Stoopid Stuff

Time and Distance

2010-08-15T21:52:00.000-07:00

I maintained this blog as a place to rail against the bush/cheney regime. After they faded into something approximating obscurity, it no longer seemed to be the right place to be. So I moved here. Come join me if you want...

Going Public

2009-09-06T12:10:00.000-07:00

Amidst all the hollering about Obama's plan for health care reform and the "Public Option", it's becoming easy to lose sight of the larger picture. So perhaps a few random thoughts are in order. First, when we discuss the public option, we are NOT talking about "Socialized Medicine", nor are we talking about a "government takeover of health care". We're talking about a government sponsored not-for-profit insurance company. One that will be able to dictate the rates it pays to providers and will serve as an insurer-of-last-resort for people who for whatever reason cannot get private insurance. This is all good. When we talk about health care, our concern is for the health of our citizens, families and their children, not for the profits of private health insurance companies. If they can't find a way to compete, who cares? This isn't manufacturing or retail, this is about the health of Americans.

Second, when it comes to health care reform in the US, we need to think in larger terms than just the public option or any other component part. Here's what I mean. When we talk about health care reform, we're really talking about three things:

1. Insurance industry reform.
2. Universal coverage.
3. Health care cost controls.

Industry reform addresses some of the more egregious practices of the private insurance industry, including refusal to cover people with pre-existing conditions, cancelling policies when someone gets sick, capping payments either yearly or lifetime, charging different prices to insure different people, etc. There is pretty universal agreement around these reforms, and along with universal coverage they form the heart of health reform in the US. Universal coverage is simply that. Providing a set of mechanisms whereby everyone in the US can get health coverage. This can be a combination of industry regulation, subsidies and expansion of Medicaid.

The last part of the reform policy structure is cost controls. From a policy standpoint, this is the most critical part, because if nothing is done to control health care costs, it is clear that within a few decades the cost of health care will be untenable, and at that point will require draconian action to avert national bankruptcy. Cost control measures under consideration include employer and individual mandates, tax policy, Medicare reforms and the so-called Public Option. That's right. The public option is nothing but a cost control measure. It isn't necessary for either insurance industry reform nor for universal coverage. It would serve to drive down the cost of health care delivery, and would provide incentives for the health care industry to reduce its administrative and operational costs. One of the oddest things about the whole imaginary "debate" over health policy this year is that the people who position themselves against a Public Option are typically people whose stated opposition to any policy is it's cost. For them to be specifically against a cost control measure, and to so blatantly choose to support industry profits over their own constituents and the national interest is eye opening to say the least.

The third thing that perhaps needs some further exploration is this broad assumption that it's up to Obama how this plays out. What's he going to say, is he going to present a plan, is he willing to drop the public option in negotiations? Look. It's fair to say that without the election of Barack Obama health insurance reform might not be on the table, we might not have as progressive a set of proposals in congress, and a popular and charismatic president can have a powerful effect on public opinion. But this legislation will live or die in the legislature. In the House of Representatives, depending on the structure of the bill, Obama could lose support of the Blue Dogs on the one hand, or the Liberal Caucus on the other. And in the Senate, with it's history of yielding to the demands of Senators from tiny rural states, with it's arcane procedural roadblocks and absolute lack of Democratic Party discipline, there are a multitude of veto points, resulting in a huge bias to retain the status quo.

For me, the public option is desirable, but the industry reforms and universal coverage are what this fight is all about. If we achieve those goals, the cost controls will come. The public option will come, medicare reforms will come, tax policy reform will come. Why? Because they HAVE TO. Because at some point, even a body like the US Senate will be forced by reality to act. So do the good now, and let reality drive the rest. But here's the thing. If you're going to give something up in negotiations, you have to GET something for it. What will the Republicans and Blue dogs agree to in exchange for taking the Public Option off the table? Unfortunately, they very likely feel like they don't need to offer anything, because so far the Obama administration has been negotiating with themselves. Anytime the Republicans or their delusional minions throw a tantrum over some health policy provision, Obama just agrees to scrap it. They have won every point, without argument, without pushback. That SHOULD be the real value of the public option - a hammer with which to drive agreement on the core elements of reform, to gain enough Republican votes in the Senate to prevent a filibuster, and to act as a lightning rod to provide cover for other somewhat less controversial provisions. There is no indication that the Obama administration is prepared to seriously defend ANY provision - indeed, they appear to be happy with any simply passing a piece of legislation, checking the box and moving on, perhaps to immigration. Obama's leadership might make a difference in the outcome - we will see if he's just too craven to take the political risk.

See? I TOLD you that you'd miss him when he was gone

2009-09-02T16:01:00.001-07:00

Ahh, those pesky unintended consequences. Bet you didn't see this one coming. The Federal Government's Brush Clearer-in-Chief has gone home to build a library and duck Alberto Gonzales' calls, and that damn brush just piles up and piles up until you get something like this. I hope you're satisfied.

It's not that people don't like you, it's just that you're not popular

2009-08-28T15:39:00.001-07:00

So in the course of this summer's long hot descent into madness, otherwise generously referred to as a "healthcare debate", we watch with detached fascination as Barack Obama's popularity falls to 50%, showing every likelihood of going lower. But I wonder what's really behind those sagging numbers?

In my case, I always tried to be realistic about who and what Barack Obama was. I accepted he was a center-right populist out of the Clinton school, but in spite of his corporatist and interventionist instincts he'd be a vast improvement over the bush/cheney authoritarian kleptocracy, and both America and the world would be vastly better served by an Obama than by a McCain. There were large constituencies that wanted desperately to believe that he was the second coming of FDR, and others that believed he was the antichrist.

I suspect these poll numbers have very little to do with the opposition. The American Political Right has always hated and feared an Obama presidency, and the hardcore 28%ers, the bush/cheney dead-enders, have never endorsed anything he ever did or said. Indeed, they have managed to convince themselves of things he has done and will do that beyond laughable. So all their frantic shrieking and bald-faced lies might have moved a few right-leaning independents back out of his corner, but it can't be that many and he wasn't ever going to be able to sustain their support anyway.

Nope. I think it's me. People like me. Liberals who feel there is a role for government in society, and who believe that spending huge sums on the military and on wars is stupid and wasteful. I began to be disappointed when he squandered opportunities to do some easy, important things. A quicker withdrawal from Iraq, a prompt, fearless closure of Guantanamo Bay, criminal investigations of bush administration lawbreaking, an end to state secrets and national security defenses in trials and lawsuits, there were so many egregious precedents from the previous administration he could and should have rolled back, drawing a bright line between what was acceptable and what was toxic. And he didn't. In every case he hesitated. He equivocated. He tried not to offend, to take small steps that would not draw criticism. He called it bipartisanship, the press called it pragmatism, I saw it as political cowardice.

And now, throughout the most appalling demonstration of what a small band of dishonest ideologues can do to democracy, he has been in the background, careful, fearful, unwilling to draw a line in the sand and say NO! He has sought to appease those who cannot be appeased, he has put process over policy and is clearly trying to build his legacy with a political win, even if the result is horrendous legislation. The right says health care is too expensive, we KNOW it's actually deficit - neutral and he says nothing. The right says any cuts to Medicare are unacceptable and then immediately shrieks that Medicare is bankrupting America, and Obama fails to note the blatant hypocrisy. They say a public option is a trillion dollar boondoggle when it's whole purpose is to control costs. And Obama says it's on the table.

Now, granted, he's the president, and while those foreign policy and defense matters are his to control, it is up to congress to pass health care reform legislation. But it's THE cornerstone of the Obama Agenda, and he needs to come out forcefully and lead. Of course, there's, as they say, the rub. He needs to come out and lead but he might LOSE. And he very clearly is more afraid of losing than he is of implementing bad policy.

All things considered, we should remember we only had two choices in November, and I'm still glad we have Obama instead of John McCain. But any belief or hope I had that he would actually change the way politics are done is gone now. I never thought he could win over the republicans, they are all playing to their regional and local constituencies, and as a result all that remains on the American Right are fringe radicals. But first I hoped he would be something sharply different from George Bush, and he turned out to be very much the same. Then I hoped he would at least use his popularity and majorities in congress to ram through important domestic legislation, and he doesn't seem to have the stomach for that either. Now, as I watch him pointlessly escalate a useless and hopeless war in Afghanistan, I realize that once again, I am drained of hope. I wonder how bad things will have to get before someone has the courage to actually confront the real problems....

Oh for fucks sake!

2009-08-21T18:08:00.000-07:00

The bastard is in the last weeks of the process of dying from terminal cancer. He's not anything but a sad, dying human being who did some awful things, but what do you want? Should we try to make him suffer as much as we can? Is that what we are reduced to?

"But he didn't show any mercy to his victims on flight 103".

Nope. He sure didn't. Once again, are we going to draw our moral guidance from the worst of our enemies, or shall we look to the best of our heroes? Is it somehow important that, in extremis, we reach down inside ourselves and, in our deepest irreconcilable hated tailor our behavior to the worst of our enemies in hopes of, perhaps, what, frightening them into not fighting us?

What is it we hope to accomplish? Whether this piece of human garbage spends his last days in a cell or or at home, nothing changes. More importantly, it's just not about HIM. How do we see ourselves? What is the bedrock meaning of our society? Do we simply want to ape the worst instincts of our enemies, or should we consider holding ourselves to a higher standard?

This is a conflict with no defined borders, and no functional rules. Isn't it incumbent upon us, if we so desperately want to view ourselves as the "good guys", to try to find a higher moral plane than that which we view as our "enemy"?

Or put another way, if we decide that, in fighting them, we must become them, haven't we already lost?

Interesting Update:

Lt. William Calley has recently apologized publicly for his actions in My Lai in March of 1968. According to AFP:

A survivor of mass killings by US troops in the Vietnamese village of My Lai in 1968 has said he welcomed the public apology made by a former officer convicted for his role in the atrocity.

"It's a question of the past and we accept his apologies, although they come too late," Pham Thanh Cong, who saw his mother and brothers killed in the massacre, told the news agency AFP on Saturday.

"However, I prefer that he send his apologies to me in writing or by email."

Pham Thanh Cong, who is the director of a small museum at My Lai, said: "I want him to come back... and see things here.

"Maybe he has now repented for his crimes and his mistakes committed more than 40 years ago."

I find the juxtaposition of the views of a survivor of the My Lai massacre and the insistence of the Pan Am 103 families that Megrahi spend the last weeks of his slow death from terminal cancer in a prison cell to be worth consideration but will leave you to draw your own conclusions...

A Thought Experiment

2009-08-12T17:48:00.000-07:00

Let's take a moment to consider what the Health Care Reform "debate" would look like if we had an honest, functional press covering it in a responsible way. Imagine if every night a handsome and elegantly coiffed news anchor solemnly recapped the day's events, clearly identifying and differentiating between facts, opinions and lies. How quickly would the debate change if respected news reporting would simply say "Senator X stood up on the floor of the Senate this afternoon and told no less than four outrageous lies." There would be no need to speculate on the Senator's motives nor suggest that there was any agenda behind his lies. It would merely be accurate to take the position that he is either grossly mistaken or lying, and it is not reasonable to assume that someone in that position is ignorant. If the Senator would like to issue a statement that he was not lying, merely uninformed on the issues that would be perfectly acceptable, however any expectation that this might cast him in a better light is likely to result in disappointment.

At first there would be outrage. Fox News would condemn the shrill liberal media voices that had the temerity to identify dishonest rhetoric, and to simply report that there is absolutely no truth behind these outrageous statements. I think most of us can remember a nation where it wasn't acceptable to state that the president is a racist who's singular goal is to kill elderly and disabled people. But if every other news outlet stuck to the facts, calling lies lies, opinion opinion, and fact fact, very quickly the nature of the conversation would change. Every time Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich tried to inspire fear and confusion, a calm, trusted talking head or a respected newspaper would point out that they are lying, that there is NO basis for their frantic pronouncements, and that the facts exist where anyone in the 21st century with an Internet connection can find them.

Soon, the "debate" would narrow. After all, as Ezra Klein points out, there is not a tremendous amount of daylight between the two sides, if you could just get past the insanity:

Here are the things that, broadly speaking, legislators agree about: insurance market reforms, including community rating, guaranteed issue, an end to rescission, an end to discrimination based on preexisting conditions, and an individual mandate. Subsidies for low-income Americans. Delivery system reforms. Health insurance exchanges. An expansion of coverage to about 95 percent of legal residents. Prevention and wellness policies. Retaining and strengthening the employer-based insurance market. Creating some kind of incentive for employers to offer, and keep offering, health benefits. Expanding Medicaid to about 133 percent of poverty.

Here are the things that legislators disagree about, but are discussing, and will probably figure out: whether subsidies should reach 300 percent of poverty or 400 percent. Whether there should be an employer mandate or something milder. Whether medium-size employers should be eligible to enroll in the health insurance exchanges. Whether health reform should cost $1 trillion over 10 years or $1.4 trillion over 10 years. Whether it should be paid for through new taxes on the wealthy or a change to existing tax subsidies in the health-care system.

Here are the things legislators don't agree about: whether we should have a public option that is open only to the minority of Americans on the exchanges or a co-op option. How to handle abortion. How to handle geographic disparities in insurance costs.

Here are the things that aren't under consideration but are alive in the public debate: socialized medicine. Euthanasia. Government-driven rationing. Death panels. Illegal immigrants.

If we could stop hiding behind fear and lies, if we could make this discussion as truly serious as it ought to be, if we could accept that the American health insurance system is broken and something HAS to be done, something genuine and effective, then we could get to a place where the conversation might lead to something of value.

Alas, this is a dream. Do I believe the American media is entirely responsible for the embarrassing status of this critical political process? Yes. Yes I do. They alone have the power to turn this into a real conversation, to stop the lies and misinformation that serves no one but the Insurance industry and begin to develop something that serves the people and the nation. That would not just be good faith, that would be patriotic.

In the meantime, we have people in the streets, AMERICANS, demanding their government NOT provide basic health services to the population. How we have arrived here, and how we might find our way back, is beyond me...

The Path to Enacting a Progressive Agenda

2009-08-12T13:58:00.000-07:00

Important breaking news. Barack Obama is not a liberal. Just in case you were disappointed by what you've seen from his administration so far, from Gates to Sotomayor to Dennis Ross, you need to recalibrate your thinking. Obama is a Clinton Democrat, a corporate friendly center-right populist with very strong international interventionist instincts. Additionally, he's been somewhat corrupted by the Bush/Cheney administration's Presidential power grab - it's very difficult for people with power to give up any power they already have - so we find Obama with more authoritarian tendencies than we had come to expect.

But consider the election of Barack Obama in context. Since 1980 we've had 20 years of Republican presidents. It was Bill Clinton who implemented the tactic of "triangulation", where he essentially moved to the right, co-opting the center while willingly sacrificing both the left- and right-wing bases. After 8 years of Bush/Cheney, there was a huge opportunity in the center once again, with only that hardcore 28% demanding ever more radical right-wing positions from their candidates. But in an election between Barack Obama and John McCain, the more liberal members of the electorate had nowhere to go, so they placed their hopes firmly behind the Democratic candidate. That, coupled with the incessant characterizations of Obama in the press as "liberal", a code word for everything bad in America from black nationalism to communism, resulted in an unrealistic and irrational expectation that Obama would implement a "liberal agenda". Hence all the shock and outrage from the left over his policies.

But there was never any realistic hope that Obama would pursue any truly liberal policy. The Health Care reform legislation he champions is really intended to be the salvation of the American economy, not the American insurance consumer, just as cap and trade is at least an attempt to be an adult and take responsibility for the well being of the planet. America is schizophrenic - the population is overwhelmingly liberal in their viewpoint, but overwhelmingly conservative in their politics. And it's going to take more than 8 disastrous years to expose the failings of these policies and leave them truly discredited. It's going to take something far more catastrophic.

Which leads me to an odd thought. I find myself wondering if we continue to elect center-right populist Democrats and our political system continues to cause them to fail, driving the election of increasingly Right-wing radical fundamentalists, who bring about such disasters that the electorate turns in desperation to another center-right Democrat, America will muddle along a downward path, slouching toward irrelevance, poverty and declining living standards. So maybe what is necessary is a much greater shock to the system. Perhaps the left should just sit back with folded arms and let them elect a Huckabee, a Palin, a Santorum. Maybe before we can begin to run this nation in an effective and compassionate manner the train needs not only to leave the tracks, but explode in a toxic fireball.

Imagine it's the summer of 2010. Unemployment is still high, consumer spending is still down, GDP growth is flat. Health care "reform" turned out to be nothing but a giveaway to the insurance industry, Waxman-Markey died in the Senate, the Immigration reform "debate" turned into a nativist racist horrorshow, and in 2011 Obama had no option but to raise taxes across the board, breaking a campaign promise he never should have made in the first place. The Republicans are successful in painting his first term as a failure, which allows them to claim their policies would have worked. They still insist on unquestioned ideological purity, and at the convention they nominate one of their most ignorant, nativist, war-loving, fear-mongering luminaries.

Whatever the result might be, if the world is not a smoking, radioactive ruin in 2016 it should be the end, for all time, of these lunatic, anti-science, theocratic authoritarians and their angry, violent, irrational followers. It seems to me that a case can at least be made that the best hope America has for a sustainable future over the next 10-25 years is to let them go ahead and break it quickly so we can get on with the job of fixing it.

The Beer of Fear

2009-07-30T17:17:00.002-07:00

Dammit. I'd LOVE to have a beer and chat with Barack Obama. He is, in spite of my concerns about his Presidency, a brilliant and inspiring figure, and one who would offer an interesting insight into the current state of affairs.

But as a supporter, a person who believes he is trying in many ways, someone who genuinely wishes him well, I have little or not chance of ever seeing something like that come to pass. In fact, the lesson here is the best way I can hope to have a soul-searching one on one conversation with the most interesting American political figure since John F. Kennedy is to find a way to abuse and mistreat a black man. If I can violate his constitutional rights in a public setting, then deny it was racially motivated, to the point where I can earn the wrath of the President so that he might speak intemperately, then I can hope that the whole thing will blow over as we sit in the garden outside the Oval Office enjoying a Red Stripe and laughing about post-racial America.

The Gates of Wrath

2009-07-28T15:04:00.001-07:00

Not much left to be said about this, but once again we find we're not arguing about the issues raised by the very public mistreatment of a black man by white policemen, we're seeing them trying to silence that argument using a well-understood tactic. By being offended, not by the repugnant actions of a cop steeped in the tradition of dealing with people of color as if the Constitution does not apply to them, but by the words the President used in talking about it.

And once again, it worked. We're not having a national conversation about the abusive manner in which police treat minorities, as should have been the result of the Gates arrest, but rather we're taking the political opportunity to back the President down, simultaneously rehabilitating the cop and subtly demonizing Gates for having the temerity to expect to be treated the same as his white neighbors. Outrage at the actions of the Police has shifted to outrage at the words of the President, who, it should be mentioned, is black.

The narrative of white America, where the police are uniformly good and black people are criminals remains ascendant, even though everyone KNOWS that the police routinely profile and mistreat minorities, abuse their authority and use unnecessary violence against anyone who stands up for their rights.

What we know to be true and what we are permitted to say have become so radically disassociated from one another that it really can only be described as Orwellian. How have we allowed our society to be bullied like this? What happened to the open exchange of ideas that is such a necessary part of a functioning democracy? Why should we care if someone feigns outrage in a cynical, manipulative attempt to stifle those ideas? Why are the self-appointed "idea police" winning?

In a deeply ingrained pattern of racial domination, Henry Louis Gates was wronged. It was important for Americans to talk about it, and it was important that Barack Obama, as the President and also as an American black man, to call out that abuse in the harshest possible terms. If there is outrage over Obama speaking bluntly about the behavior of the officer, it should be noted by all observers that it is the outrageous behavior of that very cop that brought about the whole discussion. Had he acted professionally and humanely, as we know he would have if the homeowner was white, none of this would have happened. But immediately the last bastions of white privilege rushed to the barricades to defend a policeman's right to abuse, mistreat and even take into custody a minority citizen because that's the way America works. Disgusting.

Centuries of abuse by white Americans is coming to an end, probably in the next generation. Demographics and the relentless march of human diversity will out. But make no mistake, in their desperate fight to cling to power and privilege, we will see white racists say and do increasingly irresponsible things, and there is suffering yet to be inflicted. And the worst thing we can do is allow the defenders of the unfair and untenable status quo silence the discussion when abuse occurs. Artificial outrage is not a viable basis for a society to answer these questions...

You Can't Say That!! I Demand an Apology!

2009-07-23T19:08:00.001-07:00

So, let's be real clear. You can't accuse the CIA of lying, because they are wholesome keepers of the American dream. You can't ever say that police acted "stupidly", because goodness knows they only ever act with wisdom and altruism in their unstained hearts. You cannot suggest that American soldiers died in Iraq for nothing, because American soldiers are, to a man and a woman, saints with guns, unmarked by the horror of their profession. You cannot call the abusive treatment of detainees "torture" because there is a perfectly reasonable policy debate about the meaning of that word, and to simply use it as it is defined would be a partisan act. And of course, if some OTHER nation acts in exactly the same way, it can accurately be described as torture, as obviously there is no policy debate about THEIR actions. And heaven forbid you should mention the horrendous treatment of the innocent civilians of the Gaza Strip by the Israelis, or that it is precisely this kind of collective punishment they had in mind in Geneva when they designated it a war crime. Certainly, the Israelis, just like the Americans, are by definition incapable of committing war crimes.

Of course, we all know what we're really seeing here. It's a kind of conversational filibuster, designed to do nothing so much as silence ideas we dislike. And like the filibuster, we sit back and let it be used against us because we desperately want to be able to use it against our ideological foes tomorrow. If we can create a general sense that some things simply should not be discussed, then we never have to consider those ideas on the merits. We can simply attack someone for saying these things, and that acts to limit the exposure the idea can get, reducing the tendency of people to bring it up. In a perfect social feedback loop, by defining an idea as off limits, we enforce the belief that idea IS actually off limits.

Interestingly, these taboos can evolve over time. We saw a very interesting example of this in 2002-2003 with the invasion of Iraq. To even question the legitimacy, necessity or utility of that invasion was to immediately be shouted down, as those ideas were not considered to be part of the legitimate conversation. To even consider them was to become ineligible to particpate in the discussion, as you were simply not "serious". Now, of course, all of those ideas have not only been validated, they are the widely accepted consensus. But at the time they mattered, when they might have made a profound difference, they were effectively taboo.

This needs to stop. By making specific ideas off limits, by limiting the conversation to non-controversial topics we are allowing the defenders of the status quo to control the discussion. The purpose of this type of argument is to suppress ideas, not to argue against them but rather to try to prevent them from ever being considered. We have to be willing to offer these ideas up in the face of shouts of "racism", of "unamerican", of "soft on crime" or "supporter of terror", and defend them in a manner that requires an opponent to make an argument against the idea, rather than an argument intended to disallow the idea. And we have to have the courage to reject this same tactic when it would favor us. It is only logical that if we cannot construct an argument for why a bad idea is bad, maybe it's not a bad idea after all. And if we can construct such an argument, THAT is the position we need to take.

Ideas can be good or bad, but the discussion of ideas is always good. Silencing an ideological opponent does not win the argument, it is the tactic of a bully. It seems that the arguments against even discussing ideas are louder these days than the arguments of the ideas themselves, but that is a toxic formula that must be resisted...

Maybe it would be simpler to just list who DOESN'T Suck

2009-07-22T10:18:00.000-07:00

The vote was 58-39 in favor of the provision establishing concealed carry permit reciprocity in the 48 states that have concealed weapons laws. That fell two votes short of the 60 needed to approve the measure, offered as an amendment to a defense spending bill.

Here it is. Neatly summed up in two sentences, a clear description of what's wrong with our Congress, our Press Corps and our entire legislative process.

1. It's utterly wrong about what happened. The American Congress operates on majority rule. That is, it takes a simple majority to pass legislation. Up until recently, the filibuster was an obscure procedural tactic in place to protect the minority but seldom used. Now, we have arrived at a situation where the accepted wisdom is that ANY legislation requires a super majority in the Senate to pass. It should be noted that this is glaringly incorrect. When cloture is invoked, 60 votes are required to end debate and bring a bill to a vote. So once again, this bill, however you might think about it, wasn't "defeated" with 58 votes, it was prevented from being voted on at all. Had it been voted on, it would have passed easily. I happen to think this is bad legislation and was glad to see it did not become law, but I would much prefer to see a reduction in arbitrary veto-points in the American legislature, and would gladly accept the passage of any bill with the support of 58 Senators. This new set of rules for the operation of the Senate strongly supports the status quo, and no matter what your political worldview, I don't know anyone who actually prefers the status quo over some kind of significant change.

2. The Bill itself is so incredibly stupid and misguided that for any representative to actually support it is an indictment of that representative's priorities. Gun possession and concealed-carry laws are the province of the individual states. Absolutely no one disputes that. The Second Amendment guarantee of a right to keep and bear arms is enshrined in the Constitution, but the local rules about how that right is implemented and regulated is left up to the various statehouses. A law like this one would essentially strip those regulations in the worst possible way, standardizing all state gun laws on the bases of the weakest state's rule set. What's interesting is that the 2nd Amendment zealots that favor legislation like this don't seem to be cognizant of the potential for unintended consequences. The law would have applied to 48 states, as Illinois and Wisconsin do not allow citizens to carry concealed weapons under any circumstances, so one has to wonder how many additional states would repeal their concealed carry laws if required instead to accept other states weaker regulations.

3. Once again, the blatantly corrupting power of interest group money is on full display. And nobody is even slightly embarrassed. There was no large constituency clamoring for the right to carry their handgun outside of their home state. It was nothing more than an arbitrary and needless expansion of the law that found voice in the legislature for two reasons. First, the gun lobby is so wealthy and so powerful that they regularly use that wealth and power to bring to congress ANY legislation that weakens firearm regulation. They use it to force elected representatives to publicly support virtually unregulated firearms ownership in the US, preventing Members of Congress from avoiding the issue, and giving pro-gun candidates leverage over gun-control advocates in many, if not most districts. And for the Republican Party, so badly damaged after 8 years of Bush/Cheney they are left with nothing but fear, hate and bigotry, this was nothing short of a political windfall, a win-win opportunity of the first order. If the law was enacted, they had a rare legislative victory. If the law failed or was vetoed, they had the opportunity to further scare-monger the President as a socialist out to take away their guns. Either way, they would be happy with the outcome.

Does the Truth even Matter Anymore?

2009-07-20T11:00:00.000-07:00

Iran, by all reports, is not developing nuclear weapons, but rather a civilian nuclear power industry. You would not know it by reading the statements of the American political leadership.

Iran can become a constructive actor in the region if it stops threatening its neighbours and supporting terrorism.
--Hilary Clinton, United States Secretary of State

What? Who is doing the threatening here? Not a week goes by where powerful figures in the US and/or Israel don't have open, casual discussion reported in the press about starting an unprovoked war against Iran. Is that threatening war, or is that terrorism? Either way, it seems to demonstrate a bit of a double standard. But somehow, American and Israeli leaders have the chutzpah to accuse Iran of threatening their neighbors. Oh, and with thousands of nuclear weapons, neither developed under any international oversight at ALL, both the US and Israel have decided that Iran may not join the nuclear club, even as India and Pakistan and, in perhaps the most egregious case of flaunting the non-proliferation regime, Israel, have developed weapons and missiles and warheads and yet, somehow they maintain their status as responsible players in the global order. How could it be that they are willing to threaten nuclear war on their neighbors, where Iran does not, and yet continue to be viewed as reasonable stewards of the global peace?

And then there's that whole pesky issue around human rights and torture. The US used to have a strong position on the moral high ground, with an uncompromising stance on the treatment of suspects and POWs and the unquestioned limits imposed by the rule of law. Not so much, anymore. The US has been shown to be every bit the hypocrite on human and detainee rights that the Soviets, the Chinese and our dear friends the Saudis and Egyptians are. Speaking one thing, but in a time of fear and extremis, reverting to our most base instincts and hurting and killing people out of a hopeless, terrified rage and an inability to find a place of safety and comfort. Sad, all too human, but not what we claim to be about. When fear causes us to throw our most profound values over the side, we reveal to all that our values were never that important in the first place. That the only reason we were able to hold that moral high ground was that war and mass violence is never visited on our homeland, and as soon as it was we became everything we ever said we hated and would never be.

So what is America now, today? A sad empire, an increasingly authoritarian and militarized society, torn apart by the same kind of ethnic hatreds we are so prepared to cluck over in other, less "developed" nations? Some kind of giant mutant, strong and deadly, but mentally and morally challenged, with the majority of our citizens unconvinced of either evolution or global climate change, but willing to embrace unconditionally a sixteen hundred year old peasant's tale of supernatural power and impossible events?

We hear repeatedly that the primary role of a national government is to protect the nation and her citizens from attack. If this is true of the United States government, is it not equally true of the Iranian government? And if so, and the goal is to discourage Tehran from developing powerful weapons that might be used as a deterrent to an attack, wouldn't it be much more effective to STOP THREATENING TO ATTACK? In who's imagination would continued threats be an effective method to cause an adversary to take fewer defensive measures? That wouldn't even make sense to a third grader.

