican talking point about the dire need for tort reform. "Tort reform," as Palast defines it, means taking away "the God-given right of any American, rich or poor, to sue the bastards who crush your child’s skull through product negligence, make your heart explode with a faulty medical device, siphon off your pension funds, or poison your food supply with spilled oil":

Now, all of the Democratic candidates have seen through this ‘tort reform’ con – and so did a Senator named McCain who, in 2001, for example, voted for the Patients Bill of Rights allowing claims against butchers with scalpels. Then something happened to Senator McCain: the guy who stuck his neck out for litigants got his head chopped off when he ran for President in the Republican Party in 2000 for what one lobbyists’ website called McCain’s, “his go-it-alone moralism.”

So the Senator did what I call, The McCain Hunch. Again and again he grabbed his ankles and apologized to the K Street lobbyists, reversing his positions on, well, you name it. For example, in 2001, he said of Bush’s tax cuts, “I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans.” Now, in bad conscience, the Senator vows to make these tax cuts permanent.

On “Tort Reform,” the about-face was dizzying. McCain voted to undermine his own 2001 Patients Bill of Rights with votes in 2005 to limit suits to enforce it. He then added his name to a bill that would have thrown sealhunter Kompkoff’s suit out of federal court.

In 2003, McCain voted against Bush’s Energy Plan, an industry oil-gasm. But this week, following Exxon’s report that it sucked in $40.6 billion in earnings last year, the largest profit haul in planetary history, McCain failed to join Clinton, Obama, most Democrats and some Republicans on a bill to require a teeny sliver of industry profit go to alternative energy sources. On oil independence, McCain is AWOL, missing in action.

All of which leads us to wonder: is the so-called "Straight Talk Express" running on a Moebius Strip?

In Which We Endeavor to Elevate the Discourse

2008-02-27T21:15:00.000-08:00

1.) Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (far left) in the distinctive headgear she wore when her husband was peddling all of America's military secrets to our future owners, the Red Chinese (near left).

2.) First Lady Laura Bush (upper right) in the burqa her husband makes her wear when they visit Poppy's for dinner with the bin Ladens, who still haven't figured out where to invest all the cash they used to park, pre-9/11, with the Carlyle Group.

3.) American soldiers (lower right) attending a garden party in honor of presumptive GOP nominee John McCain, whose middle name is "Genet" (French for "cocksucker"). Like his namesake, candidate McCain picked up a trick or two in prison. After revealing all of America's military secrets to his North Vietnamese masters (and thence to our future owners, the Red Chinese), he was sent back to the U.S. to introduce le malaise Francais to the Republican party. As should be obvious from recent headlines, it has since that time spread like wildfire.

(Thanks to Zemblan patriot J.M. for the photos.)

UPDATE (in response to a query from Zemblan patriot J.D.): No, we do not happen to feel that First Lady Laura Bush is a dead ringer for the famously large-boned sitcom actress "Delta Burqa."

His Legacy

2008-02-21T01:11:00.000-08:00

Say, who'd like to have a beer with the lamest duck ever?

Reality Mining

2008-02-21T01:01:00.000-08:00

The good applications are in epidemiology and personal health care. The bad applications -- well, you can certainly guess the bad applications without any help from us:

Every time you use your cell phone, you leave behind a few bits of information. The phone pings the nearest cell-phone towers, revealing its location. Your service provider records the duration of your call and the number dialed.

Some people are nervous about trailing digital bread crumbs behind them. Sandy Pentland, however, revels in it. In fact, the MIT professor of media arts and sciences would like to see phones collect even more information about their users, recording everything from their physical activity to their conversational cadences. With the aid of some algorithms, he posits, that information could help us identify things to do or new people to meet . . . .

Within the next few years, Pentland predicts, reality mining will become more common, thanks in part to the proliferation and increasing sophistication of cell phones. Many handheld devices now have the processing power of low-end desktop computers, and they can also collect more varied data, thanks to devices such as GPS chips that track location. And researchers such as Pentland are getting better at making sense of all that information.

To create an accurate model of a person's social network, for example, Pentland's team combines a phone's call logs with information about its proximity to other people's devices, which is continuously collected by Bluetooth sensors. With the help of factor analysis, a statistical technique commonly used in the social sciences to explain correlations among multiple variables, the team identifies patterns in the data and translates them into maps of social relationships. Such maps could be used, for instance, to accurately categorize the people in your address book as friends, family members, acquaintances, or coworkers. In turn, this information could be used to automatically establish privacy settings--for instance, allowing only your family to view your schedule. With location data added in, the phone could predict when you would be near someone in your network. In a paper published last May, Pentland and his group showed that cell-phone data enabled them to accurately model the social networks of about 100 MIT students and professors. They could also precisely predict where subjects would meet with members of their networks on any given day of the week.

More on our favorite mod con here and here.

The Man from C.U.N.T.

2008-02-21T00:08:00.000-08:00

In which MSNBC treats you to a "one-word education." (Thanks to Susie, Queen of Philly for the link.)

Because No Woman Is Retroactively Immune to His Charms

2008-02-20T23:24:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of Zemblan patriot M.S.: We were not surprised to learn, when the warrantless wiretapping story came out, that President Bush was in bed with the telecom lobby. But sweet baby Jesus! -- it sounds like John McCain is literally in bed with the telecom lobby!

PHOTOS: Telecommunications lobbyist Vicki Iseman (left); presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain (right).