Indeed, in the course of merely considering the glaring hypocrisy represented by ongoing American and Israeli threats of war, of bombing, of "covert action" and "regime change", the thing that becomes most obvious is that the goal is clearly not one of peaceful coexistence. No, the only logical goal of all the sanctions, saber-rattling and unreasonable demands is to end up, at some point, in a state of war. It appears that the Obama administration has decided that the time for that war is in the future rather than now, but when you observe smart people taking what appear to be stupid and counterproductive measures, you must apply Occam's razor and accept the obvious assumption, that they want what they seem to be working towards.

The American war culture can't see any downside in starting another war, because America is so powerful and remote that none of the destruction and horror of yet another war will be felt by her citizens. No thought will be given to the desperate suffering of the innocents under the bombs, for they aren't us, they are not even LIKE us, and their deaths cannot interfere with our shopping malls and TV shows.

So be it. But rather than making up wild stories about who is threatening who, and who has the power to unleash industrial - scale death and suffering, let us understand clearly that we are starting yet another unprovoked aggressive war out of our own vast pool of fear, ignorance and hubris. Let us describe it as what it is, not a defense of our way of life, but a crime committed in our name. The world has turned a blind eye to our deceit in the name of massive violence for a long time. History will record the names of the butchers...

The Second Amendment is Not a Suicide Pact

2009-07-14T16:48:00.000-07:00

We aren't stupid. We aren't blind. Regardless of ideology, we can sit down together and talk through the issues, can we not? Even if we cannot arrive at a real solution to intractable questions, we can at least ponder the questions as thinking adults, right?

Sadly, the stupidity has taken hold in a genuinely frightening way, preventing even our elected legislators and appointed adjudicators from speaking honestly about so many issues. In the Sotomayor confirmation hearings today, we saw this, from a woman who grew up in a hardscrabble Bronx neighborhood that lost many of it's sons and daughters to pointless violence:

"I understand how important the right to bear arms is to many, many Americans," Sotomayor told Leahy, adding that one of her godchildren is a member of the National Rifle Association and she has friends who hunt.

Show of hands. How many people think that's actually her honest thoughts around guns in America? How many think THATS the thing she'd choose to say when asked about the Second Amendment? We have reached a tipping point, where not a single government figure is allowed to tell the truth about important issues anymore. Can someone tell me how all this hiding from the facts and refusing to even have a conversation about the real-world issues and their non-imaginary impacts on neighborhoods and families all over the country is a sustainable path?

Look, here's the hard truth about gun ownership in America. First, it's in the Constitution. As much as firearms opponents want to try to create some kind of fuzziness around that, and they do make a valiant effort, "...the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" is a hard phrase to obfuscate. Is it valid, or valuable now, today, in twenty-first century America? Of course not. It is a deeply embedded evil built into the very fabric of our national heritage, and the bloodshed just goes on and on. To get to something approximating common-sense gun ownership laws, you will HAVE to change the Constitution. But here's the thing. It's not just in the Constitution, it's in the Bill of Rights. And if you open the door to tampering with that, there is NO reason to believe it will all just stop there. A free press, as poor a job as they have done recently, is a pesky thing that most authoritarian governments do not allow. Speech can be re-defined. Assembly more tightly controlled. As much as we have seen the American Constitution trampled upon over the last decade, to allow people to begin to tamper with the core principles is to open a Pandora's Box of authoritarian and plutocratic activism, something we've seen far too much of already.

But to leave things as they are is a horrorshow of blood and loss, wasting our best along with our society's detritus, breaking families and hearts even as no higher purpose is served, and nothing of value is accomplished beyond the profits of the weapons industry. We cannot allow the status quo to be the future. We cannot continue to watch our children and brothers take the lives of their neighbors so casually, and then rot away in a prison cell for a moment's sick anger.

It's easy to reach the conclusion that there is no way out of this conundrum. And, for all that, I have no solution to offer. A solution, if there is one, would not look like an assault weapons ban or a law against high capacity magazines. It would be something that greatly reduced the number and availability of handguns, particularly in places like the inner city where the murder rates are unacceptably high. There would be regional, emergency legislation that, while unlikely to have an immediate impact, would begin to make guns more scarce, more expensive, and more difficult to for children to get and use casually. But it doesn't really matter. Because we have created a system where the only people that matter, the only people who have within their grasp the power to make a difference, to try to save some lives over time, the people who ASKED for the responsibility to deal with our society's hard problems are afraid to even have the conversation. Are AFRAID to even start a dialog with the phrase "what are we going to do about gun violence in our communities". The brave men and women who are asking this question, who are demanding answers, are written off as leftists, pacifists, unamerican hippies who are not "serious". And the people who are considered serious are AFRAID to say to the very constituency that elected them "I need you to help me develop a solution". They are more protective of their reputation in Washington then they are of the children back home.

Let's be honest. They will never have to try to decide whether to risk taking a gun to school, or risk leaving it home. They will never learn to not just flinch at the pop-pop-pop-pop of a drive by but to find good cover, and take care of their friends under fire. They live in nice, safe neighborhoods and will never have to try to understand the loss of a daughter caught by a stray round, or a son who just didn't have the strength and support to say no to the gang.

When you're scared, a gun is a very easy thing to reach for. I've done it. But when you're scared to talk ABOUT guns in America, it is enough to offer platitudes to the people who perpetuate the violence without ever suffering from it. The Alabama Senator, the Michigan Congressman, the Florida Governor will never lose a child to gun violence. They will never have to lie awake in the depths of the night, sobbing, wondering why god has taken their daughter, or what could have led their son to a life sentence. Like so much in our world, the difference between where we are and where we need to go is courage, and sadly, once again, courage is sorely lacking...

Do you think he Understands the Difference?

2009-07-10T17:12:00.000-07:00

Pope Benedict XVI stressed the church's opposition to abortion and stem cell research in his first meeting with President Barack Obama on Friday, pressing the Vatican's case with the U.S. leader who is already under fire on those issues from some conservative Catholics and bishops back home.

Pope. Leader of an international group of people who have chosen to live according to the strictures of a particular mystical, metaphysical and philosophical belief system, predicated on an ancient text that is generally accepted outside the confines of the church as describing events that often have no basis in reality. Like membership in a club or union, the members of a church agree to abide by it's arbitrary rules and live within it's proscribed boundaries.

President. Elected as leader of a country or nation-state, chosen by the people to represent EVERYONE in that country equally and fairly. To consider the real - world needs and aspirations of his constituency, regardless of their individual spiritual or philosophical beliefs or the demands and constraints of their chosen thought-leaders.

These are powerful men, with very large constituencies and responsibilities. And yet, they are not the same. They are FAR from the same. If Obama (or any elected leader of a diverse constituency, for that matter) allows himself to be influenced by the dogma and doctrine of a narrow group whose ideology is defined by mythology, he will be no different in his governance than Amedinejad. Obama was elected by the vote of the majority of Americans, and is obligated to balance his agenda so as it might serve the broadest measure of the citizenry.

By dint of the constraints of their beliefs and the dictates of the church leadership in Rome, Catholics are by the very nature of that self-identification constrained from various actions and activities, although it does seem odd that these are subject to some evolution over time. While they now can eat meat on Fridays, they are still prevented by threat of excommunication and eternal torment from divorce, contraception or abortion. And this is as it should be. Anyone is certainly entitled to enter into membership agreements that constrain their ability to choose their own actions in exchange for the perceived benefits of said membership. But people who choose to believe a different doctrine, or even who choose not to believe at all, must still be governed as equal citizens under elected democratic leadership.

I am an atheist, and Obama is my president too. He needs to lift his head, square his shoulders and tell the pope "you may instruct Catholics all over the globe, but I lead Americans, four fifths of whom are NOT catholics, so while I deeply appreciate your input, it would be profoundly undemocratic for me to follow that course". Of course, he also must send the same message to evangelical American christians, that they are completely entitled to live their lives in accordance with their interpretation of scripture, but they may NOT impose that scripture on Americans who do not choose it for themselves...

Sarah Smile

2009-07-07T18:14:00.000-07:00

So what does the future hold for former part time governor and full time ideologue Sarah Palin? Well, it's a bright, if somewhat constrained future. Let's be clear about this. She is the queen of the 28%ers. The far right bigots, the tribal paranoids, the people who use the word "socialism" without ever bothering to look up what it means all love her. And when you are the figurehead for a political movement that constitutes by any reasonable metric close to 60 million people, people who will forgive you for any transgression and allow you any stumbling incoherence, you have a great opportunity not only to a life of cheering adoration but for great wealth.

Let's be clear. Sarah Palin offers the Republican party nothing. The base loves her, and will turn out with activists, phone banks and money. But she will bring not one single independent or fence-sitting voter over to her cause, for her message is so extreme and her qualifications so limited. She can raise money that they would have raised anyway, and bring out crowds that would have come out anyway, more out of Obama hatred than Palin love. She will keep their message on the front page, but with her political illiteracy, issue ignorance and odd, provincial cadence it won't be in the way they hope for.

Sarah Palin is a fool's choice for spokesman, and an even worse choice for political leader. As spokesman, she delivers nothing but derisive laughter and head-shaking confusion. As leader, she offers only a fair-weather leadership, and when things heat up and times get hard, well, we've learned her response this weekend. Only quitters fight. Fighters quit. Right. In the Republican black-is-white up-is-down world of political convenience and institutional incoherence, she offers a unique willingness to ignore not just reality, but logic in general.

So carry on, Sarah. Let your victim flag fly. Go proudly into that tiny, insular world of paranoid fear and hatred, rally the angry, scared white people to the cause of holding back the tide of history. Diversity and community is the future, so cling to fearful homogeneity and tribal animosities. Dwell in the past, glory in a time when anyone who wasn't a white man had no voice and no power. Of course, the fact that that was you, as a woman, is not to be considered. There is a constituency for your message of hate, ignorance and fear. But fortunately for the rest of us, it is small, regional and shrinking. And as you can only guarantee the ultimate failure of that message, you may actually turn out to have done some good...

Genuinely Stoopid Stuff

2009-06-26T17:49:00.000-07:00

Waxman Markey.

Simple Cap and Trade.

Glenn Beck says it's either ignorant or treason.

Broun calls it a "Hoax".

Gingrey says its just the same as North Korea and Iran.

Boehner says it will cost millions of jobs, Bishop says passage will be "tragic" as the death of Michael Jackson.

Really? Do any of these idiots know what they're talking about? Or perhaps more to the point, how stupid do they think we are? Yes, I understand they're counting on the disinterest and ignorance of the American electorate, but at what point will they actually get called on their lies and demagoguery?

Underneath the economic complexity of it's implementation, this is what we're arguing about: Industries that burn a great deal of fossil fuels have, up until this point, had access to a critical public resource for zero cost. The atmosphere. Although the environment belongs equally to all human beings, and it's degradation carries the same costs for all in terms of health and quality of life, it has for centuries been used as a dumping ground by industries around the globe. And yet the costs of this resource, upon which these industries depend for their profits, has never been valued, and the costs to human society have never been assessed. For global business to assume this resource has no value and to utilize it at no cost is ridiculous, and outside of the most basic understanding of how business works.

A so-called "Cap and Trade" bill, at it's root, is nothing more than a methodology for factoring the costs of the "negative externalities" of burning fossil fuels, while at the same time seeking a way to implement these costs without either excessively hurting the profitability of these industries and protecting consumers from the cost increases.

Of COURSE there are costs associated with recognizing the costs of greenhouse gas pollution, and while a Cap and Trade program does a pretty good job of mitigating the costs to both business and the poorest segment of the population, this isn't a sudden decision to "tax" greenhouse gas polluters. It merely brings the cost of burning fossil fuels into a more realistic realm, where it is not artificially subsidized with the lives and livelihoods of the human population of the planet.

And suddenly, when you have a realistic cost structure around burning fossil fuels and dumping the waste into the atmosphere where it has global consequences, other forms of energy, from renewables like wind and solar to alternatives like nuclear are not anywhere near as comparatively expensive and a more realistic mix of power generation can be implemented that is substantially less destructive to the future of mankind.

Waxman Markey isn't a solution. It doesn't begin to address the problem in the US, let alone globally. But it's a start. And the fact that American business is so greedy and so shortsighted that they are frantically opposing, along with their republican lackeys, the implementation of even a watered - down and limited beginning is appalling. They are essentially demanding the right to destroy the ability of the planet to sustain human life on it's current scale in order to ensure their own short - term profits.

I cannot even conceive of a deeper evil...

A Beautiful Life

2009-06-22T18:04:00.000-07:00

Neda.

Tragedy wears the face of a beautiful young woman.

Ideology breaks hearts even as it bleeds out the innocent.

Horror is the eyes going slack, at the end of a young life destroyed.

Revolution is costly, and none of the lives lost will be forgotten either by those who love them, nor those who took them.

Agony carries the misery of the loss, never balanced by honesty nor truth nor fairness nor love.

Hope dwells in the tears of the masses, tears of loss, and tears from the gas.

Anger sits heavy in the breast, railing NO! against the pointless lies and self-serving violence of the leadership.

Power is found in guns and terror, but also in righteous beliefs and solidarity.

Strength can only be rooted in the love of family, the support of neighbors, and the caring of a world unwilling to let this crime stand.

Faith can sustain believers, but it is the children that create the space where a new world can grow.

Courage can be recognized, in the videos and the texts, but cannot be impelled and should never be expected nor demanded.

There is a purity in combat, not a glory, certainly not a promise for a bright future, but in the smoky chaotic violence of a moment forever frozen in time, our hearts are savaged and our souls are thrown to the cracked asphalt in the wild confusion of the shouts and gunfire, but in the very same way that everyone is tainted by the horror of the confrontation, in the high keening madness of a fight that leaves your life behind you, hopefully to be retrieved later when you have recaptured your sanity, you make decisions that, should you survive the revolution, you will describe to your grandchildren fifty years on, eyes glistening with the names of the fallen.

Later, when the roaring in your ears is quieted, and a somber silence lies across the field, the lonely broken dead lie crumpled, bled out, the ultimate cost for the ultimate conflict.

Neda.

Lost forever to her family and her friends, even as she is embraced by a world horrified and angered by her loss. And the awful, bloody irony that they took her life in order to undermine their OWN system.

Do not misunderstand. You can't define who is and who is not a combatant in a war zone. Who will live, who will die, who will win the day. The price paid is not measured by contribution, but merely by participation. And at the end, the dead offer the only real truth...

Day of Reckoning

2009-06-19T11:54:00.000-07:00

Like the cylinder of a revolver smoothly rotating to place a live round under a cocked hammer, the last piece of the seemingly inevitable collision between an authoritarian leadership that has finally crossed a red line they never even knew was there and a seething young population who only want what other young populations want, not even anything so profound a true democracy but only to sing and dance and love in the springtime of their lives has fallen neatly into place. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khameini offered to his people a sermon today, in which he told them they must not only accept the blatant fraud imposed upon them even while they had faith that their system, limited and claustrophobic though it already was, was fair and did not fear a leader they could elect but who would never have real power, but to continue to merely stand on the street in silence was to invite beatings, arrests and even death.

It is entirely unclear how this will pan out. Perhaps, under the threat alone, the demonstrations will lose steam and fade away over the next couple weeks without further bloodshed. Perhaps the demonstrations will continue, and in the power of their numbers and their compelling silence the security forces will refuse to murder them, and something historic will happen. Perhaps in a brief, terrifying paroxysm of violence and horror the institutions of a state that finally chose to take off the mask and reveal itself to be the dictatorship it has denied being for so long will crush the "Tehran Spring" moment, ending for a generation the hopes of the population to make decisions about their own lives without intimidation from their government.

What does appear clear is that, after a week of posturing, maneuvering and shadow-boxing, the tipping point has been reached. Tens of thousands of Iranians will take to the streets on Saturday, seeking to be heard, asking only for the rights they have grown up believing they already had. And they have been warned - they will do so at their peril. In the recent history of authoritarian governments, it has frequently been the case that they only fall when they fall victim to their own lethal combination of hubris and paranoia. When they react to popular discontent with overwhelming violence and abuse of their power. When they force the people into an understanding that there is no longer anything to lose, and popular outrage turns into a bottomless anger more powerful than fear. Sometimes massive killing works, but it's always the last desperate gamble of a regime bereft of all credibility, seeking merely to cling to power for the sake of power, offering no reasonable explanation of their actions, only fighting and killing the only existential threat that ever ultimately matters - their own people.

The Americans who wave pompoms and shout from the sidelines when peoples are finally pushed past the point of acceptance, be it Georgians or Iranians, are wrong. We have no dog in this fight. These people aren't necessarily standing up for some kind of nebulous political philosophy such as the American political right has so toxically fetishized. They have been forced to acknowledge that their leadership has so degraded their personal liberty that they have no real future, no hope of living the life they desire, and their concrete demands are not for a political system, but for a chance to make a living, raise a family and live the way they wish. Understand, for this is important. They don't WANT to be Americans. They WANT to be Iranians. When even that became impossible, they went to the barricades.

Tomorrow we may find out what destiny has in store for them...

The Soft Bigotry of...Expectations

2009-06-18T10:20:00.001-07:00

Measured objectively, it is fair to say that so far, Barack Obama has been a pretty good president. Not great, certainly, but orders of magnitude better than his foul, venal predecessor. Unfortunately, for both him and for us, it is not possible to view his presidency objectively. Indeed, everything he does or doesn't do must be viewed through the prism of the expectations set during his very long campaign.

We could not help but see him as a forceful agent of change, major if not radical change to the system and the way it works, so every day we see the status quo is a day we wonder what happened to the Barack Obama we THOUGHT we were electing?

We expected powerful leadership, and we are disappointed to see an odd, kind of weak passiveness in the face of a weakened and discredited political opposition.

We expected the promised transparency and we have seen the Obama administration double down on state secrets, reverse itself on the release of photos and documents and just this week refuse to release the White House visitor logs a la Dick Cheney.

We expected a strong voice on freedom and equality and instead got an administration out of step with the people it claims to represent, strongly supporting DOMA and refusing to even begin to engage on Don't Ask Don't Tell.

We expected a reasonable voice to end America's horrendously counterproductive wars and we get hedging and doublespeak on Iraq, a major escalation in Afghanistan even as we edge closer to open warfare with Pakistan and North Korea.

We expected a leader that would protect the middle class from economic predation, and instead we got an administration that seems to cower before the financial lobby, that didn't even show up on Cramdown and allowed a few political grandstanders to water down his stimulus bill.

We came to expect a powerful political force, willing to stand against the worst instincts and excesses of both parties with demands for common sense and real-world solutions. We got a president who won't even fight for his own cabinet nominees, who seems to lack the political vision to make use of overwhelming majorities in both houses.

Given the choice between Obama and McCain, it's impossible to actually regret the actions and events that brought us here. But I think disappointment and discontent is brewing, as the people are tired of a political leadership that refuses to serve their interests while talking openly of serving the interests of corporations and industries. The people are beginning to sense that something has gone horribly wrong when a young, brilliant, charismatic leader is elected and cannot seem to move the nation off its unsustainable path. When a trillion dollar military is not even worth discussing, but a trillion dollars over ten years on health care for American citizens is just "too expensive". When a few of the Bush administration's worst crimes are rolled back and the vast majority of their maniacal grab for power and wealth is embraced by what we had come to believe was the "anti-bush".

President Obama, now is the time. It is not yet too late, but make no mistake, one can see "too late" from where we stand today. You must begin to stand up for what you claimed to believe in, you must begin to demonstrate a willingness to fight, even to make a few (more) enemies in the process. You have an unusual opportunity to change the course of history, and if, in the interest of some kind of political legacy you allow the self-interested rabble of congress and the media to cow you into passivity, silence and "compromise" that is not compromise, but surrender, it will all slip away. The people are becoming restless, and if you continue to demonstrate political expediency rather than political courage, you will lose everything. Popularity, power, opportunity. You are well on the way to proving yourself a fraud, another political hack who told a good story to acquire power. If that is how the Obama story plays out, we will all have lost.

Iran into a Little Trouble Over the Weekend

2009-06-15T10:31:00.000-07:00

I suppose I should say something about the Iranian elections. Although there really isn't a great deal to say, as most bloggers and pundits seem to waver between sky-is-falling speculation and suggestions for somehow putting things right.

In order to even have the conversation, you need at the very outset to define who it is you are speaking for, and about. If you want to discuss the implications of the election and it's dubious outcome for American policy and in light of American interests, that's going to be a very different conversation than a discussion of the impact of the election on the Iranian people and regional geopolitics. Neither of which is as fascinating as a completely speculative discussion of not just what actually happened, but why.

But first, we need to try to decide what, at this point, we believe actually occurred. There are three possible narratives.

First, and least likely, the possibility must be considered that something unexpected happened and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad actually did win this election fair and square. There are no reliable polls in Iran, and Ahmedinejad's base of support is rural, so one must consider the possibility that the outcome was exactly as it should have been. However, enough experts have debunked this possibility, not to even mention what simple common sense tells us about the differential and how it was announced. If he had "won" by a much more scant margin, or even had to wait and "win" the runoff, there would have been fewer questions asked. But it appears that in their arrogance, the powerful people ruling Iran did not consider the popular reaction.

If we do not accept that possibility, the next likeliest scenario is that Ahmedinejad had become part of the powerful elites in government and the Revolutionary Guards and they set out to manipulate the election results on their own, outside of the purview and capacity of the clerical leadership. This is somewhat unlikely because of the absolute power the Ayatollahs wield, but if it happened it would be the scariest outcome, because then power would be vested in the hands of a dictatorial few who's agenda we cannot know.

The most likely explanation for what we saw in Iran over the last few days is that the clerical leadership had some deep reservations about Moussavi's ascent to power, and at the last minute decided to make certain that Ahmedinejad kept the Presidency. This seems to be the scenario that most people favor, and based on what we've been able to observe it is the description of events that most neatly fits observed reality, but it has one gaping flaw. Why? The Ayatollahs have the power, and they have kept that power when reformist politicians held presidential office before, in much more challenging times when Saddam was a real threat on their border. What could have caused them to decide it was necessary to risk the social turmoil, or even the possibility of a real change in government that this blatant action might lead to?

Until we can understand what it was about a Moussavi Presidency that was categorically unacceptable to the Mullahs we cannot really understand what transpired there. So we move on to the next question, the one that Americans always ask because EVERY global event is ultimately about us, is it not? What should we do? And of course, wisdom would cause the American leadership to recognize the limitations on any American reaction. Almost ANYTHING we can do would be counterproductive in light of America's unfortunate history meddling in Iranian internal politics for the last sixty years.

The US can register it's concern over the election, and can certainly support any internal Iranian calls for internal or international investigations. Beyond that, America cannot do anything helpful to the Iranian people or their nascent democracy movement. And there has been so much debate about diplomatic engagement with Iran over the last few years, certainly there will be calls for an end to the American diplomatic outreach to the Iranians that has only barely started. But for what? What can possibly be gained by further isolating the Iranian leadership.

The reason a nation engages diplomatically with other nations is to pursue HER interests, not the interests of the other nations. American interests haven't changed, and the only way America can pursue those interests is to engage with the leadership, no matter who they are, or how they came to power. If America is willing to share diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia or China, we cannot honestly claim to be squeamish about dealing with a non-democratically elected leader in Iran, can we?

Kerry Good!

2009-06-12T13:05:00.000-07:00

In an interview with Financial Times, Sen. John Kerry did something unprecedented among Washington politicians and pundits. He told the truth about Iran's nuclear program. After years of wondering whether ANYBODY in the American leadership had ever even READ the NPT, it is stunning to discover that finally someone has the cojones to actually say that under the treaty and international law Iran has every right to enrich Uranium to produce reactor fuel, which is what they have been doing. The IAEA inspection regime has repeatedly assured the world that there is absolutely NO evidence that the Iranians have diverted any fissile materials to weaponization.

When you think of all the time, effort and international political collateral that has been wasted in order to try to end a program that is entirely legal and that exists unchallenged in dozens of other nations you realize how outrageous, unproductive and unnecessary it is. When you think about how many people have called for starting a WAR over the perfectly legal actions of the Iranian researchers, you wonder how it is that the US is not an utter laughingstock.

Israel has an advanced nuclear deterrent. There is no possibility that any reasonable, thinking person in Israel actually believes that an Iran with nuclear weapons, let alone an Iran with a nuclear research program under IAEA monitoring is truly an "existential threat". It's pretty clear that if the people in power in Israel want to avoid making any concessions to the Palestinians they need a credible external threat to keep people from concentrating on the brutal occupation of the West Bank and the horrible conditions being forced on the people of Gaza, and Iran fills that requirement nicely. It has, however, been appalling to watch the American government blindly and unquestioningly go along with nothing more than a political ruse in order to support a single political party in Israel.

And now, finally, someone stood up and told the truth. Someone powerful, as Kerry is the chairman of the foreign relations committee. Someone has actually pointed out the pasty white ugliness of the naked emperor. I'm very proud of John Kerry today. Maybe even slightly hopeful that this whole weird honesty thing might become a trend.

Pundits like to refer to a particular school of thought around International Relations as "realist", and oddly, much of the foreign policy under Bush/Cheney did not fall into that category. They never had much truck with realism, of that there can be no doubt. But one should be careful not to confuse a "realist" stance on foreign policy with being realistic. It is clearly time to start viewing the world without the obfuscation of ideology and fantasy, and learn to put the maximum effort into the most genuine challenges. To spend so much capital trying to artificially define challenges to serve nothing but a political agenda is nothing short of stupid. There are real challenges, from climate change and energy policy to human rights to economics to resource depletion. All the time spent addressing imaginary challenges only takes away from doing something about unquestionably REAL challenges. If there are solutions, they will come from powerful people being honest about what they are.

Unplug the Coffee Pot, Turn off the Lights and Lock the Door

2009-06-07T15:44:00.000-07:00

That's got it. All caught up. At dawn I leave for the high country. Yosemite. Grubbing in the dirt, rassling bears, living on nuts and berries. I'm messing around getting my backpack squared away now, and I can't wait to leave this valley behind for the tranquility and beauty of that one.

Peace be on all of you, I'll be back Friday if I don't get eaten by a bear.

Private Holocaust Post-Embrace Denial?

2009-06-07T09:20:00.000-07:00

Imprisoned in the Hague for war crimes, Charles Taylor has converted to Judaism. He was a Christian, but apparently had trouble believing the whole Christ Son of God thing, so in his metaphysical and theological explorations he has decided to become a Jew.

Now, there's about six layers of irony in all this, but mainly I'm struck by the common embrace of religion by those who have inflicted death and suffering on an industrial scale, people who's very life stories embody the hellish dishonesty of scriptural gospel.

Of course, there's also that whole "genocidal maniac identifies as Jewish" thing that's frankly a little hard to wrap my mind around.

There's that whole "finding religion once you're pretty certain never to have your freedom again" deal that somehow always seems a little tawdry to me.

For years I have grappled with and railed against the fundamental hypocrisy of the worlds motley collection of organized religions, but this is something beyond their baseline mendacity. If some very powerful Rabbi somewhere doesn't stand up and say, "hey Charles, know what? I checked with god and he says fuck you - find some other path to spiritual realization", it will reinforce everything I've ever thought about religious institutions...

Words and Deeds

2009-06-07T08:04:00.000-07:00

"No single speech can eradicate years of mistrust..."

President Obama said that early in his speech in Cairo. And, of course, therein lies the real problem. Just as it's a ridiculous falsehood that "they hate us for our freedoms", it's equally false to assume that they "hate us for the things we say". It is America's actions in the Middle East and around the world that have gotten us to this point. Sure, terrorism is bad and people who use terror as a political tactic are criminals, etc. etc., but we understand WHY there are people, many of them muslims, who want to attack the United States.

So whether America's leader uses the arrogant, bellicose words of the cowboy in a saloon or the eloquent, poetic words of peace and moderation, it is unrealistic to expect any real change in the world without actual changes in behavior. And that, of course, is a great deal harder than saying the words.

The people of the "muslim world", the population of the middle east and south asia, have a lot of reasons to hate the United States government. The US has not been an honest broker in their legitimate disputes, and they can clearly and without argument identify a series of actions the United States has taken in their region that negatively and measurably impacted their life and well-being. It is a wonderful first step to announce that we have common goals, and that we should pursue them in peace. But you cannot blame them for being skeptical, after all these years, and waiting hopefully for some indication that America as the entity that has destroyed so many lives and families is willing to act with their interests at heart.

America can select what it is she wishes to talk about, but it's imperative that, whatever the topics chosen, she speak with honesty and balance. If the American leadership wants to talk about nuclear proliferation, they must do so honestly, unflinchingly indicting enemy and ally alike, not just Iran and North Korea, but India, Pakistan and Israel also.

If the American leadership chooses to talk about authoritarian government, they must be prepared to address not just nations with whom they have differences, but also nations like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and even Israeli governance of the occupied territories.

If the American leadership chooses to talk about human rights, they must move forward under already ratified international law and prosecute the torturers in America.

American international credibility is at it's nadir, and the primary reason for that is a combination of American Exceptionalism and American Hypocrisy. When we continue to make demands of some nations we do not make of others, when we speak to how nations of the world should behave and then abandon those behaviors ourselves when they are inconvenient, when we ask governments to respect the rule of law when we neither do so ourselves nor require it of our friends, we hold ourselves up as nothing but a blowhard bully, a toxic combination of empty rhetoric and massive weaponry.

If it is to be an argument about ideals, then American leadership must recognize that it is not an argument to be won with bombs and bombast, but rather by living those ideals at home and abroad, and demonstrating their utility in modern society. If you seek peace, you begin by not engaging in war. If you wish to demand an end to aggression, you first must stop invading. If your goal is to spread human dignity and the rule of law, you must have the courage to release people from custody if you cannot charge them with a crime.

There is much America can do to lead the world into a peaceful and prosperous century, each more simple and obvious than the next, but all requiring a level of political courage not present for many decades. Obama says nice things, but will he have the courage to risk his personal political future and become one of those rare, transcendent global figures, a statesman who changes the status quo, or will soaring rhetoric be followed up with safe, incremental changes in American policy that essentially preserve the current order? I know what I see, and I am not optimistic...

It's Like if you Went Through the Looking Glass, Only to Find Another Looking Glass

2009-06-05T14:22:00.000-07:00

Sure, Michal Steele is willfully tone-deaf on any kind of social justice issue, and sure, irony crawled under George Bush's personal oval office carpet, curled up and died nearly a decade ago, but some things are just so amazingly, blatantly idiotic that even after you go back and read it a second time, you still think you must have mis-read it.

Stuff like this, from Think Progress this morning. Yes, THAT Michael Steele. The black one. The one who seems to think that the key civil rights issue facing Americans in 2009 in the oppression and unfair treatment of white men. A man who, in his own lifetime, has seen black men murdered, wrongly incarcerated, prosecuted and executed at a rate that far outstrips their representative population. One can only shake one's head when you realize that, yes, the Republican party IS actually going to base it's platform on resistance to the oppression of white men. The sense of entitlement, and it's coinciding sense of victimhood as their grip on total power slips away, is breathtaking.

And now there's this. Bay Buchanan, a terrifying aggregation of her husband's hate and bigotry and her own massive dishonesty had an assistant who was convicted of a hate crime. She knew about it, but it wasn't widely distributed knowledge, and ultimately he only more honestly expressed the actual beliefs of the organizations that employed him, so she quite happily kept him on staff. Of course, in Washington, everything eventually comes out, and so this ugly, sordid story exploded on the Internet this week. And while this guy was rightfully pilloried for his bizarre and ugly felony, his employer saw fit not just to defend him, but to describe his treatment as a "lynching". That's right. Lynching. As if there was some equivalence between pointing out that an organization actively involved in attempting to preserve the traditional privilege of white males employed a man convicted of a race-based hate crime and the torture and murder of people for no other reason than their skin was a different color.

The grip the extreme right has come to exert over Republican party politics cannot last. Virtually everything they do, every position they take, and every time they cling to ideology to the detriment of the vast majority of the American people they lose more ground. They really only represent the deep South, where their constituency lives in fear of freedom, human rights and diversity, and will only elect leaders who they believe will shield them from the future. Whether there is a path back to sanity and electoral success for the Republicans, or another party will arise to provide modern, realistic opposition to the center-right Democrats in power remains to be seen. But is does seem clear that while they are in the wilderness, struggling for relevance in a world that has passed them by, they are prepared to unleash an obscene, violent attack against the basic values that America stands for, and the more unhinged among them will serve as their shock troops. Of course, as with the previous administration, only those foot soldiers will be held accountable for the bloodshed...

Money Talks and Bullshit Walks

2009-06-05T07:50:00.000-07:00

Timothy Geithner's "Legacy Loans" program that caused so much angst a few months ago is now officially off the table. This may or may not be good news, as the very idea of taxpayers guaranteeing loans that private firms could then use to overpay for some of the banks assets without any risk of financial loss appalled most people as they came to understand it. And that's not to mention the various ways for banks to game the system and further enrich themselves at the expense of the American taxpayer. But the most interesting thing is WHY the policy failed.

If you recall, the idea was for Treasury and FDIC to help the banks they deemed "too big to fail" to improve their balance sheets by being able to sell off a substantial part of what have come to be called "toxic assets". The banks haven't been willing to sell them, because in order to do so, the market would have to determine what they were actually worth, not what the bank values them at as an asset on the books. If a bank says it has 100 million dollars in CDOs, it can show 100 million dollars in assets. If those CDOs are sold for 18 million dollars, the bank no longer has assets worth 100 million dollars, it has 18 million dollars in cash. In essence, it finds itself insolvent.

But the Geithner plan was for the US government to offer "no recourse" loans to anyone willing to purchase these assets at auction. The assumption was, if there was little or no risk in buying them, the funds that did so would be willing to essentially overpay for them, as any losses they would take down the road would be passed off to the taxpayers.

Apparently, that's not what happened. Nobody was going to come close to paying what the banks claim these assets are worth, and as such, with implicit guarantees from the government in place even without the auctions, the banks simply refused to offer them for sale. They would keep them to maturity, insisting all along that they would make a profit on these investments, without being required to expose them to the market for a valuation.

The ride these giant banks have taken the American people on is just horrendous, by any measure. Their ruthlesness and overarching self-interest makes the mob look like a caring and compassionate organization. To borrow a phrase from the presidential campaign, how can we expxect our government to stand up to the likes of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Il when they are utterly cowed by their own financial industry. The banks take billions from the US treasury and refuse to offer up even the slightest concession, knowing that there will be no sanction, and should they require even more billions, they'll get them without question. They continue to sit at the table in a game that is fixed in their favor, one that they cannot lose no matter what decisions they choose to make. In this game, they not only flaunt the rules, they do it blatantly with sneer of disrespect, for they know there will be no consequences.

This is a glimpse into the interconnected, globalized world of twenty first century capitalism. Increasingly, nations serve only as platforms for business operations, and the real power is in the hands of the bankers and the CEOs. Increasingly, people and resources will be brutally exploited in the name of quarterly profits simply because there will be no entities who have an interest in protecting them. Increasingly, the gap between the rich and the poor will become a chasm, and there will be nothing in between. It has become desperately clear that this is not a place we want to go, and yet already we find we are powerless to affect the outcome...

A Death in Kansas

2009-06-01T09:50:00.000-07:00

It really was only a matter of time. The American political right had already adopted the intolerance and bigotry of al Quaeda, demanding allegiance to one true religion and branding non-christians as apostates and infidels. They had already adopted the tribal fealty and superstitious fears of the Taliban, seeking to dictate a set of repressive measures to control what people do, what words they can use, how they are to dress, what social and sexual behaviors will be permitted and those that will be suppressed by punishing anyone who deviates from their vision. They had already defined their desired society, ruled by iron fisted men, with rights carefully limited and wealth in a few, powerful hands.

So one cannot be at all surprised that once again, when they find their power at it's nadir and their ability to influence people outside of their own community to have slipped from their grasp, that they would turn from the philosophy of al Quaeda to the tactics of al Quaeda. Terror. The use of violence to create fear and close off options, so people, however unwilling, might be forced to live under their repressive, medieval laws. The use of intimidation to squelch political debate and silence opposition. If there are ideas out there you cannot suppress, you can still try to kill them, by killing those with whom you disagree, and inciting the less stable and more fanatical among your followers to kill and destroy in the name of an ideology you espouse and a fear you create. All, ultimately, to achieve power.

Power over the population. Power over the purse strings. Power over the military, the police, the legislature. Power over women, power over thought, power to neutralize ideas and defeat progress. Power to take lives and destroy families. Power.

The Obama administration has been in power four months. Four months out of at least four years. The republican opposition has yet to find a single position that resonates with the majority, that hasn't been widely discredited, that hasn't simply failed epically. The frustration deepens, the futility gives rise to a desperate kind of anger, the rhetoric becomes uglier, more polarizing and certain unsavory and deeply amoral partisans see an opportunity for personal aggrandizement. In a heavily armed nation where all the brightest traditions have the population reaching for their guns in the face of any sort of problem. Americans kill their way out of trouble, and solve any kind of challenge with violence, and they certainly face a daunting challenge this time.

The American people rejected their fear, their hatred, their bigotry and intolerance. Americans have embraced diversity, and our culture has left the old divides in a tragic past. They have lost the argument, so now it remains only for them to take out their guns - from Davey Crockett to Audie Murphy, from John Wayne to Mel Gibson, the answer is there for the righteous man wronged.

Keep in mind that the media will talk around the elephant in the room. Keep in mind that it still quacks like a duck. Keep in mind that today and tomorrow and into the future, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich and all their hate - spewing colleagues will continue to ratchet up the rhetoric, offering only incitement, not as a solution, but in place of one. They are the ones who will look at Dr. Tiller's murder and see progress, hope for their cause. They will see the pain and fear in an opposition that had already won the field, and they will be encouraged.

I don't know how it will all play out, but I think we can safely assume that we will bear witness to something horrible over the next few years, something ugly that America has not seen before, and Americans are very much unprepared for. A kind of low-level insurgency, not-quite-civil-war and not-quite-peace. America has had a lot of experience on that kind of battlefield, and it seems unavoidable that she faces the same kind of cowardice and butchery in her cities that we witnessed in Iraq. If we have learned nothing else, it is that the expression of fear and hatred is seldom without consequences...

Kim Jong Illin'

2009-05-27T15:29:00.000-07:00

Once again, the entire world has it's collective panties in a bunch over the actions of North Korea and their Amazing Steampunk Nuclear program. Perhaps it's time to have a grown-up conversation about this.

First, let's understand the reasons behind this nuclear test. Certainly , having a few nuclear weapons will always serve as an effective deterrent to foreign attack or invasion. Once the international community is convinced that you have the bomb, any saber rattling they do in your direction can be safely ignored as hollow and perfunctory. But the international community was convinced by the first North Korean test, back in 2006, so what is the justification for this one?

It's never a real good idea to try to determine the thought processes of the legendarily unpredictable, some might say unstable Kim Jong Il, but one obvious trend that runs through all of his provocations is a cry for respect. As the leader of an isolated, insular nation with no economy to speak of, unable to feed it's population or influence international events, Kim has found the only way he can demand attention is to act in a warlike, threatening matter. To create the perception that North Korea is a threat, a force to be dealt with as a peer. And right down the line, the leadership of the US, Japan, South Korea and Europe all react as frightened mice, calling him a "threat to international peace and security" and offering to immediately begin talks to find a way to make the big bad Kim Jong Il stop threatening them.

This is nonsensical. Exactly who is North Korea threatening, and how are they doing it? Their atomic weapons have a short history of not being very robust, they have no real method for delivering them outside their own borders and other than it's symbolic nature, they don't really need an atomic bomb at all. For many years now, North Korea has protected itself from foreign attack by effectively holding the 25 million people of greater metropolitan Seoul hostage. Seoul sits right on the DMZ between the two countries, and North Korea has it surrounded by thousands of artillery pieces, rocket launchers, missile batteries and armored assault units. It is accepted as doctrine that before they could be rolled back, the North Koreans will have destroyed the third largest city in the world and killed hundreds of thousands, if not a million civilians. With or without nuclear weapons, this threat is enough to shield them from outside military intervention, and they know it well.

The two nuclear tests they have undertaken have not been particularly awe inspiring for their effectiveness or competence. The first test is generally acknowledged to have been what weapons experts like to call a "fizzle", where the weapon either does not reach criticality or it "pre initiates" and very little fissile matter is converted to energy. The second test, while almost certainly a fission explosion, is being rated in the neighborhood of 4 kilotons, about a fifth of the Nagasaki bomb of the same general design. A pretty large explosion as explosions go, but not even on the scale for typical atomic blasts.

It's time for the rest of the international community to stop panicking every time Kim demands attention. North Korea is a nuclear power, and unless they can be persuaded to give up their weapons, there is nothing in the world that's going to change that. They are a genuine threat to South Korea, and to a much lesser extent Japan, and not at all to America. Considering their geopolitical location, they cannot even be accurately recognized as a regional power. If they want talks, fine, have talks. If they want aid, well, that can be part of the talks. But the US should make it clear that from where we sit, WAY over here on the other side of the Pacific, they are welcome to their nuclear weapons and we aren't going to either attack them for having them or offer them any kind of substantive reward for giving them up. We just don't care. Let China carry that ball for a while...

Memorial Day

2009-05-24T16:00:00.000-07:00

Usually on Memorial Day I write an overwrought, maudlin piece expressing support for the struggles of our soldiers home from combat. It is an important issue for me, and one can never do enough to make people understand the implications of a world where you can be under fire one day, in a restaurant in Germany the next and home sleeping in your own bed the day after that. The human brain wasn't designed for the demands of modern combat, didn't develop any mechanism for dealing with a full year of 24-hour-a-day stress and fear, and simply can't adjust to such radically changed circumstances without extreme difficulty.

But this year, I'm feeling substantially less charitable. It's hard to honor our "heroes" who, when engaged with a small group of lightly armed irregulars, call in massive air support and kill dozens of civilians. It's hard to ask people to salute those who risk so much for freedom when we chose to start the war in the first place. It's hard to demand people "honor their sacrifices" when they have laid waste to so much of the world, destroying so many lives in the name of a nebulous and arbitrary agenda. And should we look forward to a future Memorial Day when we unveil a glorious marble monument to our courageous drones?

It seems the world is in a dark, somewhat hopeless place today, and at least some of that can be laid at the feet of the American love of war, our virtual fetishization with all things military. Perhaps it's time for a holiday that celebrates men of peace, builds monuments for wars avoided and calls the roll of those, combatant and innocent alike, not killed in vain. Maybe on a Memorial Day sometime in the future, when a child looks upon a statue of a soldier and asks what it is, his mom might be able to tell him "men used to travel around the world killing and destroying because their leaders told them to". A time when we can look back on the brutality and barbarity of war as a solution to political and economic disagreements as something from an earlier, less enlightened era. When a country's great leaders will be recognized for the health, well being and education of their people and a country's great scientific advancements for curing disease and improving the lives of human beings.

In the meantime, today? A car race, a ball game, a steak and a beer. A warm spring day in the park. Not so much reflection - I've had all the war I can stomach for now, and I fear more is yet to come. The soldiers are still coming home from combat, still watching a surreal world through wary eyes, still struggling to adjust to a world without bombs, without weapons, without deadly enemies around every turn. They'll still need our support and understanding, and we'll still need to welcome them back. But today it occurred to me that much of the honor is gone, and if it ever really existed at all, the time for celebrating war is at an end...

Pink Boxers

2009-05-22T13:01:00.001-07:00

I have to admit this made me smile, and I can't deny I not only enjoyed, but appreciated what Secretary Gates had to say about it. But it's interesting to take a moment and ask ourselves why it's newsworthy.

As much as Americans approve of military solutions to all sorts of intractable problems, worship and even fetishize the military and call for acts of extreme violence from invasions to air strikes with minimal compunction, very few Americans have ever had to come to grips with the realities of life in a war zone. While they are perfectly able to conceptualize, it is well nigh impossible for most Americans to viscerally understand how a family might live day in and day out, being startled awake and rushing out into the dark and chaos to fight or to flee. The easy death, the endless horror, the constant fear, the disease, the destruction, the smoke, the smell.

Even American soldiers, with their vaunted reputation for taking some of the comforts of home to the front lines of battle, have to live wound tight, on a razor's edge, understanding that at any time peaceful quiet can be shattered by gunfire and explosions, and there can be no hesitation in response. Anyone who has tried to sleep in a war zone has had to make the most careful of calculations - Should I take off my boots? My pants? Where should I put my weapon, my magazines, my grenades, my helmet? Should I keep my pistol in my rack? A knife?

For the residents, of the battle areas, the families with farms and livestock and children and pets, the calculations are harder, and the choices fewer. It seems certain to me that if Americans had a better understanding of the misery, the disruption, the tragedy that is unleashed on regular people every time there is a battle or an air strike, they would be much more circumspect in their desire to see deadly force employed as a routine matter of policy. It is unfair that a nation can unleash so much death and suffering, so much fear and horror, and suffer so few consequences for it. It's all gotten too easy, too mundane.

Perhaps the sight of a young man rushing to the fight with his comrades in boxers and flip-flop sandals can teach us, as a people, a little something about life in war. About what it demands, and what it costs...

Pakistan, The Taliban and Those Pesky Nukes - A Calm Analysis

2009-05-18T16:31:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure what the US Government and their stenographers in the media actually want. The seem determined to drive Pakistan from a democratic, civilian government with an active political opposition and a small, militant insurgency to a full-blown civil war. They don't seem to be willing to allow the Pakistanis to work out their political and ideological differences through a negotiated political process, but instead seem to be frothing for bloodshed. It never seems to get mentioned in any of the American discussions, but a nation that is at war with it's citizens, attacking it's own towns and creating desperate refugees has failed at it's primary purpose.

The Pakistanis were understandably resistant to going to war against their fellow Pakistanis, so the US and the Obama administration just kept ratcheting up the pressure and offering more in the way of rewards until the Zardari government and the Army under General Kayani made a craven calculation that it was in the short-term interests of the governing elite (yes, that does include the military and ISI) to kill a few thousand of their citizens in order to keep American aid flowing. It is nothing short of appalling that apparently neither the Obama nor the Zardari administrations can see beyond the next fiscal quarter. That future is grim, but precisely NOT for the reasons the American hype machine keeps shrieking.

Let's be clear. Assertions are regularly made in the American press about the state of Pakistan, her government, her military and her nuclear weapons. In parallel, further assertions are made about the Talilban, their goals, their support and the type of threat they impose on the Pakistani nation. They are almost entirely and uniformly false, and yet the truth so seldom finds it's way into the conversation that one must reach the conclusion that the truth is, to borrow a phrase from Al Gore, inconvenient.

Let's start with the real bogeyman here. The nuclear weapons held by the Pakistani military. And make no mistake, the civilian government has NO access to them, nor the ability to order their release. The military retains the strategic options, both because they don't have faith in the willingness of the civilian government to unleash them, but also, and perhaps more importantly, they don't have faith in the institutions of democracy that might place someone who's ideology is at odds with the Generals in a position of power. The American press loves to describe a frightening scenario where a Pakistani nuclear warhead "falls into the hands" of the Taliban or al Quaeda and is smuggled into an American city and detonated with hundreds of thousands or millions of casualties. Is that reasonable? Should that be the primary concern that drives American South Asia policy? Let's think about it for a minute.

Does anyone else hear that "ticking time bomb" from the torture "debate"? For this scenario to come to pass would require a set of circumstances, decisions, operations and opportunities so far fetched as to be the same kind of science fiction as that legendary time bomb of the hate-driven fever dreams of authoritarians in and out of government. But with America's cultural predisposition to the expedient, our love of action-adventure stories and our utter lack of understanding of Islamic cultures, we have no second thoughts in believing these terrifying stories. And yet...

A nuclear warhead is a large, heavy, incredibly high precision device that is easy to conceptualize, somewhat harder to design and very difficult to engineer. And any loss of precision results in something less than a mushroom cloud. And we've seen too many movies with "suitcase nukes". While a few, highly advanced nuclear weapons programs (the US, Russia, perhaps China, Great Britain and France) have developed the technology for reducing the size and weight of an atomic weapon, those are NOT the weapons we are talking about in Pakistan. That nobody ever bothers to make the distinction, but rather avoids the discussion in order to allow American imaginations to run wild is telling in and of itself. A Pakistani warhead is a large, cumbersome piece of single-purpose technology, designed to be delivered by short or medium range missile against Indian targets. It is heavy, not designed to be portable and requires a great deal of gentle care if it is to be expected to release it's nuclear energy on target. And even then, it's a dirty little secret that the reason a nuclear power wants so many warheads is that many of them can be expected to fail to "deliver significant yield" and it is doctrine to plan to deliver multiple weapons to ensure a single detonation.

But OK. For now, let's assume that Taliban, with Osama bin Laden's evil minions assisting, have commandeered a 300 kiloton Pakistani warhead, perhaps with significant assistance from the ISI. They have the engineers they need to to load it into a 40 foot shipping container and brace it so it is not damaged in transit. They now have a nuclear warhead ready to transport, in an international standard shipping container, in a remote Pakistani nuclear development facility. Has no one noticed? Is there not SOME part of the Pakistani Government, or the Pakistani military, who is concerned, and would prefer this did not happen? After all, even with all the support in the world, this weapon was NOT designed to be delivered in this way. It took time, innovative thinking and creative engineering to get this far. The Pakistanis would have known where the facility was, and they would have known that it was compromised. Even assuming their F16s and helicopter gunships somehow fail to remove the threat at the source, their special operations teams can't find a way to stop this? OK, let's say they can't

Now the time has come for the Taliban and their al Quaeda henchmen to move this weapon to a port. They load the container on a truck and, what, just drive to Karachi? Whereupon they innocently load this container on a container ship bound for Savannah, pay their money and sign the bill of lading? Do the Pakistanis not KNOW their nuclear facility has been compromised and a weapon stolen? Do the Americans not know? This happened in complete secrecy, without having to kill a guard, blow a gate, coerce a manager or trigger a safeguard? Wow, these guys are good. In fact, the whole world would realize that there were rogue nukes on the loose and among other obvious countermeasures, container traffic would be anything but business as usual.

Then there's the matter of device security. What we call PALs, or permissive action links. See, everybody figured out about fifty years ago that, with forward deployed nuclear weapons, the enemy or a rogue ally could seize control of one or several of them and, well, at that point anything's possible. So from combination padlocks to advanced digital security, the weapons have been protected by security devices and tamper proof housings. Do the Pakistanis employ this level of security? We do have to admit we don't know, but they would have the same motivation as the US or Russia or any other nuclear state - to make certain that the weapons didn't end up destroying their own interests. I think it's VERY likely that the way the Pakistani military maintains control of the nuclear weapons is to control the release codes. There is very likely no one, or a very limited number of people anywhere near the development/maintenance facility, who actually have the knowledge to make the bomb go boom. The science of encryption and one-way cyphers is well known, and the Pakistanis have plenty of mathematicians. This would not be a significant challenge to them, and they would be madmen to have no controls on these weapons at all. They are not.

Which brings us to an important cultural discussion. Here in the west, we like to make all sorts of determinations that Islamic extremists are "fanatics", that they have no interest in living, that in order to carry out their nefarious plots they would happily die, even along with their family, their tribe, their mosque and their nation. They are just not like us, you see. We want to live. They WANT to die. And yet, look around for evidence of this. Attempt to demonstrate a case where anyone, Islamic extremist or other, who was willing to see his entire group, the very same group that suffered the grievances he's attempting to redress through violence, utterly destroyed. An individual, traumatized and indoctrinated, carrying out a suicide bombing does not rise to this level. I frequently hear this charge leveled with a particular kind of smug self-certainty at Iran. But yet, with all their power, they seem to be highly circumspect in attacking their enemies, be they Israel or Saudi Arabia. It's almost as if they aren't willing to absorb the certain retaliation that would come from starting a war. As if they actually WERE like us. Human beings, with families and hopes for the future.

Our government and our press regularly tells us things that are not true. It is up to us to think about the claims they are making, and to evaluate them based on facts we know or can logically assume to be in play. The people attempting to shape the discussion, the groups that want to frame the debate, have an agenda. And while your hopes, dreams and desires may coincide with that agenda, they very likely do not. You must take the time to think about what you are being told, and to insist it pass a very basic smell test. You will commonly find you are being manipulated, to your detriment, and that is something you should very much want to avoid.

Liberal Democracy to Authoritarian Police State - The Direct Route

2009-05-17T12:53:00.000-07:00

Republican legislators are outraged that Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called out the CIA for "misleading" her in briefings over the Bush/Cheney torture policies. Of course, their arguments against Pelosi's statements have very little to do with their accuracy or truthfulness in the sense that they are offering actual evidence that she is incorrect or lying. Rather, they are taking the radical position that it is simply beyond the pale for an American lawmaker to call into question the agency's perfection, apparently because to do so is unacceptable, unamerican and unpatriotic.

Eventually, when historians look back to identify those critical points where the American experiment in representative democracy collapsed, this might well be one of them. When an elected representative of the people, with statutory and constitutional intelligence oversight responsibilities, feels it appropriate to take the position that it is unacceptable to question the actions of the Central Intelligence Agency, he is essentially ceding control of Government from elected political leaders to anonymous, unaccountable intelligence bureaucrats. He is saying that the secret police should be allowed to operate without challenge, unfettered, based on the assumption that they will never take a self-serving or counter productive action because, well, they're the good guys.

Especially in light of the excesses of the previous administration, I WANT the co-equal Legislative and Judiciary branches to question every agency, demand information on every program, and exercise active oversight to the point of denying funding for questionable programs and lack of transparency. One of the truly appalling things about the Bush/Cheney years was the way the Republican - led Congress was willing to subjugate their power and authority to that of the White House. These are men and women of immense ego and great power. Under the constitution they had not only the power, but the responsibility to make themselves part of the process. Instead, they chose to act as lap dogs, nothing but a rubber stamp, the saddest kind of flaccid third-world banana republic parliamentary assembly, acting as instructed by the party elders, without any ability to influence events. These partisan hacks sold out their country, and their constituents for nothing but some political party platform. They made a mockery not just of themselves as legislators, but of the institution to which they had the rare privilege of being elected.

And now they want to take their craven, anomalous behavior as servants of the party in the name of executive power and make it, not just the way the system is supposed to work into perpetuity, but to make a powerful, independent, effective Legislative branch into some kind of subversive fifth column. For that does seem to be the takeaway from the mindless arguments they are shrieking at increasing volume.

Don't question the secret police. Let the military make the decisions, not the civilian government. Demand more surveillance, more torture, more incarceration, a militarized border, more and more military spending to support more and more wars. The irony is that on political issues there is very little daylight between the Republican party's official positions and that of the Saddam Hussein government. Just as on social issues, tolerance and diversity, the Republican party and al Quaeda have shockingly parallel beliefs and ideologies.

It's a path I don't believe the majority of Americans want to walk. But with the political cowardice and self-interest of the government and the mindless, arrogant, embarrassing idiocy of the press, there seems to be no way to change direction. We're going to be very unhappy with the nation we're creating, and yet we continue to rush headlong into a dark, authoritarian future...

Incredible Sources

2009-05-17T10:40:00.000-07:00

Let me ask a very quick question here. Why would anyone ask Liz Cheney about her father's actions as Vice President? I'm not certain but I'm pretty sure she was NOT on his staff or involved in his actions around detainee interrogations, particularly as much of that was classified, but even beyond that, has anyone noticed that he's her FATHER? Asking someone if they think their Dad is a war criminal seems unlikely to result in any valuable data.

As if we needed some additional evidence to allow us to understand the mindless and tragically ineffectual nature of our electronic press, this should serve as a milestone, a stake hammered into the very concept of political journalism announcing, for now and ever, it's wheezing demise. Think about this. The Vice President of The United States of America is embroiled in controversy due to his horrific and very likely criminal behavior. And the press thinks it will contribute valuable insight into the issue to interview his DAUGHTER on her views of his actions. And people listen to her speak, and discuss the things she says as if she has any credible standing to address the matter. It's beyond bizarre. And I know you're going to find the outcome shocking, but Cheney's daughter deems his actions to be completely reasonable, utterly justifiable and undoubtedly legal. Now that you know his daughter thinks his actions were correct, you have a much deeper understanding of the entire affair, right?

Of course, as we sadly view this marker on the grave of electronic journalism, we must recognize, and admit to ourselves, that it is too late. The media cannot be repaired - it is far to broken to ever find it's bearings once again. What we can do, what we MUST do, is help the people who pay less attention and still rely, to their great detriment, upon television and cable news for their view of the world understand that this medium is for entertainment purposes only, and that nothing credible can be learned by viewing it. As long as these hucksters and clowns can be cited as authoritative sources, the discourse in this nation will continue to be hijacked by people with money and an agenda, and our aspiration to live in a democracy will slip farther out of reach.

Imagine how refreshing it would be if one of these television news actors reported Liz Cheney's views on her father's actions, and then looked in the camera and said "but then again, what else would we expect her to say", shook his head ruefully and added "for a credible take on Vice President Cheney's actions, let's go to ____________". They could fill in anyone, from someone in government to a former administration official to a constitutional scholar to a torture survivor. It is not difficult to find people who can make a valuable contribution to this conversation. But the suspect's daughter? That's just laughable...

Who Knew?

2009-05-13T12:34:00.000-07:00

So now the torture-loving authoritarian right are all stomping their feet and shouting triumphantly that Democratic legislators including Speaker Pelosi were briefed about the Bush/Cheney torture programs and essentially signed off on them, or at the very least did nothing to stop them.

Please forgive me for being so dense, but I really don't understand this argument, what it means or or what they believe it accomplishes. It seems so simple to me, I'm sure I must be missing something. I believe there is sufficient information available to justify a Justice Department investigation. If Cheney, or Addington, or Bybee are found to have committed a crime, they should be indicted and tried for those crimes. If Nancy Pelosi, or Jay Rockefeller, or Jane Harmen are found to have committed a crime, they should also be indicted and tried. I don't understand how you might wish to live under the rule of law and think anything else.

I suppose they are hoping that Democrats won't want to see other Democrats prosecuted, but I think this exposes the critical difference between a political party and a political ideology. To put it succinctly, a political ideology doesn't automatically lead to a mindless support for a particular party, but rather for politicians and organizations that espouse and advance that ideological agenda. I'm not sure why anyone would support a party no matter what that party did or sought to accomplish, but that certainly doesn't work for me.