UPDATE: We are distressed to report that several of our regular correspondents have taken us to task for what they perceive to be the "undue sanctimony" of the above post. Kindly allow us to state, unequivocally and for the record, that if a young and toothsome lobbyist such as Ms. Iseman wished to "nuzzle the candidate's withered hairy balls" (to quote Zemblan patriot J.O.'s memorable phrase), or to "shove a greased finger up the old boy's asshole, if it helps to bring him off a little quicker" (Zemblan patriot B.J.), we would have absolutely no objection! -- so long as the grotesque, degrading, and unhygienic activities in question helped to guarantee our patriotic telecom companies the freedom they need to spy on any and all Americans at will without fear of legal reprisal, thereby ensuring a speedy, decisive victory in the war on terror. If Ms. Iseman did indulge in such unsavory practices, we know that she was thinking not of England, but of America; and we can only hope that the belated revelation of her mad bedroom skillz will not arouse the media to a frenzy of sniggering prurience, as in the unfortunate case of Mr. Clinton and Ms. Lewinsky. There is, after all, a principle here!

UPDATE II: As of midnight tonight, there is still no word as to when Dr. James Dobson plans to offer a formal endorsement of McCain's candidacy. We are reliably told, however, that Ann Coulter has been asking around town for the Senator's home phone number, no doubt to discuss the possibility of an ideological rapprochement.

UPDATE III: Our condolences to poor Mitt Romney, who is undoubtedly wishing this story had broken thirty million dollars ago.

Memo to Ann (CC: Rush)

2008-02-19T00:03:00.000-08:00

Our esteemed colleague Timbuk3 has some disturbing news for all the hardcore principled conservatives who might be tempted to get a little, shall we say, obstreperous at the GOP coronation, later this summer, of the insane-but-not-quite-insane-enough John McCain:

The St. Paul Police Department is requesting 230 Tasers to outfit the all of the department's officers with the electroshock weapon, Fox 9 News reports. The SPPD will purchase the Tasers with $210,000 collected from drug raids . . . .

The purchase is expected to arrive in St. Paul just in time for the Republican National Convention prompting media speculation that the weapons are being purchased specifically for the convention. When asked by Fox 9 News whether the police will use the weapon at the convention particularly against protesters, police spokester Tom Walsh said, "Our hope is that no one will have to use any degree of force. If it becomes necessary, will that be one of the tools available to them? I suppose that's safe to say."

We are disappointed to see the Twin Cities constabulary investing in the taser, a primitive device with which their brother officers nationwide have been killing American citizens at a rate of better than one per week in calendar 2008. For years now we have been promised a new generation of futuristic crowd-control weapons. Where is the Piezer? The Inertial Capacitive Incapacitator? The Active Denial System, the Plasma-Flash-Bang Laser? Will even one of these splendid new gadgets be available for use against the rambunctious throngs of hardcore principled conservatives who simply cannot abide the thought of Walnuts McCain assuming the mantle of his legendary predecessor in senile-old-fuckery, Ronald Reagan?

We doubt it. And because we hate to think of the SPPD having to subdue a mob of rage-addled, spittle-flecked Limbaughs and Coulters with nothing more than tasers, we fully expect the department to adopt a policy of preemptive mass arrests and extended detentions like the one employed by New York cops during the 2004 Republican convention. The NYPD's "wide net" approach cannot be topped for efficiency, eliminating, as it does, the tricky and time-consuming process of distinguishing among innocent bystanders, peaceful protesters, and actual perps.

Oh, to be a fly on the razor wire when all those hardcore principled conservatives arrive in the holding pens! No doubt we'd overhear intellectual colloquy of a vigor and rigor unmatched since the last National Review cruise. Say, wouldn't it be nice if the delegation from Westboro Baptist put in an appearance?

And Let God Sort It Out

2008-02-17T00:42:00.000-08:00

If you have been reading our stalwart colleague J. Doolittle at Bad Attitudes, you already know about the substandard helmets supplied to our troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere by Sioux Manufacturing of North Dakota, a cost-shaving measure which resulted in the company's receiving A) a $2 million fine from the DoJ, and B) a $74 million contract to make new improved helmets for the Pentagon. Now, from our equally stalwart colleague the Fixer at Alternate Braincomes another, similarly appalling tale of corners cut and American lives squandered:

Hundreds of U.S. Marines have been killed or injured by roadside bombs in Iraq because Marine Corps bureaucrats refused an urgent request in 2005 from battlefield commanders for blast-resistant vehicles, an internal military study concludes . . . .

Cost was a driving factor in the decision to turn down the request for the so-called MRAPs, according to the study. Stateside authorities saw the hulking vehicles, which can cost as much as a $1 million each, as a financial threat to programs aimed at developing lighter vehicles that were years from being fielded . . . .

An urgent February 2005 request for MRAPs got lost in bureaucracy. It was signed by then-Brig. Gen. Dennis Hejlik, who asked for 1,169 of the vehicles. The Marines could not continue to take "serious and grave casualties" caused by IEDs when a solution was commercially available, wrote Hejlik, who was a commander in western Iraq from June 2004 to February 2005.

Gayl cites documents showing Hejlik's request was shuttled to a civilian logistics official at the Marine Corps Combat Development Command in suburban Washington who had little experience with military vehicles. As a result, there was more concern over how the MRAP would upset the Marine Corps' supply and maintenance chains than there was in getting the troops a truck that would keep them alive, the study contends.

Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?
Why, if it prosper -- Ahhhhrrr, fuck it. You know the rest.

Resetting the Table

2008-02-17T00:15:00.000-08:00

It may prove, in the end, an act of gratuitous cruelty, but until it does we are grateful to our distinguished colleague Scott Horton of Harper's for offering us, in his Friday analysis of the 223-32 House vote to issue contempt sanctions against White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers, a faint but extremely welcome glimmer of hope:

The Department of Justice’s internal investigation into the December 7 firings is coming to a conclusion. I am told that it is highly likely that this investigation will conclude that the decision to fire New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was clearly motivated by improper reasons. Iglesias resisted efforts by members of the New Mexico Congressional delegation (including Heather Wilson, who joined Boehner in his infantile march to the Capitol steps) to get him to bring a prosecution of a prominent Democrat in the weeks just before the 2006 elections in order to help influence the results. Being rebuffed by Iglesias, the New Mexico Republicans went to the people they knew pulled the prosecutorial strings all across the country: Karl Rove and his staff in the White House. And that path led to Iglesias’s firing.

The investigation into the firing of the U.S. Attorneys in Phoenix, Seattle and San Diego is showing similar signs of improper tampering with prosecutions by White House figures for partisan political reasons.

I am betting that [Judiciary Committee Chairman John] Conyers is pretty well informed about all of this and is awaiting the release of the internal Justice Department study, just as the White House and its political cronies in Justice are busily attempting to throw sticks in the spokes of the investigation to slow it down and delay the issuance of a final report with recommendations.

Now the Justice Department’s investigation focuses only on Alberto Gonzales, Paul McNulty and a handful of other senior political appointees, almost all of whom have left. It does not have the jurisdiction to address staffers in the White House like Rove, Miers and Bolten, nor indeed, President Bush.

But they are clearly within the jurisdictional remit of the Judiciary Committee. Moreover, if the Justice Department’s report implicates not just Rove, Miers and Bolten, but also Bush in the decision to fire for improper reasons—a conclusion which is now looking extremely likely—then it will be up to Conyers’s committee to press the investigation forward. In so doing, he is entitled to conduct hearings on the footing of impeachment. If he does, the executive privilege objection interposed by the White House and backed in another Constitution-defying opinion of the Attorney General, would not apply.

My guess is that the chess players are thinking several steps ahead of the game. It may or may not come to the sort of inquiry I am envisioning—that will depend in the first instance on the Justice Department’s own internal conclusions, and the pressure for the Justice Department to simply whitewash the matter may prove irresistible. But if it does come to a pointed inquiry into criminal conduct in the Oval Office relating to the dismissals, Conyers and his Committee want to be in a position to demonstrate that they have exhausted the other remedies—subpoenas and contempt citations—and have been stymied by the White House. In a sense, the White House will be forcing the opening of an impeachment inquiry by its own intransigence.

The Universally-Coveted KoZ Endorsement

2008-02-16T15:36:00.000-08:00

We have not yet managed to work up a great deal of enthusiasm for either of the frontrunners for the Democratic presidential nomination, our extensive research having proved something of an impediment, but we are pleased to say that we have already picked our candidate in another upcoming contest, namely the Alabama gubernatorial race of . . . well, 2014. Go ahead, call us premature, but WE'RE BACKING BARKLEY!! -- and we don't care who knows it:

Sir Charles was, in his youth, the most preternaturally gifted rebounder it has ever been our privilege to behold; he was also, and remains, the funniest man in sports, and we liked him even when he was a Republican pimping tax cuts for the rich ("I'm a multi-million-dollar black man. If my wife divorces me, I'm a million-dollar black man. If a Democrat gets elected president, I'm a black man.") We knew the GOP was facing profound electoral trouble when Barkley jumped ship in 2006 ("I was a Republican, until they lost their minds"), although we would certainly have seen it coming if we'd read Dave Zinn's compilation of Barkley quotes from two years before:

On racism: "Any time something bad happens to a black person because of racism, I feel it in my soul. I really do. You take the Abner Louima case. That let me know one thing: If some white guys wanted to stick a plunger up a black guy's butt, and I'm the black guy who happened to be around, I'd have a plunger up my butt."

On Saddam Hussein: "I think he's still alive. . . . Look at Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein - they used to both work for the United States and now they're enemies. That's part of the hypocrisy that goes on here."

On the flak celebrities get for their anti-war beliefs: "That's part of the hypocrisy that goes on when you're in the limelight - if you say something, you're anti-American or unpatriotic or too liberal. We're all free to say what we want to, but if you ever forget your place, we'll put you back in your place."

On politics: "Politics is too corrupt," Barkley said. "You know how you can tell politics is corrupt? President Bush is going to raise $250 million for a job that pays $400,000. Now tell me there isn't something wrong there?"

On his priority in life: "My No. 1 priority is to help poor people. In this country, 90% of the money is controlled by 10% of the people, and that's not right."

What a pleasure it would be to hear such positions straightforwardly espoused by the likes of prominent Democrats such as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Skeptics will perhaps point out that Mr. Barkley has been forced to pay out large cash settlements after throwing obstreperous strangers through plate-glass windows. We can only reply that that the full-body window-heave is yet another maneuver we would like to see adopted by prominent Democrats such as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

UPDATE: Or, for that matter, this guy.

So How Much Did We Have to Pay Him?

2008-02-15T17:52:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of our waggish colleague J. Schwarz: According to British high court testimony, the President's #1 asshole buddy (pictured at right below) has been running a sweet little protection racket:

Saudi Arabia's rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack London unless corruption investigations into their arms deals were halted, according to court documents revealed yesterday . . . .

Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi national security council, and son of the crown prince, was alleged in court to be the man behind the threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists. He faces accusations that he himself took more than £1bn in secret payments from the arms company BAE.

He was accused in yesterday's high court hearings of flying to London in December 2006 and uttering threats which made the prime minister, Tony Blair, force an end to the Serious Fraud Office investigation into bribery allegations involving Bandar and his family . . . .

Lord Justice Moses, hearing the civil case with Mr Justice Sullivan, said the government appeared to have "rolled over" after the threats. He said one possible view was that it was "just as if a gun had been held to the head" of the government.

Why, if we thought even half of that story was true, we'd be tempted to call the little Saudi motherfucker a common terrorist. But we know for a fact that our stalwart commander-in-chief would never deal with terrorists, and Mr. Bush sure-as-shootin' deals with Prince Bandar -- or, as he's affectionately known in Kennebunkport, "Bandar Bush":

In an interview that aired Sunday on CBS, [Bob] Woodward, a Washington Post editor, said that Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, had promised President Bush that the Saudis would cut oil prices before November [2004] to ensure the U.S. economy was strong on election day. Woodward is the author of the new book "Plan of Attack" on Bush's preparations for the Iraq war . . . .