There are two interesting things here. First, one has to wonder what the overall strategy among the torture supporters actually is. Their position has been that the interrogation methods weren't torture because the Bush administration lawyers determined them to be legal, so there is no need to investigate what was essentially a "policy disagreement". But if that's the case, why exactly are they crowing so loudly that "Pelosi knew"? If your position is that these actions weren't torture and therefore not criminal behavior, then what point would you be making in trying to demonstrate that your political opponents were complicit? It's oddly inconsistent at best, and incoherent at worst. The other striking thing is that by shrieking that there were also Democrats caught up in these torture authorizations, aren't they essentially leaving themselves in the position of demanding investigations to establish the facts of these allegations? It seems to me they are, and if they are calling for investigations that follow the evidence wherever it leads, then they are taking exactly the same position I am. I'm not sure how you can accuse people of being complicit in a war crime and then turn around and demand there be no investigation.

At the end of the day, I have no idea if ANY lawmaker committed a crime by enabling torture. I don't know what law would apply, and how it might apply. Once again, another reason for prosecutors to investigate. Here's what we can be certain of: War Crimes were committed. By Americans. Under cover of the US Department of Justice. But for me, at least, if an investigation can be mounted, whatever crimes it uncovers should be prosecuted, regardless of the political party membership or ideology of any of the participants. I'd hope that would end this ridiculous charade...

Band Aids

2009-05-09T17:22:00.001-07:00

When was the last time you bought Band Aids? Ok, maybe if you've got kids, that's a dumb question. I don't have kids. I'm not sure when, if ever, I've actually ever bought Band Aids before, but it finally came to pass that I needed to refresh the inventory of Band Aids at mikey HQ.

The first thing I noticed is they don't come in those cool metal boxes anymore. That's a tragedy. Those flip-top metal boxes were by far the coolest thing about Band Aids.

I have had this little metal box of Band Aids at LEAST since I was married, back in 1990. So probably twenty years. Who knows where it came from, or who actually decided to buy it, or why. History, lost in the mists, as represented by a metal box of Band Aids. Cultural touchstone, or pointless search for meaning?

Parsing Obama - AfPak Edition

2009-05-06T16:41:00.000-07:00

In his remarks after meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Zardari, American President Obama said:

"The United States has made a lasting commitment to defeat al-Qaeda, but also to support the democratically-elected sovereign governments of both Pakistan and Afghanistan. That commitment will not waver and that support will be sustained."

Well, OK then. In light of my strongly held opinion that there is no compelling challenge to American security that requires a large US or NATO troop presence in South Asia, a couple of pieces of this statement jump out at you.

First, what has to be considered the good news. Obama specifically says that the US commitment of support is to the "democratically-elected sovereign governments" of Afghanistan and Pakistan. I'd like to think that contains a pointed message that a military coup or other extra-constitutional transfer of power in either nation would be grounds for the US to re-examine it's commitment of support. This is particularly important in Pakistan, where the military has been and remains the overwhelming political and economic power, and cannot be assumed to be a passive or even neutral player in Islamabad. While the Zardari government is fairly weak and the civilian leadership is fractured between the majority Punjabis and the population of Sindh and it's Urdu speakers and quite reasonably might not be expected to survive, it's important in the long term that the military stay out of parliamentary politics and, if possible, reduce their influence on the government in general. If Obama is sending them a message that American aid is strictly premised on their adherence to their own constitution, and if that is a message they take seriously (much less likely), then that will go a long way towards supporting real democracy and the rule of law in Pakistan.

The second point raises more questions than it answers. If the US commitment is to defeat al Quaeda, and nowhere in that statement do we see a reference to a US commitment to defeat the Taliban, then much of this entire discussion is rendered moot. al Quaeda is a small, trans-national extremest organization that uses terrorist attacks against other nations as its primary tactic. Any fight against al Quaeda should clearly be led by intelligence and law enforcement organizations, with the support of small, covert special operations strikes when actionable intelligence is uncovered.

As I have said repeatedly, the Taliban in no way constitutes a security threat to the United States of America. If a small, local, religious-extremist political/militant movement is a threat to American security, then I could list something on the order of twenty or more we should be fighting with Division-level long term military operations. al Quaeda, on the other hand, is inarguably a threat to the United States, and should be confronted and defeated. But what will it accomplish to defeat the Taliban? Asked another way, if we allowed local religious/tribal/ethnic conflicts in South Asia play out the same way we allow them to play out in Asia, Africa and other parts of the world, how exactly would that endanger American security, and if it does, why don't other similar conflicts do the same?

I don't know how it happens, but I have to believe that Barack Obama is smart enough and thoughtful enough to eventually come to understand that there is no value in spending American blood and treasure in South Asia, and withdraws the vast majority of our troops, all of our combat brigades, and starts putting significant conditions on aid to both Pakistan and Afghanistan. From an American Security standpoint, there is nothing special about these nations or this region that makes it necessary, or even slightly prudent, to engage in counter insurgency warfare to support these marginal governments. There is a place for the State Department, for economic development, micro-loans, public health, clean water and entrepreneurial support, but no reason, NONE, to be fighting the Taliban with American soldiers...

No Tolerance for Intolerance

2009-05-05T16:48:00.000-07:00

This is really nice to see. We've gotten so cautious about defining something as wrong, so unwilling to draw a line and say "there is no moral ambiguity here", that we have drifted to a point where everything is just as valid as everything else. And all to our detriment.

No. "Intelligent Design" is not science. Global Climate Change is not only a real threat to all our children, but it follows out of a simple understanding of science. There are things that must be established as facts, and arguing against them should make you a crank at best. When those things are reasonable established tenets of human rights, arguing against them makes you a bigot, and the things you say hate speech.

Which brings us to the UK and their announcement of a small group of people who are not welcome in their country. That short list includes Michael Savage, American Hate Radio host. This is good to see. If Americans cannot find a way to draw a line, to create a limit and say that at some point hatred is destructive to our society, then it falls to other, more enlightened communities to point out the turds floating in the First Amendment's punchbowl. Now don't get me wrong, I don't think we should stifle Michael Savage. I am just deeply disgusted and disheartened that he can sell airtime on a commercial radio station with his Neanderthal ramblings.

But it does seem clear to me that if you put yourself in the position of appealing to the most primitive, ignorant, bigoted and fearful extremists in order to make money, you should expect some rather intensive push-back from civilized nations. And now, today, we see that from those eloquent ladies and gentlemen in the United Kingdom.

It's meaningless, sure. So Savage can't visit jolly old England. I'm sure he'll get over it, and in the near term it provides a thug like him with something else to bleat about. These people thrive on victimhood, and will always look for an opportunity to blame others for what is essentially a reaction, not a proactive act. But it makes me smile, and here's why. When challenged, these kinds of bugs scurry back under their rocks, crying "First Amendment!" as a magical incantation to protect them from bearing responsibility for their destructive and irresponsible statements. It's way past time for people to stand up and identify them for the enemies of civilization, peace and progress they are, and expose them to the purifying sunlight of disgust and mockery.

The more quickly we, as a culture and as a species, reject this kind of divisive, tribal hatred, the sooner we can begin to see genuine peace in the world. And the government of the UK has stepped up and accepted their responsibility to identify a true enemy of civilization. They are to be commended, and I look forward to others doing the same...

The Specter of One Party Rule

2009-05-01T12:32:00.000-07:00

It would be easy to put the National Republican leadership down as brain-dead ideologues, and you would not be that far from an accurate description. But to be honest, they are faced with a very serious dilemma, that is neither simple for them to address effectively, nor would any solution be politically painless were they to find a leader with the courage to enact one.

The basis of their problem is rooted in the nature of the American political system itself. The largest constituency that the vast majority of politicians are required to appeal to is at the state level. Many more run at the district and local level. At this level of granularity, you will find a tendency for people to hold a more consistent set of beliefs and opinions than at the broader, national level. A candidate for US Representative in a district in rural Alabama will have to have a vastly different set of social and political ideologies than a candidate for US Representative in urban Massachusetts would have. In and of itself, this is as it has always been, and is typically not a problem for a national political party or movement. At the National level, a party builds a coalition, employing a significant amount of ideological flexibility across geographic regions in order to represent the largest share of the electorate possible. An excellent example of this is the pro-life and pro-gun "Blue Dog" Democrats in the House and the so-called "centrist" Democrats in the Senate.

The problem for the Republicans has arisen directly out of the Bush/Cheney Presidency. So many of their core issues have been demonstrated to be unworkable, disastrous policies that the people soundly rejected them in both 2006 and 2008. From economic policy to foreign policy, from taxes to immigration, from free-market deregulation to unabashed union-busting, the entirety of the Republican platform has become anathema to a very large majority of Americans who want to see their government work to improve their lives and the lives of their families and neighbors.

But most Republicans in office today were put there by people in the south, the rural Midwest and parts of the Rocky Mountain west who continue to hold ever more narrow and parochial views of what is "American" and what is "socialism", never mind what the word actually means. Overall, in spite of their dominance in certain states and districts, this portion of the population represents only a third of the electorate, and is shrinking at a measurable rate. For any of these elected Republicans to try to take a national leadership role would require them to expose themselves to primary challenges from the far right in their home districts, and probable defeat , either to the Democratic candidate in the general election or the far-right challenger in the primary. The challenge can be summed up like this: The Republican party needs to moderate it's platform and move towards the center in order to be a viable national party, but any individual who does so will be removed from office. When an individual's political survival is pitted against the party's political survival, it takes a rare kind of politician, with a rare kind of courage, to step up to the plate. And not surprisingly, the Republicans haven't found that brilliant, charismatic messiah to lead them out of the wilderness.

Which brings us to Arlen Specter. Now it's arguable that Sen. Specter made the choice he did out of pure political expediency. The remaining Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate is very far right, and likely to nominate the radical Toomey over the moderate Specter. He certainly saw no clear path to another Senatorial term, which is the kind of survival challenge that tends to focus the mind. But even with that, he is an important example of where the Republican party is deficient, and he clearly demonstrates the things they will have to do to regain national political viability. By any measure, Specter has been an effective and powerful Conservative politician. His views and votes, while not as far right as the party might have liked, have been consistently supportive of the worst of the Republican agenda. The fact that he is not sufficiently radical for the right-wing is telling, but one wonders how much he might actually contribute to the progressive agenda. Certainly he was encouraged to make a commitment on health care reform, but overall one wonders if he might make the Blue Dog Democrats look positively socialist by comparison.

Fortunately, the very cravenness of Specter's abandonment of the Republican party might very well serve to moderate his actions, to the benefit of the Obama agenda. He will now have to run as a Democrat in 2010, so he will have to be sufficiently supportive of a progressive agenda to first avoid a Democratic primary challenge, and then to win the Senate seat itself.

The disintegration of the Republican party is not, in general, good news for our political system. A rational and viable opposition party can prevent the party in power from indulging in excesses that might otherwise be inevitable. But that opposition party needs to have a reasonable and viable platform, one that has some appeal and one that might result in better outcomes. To spew madness and discredited policies is neither valuable nor is it supportive of a viable political opposition. If the Republican party cannot find a way to moderate its ideology, indeed, if it continues it's headlong embrace of the most radical rightwing agenda, then another party will have to arise to challenge the Democrats for political leadership. It has become clear that bile, hatred and ignorance will not sustain a national political party in the twenty first century.

Hearts, Minds and Robots

2009-04-30T11:22:00.000-07:00

We know a great deal, and think a great deal about the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Whatever you might think about the wisdom and efficacy of these large-scale military occupations, the implications and consequences of them are broadly and regularly discussed. But there is a third conflict, one that gets reported regularly, but without details, context or critical analysis - the American war in Pakistan.

We have, somehow, created and defined a "robot exception" as a justification for these deadly actions. We seem to believe that there is some kind of rule that says if you use unmanned, remote-controlled aircraft to bomb homes, cars and villages in Pakistan you are exempt from responsibility, or even any requirement to honor the sovereignty of an ally.

Credible reports indicate that in the last year, out of hundreds of Pakistanis killed in unmanned airstrikes, a total of 14 of them were al Quaeda operatives. Indeed, Pakistani intelligence estimates that these remote-controlled attacks have a success rate of six percent. The rest either miss the targets or target the wrong people, typically due to faulty, or worse, purposely misleading intelligence. It seems that our air war on Western Pakistan is most effective in it's support of warlords, drug traffickers andal Quaeda operators themselves who supply fake intelligence in order to goad the United States into attacking their enemies instead of our own.

This, of course, is something you are particularly vulnerable to if you don't have actual troops in the country where you're fighting. You lack much of the ability you might otherwise have to vet and verify the intel you get from the field, and you have human decision-makers in the loop to prevent accidents and manipulation. America's unwillingness to either fight the war or stop the attacks leaves us in an untenable position. Our robotic air attacks are counterproductive on every level - they increase anti-American sentiment among the Tribal populations, they contribute to Taliban and al Quaeda recruitment while they supply our enemies with access to an air force they otherwise wouldn't have. So we have to ask: Why does Obama continue to launch these strikes?

It at least must be considered that he knows something we don't. Perhaps these attacks are truly providing an effective counter to genuine al Quaeda operations, to the extent that the net outcomes are beneficial even in light of the counterproductive fallout from them. Certainly there is no evidence of that, and there are strong reasons to believe that even with good intelligence about an actual operation, drone attacks are more likely to miss or fail than any other method we could use to disrupt that operation. The conclusion I come to is Obama's reasons are simpler, and more craven. There would be some political exposure created if he ended these attacks, especially in light of his statements that Pakistan is the key battle in this fight. The political pressure would not be that great, but as long as there is no political pressure to end the Predator attacks, he keeps his strong, activist national security credibility without significant downside.

This robotic air war in Pakistan is killing hundreds, ruining thousands of lives and turning wide swaths of the Pakistani Tribal population into our enemies. It is wrong, inhuman, nothing but the robotic mass murder of proud, poor rural people who have no defense against it. If you were sickened and saddened by the depths that Bush and Cheney sunk to in order to drive their modern imperial agenda, at least we knew well they were barbarians, and their actions, no matter how brutal and authoritarian fell into a spectrum we expected of them. There is something sadder, and more shameful, that a man like Barack Obama continues those murderous policies for political expediency's sake.

Looking Forward to Prosecutions

2009-04-29T12:11:00.000-07:00

President Obama keeps saying he prefers to "look forward rather than backward" whenever he is asked about the possibility of investigating and prosecuting the architects of the Bush/Cheney administration's torture policies. As clearly brilliant as he is, does he actually not realize that doesn't make the slightest bit of sense? Does he understand that investigating violations of US and International law in no way prevents him and his administration from "looking forward"?

This very construction is odd, forced and awkward. You never hear any one say "I prefer looking forward rather than backward" when it comes to prosecuting fraud, corruption, larceny or even bank robbery or murder. That's because there is no way that investigating and prosecuting crimes is accurately described as "looking backwards", and in fact have nothing whatsoever to do with whatever direction you choose to look. We have laws. Enforcing them is something we do. We have government policies and agendas. Setting and pursuing them is another thing we do. No one has ever seriously made the case that one interferes with another.

"Looking forward rather than backward" sounds to me like nothing so much as "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here". Clever, facile and utterly nonsensical. Repeat it enough and it will become accepted, received wisdom, inarguable and irrefutable. Marketing 101. And it very often seems to be an effective tactic - but only as long as critical voices don't ask obvious questions. And once again, there are no critical voices asking obvious questions. That a specious and nonsensical statement like this can go unquestioned is not, I suppose, particularly surprising. But it does raise the question of just how blatantly false the statements of America's political leadership will be allowed to become before someone asks the most simple of questions?

"Mr. President, you have stated on many occasions that on the issue of American War Crimes, you prefer to look forward instead of backwards. Can you explain to the American people how refusing to investigate and prosecute criminal acts prevents you from looking forward? Because I'm at a loss to explain it to my readership".

That's all it would take. Oh, it would certainly have to be asked more than once, but if the most facile nonsense can be offered by a democratically elected government as explanation for the most radical policies, then there is nothing left to prevent them from doing anything they want. The final check on arbitrary government power is the requirement that they provide some kind of coherent framework for the actions they choose. If they can do something like this, to the long-term detriment of the United States of America for purely short-term political reasons and explain it away with slogan, a meaningless mantra, a mere incantation, the people can no longer expect their government to act with their best interests foremost.

Third Base!

2009-04-27T14:28:00.000-07:00

I know. It's a very serious subject.

But Abbot and Costello have changed the way I look at the World Health Organization forever.

One has to wonder - do headline writers wake up at night snickering?

All the News that's Fit to...Digitally Distribute

2009-04-26T12:23:00.000-07:00

Amid much sound and fury, the newspaper industry as it has existed for a few hundred years is changing into something different. Different both in the manner it delivers it's content, and perhaps more significantly, in the nature of that content itself. In a sense, none of this would be particularly noteworthy were it not for the question of the economic viability of the newspaper companies themselves. The key questions that need to be asked are:

1. Is this a terrible catastrophe or the natural evolution of another industry in the digital age?

2. While the near-term economic disruptions in the news-gathering and publishing industries have quite demonstrably had a profoundly negative impact on quality of reporting in traditional media, will the consumer suffer overall for the radical changes taking place in the newspaper publishing sector?

3. Are there genuine dangers to society and even democracy in the decline of newspaper publishing?

In order to answer those questions, we need to think more critically about what a newspaper is, what it's role in the economy and the culture is, and just how unique or irreplaceable that role might be. When you think about it, a newspaper isn't even mostly about news. A newspaper is a collection of information - local, national and global news, weather, sports, stocks, advertisements, features, opinion, movie times, obituaries - virtually anything that might be of interest to some portion of the readership. This clearly came to be what we think of as a newspaper because for well over a hundred years that was the only way to make this information available to a wide readership at a reasonable cost.

As that is no longer the case, we are free to re-imagine the news delivery model. There's plenty of sports, weather, movie times, TV listings and opinion available on the Internet. No one can make a credible case that the newspapers did a better job of classified advertising than eBay and Craigslist . And in a broadly connected world, is anyone particularly happy reading brief news articles, lacking in both depth and context, about events that happened yesterday?

But caution is in order at this point. When we ask the question "is there anything a newspaper can do better than an Internet connection?", we arrive at the obvious answer that succinctly explains the precipitous decline of the newspaper business. But perhaps we are asking the wrong question. Because it has always been bundled together, we are very quick to conflate news DELIVERY with news GATHERING. As we de -couple the various types of information and deliver it through increasingly specialized websites and blogs funded at best by display advertising, it is reasonable to ask, amid the decline of the for-profit news sector, where the source information will come from. If there's not a bureau in Beijing, will we only get our information on China from Xinhua ? From Congo to Kenya to Capetown, what will be the motivation to provide honest and in-depth Africa coverage? Will it fall to the corporations there to exploit the resource wealth of the African continent to provide this information through their marketing communications shops? It's true that we've seen compelling news from citizen-journalist sources like Kevin Sites and David Axe, and truly worthwhile and effective news-gathering from new media sources like Firedoglake, The Washington Independent, The Huffington Post, even The Daily Beast.

The important question, and one that remains unanswered at this point, is whether there will be enough people, enough opportunity and enough resources to support a broader, more diversified and less corporate news-gathering sector. If there is, newspapers will not be missed at all - the new news will be faster, smarter, more timely, in much greater depth and infinitely richer. The question is all the more important because there can be no doubt that traditional newspaper publishing will not survive the current technologically - driven upheavals. They will be gone in our lifetimes, a kind of historical oddity similar to the 8-track tape and the three martini lunch.

For those who question the "journalistic independence" of these new, smaller, more independent and less accountable news-gathering organizations, while the question is reasonable, it is meaningless. If journalistic "integrity" and balance is what has led the currently dominant media to a place where both sides of any discussion are ALWAYS equal, where we find global warming denial and proponents of government sanctioned torture given equal time to offer patently false, incorrect and misleading coverage, then the very concept died long ago. We can hope for it's revival in the future, but it is not the decline of the newspapers or the rise of Internet news organizations that brought about the current shoddy state of journalism.

It's very important to observe that, at some point, traditional businesses will have to learn to recognize a fundamental evolution within their industry, and instead of fighting to preserve the status quo until it's too late for them to make the profound changes necessary to survive, they will embrace the new paradigms and at least TRY to maintain a leadership role in the new order. The music industry should serve as the classic example of a dinosaur after the asteroid, and as such should provide a cautionary tale to any newly-disrupted industry. With the advent of effective compression (MP3 files) and a delivery/storage/playback mechanism (computers connected to the Internet), there was no longer any NEED for music to be tied to a playback media. And desperately fearful of losing a major source of revenue, the music industry refused to accept this obvious fact and argued for years that even if there was no need for the CD, it was somehow to be perceived as desirable to have it. The market ignored their obviously flawed argument, even when they sought to criminalize the natural technological evolution of their industry's delivery model.

It seems inarguable that when technology provides some fundamental change in either the things people choose to buy or the way in which they buy them, the people who sell those things are faced with an existential challenge. If we have learned anything, we have learned that people will not be bullied or coerced into maintaining the status quo, but rather will support those people and organizations that provide what they want to buy and deliver it the way the consumers want it delivered. To do anything other than embrace the new market reality is to consign one's organization or even an entire industry to the tar pits. There will always be winners and losers, but to refuse to participate in the discussion only guarantees a quicker demise.

All this Talk about Torture is TORTURE!

2009-04-24T12:16:00.000-07:00

I know. There are a lot of other things we need to think about and discuss, but the fact that the American government openly sanctioned torture is a very big, very evil thing, and it's kind of hard to get past it. So, allow me to offer two more thoughts on torture.

First, all this conversation about a "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" or some kind of independent inquiry modeled on the 9/11 Commission has got to stop. It's nothing but cover, a fall back position for the apologists and enablers of these criminal acts. First, the thought of an American "Truth and Reconciliation" commission is sickening. Typically, this kind of process is used when a democracy emerges from the rubble of a dictatorship. It is not one legitimate government passing judgement on it's predecessor, but rather one SYSTEM of government trying to find a way to deal with the outrages and excesses of a previous system. It is an early flexing of democracy's muscles, offering transparency and a chance for the people who participated in the crimes of the previous regime to publicly reject those methods and make a positive contribution to the new government.

Here in America, we have had the rule of law for centuries. We aren't trying to heal the wounds of an authoritarian dictatorship's savagery in the name of power. We have continuity, we have laws, and we have processes for investigating violations of those laws.

A 9/11 type commission would be even worse. There would be a "bipartisan" investigation where all the obfuscations, false "debates" and facile justifications would be presented right alongside the brutal crimes themselves. At the end, a volume would be published, "closure" would be attained and we could move on, secure in the knowledge that...What, exactly? That crimes were committed, discussed, analyzed and ultimately ignored. A beacon of freedom and liberty are we.

Nope. The answer is as simple and obvious today as it always has been. You do what the law of the land requires. You have an investigation, which in this case, as members of the Department of Justice are compromised and under suspicion, would be run out of a Special Prosecutor's office. At the end of the investigation, the Special Prosecutor presents his or her evidence to the Grand Jury. If the Grand Jury finds it persuasive, they hand down indictments and the accused have their day in court. Not hard to grasp, not hard to do, certainly not "political retribution". Just dusty, dry laws, followed where the evidence takes them. We should ask for no more, but we should expect no less.

Second, after the revelation that KSM was waterboarded 183 times, let us never again hear any discussion of the odious "ticking time bomb" scenario as justification for inhuman behavior. It is clear that no act of torture, no matter how barbarous, can be expected to yield even the most inaccurate of results in a timely manner. If our damp friend Khalid Sheik Mohammed HAD known about an imminent attack, it is now unquestionable that he could have held out for the day or two necessary for that operation to go forward.

Looks like the bloodthirsty wing of the Republican Party will have to find a new justification to indulge their sweaty fantasies of blood and terror. I suppose that's the problem with actually living out your fantasies. The myth of America's invincible military might died as soon as it was tested in the Mesopotamian sands, and the Jack Bauer - reinforced mythology of using torture to save Western Civilization is exposed as the ridiculous imaginary construct it always has been. Perhaps the lesson they will learn is that they are better off when grownups are actually in control...

Hey, wait! Torture WORKS!

2009-04-23T17:49:00.000-07:00

What? This is it? This is the argument? Uh uh. This is weak sauce. Hell, babe, bank robbery "Works" as long as it generates an income stream. Whether or not torturing people works is not, and should not, be any part of this discussion. That's not the point. The question is infinitely simpler than that. The important question is whether we can adopt the brutal, authoritarian tactics of our enemies and still, at the end of the day, claim to have "won".

We can't. Winning means "walking alone though the combat zone and come out with your soul untouched" as none other than Bruce Springsteen told us oh so many years ago. This is important, and it's important to understand the terms offered on the bloody clay of this field. We cannot win if we become something coarse and foul, if we cannot stand tall and say that we never compromised our beliefs and values in order to fight an enemy with neither. And the Americans who are so quick to toss away the things that make us right are no different from bin Laden and his criminal ilk, who recognize no limits, for whom winning the battle is more important than winning the war, no matter what the cost. I despise you all.

I had lunch with a friend the other day. He doesn't follow politics, or news for that matter, but he was quick to tell me that he had "...a hard time feeling sorry for these people..." who we tortured. That's what were up against, in a sense. People who never really considered a constitutional issue, who were never "detained", never found any tendency toward authoritarian government to be troubling to them, as it never affected their lives. People who cannot feel empathy for anyone our government says are "evildoers". After all, didn't they kill 3000 Americans in 2001? "They" seem to expand infinitely to fit the requirments of our fear - mongering government, and nobody seems to be willing to take time out from American Idol to do the minimal research required to find they are not just lying, but manipulating.

Chris Hayes says "...the torturers are winning [the argument]..."

President Obama says he only wants to "look forward, not backward" as if somehow investigating hideous crimes that America has ALWAYS stood against is in itself some kind of obstructive behavior. What madness, what Orwellian doublespeak do we find ourselves swimming in?

It's time for us to speak with an unusually focused clarity. It does not matter if torture "worked". For ANY definition of "worked". It cannot matter, it cannot be ALLOWED to matter, it cannot ever be a standard by which a government - sanctioned torture policy is evaluated. The answer must be, now and for all time, regardless of the argument, "Who Cares?"

There are nearly infinite arguments I could make to support this position. I could point you to Nuremburg. The trials of Japanese war criminals, the actions of KGB and STASI and NorKor interrogators. I could tell you about all the times we stood, nearly alone, and told dictators and secret police and sick bastards from Chile to the fucking Hanoi Hilton that you might choose this path, but a very large part of the reason we will BURY YOU is that this is a path we will not go down. We will live up to our stated values, our beliefs and our constitution, and we will win because we are right, for fucks sake, and any mentally challenged nine-year-old can recognize that very simple fact.

Except we're not anymore. Except in fighting them we've become them. Except that it's bad enough that in a time of fear and confusion when our country suffered what so many countries have suffered orders of magnitude worse for hundreds of years, we chose to turn our backs ont the values and convictions we hold so dear, the very beliefs and rule of law that we held up as a beacon, a shining light of hope to people around the world, and we took actions we could recant and try to seek absolution for. Except there is a small but significant membership in the American electorate that chooses any form of expediency over beliefs, any short-term solution that might feel good over the pillars of American values that made us different, who chose and continue to choose the same behaviors as our enemies. The cannot see that to become what we are fighting is to lose the fight. They seem to think that there is, what, some nobility, or worse, efficacy in acting in the same way as those very thugs we have been calling out for decades? I am sick to my soul.

18 and Life to Go

2009-04-21T18:29:00.000-07:00

So American Federal Prosecutors are going to ask the court to imprison Abdiwali Abdiqadir Muse for the rest of his life. I don't know, maybe I'm just "objectively soft on piracy", but this seems neither fair nor appropriate. This is a desperately poor kid from Somalia. I'm not sure you or I or the Federal Prosecutor has any REAL understanding of his life circumstances nor the things he's had to see and deal with in his short life.

While he certainly committed a crime and needs to be dealt with in a criminal process, is it really the best we can do to lock him up for the next seventy years for the crime of being born Somali? This is reminiscent of nothing more than John Walker Lindh, the so-called "American Taliban". At what point does justice stop and pure vindictiveness begin? Where does mercy, compassion and understanding come into play? What is gained by throwing away a life that may very well be infinitely recoverable? How are we served by retribution, when mere justice would suffice?

It just seems to me that there is a wide range of acceptable outcomes in this case, and in many similar cases. And putting a hungry, uneducated Somali teenager in prison forever isn't within that range. If this kid serves two years or eight years, it's possible that there might still be a future for him, and a sad, sordid story might have an outcome that isn't simply tragedy. I have been saddened in recent years as our justice system has gone from something that supports our civilization to something that demeans it. It's become more about vengeance and hate than about justice or even anything even resembling rehabilitation. It's almost as if we don't want to help people avoid criminal behavior - as if repeatedly and severely punishing them feeds something dark within our souls.

Some things are not overwhelming in their complexity. Some things are easy to look at and say "this would be right, and this would be wrong". Some things are clear and simple, and just because we CAN do something does not mean it is something we SHOULD do. Justice can be served simultaneously with civilization, and we can clearly tell that something has gone horribly wrong when in the course of administering justice we demean ourselves as a society...

The Limits of Executive Power

2009-04-19T10:26:00.000-07:00

Amid the revelations of a particularly systematic American kind of barbarity and depravity we find in the DoJ Office of Legal Counsel justifications for torturing other human beings, perhaps a larger question needs to be discussed, and possibly even resolved.