"It is a relationship that goes back generations," said [author Craig] Ungar, who says he's tallied some "$1.4 billion worth of contracts from the House of Saud to companies in which the Bush's and their allies have had big positions."

You may or may not be amused to note that on 4/19/04, the publication date of the article cited directly above, crude prices had risen to a shocking high of $38 a barrel "on fears over increased violence in the Middle East."

Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

-- Sir John Harrington (paraphrasing Seneca)

UPDATE (2/16): If you are pleased by pretty pictures of moral idiocy in full flower, you will find much to love in this Guardian recap of Mr. Bush's Thursday night interview with the BBC:

President George Bush cited the London July 7 bombings in an interview broadcast last night to justify his support for waterboarding, an interrogation technique widely regarded as torture.

In an interview with the BBC he said information obtained from alleged terrorists helped save lives, and the families of the July 7 victims would understand that. Bush said waterboarding, which simulates drowning, was not torture and is threatening to veto a congressional bill that would ban it . . . .

In the BBC interview, Bush was asked whether, given waterboarding and other alleged human rights abuses, he could claim the US still occupied the moral high ground. He replied: "Absolutely."

He added: "We believe in human rights and human dignity. We believe in the human condition. We believe in freedom. And we're willing to take the lead. We're willing to ask nations to do hard things. We're willing to accept responsibilities. And - yeah, no question in my mind, it's a nation that's a force for good."

What a remarkable coincidence! -- that President Bush and the Saudi motherfucker whose bitch he is should both invoke the 7/7 attacks in their discussions with the Brits! -- albeit in different contexts:

Previously secret files describe how [British] investigators were told they faced "another 7/7" and the loss of "British lives on British streets" if they pressed on with their inquiries [into the BAE bribery scandal] and the Saudis carried out their threat to cut off intelligence.

We are in principle opposed to all forms of torture, waterboarding included, but under the circumstances we do not feel it could possibly hurt if, upon Prince Bandar's next visit to the UK, the chaps from MI6 were to strap him to the old seesaw and attempt to ascertain whether he has been completely forthcoming about the possibility of future terrorist attacks. Nor should his American client and confidant be allowed to set foot on English soil without being given the opportunity to explain, under extremely moist conditions, what sort of delicate intelligence the eminent Saudi nobleman might have confided to his trust.

Barbaric? Perhaps. But then, we're willing to ask nations to do hard things. And Mr. Bush, by his own admission, is willing to accept responsibilities.

Now: place your bets. In the scenario described above, which one rats out the other first?

Luckily, the Reactionary Dimwit Vote Is Still Up for Grabs

2008-02-13T22:05:00.000-08:00

Concession speech?

Playing down expectations, the Clinton camp says Wisconsin's primary electorate is liberal and well-educated—the kind of voters who have strongly supported Obama.

Well . . . there's always Texas. (Thanks to Zemblan patriot J.M. for the link.)

The Things That You're Liable to Read in the Bible

2008-02-13T21:37:00.001-08:00

You are certainly familiar with the truism that if you put four juvenile delinquents in a room with four members of the chess club, you are far more likely to wind up with eight Henry Winklers than with eight Aleksandr Alekhines. We are sad to report that Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, is unfamiliar with this universal principle, and imagines that the good example of more civilized nations -- even though we are bigger and more important than they are! -- might eventually drag our own benighted land into the 21st Century:

Today [2/12] is the anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth (the 199th, as it happens) and, as usual, scientists around the world will hold ceremonies honoring the man responsible for the foundational insight of modern science - the theory of evolution by means of natural selection. In the United States, as usual, rational thinkers will struggle to explain why fewer than than half of Americans accept the scientific validity of any form of evolution.

The widespread American skepticism about evolution is a phenomenon unique in the developed world, as is the controversy over whether evolution or religious theories of creation should be taught in public school science classes. The usual explanation for this anomaly is the equally anomalous (again, in developed countries) persistence of fundamentalist religion in the United States. But that explanation is too simplistic and leaves out what may well be more important - the American public's low level of scientific knowledge, independent of religious beliefs and completely at odds with America's image of itself as a world leader in education, science and technology . . . .
If only 30 percent believe that the Bible is literally true, why do so many more Americans reject the evolutionary theory considered settled science in the rest of the developed world?

The answer is ignorance - and Americans may be no more ignorant about evolution than they are about other aspects of science. According to surveys conducted for the National Science Foundation over the past two decades, more than two-thirds of adults are unable to identify DNA as the key to heredity. Nine out of 10 Americans - nearly 63 years after the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima - do not understand what radiation is or its effects on the body. One in 5 believes that the sun revolves around the Earth.

Which is fine as far as it goes, but we frankly resent Miss Susan Jacoby's baseless implication that the good ole U.S. of A. has some kind of monopoly on superstition and scientific illiteracy. Why, there are vast reeking pockets of gormlessness and ignorance all over the world, if you know where to look for them. As Mr. Bush so memorably asked a few years ago . . . what about Poland?

Exorcism - the church rite of expelling evil spirits from tortured souls - is making a comeback in Catholic regions of Europe. In July, more than 300 practitioners gathered in the Polish city of Czestochowa for the fourth International Congress of Exorcists.

About 70 priests serve as trained exorcists in Poland, about double the number of five years ago. An estimated 300 exorcists are active in Italy. Foremost among them: the Rev. Gabriele Amorth, 82, who performs exorcisms daily in Rome and is dean of Europe's corps of demon-battling priests.

"People don't pray anymore, they don't go to church, they don't go to confession. The devil has an easy time of it," Amorth said in an interview. "There's a lot more devil worship, people interested in satanic things and seances, and less in Jesus."

Amorth and other priests said the resurgence in exorcisms has been encouraged by the Vatican, which in 1999 formally revised and upheld the rite for the first time in almost 400 years.

Although a Vatican official denied reports in December of a campaign to train more exorcists, supporters said informal efforts began under Pope John Paul II - himself an occasional demon chaser - and have accelerated under Pope Benedict XVI. A Catholic university in Rome began offering courses in exorcism in 2005 and has drawn students from around the globe.