Our President has made the unequivocal statement that the front line people, the CIA field agents and their military partners who actually committed the war crimes described in these appalling documents will not be prosecuted nor held to account in any way as long as they were acting in good faith based upon assurances from the Department of Justice that these acts were legal. Now, this may actually be good policy - at least one could make the case that in this type of situation you should prosecute the architects of the policy, not the front line soldiers - but let's set this aside for now. You could also shake your head and ask how anyone involved could have genuinely believed "in good faith" that these ancient, barbaric acts of torture were suddenly and magically legal based on a few documents produced under obvious political pressure, but that's a conversation we can have later.

Here's the BIG question. Under our system of government, can the elected executive simply decide, on his own and based on no law nor constitutional provision, what criminals are prosecuted and what criminals are not? From what provision does this authority derive? Under what statute can the President issue this edict? It doesn't seem that he's granting amnesty - it seems he would have to say what individuals are being granted executive clemency - and typically he would at least wait until after the criminal prosecution has run it's course (see Libby, I. Lewis) to issue the order of clemency.

But immunity? Can he do that? Certainly the DoJ could offer various forms of conditional immunity in order to get the testimony they needed to convict other, more heinous perpetrators of these crimes, but that's not what we have here. This is a sweeping statement that it is the policy of the United States of America to refuse to prosecute our own torturers and war criminals. One wonders how this mechanism might even work. If an individual Federal or State Prosecutor undertook to investigate and prosecute these horrific crimes of which so much detail is now known, would the President threaten those Prosecutors with prosecution for violating his policy? How far have we drifted from the rule of law when not only is law consistently subverted by policy and political considerations, but our democratically elected President can issue monarchical edicts unsupported by statute or constitution.

For that matter, what would the official reaction of the United States, not to mention the United Nations be if Hu Jintao issued this very same edict. Would the world simply shrug in acceptance that the Chinese torturers acted "in good faith"? Or would the world issue broad statements of denunciation, decrying the authoritarian Chinese government's unwillingness to abide by the rule of law?

It just seems so simple to me. There is plenty of evidence of a crime. Under International Treaty obligations, if not simple integrity and commitment to the rule of law, the United States is required to investigate these allegations. And if there is enough evidence, which there most certainly is, to prosecute them. Now, all hyperbole aside, all that says is the people will have their day in court. If it is the case that the OLC memos authorizing the specific inhumane acts exonerate anyone who followed their guidance in good faith, than it seems obvious that the court would find them not guilty. At least there would have been some process, and the rule of law would be upheld.

Instead, we have a President who has assumed for himself the authority to determine which lawbreakers are tried and which shall go scot-free. This is an unprecedented overreach - it's hard to say that any power the Bush/Cheney cabal claimed for the White House was any more blatantly and illegally arbitrary than this one. President Obama needs to shrug his shoulders and tell the people of the United States and the world that it is not his role, that courts and judges make these decisions, and that he, along with the people, will live with the findings of that court. It is the American way. This is something much less...

The Blood Red Tide is Dimmed

2009-04-13T18:36:00.000-07:00

Pirates. Snipers. Head shots. We win.

A sex murder in Tracy, but the perp is a woman.

Some whack job thinks the President can just order firearms confiscation and he shoots three cops.

Another guy who couldn't find a way to live in this land of inequality shoots Oakland cops to stay out of prison.

Minnesota's representative from the 6th District calls for armed insurrection.

And the people trying to solve the financial crisis seem more interested in protecting and enriching the bankers than doing the right thing for America, not to mention the whole world.

Yep. It's unraveling. We're seeing it now. It's slow, and there are times when something happens to make us feel hopeful, but overall, big picture? It's all getting away from us. With hundreds of thousands of American Imperial soldiers on the ground throughout the middle east and south Asia, in order to expand our fight with poor rural people in India, we use robots. Someone explain to me how that exonerates us in a way that manned aircraft would not?

And accelerating the unraveling, the American opposition party has embraced a mindless, racist, tribal, anti-intellectual kind of populist ideology, struggling mightily to prevent the elected American political leadership from diverting American funds to help Americans in need. The cognitive dissonance required to cling to a discredited ideology against one's own best interests is stunning in it's scope.

The things that must be done to save the economy, maintain an American quality of life, reverse the ravages of climate change and create a peaceful, prosperous world are as obvious as they are necessary. And so, the guardians of the status quo make certain that it is taboo to even discuss them. Reduce the defense budget? Impossible! Place a cost on the negative externalities of carbon-based energy? Not if it costs me one red cent! Restructure the Financial sector? Probably can't win that one - it seems they have "invested" in the political leadership to the point where they own them.

If you step back from the day-to-day news cycle, it's plain to see that things are coming apart, and, at least for Americans, are not going to improve any time soon. The lunatics have been running the asylum for so long that to question their madness is to see them immediately close ranks and shout rationality down. And then they gibber and dance, shouting incoherently and smearing their feces on the future. And, like Alice through the looking glass, we must pretend this is exactly how things should be...

Building a Metaphor: Obama is Lucy, Immigration Reform Legislation is the Football...

2009-04-09T17:26:00.000-07:00

And the Republican Party is Charlie Brown. Seriously, this is a fascinating exercise in clinging to an unpopular and discredited ideology and wondering why you're not competitive in national elections. It's so blind and mindless it's funny.

Why would President Obama choose to start another legislative debate on immigration? After all, if we learned anything the last time it's that the terrified old white guys could prevent any significant legislation when times were perceived as good - in this economy there's just no hope of getting past their racial hatred and demagoguery to do something either rational or productive.

But just maybe, that's the point. Maybe, from a political perspective, the whole point is to bring out the most irrational, the most clearly racially bigoted, the most spittle - spewing category of bottom dwelling wingnuts right about the time the Republican party will be making it's appeal for votes from something beyond it's white southern conservative christianist "base". The party has no chance of controlling these people, or preventing them from poisoning the well of popular support.

As a strategy it makes me smile, because the Republican party has been content to encourage the most rabid, loathsome, extreme fringe of their party when it suited their needs, and then ignore them and try to act like statesmen when that wing of the party caused them to be uncomfortable. But here's the funny part, the paradox of deploying the craziest bigots in your constituency to do your bidding. They are so dependent on their base ideological dog whistles that they cannot be controlled by anyone, to whatever detriment to your political strategy that might result. And that means that they can not only be deployed by your political allies, but your political enemies have that same control over them.

Time the call for legislation on their pet issue just right, and you'll have the most foul bigots spewing the most evil hatred at the very time you'd like to appeal to that constituency for votes.

And in case the demographics are unfamiliar to you, you just cannot win a national election with your support limited to southern white christianist bigots. Oh sure, you can win local elections, and even regional elections. But you have given up any hope of representing a national electorate.

My man Obama has not pleased me on the constitutional issues, but as far as the political process goes, he's doing a fine job of keeping the worst elements out of office. So maybe that's enough.

For now...

2009-03-22T12:59:00.000-07:00

A blog that I like to read has in the last few months become almost unreadable due to a numbingly endless series of posts by so-called "trolls" espousing right wing points and positions. The main problem stems from the grinding repetition of stupid "talking points" and a particularly arrogant and triumphalist tone, encouraged by an apparently irresistible urge on the part of the readership to argue with them, no matter how painfully stupid the topic.

But lately it's occurred to me that there's another thing these "trolls" do that I find grating. They start at least half their posts by referring to "you libs". Now, I am completely comfortable with the shorthand description of my general political outlook as "liberal". I've always preferred it to the more weaselly "progressive", which was mostly adopted because the political right was able to successfully demonize the word "liberal".

But while I can broadly be characterized as a liberal, I, and most of my political fellow-travelers, are not in lockstep on every position when you begin to speak in terms of specific issues. In fact, unlike the more doctrinaire "conservatives" (the most ardent of which most certainly are NOT), you will find a very wide set of opinions among the people who populate the left-of-center continuum. In some areas I am very liberal, in others, much less so.

But in thinking about it, it occurs to me that definitions like this are essentially asking the wrong question. It's as if you and I were having a conversation and I suddenly left my chair, floated into the air and flew around the room, and you asked me what I could see from up there. The right question would be what caused me to be able to fly? Politically, this is also the right question. What informs my positions, what is it that brings me to these positions?

The thing I find most appalling about the extreme right wing in American political thought is their utter lack of compassion and their undervaluation of their community. Whether it is the deaths of a hundred thousand Iraqi women and children or their neighbor's loss of their house due to their lack of health insurance, the right wing refuses to endorse a position that could prevent either. It seems to me that my positions are mostly based on compassion and community. America is going to spend a certain amount of money. I'd like to see that money spent to help Americans be healthy, educated and secure. I'd like to see that money spent more on raising people up and improving their lives than on killing them.

If they were truly opposed to ALL spending equally, then I'd have more respect for their position. It would still be insane, but at least it would be consistent. Instead, they seem to have no problems with international military adventures and unspeakably massive spending on what we have euphemistically come to call "defense". But spending American money to help Americans, whether they be sick, out of work, homeless or old is something they continue to rail against, and seek at every opportunity to obstruct. I don't understand this sort of thinking - it just cannot be reconciled. Just as the same people who feel it is within their purview to control a woman's personal medical and reproductive decisions because to abort a fetus is killing, and killing is never acceptable are the ones who rabidly support wars, occupations and capital punishment. They should call themselves the party of cognitive dissonance.

It is beyond frustrating to even have to have this argument, let alone endlessly repeated, over and over. How do you argue with someone who is taking a position against their own better interests? How do you overcome this kind of indoctrination, that causes people to passionately support those who would see them lose everything and die hard rather than offer them a hand? What can you say? President Obama has said some hopeful things, but it is clear that there are powerful forces deploying to resist his attempt to make America a more compassionate place. I am not, frankly, optimistic.

Bashing al Bashir - Is it Time for Real Action in Sudan?

2009-03-16T14:37:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I get it. Military intervention has not exactly yielded the kind of benefits it's advocates so glibly promise. Iraq was the hideous disaster it always had to be, and Afghanistan is nothing but incoherent, mindless violence and corruption with no benefit to the parties doing the bleeding. Israel did not exactly cover herself with glory in Lebanon and Gaza, and the only lesson little Georgia learned was not to pick a fight with the biggest kid in the neighborhood.

I know. I DO get it. Except.

Except I always wonder what difference a Ranger battalion might have made in Rwanda. I wonder about Kenya, if some determined men under arms could have brought a halt to the bloodletting. I think it's fair to say that NATO did some good in ending the violence in the Balkans.

But most of all I wonder about Sudan. It is the Sudanese government enabling the crimes, perpetuating the horror, both ordering and allowing the brutal torment of the non-Arab ethnic minorities under the guise of fighting the anti-government rebel movements like JEM.

Were it not for the actions of the Sudanese government, there might be some viable options for the international community to intervene on behalf of the helpless people dying hard by the thousands in the sprawling refugee camps on both sides of the border, the victims of rape and murder and disease and starvation that are the whole point of the discussion. So logic seems to dictate that any first step towards addressing the suffering would require some methodology for taking the option to participate in the conflict out of the hands of the Sudanese Leadership. And if somehow one believed that additional international legitimacy was necessary before undertaking such drastic measures, the International Criminal Court in The Hague has handed down an indictment against al Bashir for Crimes Against Humanity. It seems as if the time for action, if not well past, has come.

There are a wide array of options. From a no-fly zone to the complete destruction of the Sudanese Air Force, the US military has the power to act in a coercive manner to force Bashir to behave within international norms. Certainly, widespread bombing of Omdurman would not serve the US or the International Community well, but very selective targeting of palaces and military assets would very quickly result in the Bashir Regime's cooperation, however reluctant.

I'd also like to see a few companies of Rangers set up a Forward Operating Base in the area of the Refugee camps and exact a violent toll from the militias when they kill and rape. I realize that any combat deployment of American troops is necessarily controversial, and it may be nothing more than my own frustrated loathing, but it just doesn't seem beyond the pale to me. At the current levels of deployment and operational tempo, the judicious application of a very limited set of American military assets to begin to put an end to this rapacious thug's reign of terror seems to be to be a valuable and honorable use of military force.

Done right, I don't think we'd see a lot of blowback. Sure, the al Quaedas of the world would spin it as another occupation of another Islamic nation, but Sudan's neighbors and the international aid community would counter that with a different viewpoint altogether.

I am not a "foreign interventionist" by temperament, and I remain opposed to American international adventures, but at the same time, common sense seems to dictate that if this incredible capability we have squandered so much treasure to develop can be used to do some good, on balance, that would be a very good thing.

Filling the Republican Leadership Vacuum - It's the Votes, Stupid

2009-03-08T16:14:00.000-07:00

Back in late 2004, when George W. Bush was re-elected handily, when Republicans dominated all three branches of government and wielded that power ruthlessly and arrogantly, he famously promised to "spend his political capital". And boy howdy, he sure did that. Two years later the Republican party was on the run, their policies discredited, their leaders involved in the seediest of corruption scandals and their popularity at historic lows.

Two years after that, the best they could come up with as a candidate for the highest office in the land was an aging mental defective former fighter pilot and POW who couldn't solve basic math problems, let alone huge national problems; and a brassy, undereducated trailer-park "hockey mom" who wielded her ignorance with pride, for whom all problems were simple because SHE was undeniably simple.

Now the Democrats hold the presidency and a substantial majority in both houses of congress. The people trust and support them as they offer up bold new and innovative solutions to the myriad problems created by both malicious action and malicious inaction by the previous leadership. And the Republicans find themselves at the nadir of their power, able to count only a small and shrinking minority of southern whites, bigots and cranks among their determined followers. So they have set out to find a new leader, someone who can attract support and lead them once again into the halls of, well, if not power then at least respectability.

You can describe this search in all sorts of terms, and in all sorts of directions, but what it comes down to is really simple. In American politics, you need votes. With votes you can raise funds, get attention, with supporters you can get your message heard, allow people to reach out and recruit more supporters, and of course, at the end, that leads to winning elections. And no matter what else you do, if you are a politician and you don't win elections, you are not going to have much influence on the policies of the country at any level.

Like a spoiled child, the Republican party refuses to acknowledge that they cannot have it both ways. They cannot cling to their obsolete and discredited policies and expect the people who are harmed by those policies to support them. They will have to walk away from the more extreme far-right wing political positions in order to attract new voters to their (revised) message. The belief that they can win over young people, people of color, immigrants, gay people and women, for example, if only they could better articulate their message is absurd on it's face. In fact, it's safe to assume that if they could better and more clearly articulate the policies that they wish to implement, they would LOSE even more voters than they have so far.

The American people are not afraid of the word "Socialism". It's not a particularly scary word. If a descent into "Socialism" is something the people should fear, then the Republicans need to articulate the reason. Merely invoking the word is silly. The people would like help, help with jobs and education and health care and infrastructure. They are not desperately afraid of the government, or of their upcoming tax bill, or that some jackbooted Brownshirt UN operative will come in their house and take away their gun. These are simply not day-to-day realistic concerns, and to make them a major part of your platform not only makes you sound hopelessly out of touch, it causes people with other, genuine fears and concerns to tune you out. You are not talking to them - they know it - it's time for you to admit it.

Every year the demographics of the American population changes. And with every passing year, the Republican message gets more and more irrelevant to people's real lives. With every turn of the calendar's page the Republicans sound more like a party at war with it's own people and less a party that can make people's lives better. Without a MAJOR overhaul, the worst news of all for the Republican leadership is that this is as good as it's likely to get. The Republican brand is in free-fall, and the only thing that can arrest the plunge into historical irrelevance is the courage of the Republican party leadership. Something, from Michael Steele to Eric Cantor to Rush Limbaugh the party has shown no evidence of.

It's really pretty simple. When you can count on 30% of the American population to vote for your candidates, you cannot win elections. So you have to ask that missing 20-25% what they want in a party. And you'll have to move toward the center to provide what they want from you. The funny thing is that, while the right-wing extremists will howl and stomp and threaten from the pulpit, they will still vote Republican. Just as the Democrats have for decades just taken for granted that the far left would end up voting for them even if the party gave them nothing, nary a crumb, the Republicans COULD accept the shouting and stop pandering to Christianist terrorists. They could simply cease to have a position on abortion, homosexuality, on morality in general as the government has no stake in these issues, and people do not need the government to criminalize perfectly reasonable activities like love and marriage. The Republican party could purge itself of the bigots and racists that have found a home there with codewords and dogwhistles to people who hate. It seems that we may have reached a tipping point where there is just not enough hate to fuel a national political party. See the Oval Office for evidence.

The choice for the Republican party is as stark as it is obvious. And the fact that they refuse to face it only makes it loom larger in the minds of the incredibly shrinking conservative constituency. They can cling to the same messages, the same policies, the same divisive narrative of exclusion and hate, and they can simply cease to have a voice in the national dialog. The other option is surprisingly simple, but I, as a Liberal in the original sense of the term, hope they remain blinded to the path of reasonableness. By backing away from social wedge issues and sticking to a political/economic message, they would quickly increase their standing in the community. Many people who were driven to the Obama Democrats in November would start to return to their Republican roots. And that, ultimately, would not be a good thing.

The train wreck has been, and continues to be, grand and amusing theater. Let's hope they continue to ditto behind Rush, and bask in the hate and fear of Cantor and the ignorance of Boehner. Because this is just the way I want it to be...

Johnny Comes Marching Home

2009-02-28T12:47:00.000-08:00

16 Months. 19 Months. 23 Months. I don't really care. All we've heard for close to six years is talk about drawdowns, discussions of withdrawals, standing up when they stand down and vague promises of troop reductions at some future point when we'd made enough "progress on the ground". Which, of course, was never defined.

I'm not concerned about the "residual force" of 35-50,000 American troops that Obama tells us are necessary. We've seen nothing but increases in the number of American servicemen and women deployed to the theater since the buildup to the invasion. The thought of having our troop presence reduced to under 50,000 fills me with joy. In theory, the SOFA takes care of the rest.

I am somewhat concerned about they way the withdrawals are structured-that is, the process is so heavily back loaded. That's an indication of some substantial doubts that the withdrawal process will proceed without major complications, and it leaves open the possibility of delays in force reductions that would not be so likely if significant troops have already been withdrawn. But at this point I'm willing to offer President Obama the benefit of the doubt, accepting his commitment to a complete American military withdrawal from Iraq by the end of 2011, as per the Status of Forces Agreement in place.

And for this process to be completed, it has to start somewhere. It starts with an order from the Civilian executive to bring the troops out, and a deadline for having that accomplished. So now, finally, after six years, a genuine end to this insane, wasteful and tragic war has begun. That's a great deal more than we've gotten before, and is cause for real joy and celebration.

The larger question, mostly left unasked, is why exactly we can't just bring all our troops home now. What are they doing there that is so vital to our interests? If you set aside the mad neocon desire to have a dominant American military presence on the oilfields to ensure that other nations didn't choose to do something with their oil that we wouldn't approve of, then it becomes a real valid question. The disturbing thing about any potential answer is that none of them explains this use of American forces in terms of defending America's own interests. Are the troops there to defend Israel? Sure seems like Israel hasn't had a great deal of trouble "defending" herself. Are they there to ensure free navigation of international waters, including the Persian Gulf and the Straits of Hormuz? When has that ever required ground forces? Are they there to play a more symbolic role, keeping governments as diverse as Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt from behaving in a manner the American leadership deems detrimental? If the American military needs entire divisions already on the ground in a given region in order to intimidate the nations of that region, we've squandered a lot of Trillions building the thing.

Certainly, part of it is guilt. The American invasion unleashed the forces that led to the Iraqi Civil War, the ethnic cleansing, the killings and the destruction. If America turns her back, the reasoning goes, and more killing results, that too will be on America's head. But while it's true that America is responsible for the state of affairs we see today, how long must she continue to police the Iraqis? When will the actions they choose to take be accepted as THEIR decisions, and not a result of an admittedly criminal and misguided occupation?

The shape of the larger outcome is mostly decided, at this point. Iraq will not be a democracy, not in the way the US or France is a democracy. She will be ruled by the tyranny of a Shi'a majority, dominated by a corrupt political party heavily influenced by Tehran, with an increasingly bellicose separatist group operating autonomously in the North. The Kurds are a special problem, completely surrounded, as they are, by nations and governments that fear and loathe them. They have been empowered all out of proportion to their actual role in the region by their partnership with the Americans since the First Gulf War. Once the Americans are no longer in a position to protect them, there is very little to prevent the Iraqis, with the support of the Iranians and the Turks, from crushing them in an afternoon.

It's at least possible, and perhaps likely, that as a result of the American withdrawal from Iraq, more blood will be shed. And it is certainly fair to say that the American occupation led inevitably to that outcome. But at some point, and this seems very much to be that point, America has to look inward, to her own interests. The time for international adventuring with neither goal nor reason is past. Obama is bringing this chapter to a close, every bit as much for pragmatic as for political reasons. Now, we can only wait for him to reach the same conclusion in South Asia...

In a World of Steel and Death and Men Who are Fighting to be Warm...

2009-02-21T12:41:00.000-08:00

I don't want to live in Rick Santelli's world. It is a cold, dark place where you seek by any available means to accumulate wealth, and fight alone to hold on to it. A place where it is not only foolish to care about your fellow human beings, it may well be suicidal. A place where your only ethical signpost is rapacious greed, and your only salvation is your own savagery.

It is a relatively new, and completely artificial development that a society could even develop that would support this kind of hardcore, unrelenting selfishness. Human survival has always, from the very earliest times, been entirely dependent upon community. Community to create, to build, to care for the sick and injured, to educate the children and grow the food and yes, to help those in need. It is community that defines us, but note that it's requirement is SO necessary that it has evolved as a survival strategy for many other creatures as well.

It is not central to the important argument, but it is worth noting Santelli's foul hypocrisy. If his house caught on fire, would he fight the fire himself? I suspect he would call the fire department, part of his community's commitment to it's citizens, collectively supported by that community. If Santelli's neighbor's child gets into the cleaning products under the sink, is he outraged that the Poison Control hotline that saves that child's life was paid for by the taxes of citizens like him? Nope. His is a kind of ignorant, faux-populist selfishness that could only develop in a human being with a narrow, stunted worldview. Perhaps someone like a derivatives trader.

How dare he pass judgement on people in his own community in their time of need? How can he feel it is within his purview to judge them worthy of assistance, or just too stupid or venal to "deserve" help? He should seriously consider what he might think if he was judged in the same way. If a child falls out of a tree and breaks his arm, we do not refuse to care for that child because climbing the tree was stupid or irresponsible. It is bad enough that we have allowed our society to become divided between the haves and the have-nots. Are we now to further divide our communities between those deserving of community services and those somehow less so?

The PURPOSE of community, and the reason it has been so fabulously successful as a human survival strategy for eons, is that it provides safety in numbers. It allows the costs of distributing resources to be spread out, and allows it's people to live and prosper because nobody is on their own. Just as Rick Santelli is not on his own. He only needs to look beyond his fear and greed to see it...

Bits n Pieces, Nuts n Bolts, Miscelaneous Crap and Random, er, Stuff

2009-02-19T17:57:00.000-08:00

That Bernie Madoff was one brilliant fella. Turns out he wasn't in the investment business. He was in the mailing-out-statements business. And he knew that all he had to do was show great results on those statements and people wouldn't WANT to withdraw their money - they'd want to leave it in so it could grow and grow at these unusually excellent rates of return. And other people would want to invest in this amazing opportunity too. So Madoff's fortunes grew huge, not through savvy investment strategies but merely through a highly automated application of applied psychology. And there was plenty of cash for the occasional "investor" who wanted a payout. Sometimes, the simplest scams, the horrendously blatant simplest scams, are by far the best. I think he's my new role model.

I see where DiFi let slip a little open secret that maybe should have stayed unconfirmed. Oooopppsss. This has been a nice, well choreographed dance. America launches targeted assassinations against Islamic militants in Pakistan. Pakistani people are pissed, and the Pakistani government howls in outrage. Of course, oddly, America never responds to these perfectly justified complaints about the violation of their sovereignty by an ally, and Pakistan never seems interested in elevating the complaints to a serious government-to-government issue. It's pretty obvious that the Pakistanis actually approved the strikes, and we just had this agreement that they could complain about them to provide them with deniability. The people would be pretty angry with their government if they kept allowing the US to kill Pakistani citizens on Pakistani soil. So along comes Senator Feinstein, the poster child for DINO. Among the many traits she shares with her more honest Republican colleagues is a depleted uranium level stupidity. So she blunders in a news conference, telling the world that the US Predator drones doing all that killing in NW Pakistan are based, not in Afghanistan as one might expect, but - wait for it - in Pakistan itself, clearly with formal agreement from the Pakistani government. Go ahead and explain that, President Ali Zardari. This oughta be good.

Waitaminute. You're telling me Roland Burris LIED? Really? Somebody involved in the whole seedy, reeking process was dirty? You sure? 'Cause I'm finding this story that the guy Blagojevich appointed to the Senate seat he was impeached for trying to sell was ALSO a crook just a little shocking. OK, not really. It really couldn't have had any other ending, could it?

What a surprise. The Kyrgyzstan government went ahead and evicted the US from the airbase at Manas that was the primary source of logistical support for the US and NATO troops in Afghanistan now that the Khyber Pass is pretty much impassable due to it's vulnerability to insurgent attacks and sabotage. It's kind of telling of how difficult it is for a 21st century military to fight in 18th century Afghanistan that you hear no talk of "hardening" the Khyber Pass route from Pakistan into Afghanistan. It's not even possible to kid yourself that it's possible, and American Military leaders are second to NONE when it comes to self-delusion. There's a lesson here. The lesson is that what we SAY we want to do in Afghanistan cannot be done, and what we need to do in Afghanistan requires far less than the troop commitment we already had there, even before the new Obama "landing at Danang" surge. Maybe there's a bit of a silver lining here. Maybe this will force the Obama administration to recognize that there are limits to what American power, soft, hard or turquoise, can accomplish in South Asia, Africa and other places where hate, violence, poverty, culture, infrastructure, resources and terrain conspire to prevent simple solutions. Maybe it's time to stop acting like a colonial power and start thinking practically about what we actually NEED to do and how best to do it. Or maybe we'll need to have that lesson repeatedly pounded into our national consciousness with a nail-studded 2x4. **SIGH**.

Will we see prosecutions of Bush administration officials for War Crimes, Constitutional violations and just straight-up felonious lawbreaking? Man, that one's still fuzzy, but a few things are going to become clear. First, sorry Senator Leahy, we're not going to go with a "Truth and Reconciliation Commission". That dog is not gonna hunt. Nobody will participate, everybody will stonewall, and they'll just dare you to prosecute them. And the fact that you were afraid to do so, which lead to your silly "Truth Commission" proposal in the first place, indicates that they'll win. It's also pretty obvious that the actual hands-on torturers, murderers, wiretappers and assorted street hoods our government employed as it experimented with some hybrid form of organized crime and representative government perhaps best referred to as "Sopranacy" will not ever be called to account for committing the actual crimes the administration ordered. The best we can hope for, at this point, is some high-profile prosecutions of the administration's lowest hanging fruit. Rove, Gonzales and Miers for certain. Addington, Yoo and Bybee maybe. Rumsfeld, Wolfewitz and Perle, probably not. Here's what I think from where we are now. Not only will there never be a satisfying outcome to these horrendous crimes, but the criminals won. Watch Obama, and future executives. Watch them break the law with impunity, and without fear of ever paying a price. Bush/Cheney changed the game for all time. America is no longer what we were taught she was - oh no, that was based on everybody being willing to agree to a set of values which are no longer in play, and there are no longer any real rules. It remains to be seen how this experiment in autocratic faux-democracy will work. My guess is we haven't seen the real downside yet...

Stoopid Economic Analysis III - Solvency, Liquidity, The Japan Example and the Swedish Solution

2009-02-14T10:19:00.000-08:00

Big Stim is out of the barn. Smaller, and significantly less effective than it should have been, it is nonetheless the law of the land. Dollars, some actual, some imaginary, are about to begin flowing in a large-scale attempt to create jobs and thus "stimulate" consumer spending. After the madness, heartbreak, horror and disillusionment of the last 4 weeks, this may be hard to grasp, but that was the easy part.

Next up? What to do about the banks. In the final analysis, the answer to this question will be determined by the willingness, or lack thereof, of the American government to be honest with itself and the American people about the real state of the banking and credit institutions.

Put in it's simplest terms, a lending institution is supposed to have assets, money or things of value, to support the loans they make. A common rule of thumb is they should have 1 dollar of real assets for every 10 dollars of outstanding loans. And banks have always be very vocal about their assets, as a way to talk about their strength and stability. Since the Great Depression, there has been a regulatory and oversight regime in place that would ensure that banks were bona fide lenders and not just a ponzi scheme.

Along comes the "Reagan Revolution", wherein we learned the conventional wisdom that the government was incapable and incompetent, and therefore should do nothing. "The Market" was described as this perfect force for good, that would reward sound business, innovation and risk-taking. Over the decades, as this belief became unchallengeable fact, regulations were removed, oversight was dismantled and, while everyone was perfectly aware that this only left the fox guarding the hen house, all the right people were making tons of money, so, while a few voices shouted easily ignored warnings from the wilderness, the system entirely unravelled.

At that point, it was only a matter of time. The housing bubble allowed the creation of all these ridiculous derivative investments, CDOs and CDSs, primarily, that the rating agencies were essentially bribed to rate as AAA and the financial industry bought, bundled, traded, divided, sliced, rebundled and resold until you had $60 trillion in securities backed by $15 Trillion dollars in actual mortgage loans. All completely and specifically outside the oversight of ANY regulatory body.