One of the recruits is the Rev. Wieslaw Jankowski, a priest with the Institute for Studies on the Family, a counseling center outside Warsaw. He said priests at the institute realized they needed an exorcist on staff after encountering an increase in people plagued by evil.

Typical cases, he said, include people who turn away from the church and embrace New Age therapies, alternative religions or the occult. Internet addicts and yoga devotees are also at risk, he said . . . .
Jankowski cited the case of a woman who asked for a divorce days after renewing her wedding vows as part of a marriage counseling program. What was suspicious, he said, was how the wife suddenly developed a passionate hatred for her husband.

"According to what I could perceive, the devil was present and acting in an obvious way," he said. "How else can you explain how a wife, in the space of a couple of weeks, could come to hate her own husband, a man who is a good person?"

The primitive Poles blame Satan for this unfortunate young woman's marital troubles. If, like us, they'd taken the time to read The Red Queen, by Matt Ridley, and The Evolution of Desire, by David M. Buss, they'd be able to pinpoint the real culprit: Darwin!

Stockholm Syndrome

2008-02-13T14:55:00.000-08:00

Former POW John McCain flip-flops on waterboarding.

This Happy Breed

2008-02-13T01:04:00.000-08:00

The most-discussed quote of the day (in Blogland, that is):

Erick Erickson, editor of the popular conservative megablog RedState, conceded that progressives currently enjoy an advantage over conservatives online—though he attributed it to an asymmetry in free time, since conservatives "have families because we don't abort our kids, and we have jobs because we believe in capitalism."

Which prompts Zemblan patriot M.S. to wonder: how the heck can Republicans spend so much time listening to Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Laura Ingraham, Michael Savage and Sean Hannity? Shouldn't they be fucking, or working?

A Dip in the Slough of Despond

2008-02-13T00:26:00.000-08:00

After attempting for several hours to compose a post on the defeat earlier today of the Dodd/Feingold amendment, which would have denied retroactive immunity to the telecommunications companies that took part in the administration's warrantless wiretapping program, we have succumbed to despair. We do not have it in us. Thirty-four years after his impeachment and fourteen years after his death, Nixon finally has the America he wanted, a nation in which, "when the President does it" -- or, by extension, orders it -- "that means that it is not illegal." Should the Senate version of the FISA renewal legislation pass, as we expect it to, Nixon's ghoulish travesty of the foundational principles of American democracy will be enshrined into federal law. Our sorrow is impossible to describe. It is so deep as to be ineffable.

We cannot even rouse ourselves to anger; we are spent. If you're craving the tonic effect of vituperation, you will have to find it elsewhere, perhaps in today's remarks by our distinguished colleague G. Greenwald:

What were the consequences for the President for having broken the law so deliberately and transparently? Absolutely nothing. To the contrary, the Senate is about to enact a bill which has two simple purposes: (1) to render retroactively legal the President's illegal spying program by legalizing its crux: warrantless eavesdropping on Americans, and (2) to stifle forever the sole remaining avenue for finding out what the Government did and obtaining a judicial ruling as to its legality: namely, the lawsuits brought against the co-conspiring telecoms. In other words, the only steps taken by our political class upon exposure by the NYT of this profound lawbreaking is to endorse it all and then suppress any and all efforts to investigate it and subject it to the rule of law.

To be sure, achieving this took some time. When Bill Frist was running the Senate and Pat Roberts was in charge of the Intelligence Committee, Bush and Cheney couldn't get this done (the same FISA and amnesty bill that the Senate will pass today stalled in the 2006 Senate). They had to wait until the Senate belonged (nominally) to Harry Reid and, more importantly, Jay Rockefeller was installed as Committee Chairman, and then -- and only then -- were they able to push the Senate to bequeath to them and their lawbreaking allies full-scale protection from investigation and immunity from the consequences of their lawbreaking.

That's really the most extraordinary aspect of all of this, if one really thinks about it -- it isn't merely that the Democratic Senate failed to investigate or bring about accountability for the clearest and more brazen acts of lawbreaking in the Bush administration, although that is true. Far beyond that, once in power, they are eagerly and aggressively taking affirmative steps -- extraordinary steps -- to protect Bush officials. While still knowing virtually nothing about what they did, they are acting to legalize Bush's illegal spying programs and put an end to all pending investigations and efforts to uncover what happened.

Eighteen Democrats crossed the aisle to support immunity: Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), Evan Bayh (D-IA), Daniel Inouye (D-HI), Tim Johnson (D-SD), Herb Kohl (D-WI), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Mark Pryor (D-AR), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Ken Salazar (D-CO), Tom Carper (D-DE), Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), Jim Webb (D-VA), Ben Nelson (D-NE), Bill Nelson (D-FL), Kent Conrad (D-ND), and Debbie Stabenow (D-MI). If you see their worthless asses, tar them, feather them, run them out of town on a rail. Failing that, work ceaselessly and give all the money you can spare to defeat them the next time they face a real Democrat in a primary race.

O, Zembla. O, Zembla!

UPDATE: Because the House version of the FISA legislation contains no mention of retroactive immunity, the offending provision could still be killed when the differences between the two versions of the bill are resolved in conference. As the heroic Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) said, "It's up to the House." Mr. Greenwald, meanwhile, in collaboration with our eminent colleague Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, is sponsoring an online petition urging members of the House to stand firm behind their own, vastly superior version of the bill. You may sign it by clicking here.

UPDATE II: TPM reports that House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, who has never lacked for grit, today wrote in a letter to White House counsel Fred Fielding that:

1) from what he's seen of the documents relating to the administration's warrantless wiretapping program, there's no reason to grant the telecoms retroactive immunity (he prefers the term "amnesty"), and 2) Congress needs to know more before it can be expected to consider granting that amnesty.