Which brings us to now. Some very large but as yet unknown percentage of the banks stated assets are represented by these types of securities. The banks know two things. First, they DO know what they actually paid for them. Second, they know that at this point they can't GIVE them away. If these securities are merely worth less today than they were when the banks bought them due to the bursting of the mortgage bubble and the recession, that is, if they still have inherent value, the banks are merely illiquid and require only additional capital to make it through to a future time when the inevitable upswing in the business cycle re-inflates their value. At that time the banks could pay off their bridge loans and go back to being profitable businesses again. Unfortunately, almost no one, at this point, believes that to be true.

Instead, it is likely that these securities are nothing more than fraudulent pieces of paper, worthless now and forever. Which, depending upon how much of their stated assets were represented by these artificially - valued securities, would make some number of America's larges banks insolvent. We have a mechanism for dealing with insolvent banks. The government seizes them, recapitalizes them, cleans them up and runs them until they can be re-privatized. The new owners pay off the government and thus the taxpayer is made hole. This is what they mean when the talk about the "Swedish Option". Sweden was forced to nationalize it's banks in 1992, and it all worked out quite well. You can look it up.

On the other hand, there is Japan. When growth slowed in the '90s, Japan's banks found themselves with grossly overvalued assets. Government's unwillingness to aggressively address the problem lead to nearly a decade of deflation and stagnation, with businesses unable to acquire the credit for investment and banks unwilling to take on any risk that might expose them as insolvent.

Of course, this is America, and in spite of the lessons of economics and history we must fear anything that the most dishonest right-wing politician or pundit might rail against as "Socialism". We're not sure why, most Americans don't even know what Socialism is, but they're certain it's a bad thing to be avoided no matter what the benefits of nationalization might actually be.

So here's the next big event. Watch the Obama administration closely. They got burned by the republicans on the Stimulus plan. They are much more likely to take more of a "My way or the highway" approach to the bank bailout. But therein lies the key question: What will represent "Their Way"? Will it be Sweden or Japan? There is speculation that by adopting a marginally incoherent "go slow" approach, where the Treasury "stress tests" the banks, ostensibly to determine how much of their assets are overvalued, the administration will actually force the banking industry to determine the actual market value of the Mortgage Backed Securities now being referred to as "Toxic Assets" and therefore will be forced to admit they are insolvent. At that point there is no real option but to take them into receivership. This plan, of course, fails to take into account the survival instincts of the banking executives. They are, it must be accepted, less concerned with the viability of the American Economy than you and I, and as such must be recognized as an obstacle to a good outcome, and not a partner.

History has shown clearly that now is the time for aggressive, decisive action on the part of the government. So far, they've appeared timid and uncertain, which does not bode well for our financial future. But at this point all we can do is email our congresscritter and the White House, then get a big bowl of popcorn and watch the fireworks. The collapse of the largest economy on earth should at least provide some entertainment value....

Judd for the Dénouement

2009-02-12T17:03:00.000-08:00

Bipartisanship. Word gets tossed around like the new girl at a biker bar. But what does it mean? How does it apply in 2009? And what the hell is President Obama seeking in his frantic search for post-partisan government?

Intermingled in the definition problem, there is an execution problem. And our man Obama's up to his eyebrows in both, and is losing on every front. First, we have a condition where bipartisan politics are not workable because the minority party doesn't see any benefit in supporting the majority's agenda. Second, we have politicians in general, in this era, exposed on ethical fronts for the money the have to raise, exposed on legal fronts for enabling criminal activity and exposed politically for their responsibility for domestic, foreign and economic catastrophe. On the one side we have Susan Collins and Olympia Snow, seeking power and recognition not through any reasonable legislative act, but simply by doing, acting against the interests of BOTH sides in order to control the conversation, unable to defend their actions but not being required to offer a coherent explanation. On the other side, we have Feinstein and Rockefeller, criminal enablers of the worst excesses of the Bush/Cheney administration, and seeking, at this point, only to stay out of prison.

Which brings us, in a kind of roundabout fashion, to Judd Gregg and the amazing Post Partisan Technicolor pony that is the Obama Cabinet. Bush appointees, Clintonistas, Republicans, hell, I think he's got a three-legged dog in there somewhere. Everything but the kitchen sink. Oh, and the solid center of Americans that want government to make life better for Americans, who can't see a good reason to spend trillions killing people half a world away just to earn their eternal enmity, who want help with their jobs and educating their kids and their health care, the people who turned out in huge numbers for the innaugauration because they had been convinced there might be something there to hope for? How does this stupid, cowardly "centrist" approach help them? Every courageous proposal watered down to ineffectiveness, every populist proposal shot down because some right-wing dead ender wants to play ideological games while holding the American economy hostage just because he can? Mr. President, with all due respect, fuck that.

Stop it. Just fucking stop it. Stop playing games, Mr. President. Stop playing word games, puzzles, jumbles and hide and seek. There is a personal reason for you to stop all this outreach to people who hate you - you will be judged on outcomes. Sure, you and I, we both know you don't have as much control over outcomes as you get credit for, but you damn well better use what control you have. Reagan got credit for the end of the Cold War. Clinton got credit for a budget surplus he had no idea was even possible when he took office. If, in four years, we're treading water, Mr. President, you are the one who will be blamed.

So maybe you better start listening to smart people, and stop trying to create some post-partisan Camelot where everybody agrees with you. Maybe you better start thinking about ramming through YOUR policies, YOUR agenda. At least, if you go down in flames, it will not be because you came out with a set of watered down symbolic actions that were never designed to accomplish anything but pacify the American people while all around them the unsustainable political and economic system was crumbling.

Judd Gregg is a symptom. He represents the fantasy portion of the Obama political vision. He is the living manifestation of why your cross-party outreach camp out must end. Now. You have been played for a sucker, punked by people who never even hid their intentions, or their contempt. Like Charlie Brown, you keep acting like you believe that THIS time you'll kick that 'ol football. But you never will. You need to spit on the Republican Caucus, and you need to explain some real hard facts to the Democratic Caucus. Blue Dogs have to forage for scraps, and the worst of the Bush enablers have a LOT of restitution to pay.

Americans want your leadership, and so far you've offered precious little. President Obama, you're going to run out of time. This Stimulus bill isn't going to do the job, you know that as well as Paul Krugman knows that. If you let the insolvent banks stumble on, if you preside over eleven percent unemployment, if there's no way to see how we get from HERE to THERE, you are going to go down in history as a failure. It's time to get your hat out of your hand, clap it on your head and LEAD this nation. You can. We still believe in you. Now, before it's too late...

Say it Ain't So, BHO!

2009-02-09T14:10:00.001-08:00

It is perfectly reasonable to start with the premise that you can't make any real judgements about a political leader during the campaign, but rather must simply wait to see their actual actions and behaviors once elected. After all, if they lose the election they never get the chance to demonstrate their political worldview in office, so they might tend to exaggerate their ideology (or lack thereof) and the benefits that might accrue from the leadership thus motivated. But it is not completely unreasonable, or even terribly naive, to form some set of expectations from the campaign rhetoric, and to believe these expectations might actually come close to defining the political bearings of a given candidate.

Which brings us, inevitably, to Barack Obama. This is indeed, all apologies to John Steinbeck, truly The Winter of My Disappointment. It's not that Obama's political rhetoric in office doesn't match up neatly with his political rhetoric on the campaign trail, no, he continues to offer an uplifting message of hope and change. He even issues edicts and Executive Orders that seem to lead us all out of the wilderness of lawlessness and autocratic excess.

But here's the thing. And it is a VERY large thing. If we say bush/cheney took us a thousand meters off course, to steer back six hundred meters will not suffice. As long as Obama, and his motley collection of Clintonistas and Republican "realists" will not take us all the way back to a place where the stain of blood and hate on the fabric of American values is bleached away, they are only hanging draperies over the abattoir door. I've become more and more concerned with the widening gap between the Barack Obama we elected and the man now in power. He speaks of openness, of transparency, of a return to American Values, of an America that doesn't accept the false choice between our ideals and our safety.

And then he equivocates. And then some of his cabinet appointees say one thing, and some say another. His SecDef is a Bush appointee, who seems determined to keep troops in Iraq forever, damn the SOFA. His CIA Director backed down when a congenital mental defective in the Senate claimed that there was no evidence that America had tortured detainees. What. The. Fuck? How about just standing up and using, oh, I don't know, HONESTY to point out the evidence that is actually available in overwhelming, disgusting abundance? He continues a program of unilateral military strikes against an American Ally, on their sovereign soil. And all we have to show for the twin centerpieces of campaign rhetoric, ending the American occupation of Iraq and closing the obscenity at Guantanamo Bay are vague "statements", promises to "study the matter", and, worst of all, transparent plays for more time, so more people can die in the name of, well, that's a problem isn't it? Nothing. They can die for NOTHING. And I suppose it's worth mentioning that all the indications are that NONE of the worst criminal excesses of the bush/cheney years will ever be investigated, let alone prosecuted. We elected this man for what, exactly?

And then, today, it gets an order of magnitude worse. There was an opportunity for real justice, an opportunity to say what happened and let the chips fall where they may. Extraordinary Rendition victim and continuing Guantanamo captive (um, all charges dismissed, by the way) Binyam Mohamed sued the US over his horrendous treatment at the hands of Egyptian security agents on behalf of the US and British governments. The bush/cheney cabal got the case thrown out by declaring the entire sordid affair (they cut his PENIS with razor blades! Proud to be an American yet?) classified under the State Secrets Act. One wonders if the secret is Mr. Mohamed's dick or the damage done to it. But I digress. He appealed to the 9th circuit court, and the case was heard today. And it was a WONDERFUL opportunity for the Obama Justice department to say "yeah, this guy got treated horribly, and it was unconstitutional, and unAmerican, and we accept at face value his position and want to work WITH him in the name of justice". Or something. Or ANYTHING.

Nope. The Obama administration, without hesitation, took the EXACT same position the Bush/Cheney criminal cabal took. State Secrets. No evidence allowed. Shut it down.

I don't know what I hoped for, but it damn sure wasn't this. If Obama doesn't find a way back to his constitutional law roots, and do it damn quick, then we can put an end to this whole conversation. The America we grew up with, the America we read about in our history books, the America that made us proud, that made us, goddamit, different, with the values and the rule of law and the commitment to the Constitution no longer exists. Bush and his henchmen wounded it, and our great hope Obama killed it. And we can try to figure out how to live in something less than a democracy, with something short of freedom.

Hell, they do it in China, and they even did it in East Germany. We'll be OK. We just won't be Americans.

Stimulatio

2009-02-08T10:55:00.000-08:00

Has it really come to this? Have we, at long last, finally reached the point where political leaders are not just irrelevant, not just obstructionist, but are the primary roadblock to doing anything about anything?

Barack Obama, his economic advisers and cabinet members and respected economists of all stripes have spent the last two months explaining to us in no uncertain terms just exactly what the problem is, how big it is, what the consequences are and what is most likely to be an effective solution package. We have seen the numbers, read the reports. We know, as does President Obama, what is stimulative, what creates jobs and utilizes available resources, and what does not. Immediately upon his inauguration, Obama, working with legislators, began preparation of a large economic stimulus package.

First the Republicans milked the President's naive attempts to "compromise" in order to bring them on board. Many of us wondered, "if you are convinced that your plan represents the best course for America to follow, then HOW DARE YOU allow a losing coterie of rejectionists and obstructionists force you to water down what you presented as necessary to avert catastrophe?" And then, predictably, House Republicans, every one, to a man and a woman, voted against the very compromises they'd demanded.

I suppose this was predictable. The Republican party in America is at a crossroads - representative of only a shrinking fractional slice of the population, but afraid to soften their rhetoric of racial and tribal hatred and failed economic ideologies for fear of losing even the meager support they have today. And it's worth mentioning that due to the large majority the Democrats hold in the house, none of those negotiations were even necessary.

But this awkward dance with so-called "centrists" in the Senate is beyond inexplicable - it is borderline obscene. As much as many of us like Bill Clinton, we were frequently appalled by his political flexibility. He didn't seem to hold any core positions, but would shift and triangulate to whatever was the most popular political ideology. His ideology meant nothing, his promises all turned to ash as he played out a grand game without seeming to care about the actual outcome. What we have seen of Barack Obama in the last couple weeks is disturbingly similar.

Held hostage by a group of bloviating narcissists led by Susan Collins and Ben Nelson, Obama pandered and praised as they weakened some of the best provisions in the legislation in exchange for a ridiculous, regressive tax refund for the purchase of an automobile or a home. Oh, the automobile you purchase doesn't have to have even a minimum set of emissions standards, and the house you buy will likely continue to plummet in value for another year at least. While additional funding for states, who need to spend that money NOW, in your community, was slashed.

Why? What were they trying to accomplish? Cutting 80 or so billion dollars out of a nearly 1 trillion dollar package doesn't seem to change much of the calculation long-term. And yet, much of what they cut was some of the most effective stimulus spending possible for a government to undertake, while the tax credits they put in are worthless in that context. There can be only one explanation, and sadly, it is the obvious one. In 21st century American politics, it isn't about doing the best you can for your country and your constituency. It's about the politicians themselves, what they can gain personally, without regard to any genuine harm or damage done. In our celebrity-infatuated rock-star culture, personalities are something we can cling to, identify with, love or hate without having to invest the time and effort to learn what is actually at stake.

In Washington, the coin of the realm is power, and Susan Collins and Ben Nelson have it. They could thumb their noses at the new administration, tearing much of the heart out of Obama's first big package, and then stand in the glare of the cameras and claim to have facilitated the passage of the bill.

Obama needs to learn that the world is NOT the one in which he'd LIKE to be President, it is the one in which he IS President. The days of good-faith negotiation in the best interests of the American People, to whatever extent they ever actually existed, are well and truly over. He has to stand firm, to say "I believe this is the best course for our nation, and if you won't allow it to be implemented, you need to stand before the public and explain to them why". He needs to say, "the idiot who last occupied this position showed us in detail exactly what doesn't work, so anyone still pushing these clearly failed and discredited ideologies can expect nothing but scorn".

In short, we need President Obama to save us from ourselves, from what we have become. Because if he continues to allow the system to define him, he will fail, and that failure would have serious consequences for us all...

Stoopid Economic Analysis II - The Expectation Gap

2009-02-07T12:14:00.000-08:00

Americans, for better or worse, have developed into a society that thinks of itself as somehow fundamentally different from others. Some of this has led us to some obscene manifestations of exceptionalism, but a case could also be made that it created an environment where we internally artificially minimized the apparent risk of a given undertaking, allowing for great leaps. Of course, it's fair to say that another way to describe this unwillingness to see the world the way it actually is rather than the way we WANT it to be is delusion. In many ways, we are, as a people and as a culture, collectively delusional.

It has been said that it is nothing less than your best trait that results in your ultimate downfall, and when you listen to the discussion about the economy these days, you have reason to be fearful. These conversations and monologues tend to regularly include two key points. First, a discussion of how effective, or ineffective, a given economic stimulus program might be, and what the world might look like with or without that program. Proponents of any given stimulus methodology always paint a rosy, or at least rosier, view of the world if only their program is implemented, immediately and without alteration. The other point is at least a mention that there are natural cycles in play here, and we will return to economic growth in [insert point in time here].

So okay, pretty good arguments can be made for stimulus spending, and as long as that spending utilizes otherwise idle assets then it will certainly have a positive impact. If it is poorly targeted or just too small, it runs the risk of utilizing resources that would otherwise have been better utilized by the market, while failing to bring un- or under-utilized assets back into action. But it's become clear that the American legislative process is broken, and in it's current crippled state is unable to produce bold, effective action, only watered down symbolic programs designed to demonstrate the superiority of a particular political ideology.

What I'm worrying about today is the perception of those "natural economic cycles", and how Americans hazily foresee life after the Great Recession. For at least 13 years, America has lived in a bubble. First the fondly remembered "dotcom" bubble, with it's "irrational exuberance", technological breakthroughs and ill-considered business schemes. At the end of that period of massive wealth generation, we rolled right on into the "housing bubble". In this period of madness and overheated greed, we saw people with no experience get rich in the mortgage business, and young people with low-level jobs buying multiple houses. And as those houses increased in value, quarter over quarter and year after year, there was so much equity, so much cash, such unlimited sources of credit, that Americans spent like drunken sailors. They bought houses, sure, but they bought TVs and SUVs, they traveled and played, they laughed gaily in the eternal sunshine of a happy present and drank deeply of the promise of an unlimited future.

We now find ourselves hung over, broke, and surveying the wreckage of an economy built on a fairy tale. We tighten our belt, we do what we can to preserve our jobs, we lower our eyes even as we lower our expectations. But we all believe, no, we all KNOW, that we just have to weather this storm, that everything will go "back to normal" in a year, maybe two. Just one of those cycles, right? Oh sure, all the greed and fraud and madness of the mortgage markets made it worse than it should have been, but these things happen occasionally, and they never last forever.

But therein lies the real catastrophe. The fever dreams of Suburban Americans, fueled, as they have been by two consecutive irrational, unsustainable economic bubbles, do not represent "normal". Indeed, they are highly ABnormal. The world doesn't work like that. Economics doesn't work like that. Unlimited credit supported by skyrocketing equity is not a "normal" condition. Historically, a person's, family's or company's spending was required to at least recognize their actual MEANS.

So what actually IS normal? What will it look like? What can we hope our economy, and for that matter our lives, will look like when the downturn looks up? Coupled with the certain long-term rise in energy costs and the restrictions certain to ultimately be imposed to save the very planet, I think we are looking at a very different future. The twenty teens will very likely be remembered as a time of austerity, and the long, slow decline of America as a disproportionately powerful nation. 70% of the American economy is consumer spending. Just think about where that number might ultimately settle, and you'll begin to understand your future.

Now, we're not (hopefully) talking about living in tarpaper shacks, wearing burlap and growing corn in the yard for survival. We're simply postulating that the lives of ridiculous excess lived by most Americans will be talked about in a historical context the way the court of Louis XIV is remembered. Almost fondly, with a certain amount of awe for it's profligacy and shortsightedness. But I expect the collective delusion about the future to last a few more years, until reality can no longer be denied. Then we'll know...

All your base are belong to us

2009-02-05T14:37:00.000-08:00

So it's come to this. The Pakistani side of the Khyber Pass is vulnerable to sabotage by Taliban fighters. And now the Russians have successfully convinced Kyrgyzstan to close the US facilities at Manas Air Base. In recent months, more and more of the supplies required by NATO forces in Afghanistan have had to come in by air, as Pakistani militants have had no difficulty interdicting truck traffic on the treacherous road over the Khyber Pass. They've burned large numbers of vehicles and hundreds of containers of supplies, and just this week they dropped a 32 foot bridge - all without meaningful resistance by the Pakistanis.

The thing is, Manas is the only air base available to large American military transport aircraft in the region since the closing of K2 Air Base in Uzbekistan in November of 2005. So when President Bakiyev announced (from Moscow, no less) the decision to shut down American operations at Manas, it was a very bad sign. Bear in mind that the Obama administration has committed to increasing the American combat troop presence in Afghanistan by as many as 30,000 soldiers and Marines. While at the same time the options for resupply have been reduced to one primitive road through a legendary mountain pass that runs directly through the most hostile areas in two countries. Areas that are NOT in friendly control, and appear to be frankly impossible to defend.

I've reached my own conclusion about the American troop presence in Afghanistan. I've concluded that it is utter folly. All of the results of US combat operations in that blighted country are counterproductive to US goals and interests in the world and in the region. They result in more fighters, more hatred, more death and destruction, while contributing absolutely nothing to the economic growth or political stability of Afghanistan.

The Taliban didn't attack us. They are fighting us because we are in their country. If we leave, they lack the interest, funding and operational capabilities to attack us here in America. If there is a hornets nest a hundred miles from your house, the hornets will never bother you. Unless, of course, you drive the hundred miles to where they are and whack them with a stick.

Of course, there certainly IS an al Quaeda presence in the Afghan/Pakistan border region. And yeah, we have a bit of business with those gentlemen. The question, then, is using 50,000+ troops with armor, artillery and air support the best way to fight al Quaeda? If we haven't figured out the answer to that question in seven years, we're simply being intentionally obtuse.

Nope. At this point America is wasting time, money and lives fighting in Afghanistan. It is clear that nothing good nor productive can come from it. It's why the leadership can't just come out and say what our goals are, and how we'll know when we're done. Any goal that had value is impossible to accomplish, and anything that is possible is utterly worthless at best, and in many cases counterproductive.

The Bush/Cheney administration was noted for making decisions based upon ideological theory rather than the actual conditions extant in the real world. Obama's insistence that what's required in Afghanistan is thousands more American combat troops is beginning to look similar. Nothing to be accomplished, much harm to be done, lives lost and money spent, but doing something is preferable to doing nothing. Even when doing nothing - or at least a whole lot less - might just be the wisest course...

Autocrat - Cool

2009-02-02T14:30:00.000-08:00

Maybe it's just me, but I can't help but wish that heads of state were a little, well, cooler. Ok, we've got Nick Sarkozy's singing supermodel wife, but Nicky himself looks kind of Euro-stuffy most of the time. We've got Vlad Putin, he of the dead eyes and the Judo, but in spite of the fact that he wears a mean suit and can have you whacked anytime he wants, I'm pretty sure he's not cool. Barack and Michelle, smart, driven, attractive, erudite, with shirtsleeves in the Oval office and bare-chested on the beach in Hawaii (Barack, not Michelle) are about the closest we can get to a genuinely COOL head of state.

That is, up until now. Show me a dictator with the look of a stoned surfer who digs Ravi Shankar and just took a big hit and is grooving on a zither solo and I'm gonna take the position that dude is cool. I mean the other side of the MATTERESS cool, the kind of brutal autocrat you'd want to have a beer with.

Or maybe a toke.

Hang ten, Muammar...

Springsteen at the SuperBowl

2009-02-01T17:11:00.000-08:00

When did 10th avenue Freeze Out become some kind of American Anthem? Am I missing something? I thought that was a pretty subversive song, not like "Lost in the Flood", but not something we could hang our national consciousness on. But I'm not convinced this is a bad thing.

Born to Run, not as the encore, but as song #2. Is it just me or does Bruce look a little uncomfortable with the song these days? He didn't seem to relish the whole "...at night we ride to mansions of glory in suicide machines..." line that spoke to my soul what, 34 years ago.

Now don't get me wrong. If there's a musician whose success I don't for one second begrudge, it's Springsteen. He did it honest, and goddam it he always stuck to his story. But I can only imagine how hard it is to try to sell an insurgent message of anger and alienation when you've been wealthy and successful for decades. I like Bruce, but to be honest I like "Asbury Park" and "Nuns run Bald, thru Vatican Halls, Pregnant, Pleading Immaculate Conception" a whole lot more than I like "The Rising".

The ovation makes me smile. I guess I feel like maybe I own a little of his success, and I appreciate the way he's done it. But there's a bittersweet sadness. Just in case you were uncertain, the things we we really thought we believed when Bruce showed us a way to shout them? They no longer occupy a place in our hearts, only in our scrapbooks.

I guess it's important to get that, but it makes me sad to have to know...

Hard Choices

2009-01-20T15:04:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama:

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.

I'm not optimistic. I can't share your hope. I don't believe there is any reason to believe, even with this singular human being assuming America's leadership position, that suddenly America will be able to reverse course and do the things necessary to go from doomed to healthy, from unsustainable to viable, from blind plunge to controlled crash.

Obama is right. It is about those hard choices. The question is really does he have the political courage to make them, and will the system allow it? If we thing about what those choices truly need to be, it becomes clear that we, as a society and as a community will continue to cover our ears and close our eyes, running headlong into disaster even while denying that disaster is even a possible outcome.

1. Health Care. The system is broken. The only real, sustainable answer Single Payer, operated as a government agency. As long as for-profit private insurance companies are the primary source of coverage, and private employers desperate to cut costs are the primary buyers of coverage, no amount of tinkering around the margins will serve to make health care for Americans increasingly rare, and increasingly shoddy.

2. Defense Spending. The days of the Trillion dollar American Military have to be over. Now, not next year, not next decade, now. Even with 50 or 60% cuts in military spending starting in fiscal 2010, the skyrocketing cost of veterans benefits coming as the result of the last 20 years of profligate combat deployments will still be a real drain on the American economy. A few suggestions. Cut the nuclear stockpile to 120 warheads. 100 on Submarines. 12 ICBMs in silos. 8 air-deliverable warheads. Period. Destroy the rest, they serve no real purpose. Eliminate all strategic bomber programs, from the B52 to the B1 to the B2. In today's combat environment, they are useless dinosaurs. Eliminate all but 5 Submarines (2 Boomers and 3 Attack), and all but 2 Aircraft Carriers. Combine the Navy and the Coast Guard, eliminating redundancies and waste. There are a lot more, but all we actually need is a means to ensure that an amphibious force doesn't land on American Shores and depose our government, and a means to defend genuine American interests abroad.

3. Domestic Spending. Consider what actually is needed to make American society viable in the for the next 50 years. Education, infrastructure, carbon mitigation, a real social safety net, etc. Now consider what is realistic. What American politics will allow. It doesn't take a genius to recognize that even with Barack Obama standing tall and eloquent in the bully pulpit, courageously willing to commit political suicide to try to put America on a truly sustainable path, that level of courage will be awfully scarce amongst the garden variety pols and pundits that will have to do the heavy lifting if something truly dramatic is to be accomplished.

There are lots more. You can make your own list. The "hard choices" are nothing more than the basic, grownup sacrifices any community has to be willing to make in order to guarantee it's own survival. Choices that can generate some near term pain. Choices that can interfere with getting everything you want and getting it NOW. Choices that America has refused to even consider for decades.

I wish President Obama all the best, and I'll do anything I can to support him. And, I suppose, if America was a Monarchy I'd be more hopeful. But what's required at this point is dramatic action. And once it's all watered down into politically safe little symbolic acts, it will have no more value than it's intrinsic placebo effect. And I'm pretty sure that won't be enough...

What is this I feel? Relief? Anticipation?

2009-01-20T11:36:00.000-08:00

I know it's a dreadful cliche, but our long national nightmare is, at long last, over. Now comes the real work. The work of governing a superpower in decline. The work of remaking America in her own tattered, dimly remembered image.

Solve the problems.

End the abuses.

Make the "Hard Decisions".

Sure. We'll see. But for now, it is enough to have competent, honest leaders with values and integrity. Tomorrow comes the serious work of trying to steer the ship of state around all the ice, but for today, a big smile, a few tears, and a contented sigh. It is enough...

Stoopid Economic Analysis

2009-01-17T17:50:00.001-08:00

There are a vast number of subjects about which I am ignorant. My ignorance could fill volumes, libraries, indeed, the number of things I don't know cannot even be measured. They are, as articulated by the eloquently pusillanimous Don Rumsfeld, Known Unknowns and Unknown Unknowns.

For me, Economics falls into the known unknown category. Honestly, there is a part of me that wants to question whether there is even a viable science in all of this random sloshing about of money and the greed and fear that drives it. It's Von Clausewitz's "fog of war" without a clearly defined goal beyond "more, more, more". Kind of as if you let Billy Idol write your corporate mission statement.

But after a few months of this meltdown and the obviously venal motives behind not just the suggested solutions, but behind the solution SUGGESTERS, a couple things have begun to become clear.

First, the nature of "financial markets". It's pretty much inarguable at this point that "financial markets" are a parasite that has found a way to live on the blood and health of the host, the International Economy. The International Economy is based on things. Things you can make, things you can sell, things you can send down a fiber optic cable that people might want to buy.

In it's most simplified terms, it works like this. Companies pay people to develop, bring to market and deliver stuff. People earn a living producing the stuff companies sell. They take that money and buy stuff other companies make and sell. It works because there is always new STUFF, and there is always people with money to buy it.

This depends on a lot of fragile, finely balanced factors, but none more important than the requirement that the parasite, the financial markets, take their sustenance from the host, the International Economy, but that they leave enough lifeblood in the host that it can continue to grow and thrive. Now, nothing compels this parasite to behave with moderation and prevents it from eating the host, so we have "regulations", rules and laws and modes of conduct that prevents the greedy parasites from draining more from the host than it can afford to lose and still remain viable.

Post Reagan, in the eighties and nineties, the parasite became much bigger. It began to develop and use political clout, particularly, of course, in the nature of cash, to begin to redefine the rules to allow it to grow larger. A particular political ideology began to be dominant. In this ideology, "The Market" was all knowing, all seeing, and self correcting. There was no long term or systemic problem in "The Market", because "The Market" would correct these problems more quickly and more efficiently than any political entity ever could.

So the Parasite became larger, and it sucked more resources, more value, out of the system. And it began to find itself in a dominant position that allowed it to actually MAKE the rules. Well, if you're a parasite, your job is to grow. Now sure, a carefully evolved parasite would have learned over the millennia to avoid taking more from the host than the host could provide and still stay healthy, but this was a young, powerful parasite that had no sense of it's own vulnerability. And it ate, and sucked and sought more power, and made more, riskier investments, and then it derived even riskier investments out of those investments, again and again, until the huge valuation of the parasite was significantly based on a dense, unregulated and completely impossible to truly understand pile of paper.

Now? Now, the host is sick. With all this worthless paper valued at ridiculous levels, nobody knows what institution is actually viable, and which is nothing more than a dead man walking. Hands out, they come to the very government they've been pouring money into for decades, and pronounce themselves "too big to fail". Suddenly, they find they have stolen too much wealth, stripped too much value out of the system they ultimately depend upon for their existence, and demand tax dollars to prevent them from suffering the costs of their own malfeasance.

I don't know. My government, including a new President I have a great deal of respect for, tells me we just don't have an option. And yet, and still, they hand out BILLIONS without any rules, without any questions, without any requirement that they be able to tell US, you and me, what the fuck they did with our money. I'll be honest, it makes me want to go to the pitchfork and torch closet and start dragging stuff out.

I guess there's really two things I don't know. Was it necessary, and can it work? We'll honestly never know the answer to the first question, but we're going to find out the answer to the second, whether we want to or not...

Pardon Me?

2009-01-17T14:01:00.000-08:00

"We have to look forward, not backward". Odd. Nobody ever said that when I was charged with a crime. Nobody ever said it would be unreasonable, shrill, extreme, radical or partisan to prosecute my ass. Tom Ricks called for a "Truth and Reconciliation Commission".

Nope. Not even that is good enough. It seems simple enough to me. Chris Hayes makes the case perfectly:

1) Yesterday, AG designee Eric Holder said, without hesitation that water-boarding is torture.

2) Dick Cheney has admitted authorizing water-boarding.

3) Dick Cheney has admitted authorizing torture.

4) Torture is a felony under US law punishable by up to 20 years of prison.

5) Dick Cheney authorized a felony.

QED, right? Is there any other way to reason through these premises and deductions?

It really couldn't be simpler. Bush and Cheney, among their other enablers, repeated broke both US and International law. They violated statutes the US has prosecuted before. If they are not prosecuted and tried, there is nothing that will ever again compel an American political leadership figure to follow the rule of law, even while we say emphatically that it is our belief in the rule of law that makes us different.

I don't even see how it's a question at all. I mean, imagine if Dick Cheney had actually SHOT someone instead of authorizing torture...Ok, that's a bad example. Imagine if Dick Cheney had robbed a bank during his lunch break. Or raped a tourist. Prosecuting him would not be considered a "partisan act".

If the brave American Patriots who tortured the men in their custody really thought America was at risk and it was necessary for them to break the law in order to save American lives, then they should WELCOME a trial. Because if they could truly make that case, there is every likelihood that they would be exonerated, or pardoned. They should not expect not to be prosecuted, they should expect to prevail in a trial. Somehow, they had the courage to torture, even in some cases unto death, helpless men entirely in their power. Have they not the courage to stand up and take responsibility for their actions?

For heaven's sake, even Stalin's Russia and Mao's China never admitted to torture. They never discussed it as a POLICY POSITION, for gawds sake. You either do it or you don't, but you do it in the dark, secretly, without telling the world you do it. Somehow, as a nation that embraced human rights and rejected authoritarian measures like surveillance and torture, America was able to survive, indeed to thrive, in the face of threats as big as Nazi German and the Soviet Empire. But 800 guys in a cave halfway around the world represented a threat so severe it became necessary for America to become precisely the thing she fought against all those years? I completely reject that premise.

Still, there's this niggling little voice in my head that keeps wondering. Maybe Obama isn't willing to come out and say his administration will investigate and prosecute war crimes in hopes of preventing Bush from preemptively pardoning the primary players in his government. Maybe Obama hopes that if Bush believes there won't be investigations, he won't need to take the unseemly step of admitting crimes by issuing pardons.

Here's hoping, anyway. We'll know the answers soon enough...

A Nation gets the Government it Deserves

2009-01-16T18:23:00.000-08:00

Sure. There's a lot of hooting as Bush and Cheney slink away, leaving us to try to repair the damage that, at this point, we still cannot even triage. Comedians make jokes, fake news anchors sneer, events and days are counted down, and the calendar pages flip inexorably toward the changing of leadership.

Bush's farewell speech was a travesty, and tantrum demanding respect for actions and events that can only be ridiculed. He took no responsibility for the harm, indeed, he claimed to have done well, and appealed only to time to recognize the quality of his leadership. While we all languish in the disaster that was his domestic policy, his foreign policy, his hubris, his stupidity.

Yes. We GET that Bush and Cheney, along with a large number of their staffs, have committed crime after crime, murdering, torturing, renditioning, spying, lying, even shooting their FRIENDS. But it must never be forgotten. No matter how you decide to come down on the 2000 election and the criminal fraud perpetrated by the Bush cronies on the Supreme Court, ultimately, it should never have come to that.

At the end of the day, a nation gets the leadership it seeks. It follows the ideology it deserves. It offers power to those it would follow. And enough Americans chose to follow these ignorant thugs. Enough Americans were afraid, enough Americans viewed the world with fear and hatred, enough Americans wanted an autocracy to eliminate this scary democracy and all those people we hate.

We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are also the ones who bear responsibility for the actions of our nation over the last 8 year. We need to do (at least) two things. We need to accept that AMERICA did these things, not George Bush, not Dick Cheney, but OUR tribe. We need to own that, accept that, and forgive ourselves. And we need to begin to hold the responsible individuals accountable. We have to accept our responsibility, but that doesn't mean we have the option not to purge this demon. We are the criminals, and we somebody has to pay.

We can't even begin to turn the page until we accept, understand and embrace two things. First, we are also culpable, and in that context, it can happen again. We have to take much more seriously how people become our leaders. We have to recognize the inherent risks in the system, that we can make very large mistakes that we can't find an easy way to reverse. And second, people who have done this to us, even if in our names, must have accountability. If nobody pays a price, there will be no disincentive to the next kleptomaniac thug criminal ignorant incompetent prettyboy who wants power and can't come up with a downside to its pursuit.

Kristof's Sweatshops - REAL Problem Solving in the 21st Century

2009-01-16T15:04:00.000-08:00

Have you read Nicholas Kristof's column on the relative value of Sweatshop manufacturing in raising the quality of life in the poorest nations? If not, go read it now. It's important.

I'm still thinking about it. I'm not sure I agree with the premise, but what's more interesting is that I'm not sure I can challenge it, either. It's important to recognize that we don't WANT it to be true, but that's no basis for making a judgment.

There are no easy solutions to global poverty and wealth imbalance. If there was any actual low-hanging fruit, it would have been picked by now. Every decision is a trade off, a compromise of the first order. You give up something to get something. And maybe, in some cases, you give up a piece of your soul.

It's hard for most of us, living comfortably here in America, to conceive of life in a sweatshop. Hard, but at least possible. We know about manufacturing, we know about agriculture, and it is within our reach to imagine the same jobs without any employee protection, without safety rules, without even a minimum wage. But it's well nigh impossible for us to imagine how people get by without even the luxury of a sweatshop job. Indeed, in a situation where a sweatshop job is nothing more than a hopeless dream.

So we overlay what we know on what we can imagine, and we say, "just pay a living wage, provide for a minimum of employee comfort and safety, and don't poison the community with toxic pollutants". This seems like a reasonable, responsible goal, and as good global citizens we're perfectly willing to support good actors by paying more for their products.

But it's important to remember that the retail price we're willing to pay is not the sole variable in play here. The companies that contract with offshore manufacturers are trying to squeeze as much of the costs out of bringing their products to market as possible, so if a shop that pays a better wage and has higher internal costs due to better practices gets underbid by a sweatshop, the more desirable player loses the order and cannot increase his employment.

As Kristof points out, low-cost offshore manufacturing is a two-tier market. In some cases, better infrastructure like roads, housing and electricity need to be available, so these facilities tend to locate in relatively wealthier nations, while the more labor-intensive manufacturing can be done in the poorest of countries. It is in those countries where it is at least possible that more low-cost manufacturing jobs would provide a very welcome increase in the local quality of life, even if we would consider them, quite rightly, sweatshops.

I don't know the answer. I do know that this is a very timely reminder that the answers to many global challenges are neither obvious nor easy. We need to think about local solutions, and if they seem counterintuitive to us, well, perhaps thats more due to local perception than global reality...

Life gets Tejus, Don't It?

2009-01-16T11:17:00.000-08:00

I've just gotten fed up. Still arguing about torture. As if there were two sides to TORTURE! As if there was an honest and righteous and defensible position in support of torturing people. And while we find ourselves still arguing, after years of argument nobody's said anything new in years.

"No one is above the law".

"Ticking Time Bomb".

"Torture Doesn't work".

"24".

No. No more. I just don't want to repeat myself again. Even more so, I just can't listen to the liars lie any more.

Bellicose talk about Iran. Saber rattling over a Nuclear Weapons development program that doesn't exist.

The US Congress voted 390 to 5 to vigorously support Israel's slaughter of Palestinian women and children in Gaza. And if you say "War Crimes", if you question the savage, brutal, horrendously disproportionate nature of the Israeli onslaught, there's still, even today, somebody prepared to declare you an anti-Semite worthy of Hitler.

The US Treasury is still shoveling money into the most greedy, rapacious, incompetent financial firms, the ones who drank too much for too long at the trough of ridiculous, unsustainable business models, while people lose their jobs, their health care, their homes. While poverty and desperation climbs among Americans, the very American Corporations that CAUSED the problem in the first place just keep getting all they need, over and over again.

The same arguments. The same lies. The same crimes. Something new has to be injected into the discussion. Some cost must apply for being wrong, for breaking the law, for violating the constitution, for forgetting who you work for. Because while we have the same argument over and over, while we make the same statements and listen to the same lies, while nothing, not one little thing changes, it just seems like fiddling while Rome burns...

Implacable Enemy? Really?

2009-01-15T11:51:00.001-08:00

I have to be honest here. I just don't see where Iran is such an awful player in the game of global geopolitics. I mean, sure, people keep repeating the same tropes, but why don't they ever offer any specifics?

1. Iran is meddling in the affairs of her neighbors. Well, yeah, she is. Pretty much everybody does. The US "meddles" in the affairs of most Latin American governments, and if you want to honestly try to take the position the US hasn't meddled in Cuban affairs over the last five decades I'm sorry, I'm just going to laugh at you. And when it comes to meddling in the affairs of Iran's neighbors, wouldn't you say a massive military invasion and occupation that toppled the previous government of Iraq would qualify as meddling? For that matter, we don't seem to have a terrible problem with Israel's serial meddling in pretty much ALL the middle eastern nations.

2. Sponsoring terrorist organizations. Well, yeah, that would be bad. But then it turns out that they're talking about Hezbollah, part of the coalition government in Lebanon, and Hamas, the elected leadership of the Palestinians in Gaza, a group trying to resist an illegal occupation. And it's at least a little disingenuous that Iran has a problem with a Kurdish separatist organization generally classified as a terrorist organization, and THAT group is sponsored by - wait for it - the United States.

3. Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons. Ah, yes. The BIG one. And people from Dick Cheney to Bill Kristol state with certainty that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, so it must be true, right? Ok, sure, Ali Khamenei says they aren't developing weapons. The US intelligence services says they aren't developing weapons. The IAEA says there is absolutely no evidence that they are developing weapons. Iran is a signatory to the NPT and has agreed to the implementation of the "Additional Protocols" allowing International monitoring of fissile materials. And the very important point that the only nation ever to use nuclear weapons on another in anger is the United States.

4. There's the whole "wants to see Israel wiped off the map" meme. Outside of the US, it is well known, and has been widely acknowledged that this is a mis-translation quotation of

Ayatollah Khomeini in a speech made by Ahmedinajad in October of 2005. Only a dishonest press with an agenda would continue to claim that Ahmedinajad was actually calling for an Iran/Israel war. Unfortunately, that is what we seem to have in America.

So it mostly just seems as if America collectively has decided it needs a big, bad dangerous enemy in order to justify doing things that would otherwise be beyond the pale. Now, obviously we can't choose Russia or China, for they have powerful militaries with a global reach and could actually hurt us if acted aggressively toward them. So what we need is to select a much weaker enemy and imbue them with some vast imaginary power to do us great, even existential harm, such as secret terrorist armies with nuclear weapons. Sure, North Korea under Kim Jong Il and Venezuela under Hugo Chavez are inviting targets, and it's not like we haven't spent a fair amount of effort demonizing them too, but it's Iran, with her vast oil reserves and implacable opposition to Israel that we find the easiest and most convenient to hate.

So Obama and Biden and Clinton might be a breath of fresh air compared to Bush/Cheney, but they have adopted the same bellicose rhetoric toward Iran as their predecessors, so don't be surprised if events spiral out of control and we find ourselves in another, much bloodier, Mideast war.

Ding Dong the Witch is Dead

2008-11-05T11:26:00.000-08:00

At long last, it's over. And while I recognize that the outcome was historic, and all that goes with that, a new America, a Post-Race society and an unapologetic populist leader who can inspire people toward equality and justice. I get all that. And intellectually, I embrace it as more, much more than I could have realistically hoped for just a year ago. I am proud of my nation, and I am proud of her new leadership.

But to be honest, that's all secondary. That's not why I'm celebrating, that's not what fuels the white-hot joy the courses through my veins today, that's not what makes my heart sing and my soul full.

Nope. It really just comes down to one thing. The brutal criminals' reign of terror and destruction is truly at an end. The end of the Bush/Cheney policies. Not some mindless continuation, a mere ape-like doubling down on all the worst policies and worse instincts of the thugs.

What will Obama do? How will he lead? What direction will he take us? How will he roll back the excesses and begin to heal the wounds and repair the damage?

Today, it doesn't matter. It's important, sure, and there will be plenty of battles to fight along the way. But for today, the embarrassment and dishonor are at an end, and for me, for today at least, that's enough.

Thank you all

The Preferred Outcome?

2008-10-11T13:03:00.001-07:00

James Wolcott says it with his usual eloquence:

My rooting interest is less about Obama himself than about how big a hurt he can put to the Republican Party. I don't want the Republican Party simply defeated in November, I want to see it smashed beyond all recognition, in such wriggling, writhing, anguished disarray that it can barely reconstitute itself, so desperate for answers that it looks to Newt Gingrich for visionary guidance, his wisdom and insight providing the perfect cup of hemlock to finish off the conservative movement for good so that it can rot in the salted earth of memory unmissed and unmourned in toxic obscurity.

And:

Reading the conservative blogs, many of its commenters have already slid into a state of resignation about the election, comforting themselves with the hope that just as the ruins of the Carter administration gave rise to the glory that was Ronald Reagan, out of the ashes of Obama will rise Sarah Palin in seraphic splendor to preside over the restoration.

I certainly can understand these sentiments. When I look back on the carnage and horror of the last eight years my knee jerks and I want to see all traces of worldview that brought them to us eradicated, ground to dust and shot into solar orbit where they can never again create their characteristic havoc.

But like everything else, if you start to think it through, you begin to realize that while this might an AN answer, it is clearly not THE answer.

America's only hope, if she is to remain even the sad shadow of a democracy that she has become, is to continue a two- or multi-party political system. Single party rule seldom works well, and to the extent that it can work at all requires a dictatorship and no opportunity to change governments.

If you have any doubt that a democracy requires and opposition party, you need look, once again, no further than the last eight years. If the Democrats had been willing to operate as a true "loyal opposition", they might have prevented any number of the ideological excesses of the Bush/Cheney administration. The fact that they stood by, or even in many cases actively enabled, the agenda of the governing party only demonstrates the necessity of an opposition.

Any party entrusted with great power, no matter how pure their original intentions, without an opposing party and some methodologies for that opposing party's voice to be heard, will invariably sink into tyranny. If the Republican party cannot survive it's current state, then it will be necessary for another party, or several, to rise up and do at least well enough in Congressional elections to have some power to control the worst instincts of the party in power, no matter who they are.

Now there is no real reason why this can't be the Republican party. But it has become pretty obvious that it cannot be the Republican party as it is constituted today. A truly conservative political voice is not a bad thing, even in cases that call for a more liberal political solution. But in exchange for power, the Republican party sold it's soul. It has become the party of stupid, of hate, of insular beliefs and worldviews. It has become the party of bigotry and illiteracy, anti-science and anti-populist. It has rejected or driven out people of color, gay people, secular people, people who value any kind of intellectual evaluation over blind ideology. And as such, the Republican party is increasingly irrelevant in twenty-first century American politics.

It appears they are going to take quite a drubbing at the polls in a couple of weeks. And they will withdraw to lick their wounds and plan their strategies, as well they should. They will have two choices. One would be to soften their positions, become more inclusive, consider a less strident tone on abortion, immigration, health care and government participation in the community in general. This would allow them to reach out to people who support their economic and foreign policy agendas but who are put off by some of the more extreme rhetoric. And this is a path fraught with concerns, for they would have to acknowledge that to do so would be to alienate the most extreme far-right components of their political base, in hopes of attracting a much larger group of supporters from nearer the center. That far-right "base" would have their own decisions to make at that point - form a new political party with much less national clout or swallow the insult and continue on as Republicans anyway.

Their other option would be to go into the bunkers - move to the right. Declare that Bush/Cheney and McCain ultimately failed because they were not "conservative" (in it's current, non-dictionary meaning of "extreme right wing ideology") enough. To go to the Gingerichs and Huckabees of the right wing of their party and embrace an even more extreme ideologically driven world view. To essentially become the "White Blue Collar Evangelical" party. To do this cements a base, but will it be possible for this platform to attract a majority in a national election? It seems unlikely to me.

Should the Republican party adopt this second course, and I think it rather likely they will, at least in the near term, they seal their own fate and become a small, irrelevant, angry party with very little in the way of national representation. With fewer people supporting them, and less attention being paid to them, they may simply disintegrate into factions, opening up the opportunity for a new, Center-Right party to come into being.

Of course, it's also possible that the Democrats, sensing an opportunity for long-term dominance, will continue to move to the right, albeit in a much less extreme fashion, in order to cement the support of those who had been Republicans but could not, in good conscience, support the glorified hate group the Republicans had become. Would that, perhaps, open an opportunity for a new, Center-Left party to come into being to challenge what the Democrats have become?

Leaky Boat

2008-09-28T17:24:00.000-07:00

The problem is that nobody, not me, not you, not Hank Paulson has any idea what they're doing. I have a couple questions about this whole 700 Billion Dollar Bailout program.

1. Is it necessary?
This is the biggest question. And I think it's quite telling that this is the question the players in Washington LEAST want to address. What would happen if we did nothing? What would happen if we spent significantly less? Shouldn't that that be the very first question anyone asks? How can we determine what we need to do if we aren't allowed to have a conversation about what we WANT to do will accomplish?

2. Will it even work?
Honestly, why should it? And by what mechanism? All we have proposed to do is buy a specified amount of grossly overvalued non-performing investment vehicles at some, very likely overvalued price. After we do that, all we know for sure is that the government, and that means taxpayers, has lost. We now own these ridiculous derivative mortgage-backed investments and credit default swaps that never had any real value in the first place. Will that do ANYTHING to improve the position of the firms holding them? Oh yeah? How much of this worthless debt are they holding? What else do they own that is overvalued on their balance sheets? What will be their next demand? Under the current (lack of) oversight regime, we have no idea. It's all guesswork.

Think it through, for gawds sake. Every bank and investment firm that owns this crap is failing. Why would anyone believe that in a sixty trillion dollar market, 700 Billion dollars will be enough to prop them up? Especially with the immediate history of these firms taking the money and just investing it themselves in safe international funds. Nothing changes.

3. Is it enough?
Of course not. They're lying. Again. This is an immense global market that has been generating ridiculous wealth for it's participants for well over a decade. Every new loan product that they could think up, no matter how unsupportable, was greedily snapped up and repackaged and resold. Brokers made millions. Fund managers made tens of millions. Brokerage firms made HUNDREDS of millions. All predicated on an unsupportable basis. And now the chickens have come home to roost. I personally would tell them to eat shit.

4. Will it actually do more harm than good?
Since the entire process is a fait accompli, I guess this is the only real question that matters. If it actually staves off some kind of apocalyptic collapse, then it was probably well spent, even if it was overspent. But know what? I am not optimistic. We are going to go significantly deeper into debt. This isn't something that happens in a vacuum, unilaterally. We have to have partners who will buy this huge additional debt. Ask yourself. Why would they? Our financial system is in collapse, and we're asking these international investors to trust us that in thirty years we'll be able to honor our commitment. Of course, in many cases, they have a significant investment in our ability to continue to support this level of consumer spending, so they might make questionable investments. But at some point, there's just no justification that can drive further investment. At that point, the US economy is in deep trouble. And yeah. Nobody's talking about that little problem.

What will happen when we, America, have nothing to offer but the ability to destroy your enemy in a matter of days in exchange for money? What will it mean when the only export we have to offer is the "War Fighter"? What will the world look like when we have to sell "regime change" because we have nothing else to offer?

I honestly never thought I'd see America fall this far in my lifetime. I mean sure, everything ends, all empires and regimes fall, only to be replaced by others, but this last eight years has been breathtaking in it's horror. And make no mistake. It's going to get very much worse. My pity to all you young folks...

But what about ME?

2008-09-27T19:51:00.000-07:00

As I was watching the debate, I started to wonder: Do they really not understand what people want? Are they SO out of touch that they just make decisions and spend money and lives and time on what THEY have decided is important, without any consideration of what American citizens might care about.

So I started to wonder.

As a voter, what DO I want?

Do I want more wars? Do I really gain anything, security or peace or ANYTHING, from fighting wars 18,000 miles away?

Do I really gain anything from helping Israel oppress and dominate the Palestinians?

Do I really gain anything from a confrontation with Iran?

What do I gain from a confrontation with Russia over Georgia?

Or would I be better off with guaranteed health insurance?

With a job. A job with a future.

A chance to get to work without being hostage to four dollar gas.

A future for America not tied to an 11 TRILLION dollar debt and a poisoned planet?

How can we convince our leadership we don't care about nuclear weapons and the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and the bare-knuckles confrontation in the Caucasus? We're not afraid of Iran, we want our law enforcement and intelligence organizations to manage the threat from terrorists, a threat that will diminish as we stop killing their families.

When will our leadership recognize that their job is to improve the lives and meet the needs of their constituencies, the citizens of the United States of America, and not to play stupid games and take self-aggrandizing positions with the lives and treasure of those citizens?

You know what? My problem is actually NOT with a political leadership that acts like a bunch of thugs running away from a smash and grab robbery. Oh no. My problem is with a population that doesn't seem to mind that every year they write a check to the government, and nobody seems interested in how they spend that money.

Bridges and roads and schools that actually work.

What am I getting with the income tax checks I write?

War in Iraq, bombs in Pakistan, madness in Afghanistan, hate and fear and death and murder and torture.

I do NOT want that.

I'd like my tax money to contribute to the well being of americans. Not the murder and domination of people half a world away.

Am I the only one?

That was Then...

2008-09-24T14:16:00.000-07:00

So what is it with America's political leadership today? Doesn't it seem that there was a time, not that long ago, when people of dissimilar political and ideological worldviews could come together responsibly and hammer out compromises that actually advanced the nation's agenda and contributed positively to public policy? I've been trying for a year or so to figure out what has changed. Certainly our political positions have hardened, our ideologies have become more rigid, and in many cases more extreme, and the discourse has become toxic.

But why? Certainly those leaders of a bygone era held strong beliefs, and were no less committed to achieving their ideological goals than those of today. And yet, they could find a place, not necessarily in the center, but where the central goals were met without giving away more than was absolutely necessary.

Of course, the drift toward extreme positions is seriously problematic. It's hard to be willing to compromise with torturers, with people who start wars, hold people without due process, run offshore gulags and shred the fourth amendment. How exactly am I supposed to do that? "OK, you can invade and occupy Iraq, but you have to promise to try not to hurt anyone"? I'm not sure I see a way compromise can work. And I'm sure there are elements that feel the same way about compromising with somebody like me.

But I think I've figured out the difference, and it's both smaller and much bigger than I thought it would be. In earlier times, the goals were the same, it was only the methodology for achieving those goals that was argued about. In a sense, ideology defined method more than it did outcome. But today, ideology is the primary determinant of desired outcome, and that creates a kind of inflexibility that never existed before.

Take for example, terrorism. If everyone had the shared goal of ending terror attacks on Americans, then we would be more flexible in our methods for dealing with it. We would certainly recognize that fighting terrorists with military force only perpetuates the fighting - indeed, can NEVER end it. We might try using Law Enforcement and Intelligence assets to attempt to prevent attacks while we did all we could to improve our relationship with the source populations, acting as an honest broker and offering genuine partnership. But for much of our leadership, that's not the goal. The goal is to have wars, to have our troops deployed on the oil fields, to create a multi-polar world and to try to ensure that some are winners and some are losers. In that case, the end of terrorist acts against American interests is the farthest thing from the goal - indeed, without the EXCUSE of the terrorist threat, the outcome desired by these factions would be impossible to achieve.

For that matter, consider nuclear non-proliferation. If the goal was to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons to any new nations, there would be a relatively straightforward set of methodologies employed consistently and fairly. And as became clear what was working and what wasn't, everyone would work together to deploy the most effective approaches. But clearly that is NOT the desired outcome, despite the rhetoric to the contrary. It seems that anyone in a political leadership position who talks about non-proliferation these days is actually speaking of a specific set of nations and organizations who's development of nuclear capabilities cannot be permitted. Israel, India and Pakistan develop nuclear weapons without much in the way of outside interference, while Libya, North Korea and Iran encounter the wrath of the non-proliferators who couldn't be bothered to complain in the case of the previous nations. And these choices are so arbitrary that we have the bizarre case of NPT signatories being placed under sanction for doing things that the NPT they signed specifically allow them to do, while others blatantly refuse to sign the NPT and develop weapons unfettered.

So it seems that when ideology dictates methodology, goals and outcomes can be agreed upon and specific methods can be hammered out in civil negotiations. It is only when ideology dictates outcomes that the leadership becomes intransigent, and the conversation turns bitter, angry and personal.

You Can NOT be Serious

2008-09-20T11:16:00.000-07:00

It appears that what NASA really needs is either a whole lot MORE rocket scientists, or a whole lot less. Because in the annals of painting oneself into a figurative corner, the management at NASA has taken not just the cake, but the entire bakery.

There are exactly two vehicles capable of delivering human passengers and crew to the Space Station - The Shuttle and a Russian Soyuz three-man capsule launched using a traditional disposable rocket motor.

For a whole lot of reasons - economic, political, technical and safety related - the Shuttle will be retired after STS-133 is completed in June of 2010. But why should that be a problem? NASA is building the replacement to the Shuttle, Orion, so certainly any project manager worth her salt would have the new replacement vehicle ready at the point where the previous system was being eliminated. Right?

Uh, no. This is NASA, one of the most dysfunctional bureaucracies in the long dysfunctional history of bureaucracies we're talking about, and nothing ever just works in a manner that makes sense. Orion's first flight is scheduled for 2014, leaving almost exactly five years without America being able to independently deliver personnel to the ISS. So after investing 100 Billion dollars and a vast amount of national energy and prestige, America will have to effectively abandon the Space Station immediately upon completion. Of course, the other participating nations including Russia, the ESA and Japan all have arrangements in place to provide crews to man the Station, so really only America will be left behind. Really.

But not to fear! NASA has a plan. (If there was ever a phrase that ought to cause you to grip your wallet tightly and run as fast as you can in the opposite direction, that one is it.) All we've got to do, you see, is order up some Soyuz capsules from the Russians and we'll just use those to send our crews back and forth to the ISS. What could be simpler.

Well, unsurprisingly, it turns out that it's not that simple. A number of problems plague this "solution", in fact. First, logistically, it takes three years to build a Soyuz. So if they started now, today, there would still be a minimum six months to a year gap between the last Shuttle flight and the first Soyuz trip. So why hasn't NASA placed their order?

Well, they don't actually have the funds. They need to get the money allocated from Congress. And as you might have expected, there's a problem with that. The "Iran, North Korea and Syria Nonproliferation Act". Until Russia is certified as not assisting any of these nations in building weapons of mass destruction, there are trade sanctions preventing the purchase of Russian rocket technology. Of course, Congress can provide NASA with a waiver and the funds, and that is what NASA is hoping for. And it's not like Congress would actually be concerned about acting in a two-faced, politically inconsistent fashion when it suited their interests to do so, so this actually COULD come to pass.

Of course, Congress is going on recess the end of September, and then there's the whole presidential elections thing, the transition to the new administration, new priorities and mandates, a different way of doing business, a new "100 days" legislative strategy. Along with the 3 or 4 trillion dollars the US does not have just spent preventing a complete financial collapse, it seems somewhat far fetched that the funds to buy Russian Rockets will be made available in the next year or so, anyway.

So, through a combination of embarrassingly poor planning, political manipulation, economic mismanagement and just out and out blundering, the American investment in that technological jewel in the sky, that pinnacle of scientific achievement, the sole focus of the American Space Program for fifteen years, will have on board NO American crewmen for at least five, and likely closer to seven years.

Not just your tax dollars at work, but an example of the quality of management at the top in America today. We let these people run things, and we keep being surprised when things don't run well. We are surprised by Iraq, by Katrina, by Fannie and Freddie, by all of the ridiculous, predictable failures large and small, over and over again.

It's almost like there's a pattern here...

The Kid Rocks

2008-09-18T19:45:00.000-07:00

Damn, I'm enjoying watching this kid. It's not that he's fearless. I've known people who are fearless, and they scare the crap out of me. It's not that he's thoughtless. He understands what it takes to win, and what winning means, and how you compete in the big leagues.

You want to know what it is? He just wants to play. Put your guy at the plate with a bat. I'll try to get him out. There's nothing complicated or difficult about this game. Let's go.