Conyer's letter includes nine questions about warrantless wiretapping the Senate was afraid to ask:

1. Since September 11, 2001, has the Administration conducted any warrantless surveillance in the United States, other than through the warrantless electronic surveillance program the President acknowledged in late 2005 (known now as the Terrorist Surveillance Program), or as explicitly authorized by FISA, or any other warrantless surveillance techniques such as physical searches of home or offices or opening of mail? Are such activities continuing? Is the Administration currently conducting any foreign intelligence surveillance in the United States, other than that explicitly authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)?

2. How many actionable leads have been referred to operational entities as a result of acquisitions of U.S. persons’ conversations or communications?

a) Please break down the response as follows: 1) between September 11, 2001, and October 25, 2001; 2) between October 25, 2001, and January 10, 2007; 3) between January 10, 2007, and August 5, 2007; and 4) since August 5, 2007.

b) Of the actionable leads referred to operational entities, what have been the results? Please differentiate between counter-terrorism, criminal investigations and prosecutions, counter-espionage, and in-theater combat operations. Please indicate with specificity whether any attacks have been averted.

3. How many conversations or communications (both incoming or outgoing) monitored under the programs have revealed a contact between a U.S. person and someone for whom there was probable cause to believe they were in or supporting al Qaeda? How many people in the U.S. have had email communications with someone considered to be in al Qaeda? How many of these conversations or communications have actually involved terrorist activity, as opposed to other topics of conversation? How many people have been charged with any wrongdoing as a result of such interceptions? How many terrorist activities have been disrupted as a result of such interceptions? How many people have been subjected to surveillance but not charged with any crime or otherwise detained?

4. How many persons whose conversations or communications were monitored under the programs have been subjected to any other surveillance techniques or searches, such as physical searches of home or offices, opening of mail, etc, whether subject to a warrant or not?

5. Have any U.S. persons whose conversations or communications were monitored under the programs been detained within the United States? Have any U.S. or foreign persons been interrogated or detained outside of the United States, whether by the United States or any other government, in significant part as a result of such monitoring?

6. Have journalists, lawyers, lawmakers (whether federal, state, or local), or aides had their conversations or communications monitored under the programs? If so, how many?

7. How many U.S. persons had conversations (voice or email content) or communications (call or email data) acquired through electronic surveillance programs? In how many of these acquisitions was the U.S. person the target of the acquisition? In how many of these acquisitions was the acquisition incidental? How many warrants for continued surveillance were sought after identification of someone as a U.S. person? How many such applications were denied? Please break down the response between warrantless and other electronic surveillance programs as to the following periods:

a) between September 11, 2001, and October 25, 2001;
b) between October 25, 2001, and January 10, 2007;
c) between January 10, 2007, and August 5, 2007; and
d) since August 5, 2007.

8. How many individuals have been targeted for surveillance under the Protect America Act that involved foreign intelligence generally, as opposed to terrorism or nuclear proliferation?

9. Please identify any telecommunication companies or internet service providers that refused to allow access to communication streams without Court sanction or questioned the terms of the requests or demands which were being made of them and, to the extent that discussions with such companies were conducted orally rather than through written dialogue, please authorize the relevant parties to discuss the content of those discussions with Committee staff and Members.

We assume we need not elaborate upon our boundless admiration for John Conyers.

UPDATE III: Chris Dodd, whom we mentioned above, has again expressed his determination to filibuster the RESTORE bill if it emerges from conference with telecom immunity intact. (Our distinguished colleagues at Crooks & Liars have posted video footage of his rousing floor speech from Monday night.) Today's developments reminded us of an interview he gave to a group of S.F. Chronicle readers shortly before he withdrew from the presidential race -- an interview we had fully intended to post at the time, before lassitude, malaise and procrastination got the better of us. But as they say, better late than never:

Benjamin Franklin, I guess, coined it well some two centuries ago when he said, "Those who would give up liberty for security deserve neither." And there has been that effect in terms of trying to achieve ["security"], beginning with Abu Ghraib, with the Military Commissions Act [limiting habeas corpus for "enemy combatants"]. And of course, more recently, with some of the decisions made - even Judge Mukasey making the rather remarkable statement in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee that presidents have the authority to violate federal statutes provided they're operating within the authority of keeping America safe - which is a remarkable statement for a 14-year veteran of the federal bench. And the more recent decision here by the Congress, along with the president, requesting that the telecommunications industry be granted retroactive immunity for having turned over the records of the America people without any court order. So, [I] talk about that, and the importance of making the case that the preservation of these values is, in fact, the source of our security.

Wouldn't it be nice to vote for a presidential candidate whose stump speech showed some simple common sense?

Now we're getting our dander up. That's more like it . . . .

UPDATE IV: If you have the time and the energy to sign a second online petition, may we recommend this one from our friends at Credo?

P.S.: The Oscar Party Is Back On

2008-02-12T19:27:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to our friends and colleagues in the Writers Guild of America, whose just-concluded strike against the AMPTP reversed a trend of labor rollbacks dating back to the breakup, under Ronald Reagan, of the air traffic controllers' union:

The membership of the Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW) and the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE) today voted overwhelmingly in favor of lifting the restraining order and ending their 100-day strike that began on Nov. 5. 3,775 writers turned out in Los Angeles and New York to cast ballots or fax in proxies, with 92.5% voting in favor of ending the work stoppage.

"The strike is over. Our membership has voted, and writers can go back to work," said Patric M. Verrone, president of the Writers Guild of America, West. "This was not a strike we wanted, but one we had to conduct in order to win jurisdiction and establish appropriate residuals for writing in new media and on the Internet. Those advances now give us a foothold in the digital age. Rather than being shut out of the future of content creation and delivery, writers will lead the way as TV migrates to the Internet and platforms for new media are developed."

"The success of this strike is a significant achievement not only for ourselves but the entire creative community, now and in the future," said Michael Winship, president of the Writers Guild of America, East. "The commitment and solidarity of our members made it happen and have been an inspiration not only to us but the entire organized labor movement. We will build on that energy and unity to make our two unions stronger than ever."

One Hundred Years of Recession

2008-02-11T00:15:00.000-08:00

The heck with Congress' big stimulus bill. The way to get the country out of recession - and most people think we're in one - is to get the country out of Iraq, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll.

Pulling out of the war ranked first among proposed remedies in the survey, followed by spending more on domestic programs, cutting taxes and, at the bottom end, giving rebates to poor people in hopes they'll spend the economy into recovery.

-- "AP Poll: To Fix Economy, Get Out Of Iraq,"
Associated Press, 2/10/08

As President Bush backs out the White House door, he is asking Congress to appropriate enough money for the coming fiscal year to enable the Pentagon and its government sidekicks to spend $1.2 million a minute on what is loosely called national defense . . . . No ordinary person can get a sense of how much money that is. It helps to divide the $608.6 billion by the 365 days in a year and realize Bush’s new defense budget will cost the taxpayers $1.7 billion a day. This works out to $1.2 million a minute counting Saturdays and Sundays. Yet the main threat to the country as advertised by Bush are terrorists who have no standing army; no warships; no warplanes; no tanks; no satellites.

-- George C. Wilson, Congress Daily

That’s a hell of a lot of money. Among other things, it’s a lot closer to 7% of GDP than “4%.” It helps ensure massive deficits even in “good times.”

-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings

In the past decade, Senator McCain has supported unsheathing the saber against a variety of enemies from Serbia to Iraq, Iran, and Sudan. And in the present, as Matt Welch writes in his new book The Myth of a Maverick, the senator from Arizona “envisions a more militaristic foreign policy than any U.S. president in a century” . . . . when voters go to the polls, there will be plenty of information available to indicate that a vote for McCain is a vote for perpetual war and occupation.

-- Justin Logan, Cato Institute

The United States military could stay in Iraq for "maybe a hundred years" and that "would be fine with me," John McCain told two hundred or so people at a town hall meeting in Derry, New Hampshire, on Thursday evening . . . . After the event ended, I asked McCain about his "hundred years" comment, and he reaffirmed the remark, excitedly declaring that U.S. troops could be in Iraq for "a thousand years" or "a million years," as far as he was concerned.

-- David Corn, MoJoBlog

Now wait a minute here. Surely John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, understands the fiscal impact of one (1) full century in Iraq at a cost of $1.2 million a minute. Surely he knows something that 48% of the respondents to that AP-Ipsos poll do not. Surely he's got . . . a plan. We're guessing he's been reading up on the subprime loan crisis. We're guessing he means to unload another hundred years' worth of bad U.S. debt on the Red Chinese, so that when they finally call in that quadrillion-dollar note in the year 2108 . . . we won't be able to pay it! And their whole economy will collapse! On the spot! Without a single shot being fired!

Or maybe . . . maybe . . . .

Regret what? That secret operation [arming the mujahedeen] was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

-- Zbigniew Brzezinski, interview with
Le Nouvel Observateur (France), 1998

. . . maybe the ChiComs did flip him in that North Vietnamese prison camp, just as the right-wing-freakiest of the right-wing freaks have been saying all along. Maybe it's our economy that's in the crosshairs. Maybe he is a Manchurian Candidate!

The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should. I've got Greenspan's book.

-- John McCain, to reporters in New Hampshire, 12/17/07

UPDATE: Our learned colleague R. Gathman of Limited, Inc., patiently explains why we should not hold our collective breath awaiting the economic boost from an Iraq pullout, even under a non-Manchurian candidate:

There's only one problem with this - it would actually work. And that would bring down upon the Dems the collective wrath of the Petro-Gun club in D.C. Imagine, if you will, a sort of nightmare in which Pinocchio sees all the candy canes at the fair melting before his eyes - that same sinking feeling would inhabit the poor generic Dem Politicians soul as the opportunity for legal graft from the people who have the serious money in the country evaporates. It is one thing to ineffectually oppose Bush’s war plans – throwing sops to suckers is just good business. But to follow the money – why, that’s getting personal.

Into Your Life It Will Creep

2008-02-08T23:10:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week, as Attorney General Michael Mukasey was formally reasserting the core legal principle of the Bush administration ("Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law"), we found ourselves in an unusual position of sympathy with President Bush, who has repeatedly insisted upon retroactive immunity for the telecommunication companies that functioned as accomplices in his efforts to spy, illegally, upon American citizens. Given the choice between seizing the prerogatives of the tyrant and serving several consecutive terms of hard time, who among us would choose the latter? Not us! -- and certainly not Mr. Bush. (Clearing brush, si! Breaking rocks, no!) The language of the FISA amendment that the White House favors would, in a tidy coincidence, also immunize the President and his cronies from prosecution, and it is easy to see why he like to have it passed sooner rather than later: his crimes are of recent vintage, and the statute of limitations will not run out before he leaves office. Nor can he rely on having a cheap, bootlicking gangster at the helm of the Justice Department after January 20, 2009.

In defense of his felonies, the President has explained that "9/11 changed everything." He is mistaken, of course: one thing that 9/11 did not change was his warrantless wiretapping program, which began more than six months before that endlessly exploitable Day of Infamy. As with so many of its depredations, the administration routinely argues that its domestic spy program was necessary to protect American citizens from terrorists -- but we have yet to hear any compelling reason why Mr. Bush's snoops might need to elude the oversight of the FISA court, which exists solely to ensure that federal wiretaps are in fact directed against terrorists, as opposed to ordinary, law-abiding citizens or (perish the thought) political enemies.

In short, we would very much like to believe that for the last few years Mr. Bush has been committing his crimes For Our Own Good. We are not, alas, sanguine that he is altogether clear on the distinction between the American citizens he means to protect and the terrorists he means to protect them from. In a recent SF Chronicle opinion piece, Messrs. Lewis Seiler and Dan Hamburg suggest that, in the President's mind at least, there is considerable overlap between the two groups:

Beginning in 1999, the government has entered into a series of single-bid contracts with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) to build detention camps at undisclosed locations within the United States. The government has also contracted with several companies to build thousands of railcars, some reportedly equipped with shackles, ostensibly to transport detainees.