So when he set out to bunt the runner over, and instead got a Randy Johnson fastball on his finger, what did Lincecum want to do?

Look out. Lincecum wanted to throw the ball. He wanted to get on the mound and try to get guys out. Because for him, at this point, this game isn't about money, of which he will make plenty, and it's not about ego, SportCenter Highlights and individual numbers. Nope. Timmy is fun because he still understands that it's about him trying to get hitters out. And that is why I watch the game....

We're all Ghouls Now

2008-09-04T18:22:00.000-07:00

I just watched the "Tribute to 9/11 victims" they ran tonight, the last night of the Republican National Convention. And a great deal became clear to me. They present the attacks on America, and on Americans, as if they have no basis, no history, no reason, they are just a bunch of Muslims who hate us for no good reason. Maybe they just don't have anything better to do, they don't drink beer, so when they get bored they think "Hey, I dunno, there's nothing on TV, let's go kill some Americans".

Their response is we have to fight them. But it's so clear that that's stupid. It's so obvious that killing them, invading and occupying their countries, assassinating their leaders and starving their populations will only create more fighters who hate, not America, but American policies, and will continue to try to change those policies. Again, it's obvious that they don't have the leverage, the political or military or economic wherewithal to try to make America and The West and the UN LISTEN to their grievances, so they can see no option but to attack assymetrically, in the only way available to them.

Finally, at long last, to any thinking person, the answer is obvious. To try to kill them is to perpetuate the conflict. To try to find a way to live in peace with them, to respect their rights, their countries and their beliefs, to help them out of poverty, to help them educate their people and eradicate disease and develop their economies, these are a path to peace between our people.

Honestly, this is not really complex. Disgustingly, our governement recognizes these self-evident truths. But to coexist in peace with the Islamic Nations is not the goal. No more than the goal was ever to end the occupation of Iraq. The goal is a permanant state of war, and the costs in lives and treasure don't seem to matter.

What's truly important at this point is we stop providing cover to the parties on both sides who profit in so many ways from eternal warfare. Both bush/cheney and bin laden/zawahiri are quite happy with the current state of affairs. Neither can be concerned with the lives lost, the lives ruined, the hopeless, the homeless, the stateless.

When the answer is easy and it's hard to prolong the status quo, and yet the status quo is prolonged and the people aren't asking the simple, obvious questions, there's something truly wrong with the system. When the war destroys families and families don't actively work to end the war, when people rail against waste and ignore the waste of fighting a war that would simply end if we just quit fighting it - when death, poverty and disease is accepted and any peace intitiative is seen as weakness, it's the society itself that is sick.

Anbar-ing Something Unforseen...

2008-09-01T17:04:00.001-07:00

The surge worked, right? John McCain says Iraq is "stable and peaceful" The American military turned operational control in bloody Anbar province over to the Iraqi government today. Everything is going just swimmingly over there, huh?

Not so fast. You'll never learn it from the American media, but Iraq is unraveling faster than Rivers Cuomo's sweater. And there is a certain ennui among the American military leadership, anticipating an Obama administration implementing an orderly withdrawal of American troops. So planning is more short-term, more defensive. Sure, as John Kerry so famously said, nobody wants to be the last man to die for a mistake, but even more than that, nobody wants to die when the whole thing is winding down.

First, Anbar. When the Iraqis were rushed from the battlefield to the ballot box (remember all those purple fingers?), the Sunni dominated provinces boycotted the election, as they could see clearly that there was nothing in the system to provide them with representation. When you have a clear majority, as the Shiite parties did, you don't need to compromise, to offer concessions. You can ignore your opposition, crush them in legitimate voting, and strip them of power and influence. This has long been known as the "tyranny of the majority", and one of the major tenants of democracy has been to find a way to give genuine voice to minority parties. There was no thought of that in George Bush's brave new Iraq.

So now you have a weird condition in Anbar Province. The population is overwhelmingly Sunni, but the political representation at the provincial level is Shia. As is the national government. As a result of the political outcome, along with a radically unfair de-baathification program, a very competent and bloody insurgency developed in Anbar, the heart of the "Sunni Triangle". For a couple years, American Marines fought them to a standstill, taking heavy casualties along the way. Eventually, somebody wised up. A case was made that the foreign Salafi Jihadists that came to the Sunni provinces did not respect either Iraqis nor Iraqi nationalism. Many of the former Iraqi Army and Baathist insurgents were hired to effectively switch sides, and defend the existing political status of the province against the hate and extremism. It was a good deal. For the first time since the fall of the Hussein government, they could support their families and build stable neighborhoods.

Now, of course, there are cracks in the happy tale. There was never any love between the Sunni "Awakening Councils" and the Shi'a provincial government. The government made no bones about the fact that they felt they should have the typical "monopoly on the use of force" that governments are entitled to. The Councils, on the other hand, distrust the intentions of the Provincial government, and expect to have to fight the Shiites after America leaves.

Well, America is starting to leave. al Maliki is supposed to take over the payments to the Council fighters next month. It's pretty clear that's not going to happen. The Iraqi Defense Forces in Anbar want the Sunni fighters to surrender their weapons. The Councils want to to be absorbed into the Defense Forces. Maliki cannot allow that.

Along with the wide open Kirkuk question, the tensions between Kurds and Arabs in the north and the various Shiite factions in the south, this is much less a country than a cauldron. Close to full boil, the rules have to be fundamentally changed before any real stability can be found.

I don't know if he knows it or not, but Obama's right. These issues have to be brought to a head and RESOLVED before there can be any hope of Iraq becoming a functioning nation. As long as they are hanging, open ended threats and challenges, unaddressed like an untreated cancer, Iraq will be dependent upon a third party to keep the factions apart.

Sadly, the factions cannot be resolved from "apart". Once these basic, fundamental issues upon which Iraqi sovereignty depends are resolved, then there will be an opportunity for whatever the final version of Iraq looks like to bring home her refugees, provide services to her people and move out of the stasis she finds herself in.

Of course, she will, for the foreseeable future, be an ally and friend of Iran, and another oil-rich autocracy. But this is one of the things that MUST happen if we are to get beyond killing as a solution to economic and ethnic problems...

Hypocrisy in Action

2008-08-31T11:30:00.000-07:00

Sure. The logic is clear, and easy to follow. See, the US backed independence for Kosovo, a separatist "breakaway region" of Serbia. You see, it's just Democracy in action, the people don't want to live under the bootheel of Serbian governance. They want to forge their own path, make their own decisions, form a nation of like-minded people of similar ethnic background and live in peace with their neighbors. This was vehemently opposed by the Russians.

The Russians could not sit by and watch the aspirations for Democratic independence amongst the Abkhazians and South Ossetians crushed by those dangerous, authoritarian Georgians. The people who occupied those separatist "breakaway regions" of Georgia didn't want to live under the bootheel of Georgian governance. They wanted to forge their own path, make their own decisions, form a nation of like-minded people of similar ethnic background and live in peace with their neighbors. This was vehemently opposed by the Americans.

While every player in this panoply of pawns is obviously guilty of the most blatant, self-serving hypocrisy, I do have to say that Putin (oh, I'm sorry - should I be saying Medvedev? Haha, just kidding) and Medvedev are just slightly less guilty than bush/rice. Both events, Kosovo and Georgia, happened on Russia's frontier, deep inside their sphere of influence. Just exaclty what the US and NATO think they are accomplishing creating military and political challenges to Russia on her doorstep is hard to determine. Most of us learn very early on that if you are INSIDE the bears cage, repeatedly poking the bear with a sharp stick is going to lead to some highly counterproductive results.

So the US put radars in the Czech Republic, and Midcourse Defense Interceptors in Poland, explaining patiently to Putin and the Russians that they are just SILLY if they construe that as any kind of threat to THEM - it should be obvious that missiles in Poland were necessary to counter the threat from Iran and North Korea. The Russians, however, don't seem to be buying that logical construct. But I think it's historically interesting the way the US reacted to the possibility of Russian missiles in Cuba. For that matter, the rhetoric employed by the US Diplomatic Corps after the Chavez Government in Venezuela negotiated military purchases from Russia.

But the best available analogy to the American "activities" in Georgia is hypothetical. Just imagine Washington's reaction if the Russian government began developing extensive military, diplomatic and economic ties with Mexico. If the Russians were training the Mexican Army, and providing arms and military aid. If they invited Mexico to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Do you think the US goverment would smile and welcome the Russians to the Western Hemisphere? Somehow, I doubt that the American reaction would be terribly sanguine.

So Bush chastises Russia for using military force against a sovereign nation, and Rice flails Medvedev over Georgia's "territorial integrity" (Russia's EXACT argument against the independence of Kosovo) while people - real people with lives and families and houses and possessions and hopes and dreams - people watch those lives and dreams extinguished over nothing more than a playground scuffle. But on this playground, the boys who are fighting both have big brothers who can wreck the whole neighborhood if they get drawn into the fight.

It's the tribal madness of ideology writ large. No one stands to gain anything but a little international leverage - and the world stands to lose so much...

My Speech Before the Democratic National Convention

2008-08-28T18:27:00.000-07:00

Ladies and Gentlemen.

Mikey!!

[Crowd goes predictably wild]

*AHEM*

Hate. Fear. Greed.

There's powerful motivation in the base emotions. We hate what we fear. We fear what we hate. We want what we don't have, and we hate and fear those who have it or want to take it away.

It's hate that conquers continents. Fear that builds tribal and national unity. Greed that builds wealth. We would not be who we are today, we would not be sitting in the wealth and comfort and safety that is the envy, yes, the desperate envy of so much of the world, without those motivations.

But now? Now there's nothing left to be conquered. Nationalism, ethnicism, tribalism only limit our ability to interact with the rest of our species both within our nation and globally. And greed? Greed creates structures to protect and preserve wealth. Without legal constraints on greed, a wealthy class is perpetuated, and the dream of becomming wealthy is nothing more than that - a dream.

Folks, it's been a long time since Hate, Fear and Greed were a way to move a society forward. Now those same base emotions are used to perpetuate the status quo, to compel people to use their vote to preserve the position of the wealthiest, against the best interest of that voter. Manipulated, divided, scared.

The united states of america spends more on the military, on machines of war, tools of war, warriors and wars, than the rest of the world COMBINED. And that goes unquestioned. I'm asking the question. Is that the best way to invest your tax dollars? Do you suppose, if we all got in a room, sat down around a table, and figured out how to spend the tax revenue of the wealthiest economy in the world, that at the end of that dialog we would arrive at that figure? To say that it is insane is to grossly understate the case. For the taxpayers themselves to agree to it, to agree to it ACTIVELY, is ten times insane.

We stand, now, at an historic fork in the road. We are not being asked to choose a president. We are not being asked to commit to an ideology. We are not being asked to decide on a personality. We are, here and now, being presented with two paths. And we must choose one. Two paths forward, neither has a guarantee, neither leads to a clear outcome, neither assures a perfect world.

One path is the path of Hate, Fear and Greed. It is the path of more wars, more military spending, more arbitrary, unilateral international actions. More support for the corporation at the expense of the worker. More degegulation, more limitations on unions and workers rights, more opportunities for corporations to profit, without any requirement for those profits to roll down to the workers who create them. Without any promise that a successful, profitable corporation will reward it's workers with even the continuing promise of a job.

Another path is one of strength, courage and unity. It is a path that rewards the people, that recognizes and accepts the responsibility of government to contribute to the well being of it's people, to help them achieve success, raise their families, educate their children, and retire in security. It is a path that takes us to a peaceful coexistence with our international neighbors, working together to bring poor nations into prosperity, eradicating disease and improving lives. It is a path that rejects war as failure, not success, and reduces American strategic military spending by two thirds. Immediately. It is a path that makes certain that no American is hungry, that every american has the best health care available in the world, and every American child is educated to the extent he or she wishes to pursue.

So the choice to be made, the decision demanded by the moment, is simple. Will it be Hate, Fear and Greed? Or will it be hope, courage and solutions? Will it be wars and imperial occupations, or will it be domestic growth and help for people like you and me. Will we choose to squander our remaining wealth on international adventurism and foreign entanglements, or will we choose another way to spend our national treasure?

It seems like a simple choice. It seems obvious. It seems easy. But so many of the American people have chosen instead against their interest, in order to choose hatred, military intervention and authoritarianism. This is a drive that cannot be understood by people who cherish liberty and American Values, but if this drive cannot be redirected, America will perish.

It's time for America to grow up. You have a responsibility. Read the positions of the candidates. Think about how they might affect you. Make a decision with your head. Not your heart. And not your genitals. Look at the costs of the policies of the last eight years and think about what YOU would do differently. And think about what Barack Obama brings to you. Then make your choice.

I have no doubt that you will make the right decision.

Thank you, and good night...

Political Realities

2008-08-25T16:10:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about American politics. Nope. It's not the convention that drives this deeper reflection on the state of our Democracy in this foul year of our lord, 2008. I guess, more than anything else, it was the REACTION to the Biden VP choice. They started braying right off that the Obama/Biden ticket was some kind of fringe far-left loony tunes hippie-commie tag team that was going to lead the country off some kind of cliff. The fact that the bush/cheney administration has pretty much monopolized the cliff market these days doesn't seem to occur.

I've arrived at a couple conclusions. While they don't rise to the level of epiphany, they do help me both accept in an adult manner the flaccid, useless outcome of "the most important presidential campaign in history" and put in perspective the incredibly bad decisions that americans keep making that are leading us willingly to our own destruction.

First, America is a nation that collectively lives in terror of losing whatever it has managed to accumulate. It seems that the American people are willing to accept any affront, any imposition of authority, the elimination of any freedom if they can just feel like they will be able to keep their position, and no one on a lower rung of the ladder will be allowed to move up. Those spaces are limited, and not to be shared - especially with people who are "not like us". Americans are like an old man with all his money buried in coffee cans in the back yard. So afraid of all the unprocessed changes around him in society, he cannot bring himself to use that capital to fund a transition to the new realities. Eventually he dies, and the wealth just disappears into the mists of time.

Second, the lessons of the Bush/Cheney administration and their compliant lap-dog congress are there for all to see. Unfettered power in the hands of those with a corporatist and authoritarian agenda is toxic to everyone not already "in the club". It seems that all branches of government and the national media whose income is provided by that government have a vested interest in the status quo. Sure, populist economic programs and a major reduction in military spending, along with reinvestment in infrastructure, health care, education and energy would be very good for 85% of the population. But it would be bad for those who make laws, allocate money and form opinion. And therefore, they are accepted as "bad".

If the American people don't even have the wisdom, insight or courage to vote in a reasonable center - right Democratic government led by a charismatic young man with at least a few vestigial populist instincts, they will have gotten exactly what they deserved. And in the blood, smoke and disease of endless war, deficit spending and unregulated corporations, they will watch the end of it all. Everything they allowed themselves to be convinced they were protecting by sacrificing so much of what it meant to BE an American.

John McCain and the criminal, dishonest power-hungry old white men who represent the Republican Party in 2008 have nothing to offer the American people. And the sad thing is, they don't even feel that they need to pretend they do. The entire Republican campaign is about Barack Obama, an effort to make him a frightening threat to everything we keep trying to hold on to, even as we watch everything change around us. If they win, they will jealously protect the status quo, everyone in their party desperately clinging to one last good run, to live well and die well, with no thought to the economic, diplomatic and environmental death spiral they were responsible for.

It's not hard to see what the policies of today lead to. But if racial, tribal and religious hatred can outweigh national and global survival, then perhaps we, as a culture and as a species don't have any goddam right to survive.

The Drake Equation's last variable is the lifespan of an intelligent species. I think it's an important question - perhaps the most important question. Because if a society, merely by dent of it's inherent intelligence, builds an unsustainable society out of greed and hate, it cannot be expected to last a very long time, and perhaps, ultimately, that is in the best interest of the cosmic neighborhood.

Georgia on my Mind

2008-08-15T10:52:00.000-07:00

At this point, the madness, stupidity, hypocrisy and blind ideology have reached epic proportions. Let's look at what actually happened objectively. Georgia, traditionally a region under the purview of Moscow, with a limited history of independence, took advantage of the fall of the Soviet Union to declare independent nationhood. The borders were arbitrarily set to coincide with the original borders from the Georgian independence of 1918. These borders enclosed a number of independent minded regions with no love for the Georgians and no interest in being part of an independent Georgia. These regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, became autonomous regions with support from Russia.

Georgia is led by an American Educated nutjob with delusions of relevance on the world stage named Mikheil Saakashvil. Saakashvili pursued close economic and military ties to the west, primarily due to the fact that he had no hope of developing good relations with his enormous neighbor to the north. With ideologically - driven support from the Bush Administration, Georgia wanted to join NATO. Russia was understandably concerned by these actions by a nation with which it shared a 723 kilometer common border.

So we come to last week. Believing he could act in an unfettered manner due to perceived security agreements with the US and NATO, Saakashvili ordered his forces into South Ossetia to dislodge the separatist leadership and re-assert authority over the breakaway region. Russia, deeply unhappy with Georgia's increasingly close ties to the west, and unwilling to see Georgia incorporated into NATO, did the obvious, predictable thing and with her overwhelming military advantage over tiny Georgia drove the Georgian military units out of the Ossetia region and continued an offensive to punish Georgia for her actions, cripple her military capability and demonstrate that in her sphere of influence, it is a very bad idea to make Russia angry.

While this outcome was not only obvious and predictable, but entirely in keeping with the way the world has always worked, the American response has been just as predictably hypocritical and deeply, dangerously stupid.

The hypocricy is reflected in the sad bleating of the American administration over things like "Territorial Integrity", "Georgian Sovereignty" and how it is unacceptable in this day and age for a powerful nation to impose her will by force and seek "regime change" in an external nation. There is of course the obvious comparisons to Afghanistan and Iraq, but in fact, the complete lack of self-awareness and shame runs significantly deeper. For there is also the key question of geographic proximity. Powerful, imperial nations have always jealously managed the nations in their immediate sphere of influence. There is a security dimension to this, along with the economic and political explanations. It not only explains America's traditional dominance of her neighbors to the south and long-term friendly relations with Canada, but also the stick-in-the-craw spittle-spraying anger with Cuba that has led nearly to nuclear war on at least one occasion, and to dozens of confrontations over the years.

How can one be surprised, or even take significant umbrage at Russia being actively involved in the political and military status of neighbors with whom she shares a common border? If America can justify the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq on national security grounds, how can she begrudge Russia doing the same with a regional neighbor? America's leadership may not like it, but for them to mindlessly bray about how it is no longer acceptable for a modern nation to act in this way flys in the face of Imperial America's actions in the last decade. And they must realize that this is clearly and transparently visible to the rest of the world.

And then there's the abject, ideologically - driven stupidity of the belligerent American response. With our recent lessons on the limitations of armed might, with our army and marines bogged down in the occupation of a couple of tiny, third world nations, much of our equipment deployed and worn out, National Guard and Reserves heavily over-committed, with the lessons learned over and over again since Vietnam, lessons clear for all to see, with all this knowledge and history apparent for the world to study, to threaten Russia with any kind of military response on THEIR BORDER is simply insane. Other than starting a nuclear war, what could we really hope to accomplish. Our forces would have to find a way to get halfway around the world while the Russian forces could just sit and wait for them. Our air might be better, but they have local bases and plenty of planes. Our navy might be better, but they can deploy subs and missile right there locally - our navy would lose most of their capital ships in two weeks. What do these idiots want to see, some kind of Normandy invasion? We don't have the ships, the troops or the ability to land in those numbers. And can you imagine the difficulty of doing so today, under a rain of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and smart bombs?

And of course, the other side of this rich panoply of international idiocy is the threats and belligerence themselves. As they get repeated, without any action, indeed, without the ability to back them up, they lose all currency. Just as the threat of American military intervention was taken much more seriously before the actual American military intervention in Iraq demonstrated that the anticipated effectiveness of large - scale military action did not live up to the actual effectiveness. Indeed, America's military "sucess" in Iraq has damaged her much more deeply than Saddam ever could have dreamed. As American polititians, pundits, candidates and thought leaders continue to rant about the evils of Russian intervention in Georgia, ratcheting up the rhetoric to "Remember the Maine" levels, they merely demonstrate for all the world to see the impotence of twenty first century imperial America. For all McCain could actually do, he might as well tie an onion to his belt and yell at clouds. Russia knows America is powerless to act, and every threat and challenge she issues merely reinforces that point around the world...

Drilling for Dummies

2008-08-10T11:47:00.000-07:00

So American Politics has finally hit bottom. All lies and pandering, all the time. It's rapidly approaching the point where both campaigns will be running entirely fact-free campaigns by the debates.

There's suddenly a whole bunch of political heat around domestic oil exploration and drilling. Not just ANWR these days, but offshore. Offshore drilling has been a political non-starter for decades. There's two reasons why it's a ridiculous idea at this point.

First, what problem are you trying to solve? Sure, we're running out of oil globally, and with the increasing demand from the developing nations, particularly India and China, that trend can only accelerate. But the amount of oil available on the market is greater than or equal to demand. We are not in a shortage situation, where we need more crude to meet demand. No, apparently the goal is purely political - have some impact on retail gasoline and home heating oil prices before the presidential election.

Lets interject a few quick facts into this debate:

It takes YEARS to bring a new oil platform on line
There are no available oil rigs - they are all in use
The oil companies don't give us a discount on American Oil
America's reserves are so tiny as to have NO discernable impact on prices
The problem is not additional crude - without additional refining capacity, there's nothing we could do with it but sell it to foreign nations anyway

It's not difficult to understand the way the international oil market functions, at least on a macro level. John McCain just thinks you're as stupid and uninterested as he is. Barack Obama has given up, and decided John McCain is right about you.

Second, and by far most importantly, oil is NOT the solution. Oil, and gas and particularly coal, is the PROBLEM. We're actively and rapidly killing the planet. If our current economic uncomforatability causes us to pump more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, are we really bringing anything resembling a solution to bear?

If you believe, as I do, that high oil prices are not a temporary economic anomaly, but rather a new reality that will be with us forever, then tinkering around the margins in an attempt to lower retail gasoline prices will not accomplish anything of value. If you can artificially drive prices from $4.25 to $3.75 temporarily, without doing anything to restructure the fundamentally unsustainable underlying economy, you have actually made the situation worse.

One of the things I find amusing in the debate is that the new offshore rigs, even if we authorize them today, would come online in the 2012-2014 time frame. Now setting aside any economic or political consideration, the pace of the effects of Global Climate change seems to be much faster than originally anticipated, and it also seems to be accelerating. That being the case, it's very possible that in five years, in the name of our own survival, humanity may well have enacted draconian anti-fossil-fuel laws that would make any additional oil production meaningless at that point.

And the alternative view, that the world will be just as desperate for fossil fuels in 2015 as it is today, is even more frightening and dystopian. What might a world of 2020 look like if we don't reduce our carbon output? Not even to mention our nitrogen problem, our oceans problem, our water problem.

If you are under 40 years old and this does not terrify you, I simply don't understand what you are thinking about. The parallel disasters of economics and pollution are going to swarm our civilization in the next ten years. There may be NO hope. But whatever hope there is is fully predicated on taking very serious action NOW, making the changes and sacrifices necessary to pass on a world that provides for it's population in a sustainable way. NOW. Not in a few years, not after the super bowl, not after our daughter graduates. NOW.

People are sleeping. The planet is dying. I can't be the only one who thinks you'll deserve what you inherit...

I Miss Jeff

2008-08-07T19:20:00.000-07:00

I know. Lots of people miss Jeff. I don't want to make it a competition, but frankly? You've got your own problems. Jeff was the friend I never had to measure up to. The guy that carried me home that afternoon, right through my parents dinner party, passed out and covered in vomit, and he never allowed a question.

And none was asked.

We're well beyond the point where Jeff taught me things, indeed, I plumbed the depths that life can offer well beyond any glimpse of the void he ever danced over. But it was the embrace, the knowledge that even though I didn't have the style or the dance, I was welcome in his world.

He always found a way to bring the best out of me, and we found the same kind of ridiculous funny.

It's sad I don't have shit for photos. It just never seemed important. The story was open-ended, y'know? It didn't need to be documented because it was endless, and part of our lives. Well, lesson learned. And please don't be offended if I point my camera in your face. You cannot be allowed to escape from my life that easily. I don't have an easy way with eternity, and I don't know how to negotiate the details.

I've lost something I can't replace. And you can't tell me it's ok...

Welcome to the Resistance

2008-08-02T11:56:00.000-07:00

It's time to step all the way out of denial. Perhaps not to admit total defeat, but to acknowledge that the forces of darkness have won every round and are likely to continue to do so. And to operate in clear-eyed acceptance of the new realities.

When you recognize that Congress passed a law in direct contravention of the Fourth Amendment allowing government agencies and even private companies to eavesdrop on your personal communications without warrant or court order and at the same time you realize that the government has asserted the right to examine everything in your computer and storage devices without even any "individual suspicion", well you better stop pretending you're still in Kansas.

Instead, think in terms of East Germany or Soviet Russia circa 1980.

But wait, you say. I'm just another guy, a working stiff, trying to raise my family, make a living, just live my life. I'm in no way working against the American government.

Ok, sure. But here's the problem. The rules have fundamentally changed. They used to tell you what you couldn't do. Laws had to very clearly inform you what was illegal, and the proscribed punishment for each infraction. It was realtively simple to educate yourself and stay on the right side of the law. As long as you did, you typically had no problems. And you could accept the premise that "ignorance of the law is no excuse" because, frankly, it was pretty easy to NOT be ignorant of the law.

But today, they don't need a law. They don't need to tell you what you did. In fact, they specifically say they don't even need to suspect that you did anything at all. Any reason, any moment, any comment or bad day at home or something you wrote or said or did. Anything. They can take your laptop. They can go through your data. Oh, and don't forget. They can detain you without charges indefinitely if they choose to.

So you don't have to be part of any revolution. Just to try to live your life in these times, you are part of the Resistance. You must think in those terms. You must take steps to protect yourself, your family, your friends and your company from the most intrusive authoritarian surveillance state outside of the Peoples Republic of China.

But there is some good news. Once again, it is technology that helps somewhat level the playing field. In an upcoming series, I will examine the various available solutions to your personal data and lifestyle security. In the short term, take these actions immediately:

1. Get a Box.net account. It's not expensive, get as much storage as you need. The idea is to have NO data on your laptop when you travel.

2. Get the largest capacity USB Flash Drive you can afford. Download and install TrueCrypt encryption software.

3. If you travel often, or if you can afford it, consider getting a second laptop just for traveling. Because it will not actually contain any data, merely an OS and applications, it does not have to be expensive or powerful. Check into some of the inexpensive Ubuntu machines available these days.

4. Start using Google Docs. All you need to open an account is an email address. Consider setting one up just for that purpose - preferably one that can't be traced back to you or your computers. Google does the storage, the applications run in the browser, it's truly a zero-footprint solution. And when you delete your surfing history, no one would have any way of knowing about your Google Docs (or, for that matter, your Box.net) account. It's worth remembering that if they do find out, your friendly government agency can likely get Google to turn over your documents, certainly with a court order, so consider what you choose to store there.

Look. We were all raised in the "Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave". It can be very hard to get your mind around the new normal. But everything has changed. You can rail against it, fight against it, agitate against it and work against it. But in the meantime don't forget to recognize that it is real, it is in place, and it has you in it's sights.

How Dare They?

2008-07-30T09:24:00.001-07:00

I'm with Michelle Obama. There really is not a great deal in America today to be proud of. And perhaps it's indicative of the depths to which we've sunk, but I can't help but be proud of my state for it's courage in support of such a controversial concept as equality and justice.

When you talk about equality, and specifically the Fourteenth Amendment, it's beyond my understanding how you could deny the right of marriage to any couple. Particularly when we went through this very same fight so recently with Miscegenation laws. And yet, here we are, with a bunch of Americans so blinded by ancient superstition and tribal hatred of anyone different than them that they are willing to abandon the very values that made America the shining city on the hill. Values, by the way, that these same mindless drones will happily tell you that American soldiers have given their lives to defend.

Like so many current political arguments, this is not a close question. There is no valid argument for preventing marriage. It encourages stability, it's every bit part and parcel of the "stable families" that social conservatives are always wailing about, it solves sticky legal questions that otherwise result in unnecessary confusion and suffering. How can it be in America that you can say "this group of people can get married, this group of people cannot"? For that matter, why would you want to? Why would you even care?

Like abortion, where indeed you are not required to participate if your personal beliefs prevent it, if you are opposed to same sex marriage, don't marry someone of your gender. But unlike even abortion, no case for the slightest harm to anyone can be made. Over the years, my greatest disagreement with religion has not been their silly beliefs, although any grownup who believes in the actual existence of magic and superheros should be embarrassed, but with their abiding desire to force their twisted beliefs and values on everyone else. It's not enough to live in the isolation necessitated by their belief in fairies and angels, they seem to feel the only way to validate their mad fantasies is to require everyone around them to believe the same fantastic stories.

Well, I salute California. And Massachusetts. And Freedom and Equality. For what more basic expression of a functioning democracy than assuring all citizens the exact same set of rights, and identical treatment under the law? For that matter, what better expression of an authoritarian dictatorship than arbitrary exclusion of a specific group of citizens from participation in any legally sanctioned action?

I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in the People's Democratic Republic of Amerika. I want nation that embraces the values in her constitution rather than seeking to constrain and eliminate those values.