According to diplomat and author Peter Dale Scott, the KBR contract is part of a Homeland Security plan titled ENDGAME, which sets as its goal the removal of "all removable aliens" and "potential terrorists."

Fraud-busters such as Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, have complained about these contracts, saying that more taxpayer dollars should not go to taxpayer-gouging Halliburton. But the real question is: What kind of "new programs" require the construction and refurbishment of detention facilities in nearly every state of the union with the capacity to house perhaps millions of people?

For clues, take a look at the 2007 National Defense Authorization Act; the Military Commissions Act of 2006; National Security Presidential Directive 51; and Rep. Jane Harman's Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007. The ostensible goal of Operation Endgame is "to remove all deportable immigrants by 2012." Once the infrastructure for managing detainees is in place, however, there are quite a few demographic groups that might be classified as "homegrown terrorists" -- and quite literally railroaded, should our Omnipotent Executive sense the potential for mischief:

A clue as to where Harman's commission might be aiming is the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, a law that labels those who "engage in sit-ins, civil disobedience, trespass, or any other crime in the name of animal rights" as terrorists. Other groups in the crosshairs could be anti-abortion protesters, anti-tax agitators, immigration activists, environmentalists, peace demonstrators, Second Amendment rights supporters ... the list goes on and on. According to author Naomi Wolf, the National Counterterrorism Center holds the names of roughly 775,000 "terror suspects" with the number increasing by 20,000 per month.

What could the government be contemplating that leads it to make contingency plans to detain without recourse millions of its own citizens?

Now, we are a constitutionally jovial monarch, and we would never wish to be accused of promoting undue paranoia. By the same token, we would hate for you to visit your local newsstand, pick up a copy of The Progressive, and be hopelessly traumatized by Matthew Rothschild's cover story. Better, we feel, to give you the bad news now:

Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does—and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to “shoot to kill” in the event of martial law . . . .

To join, each person must be sponsored by “an existing InfraGard member, chapter, or partner organization.” The FBI then vets the applicant. On the application form, prospective members are asked which aspect of the critical infrastructure their organization deals with. These include: agriculture, banking and finance, the chemical industry, defense, energy, food, information and telecommunications, law enforcement, public health, and transportation.

FBI Director Robert Mueller addressed an InfraGard convention on August 9, 2005 . . . . He urged InfraGard members to contact the FBI if they “note suspicious activity or an unusual event.” And he said they could sic the FBI on “disgruntled employees who will use knowledge gained on the job against their employers” . . . .

In its list of benefits of joining InfraGard, [the InfraGard website] states: “Gain access to an FBI secure communication network complete with VPN encrypted website, webmail, listservs, message boards, and much more.”

InfraGard members receive “almost daily updates” on threats “emanating from both domestic sources and overseas,” Hershman says.

“We get very easy access to secure information that only goes to InfraGard members,” Schneck says. “People are happy to be in the know” . . . .

One business owner in the United States tells me that InfraGard members are being advised on how to prepare for a martial law situation—and what their role might be. He showed me his InfraGard card, with his name and e-mail address on the front, along with the InfraGard logo and its slogan, “Partnership for Protection.” On the back of the card were the emergency numbers that Schneck mentioned.

This business owner says he attended a small InfraGard meeting where agents of the FBI and Homeland Security discussed in astonishing detail what InfraGard members may be called upon to do.

“The meeting started off innocuously enough, with the speakers talking about corporate espionage,” he says. “From there, it just progressed. All of a sudden we were knee deep in what was expected of us when martial law is declared. We were expected to share all our resources, but in return we’d be given specific benefits.” These included, he says, the ability to travel in restricted areas and to get people out.

But that’s not all.

“Then they said when—not if—martial law is declared, it was our responsibility to protect our portion of the infrastructure, and if we had to use deadly force to protect it, we couldn’t be prosecuted,” he says.

Because we prize optimism, however cockeyed, those of you who still believe that It Can't Happen Here should know that you have our unalloyed envy. It is nonetheless our burdensome duty to recommend, in sorrow, we assure you, a couple of topics for further research: A) the Bush administration's uneasy relationship with posse comitatus law, and B) Col. Oliver North's FEMA plan, originally devised during the Reagan administration to cope with the mass antiwar protests that might ensue should the U.S. elect to invade an unnamed Central American country. Kindly do not think us vain if we recommend that you begin here and here.

(Thanks, as always, to our beloved colleague A. Carol for the Chas. Pierce link.)

UPDATE (2/12): We are grateful to commenter Joel Hanes for directing our attention to the blog of Jim Lippard, a member of the Phoenix InfraGard Members Alliance who asserts that InfraGard is in no way a paramilitary outfit, but rather an organization that "facilitates communications between members about sensitive subjects like vulnerabilities in privately owned infrastructure and the changing landscape of threats." Our own concern is not that private citizens are being trained as "Bush's hit team," to use one hyperbolic formulation Mr. Lippard dismisses in his comments section; it is that private citizens are being recruited and trained not just to assist the government in emergency-response situations, but -- assuming that Mr. Rothschild's sources are correct -- to prepare for the imposition of martial law, a prospect that is never quite as remote as most of us, including Yr. Mst. Bnvlnt. Dspt., would like to imagine.

Breaking: Nuremberg Defense Validated!

2008-02-08T20:40:00.000-08:00

AG to Congress: If you were only following orders when you broke the law, you are officially off the hook forevermore.

No word yet on whether the Bush administration will issue formal apologies to the families of Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Jodl, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Fritz Saukel, Arthur Seiss-Inquart, and other blameless Nazis who were improperly executed, under the newly obsolete Nuremberg Principles, for their wholly understandable part in the murder of six million Jews.